A/N: This is one of those AU scenarios that randomly pops into my head, and then I turn to Meg and go "what if?" And usually it's something like, you know, "what if I drop sarin on Mac?" and Meg rants and raves about why I shouldn't do it while researching how to have Mac survive whatever I'm throwing her into because she knows I'm going to do it anyway.

Well, this time she said yes. So then I pitched it to about three more people and wrote 5,000 words and decided "fuck it, it's finals, I'll make it a two-parter." This AU starts pre-series (imagine the bombing replaces the stabbing) and will go through "Amen."

I've attempted to portray the circumstances sensitively and respectfully and have researched it to my best. But in the likely even I've fucked something up, just let me know on here or on tumblr. Italics represent sign language in this fic, not thought. I went back and forth a few times on whether to write out the signed communication in ASL grammar or not. I ultimately decided not to because I wasn't convinced I wouldn't butcher it offensively and because I wanted this fic to be accessible.

PART ONE: HANDSHAPE

It's more than a homemade incendiary this time but an actual bomb, and Mac finds herself on her back outside a UN food office a mile from the parliamentary building in Islamabad, the building crumbling down in front of her.

Shaking her head to clear it she rolls onto her front, pushes herself up into a sitting position, and promptly pitches forward again. Her entire body in tremors, she fumbles her the satellite phone in her pocket, jams her fingers against the buttons.

Dead, the screen shattered.

Her eyes slide in and out of focus, building the pain in her head. Every muscle in her body vibrates with pain, pulling and tensing and releasing without any sense. Looking back she sees the food office go up into flames and sucking in a deep breath, Mac crawls forward, her palms catching on debris and glass and she slowly moves herself away.

Jim.

She needs to find Jim.

Backpack sliding off her shoulder, she's forced to drag it along with her.

Her hand was on the doorknob. She had an appointment for an in with the UN Delegate in residence for the new program. She put her hand on the doorknob and the whole building exploded and now her head is unable to make sense of direction or the angle between her body and the ground and eventually Mac gives up, collapsing against a building opposite the heap that was the UN office.

She watches people swarm the burning rubble, and waits for the high-pitched ringing in her ears to fade.

Thirty minutes later, Jim grabs her shoulders, kneeling before her on the ground. Mac. God, Mac! Confused, she narrows her eyes, trying to focus on his lips. Mac, look at—god, okay.

He takes her hands and puts them on her ears.

When she pulls them away and brings them before her eyes, her fingers are coated with blood.

There's the British Sign Language system, which she learned at university.

Her tenure as the President of the Cambridge Union had featured a platform with a plank dedicated to disability services, and she had done her best to learn. But now over fifteen years she's out of practice and regardless, she's American.

American Sign Language is quite different (roughly a third of the signs are identical, she learns, and less than half are cognates and she spends many of her early classes with her tutor accidentally offending him), but the specialist she sees in Landstuhl signs her up for advanced classes anyway.

(Jim, sweet Jim, enrolls as well.)

Soon Mac is deluged with books and videos and pamphlets and references to speech therapists and otologists and audiologists and, once it appears that the hearing in her right ear may have a chance of partially returning with surgery, a hearing aid specialist.

MacKenzie spends months completely deaf from the trauma of the explosion, recovering at first in a hospital room at the medical center on base and then in a hotel room not far from CENTCOM trying to keep her splintering career as a war reporter together. Jim rapidly progresses from fingerspelling to more complex phrases to understanding her entirely frustrated attempts at miming the signs she doesn't know yet, proving himself an able interpreter.

"If you trust me," she tells officers and diplomats in an uncertain voice, one hand resting on her collarbone as she tries to gauge the volume of her words. "Then you trust him."

Her lip-reading is progressing, but for the love of Jesus it's just easier to have Jim sign what they're saying and can't they just trust her on that?

It works for a little more than seven months.

Not because the hearing aid fitted to her right ear (in February, after a flight to Paris to be operated on by the best otological surgeon in the West) doesn't work (it does, restoring approximately sixty percent of her hearing provided she isn't standing in the middle of a goddamn wind tunnel, and doesn't get blown up again) but because it quickly becomes apparent that her hearing wasn't all that she lost in Islamabad.

Trembling, she stares down at the psychological evaluation in her hand.

Displays symptoms of complex PTSD, initial symptoms of acute PTSD following the initial incident in August have not dissipated. Unfit to return to a combat zone.

A CNN vice president asks her for her resignation two days later.

There's no interpreter at the panel at Northwestern, and between the fact that her flight from DC was late and she wasn't able to do anything but grab a seat at the back and the growing whispers and chatter from the audience, she winds up watching Will's mouth more than anything else.

It's been three years.

She's missed his voice the most, she thinks, which is wholly ironic and cruel and probably what she deserves because she can barely hear him but the way his eyes pinch and his lip curls she knows he's being flippant and sarcastic and MacKenzie can imagine exactly what he sounds like, knows what the vibration would feel like if she laid a hand on his chest, but just fuck she wants to be able to hear him.

Even though she's unable to pick out even half of what Will's saying, she can still see him and how little he's changed since the very last time she saw him. The smooth mask of indifference, the angry angle to his shoulders, the off-put posture and unkempt appearance. And it's not like Mac doesn't know what the critics are writing about him, like she doesn't know the breed of inoffensive behemoth News Night has become in her absence. Will looks like he's given up entirely on what they used to believe in.

And then he looks directly at her.

Blinks deliberately.

Then looks again.

Her fingers bite into her thighs and craning her head she keeps an eye on him while doing her best to keep her right ear trained towards the stage. His posture changes. He relaxes. He hasn't answered a single email or voicemail or text message in three years but Will has just seen her, and relaxed.

Or perhaps she's just as crazy as CNN thinks.

But Will is—

Definitely looking at her, again.

And then: "Jealous of the size of Jay's audience."

Maybe she shouldn't have come. It was stupid, and of course he'd spot her, this isn't a large venue and she sticks out among the journalism students.

The audience laughs and she fidgets with her hearing aid, flicking the volume wheel with her fingernail and sighing when all it amplifies is the breathing of the boy sitting next to her. Will shifts uncomfortably in his seat, and in response to the moderator's unheard (to her, anyway) question, she thinks he answers, "I've voted for candidates run by both major parties."

A girl with a blonde ponytail moves to the front of the line and the microphone is turned up loud enough that she can hear her clearly. "Hi, my name is Jenny, I'm a sophomore and this for all three of you: can you say in one sentence or less—what—you know what I mean." Until, of course, the girl trips over her words and audience laughs again and it's all garbled and staticky and Mac misses her actual question.

Will looks helplessly, directly at her.

Half-panicked, shakes her head.

If it were Jim she could sign to him, but Will doesn't know any ASL, but she does have—

"The New York Jets."

The audience laughs and it takes everything to read the moderator's lips. "No, I'm gonna hold you to an answer on that. What makes America the greatest country in the world?"

There's a painfully long silence where Will says nothing at all.

Leaning down, Mac reaches for the notepad in purse and pulls out the biggest fattest marker clipped onto her binder. Faintly, she hears his answer. Mostly the tone of it, and mutters, "Come the fuck on," probably a little too loudly, if the snort from the boy sitting next to her has anything to do with it.

Large letters mean she can't scribble quickly.

But still, she holds up the words, flipping to the next page once she's certain Will's seen her.

"Well, our Constitution is a masterpiece." he says, looking away, and she huffs a sigh. "James Madison was a genius. The Declaration of Independence is for me the single greatest piece of American writing. You don't look satisfied."

The last part, of course, addressing the moderator.

Or her, considering the scowl that she knows is broadcasting clearly on her face. She holds up the first page again.

IT'S NOT.

"One's a set of laws and the other is a declaration of war. I want a human moment from you," the moderator demands. "What about the people? Why is it—"

Will's not looking away, his eyebrows setting his face into a look of determination tempered only by his rising frustration.

She turns the page.

BUT IT CAN BE.

Giving her one last hard look, he turns to the moderator, feeling his shoulders push themselves back. "It's not the greatest country in the world, Professor. That's my answer."

By the time several people have pulled out their cell phones to record, the audience has grown so loud that MacKenzie can only lip-read once more, and it grows easier by the passing minute as Will grows more and more certain, enunciating his words without regret or recompense.

Even though she can't hear him, she smiles.

Will found his voice.

Clutching her purse in front of her she follows Will into his office, waving Jim off when he goes to follow her.

"Skipper's eager," he says, rounding behind his desk.

Mac shrugs.

"He's used to having to interpret for me," she says tentatively. That's probably not all of it, but it's a good enough explanation.

Sinking down into the chair behind his desk his brows furrow together. "Interpret?"

Exhaling shortly, she flickers her eyes towards the ceiling tiles. Charlie didn't tell Will that she was hired in the first place, of course Charlie didn't tell Will about the explosion, and the miniscule amount of her hearing that remains.

Desperately ignoring how her hands tremble, Mac gathers her hair back from her right ear, turning her head so it, and her hearing aid, are in his line of sight.

"Traumatic hearing loss," she says, probably too gently. "I was in the blast radius of a bomb a year ago."

Will's face is inscrutable.

"And the other?" he eventually asks, gesturing to her other side.

Mac bites her lip. "Completely deaf. I mean, I was completely deaf until I had an ossicular reconstruction surgery in February and then now I'm—I can do my job, I mean. If you're worried about that, I'm getting quite good at lip-reading and there are closed captions on everything and the prompter and I do have sixty percent in my right ear, I can do this—"

"You're not staying," Will says abruptly, leaning back to put his feet up onto his desk. And then screwing up his face realizing how it sounds, amends, "And not because of that. I'm sure you're still the best of the best, I just can't stand seeing your face."

Barely breathing, she tries to figure out what's changed from three weeks ago.

IT'S NOT. BUT IT CAN BE.

She supposes the difference between now and three weeks ago is that he's had three weeks to be mired in it. He made the decision to listen to her three weeks ago and decided he didn't like the consequences of saying something of substance.

But still, she didn't let Charlie talk her into coming here, feed her lines of Cervantes bullshit, to go without a fight.

It works. And for one glorious, chaotic hour it feels like she has control over her life, before the feeling wanes and she's left signing to Jim, trying to convince him to talk to Maggie before she runs out with Don.

Will's looking at her strangely and her fingers falter. Feeling self-conscious, she crosses her arms, tucking her hands against her sides.

Mac walks with him all the way to the elevator, near tears because Will noticed he was standing on her left side and, with a gentle hand on the small of her back, stepped to her right. There's more for her to do here tonight if Will intends to let her stay, the week at least, and it appears that he does.

Still, he lingers, just looking at her even after the story about being drunk for dinner which has sent her head reeling.

"Charlie said you're physically and mentally exhausted," Will says carefully, jamming his hands into his coat pockets.

Laughing, she hugs her folio tighter to her chest and stares at her shoes.

"He managed to not mention that I was also almost blown up and, you know—"

Still looking down, she gestures at an ear.

She wonders if that's because Charlie believed her able to work with her disability or because he just wanted to get her and Will into a room together. Either way, it's nice to know that at least one of the three of them thinks that all's not lost.

Will touches her shoulder, and she looks up, intending to correct him and say that she can hear, and if it's just the two of them like this he doesn't really need to worry about making sure she's looking at him before speaking—but Will just touched her.

Will hasn't touched her in three years.

"That's not an answer, MacKenzie," he sighs.

Mac shrugs. "It's been a tiring year for me."

Maybe Charlie thought that Will wouldn't mind the PTSD but would think that a half-deaf EP couldn't get the job done. She could tell him. That yes, she's in a bad place. That nine months ago she was nearly killed and her hips still hurt, of all things, and she can't sleep and when she does she has nightmares and she's hypervigilant which when you only have half you hearing in one ear is incredibly exhausting and that learning to deal with significant hearing loss at thirty-six on top of flashbacks and panic attacks is a nexus for a total breakdown.

(Which leads to absolutely no one in broadcast news wanting you in their studio.)

Tiring.

She's never going to tell him how the night after the surgery, the night she got her hearing aid, she watched a livestream of News Night and cried herself to sleep.

"Yeah," Will says with a slightly awkward smile. "You can do this?"

"I just wanted to come home to a newsroom," she whispers, praying the tears she knows are in her eyes don't spill over.

"Well this one is yours, for a week," he answers, far too kindly, and the elevator doors slide open.

And then everything changes, again. Will thought she was a hallucination.

IT'S NOT.

Flipping her folio closed again, she bites her lip. Or maybe this could be a good thing. If Will thinks that he was the one who summoned up her presence at Northwestern, then maybe he can commit to this.

Commit to who they used to be.

Or at least what they used to do.

One week turns to two and somewhere around week eight Mac stops expecting Will to show up in her office every Friday night and tell her to pack up her office and get the fuck out.

It takes him a few more weeks after that to realize that if she tucks her hair behind her ear in the middle of one of his rants that she's actually just turning her hearing aid off. Which surprises her, because he used to be much more observant than that and Mac's honestly not all that subtle about it, considering that she and Jim almost always wind up signing across the conference room table to each other in the middle of his tirades.

I think that needs to be in the B block.

She shrugs, looking down at the name of the guest Jim currently has lined up for the interview. I think we need a better guest and then we'll talk.

Maggie lays her hand on her wrist, startling her.

K-E-N-D-R-A F-O-U-N-D B-E-T-T-E-R O-N-E.

The fingerspelling is wholly clumsy and unpracticed, but Mac smiles widely anyway, folding one of her hands over Maggie's.

O-K.

Which is roughly the moment Mac looks up at Will and notices him glaring at her, before saying her name. Biting her lip around a smile, she lifts a hand to her right ear, turning the volume on her hearing aid back up.

"You finished?" she asks.

He gapes at her. "You turned me off?"

Across the table from her, Jim unsuccessfully hides a smile which is only compounded when several of the staffers sitting in on the meeting snicker.

(It is funny, if only because after months of wishing desperately if she could hear his voice now she's tuning him out.)

Mac shrugs. "I'm sure many of them wish they could when you set off on one of your…" Gesturing vaguely, she ignores the indignation on his face. "Puffer-chested lectures on the morality of this or that."

Then, not even looking at Jim, Pretend I'm saying something hilarious. Obligingly he laughs not all too quietly, and she glances at him as he signs back, Are you getting back at him for the Jets cheerleader or the neurosurgeon?

Maggie, surprising them, shrugs.

B-O-T-H.

"When the fuck did you get in on this?" Will asks.

Looking steadfastly at her notes, Maggie shrinks down in her chair. "I just figured, you know, if your boss has a hearing impediment and uses American Sign Language regularly, showing some initiative and learning ASL might not be a terrible idea."

Squeezing Maggie's hand, Mac leans back in her chair, ready for Will's response.

His face half-forms into a scowl, before he puts up his hands, dismissing the issue.

Clearing her throat, she looks down at her notepad.

"Can we get back to the rundown now?"

In the coming weeks, Mac notices more and more of the staff (Neal and Martin, most noticeably, practicing with Tess and Maggie and Tamara and asking Jim for demonstrations and Kendra just shows up half-fluent after a long weekend with absolutely no explanation) awkwardly forming signs and messing up the near-impossible grammar that is ASL, occasionally working up the nerve to try to converse with her in it.

After all, she almost never turns her hearing aid on before the eleven o'clock pitch meeting.

Sometimes it's the only way she gets anything done in the morning.

Still, Jim is the only one she can violently and rapidly sign anything to, and usually across the bullpen after something has thrown their day into the clutches of chaos. It's easier than yelling, and has the added bonus of confusing the hell out of Will, who keeps insisting upon trotting his rotating door of attractive professional women through the newsroom to teach her her lesson:

He doesn't care about her anymore.

And then there's Sloan, who keeps insisting that she go to parties where there are too many people talking and she's not quite confident enough for that yet but still she finds herself poured into a cocktail dress and brought along as Sloan's plus one to a low-key dinner party hosted by President of Columbia University.

Where she meets an Assistant District Attorney named Wade Campbell who has no problems looking at her directly and enunciating clearly and slowly.

Not that she calls Wade right away, after he tucks his business card into her clutch and gently puts his hand on her shoulder to get her attention over the din in the foyer. "I'd love to go to dinner with you, MacKenzie."

Her smile isn't even forced.

Wade is sweet, and a prosecutor, and he touches her elbow and doesn't look at her like she either needs to be coddled or praised for her situation. He's prominent without being a celebrity, powerful without having the ego.

"I'd love to, too."

Sloan had been smug and Mac would love to be sure.

But it's not like Will wants her. He's made it plain what her place is, trotting his dates in front of her with stunning regularity, uniformly and almost nonchalantly refusing to learn sign language. Not that that he's obligated, she corrects herself, tunneling her hands through her hair. But if the rest of the staff has taken it upon themselves—

The control room is running more smoothly, too.

People know to pass notes, and if one person can sign while the other two are speaking at her one semi-functioning ear it makes her life easier.

Would it kill him to learn the letters, at least? That could be of actual use during the broadcast.

It's not like she expected Will to love her.

It's just the fact that she still loves him.

And know that she knows that she can be a mostly-deaf EP and a damn good one at that, that the explosion hasn't ruined her entire worth or consigned her to running copy or something equally insulting, she's back to the daily reminders of how she ruined Will's life. She bows her head and takes the punishments. After all, she was also the one who ran away from the consequences initially, and now she should take them.

He isn't going to fire her.

But he also isn't going to forgive her.

Maybe the best she can hope for is that they can work together, and do the show well. It's not a bad goal, by any stretch. But even now she wonders, if Will thought she was a hallucination at Northwestern, then has he truly moved on?

MacKenzie chides herself.

Don't be a fucking idiot. He just thinks you were the ghost of executive producers past.

Regardless, she hasn't been on a first date in over five years.

She needs to start somewhere.

Sighing, she picks up Wade's business card and dials the cell phone number he scratched onto the back in blue ink preparing to explain that yes, she can use a phone, it has an amplifier on it and oddly enough, if she puts it to the hearing ear it all works out in the end—

Trying not to think about the fact that one of the things she's starting to love (one of the many, many things in addition to the pile of details and minutiae and traits she already does) about Will since she's come back is that he never assumes what she can or cannot do.

She hears the phone pick up on the other end.

"Hello?"

She wonders if it's a comfort to Will, that she's seeing someone. He definitely talks to her more. Maybe he's not worried about her tripping after him, trying to get him to forgive her and fall in love with her again.

It's a new normal, but isn't it all?

"I can hear you, you know," she deadpans, a pretzel halfway to her mouth. It's only been ten minutes since the two o'clock rundown meeting, so he can't have missed her, so Mac wonders what he wants. "You're six-foot-four and over two hundred pounds. Speaking of which, I heard that you're not coming to the New Year's party."

"That was a terrible segue."

Will steals a handful of pretzels out of her bag before sitting down in the chair opposite her desk.

"That was a terrible attempt at surprising me," she retorts, studiously ignoring the theft of her food.

Will balks around a mouthful, and she knows to turn her head because there's no chance in hell he's going to chew and swallow before retorting.

"I wasn't trying to—"

Not the argument she wants to be having.

"You're not coming to the party?" she asks pointedly, looking up from the Times and jabbing the tip of her pink highlighter in his direction. "The rest of the staff will be there. I don't think anyone will care if you bring a plus one, if that's what you're worried about. Jim is bringing Lisa, Neal has Kaylee, I have Wade—"

But Will, of course, the master deflector.

"He's not invited to the DA's party?" he asks, leaning back in his chair with an entirely too-smug grin on his face.

Her answering smile is tight. "He offered to come with me to ours. Since ACN is our family."

Honestly, she had expected Wade to decline and go off to his own parties for the night. Four months of dating doesn't bound anyone to spending the holidays together. (Except Will, but she's trying very hard to not think about that.) But Wade wants to come along and meet the rest of the staff and she likes Wade, she really does, she's just waiting for that spectacular moment of revelation like she had with Will.

"Does he really think you're British?" Will asks, reaching forward steal more pretzels.

She bats his hand away. "Well, I did go to Cambridge and I do have the accent—"

(And not everyone is as interested in the finer points of how she's decided her nationality as Will was when they first started dating. Because, well, first of all it's an incredibly long story and she has to explain how she and Jamie were born here and then her sisters were born in Greece and Berlin and Moscow and then she came back to Manhattan with them for boarding school while Jamie went to boarding school in London, and she went to Cambridge to be closer to her brother and—

It's really just a big mess of McHale family tree branches and it makes her sound like a privileged brat.)

Offended now, Will makes a show of stealing the entire bag out from under her. "Mac you've always told everyone that you're an American. You literally beat it into someone once."

"I've known him four months."

"I knew you were American on the first day."

Slowly, and with a degree of showmanship, he slowly puts a pretzel into his mouth.

Mac is thirty seconds away from strangling him.

But instead she sighs. "You also let everyone know you're from Nebraska within ten minutes of meeting them."

He throws up his hands in a gesture that she knows is supposed to convey but that makes total sense! but precariously resembles an incredibly loose interpretation of the signs for do you spit or swallow? and she snorts because he obviously already knows the answer to that question.

Will's undoubtedly smartass reply is cut off when Jim knocks on her office door while opening it. With a frown on his face, holds the door open by leaning on it and asks, There was a suicide bombing in Peshawar targeting high-ranking Afghan officials. Several marines were killed in the blast. I got it from Noah and it'll hit the wires in ninety minutes.

She nods. Divide them into teams.

You okay? Jim schools his face into a very nonchalant expression.

Rolling her eyes, she waves him off. I can handle this. Go away. Can I call Noah?

Yes, he answers. You sure you're okay?

Whatever, she signs back with a shrug before breaking eye contact. Used to being dismissed by her by now, Jim leaves, shutting the door behind him.

Sighing heavily, she folds her arms under her chest, staring at the bag of pretzels Will has ceded back to her desk.

"Why does he have to do that?" he asks.

Her voice is quiet. "Habit."

"What did he say?" And then, because she's still not looking at him, asks again.

Swallowing, she wipes any trace of anxiety from her face and smiles, reaching for her phone where it's sitting in her bag under her desk. "I have to call one of our military sources. There was an explosion Peshawar and it's going to be in the A block."

"Mac?"

Will reaches for her hand, assuming again that she didn't hear him, and she startles.

"Yes, Will?"

Uncertain and awkward, he lets go of her hand, and stands.

"Just keep me updated."

Thanks for reading!