AN: Okay, I admit I haven't written 100 scenarios yet, but the goal is to get there! (At the moment, I have written 21 scenarios, and have about six more ideas.) Suggestions are welcomed, though with the warning that they might be twisted or altered drastically in the weirdness of my brain.

This will update on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Australian time, for now. Accidentally Happily Ever After will update on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.


MIT

BOSTON

2007


With a noise of triumph, Mac finally, finally managed to remove the tiny bit of broken-off metal from inside the mass spectrometer that Frankie was essentially rebuilding from scratch. He held up the offending object in the tweezers of his Swiss Army knife.

It made her smile at him, which was never a bad thing. Far from being a bad thing.

'You're really good with your hands, boy genius. You ever think about going into surgery?' Frankie shrugged as she continued, already digging into the guts of the mass spec again. 'You could save or improve a lot of lives that way.'

Mac shook his head, wordlessly passing Frankie a wrench just as she needed it.

'Biology isn't my thing, remember?'

He'd gotten a C in Bio 101.

Frankie snorted.

'You knew all the content inside out, Mac.' He'd just neglected to do a couple of quizzes. More than a couple of quizzes, actually, because he'd gotten caught up in something else. Engineering was his field, not biology. There weren't many people like Frankie, who could do both. In fact, there wasn't anyone like Frankie at all. She looked up at him, having finished screwing the nut a little tighter. 'Do you know why I love biology?' Mac just shook his head. Frankie pointed at him with the wrench for emphasis. 'Mother Nature is the best engineer.'


Frankie's words stayed with him, in the back of his mind.

The one day, he had a little crisis, a moment of wondering what in the world am I doing here, solving theoretical problems when there are real ones out there?

And the rest, as the saying goes, was history.


HUNTINGTON HOSPITAL

LA

2021


'…Male, forty-seven, blood type O-negative, two GSWs to the chest. Both slugs are still inside, estimated that he left half a litre on the ground, suspected internal bleeding…'

Mac nodded as he listened to the briefing from the paramedics while examining his patient, a well-muscled brunette man whose hair was turning grey. He was unconscious, and one of the bullets had gone between his fourth and fifth ribs, the other positioned just above his heart in such a way that checking for a nick in the ascending aorta was going to have to be his first priority.

'Okay, we're taking him into the OR ASAP, I need two units of blood on standby…'


Jack woke slowly, groggily, and managed to crack open his eyes, to see fluorescent lighting and a white ceiling.

It was hard to focus on anything, but he heard a woman's voice and saw a vague, face-like shape in front of him.

'Mr Dalton, you're in hospital. You were shot, and you've just come out of surgery. You're going to be alright.' He might have nodded at that; he wasn't sure. The voice turned away a little, like it wasn't being addressed to him anymore. 'Dr MacGyver, your patient's awake…'

Everything faded out again for a while, as he drifted in and out.


When Jack woke up again, it was clearer, sharper. He could tell, this time, that there was an oxygen mask on his face, and he was lying in bed, wearing a hospital gown and connected to an IV.

He turned his head a little to the right, to see his boss, Matty Webber, sitting in a chair next to him. She actually looked relieved and still a touch worried, which confirmed what Jack had thought as soon as those guys had fired.

He'd nearly died.

He turned his head a little to the left, and found a young, unreasonably good-looking blonde guy in a doctor's coat.

'Mr Dalton-'

Jack lifted the oxygen mask slightly off his face.

'I nearly died and they give me Doogie Howser?'


Internally, Mac sighed and rolled his eyes, even as he tried very hard to keep a calm, professional exterior.

He was the youngest trauma surgeon at Huntington, at thirty, and knew he looked younger. The Doogie Howser references had gotten old ages ago.

But as much as he hated to admit it, jabs about his age (which were always, at the end of the day, digs at his competency and abilities) tended to get to him.

(He'd been through the same training program as everyone else, and trauma surgeons saw an awful lot that could be, well, traumatising.)

(He was not a kid or a naïve youth who didn't know what he was doing.)

He was pretty sure he didn't quite manage to hide his reaction, because the very short woman sitting on the other side of Jack Dalton's bed put her hands on her hips and spoke.


Matty shot Jack a look, her hands on her hips.

'Dr MacGyver just spent six hours saving your life, Jack. Play nice.'

(She'd backgrounded him as soon as she'd learned he was treating Jack. He might be young, but he already had a reputation for being a wunderkind capable of saving 'impossible' cases, one that did not seem to be unfounded in the slightest.)

Jack turned his head again to look properly at the young surgeon.

He really had thought he'd been a goner when those bullets hit him. He'd expected to wake up surrounded by angels or something, not in a hospital with a too-young surgeon, and it wasn't as if he didn't know anything about GSWs.

He had to owe a good deal of his life to this surgical wonder kid. No, he mentally corrected himself – not a kid, surgical wonder or otherwise.

He did look to be in his late twenties, which to be fair, wasn't really kid territory anyway.

But more importantly, he'd just spent six hours working his ass off, saving Jack's life. And there was something in his eyes that didn't seem young at all, something that reminded Jack of the many soldiers he'd known and what he saw in the mirror.

(He supposed trauma surgeons saw a lot, knew holding someone's lives in your hands and the horrors people could inflict on each other and death intimately.)

He did his best to smile, raised the oxygen mask again.

'Thanks, brother.'