A/N: Apparently this is what happens when you listen to Mike Doughty's "I Hear the Bells" on repeat with your earbuds in while your family watches It's a Wonderful Life on TV. The title is taken from a line in the song:
I hear the bells down in the canyon
It's snow in New York, some blue December
I'm gone to the moon about you, girl
And I'm calling to you throughout the world
Starts out with crippling angst and then ends up saccharine, you know the drill by now.
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates!
2005.
She's excited—she's won a Peabody, she's moving to New York, she's barely thirty and she has a job as an Executive Producer for a headlining show at a national cable news station. MacKenzie is excited, or at least she should be, except that Brian is complaining about how if she moves to New York to work for an 8 o'clock show she'll never have the time to come down to see him, even if she keeps countering with that since he's the one who works in print journalism that it'd be easier for him to come up from DC to see her.
It's an argument. One they've been having for months, ever since she met with the head hunters at ACN.
Her parents are thrilled, even if it means she'll be much farther than Alexandria to DC, but MacKenzie thinks that it's because she'll be far away from Brian, hobnobbing it with the media elite in New York. They think she'll meet someone better.
MacKenzie smiles over the rim of her glass at her parents' guests, happy that Brian stayed at home instead of coming here. "He's writing," she says. "Huge deadline coming up, and he's just starting to really make it." She's being supportive. She's a good girlfriend. "It's important."
Even if her father keeps looking at her like she had been raised for better.
But she thinks New York will be good for her and Brian, keep them from exploding entirely. They just need time to cool off, and then it'll be back to normal. He'll come around, if only because she's MacKenzie McHale, Peabody award-winning Executive Producer of News Night with Will McAvoy. It's everything she's ever hoped and dreamed of, at thirty.
Brian will come around, and maybe he'll follow her to New York, and they'll both be doing exactly what they've dreamed of doing, and things will settle, and they'll both finally be happy.
Maybe things will be perfect. She'll be perfect and he'll be perfect.
Maybe next Christmas will be happier.
2007.
It's A Wonderful Life was playing on one of the few English stations her hotel room gets, so instead MacKenzie spends Christmas in a German bar after telling her parents that she's on assignment, can't quite make it to London, very sorry, maybe next year. It's a lie that trips easily off her tongue, heady with liquor and grief. She couldn't bear to look her parents in the eye, not after what's she done to Will, how far she's fallen, how much she's fucked up, how far she's fled. Sir Edward McHale did not raise his daughter to be a coward, or a fuck-up.
She had been raised better.
(They had liked Will so much more than they had ever liked Brian.
She had, too.)
She had been raised to be better. Do better. To be above the fray when appropriate and get her hands dirty when duty called for it.
She drinks liquor in a bar, surrounded by US servicemen and women. Until her fingers are numb and her head swims, trying to forget last Christmas with Will. Her first, and last Christmas with Will. Forget, because she can't forgive herself.
Three shots in, she decides she's not a good person. MacKenzie thinks she wasn't before she met Will. And maybe Brian didn't make her worse, being with Brian made her worse. And Will made her better. Staring at the bottom of the glass, she decides that if she can't be good this year, or any other, she'll make good around herself. Outside herself.
Seeking perfection has only made her reckless with other people's hearts. And in the end, she cast aside her own. If only she had stuck to hurting herself.
(She's good at that, she thinks, and orders another drink.)
She fucking hates that movie.
You see, George, you've really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to throw it away?
Yeah, and she fucking threw it all away. Because she had to tell him. Because she couldn't live with it. Instead of remembering she was telling the man (the man that she loves, dearly, with all of her heart) with massive trust and abandonment issues, incredibly valid trust and abandonment issues, about something she did before they were even serious. Because she had to do that to him, to make herself feel better.
Because she fucking went back to Brian in the first place, as if Will and Brian aren't a study in contrasts.
I'm on the naughty list, she thinks, downing number four, and then five. For ever and ever.
Jim Harper, twenty-four and irascibly fresh-faced, so earnest, and to MacKenzie's bewilderment, driven to impress her, sits down in the booth with her. She doesn't quite catch what he says over the pounding music, but he slides a plate of cheese fries across the table to her. It's not the Tiffany blue box Will slid across the table to her a year ago, but it's a start.
Smiling, she thinks her mission to do good will start with Jim Harper.
2009.
Their flight back into the Green Zone is for 1:17 AM December 26, so her father has an embassy car drop them off at Heathrow shortly after ten. Even with his tugging of diplomatic strings and their press credentials, there's still security and scans to go through, even for recent stabbing victims and their dutiful hangers-on.
Jim leaves her in the most comfortable chair he can find, tucked into some little corner, and wanders off in search of coffee. Mac shifts gingerly in her seat, tugging the cuffs of her oversized sweatshirt over her hands. In another hour and she can take another Percocet, but she wants to put it off until take-off in case of turbulence.
(She isn't supposed to be back to work, but she's insisted, and Jim's insisted that he won't leave her side; she brought him along to her parents' for the holiday, if only to see him squirm alongside the kind of elite that she's spent her adulthood running very, very, far away from, possibly for all the wrong reasons. If only because her childhood in the diplomatic theater of the Cold War has led her to conflate titles with brinkmanship and self-interest, even if running in the opposite direction of aristocracy has still only led to her over-indulging in those two things herself.)
I was in Berlin when the Wall fell, she'd told Will once. It was my father's last post before being appointed British Ambassador to the US and we came back to Virginia.
When did you move back? It had been their one Christmas. She can't remember why they were talking about Berlin. Maybe he was just asking about her family. It was the year Anna Politkovskaya had been murdered. Maybe that.
(When did you leave the States? he'd already asked, many months ago, when she'd explained how she had been born in DC to British parents, when her father was the Charge d'affaires of the British Embassy in the United States under Wilson and Callaghan, and then how her father had been posted as the British Ambassador to Greece shortly after Thatcher took office, before she'd even entered grade school. My father has always supported the Labour Party, but she came around eventually on his policies eventually and moved him to West Germany.)
She'd wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, where he was cooking at the stove. Kissed his shoulder, and answered. Spring 1990. It was one of Thatcher's concessions as she was losing power.
So during Bush's term, he'd said and smiled, making her a grilled cheese with an absurd amount of fontina. We could have met.
I was seventeen, honey, when you started working at the White House. We both lived in DC at the same time for a year.
I would have waited, he'd protested, laughing. She hadn't doubted him, but snorted anyway, pressing her nose into the space between his broad shoulders, sweeping her fingers over soft cashmere down his front, tickling his ribs, laughing delightedly when he squirmed.
For your future trophy wife?
They would have been married by now, MacKenzie thinks. Curled up on the couch together—it's snow in New York, she thinks. She'd checked the weather earlier. It's six in New York, and they'd be curled up on the couch, enchanted by a fair-haired toddler playing with some new toy.
She shifts uncomfortably in the chair, laying her hand over her left side, over the bulk of the pressure bandage wrapped at her waist.
Her entire future feels inaccessible, and the past like she should wrap it in a tidy box and place it on a shelf, shut it away. She doesn't deserve all her good memories with Will. She never deserved him at all.
Jim comes back then, with two steaming cups of coffee. Pasting a smile on her face, she takes it from him, and swallows down a Percocet.
There's a man at the next gate with broad shoulders, blonde hair, facing away from her. Twenty minutes later, Mac lets herself imagine its Will. Forty minutes later, half-asleep, her face pressed against the cool glass, she lets herself imagine what would happen if he turned around. Ten minutes after her eyes close, he does, and thinks he sees a ghost, a woman he had long exiled from his life.
But it can't be her. He'd heard she'd been stabbed, was in Germany. It's just the vertigo medicine, his dosage of alprazolam is too high. Well, high enough to get him out of bed in the morning, but also high enough to make his head spin in ways that only she was only ever able to accomplish. But it had been good, back then.
His plane boards before hers, and the man flies back to a snowy New York and agrees to do a panel at Northwestern.
2010.
Wade curls around her in his sleep.
MacKenzie thinks she should have gone to her parents'. Or told Wade she was going to her parents' and told her parents she was staying in New York and gone somewhere else entirely, but now she's trapped.
She likes Wade, in the sense that she knows she should like Wade so she's very desperately trying to convince herself that she does, as if she can simply think it into being.
Slipping out of his grasp, she recognizes that she's with Wade for the same reasons she first accepted Will's dinner invitation after Brian broke it off with her the week before Valentine's Day 2006. Shrugging on a faded Cambridge sweater, she pads out into her living room and reminds herself—the ever-pulsing thrum ever since that first Christmas—that she's not a good person. But she has News Night now, again, and she can make that good. She can make Will good again. She can make the staff good.
Will likes the women he goes out with, she thinks. In a way. But not the way he ever liked her, which makes it bearable.
She turns the lights on her tree back on and sits in the center of her couch, tugging the cuffs of her sweatshirt over her hands. Reaching for the remote to turn on the TV, she pulls an afghan off the back of the couch and slings it over her shoulders.
(She hasn't slept more than four hours at a time in three and a half years, and she can't sleep at all at Wade, too wary of the questions he'd ask if she jerked awake, gasping and covered in a cold sweat, the solemn row of orange prescription bottles in cabinet over her bathroom sink.)
She's alone and pining at best, and desperate and self-deluding at worst. As if she's wary instead of just a fake, as if Wade isn't a façade, an attempt at propping herself up. She won't let him in, just into her bed. It's almost routine, at this point of her life, another move in another Cold War with a different man, a better man, and maybe that's why it hurts so badly. Because she doesn't care about Wade like she cared about Will when it was with Brian. (God, she wants to, though. She knows she can. She knows she can love Wade, let herself out of jail, be happy. If only she can keep telling herself that she deserves it.) There's no happy ending here. Because she's going to keep pushing, Will's going to keep pushing, and this fragile little peace that they have is going to go nuclear, because she's not going to fall in love with Wade and Will's not going to forgive her. They'll just keep pushing.
Relationship brinkmanship.
She was raised better, she thinks. At the least, she's only going to break her heart again. And only just her heart, if she's lucky this time.
Watching It's A Wonderful Life on mute, MacKenzie slides down further into the cushions, reaching for her BlackBerry where it was abandoned hours earlier. She's thirty-five and she can't look back to when (not where, it's definitely a when, because she's still in New York) she'd like to be, and there's no use in looking forward past more than the next press cycle. Or even the next day.
Who knows when someone will decide to blow something up.
Seeing she has a missed call, she unlocks her phone.
Will McAvoy. 2:02 AM.
It's only just passed 2:30. Careful to keep her voice low, she returns his call. She just wants him to un-reject her. And then maybe she can have a good Christmas with Wade.
(She's not a good person.)
2011.
She can't sleep. It's past midnight in New York, now, and she's been tossing and turning all night. She's come to London, to her parents' townhome. Run away again, if she's being honest with herself. Another turn of the wheel, and she's taken two weeks of vacation to spend with her family.
She had thought they were getting better, or at least closer. That's what hurts the most; they had started feeling like partners again.
Unable to sleep (for four years now, almost five, if she does the unforgiving arithmetic), MacKenzie rolls out of bed and creeps down to the den.
She can't even get into Will's head anymore. She's in his ear but not his head, and she can't rile herself up into believing that she deserves to be inside his head, not now that he's with Nina, but he can at least do his fucking job and listen to her during broadcast. This show, their show, their 2.0, has been on the air for a year and a fucking half now. They're committed. He owes her this much.
It's A Wonderful Life is on TV again.
She almost shuts it off.
He's across the Atlantic, and even if she was in New York, he'd be inaccessible. Powdered and made up and in front of the cameras and behind a screen, eyes glinting, and maybe they'll go nuclear soon. If this ends in a whimper, she won't know when to go. At least if it blows up, she can declare it to be over. Finally.
(The Berlin Wall isn't coming down this time. She's not her father, or his colleagues. Nurtured diplomacy, the careful charting of moves and countermoves, has never been innate to her. She's tried to build something perfect for him, build something of them. Although, MacKenzie thinks, if they part as former professional partners, she might be free of him.
Or at least he'll be free of her.
Maybe that's the best thing she can give him.)
Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?
She keeps touching her phone, willing it to ring.
But that's stupid.
He has Nina, and it's only a little after midnight. She knows what they're doing. Meanwhile, she spent the evening at Christmas service with her parents, stepping foot inside a church for the first time in three years. Since Christmas 2009.
She texts Jim, instead, wishing him a Merry Christmas. Reconsiders, and then opens her email to write a message to the entire staff, wishing them well for the holiday. She hits send, and after a moment's consideration, opens the skyscanner app to see if there are any flights still open out of Heathrow flying into New York City tomorrow.
1:20 AM, December 26.
She's sorely tempted to just go back to New York and sit her apartment alone. Or maybe go back and take Jim out for lunch, listen to him worry about Maggie, or talk about Hallie.
There's another flight at 3:37 AM. It's scheduled to land at JFK a little after nine. And another that lands a little after 2:30 PM.
She just wants to go home.
Except she doesn't have a home. She has this house in London that she barely knows, her apartment in New York, her parents' old house in Alexandria, her old apartment in DC, various dorm rooms, scattered US military bases in the Middle East, and embassy residences littered all throughout Eastern Europe. She is transient by nature, flitting from place to place. Her contract with News Night this time around is the longest thing she's ever committed to, excepting her pitiful love for Will, which isn't so much a commitment but a miserable, constant state of being.
MacKenzie McHale has made it her business to never settle down. To never make a home.
—This is a lie, and she knows it.
She has a home. She has a home country. She built in Will, even if she only stayed there for twenty months, he is her home. And she is an expatriate. (And hasn't she always been?) Or rather, in exile.
For the first time in her life she wants a home to go to.
—This is a lie, and she knows it.
She's wanted to go home for years.
This is just the first year she truly thinks her home might be lost to her. And not to war, or some invading army. Or even by her own treasonous heart.
It's just a fact of diplomatic life, something she learned at her father's knee over and over again, among many other tricks she's tried to unlearn over the years, because a child who has grown up in the diplomatic theater of the Cold War doesn't necessarily learn how to compartmentalize machination—sometimes walls don't fall. Even if you are trying to do good. Even if you follow the rules.
Even if you're perfect.
2013.
We fell asleep in the living room, is the first thing MacKenzie thinks when she jerks awake a little after six in the morning. Will stirs beside her, under her, her head on his chest and her limbs slung over him, his face pressed into her hair.
"Honey, wake up, we should go to bed. You'll kill your shoulder," she whispers, turning her face up towards him, miscalculating because now her lips are too close to his and Will's first instinct is to slide his hand up into her hair and kiss her, half-awake.
She laughs out of it, pushing him away. "Billy."
"Maybe I want to make love to my wife in front of the Christmas tree again," he says, voice raspy and low, and he tries to pull her against him, sliding his hands up her back, under her long-sleeved shirt. "It's the empirically tested way to get you to go back to sleep."
MacKenzie squirms against him, incredibly glad her first act after moving in was to populate the apartment with incredibly plush rugs. "What? Making love to me in front of the Christmas tree? We've only tested that twice."
"You're insufferable," he groans half-heartedly, slowly waking up.
"And you're stuck with me, since you, you old romantic sap, insisted on no pre-nup, despite your manager's, your publicist's, and your agent's insistence." She shakes off the blankets covering them and lets his hands slide up and down her back once more before sitting up and trying to tug him with her. This is what she gets for letting him charm her with a Harry Winston box, she thinks, trying to stretch her lower back. He'd slid the box across the coffee table when they'd gotten home a little after two, eyes warm and open and ever so blue. "Unless you want me to take half of everything you own."
Will groans, rubbing his eyes with the back of a hand before blinking at the soft white lights strung on the tree. "I'm a lawyer. Also fuck 'em."
"I thought you wanted to fuck me," she counters, grabbing his hand (left arm, not the right one, not the bad one) and pulling him up with her when she stands.
"Shut up," he grouses, adorably tousled.
"Take me to bed," she says, laying her arms over his shoulders, kissing along his jaw. They've only had two hours of actual sleep, after getting home from the midnight mass that they'd gone along to with their staff after a late-breaking story had kept them all in the studio, delaying travel plans or cancelling them entirely, and no one had quite wanted to go home after broadcast to empty apartments. "Our actual bed. It's not far. You know the way."
And she'd goaded Will into inviting the staffers (their news family, she'd pitched it, and it's Christmas, and they're the parents of the newsroom, and they have to take care of the family) remaining behind in NYC instead of rebooking flights or train tickets to their apartment for Christmas dinner. Not that it had taken much for him to concede, or that he'd needed to concede at all, only putting up a perfunctory protest while looking up someone willing to cater at the last minute on his BlackBerry.
Jim, Maggie, Don, Sloan, Tess, and Neal had already said they'd be there, plus a dozen others. And Hallie, Mac thinks, is in town. And Taylor. Elliot said he and the wife and kids might stop by later, after dinner with his wife's family. Charlie would ostensibly be by for a drink at some point.
(And she thinks Maggie might have shown up at some point anyway, since the poor dear basically has a drawer of her own in their guest room ever since her first meltdown before deposition prep, when she'd demanded Will cross-examine her to make sure she was ready and their subsequent ushering of her into therapy.)
Will smirks down at her, stealing another kiss and letting his hands span her waist. "Happy Christmas, Mrs. McAvoy."
(Dantana's suit was dismissed a month ago. The next day they went down to the courthouse for a marriage license, waiting only for her parents to fly in from London. Jim had served as her man of honor.)
She smiles against his lips. "How observant of you."
"I haven't had two good Christmases in a row in a very long time." He pauses, serious, and she presses her lips against his again, kissing him sweetly, giving him time. He draws back eventually, sliding his hands along the run of her waist and hips. "If ever."
This past year had gone nuclear.
Not them, but the war was on their home front, their names in the tabloids as her and Jim's exploits in the Middle East, his childhood and his father's death, their relationship past and present tense, Maggie and Gary's time in Uganda, went public during discovery and Dantana's lawyers tried to shame them into settling, each embarrassing and painful stone in their personal lives upturned and broadcasted.
MacKenzie had never learned how to deal with nuclear war.
But Will had grown up with it.
"It's been awhile for me too," she answers in a whisper, before stretching up his body to slant her mouth against his, humming contentedly when he begins to walk her back towards their bedroom.
It hasn't been a very good year, but at least they were fighting together, instead of each other. Fighting for home, for News Night, for their cobbled-together family and hand-fast home. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to fight for something, for someone, and win.
"It's nice to be home for it," she murmurs, pushing him down into bed. Because he knows what it means, because he's had to build his home in another person, too. She kisses him one last time, softly, lingering, before sliding off his chest and curling herself into his side, sighing happily when he turns into her. She traces a finger over his worn cotton undershirt. "Home for the holidays. It's perfect."
It's almost triumphant, really.
He makes a soft noise of agreement, settling down into the mattress and pulling her tighter against him, slotting his limbs along hers in a move of practice-perfect choreography.
"Sleep, MacKenzie," he exhales near her hairline, fingers tightening in the hem of her shirt.
It's perfect, she thinks one more time, burying her nose in her husband's shirt, inhaling him in.
(—It's not, and she knows it.
But it's perfect for her. For them.)
And for the first time in a long time, MacKenzie's excited for whatever the New Year will bring.
Thanks for reading! And happy holidays!