AN: I'm really hesitant on publishing this, it's definitely not my usual, and it's not really like anything else I've seen people enjoying…please give it a go and tell me what you think? Pretty-please with paperclips on top? My thoughts on 1.14, Fish Scaler, are in an AN at the end.

In this universe, the man who will become a reviled bombmaker known as The Ghost is killed in a car accident at the age of nineteen.

Everything changes.

Alfred Pena goes on leave to see his daughter Annabelle's birth. The young man who is essentially his apprentice, Angus MacGyver, covers for him excellently, and never stops emailing his college crush. (He doesn't know that in another life, he stopped replying when his mentor died, consumed by grief and anger, trapped in a terrible headspace.)

When he gets home from Afghanistan after his first deployment, a little darker and sadder and harder (but not as dark or sad or hard as he was in that other life), but also with a confidence that he didn't have before and a belief that maybe his feelings are requited after all (that maybe he'd been stubbornly blind because he never believed she could possibly want him, love him, in that way), he manages to tell her how he feels.

(All of their college friends, all of his engineering buddies, say finally. Money is exchanged, and it turns out that Thomas Davies won the betting pool.)

When Angus MacGyver goes back to Afghanistan, he has a girl waiting for him back home. (Or, more accurately, at Northwestern's medical school. Though, maybe that is home for him – either there or LA, where Bozer and Penny live – home is where the heart is, and he hasn't been back to Mission City for years.)

He and Charlie Robinson make an excellent team and set a new record. Higher-ups start to take notice of this young EOD.

Jack Dalton, CIA agent, ex-Delta Force, meets Angus MacGyver in Kunduz, Afghanistan. They work together on a taskforce for a while, and become friends, but the taskforce's work finishes, and Jack is pulled back stateside. (Jack teases the younger man about getting tied down to one filly so young, and they meet up for beers whenever they're both close enough to being in the same place at the same time, but that little hole in Jack's life is never completely filled and his biggest regret ends up being his lack of little Jacks.)

When Angus MacGyver is twenty-four years old, the six-year commitment he made on enlistment finishes. He is offered an honourable discharge, and in the end, he decides to take it. (He still wants to do something to help people and save lives, but war, with guns, explosions that kill and maim, and needless death, and the growing feeling he has that there are no winners in war, is beginning to feel like too much for him, even though he's got a knack for compartmentalizing. Besides, he's looking to the future now, and he realizes that he doesn't want to have to apply for leave to go see his child's birth – he and his girl have made it through all these years, through his deployments and almost all of her residency and the strain that brings, and he's thinking about buying a ring. Love and family and loved ones will always mean the most to him, even if he feels a duty to help everyone he can, save all the lives he can, after all.)

The DXS has had its eye on Angus MacGyver for years, and it's well-known among certain circles that they have first dibs on him, but they decide not to pursue him. They are concerned whether a man with such a big heart, such a sense of idealism, can cope with the life their agents live (he's never grown quite as hard as he did in another life, one where he cruelly lost his mentor, a father-figure, just weeks before the man's child's birth; being a walking miracle, he's not lost as many brothers-in-arms as most), and they know he'll be engaged sooner rather than later, and such a close personal connection (it's not as if his soon-to-be-fiancée is just a friend and roommate) would make keeping his cover intact almost impossible (particularly since she's an ER doctor). Instead, Angus MacGyver gets an offer he can't refuse from DARPA and winds up working to save lives in a lab in Virginia instead.

Jack Dalton is read into this by his boss, Patricia Thornton, who is quite aware of the fact that they are friends (even though Mac believes that Jack works for a think-tank now after leaving the CIA), as she's the best spy in the business. (Jack approves wholeheartedly; maybe he and Mac aren't as close as they could be, with their lives getting in the way and all, but he's always felt protective of the younger man, and he wants that white-picket-fence happy ending for him, and Jack knows, oh, he knows, that the life he lives- the life that he doesn't know Mac lives in another universe- isn't conducive to that.)

The straw (or maybe the anvil) that breaks the camel's back never comes for Patricia Thornton. Her bosses' highly questionable decision to recruit a twenty-one year old, still idealistic and naïve at his core, ignorant to the greys and the hard decisions of the world of spies and secret agents, to drag him into that world of constant potential betrayal and lies and not-so-noble sacrifice, and then think of him as an asset above all, not as an agent, a person (as they should, as she always strives to do, even if their jobs necessitate tough calls and thinking of the greater good), never happens. She never starts that downward spiral, that fall from grace, never starts walking that road to hell, paved with good intentions. (Chrysalis, in this universe, turns out to be a relatively low-level DXS agent, necessitating its rebirth into the Phoenix Foundation.)

Nikki Carpenter, the field analyst of Jack's team (Johnstone and Daniels are steady as they come, a few years' younger than Jack, ex-military, good teammates and great men, and Nikki, though the youngest of their team by far, is a brilliant hacker and plays the honeypot role when required excellently, and Jack leads them more than capably, but they never quite reach the heights that Jack and his partner and their team do in another universe, nor do they ever become family), ends up being recruited for a deep-cover CIA op, not that her team is aware. (She fakes her death on a mission and steals nuclear codes. They grieve her, believing her to be dead and that it's their fault, but then she resurfaces, putting the codes up for sale. They stop the sale, but she gets away – Jack can fly a plane, but he really can't stop one after it's taken off, not from the ground. He's not a wizard. Months later, she resurfaces yet again and reveals that she's deep-cover, after her handler is killed. They are sceptical, but in the end, she turns out to be true, but they never, ever trust her again, not like they used to. She disappears into the CIA machinery, works her way up. Jack sees her about as often as he sees Sarah Adler, his former CIA partner, which is to say, occasionally on the job, but still too often for his heart.)

After Nikki's 'death' and the revelation of her 'betrayal', they need a new analyst, a new hacker. Patricia approaches Jack, or rather, shows up at his house late one night, a file in hand. Riley Davis, she says. Tell me everything about her, she says. Is she good at heart, can she be trusted? (Jack says that yes, yes she is, and yes, she can be, absolutely, because even if Riley's in supermax for hacking the NSA, has been since she was almost twenty-three, he's known her since she was twelve, and he knows.)

Jack ends up telling Patricia (or Patty, as he calls her) everything about Riley and Diane and Riley's father and how he left them and how they thought that he was a bathroom tile salesman that night. (He doesn't know why; maybe it's because she's a good-looking woman and he's lonely and still broken-hearted over Sarah or Diane or both and she's one of the few friends he's got. She doesn't know why she listens and comforts and pokes and prods a little as needed either; maybe it's because, somehow, this man's gotten under her skin and through her defences- she never even tells him off for calling her Patty, and she thought she'd excised all those parts of her years ago when her fiancé died, but he is an attractive man, and she's lonely too and maybe, just maybe, he might be her only friend. It gets lonelier the further up you go, after all. Neither of them ever consider that maybe it's because they're closer in this life, because he hasn't got many other friends, friends who know the truth about him, and she's not selling secrets and betrayal.)

They recruit Riley, getting her out of supermax. Patricia makes Jack and Riley sit down and have a proper conversation. There is awkwardness and anger and painful honesty, but they get through it. Riley tells Jack and Patricia why she hacked the NSA, and Jack shoots his boss a look (she must have suspected, probably knew, when she came to him about recruiting Riley – it wasn't all about just picking an analyst that he, and hence Johnstone and Daniels, would trust readily, after Nikki, picking one that he knew already, was it?), and then fights every fibre of his being to not pull the young woman into a hug (she wouldn't like that), to hold her and apologize, because oh God, she did that much for her mom, all on her own, and if she'd known the truth about him, maybe she'd never have had to go to prison for her mom. Maybe she'd have come to him for help instead.

Riley forgives him. Diane does too, but it comes too late for anything that they could have rebuilt. (Maybe even a year earlier would have been enough, maybe helping to save her life might have been enough, but in this reality, it is too late for them.)

Wilt Bozer, Angus MacGyver's best friend (even if they live on opposite ends of the country, they will always, always be best friends, always have been since the fifth grade, no matter what), sees a beautiful young woman in a computer store (he's told that he needs a better rig to improve his CGI skills) and asks her for her phone number, but she says no.

Riley Davis isn't interested at all in the young man who asks for her number (because those lines he uses never, ever work) and quickly forgets about him. In this lifetime, she never gets to know him, never realizes that cheesy and questionable lines aside, at his core, he's a sweet, loyal, good, caring, funny man, who'll always do the right thing, who'll always try and provide light and joy and humour for his loved ones, who'll do everything he can to look after them, even if it doesn't seem like much (but it is).

Instead, Bozer meets a lovely young woman online with an interest in special effects, both old-fashioned and computer-generated, and a soft spot for pastrami, and together, they slowly, slowly become a behind-the-scenes Hollywood power couple. (They're forty-two by the time their first proper movie, with a multi-million dollar budget and marketing and backed by a proper big studio, is released, but it's so, so worth the years of hard, hard work and crossing their fingers and living pay-check-to-pay-check and working part-time as burger flippers and file clerks and in retail.)

Riley slowly befriends and eventually starts dating a guy who works in the Phoenix's labs. He's just as brilliant as she is, albeit in a different way in a different field, and he's kind and caring and gentle and patient, and he sticks around despite all of her issues, and never, ever, ever reminds her of her dad. Her mother approves wholeheartedly of him. So does Jack. It's Jack who gives her away at her wedding, since he's the closest thing she's ever had to a father. For Jack, Riley is the daughter that he never had, his only child, in a way, and it's not that he doesn't love her, not that she isn't so, so important to him, not that she isn't quite enough, per se, it's just that he always feels that something is missing. (For some reason, he finds himself wondering what might have been, if Mac had been recruited by the DXS. It's a shame, he thinks, that they don't see each other as often as they'd like, living on opposite sides of the country, with Jack's work, and Mac's busy life- his job at DARPA is nothing but full-on, and he's got a wife and a child and another on its way. It's a shame that Mac can't know the truth, that this lie will always sit between them.)

Riley ends up being right about Jack and Patricia, to Johnstone and Daniels' surprise. They never get married, but they do end up spending the rest of their lives together, and it's enough for them.

Jack Dalton and Patricia Thornton somehow make it to retirement, alive and fairly hale and hearty, and settle down in Dallas, Texas. She tolerates his love for the Cowboys, and they listen to records on her gramophone and he listens as she sings along beautifully.

Riley Davis works her way up at the Phoenix Foundation and eventually becomes Director of Operations. Somehow, she and her husband manage to balance their work and their family; she winds up a mother to her beloved daughter. Of course, she does an excellent job. (She did have the best role model growing up, after all.)

Wilt Bozer, along with his wife, ends up creating a Hollywood blockbuster series anchored by a protagonist suspiciously similar to his best friend. (The actor who plays him even bears a startling resemblance to him, even though Mac claims to be unable to see it.) Said character repeatedly saves the world using paperclips and gum and duct tape and his trusty Swiss Army knife, and Bozer has absolutely no idea how close to another reality that is.

Angus MacGyver saves thousands of lives, maybe even millions (a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and there's a hurricane on the other side of the world after all, so it's hard to keep track), with his work at DARPA. He also has a wife and a pigeon-pair of children, and a dog called Archimedes the Second (but they don't have a white-picket-fence). They go on trips to visit Uncle Bozer and Auntie Penny and their families in LA, and even go to Mission City, and sometimes, Jack visits and brings the kids presents when he's on the East Coast. He got everything he ever wanted, and he's so, so happy, and doesn't even think about the could-have-beens, because what could-have-beens are there to think of? (There was never a bomb in that building, no pressure plate for Pena to step on, he never even had an inkling that the DXS or the Phoenix Foundation wasn't a think-tank, never was approached by a covert government agency. Not in this universe.)

One single change, and everything is different.

(But some things stayed almost the same.)

AN: I have no idea where this came from. Definitely not my usual stuff, apart from the whole 'multiverse theory' theme that I seem to have going on in most of my works…

I think a mix of headcanons just combined and made some sort of baby in my head. The headcanons that Patricia has a deceased fiancé and is an excellent singer are helloyesimhere's. The other headcanons (like Mac having a college crush that he emailed until Pena died, or why Patricia became Chrysalis and the more sinister elements of the DXS/Phoenix Foundation and the importance of The Ghost incident and Pena's death in shaping Mac) I think I came up with mostly independently…

I don't know, I find this universe that I've somehow invented both simultaneously really depressing but also not? Like, I think it's quite a bittersweet universe…I don't know. Thoughts?

Regarding the episode- I loved Fish Scaler, I think it was a good episode, and how they're moving forwards with Matty is good, in my opinion. I really do like her chat with Mac at the end, particularly the bit about Thornton either liking him and watching her back or being a traitor – the (potential) doubt makes me happy! I do like what they did with Bozer and Riley; Bozer's fundamentally good, do-what's-right-no-matter-what character (hey, he did punch Donnie Sandoz for Mac, and there's got to be a reason why they've been best friends for so long – I think they share that nature), and also Riley's motivations for her bad decisions (saving her mother's life and because she just had to see if she could – in a way, I think she's a lot like Mac, but she never got the chance to channel her brain into something good like he did, and hacking I think is fundamentally more grey- plus I also think that Matty's not quite right about her, like she isn't quite right about Mac, when she compares Riley to a loaded gun). Also, Mac's face and voice when he's like to Jack, I need to know! That is just precious!