AN: I have absolutely no idea where this came from. Seriously, no idea. But it happened, so here it is – a MacGyver fairytale!AU, starring Patricia Thornton as a cursed Queen with a heart of stone (supposedly), and Jack as her ever-faithful Captain of the Guard, complete with teenage!Mac, Bozer and Riley and an ensemble cast.
Trigger warning on this first chapter of slight, passive suicidal ideation (for a brief period of time, a character considers allowing others to kill them).
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Phoenix, there lived a Queen. She was, of course, beautiful, but she was also a clever, just ruler, cool-headed and very capable of making decisions for the good of all. Under her rule, the kingdom flourished.
However, this particular Queen was also rumoured to have a heart of stone. She had plenty of suitors, yet turned every one away, seemingly without care, without being moved in the slightest by their words or their gifts or even their actions.
And one day…one of those suitors, who happened to be a very powerful wizard, took the Queen's rejection of him very, very poorly.
He cursed the Queen.
And, as is often forgotten in these tales, he cursed her home and her loyal servants and aides as well.
He cursed them to remain trapped behind the castle walls, like the Queen's heart was encased in stone, and he cursed them to remain unchanging and unmoved, like the Queen's heart was.
And, as is often left out of these tales, so as not to scare children, he cursed her entire kingdom too, simply out of spite.
Now, the Queen was herself a powerful witch.
But still, she could not break the curse.
And so, she was forced to watch as her kingdom fell into disarray, as fear and partisanship replaced the hope and unity she'd cultivated.
That was, undoubtedly, the cruellest part of the scorned suitor's curse.
Queen Patricia, the last of the Thornton line, lifted her hands from the crystal ball that served as her only window into the outside world.
The images she'd seen were much the same as the images she'd seen every day for the last 200 years.
After she'd been cursed, the kingdom had turned against magic.
It was, of course, part of her curse. She was doomed to forever, for all eternity, have to witness the downfall of her people, the decay of her kingdom, and be powerless to fight it.
Now, it was not only witches and wizards who were persecuted for their magic and often burned at the stake, but also others whom the masses decided must have magic too, given their talents or their eccentricities, or, often, both.
Too many a gifted (too gifted, apparently) healer had died in flames.
The Order of Engineers, an order of noble, clever, innovative people, who travelled the kingdom on the service of their ruler to help the common people solve unconventional or seemingly unsolvable problems in unconventional ways, was now thought to be extinct outside the walls of her castle.
She gave a small nod, one that would have seemed, perhaps, to most as nothing but cool acceptance, acknowledgement, but, to the man sitting in the corner of her study, was distinctly sad, angry and guilty, all at once.
Sir Jack Dalton, Knight of Phoenix, Captain of the Queen's Guard, had his feet up on a very expensive coffee table, something that the Queen ignored.
(She'd given up on Jack and his bad habit regarding her finest coffee table about 90 years ago.)
'Still looking bad, Patty?'
(That was very, very far from being a proper form of address for her. Jack knew that. He did it anyway.)
(She'd given up on that decades ago too. A lot of formality tended to fall away when you'd spent 200 years trapped within the grounds of your castle under a curse with a small group of those most loyal to you. Besides, Jack Dalton was a very stubborn man…and he had a way of getting under your skin.)
She inclined her head again, then spoke, her voice reflecting that sadness and anger and guilt that he could read so clearly across her face, an almost-defeated note in there too.
'It never changes, Jack.'
There was a knock on the door, and a moment later, the door to the Queen's study unlocked and opened by magic.
In stepped a very short, brunette woman of about the Queen's and Jack's age (middle-years) and a slim, blonde woman of about twenty.
Matty, the Queen's Spymaster, and Cage, her apprentice.
The four gathered around the crystal ball as Queen Patricia started to report what she'd seen.
Given their curse, there was probably no point in continuing their weekly meetings.
Still, they did, if only to have something to do.
And because hope, frail though it was, was very, very hard to kill.
Seventeen-year-old Angus MacGyver, known to his loved ones (not that he had many left, not at all) as Mac, and everyone else as MacGyver (why his parents had named him Angus, he'd never know), gave a little nod as he put the finishing touches on the little tool he'd constructed, painstakingly, from what little bits and bobs he'd found in the cell of the town prison he'd been locked in.
(He was thankful that it was not often cleaned, and that he had plenty to work with.)
He stared up at the solidly-barred window high in the wall.
It was dark, and moonrise would be soon.
It was almost time to enact his escape plan, to use that little tool.
But not yet.
He still had to wait a little longer.
He gave a sad sigh and slumped to the floor.
Two weeks ago, he'd been a blacksmith's apprentice, to Alfred Pena, one of the town's blacksmiths, a true master of the craft.
Pena had been very, very good to Mac, and the teen thought of him almost as a father.
(Mac was an orphan; his mother was dead, his father gone. He had no blood family left to speak of; the last, his grandfather, had passed away about a year and a half ago.)
Then, Mac had returned to the smithy from running an errand on the other side of the town, to find that the building (thankfully isolated from others, for fire-safety reasons) had been annihilated by an explosion.
Two days later, Pena's widow had given birth to their first child, a little girl whom she'd named Annabelle.
Three days after that, Mac had been found guilty of murder by witchcraft and sentenced to death by burning at the stake.
(There'd been rumours of a wizard in the area, one known only as The Ghost, who delighted in killing with his magic by causing explosions, but as soon as the town guard had come for him, mere hours after Pena's death, Mac had known that he was to wear the blame, not the mysterious wizard.)
(After all, almost all the townspeople had been suspicious of him for years. There was, it was said, something very odd about him, and with the rumours – which were true, though Mac had been sensible enough to never confirm them – that his grandfather was an Engineer, and the disappearance of his father, surrounded by whispers of threats and dark matters, and incidents like the Mechanical Scarecrow Incident in Farmer Wilson's cornfield…)
Now, the night before he was to be killed, Mac was finally ready to escape the prison, and the town, and live a life of exile, trying to find somewhere to belong.
(He was very, very lucky that he would not be going alone – despite his protests to the contrary, his best friend since the age of nine, Wilt Bozer, nineteen, a tailor and a fellow orphan, would be going with him.)
The blonde held up the little tool he'd made, to pick the lock on his cell, among other things.
It hadn't taken him nine days to make it.
It hadn't taken nine days for him and Bozer to concoct their escape plan in secretive, night-time visits, aided by a sympathetic member of the town guard, an older man named Arthur Ericson who'd taught Mac and Bozer when they'd been in school.
No, Mac had been too caught up in his grief, his anguish, his guilt (it should have been him, not Pena, not when the blacksmith had a wife and a baby on the way and Mac had no-one save his mentor and Bozer) to think straight, to prepare, to do what he did best.
(In secret, Mac's grandfather had taught him the craft of an Engineer as best as he could, but he had passed before Mac's training could be called anywhere near complete.)
And, a little voice in his head that Mac really didn't want to hear, maybe he hadn't wanted to live. Mac shoved that voice back into a box to shut it up.
He wanted to live now.
That was all that mattered.
It was almost time now.
All he had to do was wait for Bozer's distraction to start.
He heard footsteps, coming towards his cell, and Mac's brow furrowed as panic started to rise in his chest.
This was not part of the plan.
There shouldn't be anyone here, not now…
His eyes widened as several of bars of his cell were warped and bent, pushed outwards as if by an invisible force, an opening appearing, large enough for him to pass through.
Magic.
A shadowy figure walked into his field of vision, head covered by the hood of their cloak, their face in shadow.
'Come on!'
It was a female voice, and she gestured to the hole.
Mac, shaking himself out of his shock, found his voice again.
'What are you doing?'
The woman snorted, as if she couldn't believe he was asking that.
'Saving your life! Do you want to burn to death?' She gestured to him, clearly telling him to hurry up. 'We don't have much time, my distraction won't-'
There was a muffled boom, then shouts, and then, what looked like fireworks lit up the patch of sky visible in Mac's cell's window.
Startled, surprised, Mac's mysterious would-be saviour tossed back the hood of her cloak, revealing dark, slightly-wild, curly hair and a pretty face. A young face. She couldn't have been any older than Mac, surely. She stared at the fireworks through the window for a moment, then turned back to the blonde.
'What-'
He gave a very wry little smile.
'That is the distraction part of my own escape plan…'
The girl cursed.
'Oh, great.'
Two weeks later, Mac, Bozer and Mac's magical would-be rescuer, Riley Davis, sat in the woods, cold, wet, hungry, tired and scared, under a makeshift shelter that Mac had put together using sticks, tree bark and leaves, as Bozer cooked the last of their meagre food supply in a fire set into a hole in the ground (to minimize the chances of it being seen), hole and fire both made by Riley with her magic.
Mac pulled his cloak tighter around him and toyed with his Engineer's knife (the cloak and the knife - which wasn't really a knife, at least not just a knife; it was a multi-purpose tool and a signature of the Order of Engineers – were two of the very few possessions of his that Bozer had been able to save), as Riley, too, pulled her own cloak tighter around her with a shiver.
The collision of their two plans had led to neither going well. In fact, both had become disasters, and the three of them had been lucky to manage to escape Mac and Bozer's former hometown.
Now, they were wanted and had a bounty on their heads, every town guardsman, lord's man-at-arms and bounty hunter in the area pursuing them.
For two weeks, they'd been running and hiding, foraging for food and stealing when they needed to.
As Bozer hummed half-heartedly to himself as he cooked, Mac and Riley made eye contact across the fire-pit.
They knew, they all knew, that this situation was untenable. It couldn't continue.
Sooner or later, they'd find themselves captured (or, more likely, worse), or they'd get sick, either from cold or starvation.
Riley shivered again as her stomach growled, then spoke, addressing Mac, voice sharper and snarkier than she'd intended, a product of being cold, wet, miserable, hungry and frightened.
'If you'd just executed your big escape plan earlier, we wouldn't be in this mess.'
Bozer looked up from his cooking, a little wide-eyed, and tried to mediate, to cut off the argument they could all feel approaching before it really got going.
'Sweetheart-'
Riley shot him a glare and cut him off. Bozer had been flirting with her heavily pretty much as soon as Mac had shown up to his and Bozer's planned meeting point with her in tow. She did not appreciate it, even if he was kind-of cute.
'I told you not to call me that!'
He put his hands up in supplication.
'Honeybun…'
Bozer trailed off as his best friend shot him a look. Then, Mac looked back over at Riley, tugging his own cloak closer around him.
'I didn't ask you to save me.'
There was more than enough bitterness, enough pain, in his voice that Bozer shot the blonde a very, very concerned look (he had known that for a while, after Pena's death, Mac had lost the will to live, but surely, he'd regained it…though Bozer supposed that with how dire their situation was, and Mac's tendency to blame himself for everything he possibly could – such as possibly dragging his best friend and their new friend to their deaths, not that Mac could be called responsible for their situation at all, in Bozer's mind – his will might be wavering a little again), and even Riley's expression softened.
After a moment of silence, Mac sighed, reached up and ran a hand through his slightly-damp hair. Bozer got up from his spot before the pot, and crouched down again beside Mac, putting a hand on his shoulder, eyes still concerned. The blonde looked between him and Riley, who had a spark of curiosity in her eyes.
(Riley was clever – very clever - and also rather inquisitive by nature, though not quite as curious as Mac was.)
(A week ago, on a far better, more optimistic night, she and Mac had put together a makeshift chess set with some river pebbles, and Bozer had gotten to witness his best friend lose a best-of-three series of games, something he'd never seen before.)
After another moment of silence, Mac looked down at the fire, then spoke, his voice soft and sad, a note of pain underlying it all.
'My mom died when I was five. My dad left when I was ten. My grandfather raised me…' He swallowed, and Bozer squeezed his shoulder again. '…and he died a year and a half ago.' He reached into his pocket and pulled out his Engineer's knife, his grandfather's most precious possession, which he'd gifted to Mac when he'd turned twelve. The tool was all he had left of the man now, and Mac took comfort in toying with it to keep his hands busy. 'Al…Al became family. Like Bozer.' Mac turned his head a little and managed a very wan little smile at his best friend, the only family he had left, who returned it, squeezing his shoulder again. 'And then…'
He trailed off, wiping his eyes. Riley was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the blacksmith's death, of course. He finally looked over at the girl, and saw understanding, empathy in her eyes.
A very soft expression for her, tough-as-nails, determined to prove it, and with more walls than a fortress.
'…You thought it should have been you.' She swallowed, looking down at the fire-pit. 'You might even have wished it was.'
Mac swallowed and nodded, before joining Bozer in looking at Riley with understanding and sorrow. The girl was silent for a long moment, just staring at the fire, before she seemed to come to a decision and looked up at them.
'My dad was an asshole. Gambler, drunkard, thief and abusive.' Some sort of fire burned in her eyes, and she looked away, but not down, staring into the trees. 'When I was thirteen, he showed up at me and my mom's house and…he tried to throw her around.' Riley paused, swallowed, hesitated a moment, before continuing, her voice softer, confessional, a little vulnerable, even. 'I…I used my magic to protect her and…and I…I…I killed him.' She hesitated to look up at her new friends, a little fearful of their reactions. Both of these boys seemed to exude goodness; Riley doubted that there was a mean bone in their bodies. Besides, Mac, at the very least, seemed to have an extremely strong aversion to killing; three days ago, they'd had to construct (or rather, Mac had, mostly – he'd directed them, and had done most of the building himself, as he was the best and fastest at it) a trap for two bounty hunters who'd been chasing them, and Mac had very specifically devoted much effort to ensuring that it would not kill or severely injure the two men. But she didn't see revulsion in their eyes; in fact, she was quite sure that she saw some kind of sympathy, sympathy that she'd had to do such a terrible thing. 'When…when they came…' She didn't need to specify who they were; witch-hunters, an angry mob of townspeople, the guardsmen, soldiers, it didn't matter. It was all the same in the end. '…my mom said she'd done it.' Bozer shifted closer to her, and put a hand on her shoulder, a comforting gesture, not a flirtatious one. 'They…she let them…she burned.' Riley refused to let the tears fall, and swallowed the lump in her throat. She took a breath, a little shuddery, then another, deeper and steadier, then lifted her chin. 'I couldn't save my mom, but…I promised myself that I'd practice my magic, grow stronger. And use my powers to save people from dying like she did. For her.'
There was clear admiration in both boys' eyes now. Both of them spoke, half over each other.
'I'm sorry, Riley.'
'Riley, I am so, so sorry…'
Bozer squeezed her shoulder again, then lifted his hand off her, and once it was gone, Riley realized that she quite liked that warm weight there, almost missed it.
The dark-skinned boy reached for some humour, some levity, some light in the darkness, in the way that they'd realized, happily, they all had a tendency to. Bozer pointed at both of his companions, an expression somewhere between a grin and a smirk on his face.
'Eh, maybe we're all gonna grow up to be heroes!' His grin-smirk faltered. 'All good heroes have a tragic backstory…' Riley glanced over at him, as Mac scooted over a little to put a comforting hand on his best friend's shoulder. Bozer sighed, wetness appearing in his eyes. 'My little brother died when we were kids. It was an accident involving my dad's sword…' He swallowed. '…and then, three years ago, my parents were killed in a coach robbery gone wrong.'
Riley looked over at him, sought out his eyes.
'I'm sorry, Bozer.'
He nodded in thanks, then, after another moment of silence and shared grief, Bozer got up and rubbed his hands together.
'Now, who's hungry?'
He started ladling out three bowls of some unidentifiable stew, which brightened both Mac and Riley's moods a little.
Bozer was an excellent cook, and had managed to do some frankly wondrous things with what food they'd had in their two weeks on the run.
AN: So, what'd you think of that? Did I do a good job adapting canon elements to this AU? I am really sorry for killing off Diane Davis, and Mr and Mrs Bozer (and slightly less sorry for killing off Ellwood…), but for the sake of this story's plot, it had to happen. An Engineer's knife is, of course, this AU's version of a Swiss Army knife…
