A/N: finally got around to posting my tumblr stuff here. Written for the future. Hopefully this will happen. Sometime ;)
"Addiction is tricky. For example: a man who quit smoking for 11 years spent 15 seconds in an elevator with a man smoking a cigarette. He gave in.
What I'm trying to say is I think I love you again"
~ Unknown
ooo
He doesn't understand how it happens.
One day Will glances across the newsroom at Mackenzie and for the first time in 7 years can't feel anything but love.
She's deep in passionate conversation and is wearing a cream blouse with black capped shoulders and her hair is pulled back in pony tail that swishes side to side every time she moves her head. Her hands are waving in wide circles in front of her face as she tries to describe a story to Sloan and she's radiant from her smile to her eyes, and with the way her cheeks go pink when ever she giggles.
It's late on a friday night after the broadcast and Will's stood in the doorframe of his office with a report in his hand and the rest of the crew scattered in various states of disarray all around him. But it's the sight of Mackenzie, bright and relaxed and effervescent that has him completely enraptured and starring like a fool.
He often feels amused, or nostalgic, or fond around her. There are times when the sight of her during an ad break can calm him completely, and others where her small, pleased smile has a bubbling happiness brewing in his chest.
But it's always been underpinned by a melancholy sadness - and sometimes an anger that she destroyed everything so well. No matter how often he feels good around her, he also always feels bad, and it's this dichotomy that's carried them through the working week and across the weekends for two years, whether they're conversing via phone or text or email, or face to face - and he can see it reflected in her own eyes.
They're never quite comfortable around each other because there's a bubbling mess of anger and resentment and weary sadness that underpins every smile and touch. Mackenzie's never quite sure when Will might remind her of everything; and Will's never quite sure when Mackenzie will do something to remind him.
But now the night is growing late and Mackenzie is alive and beautiful before him. He tries to conjure some memory or bitter feeling from the past - thinks of the lost time and the emails and the betrayal and the anger but it all ends up feeling like a soft stirring in the water - it's there but it doesn't harm him, and it's overwhelmed by a wave of something hot and messy and wonderful in his heart the minute Sloan says something funny and Mackenzie's cheeks flush red.
He remembers this from long ago; this restless ache in his heart that's sweetly strung, not bittersweet. It's how he used to feel about her, long before she was ever his, and it's swelling and compressing in his chest and making it hard to breathe as he continues watching her.
Fuck, he thinks. He doesn't understand how or why or what changed but all he knows is that he loves her.
The rest just feels like background noise in some other song.
She glances up and catches his eye and he smiles warmly at her, hoping she feels the change. She must, he thinks, because she pauses and flushes and then in a flustered half second makes an excuse to Sloan and disappears. Will watches her slide into her office and remembers the first few weeks of knowing her, and how he'd taken such pride in watching her eyes flutter rapidly whenever he said something to take her off guard.
It's terrifying, looking at her and feeling only a wonderful sense of anticipation. An inevitability between them - like they're connected by some gossamer thread.
But at the same time he thinks he's been waiting for this all along - that moment when nothing else mattered besides the desperate desire to belong to her, regardless of their past and it's problems and the knowledge that once upon a time she did him harm.
Because he loves her.
It's late on a friday night and Will McAcoy loves Mackenzie McHale.
And nothing else really matters in the end.