Mackenzie McHale has never liked her name.
Introducing herself using her full name together is one thing – it's a good, professional name for the industry she has chosen, and she's always been fond of the alliteration, somehow. But Mackenzie on its own has always chafed like the scratchiest wool on her skin, and she avoids using it whenever possible. She answers to Mackenzie from her parents and Mac from nearly everybody else, but when she has to say it herself, it's always with a weak handshake, her head bowed low, two little flames burning on her cheeks.
She is named after Grandfather and Grandmother MacKenzie. They have no sons to carry on the family name, only one ambitious daughter, and she is quick to ensnare a rising Conservative diplomat. When the McHales learn that they are expecting, it seems like the perfect solution, bestowing her maiden name on their son, and saving it from dying out along with them.
That's all very well, except that a red-faced baby girl makes her impatient entrance into the world instead. Mr. McHale is instantly smitten with his yowling daughter, but Mrs. McHale is less enamored with the squirming bundle in her arms. To curb her disappointment, she forges ahead with the original plan, and Mackenzie Rose McHale is born.
This decision sets Mackenzie up for a childhood rife with embarrassment and misunderstanding.
Every September, without fail, her new teacher pauses halfway through the roll call, reading out McHale, Mackenzie, and expecting one of the little boys present to raise his hand. When Mackenzie's hand inches skyward instead, reactions vary from barely concealed amusement to outright disbelief. More than once, she is sent to the principal, accused of disrespect and dishonesty. The end result is always the same: her classmates' laughter ringing in her ears, and Mackenzie sinking lower and lower in her seat, wishing she could just disappear entirely.
It isn't long before Mac became the nickname of choice among Mackenzie's friends, though it really doesn't fit any better, leading to the inevitable jokes about apples and raincoats and computers that never seem to do what she wants them to. It is clipped and abrupt and not at all how Mackenzie sees herself – it is the sound of flip-flops slapping on linoleum, and she is all chiffon and stilettos.
Still, the nickname annoys her mother tremendously, so Mac is more than happy to let it stick. Ultimately, that single syllable is rapid and concise, perfectly suited to the lightning-fast pace of the newsroom she has always known she wants to be a part of. If that speed gives her even the slightest edge, then why not?
Mac rises quickly through the ranks at ACN, especially once she catches the twinkling eye of Charlie Skinner, and he takes her under his wing. She credits him with giving her her big break, producing her first nightly news broadcast, but what he gives her one morning in 2005 is more profound than anything she could ever have imagined.
Mac has no way of knowing that a shakeup is coming to ACN, no way of foreseeing that her current anchor will soon be out of work, and that Charlie has already lined someone up to fill the empty slot.
She has no idea that this is the day that will change her life forever.
"Are you joking?" Mac demands, wide-eyed, when Charlie calls her into his office to break the news. "I've seen him on Fox. He's—"
"He's brilliant," Charlie interrupts. "He's a little green, maybe, a little rough around the edges, but you can manage him. Trust me – between the two of you, we're going to have something really special here."
"Charlie—"
"Mac, the deal's already done, and he's going to be here any second. Give him a chance before you give up on him, will you?"
Mac just has time to shoot one more seriously skeptical glare Charlie's way before the knock on the door, but she shrugs, promising him wordlessly to be polite … for the moment. While Charlie makes the necessary introductions, Mac is already imagining what she will say a week from now, when she marches back into Charlie's office to give him a piece of her mind. Surely a trial run of a week is being more than generous?
"Will, I'd like to introduce you to Mackenzie McHale," Charlie says, his voice cutting through her thoughts. "She's the executive producer for this program."
Will smiles boyishly. "Pleased to meet you, Mackenzie," he says, extending his right hand to shake hers. "Charlie's told me so much about you."
Her name on his lips feels like hot apple cider all over, and this turn of events is so thoroughly unexpected that Mac's heart thuds alarmingly in her chest. "Call me Mac," she replies quietly, her throat suddenly narrow and dry. "Everyone else does."
But Will doesn't, not even once. Every day for almost three years, all she ever hears from him is Mackenzie, and that sweet, heady feeling from head to toe never fades in all that time – if anything, it grows stronger. Even as early as this first meeting, every cell in her body whispers insistently that she and Will are inevitable, their fates braided together in the soundest of ropes. She doesn't even think about correcting him again.
It just sounds right, her name in his mouth.
Despite the fact that she has a boyfriend, one who summons her most nights at midnight, he is not the one she thinks of now, when she catches herself daydreaming, a girlish smile teasing at the corners of her mouth. It's the way that Will's mouth curls around the vowels and consonants of her name that makes her shiver, makes her smile, makes her heart skip a beat in her chest.
Sometime shortly before Brian walks out of her life, Mac startles herself one morning, answering her Blackberry on autopilot as she does a hundred times a day. "Mackenzie speaking," she says absently, before she catches her own words, and her heart comes to an immediate, shuddering halt. She stands there for a long while, staring in bewilderment at the device in her hand, wondering just how long that has been going on.
When Will finally does ask Mackenzie out on a date, the sound of her name resonates even more keenly, the three syllables sounding like nothing so much as "I. Love. You," every time he murmurs them. She feels like she's adrift in a maelstrom, never able to find her sea legs. Her heart lodges immovably in her throat, and she is physically incapable of explaining why something as simple as the sound of her own name is suddenly so terrifyingly fast.
After a year in which her frantic heart never stops racing, never allows her to catch her breath for a moment, Mackenzie learns that Brian is back in town. When he calls, she agrees to see him without a second thought.
She regrets it even before the words are out of her mouth, but midnight still finds her crawling queasily into his bed, silently begging him to cut her name back down to the size she deserves. Each "Mac – Mac – Mac" from him sounds like a stinging slap in the face, and Mac almost welcomes it, because she understands that she is throwing it all away. For the first time all year, her feet are firmly planted on solid, familiar ground, and she can breathe comfortably again, but she longs for nothing more than hurling herself back into the whirlwind that Will has made of her life.
That, she realizes too late, is where she truly belongs.
Nearly a year later, when Mac kneels before Will to make her confession, he gazes down at her blankly, a stranger in his lover's body. He shakes his head as his eyes fill with wordless, incredulous tears, but what hurts the most is the way his lips look like they don't even remember how to form the shape of her name.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
So, I'm trying a lot of new things in this one, and it's really not turning out anything like I expected when I started. Initially, this was a response to Gina's ficlet challenge. Not so much any more – this chapter alone is about five times that length! It also started out as one of those "5 Times…" fics, and it kind of is, still, but not at all the one that I thought I was going to write. Ultimately, I think I've merged about five different prompts/plotbunnies into this one story!
At first I wanted this to be a very structured 'tell-y' fic with hardly any dialogue (a reverse of the show, don't tell rule we've all had drilled into us, just to see what I could come up with). But then I had lots of little metaphors and lines that I wanted to work in, so that mostly went out the window too. Just about the only thing that's stayed the same is that I wanted to try a present tense fic for the first time, and even that was harder than it should have been.
Anyway, thanks so much for reading! Please leave a review and let me know what you think so far!