Jigsaw Pieces or Molecule
Tag for Season 2, Episode 11, "Bullet + Pen." Mac's thoughts on his experience being arrested as Jack drives him home afterwards so they can resume celebrating Christmas. A few references to other episodes too: "Can Opener" (S1, Ep 7) and (tangentially) "CD-ROM + Hoagie Foil" (S2, Ep 9).
oOo
Mac leaned back in the passenger seat of Jack's car. He had rolled the window down to let the night breeze play across his face and arm. It was cool, just this side of too chilly, but it felt fine to him. He needed the sensory input: he still felt numb after the events of the evening. The light wind on his face was a big improvement over the stale air of the police station he had been cooped up in. He could tell Jack was sneaking peeks over at him from the driver's seat, but he kept his own view steady out the front and side windows. He doubted that meeting Jack's eyes would make his partner feel reassured.
It had taken some time to finish sorting out Mac's legal status after the assassin's attack on the police station, but there had been enough communications among the higher ups (presumably Matty and Phoenix's Oversight with the police chief and local captain) to finally result in Mac's legal release and the expungement of all records of his arrest. So he was now officially cleared and free and on his way home to join his friends and resume their interrupted Christmas celebration.
Jack had refused to leave the police station during that indeterminate time, sending his fellow tactical team agents back to Phoenix in the armored vehicle they had arrived in while he kept Mac company in the bullpen with Turner and some of the other officers. It had been clear to Mac—and possibly Turner and Greer too—that Jack was reassuming his position of bodyguard. Clearly, Jack hadn't dealt well with Mac's arrest and the worry caused by the separation it had entailed, a fact Mac deduced when he discovered that Cage had dropped the GTO off at the station so that Jack and Mac would have a ride home while she questioned Hector Ruiz, disguised as a social worker. Mac figured Jack letting anyone else drive that car, even Cage, was a sign Mac himself was in for some serious mother henning when they got out of there. But he was grateful for Jack's company at the station, so he hadn't yet ribbed him about it. In fact, despite the happy ending at the station, Mac didn't feel much like ribbing anyone about anything at the moment.
Jack was now drumming his fingers in time to the tune playing on the radio and trying to hide his concerned sideways peeks at Mac. When he slowed the car to a stop for a light, he apparently couldn't resist checking in. "You're pretty quiet over there. You all right?"
"Yeah, I'm good," Mac answered, still gazing out the window, missing the breeze he'd been letting his fingers play in.
"You sure?" Jack pressed. "The cops didn't—they didn't rough you up or anything, did they?" A note of suspicious anger hovered in his voice.
The light changed to green, and Jack started the car forward. The welcome breeze returned.
"No, Jack. You don't need to worry about that. Greer and Turner were completely professional all the way through."
They two detectives had been firm in handling him when they had arrested him and taken him out to the squad car, and while booking him after they got to the police station. Mac remembered the heavy hand Turner had kept on his shoulder while pushing him out the door of his house to the squad car parked in the driveway. But Mac had chosen to be compliant and had given them no trouble, presenting them with no reason to need to throw their weight around, metaphorically speaking. So they hadn't thrown him around in a more literal, physical way.
Mentally was another matter altogether, however.
And he still wasn't sure what those FBI agents had had in mind for him, as a suspected terrorist, when they had hauled him down to the basement. Just shaking him up by questioning him in an isolated location? Or had they really had something … rougher in mind?
The thought was disquieting.
Mac remembered the trip to the police station, so different from this trip going home. Locked in the back of the squad car, his hands cuffed uncomfortably behind his back, he had been still reeling at the possibility—even likelihood, at that point—that his bright idea for getting rid of the huge stock of guns had cost an innocent man his life.
Mac had been caught, tied up, and locked up by bad guys more times in his life than he cared to count, but he had never felt as trapped as he had in that police car. Those other times he had been captured he had always been free to try to escape from the bad guys. Often they hadn't even known who he was, only knowing him by whatever fake ID he was using.
But the LAPD officers weren't bad guys. As a Phoenix agent, Mac was in fact on their side. Hell, he had blown up that shipment of G-36 assault rifles precisely because they had the potential to be used lethally against cops just like the two detectives who had arrested him.
But being a covert agent also meant that he couldn't try to escape the situation he'd found himself in. Greer and Turner had arrested him in his own home, under his own name, in his public identity. He could physically get out of the handcuffs binding him—he had a paperclip reachable in his back pocket, as he always did just in case he needed one. But he didn't have any place to escape to.
Matty had been very clear that he had to maintain his cover. It had been a not-so-subtle reminder of his oath as a Phoenix agent, which meant he had to stay silent and not reveal the true nature of the organization and the work he did for them. That was his duty.
Which meant going along with his arrest for work done on a Phoenix operation.
So he was stuck.
Above all, though, he had been wondering whether the cops were right with their charge against him. If so, he had killed a civilian. An innocent person. The very thought just paralyzed him. His job was to save civilian lives. If he had killed an innocent man, then didn't he deserve to go to prison for it?
But—he had been in prison before. The memories of the horrific week he had spent at Bishop Correctional last year were very clear in his mind. The long, mind-numbing hours isolated in his cell with literally nothing to do. The equally mind-numbing work in the laundry before he made contact with El Noche. The wretched food, the walls and bars and locked doors, the aggressive leers of the other convicts, the constant noise, the lack of privacy, the casual violence that both the prisoners and the guards engaged in daily. The thought of living that life for real, as himself, and for years…. The idea just stopped him.
But if he had killed an innocent civilian, that might happen, to protect the secrecy of the Phoenix Foundation. And really, he would deserve it for having killed a man he was sworn to protect.
That had been all he could think about during the trip to the police station, where he had undergone the humiliating process of being booked. Not for the first time in his life, by any means—but for the first time, it had felt real. Carried emotional weight.
The first time he had felt like a criminal.
A murderer.
Which, by some grace, he had turned out not to be.
So he should be able to put all this away, right? Greer and Turner weren't bad guys; they'd even been grateful to him for distracting Hector Ruiz enough with the exploding pen dart that he'd improvised so that Turner had been able to rush the gunman and capture him. They had all walked out alive (well, Greer had been carried upstairs because of the slug that had grazed his shoulder, but he'd been in no danger of dying from it), and their escape was because of Mac, his special talents that he had successfully used as he always did in the field.
So a happy ending, right?
But still, he felt haunted by some comments Greer had made during the interrogation, when trying to get him to break.
The way the detectives had questioned him had reminded him of the interrogation drill he had gone through when being trained as an agent. Even at the time he had thought it was a fairly stupid exercise, and his opinion hadn't changed a lot since then. The practice was supposed to prepare agent trainees for real interrogations, but he had been through actual interrogations a number of times since then and could safely say that it hadn't really done so. Sure it had been uncomfortable to be chained to a table for hours on end and experience some sleep deprivation—but he had known all the way through that it was just an exercise, so he hadn't felt genuinely threatened. He'd gone without sleep for far longer periods while in the Army. Hell, he'd gone without sleep for longer periods as a student at MIT. His training interrogator had trotted out his family problems as a way to try to get to him, but the whole situation had felt false enough that none of it had bothered him much. There were no teeth behind the threats.
This time had been totally different, however.
Totally real.
He'd held out against Greer and Turner at first, staying silent as he kept the safety and secrecy of Phoenix in mind. It had been hard, though, when they put the pictures of George Ramsey on the table. The picture of the dead man, crushed under the rubble—wreckage he had created with the bomb he'd made—was bad.
The pictures of a smiling Ramsey with a wife and two children were a lot worse.
Two children who had just lost their father. One of them just six years old.
Mac knew exactly how it felt to lose a parent at that age. How it split the world apart forever.
And now he had apparently done it to some other kid.
He had been careful to keep his face straight and noncommittal, though, when looking at the photos, just as he had been trained to do. His lack of reaction hadn't scored him any points with Greer and Turner, of course.
The sheer amount of circumstantial evidence they had against him had shaken him as they revealed it piece by piece, and he had begun to realize how damning it was and how much trouble he was in. First, the remains of the weapons he had blown up. The idea that they thought he of all people was an arms dealer had given him the one moment of grim ironic amusement he had found in the whole business.
Second, the picture of him from the street view car. The timing on that was ironic too, given all of Riley's work to disable the security cameras. But that irony was not at all amusing since it undeniably placed him at the scene.
Third, the remains of his improvised bomb—with his fingerprints still on it.
That revelation had made him decide it was time to call the Phoenix, via Jack. Greer and Turner's refusal to allow him a phone call, along with the news they were charging him with terrorism, not murder, had finally persuaded him that talking to them a little was in his best interest. He certainly hadn't broken, but he had … bent a little. Judiciously. He obviously couldn't tell them what he was, but he had finally made some denials and asserted what he was not: not an arms dealer, not a terrorist.
And that had gotten Greer to make the crack that was still unsettling him: "What you are, Mr. MacGyver, is a jigsaw puzzle. The picture on the box looks good, but lift the lid and all you find inside are a bunch of broken pieces."
Just how true was that?
Greer had gone through all the "broken pieces": his mom's death when he was five, his father's abandonment of him five years later, the football stadium incident in high school.
There was nothing new in any of that. Mac had known—had felt—it all for years. Could feel the jagged edges of each and every piece, knew their power to slice into him at unexpected moments.
Nonetheless, having it put together in that way had somehow shaken him, seeing the way his life appeared to a professional lawman, an outsider who didn't know him personally.
When Mac had asserted the football field incident had been an accident, just as he had so many times earlier in his life, Greer had responded, "Or a clue—to who you would ultimately become."
Well, it was that, Mac acknowledged inwardly—just not in the way Greer thought it was. It had resulted from an experiment that got out of hand. But it certainly hadn't been a prank, as so many in Mission City had thought, nor had he intended it as a malicious revenge against the football team as even more had believed. Greer was far from the first to think that about the incident, wrong though it was.
Greer's next comment had confirmed that was what he was thinking, but he'd put it in words Mac had never heard so directly before, and they had been the real kicker: "In my experience, highly intelligent children with abandonment issues, a history of arson, and an abnormal obsession with explosives don't usually wind up doctors and lawyers. You spent your whole life looking for somewhere to put all that anger. It's just too bad we didn't catch you before all that rage cost an innocent man his life."
Even though Greer was wrong about Mac being a terrorist, wasn't his overall assessment ultimately the truth? Well, not the very last part fortunately: George Ramsey had not been the innocent civilian he had seemed to the LAPD, nor had the improvised explosion killed him, to Mac's intense relief. Mac's team—his friends, his family—had proved that, and he very much wanted to come up with a way to thank all of them for it in the near future, especially Jack who had come to him in the police station just when Mac had been at his lowest point. But the rest of Greer's appraisal held a certain truth about himself that he hadn't really understood before: a highly intelligent kid with abandonment issues—and an obsession with explosives—filled with anger, who needed a place to put it. Greer's words had put the puzzle pieces together to show a pattern Mac hadn't seen, hadn't thought about, until tonight.
Mac had to admit that he was angry at—well, at life, or providence, or God, or chance or whatever for taking his mother from him so young. It would have made such a difference if she had lived. He was sure he would have had her love, her support, her understanding, all the way to adulthood had the cancer not killed her. Her early death hadn't been anyone's fault, but it still felt desperately unfair. If he'd had her when his father left—well, maybe his father wouldn't have left if his mother had still been alive. His family might still be intact.
He was even more deeply angry at his father for leaving him: he had been angry for years as a kid and as a teen. That was nothing new. What was new was his growing anger now at his father for leaving this trail of clue crumbs to follow during the past few months, implying Mac should find him as though the son had to—to do what? Had to prove his devotion by tracking down the father who had left him? Why should the son have to find the parent who had abandoned him? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
It wasn't like Mac was hard to find. He lived in his grandfather's house, for Pete's sake. His father knew right where that was.
Still, Mac had known most of that before. The new epiphany was the connection with who he had become: realizing that what had led him to develop his interest in science, in hacking the world, as he'd described it to Riley when he first met her, was that deep-seated anger. Science was the answer because science was the way anyone could learn to control the world—as much as humanly possible, at least. That was where he had put his anger at the events in his life that he couldn't control: it was the reason why he had fed all his emotional and mental energy into learning exactly how the world worked, the underlying chemistry and physics and math that ran the universe, in all their beauty and wonder and gorgeous predictability—as long as you accounted for all the parts of the equations.
So no, he hadn't become a lawyer or doctor. Instead, he had become a scientist, to learn how the world worked. He had trained as a soldier to learn those skills still better, in practical contexts, and then became an agent for DXS, now Phoenix, to put that knowledge and those skills to work in ways that could help people, so fewer people would go through the kinds of loss he had felt.
Greer's view of him was wrong, Mac thought. Or rather, the metaphor didn't work the way Greer had phrased it. Jigsaw puzzles weren't made of broken pieces, of course: just separated ones. Mac had put the pieces of himself together through the years, and really, by any measure, they made a pretty good picture. He had a highly developed and specialized but broad set of skills, a stable job that allowed him to use them creatively and for good purposes, dear friends who cared deeply for him and whom he loved in return, a partner as close as any brother or father. He had a good life.
Maybe a couple of pieces from the puzzle of his life were missing, but the center held together despite that. Maybe he could still fill in one of those holes—by finding the missing piece that was his dad.
Or maybe the picture was okay without that piece. Mac was still of two minds about that and unsure which way to go.
Or maybe there were other ways to think about this. Maybe the jigsaw puzzle metaphor really was wrong. Maybe the way to think about his life was more like a carbon atom, which could bond with other elements, especially hydrogen and oxygen, to form a dizzying number of compounds. No one combination was more "right' than another: they all just had different properties and possible uses. The compound Mac had made with his talents and skills and friends and colleagues was a beautiful molecule in itself—nothing missing, just right as it was.
That metaphor felt better, Mac thought, tilting his head back.
Jack stopped for another light. "You sure you're good over there, Mac?" he asked, clearly still dubious. "What'cha thinkin' about, bud?"
Who'd have thought, Mac wondered, back when they first met, that Jack would be an element to bond so tightly to Mac's carbon atom?
"I was trying to decide if you're more like a hydrogen atom or an oxygen atom," Mac answered, a small smile playing on his face. He looked over at his partner as his grin broadened. He wasn't going to try to explain the chemistry metaphor he'd been thinking about in any kind of detail to his partner: Jack didn't usually want to try to follow a complicated science concept and would enjoy the enigma far more anyway.
Jack's eyebrow quirked upwards even as he narrowed his eyes skeptically, although Mac could still see the relief Jack felt underneath that he'd gotten an answer from his younger partner, even if it was one that seemed weird to him. But like always, Jack was willing to play. "Uuuh huuuuh," he answered, drawling his answer even more than usual. "The stuff that brain of yours comes up with." He shook his head, looking back at the road but smiling. "Hydrogen's the stuff that explodes, right? Like in the Hindenburg?"
"Yep," Mac nodded.
"I like that. A lethal weapon, that's me," Jack said, eyes still on the road.
"Yeah, that fits. And hydrogen bonds easily with other atoms to make compounds. That fits you too."
Jack snorted. "I like to think I'm selective about who I bond with, thank you very much."
"You bonded with me. Riley. Bozer and Matty and Cage, too," Mac pointed out.
Jack shifted in his seat, clearly trying to digest the emotion underlying the conversation. "Yeah—so like I said, selective. So why do you think I'm like oxygen?"
"Because I can't breathe without oxygen, Jack," Mac replied softly, remembering what a relief it had been when Jack had entered the suffocating interrogation cell, with his characteristic swagger and confidence underlying all the lawyer-speak, completely certain that Mac hadn't killed Ramsey and with the evidence that proved it.
Jack drove silently. When Mac risked glancing to his left, he saw Jack's eyes fixed on the road, but his Adam's apple moved convulsively, just once, and his head nodded very, very slightly.
Mac smiled a little more and settled into his seat more comfortably, pulling his arm out of the cool breeze and into the warmth of the car. His message had gotten through.
I'm ready, he thought, ready to be home now with the other people I'm bonded with. Let's celebrate the holidays together.