so i haven't tried to write anything longer than like a 5 + 1 since several calendar years ago. and then this happened. buckle up y'all it's gonna be a wild ride.
a few quick notes before we get started. feel free to skip down below the break if you want to get right to the story.
will feature characters from canonical crossovers making minor and secondary appearances (capitalizing off the crossover w/ hawaii 5-0 and the other canon h50 crossover with ncis la to borrow some characters from other canons) but my editor friend hasn't seen either of those shows so everything will be checked for coherence to people unfamiliar with them, and they are certainly not the point or focus here. that's why it's posted here and not under the crossover tab, it doesn't even really feel fair to call it a crossover, i'm just briefly borrowing characters rather than making up ocs.
expect a lot of found family, h/c, callbacks to minor characters from season one, and my personal #thoughts on the whole chrysalis thing. also no ships/romance. 17 chapters total. ready set let's go.
CHAPTER WARNINGS: none for chapter one!
Mac was supposed to come to the movie theater with them. It was a one-day throwback screening of The Dark Crystal, and Mac had spent many a car ride listening to Bozer's animated voice in the passenger's seat, extolling the virtues of Jim Henson's puppetry, Dark Crystal featuring prominently among his favorite examples. It was pure luck that landed the screening in the theater near their house, and upon discovering that Riley had somehow managed to make it this far in life without seeing it at all, the three of them made plans.
That was last week, before things started getting weird, before the odd mail and Mac's lamp staying on far later than even he usually went to bed. In all honesty, when the bail comes in the form of sporadic eye contact and distracted fidgeting accompanying a claim of 'some things he needs to take care of', Bozer isn't surprised. He and Riley had spent bit needling him about it before letting it drop and moving on with their day. Mac would make it up to him later by watching both Dark Crystal and The Labyrinth, and probably even let him rewind and replay as many scenes as he wanted, pausing and explaining exactly what was coolest about each of the costumes. Whatever was going on, Mac would tell him about it when he was good and ready.
Now, a couple hours later, Bozer is just turning his own phone back on, ready to text Mac a good natured 'hope you had as much fun with your errands as we did at the movie'. Before he could finish composing the message, however, Bozer's phone catches up to the data it received while it was off, and it chimes, a voicemail alert. When he sees this, Bozer stops outside the car with his hand halfway to his keys, frowning at his phone.
"-Bozer?"
It takes a couple moments for Bozer to register that Riley has been trying to get his attention while he stood frowning at the screen. He looks up cringes, then explains.
"I got a voicemail from Mac while my phone was off. It's weird, he doesn't usually leave messages."
Riley's face morphs into a look of fond exasperation and she gestures at the door. "Well can you unlock the car so I can get in while you check your messages in the middle of a parking lot?" she says pointedly, and Bozer feels his cheeks heat up, quickly scrambling his keys from his pocket and letting Riley in.
With that taken care of, Bozer remembers the voicemail and hits play, holding the phone up to his ear and ignoring as hard as he can the unsettled feeling in his stomach. As he listens to his best friend's voice on the machine, however, the feeling surges, until the message ends with an explosive sound that has him jerking the phone sharply away from his head. With fear suddenly spiking in Bozer's chest, he yanks the door open and gets quickly into the car, tossing the phone into Riley's lap as he goes.
"You have to listen to that message," Bozer says, interrupting Riley's startled question. "And we have to get back, now."
Lifting the phone gingerly, expression indicating she's afraid it might detonate at any second, Riley turns the volume up and sets it to play loud enough for them both to hear. The sound of the voicemail fills the anxiety-riddled air of the car.
"Hey Boze," Mac's slightly distorted voice says from the small speaker. "Sorry I bailed on you guys for the movie. I had a… Listen, there's something I have to tell you. Something's been going on, and I've been keeping it to myself, but it's gotten too- I need to tell everyone now, and I need your help to tell Riley and Jack. So-" The message ends with a loud, violent sound, an impact that reverberates through the car and makes Riley jump. Bozer feels her direct her gaze away from where she had been watching the display count out the twenty seconds of the message and back to him. He keeps on staring at the road, mouth set in a grim line.
"Bozer," Riley says in a numb, flat voice. The sentence dies there as she can't find anything else to say, lost for words with which to express what that message had evoked in her. Bozer can relate. He doesn't have any words either, and it's a tense, silent ten minute drive home from there.
Before Bozer has hardly parked, Riley is out of the car, heading directly into the house with Bozer a few steps behind her. In hindsight, it was maybe not the smartest plan to barrel right into an unknown situation, but in the moment, neither of them are doing much planning of any kind. The first thing they see is the front door hanging partially open with the hall visible from the porch. Inside the house, sticking close together with a baseball bat Bozer snagged out of the front closet held up in front of them, they quickly establish that, aside from the two of them, there isn't a single person inside the house. Even more frightening however, is what they find on the back porch.
On the wood floor of the deck near the house is Mac's phone. Or, more accurately, what's left of it. The sight of Mac's phone laying on the ground, shattered into jagged pieces, makes it abundantly clear what the sound at the end of the voicemail had been. As if that hadn't been enough, Bozer sees something else that causes his heart to jump into hyperdrive, pulse thundering loudly enough that he can hear it in his ears. Blood spots the pieces of the phone, a dozen or so drops sporadically dotted across the floor.
"Jack?" Bozer hears behind him. He turns around to see Riley standing next to the kitchen counter, one hand pressed to the countertop, knuckles blanched, the other holding her phone up to her ear. "Jack you need- we're at Bozer and Mac's place, we need you, Mac is gone, and-" Riley stops abruptly, hand dropping to her side, now silent cell held loosely at her thigh. "He hung up. I think he's on his way."
The knowledge that Jack is coming is the only thing that keeps Bozer from losing his mind completely between when Riley makes the call and when he walks in the front door. It's a mantra he repeats to himself over and over, trying to swallow past the lump in his throat. Jack is coming. He'll be here soon. Jack will know what to do.
"Tell me what happened," are the first words out of Jack's mouth, the door slamming shut behind him. Riley and Bozer turn to face him immediately, both of their expressions a mix of dread and relief.
"I got a message while Riley and me were at the movies," Bozer says, his voice thready and uneven in both pitch and volume. It sounds less like organized speech and more like words falling out of a person, a jumble of panicked, confused syllables all tripping and tumbling over one another. "It- Mac said- I-" Frustrated and getting nowhere trying to explain things himself, Bozer changes tack, playing the message again out loud instead. The brief voicemail isn't any easier to listen to the third time than it had been the first.
When it gets close to the twenty second mark Bozer braces himself, remembering with crystal clarity how it ended. The loud, brutal sound draws flinches from both him and Riley. Jack's only visible reaction is a clench of his jaw and a tightening of his folded arms, muscles tensing at the noise.
"And then we got home and-" Bozer flings an arm over at the ruined mess that used to be Mac's phone. "He's gone, Jack. He's gone and someone took him and he's hurt, and-"
"What do we do?" Riley demands, question breaking through Bozer's devolving ramble. "There's protocol for this, right? I mean, when I- When my mom, and, like- There's something we're supposed to do, right?"
"He's hurt," Bozer repeats. His mind is stuck like a record player whose needle has come off the track. There's blood on the ground, there's blood on the ground, there's blood on the ground.
"What should- I can-"
"We can't do anything," Jack says, strong voice cutting a clean path through the discord thrumming in the air so thick it can practically be touched, "until you two tell me - slowly and calmly - exactly what happened today. Starting from the beginning."
Shepherding Riley and Bozer away from the porch with the pieces of bloodied Gorilla Glass, Jack shoves the coffee table back away from the couch and perches on the edge of it, facing them.
"Talk," he says, short and clipped, and this is the first moment Bozer really sees the fear seep through the cracks of Jack's composure.
For just a second, in the edge that hardens his characteristically easygoing voice and in the expression that flickers across his face, Bozer sees that Jack is afraid too. This, more than anything else that has already happened, truly shakes Bozer to the core.
"Riley and I went to the movies," Bozer says, looking down at his hands where they are fidgeting in his lap. "Mac was going to come, and he bailed last second. He's been getting letters this week, it's- He hasn't been himself. I've been worried. I thought he'd tell me when he was ready, but-"
"'I need your help to tell Riley and Jack'," Riley quotes from the voicemail, and Bozer nods. "You think he was talking about the letters?"
Jack's brain churns over what he's told as Bozer talks about the letters. The young man repeats the information a couple of times, clearly too frazzled to entirely track what he's saying. Jack doesn't stop him though, going so far as to gesture at Riley, stopping her from reminding Bozer that he's already said this part. Each time Bozer recounts the letters, Jack learns something different.
There'd been no return address. Mac hadn't hidden them, but he hadn't exactly been forthcoming about their contents either. There were four of them spaced out over the last week and a half, two weeks.
"Do you know where he kept them?" Jack asks, this time interrupting Bozer's third or so insistence that 'I thought he'd tell me, I didn't want to push him into shutting down'. "I need to see them."
"Jack, I-"
"I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was related," Jack says. "I know how Mac is about privacy, trust me, I wouldn't ask if he- If we didn't need to know."
For a few moments, Bozer wavers, looking torn between loyalty to his absent roommate and palpable fear for Mac's wellbeing. Finally, without a word, he gets up and heads down the hall to Mac's room. He returns and just as taciturnly hands Jack the small stack of letters. The papers are handwritten in a messy script resembling Mac's own, and they bear the appearance of having been folded and unfolded many times. It's clear that Mac has read and reread them over and over in an attempt to process the information contained in them, and Jack's heart constricts painfully.
"This is a trick," Jack mutters, eyes scanning over the first dated letter and catching up short on the sign-off.
Dad.
"It says they're from his father," he explains, not taking his eyes off the page, "but it's not true."
"How do you know?" The question comes from Riley, the one of the three of them the least familiar with the subject and person of James MacGyver.
Setting the other three onto the coffee table next to where he sits, Jack holds up the first, contents facing outwards where Riley and Bozer can see.
"It's a letter, it's signed 'dad'. What's your point?" Riley asks, clearly getting frustrated. Just as Jack is about to elaborate on the evidence behind his immediately drawn conclusion that these letters were not, in fact, actually from James, Bozer speaks up.
"It's too long." Before Riley can ask again, Bozer continues. "I didn't know his dad very long or very well, but the guy never talked much. He didn't say much and then one day he was gone. That letter, it's… Like I said, I didn't know the guy long but if I hadn't talked to my kid in more than a decade, that-" He points at the lengthy, full page correspondence. "-is not what I would start with, and I'm…" Bozer waves a hand, indicating his general person. "I'm me."
Riley tilts her head to the side, conceding the point, and Jack nods.
"From what Mac has said," Jack continues on Bozer's line of thought, a sour taste in his mouth at discussing any of this without Mac's permission or presence, hating that the breach of confidence is necessary as it so clearly has become if they're to get to the bottom of this, "he was never much of a communicator. I can't see him doing this." A small wave of the letter in his hand punctuates his point. "Besides, there's just too many things that don't line up. The letter Mac sent got returned. We couldn't find the man in the country, never mind close enough to have left this in the mailbox. No return address, I just… It might say it's from James, but I don't think so. I think someone was playing him, and knew just how to do it."
Eyes suddenly widening, Bozer's hand darts out, knocking two letters to the carpet in his grab for the third. Jack wordlessly allows him to take it, watching Bozer's face closely. Bozer's lips move silently as he scans what Jack glimpses to be the fourth and most recent letter, dated just two days previously. As he reaches the end, the paper drops into his lap, held loosely in lax fingers.
"He went to meet this guy. This morning. When we were at the movies, he was… Shit." Only in the last word is there any kind of emotion, Bozer's voice hollow and flat in a way that sends a chill down the back of Jack's neck.
"It's time to call this in," he says, leaning down to pick up the two letters on the floor, and accepting the fourth from Bozer's outstretched hand. "I'll let Matty know what's happened, and we'll find him." Taking a moment to pause and make direct eye contact with both of them, Jack waits until he's sure both Bozer and Riley are paying attention before reiterating, "Whatever is going on, whatever's happened, we're going to find Mac, and bring him home. Okay?"
Riley nods shallowly and Bozer returns his look with equally as strong a gaze, the faith in his voice when he says, "Okay," adding yet more weight to Jack's already strained shoulders.
The drive to the office is tense and anxious. Jack glances back periodically to while Bozer and Riley have opted to sit together in the back, stress leading them to seek the relative reassurance of proximity. His own stress is manifesting in a creeping pins and needles sensation beginning in the base of his skull, winding down through his arms into his hands. His hands which grip the steering wheel so tightly that when he goes to adjust around a turn, his knuckles ache at the movement. Focusing on the road doesn't work to distract his brain from the direction it keeps trying to go in, and Jack gives up, allowing the questions to start examining themselves.
Guiding the car through stoplights and around corners on the familiar route from Mac's house to the office, Jack runs through the previous two weeks, searching retrospectively for any indication that something was going on with Mac. He can't remember anything frightening. Just a brief conversation where, after a couple days of mildly worrying behavior indicative of stress, he'd asked if Mac was alright.
I'm fine, had been the answer. (Of course had been the damn answer.) Yeah. I'm fine. I'm just tired.
Now, as he pulls the car into a space near the door and makes his way swiftly inside, not bothering to check and make sure Bozer and Riley are following, Jack wishes he hadn't let it drop so easily. The benefit of hindsight is a vicious lens to look through, and Jack fiercely chastises himself for not pushing harder.
When he reaches their usual conference room, Jack finds Matty already waiting there, arms crossed and face grim. Not once has that expression ever spelled good news, and a knot of tension grips Jack's shoulders. He walks in first and gets right to the point.
"Mac is gone. Someone took him." It's information he'd already given her on the phone, but it bore repeating, if only to assist Jack in convincing himself this is actually happening.
"I know," Matty says. There's a slight note of something odd just under the words that sets Jack further on edge, if such a thing is even, at this point, possible.
"What are we doing to do?"
Bozer's question draws Matty's attention to his and Riley's presence behind Jack, hovering uncertainly just inside the room.
"I need the two of you to step outside," Matty says, throwing all three of them for a loop.
"Excuse me?"
"Matty-"
"Matty, they're-"
"Now." The force of Matty's order is harsh, even for her, and Jack's veins go cold, adrenaline washing down his nervous system. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. "I need to talk to Jack privately, now. "
Without another word of protest, Bozer and Riley leave. Jack half watches them leave, registering them standing outside in the hallway watching through the soundproof glass before turning back to face Matty.
"I don't know what's going on with you, but Mac is gone, and I- we need to get out there looking for him right now if we're gonna find out who took him before-"
"We already know," Matty says, interrupting. Her expression is one Jack has only ever seen on her once before, once when things had gone horribly, near fatally wrong.
"What?"
"We don't need to investigate who took MacGyver. We already know."
please let me know what you think! i'm excited for the rest of this fic and i hope you are too.
(also, matty is Not the villain here. just so it's clear.)