A/N: This is a strange plot bunny... I'm not entirely certain how plausible it is (the events described hitherto are entirely real, although I don't actually know if the White House hosted a New Year's Eve party in 1992), but I like it. If nothing else, it's kind of a fun cracky-ish AU idea. I meant to post this on New Year's Eve, or at least New Year's Day, back when it wasn't supposed to be more than three thousand words... but it quickly got away from me, as I'm sure you all can tell.
MacKenzie is wearing look #33 from Elie Saab's Pre-fall 2012 collection. 1992!Mac is in a Fall 1992 Valentino. (The links are available on the AO3 crosspost.) The remarks Will is working on were really spoken by Bush 41 at a real event, and the transcript is available at his online presidential library.
As I'm sure you can figure out, italics designate the past. The title is, of course, taken from the Burns poem turned song, "Auld Lang Syne," which roughly translates to "long, long ago." The line, "for old lang syne" translates idiomatically to "for old time's sake."
Also big thanks to Meg (fredesrojo) for putting up with my neuroses while I was working on this.
She didn't entirely know why she was here tonight, with the president in Somalia with Czechoslovakia quite literally tearing itself apart at the seams, half of everyone worth anything was mulling about between their embassies and agencies and, last on the list of importance, this party. Her mother was smart, getting the "flu" after hearing that no one she found worth spending time with would be in attendance for the yearly White House New Year's Party.
Not that MacKenzie would ever turn down an opportunity to wear couture at the White House. (Or had many opportunities to do so, having only been posted in DC for two years before shipping back across the Atlantic for Cambridge.) But the affair had turned out to be quite dull as predicted, with only the first family hosting and everyone she knew from the British Embassy having headed back shortly after ten to be briefed on the newest intelligence coming through from MI-6. The staffer her father was friendly with—and who he'd asked to show her around—had ditched her after an abrupt twenty minute tour for a girl Mackie assumed he was chasing.
So she decided to have a look around. Glass of champagne in hand, of course, ducking her head into various west wing offices and creeping through labyrinthine basement hallways and corridors. Barely staffed, it provided her with little amusement. The only part of the seat of US governance that appeared to be alive was the situation room, and MacKenzie knew well enough to stay far enough away from that, lest she be ushered back up to the increasingly boring party.
Thirty-something minutes into her impromptu self-tour, she stumbled upon an open conference room. Which would be little of note, except for the exceptionally cute blonde sitting at the end of the conference table, rather engaged with writing something longhand on a yellow legal pad.
Speechwriter, she bet. Against herself. Which wasn't much of a bet at all, but Mackie had always enjoyed being correct in her guesses.
It was a testament to how tipsy she already was that he noticed her at all. Although, he would later argue, it was the rather stunning figure that she cut in her soft pink Valentino gown. Not that, of course, she wasn't stunning all on her own, he hastily corrected, blushing a bit in a way that Mackie found to be far too attractive for her own good. She wasn't much for farm-bred boys who blushed, but Will (speechwriter, she was correct, as usual) was different.
She liked she was heading back to Cambridge in a few weeks and he was heading off to God knows where for the RNC, and he was just a bit too old for a girl still in university. Not that she minded—being quite fond of older men—so much as her father would.
But she liked Will. At least for New Year's.
But the point of the story is that lame-duck speechwriter Will McAvoy did notice the nineteen-year-old MacKenzie McHale lingering in the doorway of the conference room he had claimed for the night to work on the outgoing President Bush's remarks for Yeltsin's state dinner in Moscow on the second, setting them both on paths that would have them meet again almost twelve years later at ACN New York as strangers.
"What are you doing down here?" he asked, after regaining his equilibrium. (The brunette interloper, while quite clearly an interloper, was a very pretty one, at least.)
She giggled over the rim of a champagne flute. "Lost, I guess."
He frowned at that. Well, two things: the accent, which he hadn't been expecting, and the fact that her date had probably ditched her. She was… young, not too young, but young enough that he figured she had been brought along as someone's arm candy and then abandoned for the Eastern European situation that was putting a damper on the festivities. Abandoned, and a bit drunk, which was an unseemly combination for a young woman in this city.
"Do you want me to show you back to the East Room?" he offered, pulling his glasses off his face and dropping them on top of the half-written speech. Remarks. Whatever the fuck he was writing. He still had to put together Fitzwater's thing for the recognition of the new republics tomorrow.
"I'm having more fun down here," she said, wrinkling her nose as she took a step into the room, satin gown swishing softly with each step. He had to remind himself to not look at how good the shiny draping looked around her slender hips. "But it looks as though you're hard at work, Mr…"
He snorted, reaching down to the floor next to him and lifting a bottle of Jameson onto the table, letting it hit the surface with a decided thunk. Laughing delightedly, she took the gesture as an invitation to step into the room, closing the door behind her before coming around the table to drop into the chair next to him.
"I'm Mackie," she offered in lieu of getting his name.
They managed to escape the mayor's New Year's Eve party shortly after 10:15 PM (their rather sudden engagement having caused quite a stir in the tabloids, and the words 'spousal privilege' and 'shotgun wedding' being tossed around in alternating rounds, Reese and Leona had ordered a good bit of PR for the two of them to do before the suit moved into discovery), and by the grace of God got a cab willing to take them to midtown. The entire ride over, Will couldn't help but to run his hands up and down the curve of her waist. MacKenzie had recently taken to wearing Elie Saab, and he had always been tactile, so the beadwork and sequins and other shiny shit was driving him crazy.
And it was gold. Soft gold. Nothing garish, or gaudy. A nice, soft gold.
MacKenzie always looked good in soft colors.
(Well, he thought MacKenzie looked good in everything, but he was partial to the soft colors.)
He thought she might have called it champagne earlier in the day when describing it to Sloan, but that may have just been all the alcohol he's consumed talking.
(He was rather drunk, which was his excuse for being unable to stop touching her. Not that she minded, he thought. Or he needed an excuse. They'd only been back together for two months, and she was still quite insistent on touching him every chance she got. And he certainly didn't mind that. The dress was also incredibly form-fitting, through the hips and waist, which he was smart enough to figure out was to quell the pregnancy rumors—that and the pictures taken of her drinking things out of fancy glasses that were undoubtedly alcoholic—but still made his fiancé look incredibly sexy.)
She kissed his cheek when he helped her out of the cab, and then wiped away her lipstick with her thumb, giggling and taking his arm, leaning into him for the walk through the lobby and the elevator ride up to the twenty-fifth floor.
The entire floor was buzzing about Congress steering the country off the fiscal cliff and Hillary being just a few blocks uptown at New York Presbyterian, and so while no one in their business was exactly off-the-clock tonight, there was definitely a fair amount of partying going on. Especially in the News Night bullpen.
"Congressional Republicans have reached a deal," Jim tells Mac within five minutes of their appearance, after dropping their jackets off in Will's office, running a sheaf of handwritten notes under her nose.
She took them, immediately sobering a bit and casting a serious look at her senior producer. "But?"
He smiled that little displeased smile, the one he could always share with Mac, and folded his arms across his chest. "They're going to miss the deadline."
"By how much?" She asked, making a disgruntled noise.
"Two hours," he answered, checking his wristwatch. "The bill is set to be voted on by the Senate any minute now, but everyone's saying probably 1 or 2 AM. But more, really, because Obama won't sign it into law until Monday."
"What have the Republicans conceded on?" Will asked, staunchly refusing to remove his arm from around MacKenzie's waist. Jim rattled them off, pointing to different highlighted lines on the sheet he had compiled for them, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He hadn't changed out of his work clothes, so Will imagined that Jim had worked straight through the end of broadcast whereas he and MacKenzie had immediately been whisked out the door and over to Gracie Manor.
Mac bit her lip, scanning the paper as quickly as possible before handing it over to him.
"Where's Hallie?" she asked Jim, sliding the tips of her fingers over the divots between his knuckles.
Will looked up in time to see Jim's face contort in annoyance. "Her boss didn't want her staffing this out to one of the junior reporters. So she's at the White House party, which I'm sure is thrilling tonight, with half of the attendees still on the Hill."
Will snorted.
"I've been to one of those," Mac said, tilting her head, trying to remember that rather foggy evening. Her father had ditched her pretty quickly and as a result she had gotten herself well and completely trashed on some staffer's stash of whiskey. "The White House New Year's bash during the Velvet Revolution was an exciting affair. I think everyone of any relative importance had cleared out by the soup course to make sure Yeltsin wasn't throwing a tantrum at Václav Havel's election. Including my father."
Will lifted a brow at that. "You were at the White House for New Year's Eve in '92?"
"Yup. My mother had the flu. Or so she said. I think she just didn't want to put up with the French Ambassador's wife for the entire evening." It took her a moment to do the math, before her mouth quirked into a grin, amused that they had never stumbled upon this coincidence before. "You were on staff in 1992; I don't know why I never… put that together. Honey, were you there?"
He huffed a little laugh at that. No, he hadn't been important enough to merit an invitation to most black tie White House affairs. Only the ones he was required to write for. "No, I holed myself up in the basement with the speechwriting staff's entire liquor cache because no one wanted to stick around to do Bush's remarks for the Russian state dinner."
She frowned, handing Jim back his notes, nodding her thanks at him and sending him on his way. "The basement?"
"That's where all the speechwriting offices were back then," he answered somewhat-mindlessly, still trying to run the financial statistics from the proposed tax cuts over in his mind, half-tempted to ask Jim for his notes back, but Jim's handwriting was incomprehensible to almost everyone except Mac so he doubted it would do little good.
"The basement?" she asked, insistent, turning into him. "By yourself? All night?"
He looked at her. "A conference room but—why is this important?"
"Because I wandered off from the party to escape the French Ambassador's wife," she explained, eyes big in the way that drove him a little bit crazy. "And wound up in the basement. With a staffer. But I don't know, I was pretty drunk."
The girl. M. The girl who waltzed into his conference room and drank his whiskey and made him think about what the fuck he was doing in politics. He had always thought her name was Maggie, or Molly, or something, but MacKenzie… Mackie, you dipshit, like her Dad calls her.
It clicked in the most positive, startling way, and he turned to her, wide-eyed, seeing his look of shock mirrored on her face. "You were wearing pink."
Mouth gaping, she worked her jaw over a few times before looking up at him, biting her lip, and nodding. "I was wearing… pink."
It was then that she realized he wasn't as sober as she originally thought. He ran a hand through his (blessed, perfect, etc) blonde hair and sat back in his seat… his pupils were definitely a bit dilated. "Maggie?"
"Mackie," she corrected, accent skewing a bit more proper. "As in… short for MacKenzie."
She finished the last swig of champagne and slid the flute towards him; he dutifully filled it with whiskey, which the girl, woman, drank in such a way that spoke to the regular consumption of hard liquor.
"Why not Kenzie?"
She wrinkled her nose again, making an expression that was soon to get him into trouble. What in the fuck was it about this girl?
"Never really been a Kenzie. And you, Mr. Jameson From the Bottle?"
(And spoke in such a way that spoke of irregular attendance at high society parties. British, but not insufferably posh, like most of the embassy workers he ran into here. Her appearance down in the bowels of the White House spoke to that as well, if she had no use networking with the society wives upstairs. Or at least no interest in it.)
"Will," he said, pouring more whiskey into the coffee cup that had, a few hours ago, actually held coffee, before the dregs of the speechwriting team had filtered out for their own festivities and parties he had no inclination to attend. "You're not really lost, are you?"
She laughed at that. "Oh, I'm quite turned around. Just more interested in what's going on down here than in the ballroom. If you don't mind—what are you working on?"
For some reason, he showed her. And surprisingly enough, she had a deft and articulate response.
He was cute, MacKenzie thought. For a Republican. Or she assumed he was a Republican, but Bush was centrist enough that it might not be the case. His voice definitely had a bit of a Midwestern tilt to it, though, so she stayed with her assumption of Republican for the time being.
But definitely cute. With very nice eyes. And hands. And forearms, with his shirt sleeves rolled up in a concession to the hour, and…
A line in the remarks caught her eye.
"How do you think this will change Yeltsin's public position on ICBM's for START II? I know there have already been enough questions on security of the de-proliferation, since Yeltsin made so many quick concessions."
He shrugged. "Clinton's problem."
She scoffed—a high, laughing, kind of sound. Definitely a Republican. "And it's not yours, because?"
"Where do you go to school?" he asked, abruptly, as if something had just struck him. (It had. She wasn't arm candy. She was somebody's daughter.)
She sipped her whiskey in avoidance. "Cambridge."
"And you're majoring in…?"
"I'm reading the human, social, and political sciences." Another sip. "Emphasis on political. I think. For now."
"For now." Probably because her father wanted her to. Or because she had grown up around it. Will reminded himself that she had wandered down here (like she owned the place) instead of staying upstairs. "Who are you here with?"
MacKenzie smiled secretively. "Don't worry about it."
"How old are you?"
"Old enough to drink," as far as she was concerned, silly United States law aside, "now stop worrying about it and answer my question. Why isn't it your problem?"
"Because the Republican Party has decided it's not," he answered finally, after a few more rounds of Mackie (that's… juvenile, he thought, drinking more Jameson than was probably wise around a college-aged girl) needling him over sections of the speech, interrogating it in ways that most major publications wouldn't bother.
She was pretty fucking smart. And pretty fucking drunk. And just… pretty.
"That's a terrible answer."
"Wait, seriously?" he stuttered.
She started laughing, a bubbling, roiling sort of laugh, and pressed her hand to her mouth. "You remember?"
"Of course I remember. I…we… you—"
"Were you in a regular habit of sleeping with girls who wandered into your workspace back then?" she teased, leaning into him even more. Of course it was him. Of course, she thought. Nothing else would have made sense. "Or was I special?"
Although Will was clearly having a bit of a time processing it.
"Special," he murmured after the space of a heartbeat, her hand sliding under the jacket of his tux and over the soft white cotton shirt. Half a second later he realized she didn't actually expect a serious answer and receiving one considerably softened her face, wiping all but the barest hints of humor from it.
"Oh, Billy."
"You were." Of course she was. She was the girl that had been dulled by alcohol and time, but the girl, the dream girl, who set him on the path to where he stood today. Who got him up off his ass just as much as IT'S NOT, BUT IT CAN BE did. And the girl was MacKenzie. The dream girl who he would have thought he hallucinated, but for the note, like she was the ghost of New Year's future coming to point him along the right road.
MacKenzie.
New Year's past, present, and future.
He leaned forward to kiss her softly, lingeringly. "You are."
And with that, they were interrupted by Sloan and Don and drawn in more to the center of the bullpen and the party. An hour (and several more glasses of champagne) later, the members of the News Night staff were called to rather haphazardly straddle the line between celebrating and watching the story as more and more details of the plan leaked. And so that was how, tossing aside her decorum with her sobriety, MacKenzie settled for sitting on Will's lap behind his desk while they both read through an email from an old friend in DC while several members of the senior staff milled in and out of the room.
"Is Jane still broadcasting?" Mac asked, pulling her glasses off the bridge of her nose and setting them down on Will's desk, trying to ignore his fingers as they traced up and down the skin exposed by her gown's relatively high slit, and reached for the remote.
"Terry," Don answered, crossing his legs at the ankle where he stood leaning against Will's table.
"Oh, well, as long as it's not Jane." Leaning forward, she forwarded the email to the Capitol Report senior producer while Don tried to stifle his laughter. "You know how she feels about playing like a team."
Sloan looked at Don questioningly when he barked a laugh. For a few moments, reaching over to stroke the shimmering fabric covering her lower back seemed to be his only answer as he and Mac exchanged amused glances.
"What?" Sloan asked them, head turning between where they each were in the office.
Mac finally answered, finishing up the email and leaning back against Will's chest, grabbing his hands and fitting them over her waist. "Jane doesn't think that Genoa is her problem."
Don snorted.
"She insulted Will on Election Night. Mac has decided to make herself Jane's problem," he simplified, smiling when Mac shot him a look of vague contempt. Hers and Jane's mutual animosity was hardly new. She had been protecting her and Will's territory for two years now.
Well, it was new to Will. "Wait, what?"
Mac chose to ignore him, scoffing at Don instead. "You say that like I'm an impediment to her program."
"You called four major sources and told them not to talk to her or her staff," he retorted laughingly, crossing his arms over his chest and clearly enjoying himself.
"Well, they're my sources, I brought them with me to ACN." Will's hands crept down her dress again when a new email popped up in his inbox and she leaned forward in his lap to be able to open it. Deliberately ignoring the backs of his fingers trailing down the length of her spine through the keyhole back of her gown, she scanned the Capitol Report senior producer's reply thanking them for the information before glancing back up at Don and Sloan, almost laughing at the look of pure indignation on Sloan's face in contrast to Don's smirk. "And it's not like Jane is in the habit of making anything her problem, and Jerry was from DC."
Will jostled her with one of his knees, trailing a hand up her back to wrap around his index finger an errant curl that had escaped from her French twist. "Honey, you did what, why—"
"She's a nasty person," she answered him breezily.
"Well, yes." He knew there were problems between New York and DC, but he didn't know they were quite that bad… or that personal.
She tried to, literally, wave him off, and he caught her hand and brought it to his lips. "Charlie knows I've done it, its fine."
"Charlie supports you on this?" Not that he overly surprised, but if Charlie was backing Mac up on a passive aggressive assault on Jane Barrow then it must have been a spectacular argument.
"Sweetheart, you miss out on a lot by not being in the Control Room, trust me," she deflected, voice nonchalant as she once again took his hands and put them around her waist in a silent countermove. Which, well, fuck that because since she slinked out of her office shortly after 9:20 PM he had been touching her and the revelation that she had always been his Dulcinea holding up signs had only made the urge stronger. Well. That and the immense amount of alcohol they'd both consumed. "Loads of things," she continued, blasé. "Massive developments."
Clearly he wasn't going to get the story out of her, so he turned his attention onto Sloan. "Yeah, like Sloan kissing Don."
"Things that are born and live and die all while you're doing the C-block." She kept going, regardless, gesturing to the air in front of her and letting him loose his hands once more. She was adorable, and Will wanted to rile her up more… and to get to the bottom of this thing with Jane Barrow, if only because he was definitely not going to talk about New Year's Eve 1992 in front of Sloan or Don. But when Mac got like this, drawing her back in was usually a self-defeating task.
Sloan didn't disappoint, as usual, gaping at him with a mildly affronted look splashed across her features. "Was that meant to be a backhanded comment on—"
"Yes." Will deadpanned. Or tried to, with Mac squirming in his lap.
"Well… okay," Sloan conceded, deflating a bit before her brain tracked onto another line of thought, and she pointed a finger at him, smiling a bit too triumphantly for tipsy woman for her comeback to actually go anywhere. "Strong criticism coming from the man who's sitting behind his desk working with his fiancé-cum-executive producer on his lap." She paused, titling her head. "Also besides the point, but damn Kenzie do your legs look good right now."
Mac muttered a thank you, sidetracked by yet another email.
Will definitely agreed though, letting his hand wander back to the sky-high slit in her dress. "I think," actually he knew, because he was a fucking lawyer, "it's actually executive producer-cum-fiancé, and does it look like I give a fuck?"
Because he didn't. It wasn't like they were working (well, technically) and it wasn't like the staff would be more shocked by Mac sitting on his lap than some of their other, albeit considerably less romantic, bullshit that they had pulled in the office over the past few years.
MacKenzie sighed happily, and Will figured her tangent was over. "Didn't someone write I was the First Lady of broadcast journalism the other day?"
"No," Will replied quickly. It was entirely possible (although he was a little offended at the notion that she was somehow less powerful than him—the op-ed that had slammed them by connotating her as the wizard behind the curtain and him as the talking head with special effects was closer to the truth than calling Mac the First Lady of anything) but he wanted to see her get a little heated, if only because his head was still spinning and Will thought it was a little unfair of how easily Mac was taking the fact that they first met two decades ago that night. "I think tabloid coverage is going to your head."
She refused to rise to the bait. It was always hit or miss if she had been drinking, and he almost laughed when she wound up agreeing with him. "That's a good title, although it does insinuate I'm only there to look pretty instead of doing the news."
"You also look very pretty while doing the news," Don offered jokingly, although also earnestly, over the rim of his champagne flute. "Which I would know, because I'm often in the Control Room unlike some other people in this room. But you are also a strong independent producer who don't need no man. Or anchor." He frowned, before quirking a small smile on the end of a am amused little exhalation of breath. "I'm not sure where the metaphor would take that."
MacKenzie smiled sincerely at that, taking the compliment and enjoying the ploy. "Thank you, Don."
While still kind of perplexed by Mac and Don's friendship, Will did appreciate it. Mac and her seeming band of little brothers. Although he had Sloan and what Mac once teasingly referred to as his "horde of blondes," so they were probably even.
"No, I think she was right," Sloan then interrupted, frowning into space. "It was an op-ed in the New York Times written by… um… the former EP for World News. Late-nineties. One of the guys whose been saying nice things about us."
"That's a short list," Will snorted.
"Norm Erikson," Mac suddenly remembered. "He took me to Chechnya with him after grad school."
Where you contracted acute hepatitis in a refugee camp and he didn't get you to the hospital until it was almost too late, Will thought a bit protectively, but didn't say anything. Mac was, for some reason, still fond of the old man.
"Yeah, him," Sloan agreed, before looking back to Don and offering him her hand. "Anyway, we're heading back to the party."
"We'll be right out," Mac said, leaning back against him, sighing (happily) again when Don had the presence of mind to shut the door behind him on the way out.
"What does 'for now' mean?" he challenged in response. Even if for nothing, he wasn't going to be the only one giving something up here. Even if he'd only known this girl for a few hours and would probably never see her again.
(He hoped he would. He hoped she would make it big in something and he'd have an excuse to see her again in five years. Ten.)
Something behind her eyes came alight in a dangerous kind of way. "It means that I'm sick of parties getting to decide what we do and do not care about."
"And how do you plan to change that, MacKenzie?" He realized he was actually interested, although still almost entirely cynical. And that his bottle was almost empty.
"I'm… I'm considering journalism," she finally said, kind of sheepish.
He laughed. Not necessarily at her, but at her idealism. "Throwing stones from the outside?"
A pout made itself apparent on her lips.
"Yes, because journalism has never changed countries' directions or affected policy or social change." She paused, audibly setting down her glass down onto the table, running her hands down the front of her evening gown. "My father isn't very keen on it. I wasn't brought up with a very… positive view on reporters. They were treated like more of an impediment than anything else. Or a tool." She frowned deeply. "I want to take back the fourth estate." The gloom that had settled on her face quickly settled, and then dissipated, when she turned her eyes back to him. "What about you? Don't you want to do something? Change something?"
He sighed, pushing the legal pad away from him. "I used to be a felony prosecutor."
"What happened?" Her chin tilted, big brown eyes blinking sympathetically.
He swallowed down the vague insecurity that lingered over his dismissal from the DA's office with another finger of whiskey. "The DA I was working under lost re-election and the new DA cleaned house. About a year and a half ago."
"Why didn't you make the cut?" She poured them both another round, and his eyes flickered to the TV. Thirty-five minutes. Dick Clark kept cutting to the ball in Time's Square. He missed New York in a few ways.
Maybe he could head back to New York. Practice law. Or get into city politics. Or… journalism wasn't entirely a bad idea. He had the qualifications to make it on the cable news circuit, had the connections from within the party.
If you can make there…
He closed his mouth around a sigh, forced himself to answer. She was too earnest, too kind-faced, for him to not. "I was the favorite of a judge that the new DA was trying to get rid of. Thought he was too soft on crime. Which meant he refused to take bribes to shuttle black kids off to private prisons."
"And?"
"And what?" That was the end of the story.
Her eyes got that determined look in them again. Trouble, Will decided. This girl was going to be trouble. He kind of hoped she went into journalism. If he got press secretary like he wanted, he'd be sparring with her in five years. "Don't you want to do something about that?"
A few seconds of silence passed before his mind went back to the original thread of their conversation. "So wait, what did Jane say?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Tell me." He slid his hands to the sides of her waist, curling his thumbs into her back and pushing the pads of his fingers into her flanks, turning his head to nip at her shoulder.
She giggled, turning her head back towards him to nose along his hairline. "I said, don't worry about."
"Clearly you and Charlie are worried about it," he said with a pout. How much did he not know about her? How many secrets was she still keeping to, as she felt, protect him?
Mac sighed, aggrieved this time, trying to keep him from sliding his hands up to the bottoms of her breasts. She'd managed to prevent him from discovering that she'd foregone a bra all evening; she only had to get through twenty more minutes until she could unleash that beast. "She insulted you. And our staff, while were waiting to throw it to her during Election Night."
"When?" His mouth trailed a chain of kisses up to underneath her ear.
He clearly wasn't letting this go, she thought, sighing again. Dramatically. "Election Night."
"No, when during the coverage."
"I don't remember," she tried to dodge, squirming again and feeling him harden under her, through the relatively thin fabric of her dress.
"Mac." He turned her on his lap, and Mac slid her arms around his neck to maintain her balance, completely cognizant of that fact that if anyone came into his office now they'd be getting quite the view of her legs. "Before or after the fight."
Okay, she couldn't avoid answering him when he was looking at her like that, eyes all wide and blue and loving and…
"After," she murmured, trying to not visibly react as he smoothed his palm up and down the entire length of her (albeit stocking-clad) leg.
Something lit up behind his eyes. "Before or after you said yes?"
"Before."
That seemed to really surprise him. "Wait, really?"
"Yes, really, you silly man." She laughed, nipping at his lower lip. "I said yes, didn't I? That didn't just come out of nowhere. The fact that I was pissed at you didn't mean I stopped loving you."
He really was quite astonished. Although, MacKenzie figured, she had been cold in her manner of leaving him in the hair and make-up room. But still, less than an hour after that she had very eagerly accepted his marriage proposal.
"So after I fired you—"
She sighed, watching his head spin up, and tried to correct him. Her treatment of him that night hadn't exactly been entirely fair either, no matter how far gone she had been down the rabbit hole. "After I goaded you into firing me—"
He seemed unfazed by that, talking over her instead. "And told you about the…thing… with the ring, and our fight, you told her—"
"Something along the lines that she could go fuck herself because insulted our… our…" she couldn't quite find the right word, flexing her fingers into the jacket of his tuxedo instead of combing her fingers through his hair. "Brainchild. And you." Everyone, really, but Jane brought Will into first and foremost. And she had been so angry at herself, and at him, for keeping her from walking out of there with her romanticized notion of him intact. They both were holding onto hard-won misconceptions of the other that night. "Yes." She paused, looking down at him. "'Why is this important?"
He kissed her slowly in reply, the hand resting on her thigh coming up to trace from her fine wrist bones to her elbow. "What do you remember about that night?" he asked, after breaking away again.
"1992?" she asked for confirmation, blinking slowly, biting her lip.
"Yes, 1992." He traced the line of her jaw, and she wished she could figure out what was going on in that big brain of his.
MacKenzie opened and closed her mouth around a few aborted sentences, sliding her leg up further onto his lap. "I remember getting ditched by the intern my father had asked to show me around, and then wandering around with a stolen bottle of Dom Perignon, and then stumbling upon a very handsome staffer in the basement and making myself a bit of nuisance—you were too cute to walk away from, I'll have you know—and then kissing him at midnight. And then not being able to find my knickers a few hours later when I snuck out to find a ride home before someone noticed I was missing."
"Do you remember what we talked about at all?"
She frowned, a hand drifting from his shoulder to his bow tie. "Flashes of it. I think I interrogated you about your principles, but that could just be this morning insinuating itself in my mind again."
He chuckled at that, toying with her hair. "My lack thereof of principles. You interrogated me on my lack thereof. Or my unwillingness to pursue them, if I had them. I think you thought I had them."
"Did I?" she giggled, eyes crinkling.
Did she really not remember? He couldn't stop thinking of her, across the years. Maybe because she the first person to innately believe in him, to make him believe he could be more than everything his father told him he was, or maybe just because her face was a sterilized blur of pale skin framed by dark hair, because her name was just a single letter he couldn't place. He'd remembered everything except the most important part. That she was his MacKenzie.
They had always been inevitable. It scared him a bit, the hazy and nebulous machinations of the universe with his MacKenzie acting as the single tying thread. Scared, and excited him, because he could have her now. She wouldn't slip away.
He kept his voice light. "You told me I should be the one delivering speeches, not writing them."
"Oh God," she said, startling before laughing at herself. "I think I told you were too hot to be kept off of television."
"Also that." He snorted.
"Well, I was right," she mused out loud, settling back against him. "What?"
The noise from the bullpen had suddenly increased to a jovial roar, and they both turned their heads to see every television turned to New Year's Rockin' Eve, the ball lighting up within the frame.
"It's not, but it can be," he whispered absently.
MacKenzie slid out of his lap, offering her hand, furrowing her brow at his words. "I didn't say that."
Will shook his head, standing. "No, but… I still can't believe it was you."
(He could. Those weren't quite the right words. It made perfect sense for it to be her, which was why it couldn't be her. It was too neat. But it was MacKenzie, and she had a stubborn habit of popping into his life whenever he needed her the most, of messing up his life and fixing it at the same time with some sort of cosmic grace that God had decided to afford her just to fuck with him.)
"I can believe it was you. Me." She tugged him out into the bullpen where the countdown had begun. "Whichever."
"Why?"
It was thirty seconds to midnight and they were driving off a cliff again. Holding hands on the way down. Will supposed the most important part of that was having faith. And, well, as long as they fell together…
1993 had been a hell of a year. He had a feeling that 2013 was going to be pretty crazy, too, with the lawsuit and rebuilding the ACN name and marriage, probably, at some point, but with the way she was looking at him right now, sliding her arms over his shoulders, pressing close…
"Some things are just meant to be," she whispered, stroking his face like maybe she was just started to get how much this was messing with his head. "Besides, you and I have always had awful timing." Her face split into a wide grin, the one that always made him believe in something greater. That they were greater. "It makes sense," she asserted, tilting her head.
Ten… nine…
"I think we've got it figured out now."
Eight… seven…
"Me too."
Six… five… four…
"Only took us twenty years."
Three… two… one…
He slanted his mouth across hers as cheers rose up, moaning happily when her fingers slid into his hair. Fit his hands around her waist, pulled her flush against him.
MacKenzie, again and always.
He sighed.
Meanwhile, MacKenzie's mind had clicked on, despite the copious amount of alcohol consumed. She thought she knew this one—her father called him a Republican nitwit, scoffing whenever he detected him as the author behind some of Bush's choicer remarks on China, but he wasn't entirely useless. And besides, her father was a Thatcher appointee. He didn't have much room to talk.
God, though, she was entirely wasted.
"Look at you! Your speeches are brilliant, Will McAvoy—"
"I didn't tell you my last name—"
"Don't worry about that," she waved him off. She hadn't meant to let that slip, but whatever. She thought he might be wasted too. She had no idea on how long he had been drinking, after all. If he was wasted too then she'd look like less of an ass. "Your speeches are brilliant. Well, your stances could use a little work, but nobody's perfect. Your writing is brilliant. You're what, thirty—?"
"Twenty-nine, yes."
"And one of Bush's favored speechwriters. You're a favorite in the party. The golden boy speechwriter of the Republican Party. You can—you can get sucked in, Mr. It's Not My Problem, or you can change it! You're hot, to be honest with you, and articulate. Well, I can't entirely speak to articulate, but I think you're pretty hot, and you have a nice voice. You should be delivering these speeches, not staying off to the wings." She huffed a breath, eyes narrowing at him, and for some reason he actually felt accountable to slim slip of a woman. Girl. Whatever. "And so, my question is, don't you want to do something about it?"
She was making his blood boil in more way than one, and he pushed back his chair, throwing up his hands in defeat in her direction. "Yes! Yes, I want to do something about it!"
She squealed triumphantly, stole his bottle, and took a drink straight from it.
"So why don't you?" she asked a moment later, a little serious, a little reflective, setting her glass down onto the table.
The small TV in the corner, long muted, showed thirty minutes to 1993.
He realized then that she was making a similar decision. And maybe he was, too. Did he want to stay with the party? At least in this way. Gingrich and his cronies were pushing the GOP further and further to the right, and with a Democrat like Clinton coming into office he could already predict the squabbling and gridlock and power plays. Is that what he wanted to make his name in?
"I don't know."
They stuck around at the News Night party for another half an hour, making the rounds and having a drink with Charlie, and Leona and Reese (who had surprised everyone by making an appearance away from their own high society parties that they were hopping to and from all night) before finally slipping away.
Will had her backed into the corner of the elevator, covering her, his mouth pressed insistently against hers for all twenty-five floors to the ground floor. By the time the doors slid open to the lobby, she was panting softly, a slow smile pulling at the corners of her swollen lips.
There was nary a taxi to be had at this point of the night in New York City, so it was a company car that takes them home, one of Leona's limousines, which only provided Will with the cover to slide his hands up Mac's legs, circling his thumbs in over the delicate flesh on the inside of her thighs. Not that she was complacent just to sit there. Her fingers were on his collar within moments, unraveling his bow tie and plucking at the buttons at the top of his shirt, her lips fixed on his pulse point while he strayed closer and closer to the crux of her legs.
He glanced back to make sure that the partition was up before laying her down on the seat, splaying his hand on the inside of her thigh, pushing the leg not pinned to the inside of the seat, her right leg, wide.
Thirty blocks to their apartment. On New Year's.
He could get it done.
The slit in her dress was high enough that he could hook his fingers into the waistband of her lacy panties with relative ease, sliding them down to her knees before gliding his palms up the insides of her thighs, pressing his thumb over the bundle of nerves at the apex of her folds with his right hand, and reaching up to her breasts with his left.
The fabric of her gown wasn't forgiving enough that he could pull her neckline down to expose her to him, so he contented himself with leaving wet kisses on the tops of MacKenzie's breasts until she threaded her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck and impatiently tugged his mouth back to hers, pushing her tongue into his mouth without preamble. Her other hand slid under his jacket, fisted in his crisp white shirt, and pulled the hem out from the waistband of his trousers. He inhaled the little moan she gave when he traced her opening with two fingers, collecting moisture before moving to her clit, circling with steadily increasing pressure.
When she bit down on his lower lip, moaning raggedly, the leg pinned to the back of the seat hooking around the back of his thigh, he obligingly dropped his hips, rubbing his erection against her thigh. Tracing his fingers up and down her slit again, he slowed his mouth to a tease before drawing back, placing one last kiss to the corner of her mouth before bracing himself above her.
She whimpered, pouting, looking at him with her big brown eyes. "Honey?" She stretched her neck up so she could kiss his chin. "Please?"
He was too drunk to fuck around after that. She had always been better than anyone else at playing him for a fool. Or for… His mind was still reeling, although his lingering disbelief had dissipated at midnight, like the flip of a switch, and he had solidly moved onto wanting to stretch out the hazy memory of twenty years ago into something new, let it be eclipsed, expanded, written over with new memories, another new start with MacKenzie.
God, he loved her.
It's a physical law of the universe, and damn, if tonight hadn't proven that.
He put all of his knowledge of her body into use, curling his fingers inside of her just how she liked, moving his thumb over her clit with the right amount of pressure, just enough to make her curl her toes inside her sky-high Louboutins, make her press her knees in against his hips. How wet she was driving him crazy, and her hand on his ass led him to ride his hips along her thigh, quickly losing all his sensibilities, the look on her face—open, tender, eyes darkened and pupils blown wide by arousal, cheeks flushed, teeth worrying into a reddened lip—as she looked up at him while he worked her closer and closer to peak threatening to make him lose all of his faculties.
It was then that Will knew he needed to get her off, and quickly, which meant she was probably going to get loud, which the setting was less than ideal for.
Which was how, minutes later, MacKenzie came around his fingers, biting down on his undone bowtie while he scraped his teeth along the extended tendons at the side of her neck, curling his fingers up into her g-spot again and again and again, until her legs trembled, her stifled, swallowed-down screams in his ear.
He spent the rest of the ride calming her down, grinning widely when she swatted his hands away from her head to pull the pins out of her irrevocably-mussed hair herself, shaking it out and trying to force it into some semblance of tidiness. Kissing his nose, she pushed him up, extended a leg, kicked off her underwear, and neatly tucked them into his pants pocket. All the while still trying to catch her breath.
He smirked wider at that, missing the predatory shape that Mac's expression had taken.
When he lifted his hips off the seat to tuck his shirt back in, she took the opportunity to fix his hair with her fingers, and upon finishing, kissed his neck with deliberate slowness, caressing his chest with the pretense of re-buttoning his shirt.
Their conversation after that had been much more subdued. They finished the bottle of Jameson, and then MacKenzie had reached for the remote, turning the TV off mute to catch the last few minutes of New Year's Rockin' Eve before the ball drop.
Will had turned pensive after his outburst. And she didn't know him well enough to feel justified in pushing him more than she already had. Instead, she watched him fiddle with the empty bottle, running her fingers over the pleats at the waist of her dress.
The minutes ticked down without either them realizing.
"You should go back to the party," he said, not unkindly. "Whoever you came with might be back."
She shrugged. "He knows I always wander off." She bit her lip, tightening her fingers in the pink satin. "Unless you want me to leave."
"I don't," he said quickly, before blushing, as if he'd surprised himself. "It's not often that girls in pretty dresses come wandering down here." He blushed harder. "Not that—I mean, you're very pretty. Not just the dress."
She smiled slowly, deciding to toy with him a bit, the liquor heady in her veins pushing her further, and further. Not that she had many inhibitions about men in the first place, but she really, really wanted to touch him. And rather Will than any of the boys upstairs. "You don't have to say that just because I called you hot."
"I'm not," he mumbled, rather serious about it all.
He was a bit of Midwestern Republican square, but Mackie thought that she liked him. He had principle.
"You're beautiful."
Beautiful. She couldn't quite grin at that; it affected her too much, especially in her inebriated state. She was cute, sometimes. Sometimes pretty. But no one had ever called her beautiful before, except her father.
She kissed him.
He seemed surprised by that.
"Are you su—"he asked when she pulled back, blinking slowly at her, his hands, resting under her elbows made clumsy by the amount of alcohol he'd consumed, readjusting a few times before figuring out a hold.
"Shut it," she muttered, smiling through half-closed eyelids, before pressing her mouth back to his as Dick Clark started counting down to the new year. His tongue slid along her lower lip, and when she opened her mouth to him he tasted like whiskey. Carefully, she climbed out of her seat and onto his lap, laughing into the kiss when a minute later (to raucous applause from the television) he stood, lifting her up onto the table top and leaning down over her, large warm hands sliding to span her corseted waist.
It felt like something more than just New Years, more than just alcohol and a random stranger. It felt like the beginning and ending of something.
She leaned into him the entire walk to the elevator, aftershocks rippling through her thighs and belly, devising methods to wipe the smug grin off his face while he supported her with his arm around her waist
Deciding that sometimes the best strategies were the simplest, she simply shoved him up against the wall as soon as the elevator doors closed and slid her hands to his belt buckle, deftly undoing it, opening his trousers, and before he could protest, had a hand wrapped around his cock.
"Your turn," she whispered wickedly, watching his eyes clench shut.
"Honey," he gasped, tightening his hands in the fabric covering her ass. "Um… shouldn't we wait until… aren't there cameras…"
"They can't see anything."
Or if they did, who gave a fuck, this was a private elevator in a private building, and she was sure the security guards minding the tapes had seen more interesting things in their time. Besides, in a few minutes they'd be up to their floor.
He was already fairly erect, the head of him beaded with pre-cum, and MacKenzie ran her thumb over it before teasing the pulsing vein on the underside of his cock, starting off with soft touches and teasing caresses until he began to thrust into her hand, his head tilted back against the wall. Pressing suckling kisses under his jaw, she worked a leg between his, pushing him as quickly and as far as she dared.
His hands tightened in her skirt as they approached the top floor, his breath escaping in quick pants. "MacKenzie," he half-whined, half-warned. "You gotta stop."
She waited until his hips jerked into her hand to finally slow down, squeezing the base of him before letting off entirely. Growling, he immediately turned them so she was the one up against the wall, and Mac squealed when he hoisted her up onto the railing; her legs wrapped around his waist in a grab for stability while he once again began attacking her neck and the tops of her breasts with his mouth, impatient hands pushing her diamond necklace out of the way so he could tongue the curve of her sternum.
When the elevator chimed to announce their arrival home, she expected him to let her down. Instead Will scooped her into her arms and, shrieking, she wound her arms around his neck and tightened her legs around him.
How he managed to get the zipper on her gown all the way down by the time he set her on the dining room table she'd never quite figure out, but the next few minutes were a blur of the two of them fighting to get the other one undressed. MacKenzie won, if only because after getting her arms out of her sleeves, he was confronted with the fact that she hadn't been wearing a bra all evening (the back of her dress being quite too low and the cut of the bodice forgiving enough that she could get away without one) and was summarily distracted by flushed breasts and hardened nipples.
This allowed her to wrestle him out of his jacket and shirt, although tugging his undershirt over his head proved to be a bit of a difficulty with his teeth worrying a taut nipple. Shivering, she settled for curling her toes into his waistband, pushing his trousers and boxers down to puddle at his feet in one pass, the belt buckle hitting the wood floor with a distinctively metallic noise. Releasing her nipple with a wet sound, he spread her out on the table, reaching back to remove her high heels from her feet, tossing them behind him before wrapping her legs back around his hips, pulling her across the glossy tabletop until their groins met.
Christ, he thought, when she bit her lip, arching her back on the hard surface, thrusting her tits up and flexed her hips into his, rubbing herself along his aching cock. Counting to ten, he rubbed circles into her calves with his thumbs before reaching up to ease down her thigh-high stockings, keeping eye contact with her the whole time.
"Take me to bed," she murmured, reaching for him. "We're not twenty anymore," she added, almost impishly.
He'd fucked her on the table, hadn't he? Only bothering to push her evening gown (pink, soft pink, he hadn't seen Mac in pink in years) down under her breasts and push her skirts up enough to get between her legs. Not that she had minded, he had thought.
"I didn't think you had it in you," she said on the end of a fond laugh when he drew her up, shucking her gown off onto the floor before gathering her back against him.
"What?" he asked, leaning back from pressing kisses along her neck.
She shook her head, wrapped up in the memory. "Nineteen year old me thought that you were a bit of a square, dear. Although a very cute square. Working all by yourself on New Year's. You surprised me though."
"Really?" he humored her, lifting her easily to walk the short distance to their bedroom, trying to watch out for her shoes.
"You had me on the table, darling," she said liltingly, digging her heels into his hamstrings.
"It was a conference room, it seemed the most efficient place. And I've had you on tables, several of them, since." He had, one particularly persistent memory being the time they got away with the table in the conference room off the bullpen back when they were dating the first time around. It had been during the rolling coverage of Katrina and neither of them had gone home in days, they'd finally sent the staff home at 2AM for sleep, and they'd gotten into a shouting match over something, were both exhausted and frustrated, and, well…
Mac had always been good at getting him to do things he wouldn't normally do.
"You're still a bit of a square," she said as if she was merely thinking out loud.
"Thank you?" he hedged, laying her down on their bed, and then tugged his undershirt over his head before moving to cover her.
She sighed. "It's what's nice about you."
It was, she never had to worry about him thinking she was being overbearing with her journalism ethics or early morning phone calls (now early morning pillow talk) about the A-block or her compulsive need to be at the office exactly at 8 AM (although he was usually an hour or two after her, except for days with major stories popping up) or her… just… her. She never needed to put on an act, or try to act like she was more than…
He never gave her rules about who she should or shouldn't be. He just liked her.
"Okay?"
She didn't quite know how to explain it. She thought he knew, anyway. They'd had this discussion already, their first morning back together, after the excitement and adrenaline had receded. She flipped them so that she was on top, and his hands came up to push her hair out of her face.
"You're my square," she told him definitively, a little breathlessly, kissing his cheek when he rolled his eyes at her.
"Yeah, and you're my pain in the ass EP," he answered, affectionate in his way, letting his hands wander the span of her curves before settling on her hips, urging her to move.
"Damn straight I am," she replied, certain, and spread her legs so that her knees were wide apart and she could lower herself to him. "I make your squareness marketable."
"I was an anchor before I met you, remember?" he retorted, his last few words ending on a relieved groan when she reached down and rubbed the head of him against her entrance before slowly sinking down, rolling her hips, giving him a few testing strokes before starting them in a languid, deliberate rhythm.
"Shh… I'm what makes you great," she whispered, still a bit teasing, stretching her arms up to brace her hands over his shoulders, eyes sliding closed, feeling the delicious stretch of her muscles around his erection.
His lips closed in around her earlobe. "You're what made me go into journalism."
That made her lift herself up onto her elbows. "Wait—"
"No, really," he protested softly, looking at her in that earnest way he had. "You lit the fire under my ass. Or my ass on fire." He paused, running his hands from her hips to her belly to her breasts and back, just feeling her under his hands, the temperature of the evening slowly settling into something slow and tender as they sobered up. "We've still haven't decided that, have we?" he asked, smiling.
She grinned, the expression slowly taking over for the shock she knew had been on her face shortly before it. "I think we decided I was the one setting the fire, either way, but—"
Will interrupted her in a way that she knew he just wanted to get what he needed to say out. Needed to, without her trying to soften them with her usual way of minimizing the impact of his words so he wouldn't feel vulnerable, or exposed. Or maybe that had been for her, he thought. He'd said plenty of mean things to her since she came back…
He didn't really care. He didn't mind being vulnerable to her anymore.
"You stumbled into my life at a point where I was trying to figure out what to do next."
"And?" she breathed, eyes locked onto his. Soft. Always soft. He reached up and stroked the backs of his fingers down one of her cheeks.
"And you asked me why something wasn't my problem. You made me remember why I wanted to practice law in the first place, even if I had lost the taste for it by the end of Bush's term." She let him flip them so that he was on top, traced his calves with the soles of his feet, trailed her hands up and down his back while he talked, started rocking his hips into hers ever so slowly. "So… after Clinton was inaugurated, I gave myself a time limit. Four more years of trying to change the party, or I would start trying to change it from the outside. You made me remember that I wanted to actually do something. And then you were gone again in a few hours. And I couldn't even remember your name."
"Billy." She curled her fingers into the skin beneath his shoulder blades, her legs rising to wrap around his waist.
"It's always been you, MacKenzie," he laughed, lifting himself up onto his elbows, giving her a few long experimental strokes until he found the right angle, the one that made her tighten around him, made her dig her fingernails into his back, her eyelids flutter just so.
She hummed happily, fitting her limbs even tighter around him and drawing her bottom lip between her teeth. Noticing him watch her, she smiled and brought his face down to hers, running her tongue along the seam of his lips before he opened his mouth to her, kissing her unhurriedly, but purposefully, burying his face in her hair on the pillow when they broke for air.
"You were the first person who didn't laugh at me for wanting to…" she said then, turning her face towards his, carding her fingers through his hair. "I think I actually used the phrase 'take back the fourth estate,' didn't I?" He laughed with her, trying to pick apart the memory. She might have. She probably did. He kissed her cheek. "And then… you were the first person who wanted to do it with me."
"Wait, really?" He turned them to their sides to get a good look at her, pinning her leg over his waist to
She tried to pull him back on top of her, succeeding only half-way, gasping when the angle hit just right inside her, the ridge of his pelvis riding on her clit, and he chased that for a while, until her eyes closed and mouth opened, little puffs of air escaping between parted lips.
"You know how politicians feel about reporters," Mac managed to get out a few minutes later, when he had slowed their movements to a tantalizing grind, settling against her so he could suck marks into the pale skin of her shoulder.
He looked at her, beginning to tie the threads together. It wasn't just him that walked away from that night with a new direction. "So, before that party…"
She shifted under him restlessly, moving her hips in a counter rhythm that quickly sparked his interest. "I was considering going into politics. Or was resigned to it."
His hands fitted over her breasts, thumbs circling the deep, pinkened buds before moving to fit over her hips, pinning them to the mattress while he began to deepen his thrusts, making them harder and longer while still refusing to increase their tempo.
"That's a scary thought," he rasped into her ear, pressing a kiss to the delicate skin behind her earlobe.
"Billy!"
He snorted, punctuating her indignation with a particularly hard press of his hips. "No, I mean…" He scraped his teeth against her neck. "Would we have met again?"
"I don't know," she cried, furling her limbs around him. "Maybe. It doesn't matter." Her tongue felt loosened by lust and love and… just God, she loved him so much, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut when he at last took them faster and let go of his grip on her hips. "You made me felt like it mattered and I did it and now… we're here. And I like here."
He made an indistinct sound, a kind of half-groan, half-grunt, and in the next moment she was on top of him, stretching up, so that he could watch her ride him, smiling breathlessly when the hand not bracing her lower back moved so he could ride his thumb flush against her clit.
"I like here too," Will rasped when she started making the high, throaty noises that always predicated a particularly loud orgasm, before nipping at her lips so that she would open her eyes again.
She jolted awake an hour later, dozing on Will's shoulder where they had settled under the conference table—still pretty drunk, confused, and more than a bit dazed at her immediate surroundings. Crawling out from under the table, Mackie tried to sweep the wrinkles from her gown, before running a hand under her eyes to wipe at her mussed make up, fingers coming away smeared with black.
"Shit," she whispered, feeling the grit of dried sweat on her cheeks. The time on the television read just past 2 AM. The party upstairs would definitely be winding down, and if her father hadn't come back, she'd definitely be needing to find a ride back to the embassy or someone willing to drive her to Alexandria. "Shit, shit, shit."
She looked down at the man still asleep under the table.
Yeah, she needed to go before he got caught having slept with the British Ambassador's teenage daughter. She couldn't let that happen to him.
Shit. She had no idea where her underwear was.
Although, she considered, flipping over a blank page on his legal pad, he kind of deserved them. She clicked his pen back on, thinking about what would be appropriate to write.
"Thanks for everything. And all the best of luck in your endeavors, even if you don't come around on them being your problem. –M."
He woke up a few hours after that with a raging headache, wondering where the beautiful girl in the pink dress had slipped off to and completely unable to remember what 'M' stood for.
Maggie?
MacKenzie fell back into bed wearing one of his long-sleeved shirts and a clean pair of underwear, curling into his side and sighing contentedly when he pressed a kiss to her forehead, drawing the covers tighter around her.
"Why did you leave without saying goodbye?" he asked, stroking his fingers through her hair.
She frowned, propping herself up on his chest. "I left a note."
"You didn't sign your name," he rebutted mildly, holding her hair back away from her face, scanning her face, still flushed, but freshly scrubbed of make-up. There was still a smudge of black under each eye, though, and in the morning he'd see the sun reflect in them, her eyeliner ringing her dawn-soft gaze.
She worried her lip. "You had just slept with the British Ambassador's teenage daughter. I couldn't let… if we had been found. I couldn't let that happen to you." She hesitated then, moving to lay her head on his shoulder, letting a hand circle his heart. "Did you really wonder who I was?"
"Sometimes," he answered honestly. And then laughed. "Sometimes I tried to convince myself you were just a dream, but I had the note."
"You weren't on vertigo medication back then," she needled without any real intent to goad.
Will knew. "What can I say? I've already called you special."
She made a soft noise of agreement, shifting with him when he turned onto his side, tangling their legs together, sleep pulling at them both.
"Sing something for me, Billy," she murmured faintly, eyes closed.
The pads of his fingers traced her spine like it was a familiar roadmap, his voice soft in her ear. "Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and old lang syne?"
She laughed, fixing herself tighter against him. "Ask them to marry you twenty years later?"
He shushed her.
"For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we'll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne."
Thanks for reading!