Author's Notes: I'm sure you all thought I'd disappeared from the fanfic world, but no! I am back! Settled into my, finally rebuilt, post-tornado home! If you like this story…great. If you don't…blame writingalone who, in her sleep-deprived state, thought this was ok. And also, teanc09, who assured me it wasn't total crap. Thanks ladies. And to the rest of you, enjoy! P.S. I am assuming, from the latest trailer, that gun control and illegal leaks of government documents are a major theme this upcoming season. Let us begin…
Will woke suddenly, his heart pounding in his chest. He looked to his right, where Mackenzie was sleeping peacefully, and let himself fall back against his pillows.
She is here. She is right here. Everything is fine.
Most days, those three simple sentences were enough to calm him. Well, enough to calm him to the point that he didn't think his heart was going to burst right through his chest, anyway. Those three short sentences had become like a mantra to him the past couple of weeks. A chant he had perfected in his head over and over until the words themselves became almost meaningless.
He reached over and tucked a few stray hairs back behind her ear, more for his sake than for hers. In the short period of time they had been back together, he found that he felt the constant need to touch her. Sometimes he felt needy, but then, Mac had her needs too…as evidenced by the fact that after eight days of engaged bliss, she pulled him out of the newsroom by his wrist and dragged him down to City Hall, where they slipped hastily purchased wedding bands onto each other's fingers. He understood her desperation. Sometimes he just had to touch her to make sure she was real, and alive, and here. And sometimes, all that touching her did was confirm to him that she was a different person. Longer hair, a few more lines and wrinkles, a jagged streak of scar tissue running down the side of her torso.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
His subconscious sounded strangely British that time. Damn it! There was no way he was falling back to sleep anytime soon tonight. He heaved himself out of bed with a sigh and trudged to the kitchen. He grabbed a glass and filled it with water, looking longingly at the nearly full bottle of scotch across the room, and trying to remember what Mackenzie told him about drinking alcohol late at night.
"All it does is dehydrate you, Billy. Trust me, I know these things. Never get drunk late at night in the desert. Your mouth will, literally, begin to feel as dry as the Sahara. Or in my case, the Kandahar Province. Either way, no good can come of it."
He chuckled at her voice in his head. It was always there. Either making its way in through an earpiece, or in his dreams, or whispering words of love to him late at night. He shivered as he took his water glass out to the balcony and took in the winter night sky. Why couldn't they have had just a few months of normal? Just a few months of soaking in the glorious newness (and odd familiarity) of being back together.
"Hey, why are you out here when there's a nice warm bed inside? And more importantly, a nice warm wife, back inside?" Mackenzie's sleep drowsy voice asked as she pushed her way out on to the balcony.
"Couldn't sleep" he replied tersely.
"Well, obviously" she drolly shot back.
"Do I want to know how long it was going to take you to tell me you have a gun in your purse?" he asked, finally working up the courage to say what he'd been wanting to say for days.
"What? I…wait…how do you know what's in my purse?" she sputtered.
"I work with you. I live with you. I also happened to be looking for a cigarette. You keep swiping them out of the pack in my office. And don't think I didn't know it was you. I can smell your perfume a mile away Mac."
"Thanks. Is that your less than subtle way of telling me I lay on the Chanel No. 5 a bit too heavily?" she snapped, rubbing her arms furiously, trying to stay warm in the warn old t shirt of his that she was wearing. He took off the sweatshirt he had grabbed before coming out here and handed it to her. She yanked it from his hands without thanking him.
They stared each other down for a moment and he wondered if they were about to have the first real fight of their second-time-around relationship. She continued to glare at him. Yup, here it comes.
"So I occasionally need a cigarette!" she shouted at him. "Is that such a fucking crime, Mr. pack-and-a-half-a-day?!"
"You quit eight years ago" he reminded her calmly.
"And you've been promising me you'd quit for weeks!" she screeched. Her chest heaved and her breath billowed out into steamy clouds in the cold winter's air. He pulled her inside before they could wake the neighbors and find themselves on Page Six in the morning.
"You're deflecting Mac. You may have changed a lot in the past few years but I still know how you fight. When you know you're wrong, you turn the tables on your opponent. We were talking about the fact that there's a gun in your purse, not the fact that I have yet to give up smoking. And, by the way, I'm working on it" he said, with a calm he didn't really feel, as he lifted up the sleeve of his shirt to remind her of the nicotine patch on his upper arm.
She plopped down onto the sofa and buried her head in her hands.
"I'm scared, Will. Ok? I'm scared" she whispered, from behind a curtain of hair.
"There's no need" he told her, but as he reached over to try to calm her, she shot up off the sofa and reeled on him.
"Don't you fucking dare!" she screamed, as her chest heaved and her face reddened. "Do not treat me like a child William! Don't you dare start treating me like the 'little woman'! I am not now, nor have I ever been stupid or naïve. I have seen the fucking death threats! And I know that the F.B.I. wants to meet with you about your source on the Wikileaks story. I did not stop being your E.P. when I became your wife, so please stop treating me as if I do not understand the consequences of what is happening!"
They stared each other down for a few seconds before he managed to string together the words he wanted to say to her.
"When have I ever treated you as anything but my equal? When have I ever done anything to give you the impression that you are not, in every way, my partner? I am not trying to hide anything from you Mac. You, on the other hand, are hiding a pretty sizeable firearm in your handbag! For God's sake, I am the card-carrying Republican from Nebraska! If anyone should be carrying a gun in this family, it's me!"
"Why? Because you're the man?!" They stood toe to toe, daring the other to make the next move.
"No, because you can't even be trusted to send an email properly! How the hell do I know I'm not going to startle you when I wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and get shot in the ass?!"
She chuckled at the thought.
"It's not funny, Mackenzie."
"Yes it is." A silly grin split her face and her eyes crinkled up and…oh hell, sometimes she really was just as cute as she thought she was.
He sat down on the sofa, pulled her down into his lap, and smoothed his hand through her much longer hair.
"What the hell are we doing, Kenz?" he whispered.
"Freaking the hell out over the fact that Genoa isn't even over yet and we're already facing another shit storm" she said softly into his neck.
"I wish I'd never even heard the words Genoa or Wikileaks" he groaned.
"I wish I'd never heard the words concealed carry" she whispered.
"Then why is there a handgun in your purse?" he replied, trying to get back to the point of this whole damn argument.
"Because death threats against my husband make me nervous. And the idea that some nut job, Mark David Chapman wannabe could walk right up to you outside AWM and pull a loaded pistol out of his jacket scares the shit out of me!" she spat out. Righteous indignation rising up in her at the same time fear made her burrow herself more deeply into his chest.
"That's not gonna happen" he cooed into her ear, feeling her heart beat rapidly against his chest.
"Says the man who invited a blind date with a pearl handled revolver in her purse right up into his apartment" she snorted.
"Yeah well, I'm married now. I only have to worry about my wife's pearl handled revolver these days."
"I resent that remark. I do not carry a pearl handled revolver. Who the hell would that scare? Reese Lansing?" He laughed. God, it felt good to laugh with her. No matter how many things had changed about her, the laughter (and also, quite frankly, the amazing sex) never changed with Mackenzie.
"Kenz, what's this really about? If someone had told me eight years ago that you would be carrying a handgun in your purse I would have found it about as believable as Charlie Skinner supporting the renewal of Prohibition. What's going on?" he asked, willing her to hear the unasked question in his words. What he was trying to say was, 'what has happened to fundamentally change the Mackenzie I once knew?'
"I've watched people die, Will. People I knew. Young men, barely out of high school, with years ahead of them, cut down by IED's and sniper's bullets. It was wrong, and it shouldn't have happened, but it did. Did you know that funerals homes didn't exist much before the early 1900's?" she asked, and he nearly got whiplash as his head snapped up to look at her, wondering at the sudden shift in conversation.
"People used to display their deceased relatives in their own front parlors during the mourning period, hence the term 'funeral parlor'" she explained seriously. He, meanwhile, tried not to look totally lost as to where this was going. Old Mackenzie veered off topic and flitted around from subject to subject too, but New Mackenzie (as he'd come to term her in his own head) did so in a distinctly disturbing fashion. Some days she floated from one maudlin topic to the next without the slightest clue as to why it disturbed him so much.
Because you used to be the eternal optimist in this relationship, Mackenzie. What the hell happened to that woman? He imagined her response would be something along the lines of: a hellish break-up, two and a half years in a war zone, and Jerry fucking Dantana. Not necessarily in that order. No matter, he desperately loved the woman she had become…he just didn't always understand her.
"Can we get to the point of this conversation, Mackenzie? What the hell does the rise of the North American funeral industry have to do with why you are carrying a gun in your purse?" he asked, rubbing his hands soothingly up and down arms.
"People in the western world today are disturbingly detached to death. We hide it behind hospital room doors, and operating theatres, and funeral homes, and we never really see how close we all are to it. I've seen how easy it is for someone to be laughing at an awful joke about the oxymoron that is 'military intelligence' one minute, and fighting for their life after a bomb blast in the next. It happens, Billy. It happens just that easily. I refuse to take your life, our life together, for granted for one second. We are a miracle, Will. A fucking miracle. What we've fought through to be here. What we've overcome. I won't let some asshole with a gun take it away from us. I won't." She ends her tirade by burrowing further into his chest and refusing to look at him. Conversation over, her body language says.
Three weeks later, when a crazed young man enters an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Mackenzie walks into his office, sets the gun on his desk after carefully engaging the safety, and looks at him with red-rimmed eyes.
"I don't want it Will. Get rid of it. I don't ever want to see it again."
He nods numbly, his own head and heart filled with thoughts of the baby they had just learned was growing inside of her, and how terrified he will one day be when he has to relinquish his daughter or son to a school system and rely on them to protect his child. And so, he does the only thing he can. The only thing he has the power to do…
"Good evening, I'm Will McAvoy and this is NewsNight. Tonight's topic: gun control and the second amendment."