Work Text:
They first met sixteen years ago. He first saw her naked six weeks later, after what was either their third date or their fifth, depending on the metric. She was thirty-one and he was much less than the sixty he is now, and they shared a cigarette after. He first learned her body then, his fingers tripping over the notches in her spine and sliding through the dip of her waist, tracing a scar she laughingly told him was from losing her balance as she got off her university boyfriend’s motorcycle when she was nineteen. Kissing her afterwards tasted like smoke; both of them quit six months later after her father’s first heart attack.
He took it up again a few days after she left for Atlanta, and didn’t stop again until they found out about Charlotte, but for a few months after the Dantana suit was filed she was reaching for the cigarettes in the drawer of his desk, hands shaking until the nicotine could smooth her nerves into something calmer. In the drawer of his desk, on top of his nightstand, sharing cigarettes until the apartment smelt like smoke and when they moved, she stopped.
There’s a scar, mostly faded, on the inside of her right middle finger from where the cigarette burned down to her skin as he kissed her breasts.
“What are you looking at?”
Eight years of marriage, and three children. Six years apart before that, and twenty-six months of those years in a warzone.
“You.”
Her pantyhose comes off, and then her bra, both leaving tired red lines imprinted into her skin after a long day at work. It’s rare nowadays that Mac will stay at the office past five or six, but tonight’s broadcast was one of the few that dictate her presence in the control room during News Night and so she took the kids home early, got them settled, left them with one of their babysitters and made it back for the final rundown.
A smirk tugging at the corners of her lips, she collapses down onto the bed in nothing but her panties, sprawling out next to him. “Me?” she asks, rolling her head so she can look at him. “What’s so special about a girl like me?”
He laughs, rolling onto his front and pushing up onto his elbows. “Do you want the short answer or the long one? If you give me a few minutes, I could even draft a—”
Her response is a rather dramatic yawn, and then a breathy giggle. “Sorry.”
“No you’re not,” Will murmurs, leaning down to brush a kiss against her lips; she tastes like toothpaste and the faint bitterness of the brand of makeup remover that she uses.
Scrunching up her nose and eyes, her mouth folding into a wider smile, she shakes her head.
“No, I’m not.”
He pinches the flesh at her waist and she squirms, batting his hands away from her middle. Her efforts are largely unsuccessful; he flattens one of his hands over the small round of her stomach, rubbing a finger over the ragged scar from her stab wound that, over a decade later, refuses to be anything but pink and raised.
“Are you just going to sleep like this?” he asks, looking down at her freshly-scrubbed face.
Mac sighs, trailing the sole of a foot up and down his shin. “Maybe. I don’t think the man I’m sleeping with would have any complaints about it.”
Will wonders what Mac sees when she looks at herself in the mirror, from all the tiny shrapnel wounds that have left small indentations in her skin and the faded silvery stretch marks that shimmer up and down her stomach to the eight-inch jagged mark left by a knife in Islamabad parked neatly next to the cleanly-healed incision from the c-section performed when Josie was born.
“He definitely would not,” he answers, sliding his hand up to cup one of her breasts, rolling her nipple between his index finger and thumb until it comes pert attention. “But if one of the children decides to wander in during the night, they might have a few questions.”
“That’s what the lock on the door is for.”
She bats his hand down again as her eyes drift closed.
Her abdomen has taken the brunt of it, he thinks. First the stabbing, low on her right side. Damaged muscular structures and scar tissue and even though the Navy doctor said she would never be able to bear any children, she gave them three. The melee of stretch marks would be proof enough of that,even if after nine hours of Pitocin-induced contractions their stubborn Josie hadn’t moved into a transverse position and the monitors started beeping in a low alarming tone. Your daughter is experiencing repetitive decels. I recommend that a c-section be performed immediately before she goes into further distress.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way — Mac was induced at thirty-eight weeks to avoid the complications that she had during Teddy’s birth with their nearly eleven pound son, but Will knows the common wisdom about best laid plans and he knew it then, too, but as his mind reached towards the worst possible conclusions in the surgical suite all Mac did was push herself up into a sitting position, and shrug at their high-risk obstetrician.
Well, the last time someone cut me open they didn’t do me the favor of giving me an epidural first, and I think I’ll have more to look forward to at the end of it this time. Give me the consent papers.
Mac, of course, was perfectly calm while he was almost wheezing when the smell of fresh cauterization wafted over to their side of the drape in the OR. Not that it mattered, once little Josephine was forced to make her appearance, pink and yelling and covered in vernix, and he forgot to be terrified.
(And not like he wasn’t terrified, when Charlotte and Teddy were born, when the epidural wore off while she was pushing with Charlotte and when the doctor told them that the cord was wrapped around Teddy’s neck after hours of shoulder presentation and for Mac to stop pushing with their son halfway out of her, like that was something easily done.
But he hadn’t watched either of their first two children’s heart rates decelerate on the fetal monitor, and thus cued a near-paralyzing sense of fear.)
But it made him wonder, after she was stitched back up and moved into recovery and held Josie for the first time all smiles and well-worn exhaustion, what it was like after she was out of the surgery that saved her life in Landstuhl.
When he looks back to her face, her eyes are slitted open. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at your badass scars.”
“Yeah, well, some of us don’t have prison records to prove things for us,” she teases.
Huffing and falling to lie on his back, he pretends to be offended. “The scars from the knee replacements don’t count?”
“These are because you let the children get away with everything when you roughhouse with them,” she says, laughing and reaching down to cover one of the red incisions bisecting his knees. “I mean, I love you for them, but I don’t think they’ve quite made it onto your Wikipedia page.”
Will realizes at this point that Mac thinks that he’s referring to scar from the stab wound. Which he was, in part, so he figures she’s not entirely off-base. He did spend several years focusing on it after all, some of them while in therapy.
“I was also talking about this one.”
His finger slides over the smoother c-section scar, at the top of her pelvis.
“What about it?” She lifts her head, lifting an eyebrow. “Millions of women have had their children via—”
“But you are the one in all those millions who is my wife,” he says, frowning. “I mean, not to undersell the one that has its own section on your Wikipedia page. After Neal finally got that whole Oxford business off it. You’re just, you know, impressive. And it shows.”
Settling her head back into the pillow, her hair a dark spill across white cotton, she looks up at him with an examining sort of gaze, and snorts. “Not many people see me shirtless.”
Will sighs, and rolls over, landing so he lying half on top of her. Making a squawking sort of noise in initial protest, she then decides to let him stay, grabbing his shoulders and manhandling him into a comfortable position with his face half-buried in her breasts until he moves again to wrap his arms around and under her middle.
“I do. The kids have,” he murmurs, and presses a kiss to her sternum. “They’ll know about their heroic, hardcore journalist mother.”
The hardcore journalist, with the stab wounds and shrapnel scars and Peabody’s on her desk, and their mother, with her rounded hips and soft stomach, stretch marks on her belly and breasts. He wants them to know that this is the body that bore them, that the woman who is their mother is someone who has endured and fought and persevered and then created them, and endured more. That all the parts belong to the same person, and he just wants to know that he’s not the only person who sees her like this—wondrous, magnificent, brilliant.
“You’re not too bad yourself, you know.” Her fingernails scratch lightly up and down his back until his shirt is rucked up to almost his chest, and he shivers happily.
“I like telling your stories better.”
Squinting at the ceiling, she considers it. “Fair enough. I am the one of us who’s managed to not commit any felonies.”
“Hey!” He lifts his head, ready to protest from his vantage point at her breasts. “You were fully supportive—”
Mac giggles, and then yawns again. “And to think, if you hadn’t had committed a felony, we wouldn’t have been so enthusiastic in bed the night before May the third and none of the stars would have aligned for Charlotte, so I think I forgive you.”
“You’re so charitable,” he deadpans, settling his head back down against her.
“I’m serious Billy, you were really, really enthusiastic that night. Maybe it contributed to the knee replacements. At least one of them.”
“Is that hint?” he asks, squeezing her tightly and pinning her to the mattress when she tries to wriggle away. “I am lacking in enthusiasm nowadays?”
“Definitely no complaints.” She kicks him in the shin, and he loosens his grip on her but rubs his thumbs into the sensitive spots on her sides until she releases a peal of laughter, and when she tugs on his hair, he lets up. Panting tiredly, she continues. “You could try pushing some limits, if you wanted. Just saying. But maybe not now. In the morning.”
“Noted.” He kisses her again, one her collarbone this time.
Sighing, she pushes him off her. “I need to put on clothes.”
He rolls back onto his side of the bed compliantly, but pulls a pout onto his face as Mac pushes herself back up and off the bed.
“Do you really?”
“You’re the one who brought up that the children might wander in and be scandalized by my breasts,” she answers, scrounging around for something suitable to sleep in. He’d tell her that she could find her own pajamas in the walk-in closet he built for her, but that would be defeating his own agenda.
“I have also pointed out that they’ve seen you in various states of undress.” Rolling her eyes, Mac stoops down and retrieves the Columbia t-shirt he slept in the night before, pulling it over her head and the hem down to cover the tops of her thighs. “Or, well, that’s a good look on you too.”
Smirking crookedly, she gets back onto the bed, and then under the covers.
“C’mon, you know by now that I’m easy to please,” he says, moving so that his mouth is right up against her ear.
“You are one of the most high-maintenance people I have ever met besides myself.”
“But you love me, right?” Draping an arm around her waist, he pulls her flush against him.
Wrinkling her nose, she settles her back to his chest. “Said the vows, signed the piece of paper, procreated three times with you, on purpose. Survey says yes.”
He kisses her shoulder, and gets a mouthful of soft cotton before relocating his lips to her neck, inhaling the remnants of the perfume she dabbed behind her ears while getting dressed this morning. His own scars, the carefully hidden ones, whisper in his head that none of what she said is enough to be a promise of love. That his own parents said vows, signed the piece of paper, brought four children into the mess. But Will silences that voice — he and Mac waited nine years to commit themselves to each other, and by then they had inflicted and healed wounds of their own.
When his fingers find the raised pearlescent flesh from the stabbing again, they don’t linger. His hand keeps moving up and down her front, over the topography that’s changed with each child and with the collective sum of the years. He knew her at thirty-one, when she was young and spry, thin and toned and wrinkle-free, and he loved her then. But he knows the changes to her body have also been in part of his own actions, and inaction, and at best choices they made together even if it was her signature scrawled on the bottom of the medical consent form.
At forty-seven her body has given much more for him to look at with wonder.
So he does.