A/N: I posted this over on AO3 shortly after the season finale, but after reading some amazing fic from Newsroom writers who post exclusively on this site, I decided to join the Will/Mac lovefest in multiple locations. My flail is everywhere now!

I wrote this because I wanted to address the progression of Will's thoughts with regard to MacKenzie over the past three years. The first segment of this two-part fic will take us through season 1 and the second part will deal with his headspace during season 2. The title of this story is from a song by Passenger called Feather on The Clyde. The Part I chapter title is from a song called Goodnight New York, which is from Vienna Teng's new album.

Warnings, adult content, language, and spoilers for both seasons. I don't own these characters or the words from Man of La Mancha echoed at the end.

Part I: Twist and turn as your alleyways hide

What he remembered about MacKenzie...

Well, to consider, instead, what he'd actually managed to forget during their years apart would be an endeavor that required far less time. But that wasn't how it worked.

Will was coming to understand that.

If it were feasible, if he had the option to choose, then the vivid nature of his recollection would have dimmed until it faded out. And someone could have stuck his heart back in his chest years ago and it'd have gone on pumping just fine.

But she wasn't that easily forgotten.

She wasn't forgotten atall.

There was a place in his brain where she'd unknowingly parked herself, paralleled between permanent fixtures in his cerebrum, packed in so tight he couldn't get her out.

He'd never tell anyone this, but every now and then he stopped trying to subdue her presence. He let her take over for a while, allowing the memories to stampede through his consciousness like the Invasion of Normandy.

(The analogy was imperfect, but for once he let it go.)

MacKenzie in jeans and his oversized sweatshirt on a rainy November afternoon, wool socks on her feet and the biography of Edward Murrow in her lap.

MacKenzie's face as she attempted homemade spaghetti sauce in his kitchen, then the gasp she released at the discovery of a burnt pan bottom. "It said 'Keep covered. Simmer on low for an hour'" she'd said, hurriedly scanning the recipe. "Not that doing so would burn the fucking pan!" she added, before he could tell her it was okay. It was always okay.

Mac's long legs running out of the ocean, the grimace on her face subsiding when her feet safely reached the shore. "I think I dodged a jellyfish!" she explained, breathless. Will glanced at the seaweed floating in the distance, ran his hand down her goosebumped shoulders, and grinned through a laugh. "Let me get you a towel."

The way she was the only person he ever met who never backed down during arguments. The way he couldn't stay mad because... Because she made good points, with unimpeachable rhetoric, and when she said "Billy" in the middle of a sentence he'd just...lose his thread. So she became the first and only person who could call him out on his shit and, though it was the most counterintuitive notion of which he could conceive, he'd just wind up loving her even more.

And for as much as he'd like to say he'd now (after years of practice and [debatable] progress) gained the power to control the deluge of these recollections, she recently came back into his life spouting idealistic nonsense and verses from Don Quixote, blinked her eyes a couple times as she argued the integrity of journalism, and that was all it took for him to realize she was just as far buried underneath his skin as she ever was.

And he didn't have time to consider why he remembered everything about the way she walked and talked. Why he remembered the quivery tell of her voice (ever so slight) that gave away her willingness or unwillingness to cave in any given moment. Why he remembered every last detail of otherwise mundane moments.

Why, for the life of him (and not for lack of trying) he couldn't forget the size of her ring finger.

He was helpless, raw and stripped vulnerable. Susceptible to the elements he'd been pretending to ignore.

Not that he intended to let on.

The thing about these death threats was that most of the time Will couldn't give half a shit about his own safety.

What did he have to lose, exactly?

But one of the most upsetting things about fame (and Will had benefited from some small degree of it, for what it was worth) was the lack of privacy. Since he was an anchor with some firm and controversial opinions, and because his life had recently been plastered across tabloids next to the likes of Jennifer Aniston and Katie Kardashiwhatever, Will knew people could quite easily figure out a way of hurting him without...

Hurting him.

And because he was uncomfortably aware of the implications of that thought, he took to calling her every night, long after Lonny left him at his apartment. He fabricated all sorts of good reasons, depending on the day.

"I have an idea for Thursday's D-Block. You know, if Egypt isn't up in flames by then."

Or...

"Newsweek" published a study this week citing a strong positive correlation between raw IQ and a liberal self-identification. I figured I'd be the first to mention it to you before you came storming into my office with a copy."

Or...

"How many times do you think "Fahrenheit 451" has been burned? And, on that note, what would you estimate as the percentage for the correct usage of the word 'irony'? Low, right? Like...twenty?"

Or...

"We should have a panel on the influence of lobbyists on voting patterns in battleground states. I was thinking we could book Dickensen and Morley."

But one night after he'd had maybe one tumbler too many, and possibly his excuse for calling was more obviously contrived, MacKenzie stopped him in the middle of his sentence and said, "Will, we can just as easily discuss this in the morning. What's really going on?"

It could be that his heart stopped as the question slipped through her lips, except words were coming out of his mouth, so that probably wasn't the case. He heard himself getting louder, a steady Crescendo as his tempo accelerated. "Anyone really out to get me, Mac... Any amateur who spends more than two minutes researching me could easily figure out that the best way of hurting me would be to hurt..."

Will caught himself before finishing. There was dead silence on the other end of the line, but before he could panic, before he could assume the worst had happened (like the nightmarish potentials that had blustered through his imagination and provoked these nightly phone calls), he assessed his admission and wondered If maybe the silence was because she was holding her breath. Waiting. "Are you still there?"

"...Will?" she whispered, after a moment.

"Don't, Mac. You know the rest of that sentence."

MacKenzie didn't say anything, but mercifully, she spent another twenty minutes on the phone with him. Just as they were about hang up, her voice got really soft for a second. The tone reminded him of sleepy Saturdays years ago, naked warmth under his sheets that was followed by pancakes and espresso. The scent came wafting back. He wanted to reach out and touch her. Instead, he looked out his window toward Midtown. "Will?"

"Yeah?"

"My doors are locked, you know." It came out as a sleepy whisper. "And dead-bolted."

"Okay," he heard himself say as he clutched his phone a little tighter. "Okay, good," he added. "Night."

"Night."

He didn't have to call her after that. She called him, usually around one or two, hours after they'd gotten back to their respective apartments. He wondered if it was MacKenzie telling him that she liked the reassurance of his safety,too.

Maybe.

It was more likely she was just being nice.

She didn't make up excuses for calling, at least not to the extent he did. She sometimes led with stuff like...

"We need to speed up the teleprompter. You're ahead of its pace by about a half a second and it makes for some hilarious stumbling."

Or...

"I didn't royally fuck up the Paley panel. Did you see it?"

(Of course he fucking saw it. She was amazing.)

"Yeah! You did well, Mac."

But mostly she was just honest about the whole thing.

"I can't seem to sleep."

Or...

"Just calling to see if you're okay."

Or...

"I wanted to say goodnight."

On one particularly bad night, when she knew he hadn't slept since the dawn of forever (it was obvious by the dark circles outlining his eyes and the way he couldn't string a sentence together to save his life), her voice dropped to quiet again, barely there, and he thought that it would be the end of him. That what finally undid him, when all was said and done, would be the cadence of her whisper.

"I can come over and sleep on your couch, if that would help," she said. He drew his blanket higher, fiddled with the edges between his fingers. "Do you want me to come over?"

Will couldn't think of any other question for which the answer was so obviously "Yes" and "No" at the same time.

He shook his head before realizing she couldn't see him. "No," he whispered. His voice was gravelly, lower than usual, and he cursed the way his vulnerability was audible as his uncertain words tumbled out. "Just do me a favor and stay on the line a while." he said, trying for casual. "I'm gonna close my eyes."

"Alright," she said, breathing into the phone as silence settled between them. What allowed him to finally succumb to a week's worth of frustrating insomnia was the thought that she was in his ear.

At work, he hadn't realized how much he missed that until she was there again, directing him to say something, reassuring him, taunting him about a fuck up. Or breathing.

Sometimes just breathing.

He figured the secret that he loved her (world without end), the revelation that this was an indelible truth he'd only recently managed to address in his conscious state, just couldn't be contained by his chemically-altered incarnation.

The night the U.S. forces killed Bin Laden, for example.

He'd never stopped. Not for a minute or a day. Not for anger or hurt or for Atlantic and Indian oceans that, for far too long, existed in between them.

Now the space that separated them wasn't literal. He could brush her shoulder or hold open a door or invent an excuse to guide her out of a room and whisper in her ear. But the fact that he couldn't do more than that, well. That seemed worse than actual distance, worse than when the fact that he wasn't physically connecting with her on a regular basis could be chalked up to a virtual and geographical impossibility.

The silence that followed his voicemail message was the biggest buzz kill since the temperature dropped to zero on New Year's Eve.

Except far worse.

He checked his phone repeatedly that night, dialing into his voicemail five or fifteen times, just in case she called while he was checking. All this obsession gained him was proof that he never fully got rid of the pathetically self-conscious teenage boy that lived inside of him.

After the quietness settled, he didn't need liquor or drugs or whatever the fuck else to be numb. It was a new state requiring nothing but his thoughts to maintain.

MacKenzie's face the next morning registered nothing, which flummoxed him beyond all belief because he figured at least, even if she were doing as he'd asked and ignoring him if the answer was no, there'd at least be a recognized awkwardness, some kind of apology in her expression, some inconcealable sensitivity directed at unreciprocated, raw exposure.

He supposed he should thank her, though. She was doing exactly as he'd asked. He just hoped she wouldn't take the "If the answer is no" option.

Then he brought Brian in to tell the story of News Night 2.0, partly because Will was already feeling like the rain water that seeps into your sneakers and makes your socks soggy. So why not surround himself in a fucking deluge of sock-soaking despair?

The other part of his rationale was something he didn't acknowledge out loud in his mind.

But Will knew the reason, because even though he tried to bury it, he was big enough a pathetic asshole to know that he desperately held onto the notion that...

Brian's presence worked the first time.

Why not 2.0?

Why not the second?

("I think I might have also brought him in here so you could see a side by side comparison," he'd told her. He nearly choked on his own honesty, surprising even himself that he could sum it up that succinctly. That he said that out loud when he knew damn well she didn't give a shit anymore.

Fuck.)

Desperation. A word with four syllables.

This was the one way he could go on like this.

Quietly loving her.

Loudly hurting.

It was far too easy to pretend, even to himself, that his newfound energy that propelled him out of his hospital bed was related to the evidence of AWM's hacking, a blackmail opportunity that would buy him some protection.

(What is illness to the body of a knight-errant?)

MacKenzie's phone was hacked.

(What matter wounds?)

Which meant...

(For each time he falls, he shall rise again!)

She never got the message.

(Woe to the wicked!)

And he could rewrite the past few months in light of this new evidence.

(Sancho, my armor! My sword!)

He knew it wouldn't be long before Mac put it together. She'd stampede into his office or call him up at 2 a.m., wanting to know the rest of his voicemail.

There had to be a way to tell her without giving away the pitiful reality of his behavior in recent months. Without letting on that Brian's appearance, the debate bebacle, and overdosing on Effexor and Naproxen was some kind of reaction to her perceived silence.

The truth about that fucking article was that it didn't resonate professionally as much as it did personally. The feeling it stirred up in his is gut, the one that brought on the need to medicate, was more comparable to the kind he got reading, Help Me Rhonda than the kind provoked by the McAdouche websites on the internet.

"What did the rest of the message say?" she asked, and though it was damn near impossible to resist her expression, he couldn't reveal the answer without also illuminating the destruction that was inherent in his reaction.

How much power she held.

The Greater Fool, as it turned out, was more on the money than anyone had realized.

TBC