To The Ends of the Earth
By: Ridley
A/N: A tiny missing scene to Ep 21: Cigar Cutter that I could not resist. Just because I loved the finale so much, this was born from the moment Jack said "We just got back…" leading me to believe that in true Jack form he'd gone with Mac on that little mission Mac undertook near the end of the episode. It was spur of the moment so it has not been edited and was mostly off the cuff. Please excuse any errors and emotion-fed rambling. If you haven't watched the episode, there are spoilers so read at your own risk. Despite the overall terrific finale, I did want a bit more Mac and Jack, but who doesn't? A new chapter of Casting should be up later today thanks to my tireless beta, or first thing tomorrow, that is if I can sneak some minutes from my paying job. Your reviews are always ravaged on sight!
RcJ
Jack stared out the small window of the Phoenix jet, the darkness revealing nothing. His best guess was they were 30,000 feet above God Only Knows. Mac had arranged for the top secret drop, telling no one but Matty, whose clearance was needed for the last minute mission. Jack could have merely 'borrowed' a plane, cutting everyone out of the loop, seeing as his partner insisted that the fewer people who knew what they were doing the better. It wouldn't have been the first time, but the cargo was a little harder to come by. Getting out of Phoenix with a canister containing a deadly virus would have been hard to swing even for them.
Jack had little input on the location, but after the past twenty-four hours he would have gone to Timbuctoo if it meant keeping his partner close. Mac had headed up to Intel, putting his head together with Declan Landry as soon as he could escape Matty's clean-up detail. Back in Delta, they hadn't nicknamed Landry 'Columbus' for nothing. The cartographer could find anything. Which also made him the perfect go to guy if a man happened to want to lose something in a permanent 'no one can ever uncover it' kind of way. He and Mac had mapped out the exact coordinates. Jack was just along for the ride.
He did know their plane would eventually touch down on a Russian base called Novolazarska-something-or another, where they would pick up a C-130 Hercules for the last leg of the journey. It was the workhorse of aviation, a plane capable of completing missions anywhere. Jack couldn't wait to get his hands on her. Mac had even hinted that Jack just might get to make that ice runway landing he'd yet to mark off on his aviation bucket list. It might have been an attempt to ease the sting of the whole 'Cairo Curse' debacle, but Jack would take it.
Thoughts of the past twenty-four hours had him glancing across the aisle to where his partner was stretched out on the couch finally asleep. It seemed surreal that only the day before Phoenix had been overrun by The Organization in some crazed plot cooked up by Murdoc of all people. How the hell he and his covert henchman had managed such a feat was still something Matty and her team of analysts were breaking down, trying to piece together while an engineer team attempted to reconstruct home base. Jack didn't care so much about the how or the why of the attack as he did the 'hey, let's make sure this never, ever happens again'.
There was something about being hit on your home turf that made the casualties a hundred times harder to swallow. Maybe it was a pride thing, but Jack took every fatality from yesterday personally. As if he, as senior operative in charge, could or should have somehow been good enough to prevent it. If Bozer or Riley had died on his watch, Jack would have never forgiven himself. As heavy as his guilt would have been, Mac's burden would have been ten-fold. As it was, Jack was eternally grateful that Bozer was on the mend in the hospital under Riley's watchful eye, giving their favorite computer guru more to focus on than the recent blood on her hands.
Mac shifted roughly in his sleep, mumbling something unintelligible. The distressed muttering and his partner's change in breathing reminded Jack he also had a more important task than brooding over things that had already taken place. He turned in his seat, every muscle in his body screaming that he'd had the hell beat out of him, which wasn't far from the truth. Jack's back and right side protested but he bent over to reach for the blanket the kid had kicked to the floor just as Mac bolted up right with a shouted 'no'.
"Easy there, partner." Jack backed out of Mac's space, waiting for the younger man to gain his bearings. "You're okay. You dozed off during our inflight movie. It's all good."
"Jack." Mac's voice was shaky, his eyes glassy as they met Jack's gaze and held.
"Who were you expecting?" Jack managed a grin, even though he felt a twinge of guilt considering he was the one who'd goaded Mac into taking the painkillers they'd both been prescribed by Medical after the Phoenix doctors had catalogued their numerous cuts and contusions. He'd managed that feat by promising Mac he'd taken his own, which he hadn't, unwilling to dull his senses even if they were the only passengers on board. Jack suspected the drugs were behind the nightmare, weakening Mac's usual hard fought defenses.
"No one." Mac shook his head, running both hands through his rumpled hair. The move just made a shaggy mess, causing Jack's partner to look even younger and a whole hell of lot more was a sight that breached Jack's own barriers quicker than any opiate haze he might have indulged. "I was just dreaming."
"I got that." Jack picked up the Dallas Cowboy's blanket, stifling the curse he wanted to let out as his aching body protested. He tossed it beside Mac, who had swung his feet around to sit up straight. Jack tried to see past that image of the nineteen year old Mac which sometimes bled in from their shared past, blurring the view of the now twenty-six year old who was more than capable of holding his own. "You want to talk about it?"
"Not really." Mac ran a hand over his face, wincing when he touched the spectacular bruise that graced one cheek, nearly blackening his left eye. The doctor had mentioned the possibility of a hair-line fracture but in true form Jack's headstrong partner had refused the X-ray, insisting on an ice pack instead. Jack would have been a damn hypocrite to say anything considering he'd brushed off the possibility of cracked ribs, balking at his own trip to radiology.
"Then how about you fill me in on this brilliant plan of yours. You could start by telling me where we're going." Jack could imagine Mac's dream had something to do with Murdoc, maybe a double feature co-starring the fake Dr. Zito. If it was anything like Jack's nightmares there might have been a part where the halls of Phoenix ran red with their team's blood, but then again Jack's dream-life was a dark, dark landscape. "We still have a hell of a long flight ahead of us."
"Shouldn't you be resting, seeing as you have to fly the last leg of our mission?" Mac yawned, giving another grimace when his face was contorted. It made Jack want to punch someone.
"I dozed a little while you were off in dreamland." Jack shifted his focus from thoughts of revenge to something more useful. He tossed Mac a bottle of the water he'd brought along, offering him one of the organic granola bars which Jack thought tasted like bird seed rolled in rubber cement, but kept stocked in his go-bag because Mac liked them. "Besides, I slept last night at the hospital, albeit in one of those damn torture contraptions they pass off as chairs."
Mac took the water, shaking his head at the prospects of food. "I didn't get to tell you thanks for keeping watch with Bozer while Landry and I finished the last minute plans for this mission."
"No thanks needed, brother." Jack tossed the bar on the blanket beside Mac, figuring if it was in sight long enough the kid would eventually break down and eat it. "I love Bozer, too. Our team wouldn't be the same without him."
Mac nearly choked on the drink of water he'd just taken. "You have never been a fan of Bozer being on the team."
"Hey now," Jack raised a brow. "It's true I might have loved the guy a little more from a distance, when he wasn't constantly in our business, but I'm getting used to the whole idea of him tagging along. I give credit where credit is due, and old Boze has really come through for us a few times."
"You have done a surprising job of hiding your feelings." Mac gave a faint grin, recapping the water. He picked up the bar, toying with the wrapper as he shot Jack a look. "Even when I know you were convinced Bozer was gunning to be my partner in the field."
"Like I said, he's family." Jack took a drink of his own water, studying Mac's face. Jack might have had mixed feelings about Bozer coming aboard their team, but despite his concerns of being displaced, Jack was more worried about how Bozer's position might affect Mac. If it would somehow put the kid in a state of mind to risk himself even more than usual. In the end, it was Mac's call to ask and Bozer's to accept. "This team is as much yours as it is mine, maybe more."
"That's not true." Mac shook his head. "It's been me and you from the get go. You're the reason we're at Phoenix."
"Actually that was all Hammond."
"Still." Mac shrugged, staring at the granola as if it might bite him if he opened it, instead of the process working the other way around. "You and I came aboard together. You're the one who taught me the ropes, all the ins and outs of this work."
"There are moments I question that decision." Jack wasn't surprised when Mac's blue gaze lifted to his once more. There was a flicker of confusion, followed by an all too gut-wrenching look of doubt Jack was quick to correct. "Not about us being partners, mind you, but about the whole spy thing I brought you into. Sometimes I think you would have been better off if I'd just pushed you to go the NASA route when they were gunning for you, or maybe even relented when the Fibbies came sniffing around. That FBI gig might have been safer than Phoenix."
"I made my own decisions, Jack." Mac said, fiercely. There was a touch of the heat he'd had in their 'discussion' last week when Jack had gone against protocol and spoke with Murdoc."You didn't force me to become an agent."
"Just like you didn't twist Bozer's arm to sign on with our outfit." Jack leaned forward, ignoring his protesting ribs as he rested his elbows on his knees. Jack understood that the best way to get his stubborn partner to see the damn forest for the trees was to lead him in a circular path of his own logic, using his smarts against him. "In fact, if I recall correctly in the beginning you made the offer to protect him, and then left the decision for him to stay up to him after that whole disastrous first mission of his. Sort of like that time back in the desert when I laid out our options after what happened in Helmand. The ball was in Bozer's court after Amsterdam, just as it was in yours in Afghanistan."
"Why are we talking about Bozer?" Mac's blue eyes flashed and Jack knew he was on the right track. He also knew to tread easy. Getting Mac to open up could be as frustrating and impossible as trying to rush honey from a jar. It took time and patience, and a willingness to turn things upside down.
"Because I know this little mission is in part about Bozer." Jack gestured to the cabin of the plane and then tapped his own head. "I know how your mind works."
"How is wanting to permanently get rid of a weapon of mass destruction got anything to do with Bozer?" Mac frowned at Jack. "That proposal has no logical trajectory."
"That's just it, bud. Not everything is logic with you." Believe it or not Angus MacGyver was often driven by feelings whether he was apt to admit it or not. "That big, bad weapon of mass destruction was stolen by your crazy, ex-girlfriend, who I still don't believe for one minute is truly on the up and up by the way, only to be recovered by you and me, where it ended up at cold storage in Phoenix until yesterday when it was the apparent end game of your arch nemesis Murdoc."
Mac opened his mouth to respond but Jack held up a hand to cut him off. "Somewhere in that ginormous brain of yours you feel if you'd only gotten rid of the damn thing in the first place all of this might have been avoided. So now you're blaming yourself for things way out of your control, and trying to fix said things by doing the only thing in your control. Travelling across the world to get rid of the virus."
"I wanted to destroy it when we first recovered it." Mac tossed the granola bar back on the couch, not bothering with a rebuttal. "But Thornton said it might be useful if anything of its kind showed up again. She promised it would be safe at Phoenix and I believed her."
"We both believed her." Jack bumped his boot against Mac's sock-covered foot. "I get it. I trusted her too, Mac. Just like I trusted Nikki. But that doesn't put what happened yesterday on our shoulders, dude. It's all on that sonofabitch Murdoc and whoever the hell is truly at the helm of The Organization."
"I never expected Bozer to get stabbed by a psychopath in the lab. I thought he'd be safe." Mac looked at Jack, his wounded gaze made more potent by the bruises. Grief showed on Mac. It started in his eyes and worked its way inward until he was all untied and in jeopardy of unraveling. Most people might miss it, Mac's cool, collected front camouflaging the fact he was coming undone, but Jack could easily read the signs. Maybe because the place he'd come to know Mac best was in a world where sorrow was everywhere, and grief was a constant. A place that had nearly succeeded in completely breaking them both.
"I never expected you to get shot, poisoned, captured, water-boarded, snake-bit, blown-up or the ten dozen other bad things that have happened to you since we took this job either, but, brother, shit happens. There is no safe. Not in this line of work. Maybe not anywhere." Jack sure as hell hadn't planned on disasters like Helmand Province, missions like Cairo, or a group of corrupt rogue government agents infiltrating their home base to nearly kill them. "As much as I would sometimes have liked to have surrounded you in bubble wrap or stashed you away in a science lab buffered by bullet proof glass, I had to learn to let go of the guilt. I had to learn to let you go."
"Like you let me go the first time Murdoc was gunning for me?" Mac rolled his eyes, calling bullshit where it was probably deserved. Sometimes Jack couldn't resist being a hypocrite. "I pretty much recall you leaving me behind, as good as locked in the War Room then, which as we both know is buffered by bullet proof glass. And let's not forget how you pushed for me to wear body armor when I went in as Murdoc to try and find The Architect despite it being a dead give-away to my cover. Irrefutable proof you'd still pull out the bubble wrap if I'd let you."
"I didn't say it was a completed process or that it was easy, damn it," Jack growled. If the kid hadn't already been hurt, he might have smacked him upside the head to drive his point home. Instead he gripped his hands together and took a calming breath before starting again. "What I'm telling you is that you can't go blaming yourself for everything that happens to Bozer, or anyone else on the team for that matter. It will make you crazy. It will give you godawful nightmares of which you already have plenty and if that's not reason enough, there's your mop of hair to consider."
"My hair?" Mac's eyes widened at the ludicrousness.
"Yes, your hair, Blondie. Do you think mine was always this sultry salt and pepper shade?" Jack ghosted his hand over his head. "This distinguished statement is all on you. Not to mention I had a lot more of the stuff before we teamed up."
"You had a buzz cut when I met you." Mac pointed out.
"By choice, dude." Jack grinned, glad he'd succeeded in shaking the kid from his dogged path. "Now it just falls out, especially when my partner does something like lock himself in a room I can't breach with three trained killers and then sets the room to go kaboom before he works a plan to get himself out. If I let myself dwell on all that, I'd be an old bald guy with chronic insomnia and a bad case of crotchediness."
"That's really not too far off the mark now." Mac stared as if Jack was the one thing he would never quite wrap his head around.
"Let's see how you fair, bud, after you've spent a few more years mentoring bad-luck Bozer." Jack slapped Mac's knee. "At least I took comfort in knowing, partiality for pacifism aside, you understood how to shoot a gun, and could hold your own with a garrison of Taliban, let along having the smarts to handle your average killer."
"The nightmare wasn't about Bozer, man." Mac met Jack's gaze and sure enough Jack recognized the flash of a something different than wrongly self-imposed guilt. He thought back to beginning of Cairo Day, when he'd showed up with a surprise meal to find Mac neck deep in that same old hurt he'd been floundering in since he was a boy. "It was about my dad."
"That returned letter is really screwing with you." Jack rubbed at the bunched muscles in the back of his neck, frustrated that crazed gunmen weren't the only things he couldn't keep from hurting his partner. Mac hitting a dead-end when he finally reached out to his dad was really doing a number on the kid's head, or more likely-and this pissed off Jack even more-his heart.
"Maybe," Mac glanced at him. "Or there's the fact both Murdoc and Zito mentioned my father. As if they knew I didn't have a clue to where he was, but eluding that they might be in the know."
"They were just twisting the knife, brother." Jack hoped to hell that was all it was. Having your best friend stabbed to get at you was one thing, but someone threatening your father was quite another. Even if in Jack's book the man didn't deserve a kid like Mac, he knew all too well the ties to a parent, even a piss-poor one, were hard to break. "Murdoc somehow got his dirty little hands on our psych files. You remember the interviews we went through with the shrink when we were recruited by Phoenix. He knew the ins and outs of my dysfunctional family shit as well."
"What if it wasn't a bluff?" Mac eyes held something worse than vulnerability and grief now. They reflected a rarely seen emotion-fear.
"What are you thinking?" Jack would do whatever it took to erase all traces of it. He could put up with a lot of things, but something about the idea of Mac not feeling safe was out of the question. It was the line in the sand, the one Jack had firmly put in place after all he'd been through with Mac in Helmand.
"I'm thinking I might be ready to use that file you gave me on my birthday. The one with all the information your CIA contact dug up on my dad."
"Okay." Jack nodded. "We'll get on it as soon as we're back stateside."
"You don't have to do that." Mac glanced at his hands before looking at Jack once more. "This isn't your mission to take on."
"Brother, how many times do I have to tell you that you're not allowed to do stupid things on your own?"
"You think I'm blowing this out of proportion." Deep furrows formed on Mac's forehead as he once more studied the plush carpet of the aisle between him and Jack. "That Murdoc has me jumping at shadows."
"I know better than to think anyone, including a manipulative mastermind like Murdoc could get you to do something you didn't want to do." Jack would not admit how glad he was that the dastardly mastermind was still very much locked away and now under even heavier handed security measures. He nudged Mac's knee so his partner met his gaze once more. "I also know I was the one who suggested you reach out to your old man in the first place. But that's only part of the reason I'm going."
"Then why?"
"I'm your partner, and where you go, I go" Jack pointed to the stack of maps Landry had given Mac. "Even if the trip takes me to the freakin' ends of the earth."
"Again, you're not too far off." Mac's mouth twitched, the first hint of a real smile Jack had seen in days.
"What I'm saying, bud, is you can count me in. I'm not taking no for an answer." It wasn't like they didn't have some vacation time coming. With Phoenix out of sorts and needing time to structurally rebuild and technically reboot it wasn't like they'd be much use for anything besides wielding a mop. Bozer would need to recover and Riley's computer skills would require her to be on hand, that was if Matty could pry her from the patient's side.
"Admit it." It didn't take long for Mac's full-on grin to appear. A sight that did more good for Jack's wounds, both physical and mental, than any amount of painkillers could. "You just want to avoid any more time on Mattilda Weber's clean-up crew."
"I'll never admit to any such thing. Now eat your damn bird seed, smart ass." Jack pointed to the granola bar, accepting that although he might not be able to keep Mac completely out of harm's way, he could at least keep him fed and hydrated. "Hand over my Snuggie while you're at it. If I'm going to nail that perfect all ice runway landing, this old man needs to catch some Z's."
The End-for now