A/N: This year I decided to cheat at NaNoWriMo and just write fanfiction instead. I don't know how frequently this will update, just as I don't know how much time I'll have to devote to editing chapters as they're written, and anytime I make a promise about updating fic it all falls through, so let's just say you'll get it at you get it. Major thanks to everyone who encouraged me to scrap my one fic about MacKenzie getting shot and replace it with an even more terrible fic about MacKenzie getting shot. Inspiration comes largely from Greg Laswell's "Off I Go."

This fic is ensemble, but focuses mainly on MacKenzie, and to a lesser extent, Jim.

Major trigger warnings for gun violence. Any additional trigger warnings will be included in chapter notes if they come up.

CHAPTER ONE

Did you say it? Make a plan, set a goal, work towards it? All the loose ends we leave behind, unspooled threads of twine that tie us together, what do we do with them? We can all be left behind. Life doesn't just hand us light bulb moments. It makes us claw our way into realizations—cut the thread, or pull it back. We have to work for it.

We have to do it ourselves. Make our own painful realizations, and pray that we aren't too late.

Did you say it?

Six shots ring out on the twenty-third floor of the AWM building at just past one-thirty in the afternoon. The weapon being discharged is a semi-automatic; the shooter, a white male in his late twenties in a food service delivery uniform.

There is no warning. (The ones who truly intend to kill you rarely give it; Will McAvoy was right about that much.)

Glass shatters around a vacuum of sound, and a cacophony of screams rise up after it, people fleeing to dark corners and under desks while bodies hit the floor. A computer screen is blown out, electrical wire shorting as the power flickers off but the electricity does not, the acrid smell of singed motherboard drafting out from the dead monitor in the wake of a bullet.

There are four people in the room for whom dodging bullets is not a new phenomenon; two of which feel truly comfortable in its practice.

That is to say—MacKenzie and Jim hit the floor and immediately seek out shelter against a desk, and Mac for some reason all she can remember is how one of the last few times they did this Jim tackled her to the ground in response to the sudden loud report of insurgency fire, and got shot in the ass, and how she'd yelled at him during the eight hour truck ride back to base—his head in her lap, completely miserable, in the back of a covered truck pitching side to side on a dirt road—to never, ever, try to protect her again. He seems to have remembered that, this time, breathing hard under someone's work station, eyes wide and locked on hers.

Her office is ten feet away, her bathroom little more than that and this entire fucking building is made of glass.

Shots keep ringing out, people keep screaming, and Mac and Jim keep their heads, as if they're back in the war and not here, at home, as if this isn't completely ludicrous and as if she isn't in Louboutins and a designer skirt instead of ratty cargo pants and combat boots, and if Mac squeezes her eyes tight enough, maybe she'll be back in Peshawar and all of this will make sense.

(There's no time to make this make sense, she—they, need to move.)

She turns her head, sees Don crouching across the aisle. She doesn't shout his name (protocol rapidly taking over—don't let them know where you are, don't give them a target to shoot at, don't scream, don't yell names, just get low to the ground and keep moving, keep moving, it's harder to hit a moving target, just keep moving), but waits for him to turn his head in their direction. It takes a blissfully small amount of time, and Mac gestures to her office, and she's never been gladder that she's left the door open.

Let's go, she mouths.

Before the chaos ends.

Thirty seconds have passed since the first bullet was sprayed into her staff, thirty seconds, maybe; it feels so much longer, like each second has been stretched out one in front of the other, and the leap in-between each is too much for her to think about at the moment. The string is pulled taut and Mac squeezes her eyes shut again, heart pounding. Just keep moving, before you lose your nerve. Tries not to think about Will, who had been in his office, Will who was surely one of the targets, or the target, tries not to think about Charlie who had been with him, with Sloan and Elliot while she and Don had been out here, and she hears the mechanical click of a gun chamber releasing, an ammo casing being dropped onto the floor, and now—fucking now—

Grabs Jim's hand she bolts for her office, dives through the door, and prays that Don is behind them. Shoves the door to her bathroom open (why does this building have so much fucking glass, and why is none of it bullet proof, let alone sound proof) and swings Jim through, letting go of his hand, her hand a glancing shove between Don's shoulders as she gets him into her bathroom too. Turns around, thinking, how many people are in her bullpen? How many rooms don't have fucking glass walls? Is that blood? Who's been hit? Who's hurt? Is anybody dead out there?

The shooter is reloading, and she feels Jim's hand (she knows it's Jim, they've been here before, after all, he's dragged her out of the stifling press of riots and gunfire before; Mac's always had a problem with wanting to stay and watch, she's a reporter, she wants the information) wrap around her forearm and then, fuck—

Maggie.

—is huddled under her desk, curled up into herself, legs bent in front of her, the fronts of her thighs tucked all the way up against her chest, with her arms wrapped tight around herself, eyes shut against it all even more tightly. Paralyzed with fear, Mac thinks the girl might be counting to herself, her lips wrapping around silently-formed and released numbers, trying to breathe around a panic attack.

Mac stops, breaking her own momentum forward, looking back.

It's a split-second decision, but an easy one. She won't leave her there, she can't leave her there, she was the one who sent Maggie off to fucking Uganda, she won't leave Maggie out in the gunfire again. Mac's eyes flicker to the shooter, who is still rooting through his bag for his next round of ammunition, and she goes without a second thought.

"Mac, what the fuck—?" she hears Don half-shout, voice straining to keep quiet, but she's off, her high heels abandoned, kicked off onto the carpet, and she just needs to get to Maggie before bullets start flying again.

Any tactical advantage to having abandoned her four-inch heels is immediately fucked over by the fact that she's now barefoot and running on broken glass, but the fifteen feet from her office and Maggie's hiding spot evaporates quickly and Mac finds herself on her knees in front of the girl, framing her face with her hands.

"Maggie," she distantly hears herself whispering, as if the words are filtering through water. "Maggie, darling, look at me, come on, we have to get out of here, come on, open your eyes, that's it, that's my girl, come-on-come-on-come-on, we have to move, sweetheart—"

Margaret Jordan. Call me Maggie, she hears, the audio memory swirling about in the back of her mind over the sound of a gun cocking, and really, Mac never thought that Genoa would actually kill them, but here they are. It's a lot like MacKenzie McHale. Call me Mac. Charlie Skinner brought me in to be your new EP. It's nice to meet, you, Will.

"Maggie, please," and she realizes she's pleading, frantically rubbing her thumbs over Maggie's cheeks and there's no time.

Keep moving.

She wrenches Maggie out from under the desk, tucking the smaller girl under her arm, covering her head with her hand, pressing Maggie's forearm into the space between her bicep and her shoulder. Keep moving. There's no time to crouch down, and Mac doesn't think she could manage it, anyway, even though Maggie is slight and can't weigh all that much and there's adrenaline surging through her veins, and faintly, she hears herself whispering come on over and over again into Maggie's ear, and the seconds are all stretched out again. Keep moving. They're targets but they're running and the door to the bathroom is open, pulled in and open to the bullpen and she knows that Jim and Don are waiting for them and she forces herself not to think about anyone else, especially not Will (Charlie, Sloan, Tess, Tamara, Gary, Kendra, Neal, Elliot, Martin), and she swallows a scream when the first bullet shatters the glass wall of her office.

Keep moving.

Running, and it's five feet and closing and Maggie is ducked under her arm, she'll be safe, she has to be safe, they'll all be safe, because they have to be, and this is all her fault, it's pounding in her ears over and over again, Genoa, Genoa, Genoa, the off-beat drum to keep moving, which has been the thrum in her veins for as long as she could remember, from diplomatic post to post to station to station to here and away to New York to Afghanistan to Pakistan to the Green Zone and back again, keep moving and they won't hit you, keep moving and you won't have to think about what you've done, what you've left behind. Genoa, she thinks she can't leave it behind, just like she couldn't leave Will behind, not really.

The death threats the past two weeks, since the retraction, have been skyrocketing, not just against Will but against all of them, and she was the one who gave the story the green light and here they are, in their home, in their newsroom, and someone is shooting at them.

(She sent Maggie to Africa and she sent Will on the air with Genoa, and God, if she isn't batting a thousand.)

Keep moving.

"Come on," she says, and pushes Maggie in front of her, clenching her hands tight around the curve of her shoulders and pushing Maggie through as it starts up again, and she knows the shooter can see them, and her name is on her office, but the door is thick wood with a sturdy lock on it, they just need to get through—

Maggie stumbles into Don, who catches her and pulls her out of the doorway, and then Mac's through as well and she slams her back against the door, and it closes with a loud, resounding thwack. Fumbling, she reaches back and turns the lock.

Safe.

"Are you okay?" she asks, tilting her head back up against the door, trying to catch her breath. "Maggie, honey?"

The only sound in the tiny bathroom is her harsh breathing, the soft sound of the air vent going, and her blood pounding in her ears. Mac settles the back of her head against the door, and looks down at Jim.

Who is staring at her, horrified.

"What?" she asks, adrenaline flooding from her veins almost all at once. "Jim, what?"

"Mac," he answers cautiously, taking a step towards her. "You're bleeding."

She looks down, trying to brace one of her hands against the door knob for support. The other slides against the door, her sweat-slick palm giving her no traction against the finished wood. She looks down, first noticing how bloody and cut-up her feet are, and then—

"Oh."

She is.

She's bleeding.

Jim's hands come up under her elbows, and Mac watches blood spread out across the right side of her abdomen, soaking through cream-colored silk. Belatedly, she realizes she's been shot, the pain scorching across her stomach with the visual comprehension of what's just happened, her thighs quivering, going weak, her diaphragm spasming in agony and pressing oxygen out of her mouth, heaving hard wheezes out of her lungs. She's been shot. She's been shot.

He catches her as she slides down the door to the tile floor while Don and Maggie helplessly look on.

They've been here before, after all, her and Jim. They've been here before. They've reported things, gotten people killed, gotten people hurt. Fuck, she was one of them.

Genoa, she thinks. You can't leave it behind. The last time she fucked up this bad, fucked Will over this bad, she got stabbed. And even though Will's been insistent that this isn't her fault, that she's not to blame—it only makes sense that Genoa, fucking over this many people, would leave her bleeding out in her own office. Jim pulls her into his arms, loops his forearms under her armpits and drags her away from the door, to the far wall.

(There's a distant sound, like filtered through water or blood, of glass shattering, someone screaming. Mac thinks it might be Maggie.)

"I'm sorry," she says mindlessly, voice heightened in pitch by the little breaths whistling up and down her throat. "I'm so, so, sorry."

Thanks for reading!