A/N: I'm not entirely certain how this AU of my own fic started. For one thing, I had a ton of stuff left on the cutting room floor from Holding On and Letting Go that I had to cut, lest Mac's memoirs take it over entirely. Namely, how Noah and Molly came to be a couple, the story behind Noah's divorce and his faith, Zack and Molly's backgrounds, and the List for Life. So this has kind of become one vehicle for that. But additionally, I've wanted to write a more expanded version of the first part of the trick of it is for a long time, and it was easier to do that with OCs I've already developed.
Now, I suppose you could read this without having read HO&LG, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it? You can certainly get by, though, but I think you'll be disappointed if you came here solely for a fic that is heavily Will/Mac interaction.
And this is actually not the first AU of a fic in this series. The Sadder But Wiser Girl has it's own smutty AU in the aptly-named (if I do say so myself) One More Time With Feeling.
Thanks bunches to Meg, Pippa, Emily, and Clare. The title is taken from a line in "Saturn" by Sleeping at Last. Camp Hook is entirely fictional. And... I think those are all my bases covered. I hope you enjoy!
CHAPTER ONE: BAD BLOOD
Running is immediately decided to be a good idea. Noah darts out of the meeting as quickly as possible, picking up his pace into a run as soon as he's out of the conference room and out of sight of his commanding officer. Zack is chattering over the radio as the patrol comes back into camp; he can hear Kenzie and Molly throwing in their own snide comments in the background of the security check.
Welcome to the Arghistan District and Camp Hook, Mr. McAvoy. The lieutenant here will escort you and your production staff to your barracks. I have to go meet the patrol coming back in at the East gate. If you need me, look for someone with this insignia, and they'll hail me over the radio.
"Yeah," Noah mutters, pumping his legs faster once his boots leave the concrete, hitting sand. "I've got to go meet the patrol, and your ex-girlfriend, you son of a bitch. Lord Almighty, everything is terrible. What is else is fucking new?"
The officers have known for a month that someone was coming to do ten days of special broadcasts from the camp.
"Oh, Kenz, by the way, Will's here. In Afghanistan. Just popped in for a quick visit."
It was only today that the Colonel let them know that it was ACN who would be broadcasting live from the Kandahar Province. Specifically, ACN's News Night. Which is news that Noah could have used weeks ago, but there were security concerns and apparently a General is flying in from Stuttgart to be interviewed so it's security concerns piled atop security concerns all to cater to one distinctly unimpressive news anchor who may or may not be aware that he chose the one Marine Corps installment in Afghanistan where his ex-girlfriend is embedded.
Noah sincerely hopes that McAvoy doesn't know that Mac's here. He doesn't want to begin to parse what it would mean if he did.
Out of breath, he reaches the gate as the Humvees are coming through towards the hanger designated as the garage. Slowing to a walk, he trails behind the convoy. In the hanger, MacKenzie helps Molly step down from the vehicle, letting the younger woman droop against her as she presses a dirty rag to her mouth, coughing unceasingly. She helps Jim down next. He's wan, and frighteningly pale, but able to stay on his feet. And then Danny, tired and sore like her, but no more or less worse for wear.
"Well, that was a delightful excursion," Molly wheezes, once her coughing fit finally subsides. "Let's do it again sometime."
"The scenery was magnificent," Jim mumbles, scrubbing his hands over his face. "Not that I saw much of it, since I was puking my internal organs out the entire time."
"Who would have thought that Al-Qaeda would literally poison the well," Mac mutters, yanking their bags out from the back of the Humvee. Exhausted, she lets them drop to the ground with less care than she would normally. "If we're not getting shot at—"
"Jim is shitting out his insides," Danny says with a snort, unloading his camera gear onto the floor.
"That was only the first night," Jim protests, leaning wearily against the side of the Humvee. He'd been the first and only victim of what they had previously used as a reliable water source while working out of one of the many tiny villages dotting the Khyber Pass. First, because he'd forgotten to refill his canteen before they broke off from the patrol, and only because they'd all figured it out fairly quickly once Jim started frothing at the mouth with vomit. "And I'd rather not revisit it."
(And thus began their week-long saga.)
Mac nods numbly in agreement, wishing nothing more than to return to their barracks, crawl into her rack, jam her earplugs in her ears, and sleep for the next few hours. Except she can't do that, because Molly's cold that she set out with a week ago has progressed into bronchitis due to the fact that they were forced to camp in a damp cave for many days longer than anticipated so that they could nurse Jim back to something resembling stable. That, and the fact that their filing deadline is in forty minutes and they've already given CNN too much to worry about this week.
When she sees Noah marching towards them, Molly immediately knows that something else has gone amiss.
"What now?" she rasps, feeling her shoulders drop at the alarmed expression on his face.
But he walks right past her, grabbing Mac's arm and towing her away from them.
"Can you—just—come with me," Noah says, feeling some small amount of relief when Mac stops fighting him and lets him bring her away from the rest of her team.
"What?" she asks, the expression on her face flashing from exasperation to frustration to fear at the openly anxious look on Noah's face.
He, of course, realizes that there is no good way to tell Mac about who has just arrived on base. And he really wishes he had been able to figure out if McAvoy knows that Mac is here, but he was three minutes into a conversation with the man when Zack's voice crackled over the walkie talkie to let him know that the patrol was coming back, Mac and her band of sickies in tow.
If anyone is going to tell MacKenzie that Will McAvoy was here, after well over a year of no contact with her, it's was very well going to be him, and before anyone else who doesn't know what the fuck is going on gets the chance.
"I need you to be prepared," he says, recognizing how ominous that must sound.
Mac blinks up at him, attempting to force down the fresh round of adrenaline boiling in her gut, instead clenching her fingers into the sides of her grey regulation tee shirt. "What now?"
"Kenz, I—I'm going to just come out with it, and no, no one's dead, everyone's fine," he opens awkwardly, again maneuvering them so that the marines filing by to report to their designated areas can't overhear. Hazel eyes going wide, she wonders what the hell could have happened to put Noah in this state.
And then he finally finds the nerve to get out with it.
"Will McAvoy and a selection of his production staff are here to do ten days of special broadcasts featuring multiple high-ranking officers and diplomats and I didn't have high enough clearance to know about this until he was in my fucking morning meeting otherwise I would have warned you," he rambles, his Georgia drawl growing more and more frantic as he quietly explains the situation. "Oh my god, Kenzie, I will do whatever you need me to do because I'm pretty certain they've put ACN in your barracks and you can sleep in my rack if you want and—"
Swallowing hard, she puts a stop to his nervous slurry of words with a hand wave in front of her face. "Does Will know that I'm—I'm here?"
Because if he doesn't, she thinks. The last time she spoke to Will he was moving mechanically around her living room, gathering his things and in an overly-calm tone of voice telling her that they'd have to re-evaluate if they would be able to work together. If he doesn't… He hasn't answered any of her emails, or any of her phone calls, or any of her texts.
But if he does know that she's here… neither of them want to begin speculating on what to make of that.
"I don't know," Noah says, planting his hands on his hips. "I am working on getting you an answer to that."
Mac bites her lip, eyes darting along the front of the hanger where some of the 7th Marines Expeditionary Company have clustered, waiting for Noah to dispense orders. "I mean, he has to know. I think Charlie has to know, and if Charlie knows and Will's pulled off a stunt like this then Will has to know, and—"
"What if he read your emails?" Noah asks, feeling almost optimistic.
She smiles in a small way, offering a nervous giggle. "Grand gestures don't happen to cheating exes," she says quickly, her words airborne on a rising sense of panic. "I'm sure the Pentagon just didn't give him many choices. Security, and all. It was probably here or Dwyer."
Noah licks his lips, nodding, following her eye line to where his boys are horsing around fifty or so yards off. "It still might turn out okay. You might get to have that conversation you've been regretting you two didn't have."
"It's been over a year," she whispers, hugging herself. "And I don't— I don't deserve forgiveness and I'm definitely not expecting it—"
Definitely not after she handed in her resignation, fled the him, fled their show, fled the network, fled the country. She knows she could have stayed and fought for him, for any of it. And now she is here, trying to make the fact that she ran away from it, the fact that she hurt Will like she did, the fact that she threw it all away, mean something.
Noah frowns. "Mac."
"I just want him to hear my apology," she explains, gesturing vaguely, trying to exude a calm she does not feel. Her chest tightens and her voice drops to a clamped, strained sound. Even though they've had this conversation before, even though she's explained herself to Noah before, explained Will before. "Noah, you don't know what I—I told him me cheating on him was nothing, that his pain was nothing. We spent two perfect years together and then—I got so defensive. If he fell out of love with me that night then that's what I deserve, I just want the chance to tell him how sorry I am."
Noah sighs, glancing back to where Danny and Jim have finished unloading their things. Molly collapses down on top of a duffel bag, coughing again.
"That's not unreasonable," he tells MacKenzie.
"It feels like it is."
Her face has taken on a grey pallor, her lips tightened into a grim line, and Noah knows there's no chance in convincing her that her desires are entirely rational, that she deserves to be listened to. The MacKenzie McHale who reported to be embedded with his company eleven months ago was a deceptively fragile woman. Maybe knowing that her words have been listened to would give her some of her strength back.
"Hey! Mum!"
Zack knows the look on her face. No clue what's causing it, but he knows the look and wonders if he should offer Mac a cigarette or otherwise make an ass of himself. He's startled her, he can tell, immediately curling his shoulders forward and jamming his hands into the pockets of his pants.
Danny appears, rounding from the other side of the Humvee.
"You good to go, Mac?" he asks. "I can take Molly to sickbay, if you wanna head back and file the story."
She flinches, and when she realizes that she's hugging herself tightly, drops her arms to her sides. "I can go with her, it's fine."
He smiles uneasily. "You look…"
"I'm tired."
Zack steps even closer, holding his arms out to her. "Let me give you lift, then. Cause you look like you're about to keel over. I mean that nicely."
Noah perks up at the idea, crossing his arms and widening his stance to a shoulder's width as he watches the interplay between the two. When Molly and Jim also come around to their side of the truck, he straightens up again, watching Molly carefully, tacitly offering to carry the bags hanging heavily over her shoulders. Smiling gratefully, she passes them off to him.
"What about me?" Jim jokes tiredly, passing off half his load to Danny.
"You're not my type, Harper," Zack replies, lighting the cigarette falling lazily out from between his lips and rearranging his gun to hang in front of him before crouching down in an open offer for Mac to climb on top of his back. "C'mon Mac. Let me give you ride back to Neverland."
"You better," Jim says, eyes drawing to her left ankle, swathed as it is in a combat boot. "You fucked up your ankle pretty bad."
Mac sighs. It twinges, that's all. She can walk the quarter of a mile back to the rattletrap quarters that the journalists at Camp Hook reside in. Or maybe the rec room. Or that storage closet they've used to record in a time or two. Someplace dark and quiet where she can appropriately panic while figuring out how to approach Will.
"Mac," Zack says warningly, and suddenly she's reminded that he very well could just throw her up over his shoulders.
Or worse, pester her the entire walk back.
"Fine, fine," she concedes, hopping up onto Zack's back, ignoring how thoroughly pleased he looks with himself. But he's a sweet boy, most of the time, even though he tries hard not to be.
They pick up a few more of the PFCs at the entrance to the garage. Mac is swamped by them, truly, these young boys in desert camouflage and combat fatigues, their regulation rifles strapped to their backs. Not that the embeds are close to any particular number of them (the journalists on base aren't always particularly well-liked, especially the ones sent by MSNBC, but for now CNN appears to have been given a pass, and Noah suspects that ACN will be better-liked than most but doesn't know how Mac will feel about that) but Noah can always count on Zack, Johnno, and Frankie lending a helping hand.
And Mac is going to need one (or a dozen) the next ten days.
She smiles a few times, wrapping her arms tightly around Zack's neck and letting herself be carried for a little while. When she first came she had no idea how to walk around in heavy boots or fatigues, to give up on her reliance on a well-equipped control room and hundred person staff, on Will, and now she can blindly braid her hair every morning and barely remembers what it's like to walk around in designer clothes or to be able to rely on a steady satellite feed.
And Will is here.
Camp Hook has almost been too good to her, too honest. So now the worlds collide.
She ignores it, gathering all the happiness she can before she inevitably sees Will. The boys are horsing around, updating her on who's done what stupid thing while the CNN team was gone, who got new letters and pictures from home, who's gotten into a fight with their girlfriend, who got mailed cookies from Mom.
"I still can't fuckin' believe Jim's holding out. You do know where you are, right? You need a haircut," Frankie laughs, rubbing his hand over the top of his own closely-shaven head.
Jim snorts. "I'm not gonna blend in with you guys anyway."
"I'm going to tie him to a chair soon," Mac quips, smirking at him.
"Or do you think he'd like that?" Molly asks, squinting into the sunlight. Out of the truck and the hanger she looks alarmingly pale, with deep bruises of exhaustion stamped under her red-rimmed eyes.
Zack laughs outright, tightening his grip on Mac's legs. "He'd like it if Mac does it."
"I don't—" Jim balks.
"Oh, but it's cute," Frankie says with a grin, darting ahead a few steps to grab the door leading into the 7th Marines' general quarters and hold it open for them to pass through.
"We're calling bondage cute?" Mac asks, leaning up to rest her chin on Zack's shoulder as they enter the corrugated corridor lined with doors that open into narrow barracks on one side and the rec room on the other.
He chuckles. "I mean, I guess if you use those pink fuzzy handcuffs we could call it—"
"Y'all need church," Noah groans, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, out of exasperated and to clear them of the spots erupting as they transition into harsh fluorescent light. "Or Jesus. Or both."
"Or the leopard print ones," Molly continues, flipping her braid back over her shoulder. "Or, ooh, the ones with feathers and glitter—"
"I'm allergic to feathers," Jim whines.
"He's allergic to feathers," Mac confirms, nodding along knowingly before looking back at Molly, and smiling. "We'll use rope."
"Hey!"
Mac snorts. "One of you boy scouts can do the…"
Looking forward again, she sees him. And by the look on his face, he's already seen her. The giggle dies on her lips, her legs suddenly giving out from where she has them pressed in against Zack's waist. He lets her drop gently to the floor, knitting his eyebrows together before seeing who Mac has spotted, opening his mouth to voice his confusion. But when he looks to Noah, and sees the absence of it, he closes his mouth again.
Fear, anticipation, and something like untamed euphoria floods Mac's belly when she sees him. So focused on him, she doesn't notice the wild anger flushing Molly's pale face or how apprehension takes hold of Danny's features or the look of complete confusion that knits Jim's expression into tight mask of trepidation.
Brushing past Zack, she attempts to wipe what she knows must be wide-eyed adoration from her face. This isn't what she expected to feel, but she supposes her love hasn't waned at all, and who wouldn't feel like this after fourteen months of separation.
Clearing her throat she says, trying to overlook his nervous frown, "Hi, Will. Captain Mason just told me you had arrived."
Thanks for reading!