There's the crackling of gravel as the car pulls up slowly into the half-empty lot, the motor purring as he shifts into Park.

"Last stop, son."

Doc lets his hand slip from the gear stick and he sinks back into his seat with a sigh, glancing to the seat beside him. Mac leans against the door with his hood down, head resting against the window. His jaw is slack, and there's still a small smudge of ketchup on his chin from their late night drive-through dinner of burger and fries.

"Hey." The man tries again, quieter this time as he reaches for the kid's shoulder and gives it a gentle shake. But Mac sleeps like the dead, his chest rising and falling slowly, and Doc decides that it's par for the course after pushing the kid through a grueling training regime every day this week in anticipation of the title bout. But Mac had wanted nothing less.

He snorts softly, smiling to himself, and switches off the engine after a moment. Well, all that bright-eyed, 'indefatigable' energy of youth has to go somewhere.

It takes some maneuvering, as always, but he manages to unbuckle Mac and get him out of the car without too much trouble. "All right, c'mon," he says while slipping his arms underneath the boy and scooping him up with a sigh, making sure his dangling legs are clear of the door before bumping it shut with his hip. And even while climbing two flights of stairs to Mac's apartment with the kid slumped bonelessly in his arms (and breathing open-mouthed,) Doc swears he has hoisted up heavier medicine balls at the gym.

Moving down the hall, Doc catches a long look from the corner of his eye from a loiterer by the elevators and remembers a time when he would have cared about what this might look like. A time when he would have never even shaken Mac hard to wake him up since he wouldn't have gone so far as to offer to drive him home. They were both too old for this, weren't they?

Soon he's nudging on the light-switch with his shoulder and moving past clipped-up magazines and empty cans and worn, rumpled clothes sprawled over pawn-shop furniture. And for the umpteenth time he can pretend that things are as uncomplicated as he wants them to be and almost convinces himself that these are the sacrifices trainers are prepared to make when he eases Mac down into bed, patiently unlacing his boots and shucking them off for him before making to leave the apartment. Because Mac isn't his son and he sure isn't Mac's dad.

But while stopping at the doorway and looking back for just a moment before stepping out and locking the door with the spare key Mac entrusted to him, Doc knows he can't rightly call this a sacrifice. It was the least he could do.