A/N: So... Meg says I have to apologize for this fic, because apparently the plot device is cruel and unusual, but she also helped me expand it into four parts, so I don't really know what to say about it. I don't... exactly... know... where this came from, except that I have a very twisted sense of irony.

Essentially, the idea was, "what if Will didn't have his revelation while talking with Charlie and therefore doesn't propose, or tell Mac that he kept the ring?" So assume that everything in 2.09 happened, except the proposal and the announcement thereof, and all the little butterfly effects of that. The title is snatched from the Pete Droge song of the same name, as are the lyrics at the top of every chapter. This fic will have four parts.

Thanks to Aly and Meg for helping me through this!


PART I: FALLING AWAY


Under the waves, deep in the drift
I can feel the salt upon my skin.
Under the waves, falling away
I no longer see the rings of rain.


She runs away again.

It is a fact, as simple and as old as the sea: those who know the storm sicken of the calm. And MacKenzie has always run away from happiness, fair winds, and calm seas.

But it's not happiness that she is fleeing this time, and perhaps that's why she manages to slip away.

Maybe she has never fled from happiness at all, and that has been her problem, in the taking of more than her own fair allotment of joy and in turn, the universe crashing sorrow over her head in drowning waves and rushing tides, hoping that eventually, eventually, she will learn her lesson.

She runs from sorrow, because it is easier to run than to look back and find herself to be the one who is losing. She runs away because she is angry. Angry at Will and angry that she has to be angry at Will, and angry at herself for letting Will became that large in her mind, for creating him carved from impermeable rock, perfect and inhuman and everything, everything, that she has ever wanted. She runs away because she forgot that while gods are infallible, they are not imperfect. And because he is not a god, and he only fell from Olympus because she put him there to augment her own selfish grief, to make her first exile one of dignity and purpose. She is not a tragic Greek heroine. Not this time.

She is angry at him, and because she has not loved him as he has deserved. She is angry because she deserves to be. She runs away because she has no stomach for vengeance, not against him. Never against him.

Let them blame it on her. Let the lawyers blame it on her and resolve the suit and she will be gone, gone to another far-flung, fragile corner of the world, because she will never learn. Because she holds her anger like a rock in her fist, a chip on her shoulder, off of his, the words I love you carved in stone like a curse.

She runs away because she loves him and because the seas are foul, and because she can no longer trust him to carry her through to shore, her lighthouse of a man—solid, and true, and always lighting the way back to harbor.

(Because she is a coward, and because to stop running would mean facing what she's done, what they've both done. Because she has not learned to captain her own ship. She is good at doing the news, and everything else falls at last place-what has that done but render her failures into bedrock, again and again?)

She runs away again because she knows he will not chase her.


"I'm leaving," she tells him at the end of the week. In person, because she took him at his word when he said "end of broadcast," even though their contracts stipulate "at the end of the business week," and hasn't shown up Wednesday or Thursday, but at the end of the show on Friday. "Not ACN. Just News Night. Charlie's sending me to be the point person for the embed teams in the Middle East."

This is a lie. Not entirely. But she won't stay safe, tucked away in CENTCOM.

"Jim will stay with you."

For a while, out of deference to her. And then, he too will wash out like the sea. He too has known the storm, and the suit will be settled and all will be too calm for someone like him.

Will doesn't tell her not to go.

"When are you going?" he does ask, his hand drifting to the handle on the top drawer of his desk, looking like he wants to ask her more.

She crosses her arms under her chest, staring down at her feet. "I'm heading to DC as soon as I can pack up my apartment. I won't have a problem finding someone to sublet it to." She pauses, biting her lip, biting back all the words that threaten to spill out. I love you. How could you? Why did you tell me? Do you hate me that much, even after all this time? "And then Germany, in a month. After that… I don't know. It'll be fine, Will. With me gone, the suit won't have any ground."

"You weren't fired," he protests.

She almost laughs. She really screwed him on that, didn't she? Got what she wanted, and then some. Of course Will couldn't let her walk out of here unscathed after manipulating him like that. Even if neither had them had intended… well, he had intended. She had just let the idea of… she hadn't played to his vanity intending to hurt him, but after seeing how well it worked… she's always allowed herself to be swept out to sea, never fought the currents for too long. It was true that this contract would have been her longest, three whole years in one place.

But it feels finished.

It's for the best she leaves, now. Maybe now they can both be free of each other. He's evened the scales. She can walk away and they can both move on.

"I was fired from the show," she counters, as unemotional as possible. "And reassigned to a much less glamorous position."

He scoffs. "That's more than what Dantana got."

"I'll come back if they need me to testify, but I think Rebecca will get the case dismissed."

"And then what, MacKenzie?" She can't tell if he's angry, or sad, or… what. She can't read his face, and it's bothering her. "If it's dismissed?"

She shrugs. "And then it's finally over, I guess."

Genoa. And us.

"Don't you think?"

His hand tightens on the handle to the drawer like a question unasked, unanswered. Just hanging there, waiting. But the answer depends solely on the question being asked in the first place, which she knows Will won't do.

She's been waiting thirty-two months for him to give her anything. So she walks out of Will McAvoy's office, and out of Will McAvoy's life.

Again.


In the end, MacKenzie sends herself off to be embedded with Syrian rebels.

Will sends her emails.

Or she assumes he's still sending them, by August, after they've left the rebels to base themselves in Damascus with the civilians. She changed emails months ago, giving her new address out only to the reporters she's acting as point for, Jim, Charlie, and more recently, Sloan. She thinks maybe if she waits long enough to check her old email, the tidal wave will be enough to send her back home.

Or if there's nothing, then it'll make the decisions for her to stay here.

But she lets herself be angry, for a little while. Lets herself run away from him, until someone makes the decision to stay or go for her.

The suit was dismissed in June. Charlie and Jim told her-Charlie via phone call and Jim via email-within five minutes of it happening, as if it would be enough to bring her home. It wasn't. There's only one person who will be enough to bring her home, and she hasn't forgiven him enough yet to let him be that person.

She knows she will, though. And it hurts, that she knows that she'll fold. So she tries to hold out, for longer and longer, like a child holding their breath under the water. Eventually she'll drown, or come up for air, lungs burning. Either way, it'll be over. She'll be done running away.

Because Will is her lighthouse, even if she cannot, will not, it's not fair to either of them, think of him as a god. He will bring her home, across stormy seas. Even if, especially if, she was the one to send herself out onto the waves in the first place.

MacKenzie is in front of the camera and doing voiceovers for the first time in over three years, and she knows that they've been airing on Right Now and News Night, and even if the live reports are handled by Sam, an old friend friend from Pakistan, Will still has to introduce her. And let nothing but journalistic professionalism show on his face.

But she's not cruel.

It's Sam, a woman in early-thirties with a phD in the field of the post-Cold War Middle East, an attractive, articulate redhead who remembers "the ex" from their first time embedded together, who has to actually talk to Will. (It's the few times a month Mac has Will and Jim in her ear, while she produces the segments on her end, a few feet behind the camera.) This is Samantha Hahn, reporting for ACN from... (After the suit was dismissed, she talked Jim out of leaving out of his own petty malice, misplaced loyalty to her. Take the EP position. Stay eighteen months, and then get any job you want.) So she listens to Sam talk to Will, and Will talk to Sam, and Jim give Will terse, somewhat-antagonistic instructions (she wonders, sometimes, why Will hasn't fired Jim), and it's enough to keep her from opening her old email.

It's enough to keep her from drowning. Enough to keep her across the sea.


They don't sleep the night of August 20th, 2013, working late into the night to finish editing together footage, reports on rebel activity in Ghouta and the other Damascus suburbs.

At 2 AM, August 21st, the ground begins to shake.


Charlie doesn't actively keep him updated on the location of MacKenzie's team, and Will doesn't ask, but when reports start coming down the wire about shelling in Ghouta he figures out that she's there fairly quickly, even if her name isn't on the news alerts. So when Charlie comes to his office, battle-weary and clutching a bottle of scotch, Will isn't surprised.

"It's her," Will says, forming his words loosely; a statement, not a question.

(While not surprised, he is still in shock.)

"Yeah, it's her."

He closes the web browser. Jim will have the others watch it. They'll know. He looks up at Charlie, his hands braced on his knees, palms slick with sweat. He'll know. If something happens to her…

(It will be his fault.)

They'll know.

"She's going to go out into it," he says. "She won't stay in. Not if there's a story."

"No." Charlie shakes his head, pouring one glass, and then another. "She won't stay in."

Will traces the pad of his finger over the rim of the glass, watching. Just watching. Remembering lines in emails. His. And hers, the ones he opened in June, and read all in one night, when he was certain he was going to lose Jim, his last tether to MacKenzie. And again, when it became that apparent that Jim was going to stay. Maybe he hadn't allowed himself to read them before then because he knew he'd forgive her if he read them. He, very tentatively, allows himself to hope that that's why Mac hasn't responded to any of his attempts at communication either.

"We wait," he rasps.

"We wait," Charlie agrees, settling in.


A little after 4:30 AM, she decides she wants to venture out. The neighborhood has been quiet for over an hour now. Not quiet, Mac quickly amends. There are screams, pounding footsteps, banging doors. No bombs. No bombs in over an hour.

"No one has to go," she tells her team. "But I am. I have the hand-held, I can do a report by myself. No one has to go if they don't want to."

Sam does, in the end, an eyebrow arched loftily. She's kind enough not to speak the word "Islamabad."

"I'll go," is what Sam does say, and they don long sleeves and long pants, thick boots, secure vented masks over their faces. "Do you want to be on camera, or should I?"

"I will," Mac says, fixing her mask loosely enough to be pulled on and off her face, leaving instructions with the rest of the team to wait for their word back, and to keep sending things down the wire until then. And then walks out the door, one of the satellite phones on her hip, choosing (with two of them) to take the larger camera rather than the hand-held.

They are greeted by bodies.

For blocks.

And it's almost funny, in a way. Or it would be, if Mac didn't feel herself slowly losing her shit, the camera panning to capture footage that would, unquestionably, need to be blurred for broadcast. Civilians run past them, screaming and yelling and medics stream past with kits and its chaos. And it's funny, because Mac knows within half a mile that it's sarin.

Someone—the Syrian government or the Syrian rebels—dropped sarin on Ghouta.

And that is when Sam sends the first message back to their ad hoc headquarters. And Mac confirms it, over the phone, to her assistant producer.

"Send it down the wire. Say its sarin. We don't know who dropped it, but its sarin." She does laugh a little, then. ACN will be breaking the news that someone dropped sarin. Absolutely no one is going to believe them. She saw a BBC crew a few blocks over, but she doesn't even think they would… they were running for cover, only she's fucking crazy enough to keep going, she thinks, tugging her mask back over her face. She looks at Sam. "You can head back."

"Only if you're coming with me," Sam bites back, hefting the camera back onto her shoulder.

Mac snorts. "No one is going to believe us, you know."

Sam rolls her eyes, but her response is cut off by a sudden barrage of sound overhead, before a series of deafening explosions from the block over knock them to the pavement.

Head ringing, Mac tries to stagger to her feet—seconds, maybe a minute later. Sam is above her, shouting, trying to pull her up. Her chest is tight, her head swimming, eyes burning, and grabbing onto some vector of strength, fleeting as it is, and Mac manages to wrap her arm around Sam's middle and they both get to their feet. They carry the camera between them, if only because Mac refuses to let it go, and it's still running, and Mac looks behind her for a second—just a second—and almost falls. She manages to get the camera up onto her shoulder one last time, Sam half-bracing her, and subconsciously tugs the mask away from her lips.

"As you can see, a distinctly Syrian military fighter plane is dropping shells with what certainly appears to be sarin gas onto civilians, and—"

Coughing violently, she bends at the waist, curling around the camera.

Sam roughly ("Not again.") yanks the mask back over her face, and sets them both back onto the path away, back towards home base.

She won't let go of the camera.

She has proof.

This time she has footage, raw footage, raw, undoctored, uncooked footage, of a plane and shells and screaming civilians, she has it, ACN has it, and Will is going to report on it, they're the only ones who have it—

She can't breathe.

Sam carries her another block, before everything starts to go dark, blackness encroaching in on her blurred, pained vision, and everything rushes out entirely before the wave crashes down and she's being carried in someone's arms, into the little house they've leased for the past few months, people shouting and everything hurting. She gasps, still coughing, when she realizes the camera is not within her grasp, and she tries to sit up, fighting for breath on the floor, dazed, trying to locate it, calming when she finds it in Meg's hands a few feet away.

"Send it," she chokes out. "Jim. Send it to Jim. Now."

And then the tide rushes out again, or she's drowning, or maybe both, because she vomits and slumps down onto her side, and she has no idea whether or not Meg sent the video to Jim or not, but she's in the back of a car, and her head is killing her and she can't quite get her limbs to cooperate enough to move.

She can laugh though, because heavens forbid God deprive her of laughing at the irony of the situation. Sarin. Someone dropped sarin on her. It makes sense. She cheats on Will, someone stabs her in the gut. A nice, open, bleeding wound. She puts Genoa on the air, accuses the US military of using nerve gas, and someone actually drops sarin on her. It's neat. Tidy.

She can't breathe.

Oh God, Will.

She hasn't forgiven Will. He probably thinks she—and she doesn't—and it's all her fault, again, she's fucked everything up again, and she loves him, she'll never stop loving him—even if he doesn't love her, she loves him, she'll always love him—

(Will's doing alright, Sloan's last email had said. She always gave Mac updates. Oblique, cursory, to the point. He and Maggie are pulling through together.)

Oh God, it hurts, and she wants him—

The tide rushes out.

She can't think. Nothing is making sense, and she thinks she still might be laughing, or it might be in her head, and she tells Meg that they should go to the British Embassy, because her father would be able to help them, forgetting that the British Ambassador was recalled in February 2012.

Her limbs are shaking. She can feel that. Even if she can't move them, her legs kicking uselessly. That makes sense. That's all that can make sense.

Will.

She can't fight it; the tide rushes out.

She's on a bed, somewhere, and a moment later Dan tells her it's the US Embassy in Damascus, and Ambassador Ford has her father and some friends in Landstuhl on the phone, and her father is talking to British forces, and Meg emailed the footage to Jim, and is on the phone with him right now, and it's a little too much so she keeps nodding, only really getting every third and fourth word and she notices vaguely that Dan's not touching her, is keeping five feet away, and somewhere, faintly, she remembers decontamination procedures for sarin and she waves him off when someone places an oxygen mask over her face.

She doesn't feel the IV entering the vein in her left arm a moment later.

The atropine, a moment after that, knocks her out completely.


"Yeah, I'm seeing it. You haven't? I… shit, Meg." Jim watches Mac's footage ("Start at 28:30," Meg had told him), the clear picture of the Syrian military gassing civilians, Mac's choked voice narrating over the screams of people running in the other direction. And then the camera is knocked down, and all he can hear is violent, unforgiving, hacking coughs… and the footage keeps going, the camera is eventually placed on someone's shoulder, and someone on the team is filming Mac being carried in Dan, the cameraman's, arms, and Sam weaves in and out of frame, and it's loud, and Mac is… He realizes Meg, panicking now, is still talking and he hasn't heard a word in over ten minutes. "Okay, you stay close. I'm going to put you on hold and take this to Charlie Skinner so he can figure out what to do, okay? Stay close."

He knew this was going to happen.

He knew something was going to happen.

Crossing the bullpen, he hears Gary shouting out that Mac's group is reporting its sarin gas. Jim brushes him off, anger building as he marches to Will's office. He should have gone to her, in June, like he planned.

And he… he doesn't know what happened between Mac and Will on Election Night, except that it was nasty, nasty enough to send Mac, now the wronged party, running again. He should have gone with her.

It's not until he gets to Will's doorway that Jim realizes he doesn't have a fucking clue what to say, but half a second later he realizes he doesn't have to, because Will blanches at the sight of him, or the look on his face, probably, and Jim just tells him to move and he gets himself in front of Will's computer and signs into his email.

"The reports are true then?" Charlie asks, stunned, coming around the desk. "It's sarin? Have you heard from her?"

Jim just downloads the footage, and starts it at the thirty minute mark. Stepping back to stand behind Will, he folds his arms under his chest. And lets the video run until Mac, sweating, tears streaming down her face, barely-conscious in the back of a military-grade Jeep starts convulsing and calling out for Will, an embassy officer surrounded by armed guards lifts her out of the vehicle and out of frame, and Meg finally switches off the camera.

Unable to watch Will's face after that, but unwilling to give an inch, Jim looks only at Charlie. "I would have come sooner but I didn't want the AP on the ground to have to explain it twice. Mac's Dad is already calling in all his favors on the Eastern front. The British military is sending in a medevac out of Turkey, and she—and Sam Hahn—will be taken to Landstuhl. Right now they're both being seen by consulary doctors. Sam's in better shape than Mac. They've both been given a round of atropine and pralidoxime each and are responding to treatment."

He pauses. He sees Will recoil out of the corner of his eye.

"Meg, the AP, said that Mac, or, Sam told Meg that Mac—"

"Took off her mask to finish the report," Will finishes, and for a long moment Jim's concerned that he's going to pass out, but Will recovers, somehow. "So she could be heard on camera. Over the…"

"Yeah." Charlie nods.

Jim clears his throat. "What do we want to do with the footage?" The footage Mac almost died for. The footage Mac was going to get herself killed for. "Should we pass it off to dayside?"

Jim looks to Will, for the first time in months, and then feels guilty in a way, when he sees that Will is looking up flights to Berlin and Frankfurt. Swallowing down the uneasy lump in his throat at the sight of Will's distress, he turns to Charlie, who has already collected himself.

"No," Charlie says, drawing back his shoulders. "Our girl got that with her blood, sweat, and tears-that footage stays in her house." Because even ten months gone, News Night 2.0 is still MacKenzie's. They run it like its still Mac's ship. Like she's the boss. Like she'll be back one day. "Give dayside the salient details, and let the staff run with what MacKenzie got us. We'll put Sloan and Elliot on the air tonight with the footage. Will?"

"Yeah?"

"Take Jim with you. If for no other reason than he can throw himself between you and his Excellency, who if I remember correctly, is not entirely charmed that you were a factor in his daughter's going to Syria in the first place."

Jim bites back don't expect much throwing, but only because it really does look like Will might throw up. Or pass out. Or both. And because Will only just nods at Charlie's suggestion.

So the Ambassador is pissed at Will.

Jim's not exactly surprised. He's been pretty pissed at Will, too. And at Mac, too, a little bit, for running. Or at least for running and not letting him run with her. "Anyway, I have Meg on hold. I can get the call transferred into here, or—"

His suggestion is cut off by Will's cellphone going off. Will steels himself for the duration of a ring before answering it, and Jim can guess who's calling just by that.

"Lady McHale. I—yes, Susan." He pauses, and Jim can hear Mac's frantic mother on the line, even while standing a few feet away. "No, I don't think we know any more than you do." Another pause. "Yes—yes, Jim and I are—I'm looking up flights right now, yes, I know I'm an idiot, ma'am. Sir. Yes. Jim is here too. I'm booking two red-eyes into Frankfurt."

Fifty minutes later, they're being swept through security by British customs agents and flying to Frankfurt to meet a charter plane to Ramstein, all thanks to Mac's parents, who apparently gave Mac her complete inability to hold a grudge.

Or, at least, that's what Jim's assuming as to why Sir Edward McHale offered to fly the ex-boyfriend who broke his daughter's heart twice to Ramstein in the middle of the night. Well, that and the fact that Jim's pretty certain that Sir Edward has somehow gotten his hands on the footage of his little girl crying out for said ex-boyfriend while in excruciating pain… and Sir Edward has never been able to deny MacKenzie much of anything.


Her world has narrowed to one simple truth: it hurts. The two words push out through her, inhabit every inch, every nook, every dark shadow, until it is the pulsing of her heart and the thrumming in her head and the storm ravaging her veins, choking her lungs with seawater and clogging her nose and she can't breathe and her chest is tight and her limbs keep thrashing without preamble or postscript.

She wants calm seas and still waters and Will. She wants to go home. She wants him. Her lighthouse. But now MacKenzie thinks that she's allowed herself to be swept too far out to sea. She must be dying. This has to be what dying feels like. She doesn't remember the last time, it had all happened so quickly, but they keep her awake now, checking neurological functions and urine outputs and pupil dilation.

Energy coils and releases under her skin, tightening in her muscles painfully before the shuddering unchaining of her tired limbs, holding her under the surface of wakefulness without letting her drown, just holding her until her lungs burn and she feels like she's about to burst out of her skin.

She wants Will, because for some reason she thinks that if he was here it would stop, he could make it stop, because he's always been able to make it stop—her whirling thoughts, he's always anchored them (that's a terrible pun, she almost laughs, would if she could), forced them to stop and hold steady. He's always held her steady. And maybe she's always wanted it and has run from it, too, because she's not very good at having what she wants. Because she could have stayed, Reese and Leona weren't firing anyone and her firing was only between her and Will (and Charlie, the next morning) and maybe she should have stayed where it was calm and she was steady, even if she and Will had problems to sort through but she ran away again because it got hard, and she doesn't even have the excuse of him telling her to get out of his life this time.

And Genoa. She didn't just run away from Will. She ran from Genoa, instead of facing it. Or the suit, all of her failures. She skyped in a deposition and thankfully it never progressed past that, but she couldn't—she should have—It was her fault, it's all been her fault, and she's only ever run during crises, thrown herself into something bigger. She's no good man in a storm.

She left them. She left all of them. They shouldn't have trusted her.

She left him.

I need you, she thinks, because it feels like everything is rushing out and closing in and she's very quickly become a wave-tossed thing, and so she casts out the stone in her hand (I love you, I love you, I love you) into the sea and it's no longer a curse but a lifeline.

She's not strong enough to swim to shore. Eyes dimming, she tries to pick apart details inside the military aircraft, pulling them away from one another until they seem less daunting, trying to find little things to tether herself to, until they all spin away at once, and she can't focus at all, the machine at her side beeping and warmth flooding her bloodstream, pressing her, down, down, under the surface of herself, until the pressure on her skin is Will's hand in hers, his fingers stroking down her cheek, into her hair. Until the roar of the engine is the low rumble of his voice when he's concerned.

She lets herself (is she letting herself? it's something that seems inherent—he should be here, she needs him here, he is here) believe it's him, that he's sitting, leaning over her, and the engine and the radio chatter and the voices of the medical personnel all fade away. All noise is swallowed by silence, until it's just the two of them, and—

The tide rushes out.


Thanks for reading! Part Two will be up tomorrow!