A/N: So this fic goes AU after the time-jump at the end of 2.06 "One Step Too Many." They never get the call from Valenzuela, so Operation Genoa never goes to air and Will is never set on the path to his revelation on Election Night. The story itself takes place Jan/Feb 2013.
Many, many thanks to Pip and Meg for their beta'ing/babysitting/coercion, without which I would not have finished this.
The story — which has three parts — is completed and the next two parts are sitting in my fic folder waiting to be edited. Part II, barring incident, will be posted Saturday and Part III on Monday. The chapter title is taken from the Iron and Wine song, "Passing Afternoon." The title, "grass widow," is a colloquial term for an abandoned mistress with grass stains on her skirts, indicating a romp in the grass rather than a real bed. She's looked upon with a shade of malignancy and has no social or personal security... or so Mac perceives.
PART I: OUR ENDLESS, NUMBERED DAYS
It takes her three tries to convince Charlie that she means to leave.
Not just News Night, not just ACN, but the whole game, sum total. A disquiet has settled in her bones, creaking and lingering, and MacKenzie knows that she needs to uproot and leave before she rots where she's planted. She has a friend at Columbia who has spoken for her with the head of their journalism school, a manuscript she's been sitting on since Islamabad, and a friend who's a book agent, ready to make her niche celebrity.
Charlie splutters, and silently she shrugs, looking down at the whirl of amber liquid in the glass in her hands.
"Three years ago I needed to come home, to feel normal again. Three years before that I needed to be anyone but myself. Three years before that… you gave me all the help I've ever needed, Charlie. But you know me." She pauses then, affecting a bare smile. "Three years is the longest contract I've ever signed."
(MacKenzie came home to Will in 2010 because she needed, quite desperately, the person who knew her best from before, as she tried to claw her way back to then. To before.
But there are things Will doesn't know — therapy appointments charted carefully in her planner, a little row of orange prescription bottles in medicine cabinet, two out-patient laparoscopies to break up the adhesions in her abdomen, the carefully-creased list of triggers in the top drawer of her desk — and she is now trying to bury herself in the show, bury herself by desperately trying to become the woman she was before.
MacKenzie is now nearly certain her relationship with Will has been a casualty to that.)
Charlie sighs, and places his glass on his desk blotter. "What do you want to do?"
"Teach some young idealists how to do the news uptown in Morningside Heights." He smiles gently, like a question, and she shrugs. "I spent my entire career as an executive producer as Will McAvoy's executive producer. It would feel wrong, to do another show."
Charlie doesn't say anything, but looks at her sadly. But she won't have it. She's waited three years, patiently and close-by. She has answered his 2 AM phone calls and stayed by his hospital bedside and through all the girlfriends and his father's death. Will is happy, Will is not going to forgive her, and Will is her best friend and the love of her life, but she can no longer live like this.
"This way the staff doesn't feel like they have to choose sides," she offers feebly. "And Will doesn't need me; they can do the show without me. Jim is experienced enough. And I'll be close enough that if they need a hand every once in a while—"
He hums thoughtfully. "Do you think Will wants to do the show with anyone but you?"
She has half an answer on her tongue before she reconsiders, exhaling heavily, trying to breathe the weight out of her lungs, smiling crookedly at the concern on Charlie's face.
"Post-traumatic stress disorder is a weed," she murmurs. "And it plants itself at your ankles, and if you stop paying attention, it will grow to up around your neck and choke the life from you." Charlie's mouth parts, and she waves off whatever he is about to say. "I love Will. But this isn't good for either of us, if I stay. If I go… now, like this, with us being… friends, maybe we can finally move on with our lives."
Charlie looks at her like he did six years ago. But she was younger then; more headstrong, less fearful, caged by nothing after she unknowingly unhinged the door by her own revelation. What can she say?
Will can't move past what she did with Brian.
That's plain to her now, and a better person would stay, she knows, forgiveness aside. A better person could accept friendship. A better person could stay on, work with him, settle for what he can give. But she's not better, because loneliness is threatening to swallow her up whole if the anxiety and flashbacks don't asphyxiate her first.
"I have to move on."
Charlie pours them both another drink, and nods.
By the dint of the three whiskeys she drinks far too quickly after broadcast in Hang Chews, the first person she tells is Don. He gapes at her while she drinks the fourth of the night, sixth of the day.
The last time she left she didn't drink nearly this much.
(That came after.)
Shrugging, she sinks down into the corner couch they've tucked themselves into. "I set out what I came here to do. I turned News Night into a ratings sweet spot that informs the electorate and turned Will into the anchor Charlie and I knew he could be. The show can run itself, they don't need me anymore." Don looks at her with a distinctly dumbfounded expression on his face, and she forces herself to say it, self-consciously looking down into her drink. "And I don't want to be an EP anymore."
The look on Don's face suggests that she's just blasphemed against some higher god. "So you've decided to… what? Declare victory and go home?"
"Are you comparing me going to Columbia to the US pulling out of Vietnam?"
"You compared your relationship with Will to slavery," he suggests with a disbelieving laugh.
Wrinkling her nose, she shakes her head. "I said absolutely nothing about the chattel principle," she snarks, before sullenly examining her hands. "Besides, you're happily in a relationship, so shut up."
Now with her thoughts soaked in liquor, she feels even more wretched.
"I had to wait. For Sloan. Almost a year and a half," Don says in an attempt at camaraderie.
What can she say? Not that she's losing her focus, risking slipping into the fog again. Not that she finds herself meandering through days at a time, flitting from story to story. Sitting in her office like a foolish girl sitting in a bed of grass, getting pollen on her skirt while she fists handfuls of green from the dirt and lets them go into the wind.
Not that Will is close enough to touch, and she was foolish enough to wait. Not that there is only so much she is able to hold onto in her bed of grass, and when she stands she will surely be dirty, but there are things she can hold onto, even in flux.
MacKenzie has always loved to teach.
"I left him, for three years," she says, her head heavy. When she stands, she knows she's going to be dismayed at how much she's had to drink. "Because I thought that was the best, for him and myself. And then I came back, and at the time I came back because no one else would hire me, but I thought, I genuinely thought, if it was meant to be he'd love me again."
And now she knows — has known since September, truly, but she thought she could keep going, be better than she is — that he can't.
"I've waited six years," she says with a small smile that Don returns, because he too knows what it's like to make all the wrong choices in love. "I've been in love with Will for eight years, and it's just pathetic. Now." At first it seemed noble, in a way, like she was atoning for her sins. Her smile drops. "Well, I'm sure it has been, for a while. Because clearly he doesn't want me. And it's pathetic because I should be able to handle that, and accept that, but—"
"Well… there comes a point where you have to think about yourself, so… this is good," he gently says, leaning back and wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
"You think?"
It's a comfort to know that there's someone she won't have to convince that she isn't making a mistake. Although now she needs to tell Sloan, because asking Don to keep her leaving a secret, even by omission, from his girlfriend is an unfair thing to ask of him.
He barks a laugh. "I mean, it fucking sucks. This is eight years of your life." Pantomiming with his index finger the idea of a bath toy circling the drain, Don's laugh turns into a sigh. "You really don't want to produce anymore?" he asks, balancing his chin on her crown.
Mac takes a moment to consider her response.
"People said that to me when I embedded. Asked me why… but I wanted to run. Now I just… I'm tired. Of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hour days. And I go home to no one," she answers carefully. "Now at least I can get a dog," she jokes, trying to steer the conversation back towards brevity. "Maybe a big dopey one that I can train well enough to come with me to office hours. I'll still see you guys."
That was the point of Columbia, she explains. She doesn't have to move, doesn't have to leave her life behind. People change careers all the time and keep their friends, or so she's been told.
(But she and Don aren't those people.
They're creatures of proximity — she's always been, ever since she was a child moving with her father from posting to posting all across Eastern Europe, leaving one set of haphazard acquaintances behind for another every few years. She doesn't know how Don was raised, but the two of them were educated away from fully remembering to be considerate of other people's feelings.
But she's going to try. She's changed; sometimes she wonders if that's what Will doesn't like, that she's no longer the woman he loved.
The woman he loved betrayed him, besides.)
Don doesn't ask whether or not she's told Will yet; Don already knows that she hasn't.
"Promise me you'll come visit me when I'm in the control room," he says as the bar begins to quiet.
"Why?"
"To annoy the hell out of Will." He smirks.
Mac doesn't quite know what to make of that. "Only if you and Sloan buy me dinner after," she retorts.
"Of course," he says as if he's offended that she didn't presume that was a part of the package — a seat in the Right Now control room, him, and Sloan, and dinner and drinks.
She laughs. "I'll be there every Friday."
He had wanted to tell Charlie that he met with his agent before coming in to the newsroom today, had the non-compete clause dropped alongside the contractual ability to fire his EP every Friday, to let Mac know when she came in to renegotiate her contract that she should probably leverage the fact that he had that clause to get herself a hefty raise.
Had told Charlie that, pushing up his shirt sleeves before dropping into one of the chairs across from Charlie's desk, trying to rub off a patch of foundation cloying indignantly to his jaw.
But Charlie had folded his hands together and said, "Mac won't be needing to renegotiate her contract."
"What?"
"MacKenzie has decided to take a teaching position at Columbia J-School," Charlie had said, nearly aggravated. "I thought she would have told you she was thinking about it — they offered her tenure track. But they'd be idiots not to. She's MacKenzie."
"You're re-negotiating soon, right?" he asks her during a commercial break the next night, voice controlled, eyes on his cards for the next segment. "You signed when? Early April 2010?"
He hears her sigh into her mic. "One-thirty back, Will."
"'Cause I'm thinking you'll wanna get in on that early," he suggests, glancing up at the camera. Not that there's anything assured that Mac is watching the screens, is probably hovering over someone's shoulder looking at a graphics package.
Her voice has a strange turn to it when she says, "Okay, Will. Can we table this conversation until after the show?"
"Copy."
Will's anger simmers through the D-Block, and by the time he's ripping his earpiece out at the end of the F-block it's silently boiling, and he follows her out through the darkened hallway leading to the studio out into the bullpen.
"What?" she blurts out, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear.
Will scoffs, reaching for his BlackBerry. "Were you intending on letting us know you were going to make a run for academia or were you just going to give me two weeks' notice and bail?"
She nearly stops cold, eyes wide with shock, which makes him angrier, somehow. Turning on his heel, he waits for her to start moving again and catch up, and she trails him the rest of his way to his office. Where she promptly stops a few feet inside the doorway, and rocks on her heels.
Rolling his eyes, he crosses back the open door, and shuts it.
"Charlie told me."
Biting her lip, she nods. "I figured. He's — well, he's not the only person, but he's the only person who would tell you."
"So… this is it?" he asks, flippantly gesturing towards her, his phone in his hand.
Mac came back because she needed to come home — and you needed a kick in the ass, Charlie had said. Don't you remember anything I told you three years ago? You've both done extraordinarily well, and I am so proud. But I swear to god, Will, if you don't talk to her about this.
Talk to her about what? Mac came back for herself, and now she's leaving for herself. She has an agenda, she always has. Will knows he's lucky to have remained on it for so long, to remain… what was he, originally, in her metaphor? The horse?
Lacing her fingers together, she shrugs. "You didn't want me here, Will—"
"Three years ago!"
"So you want me here… now," she challenges.
He shakes his head. It's not about that.
"Because you haven't exactly made it easy, for me to think that," she continues, voice low and oddly tense. If they were still in the middle of the show, he'd think a guest was planning on going off the topics they had agreed upon and she was about to throw the segment for something else. "For me to think that, because repeatedly, Will, you remind me that I've ruined your life very spectacularly, and it makes me think that we can't be friends and frankly, you've gotten lazy since Benghazi—"
"So you're going to teach," he says incredulously, realizing his voice is cutting near snide, but not caring enough to stop it. "You're going to leave the show and teach, because I've gotten lazy."
Disbelief etches into her features, before collapsing into something Will suspects is indecision. Mac purses her lips, quirking one of the corners of her mouth into an ironic grin. "Well, I was looking for a place that didn't have Taliban fighters or Blackwater guards, and Columbia seemed like it."
"You're leaving the show—"
"I'm leaving you," she snipes, folding her arms under her chest. "Is what you mean. I'm leaving you. But I'm not, unless you mean to say that our relationship is entirely professional, because my apartment is going to be the same exact one I've owned for the past nine years."
He rolls his eyes. "I mean I didn't think you'd ever want to teach. I don't know what your angle is here, is what I'm saying."
That's not entirely true — Will has imagined that Mac would retire to teaching, decades from now, after he's left. Actually, what he's doing is entirely nebulous. It used to be that he'd retire and she'd be too young to, so she'd be an associate professor somewhere and they'd have an apartment near campus and a house in the Hamptons and he'd spend his days writing books while she inspired the next generation of newsmen and women.
Now he's not quite certain where he wants to fit — although Mac made that choice for him, so it really doesn't matter — but he knows he wants Mac in his control room as long as he's behind the anchor desk.
"It's more that I never imagined I'd want to stop producing."
"What?"
Mac shrugs, looking down at her shoes.
"You what — you don't want to produce anymore, is what you're saying?" he asks, slowly. "Why? What happened?"
Eyes baleful, she stares at him for a long moment before exhaling, thoroughly annoyed, and walking out of his office.
"So that's the political science building, which I'm told was built over hell." Entirely at home, Sloan walks her down a block of West 118th. "Okay, so the bad thing is we're not neighbors. But the good thing is you're going to be across the street from the Starbucks I always stop at on my way to AWM, and the Kosher Deli."
Sloan, for one, has taken the news of her new teaching position exceptionally well. Mac suspects it's because Sloan genuinely enjoys having a leg-up on her on something. Besides, well, the entirety of economics as a social science.
Sloan waves to a group of young girls who shout back a Hi Professor Sabbith! before she drags Mac across the street to the immense Journalism building.
"This is your new home," she says, framing the building with an excitable flurry of hands. "They already like me here, because of the obvious reasons, so I'm sure they'll like you even more."
Together they across the green lawns towards the overbearing brick structure, its shadow quickly coming up to swallow them. Then the stairs, and the front doors, and Mac finds herself in the lobby, wondering if this building too will feel like home. The newsroom at News Night, if nothing else, has always felt like hers. But soon she'll have an office here, even if the classrooms and lecture halls don't have assignations.
Still, she thinks, heels clicking on the parquet tile as she follows Sloan into the correct wing of the building to find her friend's lecture. Still, she spent twenty-six months in the Middle East, and none of that was hers.
"And you're ready to publish," Sloan chatters on. "So, well, some people might hate you for that. And your students, if you make them pay for your book — I'd advise you make copies and hand them out instead, it'll buy you some cool points because you're saving them book costs and printer fees. But Kenzie this is so exciting — Don said you're excited."
Mac thinks Don probably oversold that one, to keep Sloan happy.
"It's just something I wrote on reporting from the Green Zone," she says with half a smile, sidestepping any discourse on her level of excitement.
(The decision to leave was not an easy one to make.)
"So…" Sloan starts, smiling coyly now.
Pre-emptively, Mac clutches her purse closer and rolls her eyes.
"You know the Russian."
"Aleksei. Yes, I know Aleksei."
Sloan's smile grows wider. "Just how do you know Aleksei?"
"Sergei Markov was the Russian Ambassador to West Germany at the same time my father was the Charge d'Affaires of the British Embassy in Berlin," she explains, arching an eyebrow at Sloan's seemingly-knowing grin. "Aleksei and I were children together. He taught me all the fun words in Russian and I taught him all the fun ones in English. His family had to make a run for America when they made it onto Yuri Andropov's shit list in the eighties."
"Okay, so you were children together, but he just so happens to have grown up hot."
Mac emphatically rolls her eyes this time. "He is like a brother to me. A very large, very blonde, very attractive brother. Who is married, mind you. With six adorable children."
Sloan takes a brief moment to cross check the lecture hall that Mac wrote down for her — The Journalist as Historian, Room 112 — with the door they've arrived to before opening it.
It was coincidence, really, that she ran into Aleksei after she came back to Manhattan in 2010. She'd agreed to be on a panel for Sloan, a collaborative effort between the journalism school and the economics department — which, this time, did not require her to have immense knowledge of actual economics — which he had been foisted onto as the only faculty member able to give a non-Western perspective on the post-Cold War economy.
They'd barely recognized each other, but he had taken a chance and scrounged up one of her business cards and emailed her after, asking if she was the little Ksenia who rode on his back up and down the velveteen carpeted hallways of the French Ambassador's townhome.
The hulking man in question waves to them as they take two seats towards the back, and Sloan makes an offhand comment wondering if Aleksei was the beginning of Mac's propensity for older, blonder, taller men. To which Mac shoots back that the over-under on her "type" is brunette, actually.
It's not a large class, maybe thirty-five students. All a little sloppily dressed, but she figures that's mostly on par with what she can expect for her own staff. Engaged; Mac can tell they've done the reading.
Forty minute in and amidst a debate on coverage of attacks on US Embassies, Aleksei smirks at her. "Now with Benghazi, everyone was initially running with—"
"That it was triggered by Innocence of Muslims. Except for ACN," one student, a blonde ponytail wearing a hoodie, begins to finish. "Who were running with a source from the State Department connecting the attacks to an al-Qaeda official calling for revenge for the death of, um—"
Another student, a girl swallowed by a green sweater with thick tortoise-shell glasses, picks up the thread. "Abu Yahya al-Libi, who had been killed in a drone strike in Pakistan three months prior."
Aleksei nods, leaning on his podium. "Good, good. Now I won't look like an ass in front of ACN's News Night's executive producer, MacKenzie McHale, who is currently sitting in the back row of our classroom and who produced that probably Peabody award-winning broadcast."
She groans. "They haven't even released the nominees yet."
"But you'll be on it," he scoffs.
It takes a solid minute of goading — most of it for fun, half of it in Russian — to get her down to the lectern, taking questions about why they decided to run with their source and how they decided to discard Innocence of Muslims and eventually on her time as an embed, once Aleksei brings up the manuscript of her book, which is sitting on his desk in his home office.
"With syrup stains on it, I'm afraid," he apologizes. "My sticky-fingered children love their adventurous Aunt Ksenia."
It's fun.
MacKenzie has fun, turning things around on students and asking them questions and debating with them and watching the lights come on once they figure something out, or watching their faces pinch when they fight with each other. It's endearing, almost, even after three years of watch the senior staff squabble like toddlers after a toy.
And no one asks her about Will.
Thanks for reading!