Author's Notes: Not only was I a little underwhelmed by the season premiere, but I am just now realizing how difficult this season is going to be to write about. Is every episode going to begin and end by focusing on the lawsuit deposition? If so, timelines are going to get terribly confusing. Not only is the show always about a year and a half behind current events, but now we will be dealing with two distinctly separate points in time. I feel like we've entered some weird time-space continuum and somehow have to write as if we exist in both worlds! Here's my first attempt at season two fic. You can't say I'm not trying…
We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic
~Van Morrison, Into The Mystic
He stared at the closed door, willing it to open. He'd looked at his watch so many times in the past hour that his elbow and wrist were starting to ache from the repetitive motion of raising and twisting them so he could view the time.
"It won't work, trust me, I've tried" Maggie said in a soft monotone.
"What?" Will asked. "What won't work?"
"Trying to will the time to pass faster. It's a universal constant. An invariable, immovable force." This new Maggie concerned him at times, but Mackenzie assured him it was normal. Maggie had seen things that her Midwestern farm town upbringing hadn't prepared her for. And now, here she was, back in a cushy office building in midtown Manhattan, and it was all a little too incongruous. There were still pictures in her head of starving refugees and child soldiers and leaving behind women who begged her to take their children with her.
And though that explanation had been informative and useful, he hated to think about how he had treated Mackenzie when she first came back from a war zone. No comforting tones and reassuring touches for her…no. Just yelling and cursing and awful acts of retribution. Sometimes he could be a real bastard.
Come on Mac…walk out that door, please.
"Doesn't mean I can't look at my watch every five minutes and hope she comes out that door" Will muttered. Maggie nodded. Will stared at the door…and Maggie stared at him. And they both prayed for this interminable wait to end.
"Why are you two doing this?" Maggie asked, looking right through him in an utterly haunting way. Shit, if the girl didn't snap out of this soon, Will was going to have to send her to therapy or rehab or maybe Fiji. Mac had always said she thought Fiji would be the one place she could completely relax. So far away from everything and everyone she knew that she would be forced to let go of her everyday concerns. Fiji sounded damn good right about now.
"Why are we doing what Maggie?" Will asked, trying not to sound irritated. She was so damn skittish lately.
"Pretending you don't care. Pretending you don't know what you want when it's staring you right in the face. There's no one else between the two of you but yourselves, and that's a waste. A terrible waste" Maggie finished, staring off into space again. New Maggie was eerily insightful too, damn it.
They spent another two hours in silence, until the door finally opened and Rebecca Halliday's harried young law clerks rushed from the room, eager to be out of there. The lawyer slowly and deliberately walked through the door, as cool and as calm as she had been when she entered that room, some fifteen hours earlier.
Will could barely lift himself off the floor at this point. What the hell he had been thinking spending the evening on the hard, unforgiving industrial carpet was beyond him. He was fifty-two years old for God's sake! These knees just didn't work like they used to.
For a moment he and Maggie stared at each other, wondering if they should go into the room. Was Mac taking a moment to gather her composure? Would she even welcome their company?
"Should we?" he started, and then wondered when exactly he and Maggie had become joined at the hip. Probably when she got back from Uganda, and Mackenzie's understanding nature and his uncomplicated, forthright behavior were the very things the young woman craved. She needed things to be simple and straightforward for a while, and despite their own soap opera-like personal relationship, he and Mackenzie seemed to be the only ones who could give that to her right now.
"Maybe?" Maggie answered his question with a shrug. They comically collided at the doorway and Will gallantly backed up and allowed Maggie to enter first. Mackenzie sat, slumped over the table, with one arm stretched out before her and one numbly tracing circles on the hardwood table.
"Mac?" Maggie whispered, and Will was secretly glad she had spoken first. His deep baritone might have startled her, but Maggie's mousy whisper wouldn't.
"Hmm?" Mackenzie answered.
"Are you ok?" Maggie took a step toward her, but Mackenzie started laughing…cackling really.
"I am a witness in a multi-million dollar wrongful termination suit as well as a hearing to determine if we, and by that I really mean me since I am the Executive Producer of this show, fucked up so badly by airing a totally fucked-up story, that we should all be driven out of journalism for-fucking-ever. So, the answer to your question is no, I am very much not alright." Mackenzie finished her speech and stood unsteadily. Will reached out and grabbed her arm before she could topple over.
"Maggie, could you call Lonny for me and tell him I'm ready to leave? We'll meet him down in the lobby." Will looked at the now spiky- haired associate producer and nodded his head at her, as if to reassure her that he would take care of Mackenzie. She didn't need to hold a vigil for the woman any longer.
"Where are your things?" Will asked.
"My office I guess" Mackenzie replied, seemingly rather unsure herself.
"Let's go gather them then" he said as he guided her to the elevator. She rocked unsteadily against him, so he wound his arm around her waist and pulled her back into his chest.
And I wanna rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
Then magnificently we will float
Into the mystic
The elevator stopped and they lurched into each other, but they were both too tired and too numb to care. Maggie was standing there with their briefcases and coats in her hands and practically pushed them back into the elevator and bid them a good night.
"Think she'll ever stop being glued to our sides?" Will asked Mackenzie.
"I think she needs some support. I just wish we weren't a little too mired in our own disaster to help her through hers." Mackenzie's tone frightened him almost as much as Maggie's far-away sotto voce did.
What had happened to all of them? He was still blaming himself for the American Taliban piece and everything that came after, Jim was still blaming himself for climbing aboard a campaign bus and leaving Jerry Dantana to screw them over seven ways to Sunday, and Maggie was wandering the halls looking a little too much like Fantine from Les Miserables. And Mackenzie…Mackenzie was doing a damn good job of holding them all together. Until the end of the night, when he could see her leave the building as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders and she didn't know if she'd be able to bear it much longer.
"Dinner?" he asked, hoping he could get her to eat something. Because these last few weeks he had been trying to tempt her to breakfast, or lunch, or even a drink after work, figuring at least the alcohol would help her sleep. Nothing worked though…not anymore. She was becoming a pale shadow of her former self and he felt helpless, and useless, and like he was the one to blame for all of it. Because sure, if seventeen different things hadn't conspired, Genoa wouldn't have gotten through their usually flawless senses of detection. But the reason those seventeen different things had conspired, and the reason they all led up to the shit storm of all time, was because he and Mac were a little too distracted by their entire fucked up personal history to smell a rat.
"I'm not hungry" she said quietly.
"You must be hungry. I've been with you all day, except for when you were in the control room or the deposition, and I know you didn't eat during either of those, so you must be hungry" he reasoned.
"Fine, if I'm so damn hungry then why do I feel like I might throw up on those ridiculously expensive Ferragamo loafers you're wearing at any moment?!" she shouted, but given her fatigue, it didn't come out as a particularly threatening exclamation.
"Because you're so damn hungry, you're nauseous. Let's get some food" he told her, grabbing her by the arm and leading her toward Lonny.
"Stop fucking pushing me!" she screamed, and this time it did come out loud and harsh, particularly in the nearly empty, echoing lobby of the building. He backed away, holding his hands up in surrender.
"I'm not trying to push you Mac. I'm trying to hold you up. You look like you're about ready to drop" he told her. Suddenly she swayed on her feet and he rushed forward.
"Maybe food isn't such a bad idea?" he pleaded, leading her toward the car.
"Uh huh" she mumbled as he and Lonny practically shoved her into the backseat and she collapsed against him.
"Lay your head down" he instructed, pushing her head onto his lap and throwing his coat over her.
"Cold?" he asked, rubbing his hands up and down her shivering form.
"No" she groaned unconvincingly. "I think I'm going to be sick" she mumbled, just as he managed to hand her the plastic bag that his newspaper and magazines had come in that morning. Thankfully, he had left it in the back seat of the car.
"Better?" he asked, when she was done spitting up the meager contents of her stomach.
"No."
"Well, that's probably because you're running on empty Mackenzie. You have been for weeks now. Think it might be time to admit you're not Superwoman?" he asked.
"Superman or Wonder Woman, please use your comic-book hero references properly" she grumbled into his jean covered knee.
"Since when are you a lifelong member of the DC Comics fan club?"
"Since I spent two years in a cave with Jim."
"Ah…so that's what you two did during long, lonely nights in Peshawar" Will chuckled.
"Well, that and endless shots of smuggled vodka. How do you think I survived hour long discussions of comic books?"
"Well-played Ms. McHale…well-played. Let's get you inside" he whispered, ushering her out of the car.
"This is your building?!" she said, alarmed.
"Your powers of observation never cease to amaze me Kenz."
"I need to go home Will. I'm tired. I want to go to bed, please" she practically begged.
"Hush. You are going to bed, but I'm going to make sure you actually sleep" he said soothingly, and it spoke to how tired she was that she didn't even try to fight him. Truth be told, neither one of them had really been fighting things lately. Sure, they'd been fighting AWM, and Rebecca Halliday, and tabloid ridiculousness…but they hadn't been fighting each other.
Somewhere along the way, he had stopped being angry, and she had stopped being incessantly annoying about the voicemail, and despite what Maggie had said earlier, they had both stopped pretending that they weren't best friends, and likely soon to be lovers again. Somewhere along the way they had stopped fighting the idea that they were coming home. Sadly, he thought, if the whole Genoa thing hadn't blown up in their faces, they would have managed to put all their shit behind them a lot sooner than this. They had been so close to figuring it all out.
When that fog horn blows
You know I will be coming home
And when that fog horn whistle blows
I gotta hear it, I don't have to fear it
"Go get in bed" he ordered, piling up their briefcases and coats by the door and heading toward the kitchen.
"Will…" she whined, but it was half-hearted at best, and she quickly turned and shuffled down the hallway toward his bedroom.
He quickly made a couple of bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches and poured Mackenzie a gin and tonic and grabbed a beer for himself. When he reached the bedroom, she was lying on her side, staring off into space.
"You kept it?" she asked.
"What?"
"That" she said, pointing toward the wall, where her old seashell nightlight was plugged into the wall.
"Figured I might be needing it again someday" he replied simply, setting her drink and her sandwich down on the nightstand. "Eat" he ordered.
"Billy, I haven't eaten all day and I'm supposed to gobble up that greasy monstrosity?" she asked, staring at the food.
"It's all I've got. Do you really want to wait a half hour or more for Chinese?"
"No. This is fine" she said softly, sitting up in bed and beginning to pull the sandwich apart into tiny pieces.
"Stop shredding the damn thing and eat it Mac." Instead, she picked up the gin and tonic and cradled it in her hands.
"It's not your fault, you know" she said softly, staring into her drink like it held all the answers in the world.
"What isn't my fault?" he asked.
"This whole thing. I know you sit outside in the hall during all these depositions and wait for us, as if there is something you can do, but there isn't."
"I only wait for you…and Maggie" he admitted. Not that he lumped the two of them together in the same category. Not at all. Maggie was fragile and could be so easily broken right now and he felt a certain amount of responsibility for that…for her. So he had to get her through this, he reasoned. But Mac? That was a whole different story. He waited for Mac because he would have been useless anywhere else. Wouldn't have been able to sleep or eat or do the news or go to a rundown meeting while she was in there being grilled. She was strong. She would do fine…but he couldn't let her do it alone. Even if he could only be as close as the other side of the door.
"I know it's not my fault Mac. But I also know it's not your fault. Sure, we're the people at the top of the chain of responsibility here, and for that we do owe the American public an apology. An apology for letting this shit get by us. But let's face it, Dantana knew he had nothing. Knew his source was shaky at best, but he misrepresented that to us…purposefully. That is something we hold no responsibility for."
"What do we do if it all falls apart?" she asked meekly, giving up on her sandwich altogether and curling back up under the covers.
"Go to Fiji?" he asked, half-kidding.
"Sounds good, except for the jellyfish" she mumbled, rolling over on her side to face him.
"Fiji only has Lunar and Crown Jellyfish. Neither of which have any real stinging power. There has been one report of a Box Jellyfish sting in the last twenty years" he replied seriously. She looked up at him, astonished, and began laughing.
"What? I prepare for these things! Why do you think I have three extra shirts in my desk drawer? Because you spill coffee on me or toss a drink at me at least once a week. And why do I have ten Flake bars in my desk? Because you forget to eat and can never refuse a Flake bar. And I know the history of the jellyfish in Fiji because I know, with absolute certainty, that one of these days either you or I are going to do something or say something that gets us fired. And when that happens, we are going to Fiji. No chance of TMI or Reese Lansing or sorority girl finding us there."
"Are you done?" she asked.
"For now" he replied simply.
"Good, then get down here and keep me warm. I'm tired" she told him. So he slid down the bed and wrapped himself around her and started humming into her ear.
"Fiji sounds pretty good, but I'm comfortable right here, for now" she whispered.
"Me too" he said, as he hummed Van Morrison into her ear until they both fell asleep.
Come on, girl
And together we will float into the mystic