A/N: Thanks to everyone who showed interest and left comments and kudos on the last chapter! And like I said in my last author's note... this is my stand-in for a NaNo, so this isn't going to be a short story by any means. So I hope you're in this for the long haul! And like it says in the summary, this story is going to be pretty Mac-centric. Obviously other people will appear and other POVs will be used, but all roads lead to MacKenzie on this one.

I'm going to try to start replying to reviews in a few moments. I really appreciate everything you guys have to say, but shout-out to myragumm, Ellie 5192, Tripple-A-Plus, MoonlightGardenias, Sarah, Chloe83, and dandoan for leaving reviews on chapter one.


CHAPTER TWO


This is not supposed to be happening. This isn't supposed to be—and not to Mac, for the love of fuck, not Mac. This has already happened to Mac. This is supposed to be happening to someone nameless, faceless, because he can't carry Mac out of here like he did last time.

But it's happening.

It's happening, and he needs to handle it, because Mac can't fucking die, and Jim's been here before but that was thousands of miles away and this is New York City, not a goddamn motherfucking warzone. They're locked in Mac's bathroom and there are still gunshots ringing out and Jesus-fucking-Christ Mac has been shot.

And he needs to do something about it.

(He did something about it, last time. Carried her out of the riot, listening to blood gurgling into her mouth, to the army medic, held her tightly in lieu of a seatbelt as they were driven block after block to a whitewashed surgical center. She had called out for Will, then, asking Jim that in the case that she, if she died, to call Billy and tell her she was sorry and honestly, Jim is an investigative reporter and why the fuck couldn't he put it together that Billy was Will McAvoy and called his assistant and given them what-for to get him over the line so she could say it to him before she was wheeled away into surgery?

—they'd all be in very different places right now, and the abstractness of it hurts Jim's head a little too much at the moment to think of it, when he needs to be focused and singular and here, present for this, so he tamps down on the thought.)

Jim forces himself to take a breath, adjust Mac in his arms. "You're okay," he murmurs, low and steady, trying not to freak the fuck out at the sight of blood seeping through her blouse at an alarming rate. "You're all right." Slowly, gently, he lies her down on the floor, before looking up at Don and Maggie. And then remembers. "The first aid kit is in the kitchen."

(Last time, after, Jim put himself through every first aid and triage class he could find, so that he'd never have to stand there, rooted to the peeling linoleum floor, watching helplessly, ever again. And Mac's trained him in everything else he's ever needed to know, anyway, so he could do this for her.)

"You can't go out there," Mac wheezes, in a rush. And fuck, Jim thinks, looking at her. She's pale, face drawn, tight with pain, and he thinks, he knows, that if the bullets stop, he'll go out there. "Jim—no."

"Mac," he pleads, shrugging out of his jacket and balling it under her head. Maybe security will be able to take down the gunman soon. Maybe they won't have to stay here longer than a few minutes. Maybe the chips will come down on their side, this time. "All we've got in here is toilet paper and some towels."

"The gunman's still out there, Jim," Don echoes, sounding more steady than he looks, taking off his own jacket and handing it to him, leaning Maggie up against the wall where she looks paralyzed, frozen in fear and shock as gunshot after gunshot continues to ring out. More glass shatters, and she covers her mouth with her hands.

All Jim can think is that he went through a riot to get to Mac the last time. He can cross the newsroom to get to the kitchen. The gunman has to leave the floor eventually.

He takes her pulse. It thunders under his index and middle fingers, and he thinks he's never been more grateful for anything in his life.

"Yeah," Jim concedes, for the moment, leaning over Mac to open the cabinet under her sink, pulling out hand towels. "Yeah." He looks down at her, folding a towel into a tight square.

He doesn't know whether or not he's praying for an exit wound, a clean break, or—but he has to be ready. He knows how to be ready. He knows how to stand by, Mac trained him how to stand by, and he's going to stand by her for.

GSW to the right flank, could be in her liver, or pancreas, or her lung, he doesn't know the angle of impact and maybe it was a semi-automatic but maybe it went through the glass wall and slowed down and maybe it hasn't even breached the abdominal cavity.

"This is gonna hurt, remember?"

"I remember," Mac whispers, because the knife hadn't been left in, the assailant had taken it with him and they've been here before. Don comes around to kneel behind her head, looking frightened and Jim keeps telling himself that he was trained well, making quick work of Mac's shirt, tugging the hemline out of her skirt and unbuttoning it, pushing up the camisole she's wearing underneath up under the bottom of her breasts and rolling the hem tight.

Fuck.

It's been a long, long time since he's seen a gunshot wound in person and just, fuck, really, and why Mac? as if she didn't already suffer enough.

"You ready?" He stares down at her, sliding his hands tentatively under her hips. Mac bites her lip, forcing her face to slacken out of the fierce grip of pain, and nods. Jim looks back up at Don. "I need you to brace her shoulders. We need to see if there's an exit wound." And then back down to Mac. "You need something to bite on?"

She shakes her head determinedly, and Jim notes that she's getting paler by the minute, sweat dotting her forehead. Something has him put his hand on her forehead, sweeping her bangs off of her face.

"On the count of three. One, two—"

On three they lift her, and turn her so she's leaning more on her left side than her right, and Jim wrenches Mac's blouse down her arms and whips it away from her body, before lying it flat under her with the towel and lying her back down onto the floor.

(Sterile field, bullshit. There's blood everywhere and he's trying not to see it, to look past it until it doesn't exist. Keep moving.)

"How bad?" she gasps, squeezing her eyes shut. Shit. Shit. He runs one of the towels under tap water, folding it over and placing it across her forehead, trying to ignore Don's panicked stare.

"No exit. Your liver might have caught it." At least Jim hopes so. Shit. At least if it's in her liver he won't have to worry about her drowning in her own blood on her bathroom floor. He looks at the wound again, measuring it out with his fingers. The entry wound is as wide as from the tip of his thumb to his knuckle, but the diameter of scorched flesh is an inch or two wider. A .45 caliber round Jim thinks, maybe. Maybe Mac was far enough away for it to make a difference.

"Hey, Maggie?" he asks, turning to look up at her. Her eyes flutter to him, a little unfocused. "You with me?"

"Ye—yeah."

Jim nods up at the sink, where a stack of paper Dixie cups sit on the ledge. "I'm gonna need you to start filling up those little cups with water." Not really, but it might be best to have Maggie doing something so she doesn't panic, and irrigating the entry wound might help Mac out a little in the long run.

It'd be better if they had a water bottle, but they don't.

Keep moving.

"I can do that." Maggie extracts herself from the wall, nodding jerkily.

He turns back to Don. "Call 911—"

"They already know about the shooting, I mean, there are over eighty people on this floor—"

"—and tell them that we've got a white female in her late thirties in the executive producer's office with a GSW to her right flank. Vitals stable. That way they know to come here first."

"Right, right," Don says with a nod, patting down his pockets for his cell phone. "Fuck, um…"

"I grabbed Mac's, accidentally—" Jim starts. He had just grabbed the first thing he had seen before hitting the deck.

"Yeah, use mine," Mac says quietly, gesturing weakly with her hand, laying limp at her side, towards where her BlackBerry sits on top of the toilet seat. She mutters the lock code, before turning her eyes back to Jim. "You're not worried about towel fibers?"

"Toilet paper might be a worse bet." He feels a bit of relief, only a little, when she nods in agreement. Jim starts to unbutton his blood-stained dress shirt. "I'll use this as a first layer though. How are you feeling? Hot still? Cold?"

"Hot. Light-headed."

MacKenzie's phone begins to vibrate.

"Nauseous?"

"Fuck," Jim hears Don say behind him. Sitting back on his heels, he turns to look at the screen that Don is holding out to him.

"What is it?" Mac asks faintly.

Incoming call from… Will McAvoy.

She's a lot more cogent than she had been after the stabbing, although Jim figures that's because the bullet is probably stopping up most of the hemorrhaging so she's not experiencing the same amount blood loss. (Yet, he tries not to think. Moving her had been a bad call, but all he could think was to get her away from the door. The bullet lodged below her ribcage might be the only thing keeping her alive right now.) He can hear her in his head, and she glares at him with more purpose than she should be able to have at the moment.

I swear to God, Jim, if you ever try to be a hero again I'm gonna pummel your ass with a baseball bat.

That's two you owe me, Mac, he had said back.

Third time's the charm.

"Will's calling you." Jim shifts his weight from his heels back to his knees, watching Mac's eyes go even wider, her thoughts spinning out of control behind them. "What do you want to do?"

She takes a moment, not really considering but trying to calm the rising anxiety on her face. God fucking dammit, Jim thinks. She's not going to—

"Don't answer it."


"She's not picking up." The thought gets picked up and then spun around again and again to the forefront his mind on repeat. After the sixth ring it goes to voicemail, and Will keeps the phone to his ear for a moment longer just to hear her voice tell him that this is MacKenzie McHale, and if he leaves a message she'll get back to him as soon as possible.

He looks up at Charlie's concerned face. "It went to voicemail."

"She might not have her phone, Will." He can't tell how much Charlie believes of that. The vision of Mac, lying on her back in the bullpen like a marionette with its strings cut, blood fanning out from her dark hair, eyes open, unseeing—

Mac, alone, curled under a desk, blood seeping through her fingers as she presses them over a gaping bullet hole in her belly—

Mac, reckless and unthinking of consequences, on her knees in front of the shooter, bargaining for their lives, until he levels the barrel at her forehead, or smashes in her temple with the butt of his gun—

Sloan grabs his arm, trying to shake him out of the visions that are cycling through his head from where he's leaning against his bathroom wall, Charlie and Elliot looking on worriedly. He ignores them.

"She probably just dropped her phone, Will. Mac's fine. I mean, hell, she and Jim lived this for twenty-six months."

I didn't say it.

Shit.

He wasn't even thinking it, until five minutes ago.

Shit.

If she dies—if she's already dead, and he didn't say, couldn't even bring himself to admit until the bullets started flying, he'll never forgive himself. And that's the kicker, isn't it?


The phone stops ringing and Mac doesn't know whether or not she should cry from relief or exhaustion. It's too much. It's too much and she can't. She picks up the phone and he's worried about her, she picks up the phone and he's reaching out from the other end of the line, she picks up the phone and he knows that she's been shot and he—what?

What does she want him to do?

(She needs him, that's the short answer.)

She feels like she's going to throw up.

(She wants him to hold her. She wants him to do a lot of things, but she wants him to hold her, like he used to, look at her like he used to, like he could carry her through, she needs him to carry her through. And he's been, since Genoa. Day and after and she wants more, and Mac doesn't know if that makes her a shitty person or not, if his friendship isn't enough, or if it isn't enough right now because she's got a bullet in her side and she's trying so hard not to cry that her chest feels like it's on fire.)

Its okay, she tells herself. Because it has to be. She's been here before. She'll be okay.

(She's shaking, and everything fucking hurts, and Maggie's gone completely white and hasn't said three words strung together since this started, and if she worries about Maggie then she'll have something to focus on besides how fucking cold her bathroom floor is, and even though that feels great at the moment because she's sweating and her face is scorching, it doesn't detract from the fact that she's been shot and she's terrified and—

Breathe in, breathe out.)

She listens to Don calling dispatch, trying to take his words and make it seem like they apply to someone else, anyone but her.

"Hey," Jim says, gently touching her face, directing her line of sight back to him. "I need to irrigate before I start applying dressings. You're gonna be okay, Mac, the police will be here any minute and—what is it?"

She follows his line of sight back to Don, who has the speaker of her cell phone pressed against his lips, brow furrowed.

"Don?" she asks, nausea rising with the look on his face.

He looks like he's unsure if he should speak, licking his lips to buy time. "The building's on lockdown. They can't get us out of here any time soon."


Thanks for reading!