Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

‘If I found my body in chains
I’d lay down and wait,
‘Cause it’s the fear of the unknown
That cripples every step we take.’

“The Craving (Jenna’s Version)” ~ Twenty One Pilots

The thing about it in the end is that it’s so terribly easy. 

Tactical training be damned. 

They book a ground floor hotel room, Desi sets up the camera on a tripod, and five hours into this stakeout—Mac yawns. Says he needs to go get ice for his water bottle. Cold always wakes him up. Except for one hypothermic incident in Winnipeg, but they don’t talk about that.

It’s the start of what promises to be a grueling surveillance op, so Desi just waves a lazy hand, already taking notes on a little pad of paper to start her shift on watch.

“Thanks, Des,” he says, and he makes sure to enunciate it. 

“Be quick.” Riley’s eyes are still on her rig screen and their arms dealer’s dossier. “You don’t want to miss more riveting views of thugs watching football.”

Quick is in Mac’s blood. He offers a two-fingered salute on his way out the door and Riley grins. 

“You’re the best, Riles.”

“Don’t you forget it.”

Mac won’t have a chance to.

He walks down the hall with the ice bucket, hair damp against his blue flannel collar. The joys late September in Amsterdam has to offer. Their room boasts a ceiling fan but no AC. Hence the need for ice. Bozer complained at first about sitting out this op for a routine cavity filling—then realized by Mac’s texts that he isn’t missing much.

It’s a nice hotel but the walls feel narrow, discoloured. Mac walks ten paces before he slows. A quiet breath escapes his nose and he sets the bucket on the floor under a fire extinguisher without so much as a backwards glance. 

His eyes lock on a glass door to his left. They bask in the reprieve from harsh fluorescents overhead, too focused to care about the bucket or the phone he left in the hotel room. Mac has stared out the window through a camera viewfinder for the last few hours, but it can’t compete with this up-close view of the sun.

And grass. A bird even flits by. 

Mac squares his shoulders and strides for the door. Four paces and he’s out. Three more and he reaches the side street. He gets to enjoy the cloudless blue sky for all of a hundred seconds. 

Two paces and a black truck roars around the corner.

Mac’s head whips down from basking in the sunshine. His eyes blow wide. 

The truck’s back passenger door slides open before it even squeals to a halt.

One sprinted pace—only one—and no amount of head start saves him. A hand yanks on the back of his shirt. Mac yelps, pure instinct more than pain. 

Before he can so much as thrash out an arm, a sharp sting burrows in his neck. 

Right before the lights go out, Mac sighs again, a popped balloon inflated by all the screams he’ll never voice. 

It’s the easiest thing in the world.

Sher-shunk. 

Sher-shunk. 

Sher-shunk. 

The sound wakes Mac more than incoming sensations. He frowns. The frown swims on his face, skin looser than silly string—too wide. Too…floaty. 

Sher-shunk. 

Ow. 

Mac’s ankles twinge. 

Thunk and his boots whack something. Gravity, Mac’s mind and inner ear prompt him. He’s propelled by gravity down a gradual incline with level sections. Stairs. His feet ragdoll on each step in a horrid duplet that sounds akin to a dead animal.

Each bicep twinges too, in perfect stereo from something clamped onto his arms that grunts every few steps. 

Mac’s head bobs where it hangs low. The grunts clarify into muttered swear words from a pair of male voices, apropos for a mildewed, damp washcloth smell permeating the suddenly cooler air. Every sensation sours. 

Mac lets himself possum in his captors’ hold. Neither of the burly grunts seem to notice Mac’s moment of lucidity or how his eyes slit open. 

Although…

Lucidity might be a bit generous. 

Sedatives. Ugh. 

No matter how many times he’s been abducted or sedated by mercenaries, he never adjusts to the dusty tang in his mouth or how long it takes to conjure words and formulas. Like the world’s worst case of temporary aphasia. He might as well have dryer lint for a brain. 

“Hey, Mac. Nice day for a picnic, huh?”

Mac’s head hurtles upright.

He locks eyes with a cheery Bozer standing by the last in a line of strange-looking cells on the left.

Bozer still wears the navy blazer Mac last saw him in, back at the war room, still with the red and pink plaid button up underneath. Mac’s captors don’t catch his sudden intake of breath. 

“I know, I know.” Bozer rolls his eyes, grinning. “I’m basically wearing the picnic blanket. Har-har, yuck it up. I’ve heard all your jokes before.”

Reality uppercuts Mac so hard his teeth ache. He goes ice cold, the whole world tipsy daisy on its axis, and his stomach swoops in one never-ending fall. 

“No…”

The grunts, however, hear even this breathed word. “He’s with the program.”

“Just in time too,” says the other one, on Mac’s left. Neither man seems to have a Dutch accent, their voices neutral to Mac’s Westernized ears. “He’s gotta appreciate the digs set up just for him.”

Mac’s eyes widen on Bozer. Harsh breaths match the horror burning his throat. 

“No.” Mac gets his chance to thrash after all. “No!”

“Geez, he’s a slippery fish!” The right hand man tries to club Mac, which he dodges, but it’s not even needed in the end. “I take it back. He’s still out of it. Just hold him down.”

A meaty palm clamps onto Mac’s nape, right where baby hairs blend with the back of his neck. It’s a taser through Mac’s system. He gasps—he hasn’t been touched there since…that awful goodbye when…

“Looks like you’re in the biggest crib, Mac.” Bozer holds out an arm to the interior of the cell, like a consummate concierge. It’s maybe five feet square. “Lotsa room to sit and eat with me.”

Mac cries out. The world whites and all he can do is wriggle and shriek and protest life crushing what thimble of self control he still possesses.

Bozer just stands there, all smiles, even when the men throw Mac onto the cell’s cobblestone floor. Even when said cobbles bruise Mac’s spine. 

Even when Mac sits up and screams. “No!”

He’s wrong. He’s never been more wrong in his life. These aren’t sedatives at all. 

Bozer waves, chipper, now holding a banana that he peels with maddening patience. One yellow slice…then another, wilted sunshine in real time. “You’ve even got perfect weather in here.”

Not sedatives—drugs. Really, really potent drugs. Mac would take grogginess over this. He’s too awake. 

After several shaky breaths and those grunts retreating up the stairs, he digs his fingers into his scrunched eyes until he can’t see Bozer anymore.

Night sucks all light from the room in one slurp, dusky by the time Mac opens his eyes. 

He pushes back into the farthest corner. It’s away from the door and away from thatched iron bars in a grid lattice on his right; the other cell. Like a big metal pie crust. It’s a bizarre prison design for this part of the world. 

At least they left him a bucket by the door. Better than some jails he’s been dumped in.

Mac empties his bladder and sits back down, holding the wall for support. He doesn’t worry about the other end—his wobbly steps are only partially to blame on the drugs. Mac can’t remember the last time he ate a full meal. Even Desi was feeling more relaxed on this op to miss the way Mac only pretended to eat his room service omelet this morning. 

Mac rests his head back on the stone wall. A window high above provides little light.

His brow furrows. That seems important. Why is it important? It’s night time and night is supposed to be dark. Aside from light pollution, of course—

Mac listens. Utter quiet reigns, broken only by crickets and tromping boot falls overhead, upstairs. 

In Amsterdam. A major European metropolis. 

The facts clash in Mac’s sluggish brain. 

We had to have driven for over three hours. 

Even still, it doesn’t explain the lack of airplane sounds. Or distant cars. There’s just nothing. It amplifies Mac’s equally sluggish heartbeat in his ears. 

His eyes sweep the primitive cell, the bolt hinges, the weird plaque out in the hallway that he can’t read at this distance, the window bars ten feet above, the boots they stupidly left on his feet. Though they at least took his belt.

But Mac doesn’t bother to get up. Just sits there, legs splayed, and his lead bones settle. Even his hands don’t fidget. 

Narcotics side effect, his mind explains. 

Mac doesn’t care about that either. 

The loneliness hits a beat later than expected but still very much on schedule. It’s the same flavour as the last few months. 

“I’m sorry,” he croaks. 

No one answers.

Mac opens his eyes and he’s not alone. 

“Why did you bail on the last three movie nights? That’s our thing.”

This person Mac cannot ignore. 

“Tech’lly.” Mac swallows and fights through the slur. “T-Technically, we’ve all missed m’vie nights.”

Riley sits and leans against his shoulder. “Missions, a lot lately.”

“Mmm.” Mac wishes she emitted body heat. Wishes he’d grabbed his brown leather jacket before leaving the hotel room.

Her image pixelates at the edges, sharp and out of focus like Mac’s tongue. His mind can’t conjure Riley’s rig too, so her hands fly over an invisible keyboard. It mesmerizes Mac, the dexterity of her fingers married to quick eyes. They dart across a screen Mac can’t see. Her legs also stretch out, ending near Mac’s shins. 

“Just saying. You always have an excuse.” Riley’s eyes stay on the ‘screen’ but her hands stop moving. “It’s tradition, especially since…”

Since. 

The most vile word in their lives, even after almost two years. 

Since one year, five months, and eight days ago. 

Mac watches Not-Riley pat his hand. He doesn’t feel that either.

“I’m sorry, Riles.”

“I know.”

“I always wanted a sister.”

Riley turns to him then. Her eyes warm. “You have one, just like I got the coolest little brother.”

“You’re only two months older th’n me.”

“Exactly. You’re the best brother a girl could ask for.”

Mac pulls his hand away. Best? His chest squeezes under a belt only he can see, just like her rig. He’s done everything wrong. 

“It’s a-almost over,” he whispers. 

Riley begins to fade. “I know that too.”

They don’t feed Mac those first two days, but he hardly notices. The suspense torments him more, this being left alone business. No one stops by to taunt, or intimidate, or to beat him up. 

In between shivering dreams and hazy hallucinations, the only thing Mac notices is that they’ve emptied the bucket and left a large plastic water bottle.

It stops him in his tracks. 

They need me alive. 

With the drugs metabolizing, Mac connects the dots faster. 

They could have just shot him on the street if he’s such a thorn in their sides. Information must be the prize here. 

One large piece doesn’t fit—the waiting. Maybe they’re trying to weaken him with starvation first.

Irony at its finest. Mac would laugh if he had the energy. 

Mac scrubs a hand over his cheek and eyes the water bottle. He debates the merits of dying a la dehydration before they can torture him. 

Too slow. Mac grits his teeth. They’ll come for you long before then. 

Will they? Mac wishes he understood the timeline here. It’s been almost forty-eight hours since a real human appeared.

His lids lower once more. Traitors. 

In those hazy moments before Mac dozes off, a rustle sounds in the other cell. Mac jumps. The rustle is whisper-soft, but in the stillness it might as well be a bomb.

Everything falls quiet once more, and Mac draws his feet up close to his body. 

He shudders. Of course this prison has rats. 

It makes sense, with mouldy patches of straw in the other cell, ones Mac is now thankful his own ice box doesn’t have. Rats thrive in places like this. He still curls up tight and prays they don’t slither through the bars. 

Another barely-there rustle, but Mac’s out like a dimmer switch.

Hands yank him back to the land of the living. These ones play much rougher. One digs a thumb into Mac’s shoulder so hard he skips a breath. His eyes pop open.

“Got the kit?”

“Yeah, just keep him still.”

As if Mac can get away, one vice on his right bicep, the other on his forearm where it rolls up his sleeve. Without the flannel material, goosebumps prickle across his skin. He longs for the sweltering hotel room already.

Then liquid flashes in the sun and Mac’s flushed all over. 

“No.” Back to thrashing it is. “Not again!”

“Hey.” The hand on Mac’s bicep flees to point an M5 rifle at his forehead. “Shut up or it’s lights out a lot sooner.”

If anything, Mac thrashes harder. It fuels his feet, flying, and his head where it bucks to either side. The two men shirk every blow with infuriating ease. As if he’s not fighting with everything he’s got.

Blood pressure roars through Mac’s neck like a noose. He flicks the gun barrel with his temple and the goon actually freezes. The brawny man’s eyes are blank, uneasy. Sweat runs into his stubble. 

Mac flicks the gun again and snarls. “Just do it then!”

Beard Boy recovers with a jolt. “Dose him already.”

The other man, squatting before Mac in a red Calgary Stampede ballcap that shades his face, finishes prepping the syringe. They don’t bother to disinfect Mac’s skin first and that alone says it all.

Mac writhes some more, but it doesn’t halt the jab into soft skin under his elbow or the room’s almost immediate wobble. Mac loses all his air along with all sense of up or down. 

Not-Bozer reappears right as they drag Mac out the cell door. His friend holds out a baguette sandwich. “Turkey and Swiss?”

Mac closes his eyes. The vertigo intensifies.

“Come on, man. You know you love a Double-O Boze picnic. Can’t keep shruggin’ me off forever.”

It hits Mac right when he ‘smells’ the turkey. 

Stronger dose this time. By the technicolour edges on everything—a much stronger dose. His body doesn’t usually react this way either. The false images are breathtakingly concrete, more almost than the room around him, which is also perfectly clear.

The increased rustles aren’t helping. Normally drugs send everything into a soupy haze. 

They hit the stairs and the world lurches into a tailspin, but then Mac doesn’t need drugs for that.

A punch to the ribs here, a boot to the face there. 

Mac’s eyes remain tired for all of it. The cobbles against his knees where he’s forced to kneel cause greater discomfort. 

It says a lot about his life experience that this comes across pretty vanilla, as torture goes. They don’t electrocute him or use a bottle opener on his fingernails. Not even any waterboarding. Just good ol’ fashioned fisticuffs in a bare bones room.

Oleg Gagarin sits there for all of it, on an uncomfortable looking lawn chair no less. A flowery purple plastic thing. He looks exactly like his dossier photos, down to the crocus blossom he always wears in his blazer breast pocket.

But his eyes are more lined. Thinned out, a shoestring about to snap. His sigh sounds more exhausted than Mac feels, and that’s a feat.

“What alphabet organization do you work for?”

Mac’s lips twist and he stays silent. His jaw clenches hard enough to smart goose eggs from the steel-toed kick to his cheekbone.

Beard and Ballcap lay into Mac again for this refusal to answer, though by the brand name on his shirt tag, Oleg correctly guessed American about ten minutes into this ‘conversation.’ 

“You’ve been watching my people from the hotel room.”

“Yes,” says Mac, toneless. No point denying it. 

“You were working alone?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. You lie, I think.”

Another punch to his stomach.

Aside from a brief assessment of the upper room—also a strange office design, all stone with an honest-to-God blackboard in the corner—Mac ignores the assault to study something much more interesting: a lab-coated man behind Oleg’s chair who studies him right back. The scientist makes a note on his metal clipboard. 

Oleg raises a loose hand. “Stop.”

Beard pulls back from a sharp uppercut to Mac’s jaw. Mac spits out a nasty wad of blood and watches it land on the cobbles beside a red stain.

Mac’s forehead creases. The dried blood looks fresh, fresher than it should for a past victim. Maybe they shot someone up here recently, not that he’s heard any gunshots. With Oleg’s track record, Mac wouldn’t put it past him.

“Is good?” Oleg asks the scientist behind him. 

The weathered man pushes up his glasses. “With even these slight alterations, I’m seeing a twenty-one percent efficacy increase.”

Mac scowls. So the drugs are intended to loosen his tongue. 

Oleg catches it. “Clearly not.”

“He could be trained for this kind of…incentivization.”

“True.”

Oleg doesn’t sneer or gloat or do anything cliche TV arms dealers do. Instead, he stands and tucks his hands in expensive trouser pockets. A shrewd note lingers in his eyes.

He gazes down at Mac with shocking pity. “You gain nothing by silence.”

Mac juts his chin towards the blood stain, with his shoulders held tight by Beard. “Is that what you told the last guy?”

“The last guy is much feistier and needs to be put in his place. You, on the other hand…” Oleg’s head cants. “Well. There might be a better use for you.”

Mac spits more blood onto Oleg’s equally expensive shoes. He wheezes after he does it, diaphragm bruised halfway to Mars, but it’s worth it for the way the lab coat pales, whiter than chalk dust on the blackboard. 

CRACK. 

Mac’s head whips to the side. He hears the sound before pain blossoms across his uninjured cheek. Five burning lines scream the truth of what’s just happened.

Oleg dusts off his hands after the brutal slap, totally unaffected while Mac blinks. Hit gut clenches. Something about the simple dehumanization of it rocks him more than the prize fighter punches. Like the way a cruel drunk slaps a dog. 

It feels like being branded. 

Mac fights a knot in his throat and wins. 

Oleg eyes him. “Your bravery is asinine in this place. I don’t really care who you work for—you’re all the same. But as a young, healthy specimen, you have much more value.”

Mac’s gut cinches even further. This doesn’t match the profile of a middle party between players, a ‘businessman,’ as Oleg calls himself in encoded messages. 

Mac sets his throbbing jaw. “I can be a lot more stubborn than this.”

Oleg smiles for the first time, if it can even be called that, the tiniest ease to lines around his mouth and nostrils. “I’m counting on it, little lion.”

Mac glances at Beard’s handgun on his belt, a Sig, while they haul him back downstairs to his cell. But Beard makes no move to reach for it and Mac finally sighs, a bone-deep thing he couldn’t censor if he tried. Oleg’s men ignore him.

Mac sweats from a fresh round of narcotic shivers, especially once he’s thrown inside and curls up against the wall. 

They toss in another water bottle next to the first. Mac doesn’t touch it either. The cell door closes with a final thud, a coffin lid. 

Not-Riley is mid-chew where she sits under the window. She sounds a lot calmer than Real Riley probably does right now. Mac distantly wonders how long it took them to notice his absence. “It’s not half bad.”

“No need to sound so surprised,” Not-Bozer squawks from his usual spot by the door. “My new pastrami recipe is five-star. I experimented with some spices.”

Mac groans. 

“Tell her, Mac.” Bozer prods Mac with his toe. Mac can’t feel it. 

“Coulda used the company up there,” Mac whispers. 

Riley continues like he hasn’t spoken. “Can’t imagine why you keep avoiding a hangout with Bozer if this is what you can expect.”

Bozer beams. “Why, thank you.”

More rustles start up in the other cell. Mac tunes out both them and the hallucinations to rest his forehead on his knees, arms so tight around his legs that the bruises smart. Mac doesn’t even wince.

It’s a fitting penance for…everything.

Mac will die of starvation or the drugs before he could possibly list why he deserves this, everything he’s messed up in thirty-one measly years. So much failure that it’s almost an accomplishment. 

“Mac?”

Mac startles, a full-body flinch. His head whirls. Literally and figuratively.

Heart a broken snare drum in his throat, Mac squints through afternoon gloom. Something shifts in the other cell, something slender and pale. Ghostly fingers—human fingers, not claws—crawl their way towards the bars to wrap around the closest grid, fingernails bloody, chipped, and bruised around the nailbed. 

Mac stiffens. Is this barrier even strong enough to hold out a fellow prisoner? Just his luck he’d survive one assault only to suffer another.

Glittering brown eyes appear next. 

“Mac? Holy—is that really you?”

“No. Please, no.” Mac groans it out, agony dragged from somewhere deep inside his body, a seal ripped off a dusty envelope.

Anything but this. 

“Mac—”

Mac turns his face away, to the wall, and begins to shake in earnest, a delayed reaction. Fifty odd hours and Mac just now begins to feel the effects of what’s been done to him.

Two hallucinations should be enough torment. But of course Mac and his deranged mind would summon this. 

“Mac, buddy. Hey. Easy. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry to see you here.”

Mac breathes in coughing pants through a seized chest. Bile bubbles up but he swallows it back. “You’re j-just a rat.”

Not-Jack’s shuffles pause.

“Okay.” He doesn’t sound offended. “That’s a new one. Certainly not the worst I’ve heard. Ole staff sergeant Diaz hurled way more creative stuff. ‘Member when he called us a coupla lemmings? Followin’ each other around? That was funny.”

Mac loses the battle. Involuntary, his stomach fists and liquid vomit spills over his bottom lip, no substance.

A gutteral cry sounds in response to the wet retching.

Mac spits and wipes his face. Jack’s raspy tone turns urgent, words blending into each other, but Mac can’t focus on both him and Bozer’s ‘perfect hangout’ planning at the same time, so he picks Bozer. At least he sounds happy, oblivious to Mac’s distress. 

Mac keeps his eyes closed, the stone slimy against his ear. It dulls the pain of the slap, small comfort. The stone smells like blueberries too—a lovely drug side effect playing foosball with his senses. Nothing feels real. Even Mac’s fingertips prickle, living cacti. 

“…And I get that this is one hell of a shock and we’re both freaking out a little, but you gotta talk to me, hoss.”

No, he doesn’t. 

Still, Mac’s mouth opens without his permission: “Not on your life.”

“That’s kinda the issue here, isn’t it?”

Mac shudders. 

“Fine.” Jack’s voice is thick, accent perfect. But then of course it is. Who knows Jack better than Mac? It’s like summoning a personal hell. “At least drink some ‘a that water. Ain’t got nothing on your stomach now.”

Mac’s lips tremble, but they push upwards, eyes blank.

“…Mac?”

“Think Bozer is cold over there?”

Another shuffle and then a clang, like something pushed into the bars. Must be a huge rat. Mac shudders again. 

Not-Jack’s voice snaps with tension, a fresh bow string. “Mac. Scoot over here for a sec. Let me look at those shiners.”

Mac doesn’t move. Doesn’t even look over at whatever’s making all the noise. 

Not-Jack’s voice gentles, tears a physical weight in his voice. “Mac, I don’t know what you’ve been through, both here and in the last year, but I’m me. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

No, he wouldn’t. 

But Mac’s brain would. 

Chapter Text

‘I could not speak what I’d done.
He could have been here all along,
He could have been anyone,
But there is no one who
Could wake my heart like this,
Could break my world in two.’

“He Came to Meet Me” ~ Hem

Mac zones out for a while, a cheesecloth filter between him and reality. He doesn’t truly sleep, but he’s not inside his own body either. The scent-based hallucinations alternate between meadow clover and ozone, like lightning hovers over his body.

He must stir or make some kind of sound, because he opens his eyes and Not-Jack’s left arm suddenly extends through the bars.

With the twilight ambience, it might as well be a mirage. Out a few hours, then. 

Mac glances around, but Riley and Bozer have disappeared. Of course Jack would be the one consistent apparition, a burdock Mac can’t shed even with five months between him and the funeral. 

“Mac.” Not-Jack tries for a whisper this time. His arm shakes a little, as bruised as the rest of him. Mac understands with long-buried instincts that this isn’t what leaves Jack so unsteady. “Man, please. Please let me see you.”

That same instinct translates the words. They stare at each other just fine, but even with Jack’s strained reach—elbow locked, fingers spread-eagle—two feet separates them. The Pacific would feel smaller. 

Mac can’t look away but he also can’t, can’t move. “I don’t want to lose you all over again,” he whispers back. “You’ll just disappear.”

Jack’s face crumples. His arm sags to the floor, though he doesn’t retract it. “Oh, man. They’ve got you on the good stuff. Pupils like a pair ‘a black holes.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s really not. Seein’ you and not being able to reach you is a special brand of torture.”

That makes two of them. 

Mac notes tiny details his mind erred over: a ropey scar above Jack’s left brow he’s never had before, black eye, lower lip stitched at some point (rather messily), and a strange red trail up his right arm, easier to see by faint moonlight where it spills into Mac’s cell. Not to mention Jack’s lack of verbal filter even more than he had before. 

Jack shifts his right shoulder, compressed where he leans against the dividing bars.

Mac frowns. Forty percent less muscle coats the bicep and Jack’s ribs are visible through a faded olive green T-shirt. The hunger in his eyes is almost terrifying, the way they LiDAR scan every inch of Mac’s limp form, drinking him in and cataloguing.

The eyes stop on Mac’s face. 

“Just touch my hand and you’ll see I’m no pigment of your imagination.”

Jack misinterprets Mac’s stare, strike one.

Mac doesn’t correct him. It seems to deflate the wind in Not-Jack’s sails a bit. 

“What do I gotta do to convince you I’m real?”

“Nothing. Any memory you can share with me I a-already know.”

Jack’s eyes aren’t blinking now. “I bet they declared me KIA after all this. But I promise you I’m not dead, bud.”

Mac rubs his forehead. “They all say that.”

Jack misses an inhale. Anyone else wouldn’t catch the sound for what it is. But Mac does. 

Jack’s eyes practically glow, intense on Mac. “Can’t lie. It’s good to see you, even in Oleg’s little funhouse. Though I do wish you were safe, far away from him.”

Mac almost sobs too. How selfish can he get? His psyche feeds him beautiful falsehoods wrapped around a dead friend’s tongue. 

Jack’s fingers curl on the stone. “I’ve missed you, son. So much it hurts.”

Mac turns away at the candid words, and mercifully the hallucination doesn’t follow his eyeline. The words tumble out of him anyway, a deep sea fish hook Jack has and will always hold the reel to, even in Mac’s mind—“I’ve missed you too. W-Won’t for very long though, I guess, once Oleg gets through with me. I’ll be with the real you soon.”

He listens to Not-Jack’s quiet sobs for the rest of the night, refusing to sleep. 

It’s the least he deserves.

At some point Mac finds himself lying down, his first time doing so since he got here. It’s more for relief from bruises now stiffening deep tissue than anything else. He shrimps his body into a tight coil, left cheek on the floor. His right arm hangs loose near his ribs. 

Jack stretches out too, on his stomach. Old blood coats the back of his shirt, turning the olive a dead tree brown.  

His left arm snakes through the bottom of the bars. Twists so his palm faces up. Moonlight graces across it, as if he can collect and keep this meager light.

Mac maps that arm, the old scars and unfamiliar scars and every last nick in between. It’s bony with poor nutrition. 

Not-Jack doesn’t speak. 

He just holds out his arm, head turned and resting on his right elbow, carefully away from the red marks. His eyes hold no judgment, only love and an aching something Mac for once can’t put a name to. The emotion is so layered it eludes him. 

Mac blinks. 

He just now notices the leather cuff. Still on, battered as the rest of Jack. But there. 

Mac’s fingers wander across the stone; Jack’s flex open in invitation. Just four more inches and Mac could touch that cuff, place his skeletal fingers in Jack’s. They’re breathing distance away. 

Mac hesitates. Left hand means artery. Artery means the disappointment of finding no pulse, even if his brain does get the warm skin right. 

The very air in both cells seems to hover. Colours Mac’s never seen before ripple at the corners of his vision. 

His fingers halt. 

Jack’s eyes well but he makes no sound. 

Mac shakes his head and ignores the twinge it wreaks on his face. 

Jack exhales a big breath, like he’s been caging it in. He taps the stone with the back of his knuckles. 

Dot-dot. 

I.

Dot-dash…dash-dash.

Am. 

Dot-dot-dot-dot…dot…dot-dash-dot…dot.

Here. 

Mac’s eyes well too. He wraps his left arm around his chest and tucks the cold fingers up into his armpit, and somehow it feels like hugging Jack’s folded flag all over again, a gaping hole where someone should be. 

Yet Mac’s shallow inhales deepen after a beat, listening to Jack breathe. It’s the best hallucination he’s had so far.

Mac watches Jack’s back rise and fall with each breath. Jack catches on immediately, like he always does, and pantomimes each inhale so it’s visible through the dark. Just like playing charades on the deck, LA skyline twinkling behind him. 

But Not-Jack’s cell is dark. And the only charade here is Mac. 

He almost taps out a reply, just for himself—I. Am. Not.—but dozes off before he can. 

For the first time in months, he doesn’t dream a single thing.

“One sip, bud.”

Again with the water. 

At least Not-Jack isn’t trying to coax Mac to his side of the cell anymore. Mac stays firmly in his corner and Jack stays firmly in his. Midday sun doesn’t dissipate the illusion, a shock. Mac half expected Jack to disappeared in direct light.

“If you don’t hydrate, I’m gonna sing all five verses of ‘Down to the River to Pray’ at full volume. With harmony.”

“Verse five is usually the same as verse one.”

“Mac.”

Mac gives up and points to the water bottles. “Poisoned.”

“I’m not so sure. The seals aren’t broken and I don’t see no puncture marks.”

Great, now Mac’s subconscious is trying to kill him. Figures. 

“Do you know what the machines are called? The ones that s-seal plastic lids?”

“No.” Jack shuffles and winces when it tugs on something. “But I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“It’s an induction sealer. And yyyou can buy one off Amazon for like a hundred bucks.”

“Lotta work to fool a prisoner.”

Mac stares into the middle distance. Sadness washes over him in a molasses wave, sweet and suffocating. “Or a lab rat.”

This must unsettle Jack enough to risk extending his hand again. He presses his neck against the bars just to reach an extra three inches towards Mac’s pant leg. He’s still a foot short.

The fingers slacken and Jack blinks. “You’ve got your shoes.”

“Yup.”

“…And the laces.”

Mac swallows, a war of attrition he’s steadily losing. He’s so dehydrated he can’t even feel his tongue. “Yup.”

That quiets Not-Jack for a while. 

His voice, when it finally drifts through the bars with songbird softness, holds none of the outraged questions Mac rightly deserves. He sounds like he’s talking to someone twenty years younger. “Alright, kid. That’s alright. You just rest awhile. Take as long you need for your hamster to start up his wheel.”

Mac relaxes despite himself. Even seventeen months sans Jack, Mac still trusts his lead. His mission to ignore this cruel mirage is a failure, but the relief from indulging it is heady anyway. 

“Before you do, though—mind passin’ me one of those? Since you’re being a teetotaler about it an’ all.”

Mac stares at Jack a beat, then gets his jittery hands in motion and grabs one of the bottles, a single litre each.

He leans to the side, holding the cap end to ensure their fingers don’t touch. A spark flares through Jack’s wider eyes before he wrangles it under control. His hand shakes too.

“Thanks.” Jack’s voice is rough—but it’s got nothing on his eyes when he cracks the seal and takes the first sip. They tear up instantly. “Oh hell. Don’t tell Boze but that’s the best thing to ever hit my taste buds, bar none.”

He sips slow over the next few minutes instead of chugging like he clearly yearns to. Mac’s stomach turns. It says something sick about his mind that he envisions Jack suffering this much. Pain lines across his forehead reach canyon depths as he pants, one arm braced around his ribs. The angle of his thumb suggests a healed break. 

“M’ alright, hoss.” Jack gazes back. “Better now that you’re here. Or worse. Haven’t made up my mind about that.”

“You’re not alright.” Mac exhales through his nose, sharp. “You’re dead.”

“That what they tell you?”

“Your bloody dog tags said enough.”

The world hushes for five of Mac’s dizzy heartbeats. 

Jack finishes two-thirds of the bottle and slips it back through one of the grid squares. With a slide, it tips over, rolls into Mac’s knee, and stops there. 

Mac refuses to look at it. 

“I drank some,” Jack wheedles. “And I ain’t turnin’ into a pumpkin.”

“A rat trying to kill a llllab rat,” Mac slurs. “How poetic.”

Jack doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. Mac can read the crooked divot over Jack’s right brow better than a lie detector. 

Poison might be the easier way to go anyway.

Two fumbling tries later, Mac unscrews the bottle cap and slants his head back. It tastes clean—and cold. The stone floor beats a mini fridge any day.

Mac’s tongue unglues from the tacky end of his molars. 

“Whoa, skipper. Slow down or you’ll be painting the walls.”

Mac obeys, more from his stomach’s uncomfortably full signals than Jack’s words. It would have scared Mac, once upon a time, not being able to recall the last substantial meal he ate. Now he just peers into Jack’s darker cell, sees the empty plate of chicken bones, and smiles. Of course his brain would give ‘fellow prisoner Jack’ the one thing he himself doesn’t have. And vice versa. 

Two empty bottles also sit in Jack’s cell.

“Bled a bit.” Jack reads Mac’s mind. “I drank my two-day ration all at once.”

“Bled from what?”

Jack snorts and looks away for the first time since his appearance. “Dude with the beard got in a lucky shot with a box cutter, right thigh, during my one and only successful escape attempt. Didn’t hit my arteries or anything, just soft tissue owies. You know. But it made me extra thirsty once they hauled me back from the woods.”

He admits it with only the slightest hesitation, totally honest. Transparent. A Phoenix doctor’s dream patient. 

Strike two. 

Mac closes his eyes.

They open again. That’s a shock. 

Mac still shivers out the drugs, but his intestines aren’t bubbling in acid like he expects from water soluble poisons. 

He’s slept through the rest of the day—moon rising but no trace of the sun. 

Jack’s slumped sideways against the bars, sound asleep. But he shifted closer at some point. Mac tries to scowl…but can’t. If the last kind thing his psyche does is help him hallucinate a dead partner, well. Even he’s not selfless enough to fight that. 

He finally notices a second water bottle that’s magically appeared in his cell next to the first, totally full. 

Mac doesn’t know whether to be awed or devastated about that.

Sunrise beckons in the grey air. 

Jack sleeps on, fingers twitching. 

Mac looks to his other side, the left, just to stretch a crick in his neck— 

Matty stands there. She wears her favourite maroon blazer, jeans, and a butterfly bracelet he’s pretty sure Samantha gifted her years ago. Her shoulders slump, weighed by something she’s carried a long time. 

Matty’s taller than Mac when he sits like this, certainly not the first time he’s looked up at her after an injury or abduction. Not by a long shot.

Mac waits, but unlike Riley, Bozer, or Jack, Matty doesn’t speak at all. Not one word. She just looks at Mac and Mac looks at Matty and of all the hallucinations—she understands him the best.

Her eyes are forlorn. They mirror that sticky disappointment in Mac’s chest. 

He removes one hand off his knee and holds it out to her. She takes it. Though it feels like nothing, when he nods—

Matty nods back.

“Your lucky day, Sunshine.”

Mac rouses at the clomp of boots on stone. Two pairs, as usual. No rifles or guns today. Mac doesn’t know whether to be devastated about that either. 

Daylight is harsh overhead, mid-morning sun with just a tinge of shadow.

The cell door squeals open and Jack twitches harder, enough to jolt himself awake. 

Mac wants to look away, but he’s locked onto the ripple of Jack’s cheeks, pale skin on his scarred arm, and socked toes that curl with each shift of his legs, evident pain. Watching things he never expected to see again steals Mac’s breath. Not-Jack groggy and waking up rivals a symphony. 

For Mac’s locked onto lucidity. His thoughts filter to his mouth in real time, full speed:

“Not again, please.”

He could be speaking about the drugs or Jack going away or this whole being alive business; even he’s not sure. 

Either way, Ballcap ignores Mac. He kneels, a zippered kit nestled in one hand. Mac tries to scrabble away into the corner, but Beard grabs his ankle with claw-like fingers, hard enough to bruise. He smiles a bit too, a hyena’s smile. 

“Hey!”

The bars rattle and Mac jumps. 

“Get your hands off him. Right now.”

Mac stares at Not-Jack—fist still above his head on the bars he just pummeled, jaw set, beard scraggly and flecked with blood. 

Eyes incensed. 

He’s not sleepy now. Neither is Mac, heart a foxtrot. 

Ballcap and Beard ignore this too, strike three. 

“You hearin’ me?” Jack seethes. 

Clearly not. Ballcap injects Mac with swift efficiency. This site jabs perilously close to the other one.

Mac waits and there he is, Bozer crocheting in the corner. He doesn’t even glance up when Mac’s manhandled out of his cell. Jack’s gone quiet but not exactly still, a puzzle in contrast against renewed hallucinations, one Mac can’t solve. 

Not-Jack doesn’t rant or rave or quote movies. His usual playbook. 

He growls.

There’s no other description apropos for the words bleeding into each other with every panting exhale. Mac strains to listen, but individual threats merge into one big one. He almost wishes Ballcap and Beard could hear it. Even hallucination Jack makes the days less lonely. 

One sentence filters through—

“I’m here, Mac. I’m not leavin’ again.”

“You’re a very…wolfy rat.”

Jack barks a laugh and it’s so much better than the sobbing.

Mac smiles all the way upstairs to a table with a knife on it.

The men deposit Mac into a chair before the table with sack-of-mouldy-potatoes care. They don’t even tie him up. Haven’t yet since this whole purgatory started. 

Oleg sits in the only other chair, across from Mac. The flowery lawn chair. 

Lab Coat hovers behind him with a tablet strapped to his arm and what looks like a surveyor’s scope, of all things. Its yellow tripod legs hurt Mac’s eyes after the dark cell, the brightest thing in this room.

Still no vehicle or airplane sounds. In fact, now that Mac looks for it—no light bulbs or switches either. 

Oleg holds a glass of white wine, legs crossed. His black-and-chrome hair shines roan in overcast light from an adjacent window. 

Mac glances from the serrated steak knife back to Oleg. 

Oleg smiles, a bland, professional thing. “Are you hungry, little lion?”

No. 

Yes. 

Mac is empty, and that’s a mighty big difference. 

His heart knocks with drunken fists against his chest. Uneven too. Four days on this drug and he’s already arrhythmic—that doesn’t fit the profile of the customary suspects.

“You don’t strike me as the cooking type,” says Mac, mostly to get a reaction. 

But Oleg smiles the faintest bit wider and, to Mac surprise, it reaches his eyes. He regards Mac with a slimy version of paternal amusement. It makes Mac feel dirty in a way that has nothing to do with damp walls. He’s suddenly extra glad Not-Jack didn’t follow him up the stairs.

Oleg snaps his fingers and Ballcap scurries off. “I am not. Luckily for you, this was flown in via private helicopter. Compliments of my personal chef.”

Flown in…just how far from civilization are they?

A plate appears before Mac, silver topper and all. Well, stainless steel topper. Oleg himself removes it, speaking with perfect French annunciation despite his Czech accent.

“Et voila. Voici ton déjeuner. Bon appétit.”

No poison, no guns, no creepy crawlies. 

All that adorns the plate is a rib-eye steak and an absurd amount of waffle fries. They’re steaming.  

No fork either, though. Mac nearly laughs. By the glint in Oleg’s assessing eyes, he likely hoped to wrongfoot Mac through the old no-utensils dehumanization trick. It’s a nice try if it wasn’t out of every criminal don’s playbook. 

Mac avoids looking at the food or Matty’s image flickering next to the tripod. She still won’t say anything. 

Instead, Mac throws Oleg a deadpan look. 

“No catch.” Oleg spreads his hands and sits back. “We just need to study you whilst you eat, if that’s not upsetting to your constitution.”

Lab Coat already types into the tablet, squinting through the scope. Except it can’t be an oscilloscope, like they used at MIT. Too many knobs on the side. It would be useless at this distance anyway.

Mac sniffs and Lab Coat’s eyes shift to the tablet. 

Thermals, Mac realizes. Maybe facial tracking too. 

“Awfully generous for an arms dealer,” he says aloud, expression neutral. 

As if acknowledging the veracity of this, Oleg slides across a white cloth napkin. “Please.” He gestures. “Eat.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

Oleg’s lips twitch, obviously waiting for this question. “Then you will tell me the names of your fellow team members and who you work for.”

That niggling thought peeps at the back of Mac’s mind. He finds he doesn’t much care if this is all a ruse and it’s poisoned. Even his usual anxiety is quiet, cogs at a slow turn. Real Jack would either be alarmed or proud, but then Real Jack lives in a box now. Mac will never know which emotion he’d choose. 

Mac drapes the napkin across his lap and presses the knuckles of his left hand into the steak, to hold it steady while he cuts with his right. Marinade juices ooze out the side and Mac’s mouth waters. He spears the modest slice with his knife tip.

One last glance at a passive Oleg and Mac pops it in his mouth.

Flavour explodes across his tongue. It sends him into a coughing fit at once, salivary glands dehydrated, but he doesn’t dare ask for water. 

The other four men in the room just observe. Or at least Mac assumes the two MMA wannabes at his back are watching too. Not being able to see people hovering behind him would’ve prickled hairs on the back of his neck once. Now Mac just thumps his chest with a weak fist and takes another bite. 

His hand is clammy around the knife handle. 

Mac eyes the distance between him and Oleg. Oleg watches Mac watch the room and there’s that smile again. 

“Do you like it?”

“Sure. It’s a little much for me right now with the…” Mac points to the inside of his elbow, still weeping drops of blood into his sleeve. 

Oleg just nods. 

Mac forces down another piece. Lab Coat checks a stopwatch in his pocket, of all things, and makes a note. Mac can safely place this on the podium as one of the weirdest hostage situations he’s ever experienced.

“You should feel privileged.” Oleg seems to take the small bites personally. “Few get to sample my creation.”

Mac’s chewing pauses. “Your creation?”

“The drug. Our own enhanced version of Dimethyltryptamine. Between me and the good doctor here, we decided that brokering weapons just wasn’t…satisfying enough.”

It surprises Mac less that Oleg synthesized whatever runs rampant through his immune system and more that he pronounces the psychedelic correctly. Their intel on Gagarin had a footnote about a short stint at Oxford; Mac vows not to underestimate his intelligence again.

“What happened to the others who sampled?” asks Mac.

Oleg’s eyes narrow, just a fraction that denotes intrigue more than frustration. “It turns out I was wrong. The others were nothing like you.”

“Oh?”

“They hadn’t lost their roar yet.”

Mac shoves the plate away from himself. It flashes neon colours anyway, a visual disturbance he could mostly ignore until now. His chest spasms but he swallows back the cough.

“This is bland,” Mac announces suddenly. He wipes his mouth with the napkin and subtly switches the knife to an overhand grip in one smooth motion. Just like Bozer’s close-up magic book. “Some salt might be nice.”

“Bland?” Oleg sits straighter and turns to murmur to his scientist. “Write that down. Perhaps it’s affecting his sense of—”

Mac shoots up from the chair. The knife is mid-swing at Ballcap before his eyes even have time to widen. Rippled steel edges bite into Ballcap’s exposed forearm and he roars. It’s strategically chosen—the exact same spot where he always injects Mac.

A fist thunders into Mac’s face.

Mac roars too when it skins his right ear, a ring splitting soft tissue along the way. His teeth clang like funeral bells.

Beard grabs Mac’s fist in a steel girder grip and winds it back towards his own stomach. His fingers clench around the knife.

Mac stiffens. This is it. This is the moment—

“Enough!” Oleg shouts. “Sloppy, my young friend. But a valiant effort nonetheless.”

Mac heaves, panting so hard his stomach bumps at the tip of the knife. Beard is the largest and tallest of everyone in the room and he lords it over Mac now, just letting the blade hover. Four more inches and Mac’s empty intestines will be all over this room.

It’s about the same distance as Mac’s hand hovering near Not-Jack.

He lets his grip go slack and surprise flickers in Beard’s eyes.

Oleg barks something in Czech. Beard backs down with a glare at Mac.

Mac doesn’t glare back, just grimaces when his hands are twisted behind his back and Ballcap marches him out of the room. Before he does, in the shuffle, Mac manages to slip the cloth into his pocket.

“That was stupid,” Ballcap mutters, more to himself than Mac. Now they both drip blood.

Mac can’t disagree.

He’s disappointed anyway.

Chapter Text

‘You’ve got all the time in the world until you don’t.
I was betting on forever, but forever comes and goes.
Never thought I’d have to know you as a memory,
Now I’m rehearsing all the things I’d say if you were in front of me.’

“Empty Room” ~ Jamie Miller

“Whoa, whoa!” Not-Jack tries and fails to stand when Mac’s chucked into the cell. The door slams. “What the hell is this?”

Mac sits upright and moans into his knees, coughing. The tip of the knife will leave a bullseye bruise tomorrow to ornament all the others, but right now all he feels is the lack of oxygen in his stuttering chest and rivers of blood down his ear.

Beard’s got a mean right cross, Mac will give him that. Keep living your MMA dreams.

“Hey. Hey, hey, hey.” Jack clams his fingers towards himself, right arm through the bars this time. “Turn your head a little, kiddo, so I can see the damage. You’re in a shadow.”

Mac doesn’t look at Jack, but he twists his head away so sunlight blushes across his ear. It’s hard to keep still with the panting and bright flashes everywhere. Words get stuck on his tongue, in his faulty lungs.

“Bastard,” Jack hisses. “Beardo do that to you? With the snake ring?”

Mac nods, just a little kid on a sopping park bench waiting for his dad to pick him up from school. The drug blurs emotions together until Mac’s body feels nine years old. Sick. Hyperventilating alone in a cold space.

“Took an alley cat chunk outta your ear, Mac. I’m sorry.”

Mac just shrugs.

“Mac.” Jack switches from sitting to kneeling. “Hey. You sound like a marathon runner. It hurts to breathe?”

Mac nods.

“He break something down there?”

Mac shrugs again.

Jack bites back a choice swear word halfway through. “Alright. With me. There you go. We’re goin’ in for four and out for six.”

Same phrase repeated on dozens of missions, at home amidst dozens of panic attacks and flashbacks. They’re a red carpet all the way back to inhaling enough oxygen.

Eyes everywhere and nowhere, Mac listens to rather than watches Not-Jack’s breaths. Injuries of his own linger in their whistle.

You really are messed up. Imagine Jack healthy, dangit.

It doesn’t work. Hallucination Jack continues to grimace, paler than a sand dollar.

Mac’s panting curtails.

Jack catches it.

“Hey, hey.” His arm goes rigid. “Whatever you’re seeing isn’t here.”

Mac stops breathing.

A stunned noise escapes Jack. He sounds almost frantic once the noise coalesces into something coherent. “No, no, no. That’s not—bad choice of words on my part. I’m real but so are those drugs and they’re wiggin’ you out. It’s just you and me.”

Mac shakes his head.

“Kid…you don’t gotta talk right now, but can you look at me?”

Absolutely not. Mac closes his eyes.

“Okay. I get that. Just keep breathing.”

Mac will pass out any second if he stops. A sea of unfamiliar hands rise up to grip him and yank him under. Beard’s hands, Ballcap’s hands, Oleg’s hands—they’re all the same in the end because they’re all Mac has left. He’s never been more alone. 

“He torturin’ you too?” Jack asks after a minute, so muted Mac almost doesn’t hear him.

Is he?

Steak isn’t torture, is it?

Leaving a knife on the table…

“I don’t know,” Mac whispers, once he finally captures enough breath to land back in his own skin. His eyes open and glance to the side. “I don’t understand what he wants.”

Jack’s hand fists on the floor, around a handful of straw.

It grabs Mac in a moment of clarity. He fumbles in his pocket for the napkin, just a stupid kid with stupid ideas who hasn’t changed his stripes from that stunted nine-year-old.

“H-here.” Mac won’t look at Jack as he slides across the cloth bundle. He leaves it a foot from the bars and ducks back to his spot. “They didn’t even notice.”

Jack hums a noise of interest and stretches through to peel open the cloth. His wrinkles smooth, whites of his eyes the shiniest point in either room.

“Shoo, Mac. Where’d you get these?”

Mac tries not to cry; his dehydrated body can’t afford it. “Compliments of Oleg.”

“I haven’t tasted the sweet ambrosia of waffle fries in two years, man.”

“Stole ‘em off the plate wwwhile they were…detaining me.”

Jack stares from Mac to the waffles fries, like they’re the hallucination here. It would be funny if it wasn’t the most tragic, absurd thing Mac’s ever seen. He might as well be feeding a pet rock.

But even pretending does more for his soul than an empty cell.

Jack’s hand hovers over the fries for a moment, still steaming, then he zips one to his mouth at Mach Two. Barely even chews.

Mac marvels that his brain can make a real object disappear like that. His visual acuity must be shot to hell by now.

That or he ate the waffle fries and doesn’t remember. That makes more sense.

Jack closes his eyes, forehead on the bars. “Like munchin’ on heaven. Thanks, brother.”

“Someone might as well enjoy them.”  

“I’m only going for seconds if you eat some too.”

Mac makes a face.

Not-Jack breaks into a smile, of all things, and fondness coats his features. “You’re better than a work of art, you know that? Seein’ the little expressions again is unbelievable. Could watch your face all day.”

“Creepy.” Mac banters back without thinking, distracted.

His extremities buzz with creepy crawly sensations. The sensory part of this psychedelic experience slithers its way into his nerves, delayed and revamped via Oleg.

“Still true. Eat up, Mac.”

Mac takes two waffle fries and just holds them, to pacify Jack.

Jack raises a brow.

Holding a sleeve to his bleeding ear, Mac forces down the fries, heart rate slower. When the batter gets stuck in his throat, he caves and drinks half the other water bottle, rolling it over to Jack.

“Let’s see a painting do that,” Mac quips.

Jack rolls his eyes, but his smile is the biggest yet.

Time means nothing.

Daylight, overcast, pitch black night—all of it becomes fair game for micro naps, the only form of rest the drugs allow Mac’s body. Then he’ll get itchy or hear a mop singing in the corner or watch Riley doing ballet (ha) and jolt awake.

Not-Jack sleeps too.

And eats, whenever a plate of bread or watery beans appears in his cell. Using his hands, no utensils of any sort in sight.

Sometimes he scratches through his longer beard and leaves little bread crumbs.

It’s the strangest hallucination of all.

When Mac flips onto his back, sometimes Cage appears.

Always when the world is cistern-still, mind you. She too lies on her back, hands folded behind her head, smile loose.

Like Matty, she doesn’t say much, just stares up at the ceiling the same way you’d lie back and watch cloud shapes. Her toes tick-tock to either side, following a beat Mac can’t hear.

Once, after he’s recited the entire periodic table in his head as a futile effort to fall asleep, he rolls over to hear Sam sigh a wistful sound.

“Pretty when it rains, isn’t it?”

Mac is too cowardly to lever up and see if red pools across her stomach.

No matter how much they inject him with, James never appears. Not even as a silent presence like Matty.

His absence is the best lullaby Mac’s ever heard.

Grit under his fingernails. Grit on his forehead. Grit inside his pant legs, up under the hem until it chafes sensitive shin hair.

The grit burns.

Mac’s eyes fly open.

His fingers wander and sink into a pillow of sand on either side. Tawny and grainy, it’s “nothin’ like the beaches in Cancun,” as their unit always chanted before a hot call. Mac pats around again, but he still lays in Oleg’s cell…

And the cell is flooded two feet deep with sand.

Overhead, moonlight wanes through the window.

Hissssss…

Sand shifts under a wind Mac can’t hear. But he feels it—hot, straight out of the oven wind that scorches worse when it moves around.

Where is his helmet? He wears BDUs and boots but no helmet. He’ll burn to a crisp before any IEDs get him.

A bloody figure stands in the corner. One of his legs is crooked, tibia bone exposed through a sooty pant leg.

Mac sits up with a holler. A wordless holler, something that might be Charlie’s name.

Charlie smiles, even with blood on his cheeks.

“Mac. You’ve been gone so long.” He hovers in shadow, almost real. Almost gone. “Got a spot with your name on it.”

Mac yells again.

A sleepy voice—“Mac?”

Mac pushes to stand but the sand drags him down. He props on an elbow and it burns too, icy fire like octane from sand crystallized in the sun. The nerves in his shoulders zap, a live wire with nowhere to go.

Not-Jack stirs on the other side of the bars. His lids whisk open.

“I’m sorry,” Mac babbles. “I’m sorry about the elevator. I’m sorry about my father’s part in it. I’m sorry I couldn’t get you out.”

Charlie shakes his head. “Don’t need to tell me anything like that, Mac. I already know.”

Mac closes his eyes but Charlie’s still there, a bloody halo floating above the dunes.

“Mac,” Jack calls. “Hey. You’re having one hell of a trip.”

Mac wheezes a gutted seal noise he’s never heard himself make before. Dead friends on all sides—that’s his lot. He should be grateful he hallucinates familiar people at all. 

“One is enough.” He pants that too. “I don’t need you both right now.”

Jack quiets.

Charlie inclines his head to peer at Mac with bloodshot eyes. The sclera of one is blown burgundy by internal injuries. The kind he would get falling dozens of storeys to his death.

His voice echoes, deeper than normal.

“You did everything you could.”

Mac looks up at him. “It wasn’t enough, Charlie.”

In his peripheral, Jack startles.

“That’s because it was never your promise to keep.” Charlie flickers. “I’m not alone.”

“You definitely won’t be alone w-when Oleg’s done with me.”

Jack pings the bars with his fingernails, a teaspoon-on-porcelain-saucer sound.

Charlie vanishes.

Mac grabs the sand—the cloth napkin—and throws it at the corner where Charlie stood. His own weakness shocks him; the cloth doesn’t make it two feet before fluttering to the ground.

“Mac?”

Every bone in Mac’s limbs judders, from his pinky knuckles down to his ankle joints. He coughs on a mouthful of nothing. It zaps his throat too.

“Mac, hang on, don’t—”

Too late. Mac leans to the side away from Jack and vomits. A thin dribble splatters onto the front of his shirt, though thankfully not yesterday’s waffle fries. Mac wipes his mouth. 

“Sand. I don’t…I don’ wan’ the sand.”

Jack hums a soothing note. “I know, bud.”

“Or glass.”

Jack hesitates.

“The elevator.” Mac keens a long note. “Its front p-panel was all glass.”

“What elevator?” There’s that urgent tone again.

Mac finally gets himself sitting up straight and leans back against the wall. Cool stone douses the burning skin. Sand can create stone but this prison stone was pounded by years of rain and pressure and friction. It lasted while sand blows away. The BDU hallucination melts into his regular clothes.

“Mac?”

Mac tunes back in and realizes he missed something.

“Mac, son.” Jack strains against the bars. “Stay with me.”

“Where would I go?”

Jack huffs but doesn’t sound very amused.

“Dead friends everywhere.” Mac wills back the burn behind his eyes. “At least I didn’t kill you too.”

Jack’s breaths quake like Mac’s fingers where they clench around his stomach. “Charlie…he’s…”

“He died right in front of me. Sacrificed himself to save others, took the decision out of my hands.”

Jack closes his eyes. Stars wend their way into his beard next to the bread crumbs, nose bearing the slightest hint of colour in translucent skin. The tears whisper on their way down, strange, only-in-Mac’s-mind sounds.

“Hero if there ever was one,” Jack whispers.

“Yeah. Charlie was the best.”

“Him too, but I’m talking about you.”

Sitting through this two-act play of corpse friends is well beyond Mac’s ability right now. He twists a hand into the dirty fabric of his pants and ignores the blushing warmth that creeps up the back of his neck.

Just go away. Please, just this once…go away.

And what do you know—the prison is quiet. Deathly quiet.

For once in Mac’s life, he might just get what he wants.

“You forgot the bonfire at my place, the night before I shipped out to hunt Kovac.”

Or not.

Mac stills. His nose wrinkles at this latest absurdity. Bonfire? They never had a bonfire at Jack’s house.

Jack keeps his eyes on the window way above Mac’s head. His gaze trails away, like stars. Like a friend’s hug. Like kind words.

“It sat there on the coffee table, the perfect excuse, you know? A reason for one last goodbye with you, to see those baby blues before I shipped out for good.”

For good. Mac shivers. He still can’t figure out the bonfire component to this.

The narcotics add a vibrant layer to Jack’s storytelling. Not to say his words aren’t always vivid, expressive as the hands that used to wave when he talked.

But now a bonfire sparks in the corner, throwing no heat, and a paintbrush-strokes version of Jack, smaller in scale to match the diorama of this vision, walks away from a sepia tone LA skyline like a still life sprung into motion. Painting-Jack’s shoulders sag in a way that has nothing to do with his pack. It’s an animated sequence in real time, so alive it sizzles.

Not-Jack sniffs. The vision simmers away. “Realized it would be better to keep you with me, even in some small way. Comforting. And boy—was I right. It’s never easy to discover your bunk mate is sellin’ you out.”

Mac’s breath hitches. Not-Jack’s words are a phantasm produced by agitated chemicals in Mac’s brain to help him feel less lonely. None of them are real.

Mac still opens his mouth out of sheer surprise. “Your unit? They…”

“Well, not the whole unit. Just one. I noticed pretty quick that intel reports were always a bit delayed. Only one person was in charge of radio and coding transmissions—even I’m not that bad at math.”

Confusion stampedes through Mac’s aching chest.

“They…they told us you k-killed Kovac, before the explosion.”

Jack sighs. His eyes go bright again.

“I did,” he rasps. “Killed him up close and personal-like, right between the eyes. But Kovac died years ago, just like I initially thought.”

Jack pauses in a very not-Jack way. He breathes slow as if to inhale cosmic dust, breaking down elements in the pleura of tired lungs.

“It felt too easy because it was too easy. Turns out others were itchin’ to get their grubby hands on Kovac’s criminal empire. Mostly one big fish, but sharks always circle a kill.”

One big fish.

“Oleg Gagarin,” says Mac.

“Mhmm.” Jack’s eyes don’t reflect anything now, space junk in an empty field. “Our resident Judas Iscariot sold me to Oleg as part of the deal when I confronted him. Couldn’t have any loose ends, I s’ppose. Not to mention that Oleg hates me for thwarting a major operation, few years back.”

Mac winces. His heart jackrabbits in his ears.

Someone…sold Jack, the same way you’d sell an old car?

It’s disgusting, abhorrent. Mac immediately wants to vomit again. Human trafficking is the one crime that never gets easier to swallow, no matter how many times he or the team faces it. It never stops repulsing at first blush. It’s an offense to the core of being human and therefore transcends their ability to compartmentalize more often than Mac’s comfortable with.

“Thought I was so clever,” Jack continues. “Figurin’ out the pattern in Commander Bronson’s night watch and how we always found a convenient lead towards Kovac the next day. How our supplies fund ran suspiciously low towards the end, despite spending almost none of it. Now…”

Jack shakes his head. “Now you’re looking at a right fool. We weren’t on a hunt for Kovac—we were on a hunt to find Kovac’s assets, hidden around the world.”

Mac’s head whirls with a distant emotion that pings through him.

“I confronted Bronson alone.” Jack admits it soft, but not gentle. Soft like the way you speak to an animal you’re trapping for a kill. “I wanted to be discreet in case I’d misread the whole thing, even though my gut knew better. We were the last to leave on our way to the next scout point and I told him I’d report everything, I’d…”

Jack runs a hand down his face. It catches in his beard, longer than Mac’s ever seen it, and slides to a stop on his sternum.

Mac, at last, notices a scar at the base of Jack’s throat. It’s a very specific type of scar, from an odd shape digging in hard. Strangling. From Commander Bronson’s Special Forces ring, probably, the same way Beard’s ring sliced open Mac’s ear.

“Best intentions and all that,” muses Jack.

Mac can finish this story on his own.

And then he sold you as part of a deal with Oleg to acquire Kovac’s old criminal fortune in exchange for a payday.

Mac finally recognizes the pinging emotion as fury—raw, salt-blooded ire that spins the room. He wishes the fire was real so he could throw it in Oleg’s face.

And they said Mac was abysmal at English. He almost flunked sixth grade because he couldn’t make up imaginary stories or scenarios very well. Well ha. Take that, Mrs. Fuller. Give his brain homemade drugs and he can spin a yarn with the best of them.

Jack catches Mac’s eye.

“Mac.”

Mac drops to a whisper. “I’m glad none of this happened.”

“Hey…”

“You wouldn’t deserve that fate.”

“Mac.” Jack’s gaze burns now. “I don’t care how this ends for me. I don’t care that Oleg’s squeezin’ me for intel on American assets. I don’t even care what happened to Bronson in the end—probably living on a beach somewhere, the bastard. Do you understand what I care about?”

No. Hallucinations are determined by the subconscious pockets of Mac’s own mind.

Jack pushes closer to the bars, like he’s the wild animal here. “All I care is that I get a second chance. I get to see my boy outside of memories and photos. I get to watch you eat and sleep, to look at me. You’re here.”

Every word trembles with emotion. Mac starts to shake too, a tuning fork to Jack’s grief and joy and what sounds like a heaping of relief.

“I get one last chance to watch your back and—hopefully—get us out of here. Should be a cinch with your help.”

Something snaps inside of Mac, something long stretched.

“You’re not real,” he chants. “You’re not real. You can’t be real. My brain is making this up to write a better ending.”

A sound slips out of Jack not dissimilar to his earlier growl. This one is more vibrant, frustration and admiration somehow bundled together. “Who identified my body, Mac?”

Mac shakes his head.

“Huh? Who made the call since I was too ‘badly damaged?’”

Mac whips around to stare Jack head-on in a way he hasn’t dared to since this all started. Jack stares back, jaw set.

“How did you know that was in the report?”

Stupid question—because you know it.

“Who, Mac?”

“S…someone…” Mac loses his breath; gasps it back. “Someone from your unit, a c-commander.”

“Bronson, right?”

In truth, Mac doesn’t know. He read the line about a ‘massive detonation’ and didn’t bother to open the casket during those few moments alone with it. Vest cam photos of the carnage were enough. Riley, too, couldn’t even bear to be in the same room as the casket without breaking down, let alone lift the lid.

Jack wipes his eyes and digs in a pocket of his rather frayed BDU pants. The tan camo has become so threadbare, it’s all a wash of one sandy shade apart from a bloody patch along his thigh.

“It’s a miracle they never found this in all the searches.”

Mac’s in the dark, in every sense.

“Even if you won’t…” Jack steels his lips. “Even if you won’t come over here, just know that you were always real for me, every second of every day I was gone. My own ghost haunting each step.”

Something shiny flashes in the light. Jack thumbs the shape in his palm before reaching through and placing it on the floor equidistant between their bodies.

Mac’s jaw goes slack.

It’s a paper clip.

A paper clip twisted into a bonfire shape, complete with a ruff of logs. Inner and outer flames add dimension, a singular piece of metal woven and spiraling around itself. It’s sacred, an echo of a time—a person—Mac’s not sure exists anymore.

His fingers trace the shape in the air before he finally touches it.

It’s warm.

His fingers dart back.

Skittish but desperate for something tangible, Mac gives in against a case of nerves and picks up the paper clip. Its warmth seeps into frazzled nerves, lowering his shoulders and easing taut muscles in his abused stomach.

He has no memory of making this, but it rivals holding a newborn. That awe and fear zip through him at the same time.

“It’s the only shape you’ve made twice.”

Mac looks up.

Jack angles his chin. “A bonfire. You wove one when we first started at Phoenix. Then again the night we had beers before I shipped out. You took your time with this one too, did it in stages like you were drawing it out.”

“We both were.”

Jack swallows. “How long’s it been?”

“What?”

“How long…”

Caution holds up a yellow flag before Mac brushes it aside. “Five months.”

Jack lets out a puff of air, like Mac punched him. “Got carted around to a few folks before bein’ returned to Oleg, but yikes. Had no idea it’s been that long. I’m so sorry, kid.”

Mac tucks the paper clip close to his chest. “For what?”

“How much time you got?”

Not very much.

Jack sobers. “It hit me somewhere right around the time I was hopping off the plane in edge-of-the-world Slovakia. That none of it mattered very much without you. The real reason I left LA, when I got that photo on my phone…I worried Kovac had been in my contacts too.”

“You worried he could find us.”

Jack nods at Mac’s whisper. “Did it to make myself the bigger target, but I see now that protecting someone is a hefty thing and you can’t do it from a distance, no matter what the poets say.”

Mac’s limbs are heavy after the nightmare and his mind playing tricks on him. He curls up on his side facing Jack, watching the pirouette of faint light over pores in his skin. Mac compares this Jack to the one in his dreams those first few months of pure agony without him, a chunk torn out of his heart.

His own pound of flesh. He imagined a reunion scenario plenty of times, usually to comfort himself on long nights. But this isn’t the triumphant return, Jack holding pizza and beers, red-cheeked, loud and ready to party.

This Jack is emaciated, haunted, honest to a fault like he’s throwing out words before it’s too late.

“It’s okay,” Mac reassures.

Jack’s eyes harden. “It’s really not. And I’m sorry I ever left you. I was wrong.”

The unthinking generosity of these words suggests much rehearsal. No bantering first, no tiptoeing around the issue before it’s forced out. Jack apologizes with granite confidence, full eye contact.

“So was I.” Mac shifts to find a position that doesn’t hurt his stomach. His fingers tighten around the paper clip until metal loops slot into his palm folds. Who cares if this isn’t real and Jack’s gone in the morning—Mac vomits up the words he’s hidden inside the cleft of his mistrust for two years. “I almost…I almost snuck onto the cargo plane the night you shipped out. Packed a bag and everything.”

“Wish you had,” Jack breathes.

So do I.

This isn’t the real Jack, so Mac opens his mouth again. “You broke your promise.”

Jack’s eyes fill.

He reaches his hand through again and rests it on the floor inches from Mac’s nose. Moonlight illuminates bloody knuckles. Scent tantalizes at this distance, just close enough to smell briny water, dirt, sweat, and that unmistakable essence of Jack underneath it all.

Mac almost smiles, at the fantasy his mind apparently wants more than picnics with Bozer or movie nights with Riley, one he’ll get very soon if Oleg has his way:

“I want to go home.”

“Aw, bud. I bet you do. LA’s a million miles away right now. Mission against Oleg went bad? He snatched you?”

Jack doesn’t get it. He misreads the misery. Mac’s shivers return, the paper clip the only warm point along his body.

He plays along. “Y-yeah. From the hotel. Stakeout.”

“That must have been scary.” Jack ripples his fingers to either side, a mime of what he likely wants to do to Mac’s hair. “Didn’t get anyone else?”

“Just me,” says Mac. And this time he loses the battle, a single tear trickling down his exposed cheek.

“Mac.” Jack lays down so they’re at eye level. “I’m with you. I know you’re hurting. But you’re not alone. I’m not breaking that promise, not ever again.”

Mac does smile then, a flit of numb lips and more bright lights.

“Kiddo?” Jack’s voice sharpens.

The words slip out before Mac can pull them back. “Home is where…the heart is…”

Chapter Text

‘Hoped they’d notice my breaking heart;
They look so close but feel so far.
I’ll spend my days locked away
In this prison I’ve built for myself.
I hold the keys,
Still I can’t break free.’

“Can You Hear Me” ~ MUNN

Jack never asks Mac if he’s okay.

It comforts Mac in a way he can’t articulate even to himself. Jack doesn’t have to ask. He just knows.

A major perk to hallucinations.

Instead, when Mac’s body cramps from dehydration or he starts kicking at bugs that aren’t there—Jack talks.

And talks.

Stories of his first car or prom or that one two-hour tale about the time he fell off a horse into river rapids and hiked back soaking wet. This increases the shivers—hot shivers without any sweat, Mac’s trained mind notes—but it also earns a real chuckle out of both him and Jack and it’s the best thing Mac’s heard in months.

It’s theirs. Even Oleg can’t take it away.

The sun sets on the next day and Jack’s voice dims too.

His eyes have settled on Mac instead of memory’s far distance. Mac glances over from his prop against the wall, hair tacky against his bruised neck; the first injection site has swollen under his ear.

“Hey, bud?”

“Mmm.”

“You still with me?”

That’s a good question. A really good question.

The answer is just as easy—“Always.” 

“Good.” Jack clears his throat. “Gotta ask you something real quick while it’s quiet upstairs.”

Mac lifts a brow.

“You wanna untie those boots for me?”

“They’re kkkkeepin’ me…” The slurry that passes for Mac’s brain sloshes into gear. “Keepin’ my feet warm.”

“I get that, and you can leave the boots on. But the laces might loosen these hinges.” Jack flicks a look over his shoulder at the iron lock on his cell door. “Not sure how much torque they’ll apply to antique stuff, but it’s worth a shot. Couldn’t bring myself to straighten out and wreck the paper clip, so I figure this is the next best trick.”

“Antique?”

Jack points to the hallway plaque. “It’s in Dutch, but I’m pretty sure we’re in a historic village in the middle ‘a nowhere. A county jail, to be specific.”

Mac glitches. “Historic?”

“One of those living museums, you know? Where people dress up and pretend it’s the seventeen hundreds or whatnot? Must be abandoned.”

That…well. That explains a lot.

Mac’s proud of his brain for finally putting it together, even informed through Jack as a mouthpiece. No wonder they can’t hear any cars. Or planes, if this is so remote that it doesn’t cross the flight path between any major cities.

Not to mention the fact that Riley and Desi haven’t burst in by now, guns blazing, with a full contingent of armed forces. Their absence is also a relief. They don’t need to get mixed up in this.

Then the implication hits. Mac’s throat tightens. “N-No. I can’t.”

“Okay.” Jack lets up immediately. His hand splays on his side of the bars. “The drugs are messin’ with ya, I get that. We don’t have to do anything right now. Will you at least give me the laces?”

Mac shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

His breathing accelerates. “Jack…”

“I mean, you physically can if you’re movin’ those fingers—”

“No, Jack.”

It’s the closest to a shout Mac can manage right now, a yippy puppy sound. It still snaps Jack’s mouth shut. Twenty-six viable options exist to escape this jail and Mac can’t push a single one past his lips.

“Please,” Mac begs instead. “No. Don’t make me do it.”

“Any escape attempt is a good attempt in my book.” Jack runs assessing eyes over Mac. “You’re not going to hurt us by trying.”

He doesn’t understand this either.

It chokes an invisible noose around Mac’s neck until he’s spluttering for breath. Enough to warrant a soft shushing noise from Jack. He looks spooked.

“It’s alright, bud. Your brain’ll fire up eventually and we can—”

Boots thump on the steps. It’s the first time Mac’s grateful to hear them, for he cannot lie to Jack, not even his mirage. Mac closes his eyes.

It’s the second morning after the waffle fries snafu, in keeping with their every-other day pattern. Mac can’t even get to his feet when Ballcap clomps inside, the lack of food and water weakening him to the point of micro faints, black patches in his awareness stitched together like an ugly quilt.

They lift Mac to his feet, a crash test dummy. He has to guess what’s going on when Jack’s mouth opens in a harsh word at Beard—and pain leaps across Mac’s face.

He blinks.

Slapped. Again. Right where Oleg did it. Purely to wake him up. The hollow of Mac’s cheek smarts where something metal dug into it, that infernal ring.

His reaction must be delectable fun for this guy because his next invasion of Mac’s space is to twist his fist into Mac’s broken ribs—and they crunch.

White static envelopes everything for one never-ending beat.

When Mac comes to, it’s to hear an awful, wet paper towel sound that rasps on a loop. It’s about all he can hear.

It takes another dozen of those rasps before Mac realizes it’s himself. Something slimy dribbles over his lips, as if he’s puking those paper towels onto the floor. It’s warm, the familiar metal tang cluing him in many more gasping breaths later than it should.

Jack shouts a word Mac doesn’t need to be fully conscious to understand. A rude word, a slur against Beard’s manhood.

Mac struggles. “Don’…don’t hurt him.”

Even as a hallucination, Mac still can’t bear to see Jack hurt. He’s roaring with rage now.

The truth hits right when Beard laughs at Mac’s struggles—they can’t hear Jack at all.

The noose knots around his throat.

Forget the yellow tripod—

The glass is halfway red. 

Deep red, the colour of Christmas decorations and velvet cake and fleece blankets on movie nights. The colour of his own blood on a cell floor.

Mac trips at the sight of it.

Beard smacks a hard knuckle against Mac’s back and it steals precious air from his lungs. He stumbles into the room between arms holding him upright. 

“Please.” Oleg sits at the table again. “I prepared something…lighter this time.”

So he did. A bowl of steaming chicken soup sits next to the bright red glass. Plastic spoon, no metal in sight. 

Oleg trails Mac’s eye. “Cranberry juice. You like, yes? Then I have something special planned for dessert.”

Two wrenching hands dump Mac into the chair. His shoulders tingle at the force of it, not to mention the swift injection into his elbow that’s so careless it’s almost an afterthought. Bozer suddenly unfolds a picnic blanket in the corner. 

Mac stares down at the bowl, oh so very tired, then back up at Oleg. “I’m not hungry.”

“Oh? But you’re not returned to your cell until you eat.”

Mac perks up. “Can I get that in writing?”

A slow smile creeps over Oleg’s face. The scientist already taps away in the corner, seated on a different plastic lawn chair. Oleg seems to have a preference for the flowery one. “You can have as much as you like and there is no physical punishment for asking. But you have to verbally ask if you want something. Anything.”

“This part of the drug experiment?”

Oleg looks Mac dead in the eye. “Yes. I don’t want to kill you.”

Mac goes cold. It’s worse than any threat. 

For an excuse not to watch those intense brown eyes—like Jack’s, but not the same brand, colder—Mac picks up the spoon and twirls it through his knuckles. He succeeds without dropping, still dexterous despite the havoc wreaked on his body. 

One bite, and Mac doesn’t taste anything. The reality of withered tastebuds kicks in a split second later and Mac reaches for the cranberry juice.

A careful sip still springs tears to his eyes from the tart bite of it. Too much flavour, too fast. He coughs.

Again, Oleg and company just watch, with the scientist jotting notes. At least the juice frees his mouth of the bloody taste.

Mac eats seven more bites and three more sips before he sits back, queasy. Oleg nods. It feels like losing a chess match you didn’t know you were playing. Mac’s cheeks burn. 

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” Oleg sniffs at the leftover juice. “To want something you can never have. Not yet, at least.”

Mac frowns. Oleg can’t possibly know about Jack, the dead friend hallucinations. 

“It’s why you’re perfect for my experiment.”

This would almost be easier if Oleg was crazy, delusional. The level efficiency in his tone sends up a red flare in Mac’s mind. 

Oleg waves a hand and Ballcap appears from somewhere behind Mac to bend and listen. Oleg leans to the side, winces, and removes a Glock from his back waistband, safety off. He sets it on the table to whisper in Ballcap’s ear unencumbered. 

The world tunnel visions. 

No one is even looking at Mac. The scientist leans over to tie a lace on his loafer. Beard has removed the bowl and walked into the hallway with it.

Three men on the opposite side of a table from Mac, eyes averted. Two heartbeats skipped over each other.

One loaded gun.

Mac lunges forward. 

His hands close around the Glock—all the way around the trigger—before Oleg’s fist home runs straight into Mac’s left arm. Right at the wrist.

Something cracks, shooting pure fire up Mac’s arm. He yelps and drops the gun. 

Over shrill pain, Oleg’s bear growl laughter booms around the room. “Didn’t I tell you I saved the best for last?”

Mac looks up, caught in the vicious web of Oleg’s eye contact.

And suddenly he understands. The rules of this game align themselves in grotesque clarity. The eyes were never off of him by accident and this gun was loaded with only one lonely bullet.

“No…”

“Oh, little lion. Your cage is far better than one I could dream up myself. Those other men were nothing like you.”

Mac loses all feeling in his legs, mouth dropped open.

“But I’m not an unreasonable man. If you’re honest, I might even let you touch it again.”

Mac’s lungs spasm. He eyes the Glock.

“All you have to do is say it.” Oleg’s jaw ripples. “Say what you want most.”

Pain’s fire licks up Mac’s face, igniting the fresh contusions. He opens his mouth. Like escape options earlier, he can’t push out the words. “Please…”

“No? Suit yourself.”

And Oleg snatches the gun, invisible timer down to zero. It disappears back into his waistband without a second thought, like it was never there.

Beard catches Mac under the arm when he swan dives. The room blacks out for a minute. 

By the time Mac regains some semblance of consciousness, he blinks open just in time to catch himself on his good arm when the men throw him into the cell. They’re laughing too, Beard blowing a kiss.

“Sweet dreams, princess!”

“Better luck next time.”

They chuck in a granola bar and a large bottle of water and lock the door.

Mac shoves himself back against the wall, face wet before he gasps his first belly-deep breath. The gun’s after-image burns his hand, just a memory and somehow stronger for it.

Mac loses a long-fought battle and sobs, breaking a promise never to cry over this, even if it’s one he made to himself. 

“Mac?”

Mac shakes his head, an arm around his knees and his bad one resting on top of his head. Fireworks pop in its quivery tendons.

“Bud, hey, did they—”

Mac sobs so hard it sounds like an asthma attack. His eyes blur, instantly puffy to match his wrist. “It w…wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

“Shoulda been outta Dodge and back home days ago, right?”

Mac weeps harder. He waves his good hand at Jack as if to erase all these words, the plastic feeling, so foreign with this man, of being misread.

He coughs and chokes and scrubs away tears only for three more to take their place. The glass holding the world together has shattered. Mac hasn’t felt this devastated since the day they handed him Jack’s dog tags.

Not-Jack is anguished. “Hey. Look at me, Mac. They torture you too?”

Mac nods. Barely a scratch on him and Oleg still managed to wound Mac somewhere deep under the crust of his identity where no one else can peek. 

“Did he hurt you in…other ways? Below the belt?”

Mac shakes his head, turned inside out by tears. Their salt dries cold on his skin.

Jack’s brow folds in on itself. His eyes dart around Mac’s balled up form, lingering on key areas. He doesn’t say it. His silence practically screams his confusion anyway—they’ve both dealt with far worse than a broken wrist or broken ribs. 

The broken wrist doesn’t hurt as much as Mac’s failure. He’s never hated himself more. 

He stutters over a breath. Can’t get it back. His eyes widen, fingers wadded up in his shirt front. Did they siphon all the oxygen from this room while they were at it?

“What’s the weather like outside?”

Mac startles. “W…What?”

“The sky.” Jack flicks his eyes up at Mac’s window. “Something’s resting over my window from the outside. A piece of wood, I think. Keeps it forever dusk in here.”

Mac stares at Not-Jack. 

“Come on, now. Don’t leave your boy hanging.”

Jack’s lips crook up a bit, but his eyes stay zeroed on Mac’s coughs. On the chest that inflates and deflates on a shallow spiral, an earthquake rhythm. 

Mac peers upward. Through matching lattice bars, he sees a gleam. 

“‘S…it’s…uh.” Mac wheezes out each word. “Drizzling. Stone’s w…w…wet.”

“Great job, bud. What else?”

Mac struggles to figure out what more could possibly be said about rain. Black spots dance in his vision. Tears race down his cheeks onto bruised skin, on wrists that are thinner by a good inch than even six days ago.

But Jack asks him a question, so he tries. “Trees are…sw…swaying.”

“Alright, so it’s windy.”

“Yeah. Breezy but n-not…not…”

“Not too strong.”

“Right.” Mac hitches. Spots vacate the dance floor of his periphery. “Right…”

“Any birds?”

Mac breathes like a beached fish now, open-mouthed but thankfully no longer coughing. He stares out the window for a while, head back. Snot runs into his throat. “Black…b-birds. White wing…tips.”

“Probably a magpie or jackdaw.”

Mac lowers his head to sniffle, looking up through his bangs at Jack. 

Jack nods. “Doin’ great, kid. You’re gonna make it.”

Mac cradles his wrist to his chest and shakes his head.

“Here.” Jack holds out the cloth napkin. “You should splint that. Best we can do with what we got.”

We. Mac makes no move to retrieve the cloth. 

Jack’s jaw flutters, worry a Picasso splattered all over his face. “Another injection?”

“Yeah,” Mac croaks. 

“They’re upping your dose each time.”

“Yeah.”

Hence Jack asking about birds. His details get stronger the longer Mac’s on this mystery drug, the scar tissue and voice and smells so real it hurts to look at Jack for too long. It hurts a lot. 

Mac turns to the side, panic attack dimmed to a plain old weepy fit. He’s calmer, but every brush of skin over even his sleeve feels raw. Stripped open. Mac might as well have been whipped to the bone.

“Mac…please splint that.”

Mac’s voice deadens. “Maybe later.”

“You’re scarin’ me.”

Ember tears thaw Mac’s cheeks. “It was never supposed to go like this.”

Somewhere around midnight, when the world is crushed velvet levels of dark, Mac opens his eyes to see a lithe figure settle herself against the door. She’s wearing a leather jacket and a flight helmet sits in her lap.

The helmet is crushed on one side. An obliterated shell of fiberglass and foam.  

“Hey,” she says.

Mac’s cried enough today, so his eyes remain dull.

But his lips tremble. Just for a moment. “Hey.”

Leanna smiles. One of those small ones that doesn’t go very far, yet it gentles her eyes. “You making sure to spend time with my Bozer?”

Guilt knifes quick and dirty through Mac. “I’ve failed a lot of people.”

“Even if they don’t know it?”

“Something…” Mac can’t look away from her astute gaze, the eyes that don’t have to blink like his. “Something like that.”

“You ever gonna tell him the truth?”

Mac listens to Not-Jack snuffle in his cell where he sleeps. To the rowdy conversation of Beard and Oleg upstairs, Ballcap strangely quiet. Mac listens to his heart grow weaker and weaker in his ears.

“I don’t think I’ll get the chance to.”

Leanna sweeps back her long hair, the right side singed and crimped.

Its burn matches the one in Mac’s chest.

“Just eat it. I’m too full after the soup.”

Jack shakes his head. He holds up the granola bar Mac kicked to his side of the cell that morning. “Only if you splint that wrist.”

Mac glares.

“Come on, man. You’re gonna do permanent damage if you don’t immobilize it. It’s been free wheelin’ all night without support.”

“Spoken like a hallucination.”

Jack’s nostrils flare. “I don’t care what you believe right now—so long as you take care of yourself.”

Mac scoffs, numb, scooped clean from processing too many emotions. His face is stuffy. “Manipulative.”

“It’s called a trade.”

“Fine.”

“Atta boy.”

“Where is…”

“Here.” Jack tosses over the cloth. “Wrap that good and tight. But not circulation-cutting tight.”

Mac shakes his head, exasperated. As if he hasn’t made several dozen make-shift slings and tourniquets in his day. He loops the cloth around his wrist in practiced criss-crosses and ties it off in the small of his wrist with his teeth. The effort leaves him swaying.

Drugs: 1

Coordination: 0

“It hurtin’ too bad?”

Mac thumbs the cloth to avoid Jack’s eyes. “I don’t feel much at all.”

“…Because it floats on water and it grows. I still don’t get how that works.”

Mac tucks his good arm under his head to match Desi, also on her side, lying about two feet away with her hands under her head like they’re at a sleepover. She even wears sweatpants. 

He mulls over Desi’s ramble while shuffling to avoid sensitive skin on his ear. “Water lilies don’t just float—”

“Yes they do.”

“They’re still tethered.”

“Oh.” Desi blows a strand of hair off her nose. “How do they photosynthesize, then?”

“Through uh…rhi…rhizomes!”

Not-Jack snorts from his cell. He speaks through a mouth of granola bar. “I don’t know who you’re talkin’ to, but only you would have this kind of conversation.”

“Rhizomes?” Desi asks. 

“Thick roots, essentially,” says Mac, ignoring Jack. It’s still drizzling; the back of Mac’s shirt is wet from where he slept sitting up. “They draw nutrients from loam at the bottom of a pond. Any body of water that stands still.”

“So cool. They’re my favourite.”

“Why?”

Desi shrugs one shoulder. “Because they close at night and open during the day. Like they don’t want any nightcrawlers looking at their colours.”

Mac hums. “Like a secret.”

“Yeah. They just want to be seen by the right people for what they are.”

Mac’s face falls. He brushes a throbbing hand over his shirt’s front pocket. The paper clip’s wiry comfort shoots through him, better than a real bonfire. It’s his strongest hallucination and he’s so grateful to have it that he feels lightheaded. 

“You don’t ramble as much anymore.”

Desi’s words draw Mac out of dark thoughts. His eyes flick back to her and she’s suddenly in tac pants and a Kevlar vest. A sidepiece clings to her leg, hair in a ponytail now. 

“Thought you’d appreciate that,” says Mac, wry. 

“I did at first. I just miss your nerdy explanations of everyday things, I guess. I took it for granted until you got…quiet. It’s a recent thing.”

“Is it?”

Desi sighs. “No.”

Mac glances up at weak daylight overhead. “I’m sorry I don’t open up anymore. Ever since the funeral, it’s hard to…talk.”

The granola bar crinkles halt.

“To pretend?” Desi prompts. 

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to here.”

Mac’s stomach clenches.

That’s what I’m afraid of.

Hairs raise on Mac’s neck and shunt him out of sleep. 

He lifts his head from his arm, prickly after the weight of his head cutting off blood flow while he slept, and his eyes dilate in the darkness. Desi’s disappeared at some point. Glue-y nubs coat his mouth again.

Mac squints, but no one has entered the lower prison level. No surprise food or water. It’s quiet upstairs.

Then what…?

Bizarre shapes float and sparkle at the edges of the room, but something about this drug keeps visual disturbances on the back burner, like a radio playing in another room. Ones that move and talk, like people, are much harder to tune out.

At least the ‘bugs’ have disappeared. Even knowing they’re not real, Mac still tremors. 

The cell materializes as his retinas adjust. Rain clouds obscure the moon and without street lamps or electricity here, ambient light is at a premium. Mac waves his good fingers in front of his face and can just make out individual lines. 

His senses reach out, and all at once Mac darts around to face Not-Jack’s cell. 

“Jack?”

He calls softly, though Oleg’s men never lurk down here except to retrieve him. They don’t seem to care what Mac babbles.

Mac drags himself closer to the bars, too shaky to stand. “Jack, hey. Are you sleeping?”

Heat creeps up Mac’s ears. It doesn’t matter that absolutely no one can see this—he’s still embarrassed. Calling out to a hallucination in the hopes his mind will conjure it sets a dismal bar. Welcome to an all new low, folks.

He stops himself an arm’s length away at the last second, in case this is a sneaky ploy to get him to approach. 

The clouds thin just enough to illuminate Jack’s cell. 

It’s empty. 

Mac cries out, clawing at the bars. “Jack!”

He bangs on the metal until it cr-whomps loud enough to wake the dead, but still no Jack. 

“Don’t do this to me.” Mac pounds his fist. “You promised not to leave! You promised! Please, Jack.”

Just a moldy, patted-down pile of straw and an empty bucket sit in the cell. Nothing alive. Nothing that tells amazing stories and eats waffle fries and makes up elaborate reasons why he never died. 

Mac sags. His wrist curls in his lap, a dead thing, head whomping against the bars.

For the first time in a week, Mac is well and truly alone, not a soul for company even from his own mind. He never imagined being secluded at the end. It’s like a space walk, somewhere so far away that no living being can reach you. 

“I’m sorry,” Mac bleats. “I didn’t mean to make you go away.”

His sobs echo for a long time.

Mac opens his eyes a few times throughout the night, but it’s always the same. 

No Jack. No one breathing.

Mac stops tracking the hours.

Frost gathers on the window sill above. 

Mac shivers violently, hands in his arm pits. Cotton ball puffs escape his lips and dissipate after full seconds on still air.

“‘M c-coming, Jack.” Frozen tassels of hair settle on Mac’s temples. “I’m a…almost there.”

Chapter Text

‘I was afraid of the night
Lost in the thoughts in my own mind
Now you hold my heart in the palm of your hands,
Oh, you gave my lies away.’

“Warrior” ~ Livingston

WHAM.

Mac jolts out of a fitful doze. Something cold against his cheek judders hard enough to rattle through clenched molars and into his aching skull. He groans. 

The slightest twitch sends octane flames up Mac’s hand.

A slit-eyed peek downwards reveals a balloon shape that was once, apparently, his wrist. It’s purple even around the cloth’s edge and it might as well belong to someone else, detached from his body.

He can see it. He can see. 

Full sun streams in from above, a golden spotlight. The other cell door jangles, lock bolted after its slam. 

Mac wakes fully at the sound of retreating boots and grimaces. Just what he needs, hallucinating his captors too.  

A grid imprint tingles his cheek, but he hardly notices. His wide eyes and galloping heart zero on a crumpled shape in the center of the other cell. 

“Jack?”

An ominous drip brings tears to Mac’s eyes and he wishes they’d thrown Jack the other way. He wills his brain to flip the image, hard enough that his temples throb.

Nothing changes.

Hallucination Jack is going to have to do this the old fashioned way.

“Jack! Hey.”

With his back to Mac, Jack’s a blank slate, no expression or physical tells. He barely breathes. Mac’s heart ratchets up another gear. He dares to reach through the bars and rap on the floor with his knuckles. 

“Jack, please. Please turn around.”

Nothing, not even a grunt. 

What if he’s...

Of course. Of course Mac would hallucinate the corpse he never let himself see. One final spectacle to torment him. At least it isn’t burned to a crisp from the explosion.

Mac wraps his good hand around the bars from the opposite side, elbow a lever to pull himself upright. “I didn’t mean to, Jack. I’m sorry.”

The prison is still. Mac hates himself a little more.

“Nghhh…”

Mac releases a dry sob, eyes closed for a moment. Jack’s barely-there sound makes Mac’s blood sing. He shakes with relief, all the way out to frosty fingertips that jitter with renewed sensation. Colours quake through the air on either side.

“M’c?”

“Just rest, Jack. I’m right here.”

The buttons of Jack’s spine press against his equally threadbare shirt in a deep breath. “‘Kay.”

Even Not-Bozer looks worried. “Is he going to wake up?”

Mac presses as close as he can get. The bars warm, smelling coppery from his sweat and tears hitting centuries-old metal, like a giant penny. The crown of Jack’s head faces the door in a blind-spot way that unsettles Mac. Jack never lets entrances and exits out of his eyeline while under threat, ever vigilant. 

Now he just lays there, limbs splayed.

“Mac?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

Birds twitter overhead.

Jack breathes.

Mac’s teeth chatter from the autumn chill.

They’re a perfect trio, the only sounds for hours on end in solitary confinement. Mac’s eyes close anyway.

A hiss through whistly nostrils…then a sharp grunt. 

The sound sifts Mac out of a reverie, half a day spent watching Not-Desi clean her gun in the corner. He wipes his good hand down his face. “Jack?”

Jack inhales a few rather deliberate breaths, then sloooowly rolls over onto his other side, his right. It takes over eight seconds of careful maneuvering and more grunts.

Jack faces Mac now and Mac can’t decide if this is better or worse. 

“Oh…oh Jack.”

Not one inch of Jack’s face is untouched in some way: black eye, jagged lacerations, beard torn out in a few places, cigarette burns, a cauliflower of puckered skin above his unbruised brow. Blown vessels in his lips. Blood leaks out his nose on both sides and Mac scrambles to unknot the brace around his wrist. 

“N…no.” Jack lifts a few fingers, the ones with nails left on them. His voice is all breath. “Y’ need…more.”

“You’re bleeding a lot, Jack.”

Jack tenses his lips, the closest he can manage to a head shake. When Mac opens his mouth to insist, Jack tilts his bloody nose into the shoulder of his shirt and leaves it there. Even that small gesture makes him ashen.

Where the shirt rides up, each rib stands out in convex clarity against his concave stomach. 

Mac can’t look away. He wishes his brain had never dreamt this up. 

“Why?”  

Jack huffs. His eyes shutter, hard yet smug. “I wouldn’ t’lk.”

“No, why…” Mac unlatches his hand from around the bars. His fingers ache. “Why can’t I picture you happy? I was never as good as Bozer at playing pretend but surely I could base you off memories.”

Jack blinks slowly too, like each push on his unsealed lid takes work. He lifts his nose away from the shirt. “Even you a…ain’t this creative.”

Mac’s hand freezes mid-reach towards Jack. He’s close enough to touch, if he strains. Jack’s too weak to lift his arms to reciprocate. 

“Glad y’re here.”

“Jack, I…”

“Spent mo…months by myself. All I w’nted was to…see you. And here you are.”

“Jack.” The broken whisper has both hitching over a breath. 

“B’t I still miss you.”

Mac’s fingers hover above the bridge of Jack’s nose. Priceless centimeters of air preserve his sanity, the selfishness inherent in not wanting Jack to leave. He’s a perfect, heartfelt bubble Mac loathes to pop.

“C’mon, Mac.”

“I can’t. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“This isn’t real.”

Jack drops to a whisper too. “F’r a genius you don’t…put facts t’gether very well.”

“You already disappeared on me once.”

One of Jack’s tears dilutes blood on his cheek until it runs pink. “D’you trust me?”

With everything I’ve got.

But not enough to touch.

This Jack would go to hell and back for him just like the real one but to touch him is to banish him. For the first time, however, the sheer want inside Mac to run his hand over Jack’s face is a bitter tang, the one pill he can’t swallow back.  

Mac doesn’t say it but he doesn’t have to.

Jack coughs out a pocket of blood from inside his cheek and it stains the cobbles a rusty red. 

Just like the cobbles upstairs.

Mac stares at it, how pristinely it matches the shape of what he saw in Oleg’s old school bullpen. Maybe his brain has imported things he’s seen and spliced them together. 

“You’re just a dream,” Mac breathes. 

Another pink river. Jack wheezes with effort, fading in and out. Yet his gaze is strangely alert on Mac in moments his plummeting blood pressure lets him. “What happ’ned, after I left?”

“Desi and Russ took over. Charlie died. My dad died. Leanna died.”

Jack’s shoulders stiffen. “No—to you.”

Mac’s fingers can pick a lock sixteen different ways, can defuse a pressure plate IED, can hotwire a robot…

They cannot bridge the last few molecules of air to Jack’s cheek. Mac retracts his hand and hugs the bars, a shipwreck survivor lost in grief’s open ocean. 

“I lost you.”

And to lose you is to lose me. 

Mac doesn’t have to say this out loud either. 

Jack’s nosebleed cracks loose and starts afresh when his nose crinkles.

The cell door opens the following morning, and it’s over. 

Mac glances to the side at Jack, passed out from his injuries in a dazed sort of sleep where each breath just barely lifts the bruised pane of his chest. A macabre lullaby but one Mac slept better to anyway. 

He takes one last look and makes a promise to himself— 

He’s not sleeping another night in this cell. 

Ballcap kneels while Beard grips Mac’s wrists in one hand. As if he can possibly fight his way out.

When Ballcap unzips the little medical case, it reveals two pre-prepped syringes in their elastic loops, one he injects into Mac and one as an apparent spare. It contains two extra ccs of that amber liquid. 

Ballcap tucks the kit in his jeans’ back pocket without even bothering to zip it.

Round four goes exactly the same as the first—dragged up the stairs, manhandled into a chair, chalk dust smell everywhere, Oleg waiting with his scientist to see how the drug affected Mac’s body over the last forty-eight hours, ravioli pasta steaming on the table. 

Round four is also different:

Mac pickpockets Ballcap. 

It’s the easiest thing in the world.

Mac pretends a little resistance being seated in the chair and suddenly both men crowd his space. A wriggle here, a shoulder to someone’s chest there, and Ballcap twists away from Mac’s good fingers, pinched around the capped needle inside the case. 

“We have a big day today. Are you hungry?” Oleg spreads his arms, purveyor of a game Mac refuses to play anymore. 

Still, he has one last trick up his sleeve—literally. The burly pair continues to hover. Perfect.

“I am, actually.”

Oleg’s smile drops so fast Mac gets dizzy just watching it. “For a man without much to fight for, it’s nice to see the drug do it for you.”

“Yup.” Mac fumbles to pop the needle cap without making any noise. “But before I eat this, can I have a glass of water? Easier for my tastebuds to actually, you know, taste it.”

Oleg studies Mac. “You’re not a very good poker player, I think.”

Mac cants his head in return. “What happened to getting whatever I ask for?”

“If only life worked that way.”

No kidding. Mac’s thumbnail catches on the stubborn cap.

“The drug enhances taste, experience, life.” Oleg motions to Lab Coat and he holds a tablet for his boss to note readings. “Granted, we took out the serotonin boosters. Can’t have our subjects too happy.”

Mac watches and waits for Oleg to look away.

“But it is nice to see you ready in time for our guests. A soldier delirious with sensation won’t feel pain or hunger like the others and our bidders are rather…thrilled about the prospect. But it’s been fun with your particular case, I have to admit.”

Mac steels his jaw, eyes up. The cap finally springs loose. “You’re right.”

Oleg turns back from the tablet.  

“I did lie.” Mac hides the needle between his and Beard’s legs where he’s hemmed in. “I’m not going to be hungry ever again.”

Oleg’s eyes cloud—then widen. “NO—”

Mac flicks his hand up and depresses the needle straight back down through his pants and into his thigh. His heartrate skyrockets. He can’t tell if it’s adrenaline or the fresh injection not five minutes after the first. 

Hands scrabble all over him. 

“Lab might—”

“—if the extra—”

“Overdose—”

Oleg shrieks somewhere in the background but Mac finds it in himself for a smile, a real one, like a fever breaking after months in a sweaty haze. “You lose, Oleg.”

Oleg flails out a hand and clips Mac’s jaw. His head snaps back, but he’s too triumphant to care. He didn’t succeed with the knife or the gun, but he beat Oleg with his own drug. Something about that feels right.

I’m coming, Jack.

“Get him back downstairs. Now! I can’t let my investors see this.”

“What time?”

“They’re due in an hour. Here. Track his vitals until we can figure out a plan.”

Mac’s vision swims. It’s still enough to see Ballcap look scared for the first time, fear in his younger eyes.

Beard just glowers. Mac can relate to the sentiment. He doesn’t fight the burly man when he shoves Mac down the stairs with more force than necessary, bruising his elbow on the wall.

A limp ragdoll, Mac hangs between their arms until they toss him inside. Beard kicks Mac’s stomach for good measure and he gags. 

“Hey!” The bars rattle. Not-Jack’s voice cracks like a whip. “Hey! That’s enough. Don’t touch him.”

If Mac’s stomach lining wasn’t trying to exit out his mouth, he might just cry at hearing Jack more conscious.

Beard kicks Mac one last time and turns around. 

“Wait.” Ballcap holds out a wireless blood pressure reader. “We forgot the cuff. Oleg said…”

“I don’t care.” Beard shakes, hatred ablaze in his eyes. “This twerp is going to ruin the whole payday.”

“Come on, man.”

“We’ve worked for weeks. And now he goes and does something like this?”

“Oleg will figure out a way to pump him. But do you want to be the one to explain that his star subject keeled over?”

Jack goes strangely quiet as they argue. He shifts where he sits, lost in mid-morning shadows. 

“Fine!” Beard throws up his hand and Ballcap cringes. “But it’s not my fault if he dies.”

To reach Mac’s good arm, Beard has to circle around to Mac’s front. 

It places him between Mac and the bars. 

Jack surges up so fast he defies physics. Mac doesn’t even see the transition.

One minute Jack crouches—on the balls of his feet, Mac realizes—and the next he’s standing with a hand around Beard’s throat. 

The two men shout. Or try to, in Beard’s case. He scratches at Jack’s arm but he’d have better luck moving an ocean. It has absolutely no effect except to make Jack squeeze harder. 

Ballcap recovers with another shout, grabbing at Jack’s wrist.

Jack is bloodied to all hell, phalanges crooked, underweight by a good thirty pounds—

And none of it hinders rage fueled strength from choking the life out of this henchman. He doesn’t even need both hands. Nor does he falter or react whatsoever to the hand on his bloody arm.

An ominous gurgle erupts out of Beard’s mouth, windpipe inches away from crushed. Foam bubbles from his lips. It doesn’t cause a lick of hesitation or conscience on Jack’s part, his eyes like a caged tiger.

Wait.

Mac blinks. Blinks wider. He stares up at the vengeful profile standing over him, ready to smite. 

Not-Jack is…

Jack is touching one of his captors. 

Mac’s mouth falls open. There must have been a lot more in that syringe.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen.” Jack’s voice barely sounds like Jack. He’s all snarl, more predator than man, eyes practically glowing. His hands are the steadiest they’ve been in days. “You hurt my boy. I’m probably still going to kill you for that. But let us go and I might be quick about it.”

Ballcap raises his hands, white as a sheet. His fingers leave white marks on Jack’s skin. “You can’t get out.”

Beard’s face goes purple. Jack rumbles, head down but eyes up. 

“No, no, wait! Stop!” Ballcap yelps. “I mean you literally can’t. Investors and their armed guards are on route and the museum settlement will be surrounded.”

Jack’s grip eases. Slightly. Beard gasps little tin whistle sounds. 

“You got a phone, kid?”

Ballcap glances at Mac, then digs in his pocket. 

“Don’t give it to him,” Jack quips. “Ain’t gonna be much left of it by the end.”

“He needs medical help.”

Jack bares his teeth. “Why? What was the commotion upstairs?”

“He overdosed. On purpose.”

Horror races across Jack’s face before it’s back to the irate expression. Ballcap passes over his cellphone and Jack takes it in his other hand, leaning a shoulder on the bars to stay upright. Their fingers brush. 

Their fingers brush each other. 

A middle school band playing an off-key medley and falling off a stage mid-performance ten feet away wouldn’t clash or clang this much in Mac’s ears.

He can only gawk at Jack texting one handed. Can only stare at the fingers leaving bruises on Beard’s neck. Beard’s feet windmill against the stone, survival instinct, and accidentally toe Mac’s knee in the process. 

He’s real. Beard’s not a hallucination. 

Mac wails out a long, long note. Barely audible, but survival instincts of his own. “Jack…”

It has an instant effect.

Jack yanks Beard forward until his head rams the bars and he crumples, out cold.

Lightning fast, Jack snatches a handful of Ballcap’s sweater and does the same to him. They lay across each other in a silent X shape, unmoving.

“J-Jack.”

Jack plummets to his knees, throwing the phone to the side. His fingers strain, just close enough to brush trembling fingers over Mac’s hair. The faintest of pressure. 

Real pressure.

Mac sucks in a noisy breath. His whole chest rattles with the force of it. 

“I’m here.” Jack’s granite face folds in on itself. Tears wring from his eyes and he stutters out an exhale. “Keep your eyes open for me.”

Mac doesn’t even notice he’s closed them. 

“Angus—stay awake. That’s an order.”

Mac’s eyes pop open. 

He stares at Jack’s wet face and fights for every sticky breath. Something warm trickles over his teeth. Jack swears around another sob. With the black eye’s swelling gone down, his gaze burns, bruised and bright.

“Y-You’re…” Mac fights to lift his head. “You’re really here.”

“Yeah.” Jack’s cheeks lift in a smile of pure delight. He hasn’t looked this happy in literal years. “I’m here, Mac. I’m real. I’ve gotcha.”

“I don’ wanna…I don’t want to…”

“I know. I know you don’t wanna go, Mac.”

He doesn’t get it, but that’s okay. Jack’s smile makes the achy places in Mac’s body weep with relief.

“You never d-died.”

“No.” Jack huffs a sobbing kind of laugh. “I didn’t.”

Mac is five years old, afraid to touch his mother’s coffin. He’s ten and afraid to reach for something his father tries to hand him. He’s twenty in the desert, afraid to grip the back of Jack’s vest when hostiles surround them, for fear of what this strange Texan and his kind hands might say about it. For fear those hands will abandon him one day.

Mac is thirty-one—and he’s done being afraid.

He reaches out and clutches Jack’s wrist. It’s bony, skin scaly with infection and grime. 

Colour still explodes back into Mac’s world, joy singing a broken duet in counterpoint to Jack’s hammering pulse. Nothing in two years compares to the authenticity of it. 

One last miracle. 

Jack keens out a broken sound, years sloughed off his face at that one touch. He immediately retracts and flips his arm so they hold hands, thumbs hooked around each other’s knuckles.

It’s a trigger for some dormant longing inside Jack.

He bodily tugs Mac closer until he can run his other hand over Mac’s bruised jaw, neck, injured wrist, and back up to his cheek. He cups it in a quivering grip. Those calloused hands might be crooked and more weathered, but they haven’t changed a lick.

Mac leans into the touch. He wishes he had the strength to reach up and reciprocate the exploration. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

Jack’s already shaking his head. “No. No, Mac. I let you down, broke my promise to always be by your side. Regretted it the moment the plane took off.”

Mac watches snowflakes settle around the cell, beautiful. Cleansing. “I’m sorry that…I just got y’ back an’ I’m the one…leavin’…”

Jack’s fingers tighten on Mac’s cheek. “Mac?”

“Snow’s…pretty.”

“Mac.” Jack pants. “There’s no snow in here.”

“But ‘m cold.”

“I know, bud. I know you are.”

Mac nods towards his breast pocket. “Not here.”

Urgency strains Jack’s voice, a sail buffeted by a hurricane. “Hey. Hey, Mac. I figured it out.”

“Mmm?” Mac strains to lift heavy lids. His heart doesn’t beat much at all now…

“The bonfire? I get now why you wove it so many times.”

The snow settles over Mac’s body in a sparkly, frigid blanket. He’s being buried. Just like they buried Jack’s casket in the ground. 

“During one ‘a those overnight runs, we built a fire in the desert and it was the…the first time while we were in the sandbox that I slipped and called you son.” Jack uses the hand still latched around Mac’s to wipe at his eyes. Salty warmth smears Mac’s knuckles. “Bonfires were the one time we could be ourselves, just us, could unwind. Our thing, right?”

Mac coughs out more warmth. Jack cleans his chin and it paints his hand red. “Then, when we got home—you shared bonfires with Riley and Boze and our team.”

“Our thing,” Mac rasps. 

Jack nods, unable to speak. His hands say enough: one squeezes Mac’s for dear life and the other pets across his cheek and good ear. 

“G…gonna miss you.”

“No.” Jack keens again, but this sound hurts. The sound of Jack flayed open and awake for every second of it. “No, Mac. You’re not goin’ anywhere. You hear me? You’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna make it home.”

Mac’s lips lift. “I already am home.”

He loses a few seconds and steals them back only to hear Jack muttering. Praying. A one-sided conversation dominated by desperate pleading. 

“J’ck?”

Jack cups the back of Mac’s neck, pumping it once. “Hear that? Help’s on its way.”

Mac listens, but all he registers are faint pops, like hail on the roof. The snow intensifies. 

“You just have to hold on.”

Mac wants to live in this moment until he dies. It won’t be a long wait, so he savours every millisecond. “Love you, Jack.”

Why doesn’t he say these words more? They’re easy too, much easier than they used to be.

“You’re my kid. My son.” Jack growls this out too, affection so heavy in his eyes it’s almost too sacred to look at. “Won’t be a day I draw breath that I don’t love you.”

It’s a blessing, better than any benediction. Mac feels safe enough to close his eyes, always safe with Jack, mind, body, and soul. 

“Hey!” Jack jostles him until his eyes slit again.

“Jack…”

“I’ve been fighting months of hell just to get back to your side, even if they kill me right after I make it there.”

“Jack.”

“Please.” Jack begs, a wreck in ways Mac rarely gets to witness. “Please, Mac.”

His heart trips over a beat…then another one…

“You’re the…” Mac loses feeling in his limbs. His hand goes limp in Jack’s, falling like the snowflakes. “You’re the best part of me.”

His heart skips a third beat—

“In here! I’ve got them.”

—And doesn’t start again. 

Somewhere down a long tunnel, Jack screams.

Chapter Text

‘And I grew up thinking I would have to
Fight all of this alone
But now you hold me in the darkness,
Hold me ‘til it hurts less.
You tell me that I’m alright.’

Little Bit Better” ~ Caleb Hearn, Rosie

Death is cold and smells like jet fuel.

Death is chest pain and choking on the despair he force-fed himself over five endless months.

Death is being unable to move his hands. Something moves them anyway, a ghost.

A ghost with crooked fingers and a leather cuff.

Mac comes to in the dark.

Pure dark. Only a narrow yellow ribbon breaks the monochrome.

And he’s warm. No icy spots linger on his body…which is a good thing because it’s been replaced with bricks. 

Mac tries to twitch just his index and can’t do it. Even keeping his eyes open takes conscious effort. His bare feet dangle against the floor, legs covered in something soft that cuffs at the bottom. Sweats. A bulky lime green cast hugs his left wrist and matches whatever hugs so tightly around his ribs.

Reality kicks in a beat later—arms.

Arms hug his ribs, a fast heartbeat under his ear and lips on his forehead. It’s rather pleasant aside from something scratchy that binds the right side of his head.

Mac frowns, whimpering.

“Sshhh. We’re okay.” Jack whispers against his skin. “Just gotta stay quiet for a bit until I figure out a plan.”

Mac can’t even speak, chest too heavy. His throat aches. Something sharp dangles out of his elbow.

“I’ve got you, Mac.” Jack rocks.

Mac’s eyes begin to sink closed. Wherever they are, Jack’s on watch.

“…can’t be here.”

“Like hell I can’t.”

“Potjandosie…American?”

Jack tenses at muffled voices.

“Sedative—”

“—Not permitted—”

“I should be the only one permitted.”

The first voice hushes. “Protocols are in place for a reason…”

“If you don’t let me see them, I’ll have your medical license revoked for life with a single phone call.”

“You have no jurisdictional power in this country.”

“Are you willing to gamble your career on that?”

Silence.

Door hinges squeal somewhere.

Jack’s chest rumbles, an ominous sound that promises fast fists and an even faster trigger finger. Mac whimpers again in response. He tries to figure out what Jack holds in his right hand where it clutches Mac’s arm, digging in.

The yellow ribbon widens.

It reveals blankets on hangers above their heads, a vacuum cleaner in the other corner, bedpans, and spare scrub shirts.

A closet. They’re huddled inside a closet.

Even with the light, Jack’s eyes dilate wide, black, protective pools to match grit teeth. A pen. That’s what it is. He brandishes a ballpoint pen like a knife in his right hand.

It’s not even remotely funny—Jack has killed people with far less.

A tiny figure is silhouetted in the doorway. Her hand drops from the doorknob.

“Hey,” she whispers. It’s one word and universe of memories.

Gazing at her warms Mac’s insides even further.

Dishevelled hair, a shirt inside out, and one pant leg cuff unrolling do nothing to diminish authority in Matty’s stance or the unfiltered compassion seeping from her gaze.

Jack pauses. His arms loosen.

Matty holds out her hand. Her voice croons, velvet soft and thick with emotion. “Hey, Jack. Long time no see. I almost thought I was being punked when I got your text. Nice codeword, by the way. Nobody else would know about the polar bear in Mac’s house.”

Jack stares at her hand, nails bitten down. His gaze and split lip flash with an untamed glint.  

Matty just waits.

“Can you at least hand me the pen? We’re not severing anyone’s carotid today.”

“Th-they tried to…to inject Mac,” Jack argues, a little wild. Something feral Mac’s rarely heard since meeting Jack. His grip tightens on the pen, knuckles hard against Mac’s arm.

“Jack—”

“I can’t lose him right after I found him. I won’t.”

“Jack, do you really think I would let anyone hostile near you both?”

“They snaked something out of Mac’s throat.”

“That was a breathing tube,” Matty soothes. “You’ve been in an Amsterdam hospital for the last three days because neither of you are cleared to fly. Mac couldn’t breathe on his own for a while. I just got here.”

Jack’s eyes water. “He coded, in the cell and then…”

“And on the helicopter. I know, Jack. That same exfil team is guarding the hospital room door right now and you’re among allies. No one’s hurting Mac. They got his heart started both times.”

Jack glances down, brow furrowed. Troubled. He’s got his knees up to his chest, Mac cradled sideways in his lap, curled so far that Jack’s panting ruffles his hair.

Matty sneaks closer. “The injection they gave Mac was a vasopressor. His blood pressure keeps dropping.”

Mac tries to speak up, but all that comes out is a huff.

At last, Matty’s eyes land on him for longer than a beat. They instantly soften. “Good to see you, Van Gogh.”

Mac puzzles over this nickname until Matty points to her own ear. Mac hopes they haven’t removed the whole thing.

Matty thumbs his knee. “You’re alright, baby.”

The maternal slip continues in hands that remove the needle dangling from his elbow, mindful of the cast, and wipe blood from Mac’s forearm. Matty tapes a gauze pad over the injection site.

Even after she’s done, her palm rests on Mac’s chest, a steady weight.

Jack swallows. “Matty…”

“I’m sorry.” Matty holds out her other hand again. “Sorry we didn’t find you both sooner. And Jack—I’m sorry we ever believed Bronson’s testimony. He’s going away for life.”

“You found ‘im?”

“Hiding out in Mexico. I personally read him his rights when the team took him down.”

“How did you find us so fast? Exfil burst in less than half an hour after I sent that text.”

Matty’s hand begins to shake, still extended. “Oleg’s private helicopter. Riley noticed the chopper flying below airspace regulations on satellite images. We sent a team to patrol the area.”

“A hunch, huh?”

“Our team runs on chewing gum and hunches.”

Jack finally makes the first move and grips her hand. They break at the same time, their breaths all over the place.

“Come here.” Matty cups the back of Jack’s head, voice pitched higher than normal with unshed tears. He promptly buries his face in her shoulder. “Come here, you.”

“Matty.”

“I’m here,” she whispers. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

Jack drops the ballpoint pen to wrap an arm around Matty’s shoulders. It’s a surrender, the first time Jack has drooped in this whole experience.

Matty strokes Jack’s scalp, which Mac just then notices is razed almost to the skin. His beard too. Stitched patches of skin give new meaning to the term clean shaven.

The hug squishes Mac between their bodies. He’s panini pressed on all sides but it’s not claustrophobic or constricting.

“Gagarin, he…”

“We caught him too.” Matty presses a quick kiss to Jack’s temple. “After what we found in Oleg’s backroom lab—he’s going away for life. The war crimes tribunal wants a word with him as well.”

Jack pulls back slightly to glance at Mac. “They hurt him, Matty.”

“I know that too. There’s no cure for the synthesized drug in his system, but they flushed him as best they could.” Matty turns directly to Mac. “You’re barely out of the woods. You shouldn’t even be awake yet.”

Jack has the decency to colour. “No hostiles?”

“No, Jack. Just a team of fretting doctors.”

“Did I hurt anybody?”

“If you did, I’m sure they deserved it. But no, other than shoving aside two medical staff and tearing out Mac’s leads, you’re good.”

Jack exhales and tugs Mac closer, crook of his elbow under Mac’s head. It places Mac in his shadow, Matty pressing in from the other side to clean a smudge of something off his cheek. The pair of them gaze down at Mac, tenderness in their eyes.

“Sorry, bud. Got…lost in my head when I woke up.”

Mac sniffs in the best approximation of ‘no big deal’ he can manage.

Jack rocks them again, nose in Mac’s hair just like Mac’s nose is in Jack’s scrub shirt. Jack has been cleaned at some point and smells faintly of lavender soap. A bandage cloaks his right arm, shiny from ointment underneath.

Jack and Matty’s hands are warm. They touch Mac with reverent fingers, casual about it, like he’s precious. Treasured.

Like he’s theirs.

With monumental effort, Mac breathes out a single word: “Safe.”

“Yes.” Matty pecks his cheek too. Gentle fingernails scratch through hairs above his ear. “Yes, you are.”

Jack hears the words underneath the word, like he always did. Does, rather. He’s really here.

“Love you too, Mac.”

For the first time since he was five years old, Mac falls asleep with a smile on his face.

Voices mill in a slow vortex, some speaking Dutch. And something pinches his elbow. Has Ballcap come back for another round?

A thumb smooths lines in Mac’s forehead.

“You’re okay, kiddo. Your old man’s on watch.”

The pinch disappears.

“Go back to sleep.”

It’s an easy order to follow.

A hand palms a circle on Mac’s chest.

“I still can’t believe you’re here. That we both made it.”

Mac tries to open his eyes. Fails this time. Beeps and sniffles compose a symphony together.

Jack clears his throat. “We’re gonna keep makin’ it if I have any say in things.”

Snoring sifts Mac’s brain out of a nightmare.

A hand prevents his right from closing, a very calloused hand nestled snuggly around his, scarred in places.

Mac squeezes it with all the strength he can muster. The snoring cuts off with a snuffle.

A beat.

The hand squeezes back.

Humming wakes Mac all the way, an old Creedance Clearwater Revival song, his brain informs him once it boots up to conscious speed. Daylight shines behind his eyelids. People talk softly on either side.

“Flyin’ out?”

A thinking hum replies, higher pitched. Feminine. “If that bottom number rises above fifty, I don’t see why not.”

“Thanks for…you know.”

“I didn’t want Bozer or Riley to see you guys like this either. They’re furious about being flown home and left at HQ all week, but I convinced them in the end.”

“Appreciate it. Not sure we’re ready for that. Not yet, anyway.”

Mac’s eyes crack open. Finally.

Matty’s pant leg swims into view, olive denim with extra zippers on the thighs. She’s much more polished this go around, typing rapid fire into a small laptop where she reclines on Mac’s pillows beside him. The head of the bed has been lifted on a slight incline, and Mac inhales his first breath in what feels like months.

Jack lies in an adjacent hospital bed. The bruises have dimmed to greens and yellows, but it still paints his face in a sickly varnish, like moss resin-cured onto his skin.

“Sleeping Beauty awakens for real,” he crows.

Mac snorts. His mouth scrapes, rougher than pumice. Despite his easy reaction, he still stares at Jack, awed that he’s here. That funeral and memorial back at his house wasn’t for someone who died in an explosion after all.

He also realizes they’ve positioned themselves strategically so Mac lies between them.

“M’tty?”

“Here.” Matty pushes the laptop down her legs to retrieve a cup of ice chips. “Slow, Baby Einstein.”

Mac complies, too stiff to grab the spoon himself.

Some part of him is aware he should be mortified, spoon fed by his boss. But after everything that happened…it doesn’t even register. Image holds absolutely zero precedence here.

Not to mention the pure heaven of cold on his tongue.

“Matty?” he whispers. His throat hurts too much for anything more.

She reads him almost as well as Jack. “You’ve been here for seven days. We’re wheels up in a day or two—maybe.”

Mac follows her eyes to the blood pressure monitor next to his bed. His sluggish brain struggles to process the numbers.

“The drug Oleg gave you metabolizes much slower than natural ones should,” Matty explains. She feeds him another spoonful of ice. “You’ll feel the effects for a while.”

Including low blood pressure. Right.

The words are still a gross understatement. Heaviness sinks through Mac’s body, vision too bright and shaky. He squints, even with the blinds drawn.

“Ah.” Matty retrieves something else off the side table. “They warned us about this.”

She carefully slips a pair of glasses over Mac’s ears and nose. They’re not quite sunglasses, not dark enough for that, but the world filters enough for Mac to open his eyes all the way.

“Pupil dilation’s a beast.”

“Yeah,” Mac rasps. “How long will the ‘ffects linger?”

Matty sighs. “A while, Mac. You weren’t given the correct dose for your body weight even before your…voluntary injection, about four times the recommended amount of DMT, let alone what Oleg created. It stopped your heart and caused hemorrhaging in your lungs. You essentially drowned in your own blood.”

“Oh.”

“That about sums it up, yes.”

Mac blinks around the room while Matty and Jack just watch him. Like he’s the most interesting channel they’ve ever seen. At least he’s not in pain, his broken wrist and ribs stiff but quiet.

His brain catches up.

“Awake already?”

Jack interprets this one. “A few times. Haven’t really opened your eyes until now. They took out the morphine drip yesterday, which was keepin’ you drowsy after the procedure to clear out your lungs.”

“Oh.” Mac looks at the back of his hand, IV-free but bruised. His tongue toggles over a slew of words before he settles on one. “N…neuro…”

Mac blinks fast, astonished at the jumble of letters his mouth won’t—can’t—say. “Neur’log’cal effects?”

Matty and Jack exchange a look.

Matty retrieves her laptop and continues typing. Not before she pats his chest with a warm hand. “Let’s not worry about that right now, okay?”

Mac’s brows pinch. “Don’t know?”

“Still perceptive as a terrier.” Jack spoons at a cup of Jell-O in his lap and throws Mac a fond look. “No, they don’t. Docs have never seen anything like this drug, so they don’t got a sweet clue what it’ll do long term.”

“Oh,” says Mac a third time. The room wobbles at the edges in a way that makes him uneasy.

“Mac.” Matty stops typing. At this angle, they’re the same height, so she only has to glance to the side to meet Mac’s eyes. “You’re a national hero and nobody expects anything from you right now. Are you understanding me?”

Mac’s lips thin.

Matty lowers to a murmur. “Angus—you and Jack are on fully paid leave for as long as you want. The rest of your life for all I care. You’re alive, and that’s a successful end to this as far as I’m concerned, no matter what healing looks like. I care about you as my family and not as an agent or asset.”

Matty holds Mac’s eyes until he sinks back into the pillow.

He suddenly does understand.

“You’re not letting other agencies test my blood for the drug or question us about what happened.”

Matty shakes her head, eyes a mirror for Jack’s earlier ferocity. “No way in hell. You only tell me what happened when you’re good and ready.”

Mac relaxes all the way.

Matty squeezes his arm above the cast.

Later that night, when the hospital is a loamy kind of dark and Matty’s gone to conference call in another room with Russ, Mac lies in his cushy bed so unlike the cobblestones and counts the ceiling tiles.

He listens to Jack breathe.

Jack sleeps like the…well, like someone who hasn’t had more than two hours of sleep at any given time in five months.

No one else appears. No Not-Bozer or Not-Riley or Not-Charlie.

Mac’s eyes flick to his blood pressure monitor, where the numbers spike until they’re almost normal.

It takes a long time for his throat to stop aching.

“Still say we could have kept in the catheter.”

Mac scowls. “No way. Besides—I’ve spent so long in bed my butt hurts.”

“Oh what a problem to have,” Ibrahim laments. 

Mac tips his head back to mock-glare at the burly nurse. Tall too. It’s a wonder the big guy finds scrub pants long enough. 

Ibrahim smirks back. The chair wheels around a corner and Mac once again resists the urge to grab the brakes. He has to clench his good hand in his lap. Just because he’s out of control of his body’s direction, doesn’t mean he’s in danger. It takes another three repeats of this in his mind before his fingers uncurl. 

“Almost there, man.”

Mac just nods. His expression remains light, but it must not fool Ibrahim. 

The wheelchair squeaks to a stop in a quieter hallway. A dark doorway looms to Mac’s right before Ibrahim switches on a light. 

“How do you wanna do this, Mac?”

“Just…just set me on the lid and I’ll figure out the rest.”

“You’re as bad as Dalton.”

“Oh no. He’s much worse about protocol and rules than I am.”

Ibrahim hums, dubious, but doesn’t argue. Crouching, he finally sets the brake. Mac braces his right hand on the chair’s arm rest and pushes, cast close to his chest. His biceps burn almost immediately along with a tendon nexus across his back.

Only a tiny gap appears between him and the chair, maybe three inches. All his shaking effort amounts to net zero and he flushes. 

“Just let me do the work.” Despite the scolding tone, Ibrahim’s face is dotingly exasperated. He slides an arm under Mac’s, around the base of his shoulders. His other winds across Mac’s front and down to his hip to interlock his fingers, a professional and familiar stance from hospital staff the world over. “Been doin’ this since I immigrated ten years ago. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Now you sound like Jack.”

“Oh yeah?” Ibrahim unbends his knees and Mac, all of half the man’s weight, ascends so fast his stomach flips. He feels like a floppy dog toy in the man’s arms. The cracked ribs have mostly healed, but he still winces. “That a compliment or an insult?”

“Bit of both.”

“Everyone’s a critic.”

Mac allows himself a small grin only to see a smug one mirrored on Ibrahim, his mission accomplished. He gingerly sets Mac on the closed toilet lid and steps back.

For the first time, his brows beetle. “You can’t even sit upright.”

“Yes I can,” Mac argues, refusing to look at the elbow he has to plant on the sink edge just to keep himself from toppling. 

“Mac—”

“At least let me try.”

Ibrahim watches Mac’s face with dark eyes. “Alright. But don’t lock the door. I’m just gonna close it and you are going to call if you need me. Are we clear on that?”

It’s a firmer tone than Mac expects. He nods on instinct, then in earnest. “Thanks, Ibrahim.”

“Yeah, well.” The big man unwinds a bit. “I’m guessing Jack usually helps instead ‘a me when you’re hurt. I’d feel off balance too.”

He shuts the door right after he says it, which is just as well since Mac has no clue how to answer. It’s true—but it’s not for sharing. Mac never speaks of the days helping each other through physical recovery and neither does Jack. It’s their own Diogenes Club of vulnerability the world isn’t allowed to hear. 

Mac fumbles to lift the Johnny gown. A dicey affair to rock forward just enough to lift the lid, slide down his boxers, and flop back onto the cold seat. The whole thing lasts three times longer than normal—Mac will never take ‘quick’ pee breaks for granted again—but he makes it work. It all stays in the bowl too, which leaves him prouder than it probably should. 

Panting, Mac slides his underwear back on, angling sideways to wash his hands in a sink that only seems to run hot. Mac shakes out his fingers with a hiss to match soap bubbles hissing down the drain. At least the action dries his hands faster, with the towel dispenser empty. 

The mirror’s pushed out farther at the top, on an incline for people in wheelchairs. Mac appreciates the irony about as much as a raccoon appreciates an empty garbage can. 

He’s just about to knock on the door—

When he makes the mistake of glancing upwards.  

Mac pauses. Full-body pause, a deer staring down the rifle. 

It almost seems for a beat that he’s not alone in the bathroom. That another shaggy-haired blond with purple lashes across his face and hollow grey eyes materialized in here without Mac noticing. He looks as surprised to see Mac as Mac is to see him. 

Then Mac’s stomach drops and his reflection’s eyes dull too. 

A muscle flutters on his neck. It’s stark, a white line against the dim backdrop. The pulse underneath pale skin doesn’t cease, doesn’t hiccup. 

It just keeps beating like waves on a rock. 

Mac has to look away. 

“Mac?” Ibrahim calls.

“Yeah.” Mac swallows. “I’m good. All done.”

Ibrahim opens the door and sucks in a sharp breath at the ragged picture Mac only now realizes he must paint—arms and chest sprawled across the bathroom sink, gown still open in the back for a perfect view of his bony spine, minute tremors accenting marble skin. 

“You overdid it,” Ibrahim chastises, even while gentle hands lift Mac to his feet. He can cup the entire bottom of Mac’s rib cage in his palm on one side. 

Mac doesn’t respond. 

Ibrahim senses the cloud around Mac’s head and stays quiet on the trip back. His chunky sneakers squeak, squeak, squeak in tandem with the wheels. Each heartbeat punches at Mac’s throat, a swelled jolt through bruises along his face, arms, and ankle. 

The one on his ankle isn’t the largest or deepest bruise, not by a longshot. 

But it burns more. 

Mac can still feel Beard’s fingers caged around the bone, his fingers long enough to wrap all the way around. The boxer in Mac’s chest punches harder. 

“Mac? Hey, MacGyver, are you with me?”

Mac blinks. Holding his head upright is fast becoming a challenge and Ibrahim’s eyes turn fretting. Funny, when did he stop the wheelchair and crouch beside it? 

“Mmm,” Mac hums, words too hard right now. 

Ibrahim nods, but he doesn’t look any less worried. “I said I have to leave you here for just a minute.”

Frantic shouts erupt from hospital staff somewhere down the hall, restraining what sounds like an unruly patient just out of view. Nurses run from behind Mac towards the lobby. 

“Ibrahim,” one woman pants. “Come on. All hands for this guy. Potential PCP walk-in.”

“I’ve got it, Sharon. I’ll be right there.”

She’s off running before he even finishes. 

“Are you okay here by yourself, Mac?” Ibrahim asks, very slowly, probably not his first time doing so. “If not, I can leave it for the others to handle.”

Even floating on the murk in his own thoughts, Mac recoils from the thought of keeping someone from the help they need. He shakes his head. “Fine.”

“You sure?”

“Mhmm.”

“I’ll be back in just a bit to get you into bed and hooked up to your leads.”

Mac shifts but the chair doesn’t move, brakes locked.

Ibrahim watches a beat longer, then bobs his head and jumps to his feet. The hallway quiets slightly, the commotion muffled around a few turns he can’t see. 

Tendons along Mac’s temples throb, pumped with pure acid. He kneads at the skin to no avail.

“…Saw the body, Jack.”

Mac stills.

Ibrahim parked the wheelchair right outside his room. Their room.

Body…what body?

“Funny, I didn’t know iron bars could leave finger-shaped marks,” Matty prompts.

A deep sigh, followed by a pained sound.

Matty’s voice gentles. “You killed him, Jack, while he was out cold.”

“Got that part wrong,” Jack rumbles. “Beardo was wakin’ up. Had his beady eyes on Mac before your boys could burst into the cell.”

Matty ‘aahs’ as if this makes perfect sense. “So you strangled him.”

“Did what I had to.”

“I see.” Something soft and old coats Matty’s words. Tenderness from a lifetime ago. “And his crushed cheek bone?”

“He may have fought back a little.”

“Is that also why you drove his nose into his brain cavity?”

Mac’s mouth drops open. Jack might be the best hand-to-hand fighter Mac’s ever met in his life—but he’s not one for wanton cruelty. Or excess. A shiver races down Mac’s spine.

The long beat that follows is pregnant with a world of things Mac hears even if Jack won’t say a single one out loud.

Jack’s slurry voice, already going back to sleep, loses none of its heat. “He hurt my boy, Matty.”

“Yes…yes, he did.”

“Beard was a poor substitute for dear Oleg, but I wasn’t lettin’ him walk away after how he tormented Mac.”

Mac’s breath halts altogether. Sleepiness flees his body in a jolt of adrenaline.

“We don’t know the man was going to kill Mac—”

“I did. Matty, I swear the look in his eyes coulda lit ice on fire. I’m not losing that kid after I just found him.”

“In a way, he found you.”

“Damned glad he did.” Another pained sound. “When I heard his voice, Matty…hell, thought I’d finally bit the dust for a second. Then when he wouldn’t touch me…”

“He’s right down the hall,” Matty says firmly. “And you’re not being separated any time soon.”

“Ever,” Jack growls, too tired to sound threatening. “Ever, Matty. Put it in writing if you have to.”

Jack murmurs a bit before his words dry up, but Matty’s voice hushes. After a few more minutes, quiet clackity-clack shoes start up and she emerges in the hall.

Mac fidgets under her gaze, tired and sad. He gets his loose tongue into motion. “Jack asleep?”

“Out like a light.” Matty approaches with slow steps, almost at eye level with Mac in the chair. Something in her posture is cautious, as if Mac might combust if she moves too fast. “He woke up and panicked to find you gone.”

“He really killed Oleg’s man?”

At Mac’s whisper, Matty sighs. “Jack has been in enemy hands for five months, Mac. Alone. He’s not going to be off high-alert mode for a long time yet, not to mention the separation anxiety.”

Defending someone and attacking someone in cold blood aren’t the same thing.

Mac sees the real truth reflected in Matty’s eyes.

“He’s been a weapon for five months.”

Matty nods. “With a hair trigger aimed solely at protecting himself and us. I’ve already got a specialist lined up back in LA to deal with some of the…darker issues.”

“For Jack.”

“For both of you.”

Mac raises a brow. Matty challenges him right back with a lowered one.

Then Mac sees the folder tucked under Matty’s arm. His own name leers back in block letters at the top. Last name, then first name.

He juts his chin. “My MRI results?”

“Busted.” Matty’s lips flip up in a crooked arc on one side. “Stole them off the neurologist’s desk after he showed me. I’m your medical consent for the time being, if that’s alright with you. Jack’s in no shape for it.”

Mac waves off the concern. He’s too busy drinking in the pages Matty flips open and splays across his lap. His eyes cloud.

She studies him, knowing. “You understand the words but how many of the bigger ones can you say?”

Mac’s cheeks heat. He points to one—‘note the shaded area on the cerebellum.’ Easy. He’s said this word before.

“Cere…cer…”

He mouths this and other medical terminology and…and absolutely none of them process on his tongue. The syllables jumble like Jenga blocks before he can so much as finish reading them.

Chipped nails clench around the folder.

Matty clasps his wrist at once. “It’s okay, Mac. This is going to be frustrating for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because Oleg’s drug seems to affect the recall centers of your brain along with your prefrontal cortex. Like a stain on the synaptic pathways.”

At least Mac can piece that one together. “Ling…linguis…language skills.”

“I’m afraid so. Words and processes you don’t use everyday might be difficult to remember for a while. Epistemic impairment, in a way.”

Mac grimaces at the black and ghostly grey image that represents his brain. A whole life lived and it fits on a 2D image in his lap.

“Matty…” Mac snaps the folder closed in one abrupt motion. “I’m not worth someone…someone dying. Being killed.”

The thought of Jack so enraged by Mac’s heart stopping that he’d strangle the life out of someone and finish him off with his own sinusoidal bone jammed into the same part of Mac’s brain that refuses to work properly makes his hands fritz.

“I can’t answer that for you or Jack or anyone else.”

Matty reaches up and palms the side of Mac’s face. Her eyes are just as intense as Jack’s, without any of the wildness. To Jack’s heat she is a blizzard in July.

And yet her whisper is the sincerest voice he’s heard since he woke up.

“But I do know family is worth living for.”

Ibrahim returns and helps Mac back into bed. He falls asleep to Matty’s hand running through his hair and an episode of Family Feud playing low in the corner that Ibrahim somehow knows all the answers to.

Later, when Mac wakes, it’s to find Jack out of bed and sitting by his hip. Still shocked by what he’s heard, Mac fixates on Jack’s hands.

People focus so much on Mac and his perpetuum motion fingers that it masks how much Jack does with his. They possess a still but not inert kind of energy, like a finger on a trigger. Or how they hover to grab Mac’s belt when he leans too far out a car window.

They killed a man a week ago for a reason that was just barely self-defence.

Mac can fathom it quite well—he’s seen Jack’s hands punch the living daylights out of terrorists in the desert—but he can’t picture Jack’s face. The glare, sure. But not the eyes.

Maybe they were tinged with a little of the riotous glint that colours them now.

Despite this, the hand that smooths the collar of Mac’s gown is infinitely soft. It comes to roost over his heart.

“Easy, bud. Just relax and let the drugs do their thing. I’ll be here.”

Chapter Text

My brain was a maze,
All the walls, once familiar, seemed to be rearranged,
Stuck inside of a body that wasn’t my own…
Then you took my hand and you guided me home.’

“You’re Gonna Be Okay” ~ Cody Fry ft. VOCES8

Mac scrunches his nose. It flashes pain across healing bruises, but he does it anyway. On principle.

“This is stupid.”

Jack leans his arms on the bed railing. “It’s either this or I carry you.”

Mac watches Jack bend to tie his shoe and pop back up and tries not to feel jealous. Jack doesn’t even waver on his feet, the old wound already beginning to scar.

Other than an infection in a bullet graze on his arm that was starting to go septic, bruises, and reset breaks in a few fingers, he’s mostly unscathed in the long-term injuries department. That and twenty-seven pounds doctors still want him to put on.

Jack claims a classic Bozer cookout will fix that.

“There’s only a nineteen percent chance I’ll keel over if I try.”

“Pfft.” Jack shimmies socks onto Mac’s bare feet. “Now who’s messin’ with the math.”

“I put on my sweater and jeans just fine. Even with the cast.”

“Yeah—while sitting down. You honestly tellin’ me you can stand up and walk all the way to the car by yourself?”

Mac’s neck burns.

“That’s what I thought,” says Jack.

Ibrahim rolls in the wheelchair. Mac gazes at it, miserable, then back to Jack.

“Save those puppy dog blues for someone else. Preferably Desi so she don’t shank you for getting captured on her watch.”

Mac sighs. Worth a shot.

They finish the ungainly process of helping Mac hobble the two feet from his bed to the wheelchair, shaky with starvation and barely-above-critical blood pressure. He hasn’t been able to keep down much more than watery soup and crackers so far.

“I’ll go find a blanket,” says Ibrahim.

Once he leaves, Mac allows his fingers to twist in the crisp fabric of his new jeans. They’re a lighter wash than he normally wears, pre-faded around the thighs. They’re also expensive, he can tell, and Matty bought a grey hoodie with an embroidered windmill on it from the hospital gift shop to go with them. An ironic souvenir considering he never actually saw any windmills while in the Netherlands.

There’s a Don Quixote joke in there somewhere. Chasing things that aren’t real…

Just outside the door, Matty stands at the nurse’s station, filling out discharge paperwork. She clamps a bag of medications under her other arm.

They haven’t left Mac alone for a minute. He’s never felt more loved.

His insides squirm.

“I’m sorry.”

Jack pauses his fussing over the chair brakes. “For what?”

Mac looks down.

“Hey.” Jack crouches, so he looks up at Mac slightly. Mac has nowhere to hide. “You feelin’ okay to fly today? Because we can go on a little European road trip before we head home. Or sleep for a week. Or whatever else you wanna do. I ain’t picky.”

Mac peeks up. He tilts his left, unbandaged ear to hear better.

Jack shakes his head. “I’m here for you, Mac. I don’t care where we go or what we do after this. I thought I was gonna die in that cell.”

“Me too.” Mac’s whisper feels as small as the rest of him.

“So I didn’t picture an after.” Jack grips Mac’s hand. “I have no idea what happens next. The future’s a big open canvas, but I’m not paintin’ on it without you. Where you go, I go.”

Guilt gnaws on Mac’s empty stomach. He pushes it aside to lift his head, too selfish to deny himself this. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Mac. You kept me going those months of hell and honestly not much has changed.”

Mac closes his eyes.

“You jump-started my soul, kid.”

That makes two of us.

No matter how hard Mac tries, he can’t push out these words.

Jack squeezes his hand anyway.

The automatic hospital doors whisk open, their exfil team walk on either side as guards, Jack wheels the chair outside—

And Mac gets his first taste of real air in over two weeks.

As if to punish him for that, Mac’s breath catches.

“Mac?” Matty turns to look at him, leading the way. “You good?”

Mac stares at everything from behind the sunglasses Matty insisted she plunk on his face. He can tell not being able to read his eyes bothers her a bit.

“Mac?”

Mac waves a hand. “It’s sunny.”

Jack’s hand finds his shoulder, but he doesn’t say anything. Mac breathes deep against Jack’s palm so it lifts and falls a few inches.

Matty’s face warms. “Yes, yes it is.”

Even the exfil team members’ lips lift in hidden smiles at Mac’s slack jaw and red nose the whole ride to the car.

Mac takes it all back. The wheelchair is better than this. Anything is better than this.

“Jack—”

“It’s for your own good.”

“But can’t we—”

“No, we cannot.” Jack meanders over from the private jet’s minibar where Matty sits, on the phone yet again. He flicks his nail at the portable blood pressure monitor. “You see that? The numbers are red. Now I’m no sawbones, but red is bad. Bad means you can’t sit upright for a bit. Let your body level out, man.”

Mac blinks up at the jet’s ceiling. The only thing he can see at this angle. Along with Jack’s face, where it bends over the gurney, its wheels locked.

Mac shifts his arms against the strap across his torso, then the one trapping his legs. His pulse ticks up and even breaths miss a step.

“Easy.” Jack grips his shoulder. “Easy, Mac. Nobody’s trying to hurt you. These belts are here to protect. If this turbulence gets worse—you’ll go flying.”

“We’re already flying.”

“Mac.”

“Sorry.” The fight drains out of Mac. He hides trembling hands under his thighs. “It’s just…we have six more hours to go.”

On top of the four hours they’ve flown already. Mac’s stiff spine and throbbing wrist remind him with every shudder. Storm clouds bumping at the underside of the plane aren’t helping.

Jack thumbs bruised skin around Mac’s neck, the scabbed injection site. “It’s just until those BP meds do their thing and stop makin’ you look like a corpse.”

The joke is effortless, familiar in its rhythm. Jack’s kind gaze is steady.

But his hand shakes a little on Mac’s throat.

Mac deflates. “I’m alright, Jack.”

“‘Course you are.” Jack sniffs, wrestling his composure under control. “The sky is blue and you’re a belligerent patient.”

Mac’s lips twitch. “Can’t forget about you hovering. Normalcy at its finest.”

Jack smiles too, but his eyes are bright. His thumb stops against Mac’s jugular. Mac tries to hold himself still so Jack can feel his steady pulse. No more skipping beats.

“Missed you something fierce.” Jack presses his hand on the other side of Mac’s mattress, arm straight, so Mac is framed by Jack’s limbs. It should feel confining, but the possessive stance eases something tight in Mac’s chest. “Would talk to the air just to pretend you were sittin’ with me.”

“Been there, done that.”

Moisture recedes in Jack’s eyes. “Your blue lips and flatline monitor are gonna stay with me for a long time. No more cuttin’ it close, you hear me?”

Mac can’t really promise this, just like Jack can’t really promise he’ll never leave. Their lives are too dangerous.

But if anyone can stand on the bomb with him, it’s Jack.

“Only if you let me go kaboom with you next time.”

“Deal.”

Mac rests his casted arm on top of Jack’s bandaged one. “Deal.”

The meds—mercifully—knock Mac out for the rest of the flight.

He doesn’t even remember falling asleep, just opens them to see a dark bolt of cloth studded with candles out the jet’s windows. The flames almost look…square.

Mac’s brain catches up a full ten seconds later—

Los Angeles. The LA skyline. Just like his hallucination in the cell, city lights constellating the night.

Hands fumble near his elbow and knee. Rather unsteady hands. Two quiet sher-clinks sound over the engines and both belts across Mac go slack.

“Maybe that’s not the best idea.”

Jack’s voice is a little too sharp. Shaking a bit. He shoves the belts away from Mac’s body. “Humour me, Matty.”

“We’re coming in for landing.”

Jack ignores Matty to slide onto the gurney behind Mac and recline against the jet’s back wall, Mac held to his chest, knees bracketed around his outstretched legs. Muscles in Jack’s chest twitch against Mac, between his shoulder blades.

It should hurt fresh seams healed in Mac’s ribs, but he finds his own pulse slowing at the full-body contact. Jack’s heart pounds against his spine.

“I don’t trust the gurney’s brakes.”

“…They’re top of the line, Jack.”

“It’s raining. I can keep him upright better if the tarmac is slick.”

Matty’s quiet for a minute.

“That must have been some night terror,” she says at length. “You okay?”

Jack just grunts. That buzzes Mac’s shoulder blades too.

He wakes fully when his stomach swoops up towards his throat and Jack’s arms lock. G-forces press on Mac’s crown, oppressive enough that he coughs a tight sound.

“Almost there, Mac. We’re about to land in the good ole US of A.” Jack twists his ankles overtop of Mac’s when the plane starts to judder. “You gonna be sick?”

Mac takes stock of his stomach. Nausea pinches his insides, but it’s background noise. He shakes his head.

“Good. Don’t want you choking on it.”

Mac jumps when wheels skid against pavement and Jack settles him with a whisper against his hair. The wing flaps press downwards, braking their weight. Jack’s too securely wound around Mac for them to do much more than bob forward.

“Home sweet home, brother.”

Mac clasps Jack’s leather wrist cuff with all the strength he can muster. “Yeah.”

There’s a flurry when they stop, Matty opening the plane door and barking at someone. Jack doesn’t even bother with the gurney, just slides one arm around Mac’s shoulders, the other under his knees, and carries him out into open air, the same way he carried him onto the plane half a world away.

It should feel embarrassing, but Mac is both too drugged and too relieved to feel Jack’s warmth to care.

He spent too many months wanting this to deny it.

Splat.  

Mac stares up at midnight clouds, mouth open. It really is raining. Another miracle in a long string of them.

More drops splat onto Mac’s forehead. It’s a sticky, misty rain that wets his hair and makes him instantly sweaty at the same time, especially in the hoodie.

A few drops christen Jack too. It gives him a funny look with his jarhead haircut where control tower lights shine off it.

He takes his time with each step, delicate motions to avoid jostling Mac.

“Here we are.” Jack slowly lowers Mac into the wheelchair Matty rolls over from the plane’s cargo hold. He resumes wheeling duties and heads towards the airport while plane crew work on removing bags. “How are we feeling now?”

Mac pops a thumbs up. “Tired but stronger.”

Jack palms the top of Mac’s hair. “Atta boy.”

“JACK!” 

All three startle, even Matty.

But she’s quick to roll her eyes. “I told them five thousand times to wait until we got inside. And for them to arrive one at a time to be less overwhelming.”

Riley and Bozer have sent this advice up in flames, sprinting across the tarmac. Desi trails behind at a more sedate jog. Their clothes are rumpled, eyes bruised from lack of sleep, bloodshot from too long staring at a screen.

Riley throws her bag to the side just to increase her speed and as such reaches them first. Jack steps around the wheelchair so he’s in front. He already has his arms open, all ten digits tremoring in the air.

Too incoherent for words at all, Riley barrels straight into Jack and cries so hard her sobs sound like gunshots. She pounds his chest with weak fists. Jack folds himself around her, careful not to curl his splints too far, and presses kiss after kiss into her soaked hair.

“I’m here, princess. I’m sorry I ever left you.”

Riley keens into his shirt, boneless. Someone might as well have snipped every last tendon in her legs.

Bozer beelines for Mac. His eyes are huge and shocked on Jack as he passes.

“I half thought Matty made up the explanation of what happened to Jack.” Bozer kneels, heedless of his wet knees, and envelopes Mac in a tight hug. His whole body shakes. “You’re a miracle worker, you know that? I’m so glad you’re okay. Are you okay? Do you need more painkillers? An umbrella? I brought Riley’s purple one.”

Mac clings to Bozer’s strong shoulders.

“Mac? Hey, talk to me.”

“I’m fine, Boze.”

“I’m feeding you until you hate my cornbread.”

Mac snorts. 

Lithe fingers brush back his hair—Desi. “I’m sorry you got taken, that we noticed too late.”

Mac shakes his head at Desi’s apology. She’s the last person who needs to apologize. He reaches out and hugs her too.

Desi drapes an arm around his shoulders, a smaller echo of Jack’s usual protectiveness. “Those must have been some potent drugs for you not to rig up a harebrained plan of escape in over a week.”

Mac pulls back, forcing a smile. “You have no idea.”

Desi meets Jack’s gaze over Riley’s shoulder. She stands to her full height.

Jack nods. “Thank you for taking care them while I couldn’t.”

“It was a pleasure, honestly.” Desi’s eyes sparkle a little. “But you’re not allowed to scare us like that ever again.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Also an ironic echo of Jack’s words on the plane. Mac almost laughs at Jack’s chastised expression.

Desi gives Jack a quick half hug around the side Riley’s note plastered to and then retreats, the rare demonstrative display ebbing with her. She seems relieved for the rain, wiping her cheeks every few breaths and trying to pretend she’s not.

Riley turns her face and finds Mac’s eyes.

Mac’s fill in a blink.

Riley and Bozer trade places, Bozer sniffling his way into a long, long embrace from Jack, the pair murmuring quiet words hard to make out, while Riley approaches Mac on slower feet. He almost can’t maintain eye contact, unfiltered emotion in her brown eyes so potent it sears to behold.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

Mac shakes his head again. He doesn’t deserve gratitude either. It’s not like he found Jack or the truth of what happened on purpose.

Riley gasps a breath. “No—thank you for not leaving too. Losing Jack broke my heart. Losing you would shatter me.”

“Riley…”

“I can’t go back to being an only child.”

Something in Mac’s chest cracks.

Riley rushes into his space at the first hitched sob, wrapped all over him. Arms and elbows and her hot breaths against his good ear. Mac cannot pretend with her. He can’t dredge up a smile or joke.

He just squeezes his eyes shut, hand over his mouth, and lets Riley rock them.

Drenched to the bone, they tremble hard enough to test the wheelchair’s brakes. Hair plastered to their skin. Riley’s long nails bury in the back of his shirt, Mac’s fingers curled in her leather jacket. Knees pressed together. Their breaths steam away on crisp night air, pure white mushroom clouds merged together.

“I’m sorry,” he pleads. Any effort to stop crying only yields more tears. “I’m so sorry.”

“No.” Riley’s tears and snot press to the hoodie shoulder. “You don’t get to feel guilty. For anything.”

“I didn’t…”

“No, Mac. You’re both here, together. I don’t care about anything else.”

Matty pats Mac’s shoulder. Bozer retrieves that umbrella and holds it over their heads. Jack’s arms envelope them both. And Desi cups the side of Mac’s hair, right over his bad ear.

Mac really doesn’t deserve them.

His voice is a mess. “We should have a movie night.” 

Riley kisses his cheek around a choked laugh. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Mac doesn’t remember much about the trip home. It’s an anticlimactic end to the babbled reunion and swapped stories.

But once he’s shoved onto the pull-out couch, Desi already conked out in the recliner and Bozer snoring on an air mattress by the fireplace, brain space is at a premium.

He’s not the only one who crashes hard.

Jack and Riley wander over to change the wet bandage on Mac’s ear. Matty putters around the kitchen with a step stool she materialized from the ether (they definitely did not own a perfectly Matty-sized step stool before tonight), putting away groceries and prescription bottles and a huge bottle of what looks like rum.

“What happened to your hair?” Riley whispers over Mac’s head. Several quilts are tugged up to his chin.

Jack breathes out a strangled sound. Yet his hands are gentle around the flayed patch on Mac’s ear while he slathers it in ointment. “Glad they buzzed me, honestly. Had a wicked case of lice by the end and I’m just lucky Mac didn’t catch any.”

Riley winces. “I still can’t believe you two were held captive in the same location. What are the chances?”

Mac’s relieved it’s dark so they can’t see his eyes dim.

“Sorta defies all logic.”

“Good thing you and Mac are experts in that.”

Jack rumbles again, something fond. Mac tries not to feel two inches tall, his lungs aching.

Then Riley curls around him on one side, Jack on the other, and he knows no more.

He only wakes once in the night from a twinge of pain along his wrist. His eyes slit open.

Riley’s arm flung across his waist is the culprit. It belts him like the jet gurney, including his cast, but he has no desire to push it away.

On his right, Jack’s leg clamps down his shin, breaths even and deep enough to fluff Mac’s hair with each exhale.

Mac sinks into the gravity of their celestial bodies.

“It’s itchy.”

Jack swats Mac’s hand with a spatula. “Well don’t. We’re not having a repeat of the coat hanger incident.”

Sitting at the kitchen island, Mac waits until Jack’s back is turned to retrieve a clean meat skewer off the counter. He slides it up under his cast.

The itches dissipate once he jabs the metal end in that one specific spot beside his thumb. There it is. Mac sags on the stool. 

“Nah ah ah ah!” Bozer runs around from chopping orange slices. “Oh no you don’t. Gimme that.”

Busted. Mac extends his arm with a frown. 

Bozer removes the skewer, then tugs a Sharpie out of his pocket and turns Mac’s lime green cast this way and that. “I’m thinking an explosion today.”

“Skyscraper or oil tanker?”

“Skyscraper. Definitely a skyscraper.”

“Make sure to get his roar.”

“Duh.”

Little marker squeaks and Bozer’s tongue stuck to one side of his mouth herald the artist at work. Rather than sign their names on Mac’s cast, they all add details or scenes to the Godzilla one Bozer started in the middle.

Mac can’t help but smile at Riley’s contribution of a little journalist driving a Humvee with a comically large camera on top. Better than Desi’s horrendous depiction of a blast at a popcorn factory, kernels everywhere. Luckily that one’s on the inside of his wrist. 

Bozer caps the pen. “There. Crisis averted. The last thing we need is you going to Medical on movie day.”

Mac grumbles while twisting his wrist around to appreciate Godzilla’s carnage. “I wouldn’t have needed a hospital trip for a skewer.”

“See, you say that, but this is the first day you’ve been able to stay awake longer than an hour at a time and that does not bode well.”

“Hard to ruin a movie day,” says Jack, flipping another pancake. “It mostly involves sitting around and staring and eating too much food.”

“That’s still not a bet I’m willing to take. Have you seen a bored Mac?”

Jack waffles his head. “Fair point.”

“I’m right here,” Mac grouses. 

“Ex-actly.” Jack slides over a plate. He doesn’t even drop this one and looks incredibly self-righteous about it. “I’ve gotta thank y’all, by the way, for not throwing out my Bruce Willis collection.”

Mac runs his fingers over Godzilla’s roar lines. “Wouldn’t have dared, big guy.”

He and Bozer both pretend not to notice Jack’s misty eyes, or the hand that touches Mac’s shoulder and photos on the fridge every so often, or the way he keeps peeking into the living room at Riley, still asleep, like he has every morning. Desi drove to the store for more chocolate chips to save their ‘soulless pancakes.’ 

“Does coming back from the proverbial grave mean I get to pick the first movie we watch?”

Bozer and Mac answer in perfect sync: “Absolutely not.” 

“Buncha sticklers.” Jack pours more batter into the pan. “You pick Wild Hogs once—once—and suddenly no one trusts your immaculate movie taste.”

“It’s Riley’s turn,” Mac insists. He slides his plate to Bozer, who deftly slides it back. Mac nibbles a bite of plain pancake, no syrup, just to make him happy. 

“She’s gonna pick Runaway Jury or something.”

“And we will watch it,” says Mac, firm. “Without complaining.”

Jack whines about braniac movies while Bozer sits beside Mac and finishes slicing oranges. 

Someone opens the front door after knocking briskly, about hip height, and all three relax at the spatial cue. Sure enough, Matty enters the kitchen, another file folder under her arm. The file has Jack’s full name printed in a little box at the top.

“Morning, gremlins.”

Bozer waves the Sharpie. “Morning! You up to drawing some falling buildings?”

Matty smiles, indulgent. “Maybe next time.”

“You always say that.”

“Then you’d better learn to love it.” Matty runs sharp eyes over Mac, who can’t stand on his own longer than sixty seconds, and Jack—whose favourite T-shirt flops around his frame like a deflated bouncy castle. She nods. “We finally sorted out a few things.”

Jack glances up from the next pancake flip. “Oh?”

“Congratulations, it’s a fully grown man.”

Matty hands Jack the folder and he opens it with a huge grin. “Woo! Who knew getting a social security number could feel so good.”

“You’re officially alive, according to the US government. We reinstated your passport, credit history, and bank accounts. Plus Phoenix backpay.”

“Sweet. I’ve been meaning to…” Jack squints at Matty’s grimace. “What’s the catch?”

“Riley took great care of your GTO while you were…gone.”

“I know that already. We had a heart-to-heart about it.” Jack’s eyes sharpen too. “So what’s the catch?”

Matty shares a look with Mac and he says it for her. “A lovely Taiwanese family now lives in your old apartment.”

“What, as in…”

“As in we sold the lease after you were declared KIA,” Matty finishes. “I’m sorry.”

Jack sets down the folder before jittery hands can drop it. “I have nowhere to live?”

“Of course you have somewhere to live,” says Mac, alarmed. 

“‘Cause three nights on a pull-out couch is about all my bones can handle.”

“Jack—”

“I lived in my car once after basic training, and let me tell you—being homeless is not fun.”

Mac slides off the bar stool and totters around the island. Jack’s arm flies away from his body, hand already cupping under Mac’s bad elbow. Mac lets him, mainly because it sucks him into Jack’s orbit and forces Jack to look him in the eye. 

“We spent months grieving and you think we’re about to leave you alone?”

Jack’s jaw works. 

Mac shakes his head, awed at Jack’s inability to understand how devastated they were without him. “The spare room’s empty.”

“The one across from yours?”

“Yeah.” Mac grips Jack’s leather cuff, as loose now as his shirt. Not enough skin or muscle underneath. “I already moved your old stuff in there after…after the funeral. You may as well move in too.”

“…You really mean that? You’re sure?”

Mac throws him a deadpan look. “Wherever you go, I’ll just end up finding a way to sneak in and sleep under your bed.”

Jack barks a laugh, eyes big and wet and Mac initiates what he’s clearly too gobsmacked to do. He frees his elbow from Jack’s grip and wraps both arms around him. Jack hugs him back with breath-snatching pressure, hard enough to bring tears to Mac’s eyes where Beard kicked him. But he wouldn’t let go for the world. 

“It’s yours, Jack. Permanently.”

Jack cups the back of Mac’s head and Mac’s glad his face is hidden in the too-big T-shirt. 

“I like the sound of that.”

Mac only leans back when Jack does, one full minute later.

Matty’s eyes are as soft as her tone. “You both have your first weekly doctor’s appointment in two days. Don’t be late.”

“We won’t,” says Jack. 

“We’ll make sure of it,” Riley seconds, wandering in from the living room, flannel cuffs dragging. Her eyes aren’t even open all the way. “Boze? You got their meds?”

“Already took ‘em with their first round of pancakes.”

“Perfect.”

“One other thing.” Matty tilts a little to catch Mac’s eye. “Sorry to ask again, but would you be up for an official statement later today? Debrief?”

Mac takes another bite of pancake to delay his answer. “Maybe later.”

Matty’s gaze morphs into something as somber as the rest of her, lips tight. She trades a quick look with Jack. “Okay, Mac. We’ll take this at your pace.”

Jack kisses the top of Riley’s head and her eyes go bright, even after three days of this. “What’s our movie pick for the morning?”

“Interstellar,” says Riley. 

Bozer and Jack both groan. Riley’s sleepy smile widens into a mischievous one. She nudges Mac towards the chair and then leans in to stage whisper once he’s seated. “You can explain all the quantum mechanics and I’ll get them with the futuristic OS systems on the TARS robot.”

Bozer’s groan dissolves into an incredulous laugh and Jack’s pancakes are burning behind him while he pretends to whine even louder, mouth quirked up at the edges. 

Something inside Mac wilts; he’s glad for the stool underneath him. Pancake crumbs on the back of his throat go ashy, too rich for the desert inside his thoughts. 

Mac arranges a smile on his face until it almost feels real. “Best part of movie day, right?”

“You know it.” Riley’s hand trails along his shoulders while walking by for the coffee pot. She buys the quip.

Jack’s hand, however, pauses around the spatula. Mac avoids the eyes he feels boring into the side of his head.

Chapter Text

‘Love, along the way I lied
Oh I tried but I can’t save this mind
Along the way I’ve grown tired
Can my eyes rest on you?
Can I come home to you?’

“Prodigal” ~ Cinematic Pop ft. Spencer Jones

Riley and Desi refuse to go home, and nobody says a word. 

Desi lives in the recliner, arms folded on her stomach at night, Glock in the magazine rack along the side she thinks they haven’t noticed. 

(They all noticed.)

Riley becomes a permanent fixture on the sofa bed and Mac just leaves out packing cubes for her to store belongings during the day. They don’t do much more than eat Bozer’s cooking and watch terrible daytime television or play long games of Trivial Pursuit where arguing about question semantics is more fun than actually answering them—mostly because Mac can’t say any of the words. A sedentary club at its finest. 

But Mac still marvels at breathing in a way he never has before. 

He stands there in the living room at three in the morning. He listens. 

And his friends breathe. They’re right there.

Jack’s snuffles are audible even down the hall from his room. Desi sleeps like a statue, but her eyes rove under her lids. Riley curls up in a hair-haloed kidney bean just like Mac sleeps. 

Bozer is…

“Mac?”

Mac swallows a knot in his throat. His hand presses to the wall for support. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Did I wake you?”

Bozer rounds Mac’s profile halfway, so Mac can see his face better than Bozer can squint at his, on the shadowy side. His brows are knit. “No. Got restless and came lookin’ for you.”

“I’m alright.”

“Tell that to my brain.”

Mac waits. He’s gotten skilled at waiting.

Sure enough—Bozer gives in and huffs. “Keep seeing yours or Jack’s lifeless body.”

“Welcome to the club,” Mac whispers. On the sofa bed, Riley stirs. Mac slides a neutral expression back on with proficient ease, not wanting to scare her in case she wakes fully.

Bozer’s voice thickens with concern. “Mac?”

Mac turns to face Bozer with a small smile. He tries thinking about puppies or his beloved SAK to keep his face relaxed. “I’m alright. This just…kinda feels like the dream sometimes.”

“Yeah.” Bozer creeps a little closer. “But we’re real, Mac.”

Mac stays quiet.

“We’re real,” Bozer repeats.

Mac’s haunted whisper gets lost under Riley’s sheets when they rustle: “I know.”

Jack tapes a switchblade to the underside of Mac’s usual barstool when none of them are looking. 

It’s a terrible hiding spot. 

But then Mac finds a mammoth bowie knife behind the DVD cabinet. That one’s better hidden. And in a much more strategic location, at least for a home invader.

It’s also strangely comforting. 

Still—“You don’t have to do that. Pretty sure Matty installed some big brother hardware while we were sleeping that first night.” 

“Mmm.” Jack shrugs, too focused to look away from braiding Riley’s hair while she types at the counter. His personal celebration for the finger splints coming off at their last doctor’s appointment.

Mac steals a picture.

It says something about their friendship that Jack doesn’t even have to ask what Mac’s talking about. “Being prepared, it just…it helps some of the wild animal in my brain, you know?”

Mac does know. Jack wakes up hollering sometimes.

“That bowie is expensive, though. It’s uh…” Mac snaps his fingers. His brain lags behind his mouth. “There’s a name for that…”

Riley’s fingers still. So do Jack’s.

“It’s a type of metal…”

“Made using a technique started in the middle east,” Riley prompts.

“Right! They can’t figure out the original formula and it’s called…umm…”

Jack puts him out of his misery. “Damascus steel.”

“That’s it.” Mac reddens and tries not to feel disappointed.  

“You’re all good, Mac. The brain gears will wind up soon enough. ‘Sides.” Jack winks. “Makes for a great prank when Bozer finds a knife and shrieks. Got ‘im twice already.”

Riley grins. 

Mac manages to speak past that ashy taste on his tongue. “You’re something else.”

“Love you too.”

Mac inhales one breath…out for three. Inhale…out for three.

He’s right outside in the driveway.

From what Mac can hear from his place lurking at his bedroom door like some kind of awkward teenager, Jack is washing the car with Riley and Bozer. Or…throwing bubbles and making the car wash last ten times longer than it should. Shrieks of laughter follow wet slosh sounds.

Point being—Jack is fine. Get the message, nervous system.

Two more minutes of walking his sleep-addled brain through the facts and Mac doesn’t feel like he’s about to shake out of his skin. The panic attack dissipates in shivery sweat drops along his neck and upper lip.

Naps are unpredictable these days. He might sleep for twenty minutes or an hour or lose a whole afternoon to ‘resting his eyes.’ It sort of feels like time travel because so much happens in the span of simply closing his eyes. Today he missed the bulk of a car wash.

The house is quiet. Empty. Mac is the only one here.

He misses a breath.

Right on cue, Jack’s muffled laughter filters through the closed bedroom window and blackout curtains. He harmonizes with Riley’s giggles, carefree.

It crushes any association to this house during the memorial, that sullen silence that never abated after everyone said their goodbyes.

Memorial…

Mac turns and kneels to root in his closet. An old rucksack holds all military memories of his time in the sandbox, but a different brown duffel hangs from a place of honour on a hook at the back.

Pulling it out, Mac runs his hand over the aged leather, the stitched JD in black along the front. Mac unzips the duffel ever so gently, fingers meticulous like he’s neutralizing a dirty bomb.

Bright red, white, and blue wink up at him. Mac stares down the coiled shape but doesn’t touch it for a long minute, listening to Jack’s slightly off-key belting of a country song outside.

When he finally does, the material feels cold. Its colours are as crisp as that day at the cemetery, unspoiled by sunlight or human hands.

The world held no life for five months. They buried Mac along with Jack’s empty casket, smothered in broken promises and guilt.

Mac’s fingers close in the fabric, swallowed by that too.

Wobbly steps carry him down the hall—with a quick breather on the couch—and out to the patio. He’s glad now that it’s not visible from the driveway.

Jack would probably holler enough to make him deaf if he saw it, but Mac doesn’t care: he grabs a barbecue lighter left by Bozer’s chair and ignites a pile of thin kindling in the firepit. The flames lick to a modest height, barely a foot tall.

It’s enough.

Mac throws in the folded flag, collapsing on the deck lip after he does it.

For a moment absolutely nothing happens. Mac wonders over the quality of the flag, if it’s polyester and will melt before it chars.

Then a stripe blackens from behind, followed by a patch of stars. The flames devour the fabric triangle in ravenous gulps.

“I’m sorry,” Mac whispers.

No one answers.

Still, white stars dissolving while Jack laughs in the background is the closest thing Mac’s felt to peace in years.

“Ugh.” Desi collapses on the couch beside Mac. “I hate bureaucracy.”

“And traffic?”

“Tell me about it.” Desi checks her watch, its face reflecting Mac’s documentary on giant squid. One inks arctic waters underneath a glacier.

“You picked the wrong profession if you hate red tape.”

Desi smiles. “But where else can I legally carry a butterfly knife down my bra?”

“Touché. Also ouch.”

“It’s surprisingly comfortable.”

“Head honchos getting antsy?”

“Ah.” Desi shrugs. “Russ fended off the worst of the Washington goons. They’re just happy to have Oleg in custody. He’s been on the CIA’s list for ages, so they get first dibs.”

Mac offers Desi the plate of toast in his lap that he can’t finish. She eyes it, gaze darker than the ink. Just for a moment. Just long enough to make Mac’s fingers twitch.

Then she smiles again. “Not hungry?”

“Not for toast.”

“I think I can do you one better.” Desi points a thumb over her shoulder. “I’m on supper duty since Bozer’s at his follow up dentist appointment, so I made a pit stop. How does a ribeye steak sound?”

Mac’s face falls. Desi does a double take once she stands. “Mac?”

“Um.” Mac’s eyes flit from her to the tentacles on screen. “Thanks but, uh, I’ll pass this time. I’m sure Jack would enjoy it though.”

Desi’s voice quiets. Whether to avoid agitating him or to keep this conversation private from Jack showering down the hall, Mac’s not sure. “It would help if we had a statement, just so we know what triggers to avoid.”

“It’s fine.” Mac flaps his good hand. “Kinda stupid, really. Oleg just…he wasn’t what I expected. Got in my head.”

Desi tucks hair behind her ear. “Macaroni and cheese, then?”

Mac hopes his smile doesn’t look as unsteady as he feels. “Perfect.”

Throb-throb-throb. 

Mac’s wrist punishes him for the day’s medical checkup, even at one in the morning. 

He sits on the edge of his bed, deliberating. Tough it out or hobble to the kitchen for another T3 tablet and hope he makes it? That is the question. 

Mac yearns for the day he can walk a full lap around the house without keeling over. Passing out in the middle of lunch wasn’t on his bingo card for this convalescence, but once is enough. He’s not sure Riley will let him live it down, once Jack stops fretting about it.  

Mac’s hands lie still in his lap, like dead things. Blank like his mind sometimes. 

He listens for sand, for Charlie, but only hears the house creak. Wooden floorboards cool his arches. Breathing no longer dominates the soundscape—Jack and Mac convinced Riley to go home and sleep on an actual mattress, promising they’ll check in often and she’s welcome any time. 

Desi left for another mission debrief two days ago and never slept over again, but Mac’s half convinced she does regular perimeter checks; he saw a suspicious shadow in the trees last night and Jack nodded at it. Mac’s meds aren’t that strong. 

Meds. Right. 

Bozer snores away farther down the hall, so Mac feels safe enough to take the risk. He sways upright only to falter on the first attempt and fall back onto the bed.

This is getting old.

Mac clenches his teeth and straightens wonky legs until they rise all the way. Godzilla—now fire-breathing; thank you, Bozer—tucks close to the windmill on his chest. 

Throb-THROB-THROB—

Mac staggers down the hall, catching himself on the counter and holding in a hiss. He keeps his gaze on a covered pumpkin chocolate chip loaf Bozer baked, left beside their sea of orange prescription bottles. They could open their own pharmacy at this rate. 

The house remains undisturbed while Mac braces on the counter to throw back two tablets and wash them down with the last of the apple juice, straight from the carton on the fridge door.

He eyes the pumpkin bread once he’s finished. His stomach lurches. 

Better not.

Mac treks back towards his room and marvels at the ease of this. His room. Nobody took it away or demanded he earn it back. They didn’t fill his room with old stuff just because they couldn’t bear to look at it.

He walked through the front door of his home ten days ago and other than truly astonishing levels of daily hugs and Bozer crying at the drop of a hat as he processes everything, nothing changed. They all want him here. He’s not intruding.

Then Mac passes the living room only to get a whiff of familiar cologne, one he hasn’t smelled in eighteen months. It’s earthy, warm, something from a different lifetime.

His legs tilt.

He backs into the wall and slides down so fast it drives air from his lungs. The hallway floor is even colder than in his room. 

Mac’s hands are already over his face by the time he curls his legs to his chest. The house is utterly quiet—and his heart screams. He wishes his chest burned like it did in Oleg’s cell, for at least then the world would make sense. 

Squeak, squeak, squeak—

“Mac?”

Mac shakes his head, quietly torn open. His brow chafes against the cast.

The cologne scent strengthens, something fresher than the old smell on couch cushions. Bare feet squeak to a stop. 

“Heard a thump out here. You fall? Hit anything on the way down?”

Mac waves his hand like he did in the cell. As if he can physically ward off Jack’s concern out of the sheer desire to not look him in the eye.

He’s pretended for ten long days since they got home and suddenly he can’t conjure up a happy-go-lucky mask to save his life.

“Not a physical hurt, huh.”

Mac inhales sharply, a cousin of a sob that can gracefully pass off as a gasp. 

Jack hums, lowering himself with panther grace. Only the slightest grunt gives away both his fatigue and stiff muscles. He places a knife on the floor beside his hip, pink rushing back into his knuckles, brown back into dilated pupils.

Though bonier than normal, his solid bulk warms Mac’s left side. Tears spring up before his next shaky exhale.

Jack draws up his legs too, arms propped on his knees, loose and relaxed—and very strategically placed so he sits between Mac and the front door. The distant snore pattern switches tempo as Bozer rolls over. 

Thunk. Jack’s head flops back against the wall. “You’re good, I’ll give you that. Almost had me fooled.”

Fooled. As if Mac isn’t doing this to protect all of them.

“Shoulda trusted my instincts. It hit me, right around the time you broke down with Riley on the tarmac.”

Mac stutters over another breath. 

“Desi was drivin’ us home and I glanced back…and something in your eyes didn’t look quite right. Been seeing it ever since, when you think no one’s looking.”

Jack sighs through his nose. His voice sounds like kitten fur, wispy and soft and just the tiniest bit all over the place. 

“Oleg figured it out before the rest of us, didn’t he?”

Mac nods, eyes squeezed shut. 

“He was playin’ with you, offering what you wanted without letting you have it.”

Another nod. 

The house is eerily still. So is Jack, a counterpoint to the not-sobs panting out of Mac.

Jack’s lack of motion broadcasts more violence than any tension could, and it hits Mac afresh that Jack has killed people with nothing but his bare hands. Without hesitation, either.

Mac almost hopes he won’t say it, that if he does it’ll be a hallucination too. 

No such luck, but Jack’s voice hushes to a murmur:

“You let yourself get captured.”

Mac scrubs against his eyes. 

“Thought it would be a quick lights out, with nobody any the wiser. It explains why you never tried to escape, why your hands didn’t move much…why you wouldn’t give me your laces.”

“I’m sorry.” All the scrubbing in the world can’t stop a few hot tears from scalding their way down Mac’s neck. “I gave up, after you left. Oleg tried to…I don’t know…prolong my life. Strung me out just enough to have energy and starved me just enough so I couldn’t use it. Taunting me with what I couldn’t have and studying my reactions.”

“It was still torture. By every prickly definition of that word. Psychological torment is still torment, Mac.”

“Most men Oleg captured begged to be left alive.”

“But not you.”

“He…he let me grab his gun, once. Just for a moment.”

Every muscle in Jack’s body shudders to a halt except his tongue and even that stilts. “…So you could kill yourself.”

That ugly word dominates all thoughts for a moment. Everything goes deathly silent.

Mac swallows. “I can barely look at me in the mirror—I can’t image how you feel.”

“You just wanted it to be over.”

The words hover in the air between them with glossy flickers, alluring yet deadly, an angler fish before it bites down.

Experienced words.

Mac’s hands drop only to see Jack looking out the patio door. His eyes are foggy but nowhere near Mac’s face.

“You wanted to stop having to pretend because it drained the life out of you anyway.”

Mac peers up at Jack, mouth open. It strikes him that this is the first time they’ve been truly alone, just them, since that cell floor. 

Mac tugs the hoodie sleeve over his hand and uses it to wipe his nose. “I figured out a few things too.”

Jack’s brows draw back. “Oh yeah?”

“That cuff.” Mac reaches over with his good hand to tap it. It still feels wrong to see the leather slide around so easily. “You started wearing it after I met you. Twenty-six days, to be exact.”

Jack doesn’t speak. City lights wink off his scalp through the thin bristles. 

“Your medical file was…” Mac hunts for a word. “Un…unsealed, when you…”

“When I died.”

Mac’s heart leaps to hear him say it, even now.

A spike of snow-white flesh on the underside of Jack’s wrist is shadowed by the cuff. Mac taps that too. “Did you do it to yourself?”

“No.” Jack lifts his head off the wall. “Hell no. I would never. But I’d been in a war zone for a long time, see, done some things I hadn’t wanted to in the name of keeping the peace. Blood on my hands. So when that piece of shrapnel nicked me and I had actual blood all over my hands…”

“Dark places,” Mac whispers. 

“Yeah.” Jack thumbs his inner eye. “Real dark. It just seemed easier to let it happen, you know? Let the artery drain. My family would never know I hadn’t fought the reaper.”

Medical files can’t cover everything. Mac’s mouth twists. “But you didn’t bleed out.”

“No. Had a moment where I realized I couldn’t do that to my people.”

“Wish I’d had a moment like that.”

“I think you did.”

Mac finally looks up at Jack, full eye contact. 

Jack lips ripple for a moment, a universe of held-back emotion Mac can read like a billboard anyway. “You believed me, even though you had no reason to. Even though you hated looking at my stuff so much you hid it all in the guest bedroom and hid a part of yourself with it.” 

Mac’s eyes blur. “Jack—”

“Even though your life didn’t feel like it had much of a point anymore.”

Mac’s nails sink into his palms. 

“You know why I bought this cuff?”

“To hide the near-fatal injury from me?” 

Jack half turns so his shoulder leans against the wall. The same shoulder that always propped him up in his cell. “I got it to remind me what—who—I would have missed out on if I hadn’t staunched the bleeding or radioed for medical help.”

Mac wipes his nose again and it muffles his voice. “What?”

“Why did you reach for me, Mac?”

Mac’s whole body throbs now, one giant ache. “Because…”

“Huh? Why’d you pretend for the others but not me?”

“You strangled that guy and he was real. You had to be too. Even if you weren’t—no risk of being disappointed anyway.”

Jack shakes his head. “You can lie to me, but don’t lie to you.”

Mac scrubs against his eye and this time Jack snares his good wrist before it can press too hard. His grip is vulcanized, like they’re fused together. The leather cuff catches city light too and turns it amber. 

The tremulous whisper matches a quivery leaf feeling in Mac’s chest. “I reached for you because I wanted it to be you. Because even if you weren’t real, I wanted to honour who you are.”

“You trusted me.”

“Maybe it’s wrong, but I’m not…me without you.”

Jack presses a thumb to the underside of Mac’s wrist. “Mac—you brought me back to life years ago, even before this circus with Oleg.”

Mac’s eyes spill over. 

“I met this string bean kid in the desert and suddenly I was whole too. A rocky start, sure, but even then you put some light back in my eyes. Took less than a month of knowing you. It’s why I bought this cuff and why I don’t take it off. Now it’s my turn.”

Mac covers his mouth with his cast. 

“You kept it together all those months for your family, Mac, and that will never be cowardice.”

“I just…I know I’ll never pay for what I—”

“No. Uh-uh. You don’t owe anybody anything. That ain’t how love works. Love means you can fall apart and we’re still gonna pick up your pieces.”

It’s a shiny gift, too perfect to be real. Icy guilt wars with the heat of Jack’s promise, one Mac wasn’t sure he could trust anymore until Jack grabbed his hand in that cell.

“You were tryna find me, even if that meant dying.” Tenderness in Jack’s tone eases the ache. “I’m right here, Mac. Right here. I’m not going anywhere, not anymore.”

For the first time since Kovac, Mac believes him.

Mac’s eyes are puffy with an agonized brand of tears he seldom experiences, so he can’t see Jack’s face for a moment while he stretches out a hand.

It doesn’t matter. Reaching for Jack is second nature.  

Jack gently pulls Mac’s wrist until his searching hand makes it over Jack’s heart, a steady wh-whack, wh-whack even through a thin henley. Mac’s breath unsticks from the back of his throat with a messy sound.

His fingers clench in Jack’s shirt. Dark blue cotton wads underneath his fingers, making his wrist throb harder—and yet somehow it’s liberating.

Then they unclench…and wander up towards Jack’s throat. 

Jack lets Mac do whatever he wants. His expression is even more tender. 

Mac touches the new strangulation scar at the base of Jack’s throat, still an angry pearl shade. His pulse bobs against that too, fainter. He supports Mac’s tottery weight with a hand behind his shoulder when reaching up unbalances him. 

Mac hardly notices, fixated. He thumbs at Jack’s cheeks. They’re wet and warm and real and alive. 

His fingers trace the bridge of his friend’s nose, then the five o’clock shadow along his jaw, healed black eye, and finally around to the unfamiliar scar over his eyebrow. The sheer story of suffering painted on Jack’s skin is vile. Mac already senses he’s going to have nightmares for weeks once he’s off the heavy meds, and he hasn’t even read all the details.

“I’m sorry,” Mac breathes. 

“You don’t got a thing to be sorry for.”

“No, I mean…I’m sorry for how they hurt you.”

“I’m not. It led me back to you and that ain’t ever gonna be a bad road.”

“But…”

“No, Angus.” Jack bumps their foreheads together. “I’m choosing you this time, not the mission. Not ever again.”

Mac opens his mouth to fumble around his snail brain for the right words, but a real sob comes out instead and Jack folds Mac into his arms before he can so much as exhale that same breath.

Jack’s lean profile still weighs more than Mac’s, holding them upright. But Mac can wrap his arms a few extra inches around Jack now and does so with shuddery gusto, relieved by the quiet house and the quiet push of Jack’s chest against Mac’s bruised one and the quiet hands that cradle the back of his head and spine. 

“I love you. And I’m really here.”

We both are.

Like Jack hears this, he clutches Mac tighter to the circle of his arms. Their legs sprawl to either side in an awkward fold-over zigzag, but neither cares. 

“Can you make me a promise, though?”

“Anything,” Mac vows, voice wet. 

Jack’s hands pause in his hair, almost clutching, as if he’s wrestled with these words for a while: “If you ever, ever, feel like giving up again, promise you’ll tell me. We’ll figure it out together.”

“I don’t want it to be over anymore.” Mac turns his head to the side to alleviate stuffy nostrils and it places the shell of his good ear against Jack’s neck scar. “But I promise.”

The hands uncurl from Mac’s hair and hoodie, palm flat now. Jack’s thin chest exhales a breath that sends heat bursting over Mac’s scalp. Not a ghost. Or a hallucination. 

Mac feels like he’s just opened his eyes from inside a coffin and now gazes up at open blue sky, alive. 

Jack whispers thankyouthankyou and Mac realizes he’s praying again. Their house creaks some more along with Jack’s breaths. 

Mac savours the beat of his own heart against the leather cuff—and the scar—resting on his back. “Welcome home, Jack.”

Mac wakes to find himself in his own bed with no memory of how he got there. 

Jack slouches against the headboard, hibernating bear levels of asleep. His mouth hangs open and one corner of his bruised lips shines with drool. One hand is clamped firmly around Mac’s good wrist.

Something feels different.

Mac peers around his room, lit by five am sunrise, and nothing looks out of place. Other than the blankets neatly tucked around them, everything’s the same as it was—

Mac blinks.

The blanket is tucked around Jack’s feet too. Even around his elbows and shoulders, a truly impossible feat with such military-level precision. 

The ache in Mac’s left arm has dulled but it’s the only limb between the two of them free of the covers, turned to the outside of his body.

He squints at his cast:

On top of Godzilla’s head a tiny crown has been neatly scribbled in, complete with gems and an ermine ruff. Godzilla now also wears a little sweater vest with a collegiate-style ‘M’ on the front.

Mac smiles.  

“Thanks, Matty.”

Chapter Text

‘It’s time to shed this masquerade
You cannot love in moderation,
Dancing with a dead man’s bones.
The darkness soon will disappear
And be swallowed by the sun—
I am coming home.’

“Land of the Living” ~ Matthew Perryman Jones

“It’s a…um…it’s…”

Bozer’s brows rise, already nodding while Mac circles a hand. “You got this, man.”

Mac glares at the pile of logs. The wood seems to sneer back at him.

Desi points to the log cabin shape she’s building on the deck firepit. “This style of wood stacking is recommended because…”

“Because it aids with…” Mac grinds his teeth with a frustrated sound. “I hate this.”

“Actually you love science facts, but neuro-inhibiting drugs suck.”

“I know this.”

“Of course you do, Mac.” Riley walks out onto the deck and plops down so Mac sits between she and Bozer. She hands a beer to Bozer and a bottle of sparkling apple cider to Mac. “Just give it time. Your synapses are recovering along with the rest of your body.”

“Feels slower,” Mac grumbles. 

Riley clinks their bottles together. “That’s because your brain moves at twice the speed of everyone else’s. Welcome to the mental speed limit. This is our normal.”

Mac rolls his eyes but he smirks along with her, especially when she nudges his shoulder. Mac’s glad his wrist doesn’t hurt so much now at the light jostling. Riley passes paper kindling to Desi while she kneels to light the fire and LA sparkles at her back. 

“Oh, hey. Almost forgot.” Bozer reaches into a gingham-checkered basket at his feet. “I made pastrami.”

Mac barely manages to swallow his first sip, spluttering. Riley thumps his back. “Easy, bro. There’s a whole case of that stuff in the fridge.”

Mac gestures to the basket. “We’re having a picnic.”

“Yeah.” Bozer throws him a funny look. “Sure, we can call it that. Since none of you animals eat at regular hours, it’s my personal mission to sneak in food wherever humanly possible. Even if I have to do it at eight o’clock at night.”

“You make the best pastrami,” Mac quavers. Desi and Riley turn to him with funny looks too.

Bozer lights up. “Thank you! Now if only you could go back in time and tell that to the judge at my tenth-grade culinary competition.”

“He did you dirty.”

“He so did, the old wind bag.”

“Aha! That’s it!” Mac snaps his fingers. “Expiratory pressure!”

Jack, emerging from inside with a pile of blankets, closes one eye like this many syllables personally hurts him. “Huh?” 

“The movement of wind through gaps in the logs creates expiratory pressure that aids in ven…vent…ah…ventilation, like breathing, thus feeding the flames.” Mac sits back, flushed. “Ha.”

“Good for you, bud. Even though I have no idea what we’re talking about.”

“Knew you had it in you.” Riley beams at Mac.  

Jack peers in the basket. “I’m gonna have it in me too after I eat that.”

“Ewwwww.” Riley’s smile sours. “Really, Jack?”

“What? I’m just starting to keep down rich food.”

“I can’t decide if that’s funny or gross,” Desi chimes in. 

“Mac’s the one talkin’ about ventilation.”

Bozer subtly shifts the basket away with his foot. “Maybe no gassy foods for you.”

“Are you gonna deny the man who’s lived in a prison half the year his right to fatty proteins?”

Riley snickers. “For our own health and safety—yes. We are.”

The others grin, a milestone. It’s the first reference to Jack’s capture that hasn’t ended in someone wincing, crying, lapsing into a somber silence, or all three.

Mac’s still smiling when Jack tucks two fluffy blankets around him, plus one for Bozer and another for Riley. Desi flips the edge of the blanket over Mac’s hair on her pass by and they all burst into belly laughs. 

“Babushka,” Jack teases, flicking Mac’s scarred ear through the blanket.

Lavender craft paper isn’t quite the right colour, but Mac takes what he can find in Bozer’s old ‘film set stash.’ Another casualty of their limited garage space.

“What’re you up to, kiddo?” Jack leans over Mac’s spot at the island. A pillow indentation on his cheek crinkles. “Good to see your hands movin’ again.”

Mac finagles with the next paper fold. “It’s or…uh…origami.”

They both smile wider at how quickly Mac’s brain finds the term. Jack pours himself a mug of coffee from the French press and swiftly slides it out of Mac’s reach when he eyes it longingly. 

“Not on your meds, you don’t. What’re you making?”

Mac shrugs, focused on each precise fold. It’s a little tricky with his casted hand unable to flex at the palm, but the bulky material also helps press thicker spots down flat. “Just something stuck in my head. Helps me think.”

“‘Bout what?”

“What I would have missed, I guess.”

That pauses Jack in his tracks. “You okay to be on your own this morning?”

Bozer technically works in the garage not thirty feet away, but Mac hears what Jack’s really asking. “I have your number queued.”

“Do you promise to actually call if you need me?”

“Yes.” Mac answers without hesitation. “Besides, it’s just thinking.”

Jack ruffles Mac’s hair. “Yeah, well, don’t get lost in there.”

Mac flails an arm to the side and misses swatting Jack’s hip by an inch. Jack cackles his way around to the fridge. Mac will never tire of the sound, not ever again.

“You’re going to be late for your first physio appointment.”

“Nah.” Jack bends to stare in at piles of leftovers. He looks to be seriously considering lasagna for breakfast. “Still got half an hour. Desi’s drivin’ and her lead foot can shave the drive by a good eight minutes.”

Mac scoffs. Fingers twitchy but determined, he tucks a tiny triangle section into itself so it flares out on an angle. This side works much better than the first. 

After squinting to ensure symmetry, Mac pinches the last bigger sections around the first and creases them on an angle so they frame the main centerpiece. 

Desi saunters in, keys in a jingling twirl on her finger. “Let’s hit the road, Jack.”

“Oh wow. Revolutionary.” Jack closes the fridge, tupperware in hand. “Never heard that one before.”

“Are you having lasagna?”

“…Yes.”

Desi consults the oven clock. “Can you eat it in ten minutes without ralphing later?”

“Just watch me.”

Desi shares a conspiratorial look with Mac. “I’d rather not.”

“Told you half an hour was cutting it close,” says Mac. 

Jack wags a finger. “No goody two-shoeing until I’ve had my cheesy slice of heaven.”

Desi and Mac genuinely spare a moment to watch Jack while he forks lasagna into his mouth, chewing more on one side of his mouth to avoid lower lip stitches.

They hold their breaths—but Jack hasn’t vomited since that first pancake breakfast. He doesn’t now either, cheeks rosy with colour, eyes alert. Dark bags have already receded around lurid bruises. 

The pair relaxes when Jack starts humming a Blue Rodeo song under his breath, totally oblivious. 

Desi pats Mac’s shoulder. “Don’t get into too much trouble while we’re gone.”

“Wait.” Mac stands and is proud he doesn’t need to lean on the counter this time. Which is good because both hands are full of his bowl-sized origami. “This is for you.”

Muscles around Desi’s eyes unspool and her brows spread farther apart. Mac realizes he’s had the rare fortune of surprising her. 

She accepts the paper flower with a wondering little smile, open mouthed. Something earnest, childhood Desi peeking around the clouds of violent life experience. “A lotus?”

“It’s supposed to be a water lily, but I could only find a tutorial for lotuses.” Mac fidgets with his fingers, stomach just as squirmy. “Water lilies are your favourite, right?”

Desi cups her hands around the flower with a quirk of her lips. “I like daffodils best, actually.”

“Oh.” Mac frowns. 

“But water lilies are my third favourite.”

“Third?”

“After irises. I appreciate it, though, thank you. This is beautiful.”

Mac deflates. The squirmy feeling melts into a golden one, so warm that he smiles wide enough to show dimples. 

Desi glances up. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.” Mac soaks in this moment—Jack scarfing cold lasagna in gym shorts and bare feet, morning sunshine glistening off dirty dishes in the sink, Desi running her fingers over the flower ‘petals’ with a delicate touch, Bozer tinkering—and something fizzes in his chest. “I’ve just never been so happy to be wrong.”

Not totally oblivious—Jack grins into his last bite of lasagna. “Some things even you can’t make up.”

If he angles himself just a few inches to the left…

“Ah!” Mac snaps away from the mirror—and a sharp pair of scissors in his hand. His arms burn from contorting. “Come on.”

A second mirror behind him, taped to a camera tripod, taunts teeny tiny golden wisps on his collar. They’re all different lengths. Mac presses thinned lips and resists the urge to throw the scissors.

Defuse a dirty bomb in a sandstorm? No problem. Snip something behind his head—   

“Hey, Mac.”

Mac jumps. He spins on his heel to see Matty by the counter in a leather jacket and jeans, stunned that he never even heard the door open.

Matty’s brow scrunches, arm hovering slightly away from her body. “You okay?”

Mac releases his lips to blow out a breath. “Sorry.”

“No, I shouldn’t have startled you.”

“Debrief. Right.” Mac circles the scissors while his brain reboots. “You want my statement for Oleg’s…ar…arraignment.”

Matty’s eyes fold at the edges a little, the way Jack’s do when Mac sets a personal best for word recall. “Actually, I’m just here to see how you’re doing. No statement today.”

Still, her posture remains alert. One foot forward, the other braced back on an angle, as if ready to leap at him. 

Mac clues in. 

“Oh, uh.” Mac lowers the scissors and Matty’s shoulders lower with them. “Desi drove Jack to his physio and Bozer fell asleep working in the garage. I didn’t want to bother him since I know he didn’t sleep well while I was…gone, so I’m trying to do it myself.”

Matty’s ankle boots clack closer on the hardwood. Curiosity replaces shadowed tension in her eyes. “Getting a little long around the gills, huh?”

Mac reddens, sheepish. “It’s a gawky process with my cast, even looking in two mirrors.”

“Hmm.” With a swift and sweeping glance, Matty points to a folded lawn chair against the wall. “I’m going to need that. And a comb.”

Mac stares at her. “What?”

“Can you give me the scissors?”

Mac does so on autopilot, passing them to Matty handle-first. He notices a beat later that Matty very deliberately phrased this as a question and not a demand. It still feels like he’s walking through a needle shop in the dark.

“Thank you.” She bobs her head and kicks over the step stool. “Now sit. Please.”

“What are you…?”

“I’m cutting your hair, Mac. If you want me to.”

“Oh.”

The lawn chair creaks with disuse when Mac unfolds it, looped white ‘legs’ chipped with age. Harry’s favourite. Mac lowers himself into the cloth seat with tottery steps after handing Matty a comb from the couch’s side table. 

A plastic creaky sound precedes Matty stepping onto the stool and fluffing Mac’s hair. Her short nails spark shivers where they brush his scalp. 

“You want it just below your ears?”

“Please, plus a bit of bangs left up front.”

“Coming right up.” She hums. “This is long.”

“I needed a trim even before we left for Amsterdam.”

“Yikes. You’ve got almost a month of extra growth on this ‘do, then.”

Mac relaxes a little. He huffs anyway, to save face. “It’s not that bad.”

“Surfers everywhere are drooling.”

Mac grins, tilting his head to allow Matty access to different angles. The comb hisses through his hair, back and forth, back and forth…it’s oddly soothing in harmony with the fridge’s drone. Matty’s own hair whispers against Mac’s shoulder whenever she leans to reach his temples. It holds none of Mac’s wave, but their matching tawny highlights glint in mid-day sunshine. 

Silence blankets them like the first snow of the season, gentle in its simplicity and the way it blocks out a noisy world. 

Matty holds a section of hair taut. Then— 

Sssssnip.

Golden strands fall like snowflakes too, right into Mac’s lap. These ones at least are even. He cups them in his palm and marvels that they’re long enough to curl a bit. No evidence of the blood or grime they’d been coated with. 

“Authorities say I need your statement, but I realized that I don’t, not really.”

Mac snaps back to the present. 

Matty’s voice is light, to match the comb. “It’s a funny thing, forensic evidence. I was there personally with the team when they processed the historic village abandoned in the woods.”

Sssssnip-snip.

More bronze snowflakes. These settle on Mac’s stiff shoulders. 

“It all looked very open and shut, and the CSU report said as much. You were captured, drugged, and couldn’t get out. Jack was being systematically tortured once or twice a week. The end.”

It hurts to swallow, suddenly.

Matty snips her way around to Mac’s alley cat right ear, a jagged scar at the very top. Her hands are warm where they touch his skin. 

“But evidence is like a painting—you can read it a million different ways.”

Sssssssnip. 

“Anyone who doesn’t know you would never see it.”

Mac’s fingers close around clumps of hair. 

“There weren’t any restraints.” Matty’s voice remains as steady as her hands. “No handcuffs, no straps, no duct tape. We dug up some in Jack’s cell, old and crusty, but not yours. Not upstairs either.”

Mac’s Adam’s apple bobs. His exhale is long and shaky on the way out. Matty doesn’t falter in her comb-snip operation, but her voice mellows, honey in a hot mug of tea. 

“I’m sorry, Mac, that I missed it. Or more accurately that I noticed something was wrong months ago and gave you space to grieve rather than checking in.”

Mac opens his fingers until sunlight dazzles off the hair. More falls onto his wrist at the next snip, near his bangs. “You’re not the one who has to be sorry.”

Ssssnnni—

“Neither are you.”

Matty’s palm settles at the nape of Mac’s neck, right where Beard grabbed him like he was a dog waiting to be put down.

Matty’s touch is just as authoritative, but her petite hand thaws rather than burns. It sends hot tendrils down Mac’s back. He’s only spoken the truth out loud once, to Jack. This still feels the same, another person’s gaze spotlighting his soul.

It hurts.

But it also feels healing, an infection purged through love’s cauterizing force.

“I made sure there won’t be a drop of cranberry juice in this house for a long time.”

Mac’s head lifts. “Thank you.”

Matty steps off the stool and walks around to study Mac’s broken-open features. He’s unable to hide with her either. They just gaze at each other for a moment, and Mac again watches her eyes glitter with something softer, just like in the hospital closet.

He pities the man who had the gall to cheat on Matty and lose the depths of a heart she doesn’t share easily.

“I’m not going to miss it next time,” she declares.

Mac finds it in himself for a tentative but genuine smile. “There won’t be a next time.”

“Good.” Matty clasps his knee with her free hand. “And no pressure to tell the others. You don’t have to share that pain if you don’t want to.”

Mac clasps her hand in return. “I just did.”

Matty’s eyes fold even more. She flips her wrist and a loopy shape meets Mac’s skin.

He opens his fingers to reveal the bonfire paperclip, one he thought long gone along with his bagged clothes in an Amsterdam hospital or on the floor of a settlement in the woods. It nestles on a bed of hair, a little bent but otherwise perfectly preserved. His locks shimmer underneath like real flames.

A palmful of sunlight, of tomorrow’s promise.

Mac looks up and nods.

Matty nods back.

“We should really go to bed.”

“Why?”

“It’s three in the morning.”

Riley quirks a brow. “Not like that’s stopped us before. No red on red, Mac.”

“Right.” Mac shakes his head and the tips of his ears go hot. If only his MIT classmates could see him now. “When laying out a suit, the colours have to be…”

“Alternating, you got it. Oh, nice! You uncovered an ace on the side.”

“Where?”

“There, in your sixth pile.”

Mac glances around at neat card columns on the living room floor where they sit, and though it takes his brain an extra second, he notices an ace of spades on the far right. Riley dips another corn chip in the guacamole bowl nestled between her crossed legs. Mac slides the ace to his stacked cards and flips over the next.

“Four,” says Mac.

“Of?”

Mac scrambles. “Clubs.”

“Look at you.” Riley holds out her fist and Mac bumps it. “I could never remember the name of that shape as a kid. I called it a lucky clover instead. Drove Jack nuts.”

“He taught you to play?”

“And now I’m teaching you. The circle of life.”

Mac smiles. “Solitaire was used as a form of fortune telling in the seventeen hundreds.”

“Of course you’d know that but forget how to play.” Riley toasts him with a corn chip. “The brain is a funky place.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Thanks for letting me crash here for a bit.”

“Hey.” Mac presses his knee into hers. “You’re talking to an expert on panic attacks. I’m glad you called and drove over.”

Riley sighs. “Just feels stupid, that the panic attack had ended but I still couldn’t handle…I don’t know…”

“Being so far apart?”

“Yeah, I guess. Dumb, huh?”

Mac sobers. “Not even a little bit.”

Riley corrects the number order in Mac’s red diamond stack—he put a ten on top of an eight—then offers the corn chip bag. Mac dips one into the guac. They crunch in companionable quiet, completing the round together. The city skyline stretches out before their spot leaning against the coffee table.

“Playing this always feels a lot like coding.” Riley cants her head at the cards. “Not sure why.”

“Similar logic gate pathways.”

“Must be.”

Mac goes to lay a black seven on a black eight and Riley taps his hand. “Almost, but not quite.”

“Black seven goes on a…red eight.”

“There you go.”

Mac continues flipping the discard pile in his hand, waiting for a king to complete his red heart pile. Riley wears sweats and one of Jack’s old hoodies, hair ruffled from strands she must have yanked out during the panic attack at her apartment and the beanie she took off once she arrived here.

“Mac?”

“Yeah?”

“I just…I couldn’t find you.”

Her fingers cinch around the chip bag, a noisy crunch. Mac sets down the discard pile.

Riley’s eyes are distant, even when Mac touches her forearm above a bracelet. She doesn’t respond, not very tactile either sometimes, so Mac withdraws his hand.

“Eight days. And without your phone or good satellite coverage at first, I couldn’t do anything.”

I’m here, Mac wants to yell. A thick throat keeps him silent. Logic has nothing to do with delayed emotions.

“I already lost you after Jack died and then, when you disappeared at the hotel—I really lost you.”

Mac jolts a little. “You didn’t lose me after the funeral.”

“Yes, I did.” Riley turns to face him. Her lips twist. “And you’ll never know how helpless it feels to watch the light snuff out in someone’s eyes in real time even while they’re walking around.”

No, Mac doesn’t. He did in the mirror, those five appalling months. He’s never had to see it in a family member.

“We were both helpless on this one.”

Riley sets the bag aside to swish her hands down her face. Restless, they don’t stop but continue towards the piles, reshuffling them into ascending order. Her dexterous hands ripple like a weaver’s over a loom, with the same efficiency she uses to type.

Mac flips over his next card.

Riley’s still fretting over order when Mac lays the queen of hearts on her knee. She halts in place.

“I need some help, I think, before I can consider being an agent again. But…” Mac leans against her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Riley stares at the card for a long moment. Her eyes are unreadable—and weary. Not nearly as exhausted as they looked at the airport, just burdened by memories. Bozer and the others mourned Jack’s loss too, but they’ll never share the pain Mac and Riley do.

Did.

A thrill skips through Mac at the past tense. Jack sleeps two doors down the hall, snoring like a bear. They’ll never be orphaned again.

Finally, Riley spins the card across her knuckles and glances up at Mac. New lines in her face go slack in her first real smile of the night.

“Even if you do—next time I’m coming with you.”

Mac bobs against her arm that wraps around him. “No place I can go you won’t find me? That the idea?”

“You bet your Swiss army knife. Another round?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

Air suctions in Mac’s throat and his eyes spring open. 

He’s bolt upright and clutching at his ankle before he wakes all the way. Instead of Beard’s meaty fingers clamped around his ankle bone—frantic hands find the sheets, tangled against his leg. 

Mac runs a hand down his face. 

Another fun side effect of this drug draining from his system and the waning pain medication—nightmares feel incredibly real. Hideously intense. His ankle still tingles with remembered pain and yet he can clearly see it’s a blanket.

The signal dichotomy hurts his head. 

Mac opens his mouth to call out, then closes it and blushes. He doesn’t need…shouldn’t need…

Don’t be selfish. Jack deserves all the rest he can get.

Still, Mac’s feet are traitors. They wobble out the door and into the hall, then stop before Jack’s door.

It’s closed. It’s always closed now, mainly because Jack dreads bothering anyone if he wakes up screaming or punching. Which is frankly ridiculous because Mac’s seen it all when it comes to Jack, the good with the ugly.

Mac’s ankles shake, so he stretches out, facing the door. The rigid hardwood digs into hip bone and tender ribs equally. His heart jitters in his chest. He presses his palm to square grooves in the door, like the grid pattern in their cell.

He’s four feet away, Mac. Calm down.

It works, a little. Mac’s breath feels heavy like his eyelids. Maybe in the morning he can get a rematch on their checkers debacle, with mint chip cookies as bets. That always gets Jack laughing…

Suddenly, a whoosh of air tidal waves over his nose.

“Mac?”

Mac’s head whips up from his doze to see Jack in the doorway.

The former Delta’s hand shakes around the doorframe, knuckles tight. That feral something blazes behind his eyes, especially since he’s so good about hiding it from the others during the day. The berserker creature inside Jack’s psyche lessens more with each hug and plate of food…but it’s not gone. Not yet, anyway. 

They both have a lot more therapy hours with Dr. Sonya before then. 

“Hey. You okay?”

Mac nods. 

“What happened?”

Mac gestures with his fingers towards his temple, too bleary to answer verbally.

Jack understands with a ‘tsk’ sound and it warms Mac all the way out to his toes. “You too? Same nightmare?”

“Mhmm.”

Jack takes that as permission, squatting to bathe Mac in his shadow. He latches onto Mac’s bicep. “That doesn’t look very comfortable.”

“Y’re here.” Which to Mac is the perfect rebuttal. Who cares if the floor is hard? It’s closer to Jack.

The feral creature retreats in Jack’s face. His fingers pump stringy muscle in Mac’s arm. “I sure am. Come on, bud.”

Mac doesn’t quite understand this directive until Jack’s hand pulls. Long hours spent on physio exercises are rewarded in the noticeable strength of the gesture. Adrenaline doesn’t hurt any, plain to see in Jack’s eyes and feel in the grip that bodily hoists Mac to his feet.

Dizziness tilts the world.

“Whoa, whoa.” Jack braces Mac with a hand on his opposite shoulder. “No concussions for you.”

Jack half walks, half carries Mac towards his bed. The arm around Mac’s back is the only thing keeping him upright and he rubs at his eye with a sleepy fist.

“Jack.”

“Still me.”

“I c’n just go back to my room. Sorry if I woke you.”

Jack shakes his head. “You didn’t. Don’t remember exactly what I was dreamin’ about, but it was cold and the people around me were mean. Woke up shivering. I’d appreciate the company.”

Mac relaxes.

He’s deposited carefully on the bed and Jack pats his chest. It’s heavy too, but in a comforting way that unspools taut muscles in Mac’s neck.

“Sit tight for a bit.”

Jack shuffles around his room, throwing on a sweater as he searches for an extra blanket and drapes it over the bed behind Mac. He does so on soundless—well trained—feet. They’re bare, as usual.

Jack spent months in the same pair of socks, surrounded by dirty stone and more infection raging through his system than doctors could shake a stick at. Mac wouldn’t want something touching his feet ever again either. It’s to the point that Jack tried to walk into Medical barefoot just two days ago. 

Mac watches him with a helpless smile, massaging his ankle bone.

Jack hones in on the motion. “Is it hurtin’ you?”

“No. Just remembered…”

Jack’s eyes pool with compassion. 

“I’m okay,” Mac deflects. 

“No, you’re not.”

“…No.”

“But it’s okay because I’m not either right now. Birds of a feather.”

“Too scared to be alone,” Mac admits. “Scared that you’ll go away when I sleep.”

Jack bends to meet Mac’s eyes. His burn. “You’re not gettin’ rid of me that easily.”

Mac swallows.

Back go the covers and Jack sprawls out on his stomach—also a new preference. The reason for this change wasn’t apparent until Mac spied new scars on his back when Jack’s shirt rode up the other day, ones he’s not ready to talk about yet.

That’s okay, though. They have all the time in the world now. And even if it turns out they don’t, Mac doesn’t intend to waste a single second of it.

He, on the other hand, lies down slower on his side. Halting. A hesitancy borne not of being in Jack’s space again but from fear of the nightmares returning, of calming enough to let them.

Jack tugs a snowbank-worth of blankets over their bodies and reaches out. He tucks his hand between Mac’s neck and the pillow. The heat of Jack’s touch feels so different from Beard’s demanding grip that Mac’s heart immediately stops pounding. The world rights itself from memory’s vertigo.

Mac’s pulse along the back of Jack’s hand must do something for him too because he closes bright eyes. 

“You’re in one piece,” he breathes, reverent. 

“Mmm.” Mac’s eyes droop. 

Right before Mac drifts off, he lifts his hand. It hovers over Jack’s back, running hot even through the blankets. Jack just opens his eyes to study Mac’s face in the dark. 

It takes faith—Mac can’t see Jack’s back rising and falling through the gloom or the covers. 

He lowers his hand anyway, light and finger-spread between Jack’s shoulder blades.

Iiiiinhale…up…eeeeeexhale…down…

“Go to sleep, son. I’ll still be here when you wake up.”

“Promise?”

Jack taps the pillow under Mac’s head:

Dot-dash…dot-dash-dot-dot…dot-dash-dash…dot-dash…dash-dot-dash-dash…dot-dot-dot.

Always.

Mac believes him.

It’s the easiest thing in the world.