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Mac woke disoriented and in unspeakable pain. His eyes popped open when hands unexpectedly curled around his head.
"Deep breaths now." Jack's voice was firm but soft. If Mac's brain could focus on anything except pain, he would ponder the dichotomy of Jack's timbre.
Mac's breath hitched like his body had forgotten how to breathe. Respiration was an involuntary action controlled by the autonomic nervous system. If it wasn't working, then he was, to put it in a Jack term, screwed.
Mac panicked as much as his current state allowed, which mostly consisted of limbs flailing and incoherent cries of pain between gasps of air. Jack was holding his head and neck immobile, which only scared Mac more.
"Angus!" Jack shouted. "Stop! Be still dammit!"
His body tired out before his will to get up and run away did, which left his limbs twitchy and his chest heaving.
Jack moved from where he'd been sitting beside Mac to kneeling above his head. He shifted his grip as well, getting a better hold on Mac's head and neck. Now, Mac was looking at Jack's face upside-down, and he closed his eyes when that nauseated him.
"Eyes open," Jack said. "Take some deep breaths for me."
Mac opened his eyes and looked anywhere but Jack's face. His eyes roamed around the edges of his vision, taking in the forest around them. Smoke was coming from something to their right, but he couldn't remember what it was.
"Smoke? Fire?" Mac rasped. He was pretty sure he raised his right hand and pointed in that direction, but he couldn't see it to be sure.
"Yeah, don't worry about that right now." Jack's eyes darted in that direction but quickly refocused on Mac. "You with me?"
Mac tried to nod, but Jack's hold was firm. His head wasn't moving.
"Don't move," Jack said, enunciating each word. "Now, tell me what hurts."
"Head."
"What else?"
It was hard to think beyond the excruciating pain that encompassed his whole head.
"Mac?"
He must have been taking too long to answer. What was the question again? "Huh?" he breathed.
"What hurts besides your head?"
He pretty much felt like one giant head trapped in a vice that simultaneously throbbed in time with his heartbeat. "Dunno."
"Wiggle your feet for me."
Mac tried, but he couldn't see if they moved.
"Good, that's good," Jack said in the same tone he used for spooked horses and scared puppies.
Mac didn't like it. His heart rate sped up, and his breathing all but stopped.
"Calm down. Deep breaths, bud. You have to breathe for me." Jack exaggerated his own breathing, lifting his shoulders up and down as he coached Mac through an exercise.
"Dalton!" Someone else's voice called out, and Mac startled.
"Hang tight, Cynthia," Jack responded. "I'll be right there."
"Who?" Mac's brows drew together as he tried to place the other voice. He'd heard it before.
"You remember Cynthia? Badass helicopter pilot."
The image of a woman in a flight helmet popped into his head. She was amused, laughing at them. "Exfil."
"That's right. Our exfil pilot. She's an ace at the stick." Jack looked in the direction that Cynthia's voice came from and grimaced.
Stuttering mental images of the last hour or so flashed through his brain. Victor Henley. One zip tie. Fighting. Helicopter. Matty Webber. Missiles. Emergency blanket. Spinning.
"Crash."
"Yeah," Jack confirmed. "We crashed, and you got tossed out, so I'm worried about you."
Mac swallowed hard and fought to keep what little composure he had. Between the pain in his head and the shock, Mac's body was spent, and his thoughts weren't as sharp as usual. Something was very wrong, and Mac didn't know what to do about it.
"Hey," Jack drew his attention back to his partner, "I need your help."
Mac's eyes locked with Jack's. There were a lot of questions swirling in Mac's head about his own condition, but he knew Jack didn't have the answers. He probably needed a hospital with a trauma center, and they were stuck in the woods in the middle of... Kazakhstan. Maybe Kyrgyzstan.
"I've gotta help Cynthia get out of the helo and put out the fires."
"'Kay."
"I need you to stay absolutely still. Do not move your head. Do you understand?"
"Yeah."
"Repeat it back to me."
Mac took a deep breath and murmured, "Stay still."
"And?" Jack prompted as he eased his hands away from Mac's head and neck.
"Don't move my head." It hurt to say so many words, but Mac couldn't tell if there was something wrong with his chest or if it was because of his head or maybe his neck. Pain was everywhere.
"Good. Deep breaths. I'll be right back."
Mac lay still. It was difficult when he heard shouts of pain from Cynthia and grunts of exertion from Jack. He did things. He made things out of other things. He saved people. He didn't lay on the sidelines listening to someone else do the things. It took all Mac's fortitude and willpower to stay where he was.
He stared up at the sky, watching as gray clouds drifted into view. A storm was coming. They didn't have any cover, so that wasn't good news.
The temperature was dropping too; not a lot but enough to make Mac shiver. He groaned when the trembling reignited the throbbing in his head that had settled into a consistent pain.
Time lost all meaning. At some point, Jack returned with Cynthia in tow. He helped her sit by Mac's shoulder and guided her hands to either side of Mac's head. Then, he crouched down to assess Mac's condition with a hand on his forehead.
Mac's initial reaction was to shake Jack's touch off, but Cynthia held him in place.
"How ya doin', hoss?"
He ignored the question to ask one of his own. "Sitrep?"
Jack shared a look with Cynthia that was too quick for Mac's aching brain to comprehend. "You first."
"It's getting cold."
That caused Jack to frown and nod. "There's a storm kickin' up. I'll see about building a lean-to with the tarp and some of these branches we sheared off in the crash."
"I can help," Cynthia said.
Jack stopped her from moving. "You have a more important job. You're going to stay off that leg, sit here with Mac, and keep an eye on him."
Mac rolled his eyes at the implication that he needed a babysitter, but it made his stomach churn. He swallowed hard and shifted his eyes slowly toward Cynthia. "You okay?"
She smiled and shook her head at him. "I should be asking you that."
He groaned and shifted his eyes slowly back toward Jack. "Sitrep?" he asked again.
"Victor escaped during the crash with my gun. Blood trail leads out into the forest, so I think he's on the run. That's good for us. Matty will send another team after him." Jack pointed toward his right with a sigh. "The transponder was in a part of the helo that was on fire. Cynthia said she has a satphone in a backpack, so I'm going to go look for that. You stay put."
"Not going anywhere."
Jack disappeared from his view, and Mac turned his attention to Cynthia.
"Remind me to do a better job at avoiding the missiles next time," she said as she looked around, probably keeping lookout for Victor to return.
"You saved us." Mac waited until she looked down at him to add, "Your fancy flying skills."
"Well, thanks," she replied, "but I'd feel better about it if we were all able to walk away from it."
Mac didn't have a response for that. He hummed a noncommittal reply and tried to concentrate on Jack's footsteps in the nearby underbrush. Unfortunately for him, Jack was a highly trained soldier who generally moved around without much noise at all. His feet were shuffling a little, which let Mac track some of his movement. That was unusual for Jack though.
A few minutes later, Jack returned with a dripping backpack and a sour expression. "Cynthia's backpack and the satphone landed in a stream."
"What's in the backpack?" Mac's brain was working a little better, but it was still only moving at about 25% of its usual speed.
"A lot of soggy nothing." Jack opened it up, pulled out items in Mac's view, and then dropped them on the ground.
"Wait," Mac said as he dropped a wide-mouth Nalgene bottle. There was something tickling the back of his brain. He could use the bottle for something.
Jack picked it up and looked to the left. "There's a stream over there, bud, but I didn't find any purification tablets."
"There might have been some in the helo, but the probably burned up or scattered with the rest of the survival kit," Cynthia said.
"No." Mac closed his eyes to think, but Jack almost immediately tapped his index finger against Mac's forehead.
"You can't go to sleep."
"Not sleeping," Mac replied as his eyes fluttered open. "Thinking."
"Well, I would tell you to do less of that so as not to strain your brain, but I feel like I'd have an easier time telling the earth to stop spinning."
Cynthia chuckled. "I've heard a lot about you two. Seems like all those stories were true."
Jack shot her a grin. "Did you hear we made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?"
Cynthia raised an eyebrow and looked down at Mac. "Does he know that's a unit of distance not time?"
Mac ignored her when his brain finally spit out what he was trying to remember. "Burnt wood can dry the phone."
Jack perked up and stood. "We have a lot of burnt wood. What do I do?"
"Put it in the bottle."
"How long with that take?" Jack asked as he started moving away to gather the wood.
"Few hours. If we're lucky."
Jack stepped back into Mac's line of sight. "We don't have a few hours. We need to get you out of here now."
Mac didn't know what to say. They didn't have many options if the helo was in as bad a shape as Jack said it was. Starting a big fire was a bad idea, mostly because they were shot down by someone who was looking for Victor. No one was in any shape to fight except Jack. And now that Mac could see most of Jack's body, he was concerned about his partner. Jack's hand was hastily wrapped in a strip of someone's shirt, and he was stumbling a bit.
The satphone was wet, and the transponder was fried. The comms in the helo must also be dead. Then, Mac realized he had lost his Phoenix comm too. That was actually good. Riley and Bozer would be looking for them, and they should have a fairly small search window around their last known location before they went down.
"How long?" Mac asked.
"What?" Cynthia was concerned as she looked from Mac to Jack and then back to Mac.
"Have we been here."
Jack checked his watch. "Helo went down about an hour ago. Right, Cynthia?"
"Yeah, that sounds right."
If Thornton was still in charge, SAR would have already arrived. Riley and Bozer were probably struggling with red tape without a Director of Operations to push things through for them.
"Help's coming," Mac said confidently.
Cynthia's jaw dropped. "How do you know that? We were flying under radar altitude when we diverted from our flight plan."
Mac looked at Jack and said, "Riley."
"Our tech analyst," Jack explained with a hesitant smile. "She'll track our comms to their last known location. That'll give her a small window of-" The distant whump-whump of a helicopter interrupted Jack's sentence. "I'll be damned."
"I can't believe it," Cynthia was looking up with an expression of pure awe. "Your girl works fast."
Everything after that was a blur. The SAR team hit the ground running, assessed everyone's conditions, and got them in the helicopter. Mac lost track of time, partly because his injuries caught up with him and partly because he panicked being back in a helicopter so quickly after the last one crashed.
When he next woke, he was laying in an ICU bed with a hard brace wrapped around his neck. He didn't feel any pain, but he could feel Jack's calloused hand curled around his own fingers.
"Jack?" Mac rasped. His throat was scratchy, and his mouth was dry. That usually meant he'd had surgery, but he couldn't remember why.
"Hey," Jack greeted, standing and then leaning over the bed so that Mac could see him.
"What happened? Did our helicopter crash?"
"It did," Jack confirmed.
"Are you okay? Cynthia?"
"We're fine." Jack held up his bandaged hand for Mac to see. "I have about 25 stitches and a couple fractured bones in my hand. Oh, and a concussion. Cynthia broke her leg, but she's casted and on a flight back home."
"And me?"
"You are a bit of a miracle, hoss. Your skull was fractured as well as a couple of vertebrae in your neck, so you have some hardware in there now. Surgeons are optimistic that you'll make a full recovery."
Mac wasn't aware he'd been holding his breath, but he suddenly gasped for one breath and then another. "I'm not paralyzed?"
"They're going to run some tests now that you're awake," Jack replied. There were unshed tears in his eyes, but he smiled hopefully at Mac. "Your spinal cord looks okay on the scans."
Tears overflowed from Mac's eyes, pooling uncomfortably in his ears. His body felt heavy, but he was pretty sure he could feel his fingers and toes. In the forest, he couldn't let himself think about how he couldn't move or why, but now it all came flooding back to him.
Jack leaned over and carefully gave him as much of a hug as he could without moving him. In response, Mac wrapped his arms around Jack, held on tightly, and cried, releasing his fears and relieved that they were all okay.