Author's Note: Going way back - this is set between 1x01 and 1x02. Apparently, I read Nietzsche and immediately think, "Oh hey, Will and Mac." All italicized quotes are from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The Familiarity of Names
Let your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you have to speak of it, do not be ashamed to stammer.
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You lived in solitude as in the sea, and the sea bore you. Alas, do you want to go ashore? Alas, do you want again to drag your body yourself?
It is not an easy thing, to be near each other again.
It is nothing like slipping into old habits, except that sometimes they forget, and for just a moment, it is like that; but then they always remember themselves, and the remembering hurts, and then the fact that they had forgotten hurts, and they turn from each other with a silent, mutual understanding to walk away and try again in a few minutes as if nothing ever happened.
Two days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, MacKenzie stands in his office, arguing with him.
"Viewers get bored," Will says. "Treasury is redesigning the hundred-dollar bill. Let's put that in the A-block, keep some interest –"
"What?" MacKenzie asks. "Why would we cover that?"
"It's information," says Will, "and our job is to disseminate information. People have no idea that the Treasury Department has made this decision, that a staple of their life will just change –"
"They'll notice when the change goes into effect," says Mac.
"Maybe not," grouses Will. Now that he thinks about it, he's not sure that he'd notice.
"By the way, the fact that you think the hundred-dollar bill is a staple of most Americans' lives is a subject for a whole other discussion."
"Yeah, yeah." He digs a cigarette out of his drawer and lights it, leaning back. The light from the window behind him falls on her face as she watches him in silence, and after awhile he feels uncomfortable enough in her gaze that he stubs out the cigarette only partly-smoked. It's nearly noon, the sun slanting through the blinds and laying stripes across her blouse. He can hear the hum of the newsroom outside, phones ringing and footsteps and voices, but it's muted and far away. When Mac shifts, he can hear the slide of her skirt against her pantyhose, and the bars of sunlight ripple across her shoulders, and he swallows.
"You should rearrange the furniture," she says. "It's intimidating for the staff to walk in here, the way you're facing the door with the light behind you."
Will snorts. "For the staff?"
"Yes," she says, "for the staff." She looks him unashamed, and he finds himself glancing away first. "We're sticking with the spill for the entirety of the A-block. The fact that the Treasury Department is changing the design of the hundred-dollar bill is not news. If you want, you can still report on it –"
"Thank you."
"– once the cameras have been turned off."
"Jesus Christ, Mac!" He fucking hates it when she tries to be cute. It makes him angry every time.
"I'll help you move the desk."
"I'm not moving the goddamn desk. Will you get out of my office?"
She shrugs. "All right."
He scoots his chair back as she leaves and turns it so that he can look out the window for a minute before rolling himself closer to the desk and starting on his script. But he's blocking the light with his shoulders, which has never been a problem before, and suddenly he notices all the empty space between the door and his desk, and he feels awkward staring head-on at the newsroom, and –
He swears and starts clearing piles of paper off his filing cabinet and desk.
Fifty minutes later, the papers are mostly recycled or filed away, and he manages to find Don without attracting MacKenzie's notice.
"Can you help me out for a minute?"
"You bet," Don says, rolling back from his computer. "What's up?"
"I need help moving my desk."
"Why are you moving your desk?"
"I just am."
"Hokay."
"I keep blocking the light when I'm trying to write."
"Sure," says Don, smirking, and Will smacks the door with his palm a little harder than necessary as he opens it.
When MacKenzie walks into his office after the six o'clock rundown, she tilts her head, surprised, and smiles.
"I was blocking the light with my shoulders when I tried to write," explains Will, unnecessarily.
"Looks good," is all she says.
"It's Earth Day," says Will. "B-block."
"No."
"Human interest."
"No."
"Mac…"
"Dammit, Will, I can't do this if you're going to fight me all the time."
"I didn't ask you to do this!" he yells, and then rubs the back of his wrist against his forehead. He can't seem to keep his temper in check recently. Things just erupt out of him. "I was fine. The show was fine before you came, with your – Man of La Mancha bullshit and your office-rearranging and your –" He cuts himself off and finds a cigarette. His hands are shaking and he doesn't look up because there's something on Mac's face that looks a lot like pity.
"You've been a little at sea," she says, softly, as if he is a puppy that might bolt.
"Yes," he says, because he can admit that, even though he doesn't like to. The part that he can't admit is that it is hard to come ashore, hard to bear the way firm ground feels beneath his feet when he takes a stand, hard to bear the weight of his own body not held afloat by the salt of bitterness. She is dragging him back to the world, piece by angry piece, and the world is not a pleasant place for him to be. The world has her in it.
He hasn't articulated any of this to himself, much less to her, but she says anyway, "It's hard for you."
"Only because you made it hard," he says, and he could be talking about how she's challenging him to do the news the right way, but they both know he's not.
"Yeah," she says. "I did. But you know what? You knew you weren't doing this show the way it should be done. You were just waiting, biding your time –"
He snorts. "What, for you to come along? Well, thank you, Dr. Freud, but I think I could have done without that. You're acting like I was the – look, there's virtue in what I was doing, virtue in drawing enough of an audience that I could tell a lot of people a few things, a few important things, virtue in staying unbiased and unpartisan, above the fray –"
"Now is your hour!" Mac says.
"Oh, boy. Really?" Will says sarcastically, but she steamrolls right over him.
"Now is the hour when you say: 'What good is my virtue? It has not yet driven me mad! How tired I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!' "
Will raises an eyebrow at her. "Did you really just quote Nietzsche at me?"
"Didn't think you'd recognize it."
"You didn't think I could tell the difference between Cervantes and a musical, either. Tell me, Mac, how dumb do you think I am?" It comes out more biting than he means it to, and she shakes her head.
"I don't, Will. You know I don't." He sighs and looks at his right hand, the way it's lying idly on his desk, veins dark beneath the skin. Mac doesn't say anything for awhile, but she doesn't leave, either. Eventually, she asks, "Was that not accurate? Wasn't it a miserable ease?"
He doesn't answer, and they wait in silence as the evening light slowly fades out from the room.
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It is intoxicating joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and to forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting – that is what I once thought the world.
"NATO acknowledged that the four Afghans killed by its soldiers were civilians." Mac leans against the open door to Will's office. He is staring out the window, back to the door, and he doesn't turn to look at her. She cannot see his face. She examines instead the hinge on the glass door, brushed stainless steel. Once, she got her fingers caught in a door like this, in the hinge side as it was closing. She had screamed, she thinks, and Will had jerked the door open again and she had stared at the dark blood welling up from her fingers like slow tears. She swallows, and puts her eyes back on him.
"Where?" he asks, picking up the lighter from his desk and fiddling with it.
"A car in Khowst province," she says, and he nods but says nothing further. She wonders what he is looking at: there is little to see out the window but the flat reflection of the clouds, thick and cold with no rain, in the building across the street.
"Were you there?" he says, and his voice is so flat that it takes her a moment to recognize it as a question demanding an answer, rather than some kind of nonsensical declaration. "Not for the shooting," he clarifies when she remains silent. "In Khowst province. Were you ever there?"
"No."
"Too busy chasing glory in Peshawar?" He turns in his chair, with a half-smirk, but his voice is too cold to be entirely joking. She feels like she doesn't know him. "More romance to be had searching the caves? Looking to move on to the next bigger and better thing?" The coldness, she realizes, is not deliberate callousness. It's a mix of hurt and rejection and anger. MacKenzie is overwhelmingly relieved, although it's unkind of her to feel relief when he's hurt and rejected and afraid.
"That's not why I left," she says, surprised.
"Sure it's not," he agrees in the easy way that means he doesn't actually agree at all.
"I think I'm the best judge of why I did what I've done," she says, angry, and then pauses. There's no way he actually believes that she cheated on him and then went to the Middle East out of coldly rational ambition. "Why did you think I left, really?"
He huffs and sets his jaw and looks away, a series of small movements with which she's become more familiar in the last three days than she ever was before. When he looks back, it's with a hard accusation in his eyes. "I don't know," he says, and she understands that he's only trying not to be cruel, because she can see that what he wants to say is, Because you're a coward. If it's not true, she still has no alternate theory to argue for instead; she's never been sure why she left, except that she just couldn't be here anymore. There was a restlessness under her skin, crawling like heat in her guts, suffocating her like several dozen feet of burning water pressing on her lungs.
She turns her face away and clears her throat, appropriately chastened. "NATO acknowledged that soldiers fired on Afghan civilians. It's going in the B-block. That's all I came to say." She doesn't look at his face as she leaves, but she hears him take a breath as if he's going to say something else. She's through the door before he gets a chance.
Later, when the sun has cleared the capstone of the sky and is on its slow descent, when the glass city is breaking the afternoon light apart like the pitiless internal facets of a diamond and the toner/hot-paper/coffee smell of the newsroom is pressing against her lungs, MacKenzie reads the paper while simultaneously trying to peer around the boxes on her desk to watch CNN.
"You should unpack," says Jim, from the doorway. She looks up; he is standing with a sheaf of papers in his hand next to Will, who looks as though he has only just remembered not to snort in dismissal.
"Maybe this weekend," she tells him, her eyes on Will. "What've you got for me?"
"Spill projections," he says, crossing to her desk as if he had been waiting for permission, laying the papers on one of the boxes, and then fading out of her office almost without her noticing, the way the daylight sometimes seeps out of a room in which you are reading, and you do not realize it until you blink and suddenly it is dark. Jim is like a ghost, she thinks, and tries not to remember that four weeks ago, they were leaving imprints of themselves in the gray desert sand when they rose up in the morning.
"Should I even bother unpacking?" she asks Will, "Ever?" and he shrugs. Taking off her glasses, she rubs her eyes to ease the strain on them. "What do you want?"
"A yacht," he says. "I've been thinking about it. Not too big, you know, but with a cabin and a galley. I could take it out on the Sound. Maybe a forty-footer. I also wouldn't say no to a well-aged scotch and a pretty woman, but let's not get too ambitious."
Sometimes, she hates his guts. In a removed, disinterested way. "Don't screw around," she says. "I'm not in the mood. What do you want? Really."
"Really?" he repeats, slowly, with a hardness in the word. Somehow, she has managed to anger him. (Somehow. She thinks that all it takes for her to make him angry is to remind him that she exists.) "I want you to leave. God. I want you to just – disappear with all your –" he motions to her crowded, disordered office – "your crap and your mess and the mess you make of my life. I want you to just disappear from the face of the planet. I want you to never have existed. I want to never have met you."
She bites her tongue to keep the tears back, her eyes burning. It would be easier to look up at the fluorescent bulbs set in the ceiling, make the wetness in her eyes fade back to where it came from, but she will not give him the satisfaction of seeing how much he has hurt her. "You've forgotten yourself," she hisses.
"Yes," he says. "Fine. I did stories on the iPhones and the volcano and lost puppies. I forgot myself. You've come to save me. Did you ever think – Maybe that's who I actually am, when I no longer require your approval."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know," he yells, and she looks away. "I was happier that way," he says, quietly. And then clarifies, "When I was forgetting myself."
She nods, turns away from him to watch the way the light swims outside the window, like it is liquid and the world is a shaken glass vessel, finely blown and delicate with the daylight vibrating inside. When she looks back, he is gone.
She wonders if he noticed that she didn't apologize.
After the broadcast, she spends a few minutes talking to the tech guys in the studio. One of the lights is flickering, but she isn't sure whether it's the bulb or the cable. Since only one light tech stays through the end of the show, Mac ends up taking off her heels and getting up on a ladder with a wrench while he replaces the cable for the hard patch to the light board. She spends longer than is strictly necessary up there, near the hot lights, where the air smells like electrified dust. It makes her think of college, the few years when she directed a play or two, tech weeks when light hang and focus stretched on until two or three in the morning and she would sit up on the catwalk with a wrench in the back pocket of her jeans, muscles tired and hands streaked with dirt, alone and content in the dark theatre.
When the light technician comes back to say that the cable was frayed at a kink, Mac thanks him and comes down, carrying her shoes back to her office. Gathering up her laptop and briefcase and jacket, she nearly misses the scrap of paper lying on her desk, handwritten in a familiar scrawl.
They wanted to escape from their misery and the stars were too far for them.
She isn't sure whether to laugh or cry, so she just stands there for a long time, feeling the unreality of the gray office carpet under her feet. Below that, it seems like there's nothing but air, thirty stories down to the Earth. Outside is the city, a billion bright lights and no sky, no stars at all.
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At last all your passions have become virtues and all your devils angels.
The next night, she calls him back when she gets home from the bar.
"You meant it?"
"Yes," he says. In the background, she hears faint music, louder and softer again with the vagaries of the phone connection. She is standing just inside her front door with her heels still on, purse in her hand, phone to her ear, apartment dark and cold around her. "I'm in."
She closes her eyes. The chill air is soothing on her flushed skin, like her mother's hand when she was a child sick with fever, fingers smoothing her hair away, cool and soft and white. It is difficult for her, sometimes, to reconcile the child she remembers herself as being with who she is now, difficult for her to understand the way time slips away and how past and present are separated. The world just seems strange, sometimes. It bewilders her. "Neal told me what you did. For the guy in Spokane."
"Yeah."
She was hoping he would give her more, but that's all he says, and she struggles for a moment. "That was good of you."
"Well."
She finally steps further into her living room and puts her purse down on the back of the couch. "Good to know you're just as comfortable with praise as you ever were," she says, and then closes her eyes and lets her head fall back in immediate regret. They were having such a nice conversation, if a rather one-sided one. She did not want to remind him of their past, of how well she knew him, of all the time in between.
"Mac…"
"Ignore that," she says. "Go back. Redo the last ten seconds."
For anyone else, it would have been a strange request, but in four days, they have spent a great deal of time pretending that one or the other of them hadn't let something slip, a remark or a comment or a memory that would have done better to remain unspoken. Unspoken things were never real.
(Maybe, she thinks, believing that to be true was her problem the first time around.)
"Okay," says Will.
She breathes out slowly, through her nose so that he won't hear it over the phone.
"He said you wouldn't let him write about it on the blog?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"You know why." She does. She knows him, still, knows all the ways in which he works to conquer himself, as if he himself is something that must be conquered: conquered and condemned, subdued and subjugated. Man is something that must be overcome.
"They think you're unkind," she whispers. "Heartless, even."
He pauses, for a long time, and she thinks she has lost him, but then he says, "Maybe I am," in a rough voice.
Gripping the back of her couch so tightly that her fingers have gone cold, MacKenzie considers the answers she could give.
"They call you heartless: but you have a heart," she says, "and I love you for being ashamed to show it. You are ashamed of your flood, while others are ashamed of their ebb."
He is silent for even longer this time, and when he inhales to speak, finally, she can hear his breath shake. "You're really on a kick," he says. "Can I expect Kant next week?"
It is better than most things he could have said: even hiding behind a quote, she cannot avoid the fact that she said I love you, but he has had the grace not to mention it. Grace: from the Latin gratia, meaning favour or goodwill. It was a favour. Good Will. She gives a half-laugh. "We'll see," she says.
"I meant it," he says. "Of course I meant it. I'm in."
She smiles. "Good, Will," she says, and means it, too.