A/N: I promise this is the last chapter that will use dialogue from the show. I just honestly think that the hair and makeup fight does it best, and the initial premise of this was "what if they had that fight much, much earlier" and then the question was, "well, what could put them in the same position as Mac goading Will into firing her." And the answer seemed pretty simple—Mac gets the voice mail. She only ever needed an inch to try to break the holding pattern.

Thanks to seareader, Sleepisfortheweek16, rachellehr16, SueG5123, and millie zhang for reviewing the last chapter!

CHAPTER TWO: TWISTING AND TURNING

Will balks. "It's a reasonable—"

"Yeah, I'm sure." Her mouth shapes into a reflexive, worried grin. "Are you sure that you're not just trying to push me away again?"

"When did I push you away?" She was the one who told him about Brian. She was the one who quit the show and left him. She was the one who walked into his apartment and said we need to talk, as if those words have ever prefaced anything but a break-up. I was using you. She even admits it.

How in the fuck is he supposed to trust that Mac didn't just dump him, and regret it once it got rough overseas? Of course your celebrity ex-boyfriend looks good when you're sleeping in a bunker in the desert. Spend two or three years romanticizing your old life, and you're bound to fall in love with it again, forget that you ever got bored with it in the first place.

And even if MacKenzie does—truly does—love him…

"I went all the way to Peshawar," she cries, half-indignant. Forehead creasing, she stares at him for a moment, before shaking her head. "No. Facing the Taliban was easier," she mutters before shaking her head again, seemingly trying to right herself. Unfolding her arms, she gestures towards him. "Which, fine." Her eyes flicker back to him, before faltering again. "That was my own decision. But you were the one who told me to get the, and I quote, the fuck out of New York and the fuck out of your life."

Because she used him. Because she used him, and was so fucking distraught when he wanted it over, when he didn't want to talk to her, when she made it about her instead of what she did. Because she had the gall to beg, and cry, come into his office with wide hazel eyes and then had the gall to abandon him and the show, not stick around and at least do the fucking job and leave him alone besides—if she just wanted to be his coworker. It wasn't like they had reported their relationship to HR.

She looks at him like she's expecting him to react in a certain way, and he won't give her the satisfaction.

"And let me tell you something," she says, turning his lack of response into an opportunity for self-righteousness. "It's just… you had a ring, you were prepared to marry me, but you were unwilling to read any of my emails or answer any of my calls from when I was still in Atlanta, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Pakistan, getting shot at, getting blown up—"

He stands, shoving his hands into his pockets. Face twisting into a grimace of confusion, she follows him to her feet, and he feels anger rising at her attempt at self-martyrization, like he hasn't spent the past four years trying to get over what she's done.

"Yeah, I'm sorry for this, but the ring was a practical joke." Ignoring how her face blanks, before slowly shifting into an expression of shock, he forces his voice to remain causal, plowing forward with the story. "You were having the staff vet me, Mac." Did she think he wouldn't know what they'd find? How she would react? "I knew you were gonna find the offer from when we were together for me to do something on the West Coast. I knew you were gonna come into the office waving it and saying, 'aha, you were never as serious as you said, 'cause if you were you'd have told me about a job you were considering on the other side of the country.' And that's what happened."

And she did. She needed to feel like she was less at fault for what happened between them.

Only once he finishes does he notice how her eyes have stopped focusing, glazed over, how her fingers are holding onto the back of her chair to keep her steady. "You know," she says slowly, "I heard 'the ring was a practical joke...' and then I didn't hear anything after that."

He scrambles. "It wasn't a joke. It was a rejoinder. It wasn't a joke."

Her eyes refocus, but on a point a few feet in front of her desk. Carefully, she brushes her hair behind her ears, blinking repeatedly until the look of confusion washes from her features. "You took out a ring, and showed it to me as proof that your intention had been to marry me."

"I bought the ring that morning," he calmly explains, feeling his confidence begin to be shaken from him when her features tighten with pain. "Scott's assistant did."

I love you. I know you said it because you were high, Will. And that's… fine. You're going to wake up and you're going to be angry with me again, even if… even if you do really love me, but I can wait.

Shit.

She was right.

And now she looks like she's barely standing. But Will doesn't doubt her ability to keep herself upright, no matter what. She'll be fine. MacKenzie's always been strong-willed, has always been able to endure.

Has she, though? Is his mind just retrofitting the MacKenzie that she is today over the one he first fell in love with six years ago? Doubt creeps and settles in his stomach. Her words have him reconsidering the early months of their relationship, fast forwarding through memories, looking for skips and deletions and edits.

I wasn't a very good person, when you first met me.

That can't be true.

Later. It wasn't just dating later.

One of these things has to be false. But he doesn't like the implications of either.

Fuck.

Her mouth settles into a grim line, and dread begins to well in his chest. "Your agent's assistant went to Tiffany's and bought the ring that morning?"

"Yes. I'm sorry. And you were never supposed to know," he continues calmly, tamping down on the panic threatening to seep into his voice, clinging to his composure. "So I get the irony, and I am really sorry."

Mac gives a disbelieving little laugh. "That ring must have cost a quarter of a million dollars."

"I'm not really sure."

He is. He knows exactly how much it cost, and she's not far off, because honestly he told Scott to buy the biggest diamond that Tiffany's had in the store. And, shit. He can't fucking tell her that he kept it, because he—I've never stopped loving you—but still, if he did that to her and then decided to keep it… Will doesn't know that that means.

"We returned it that afternoon," he blurts out. "I asked them to get a nice one—you once described a ring that you saw in a movie."

My Best Friend's Wedding. If he recalls correctly.

He stares at MacKenzie, watching her disbelief gather into hurt, and then expand into anger. When her eyes set back onto him, they're shining and bright.

Her fingers flex, palms facing outwards. "Okay—"

He needs to explain himself.

(Not that he really has any idea how to.

I bought the ring because I knew it would hurt you. I didn't want to give you the upper hand.)

"Mac—"

Exhaling hard, MacKenzie looks at him. Her lips part slightly, before pursing tightly, and he knows she's building herself up into something.

"The past three weeks, I have been replaying that moment in your office over, and over again in my mind, how I would have said yes, if you'd asked me four years ago, and how fucking stupid I am and everything I threw away, and it was a joke?" she asks, voice rising in pitch, straining not to rise in volume.

Fear and something like shame bore a hole into his chest the moment she stops looking him in the eye, instead directing her gaze and hand gestures to her desk. Swallowing, she spools her control back in until it's tightly-wound. Visibly restraining herself, forcing herself to remain even, she bites her lip, and then continues.

"I spent twenty-six months in a warzone, came home, signed the most humiliating contract in broadcast news, a three year contract, have taken every single one of your punishments for what I did to you without complaint, and you decide that I don't feel guilty enough for what I've done to you? That I don't fully understand the ramifications?" She wavers, pushing down her emotions again. "You don't know—"

Abruptly, she stops. Will scrutinizes her face, trying to get any sort of read on her features.

Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Pakistan, getting shot at, getting blown up—

"Don't know what?" he asks, voice edging on demanding.

Will knows that she got hurt, that she got caught in riots, reported on IED explosions and shootouts in the Khyber mountains.

And he hasn't asked her. About any of it. Because if he does, and she tells him about these things, about the three missing years, about why Jim follows her doggedly and why her left leg turns in now (he's angry that he even noticed that) when she walks or why she leans on tables, more commanding than she used to—

He'd forgive her.

If he asked, if he read her emails.

(Because he forgave his dad, more than once. Because his mom did, too. Because they trusted his apologies, his guilt.

Will does not give sympathy to those who have hurt him.)

"Mac, don't know what?"

"Get out," she says, the muscles of her cheeks and jaw twitching.

"What?"

MacKenzie sighs, regrouping. When she looks up, her eyes are vulnerable, but somehow hard. "I love you, Will. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. But we're not doing this now. We'll talk about this later, because I need to be able to be in your ear tonight. So you're going to leave, and we'll finish this after the broadcast."

He tries one more time.

"I wasn't—you weren't ever supposed to even know, and—"

"You just told me!" Mac cries, slamming her hand down on her desk, before recoiling, curling in on herself, shaping herself into something softer. "Just get out, Will."

Gaping at her for a moment, his mind runs through a dozen different things he could say to her, and finds them all wanting.

So he does as she's asked.

Jim finds her, not even five minutes later.

She used to be better at this, shoving the pain down, had to do it for three years because being embedded means having no privacy, and as one of a handful of women on a marine base she had to learn how to chin up and carry on, but Jim walks in on her sitting at her desk with tears running down her face anyway.

"Mac?"

Waving a hand towards him, she dries her eyes with the other. "I'm fine."

She realizes he was probably waiting for Will to leave. Jim closes the door to her office, and then shutters the blinds.

"I'm pretty sure you're not." Hands on his hips, he stands before her, working his jaw. "What did he do?"

"Nothing."

Jim looks down at his feet, before raising his eyes back to hers. Uncomfortable, he affords her the meager privacy to at least try to wrest her composure back into place. Sighing shakily, Mac reaches for the tissue box next to her computer, pulling out a few and setting to cleaning up her face, blotting off ruined makeup.

"What did he say to you?" he asks, quietly calm, voice threaded through by an unsettling intensity.

"It's nothing," she breathes, trying to keep her tone casual. Regardless, she knows that she sounds strangled. No that Jim would believe her anyway. "Don't worry about it."

Shifting his weight, he widens his stance, letting concern bleed through on his features. "Mac, it's clearly not nothing. This is twice in the past month I've found you like this after he's spoken to you."

(After Will showed her the ring in his office three weeks ago, she fled to her office, shut the door. And when she didn't return to the conference room to hear the rest of the opposition research, Jim had come to find her.

Curious, really, more than concerned.

And found her crying in her bathroom. Or trying very hard not to—MacKenzie can't quite remember if she started crying before or after she had Jim's shoulder to do it on.

Then, as usual, it's nothing that I don't deserve. It's between Will and me. Don't get mixed up in it.)

How the fuck did the day start out with I've never stopped loving you and now, barely six hours later, empty out to the ring was a practical joke? She knew, though, didn't she? That he'd be angry, once he sobered up.

She should have braced for it.

"It's my own fault."

Is it?

Jim must see the growing uncertainty on her face. "Really, Mac? Four years later, it's still all your fault?"

Her head is spinning. Will thinks that she told him about Brian to break up with him. Will thinks that she left to get away from him. That she came back to News Night for—what? What could he possibly think? She signed a contract that lets him fire her at the end of every week, stood by as he paraded date after date in front of her, landed himself in the tabloids. Has worked for more than a year to get his trust back.

She knew it was never going to be simple, or easy. And she was going to wait, for however long it took for him to come back.

You were spectacular tonight.

She should have just ignored the voicemail. And then no, she thinks. That would have just made it worse, because if the answer is no then just do me a favor and don't call me back or bring it up and just…

Fuck.

Why the fuck.

"Mac?" Jim takes a step closer, and she waves him off again before wrapping her arms around her middle. "Are you gonna be okay to work today?"

"I'm fine," she manages to offer, only half-present. The rest of her head is trying to collate her emotions, unknot anger from betrayal from guilt from self-recrimination from self-righteousness. "You know I've worked through worse."

MacKenzie wonders if this means that Will has never intended to get back together with her.

Yes. I'm sorry. And you were never supposed to know. So I get the irony, and I am really sorry.

What she thinks hurts the most is that, yes—she knows what he makes now, knows that it's more than several million a year, and that $250,000 is a hit but he can take it, but four years ago? He didn't make a fraction of he does now. She's spent the past three weeks figuring out how much of his old salary it would have been, what would have been rearranged for her to have a ring like that, something that showy and ostentatious, because he would have been proud to have her as his wife, and she would have be so goddamn proud to wear his ring and now—

It was a joke. It was showy and ostentatious because Will wanted to make a statement. He wanted a prop. He wanted it to hurt.

And it does.

Somehow she's gone from sitting behind her desk to muffling herself against Jim's shoulder, his arms awkwardly hooked under her own.

"I could put a thumb tack on his chair," he suggests, trying to pry a laugh from her. "I'm totally serious. Thumb tack. Maybe even a staple, 'cause those are harder to see."

"Jim," she says, chiding him.

"I'm just saying."

She huffs a watery laugh. "I'll string you up. I don't want to be protected. I don't need to be protected."

"Did I say that?" he asks, pretending to be affronted. "I've seen you take down seven foot marines. You've kicked my ass."

"Yeah, that wasn't especially difficult," she muses, and thinks that they're both going to not notice the wet spot she's left on his shirt.

They smile at each other, his more sure than hers, both remembering being taught to spar by the Unit Commander of the 7th Marine Regiment, because they needed to learn to protect themselves and each other, because they might need to disarm someone, because they might need to fight their way out.

(Or fight their way in.

She remembers his mouth moving silent words, his face hovering above her while she struggled to stay awake.)

Jim's expression changes from amused to conciliatory, and Mac lets her arms drop from around his middle. Stepping away, he shrugs, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Yeah… anyway, I'm saying. I know you can be your own knight in shining… whatever. I'm just offering."

She cocks her head, wiping away one last tear with an index finger. "Thumb tack?"

Of all the things…

Jim barks a small laugh. "It was the first thing that came to mind, all right?" Again, he pulls himself back, but not before reaching out with one hand to momentarily grasp her bicep. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm okay." She smiles tightly, and nods, eyes widening.

Jim snorts, rounding out back in front of her desk. "He could probably take me anyway."

"Probably?" She lifts an eyebrow. Will played high school football. Jim was the captain of the debate team and played the clarinet in the marching band.

Again, he pretends to be offended for her benefit, hesitating at the closed door before opening it. "Don't rub it in."

He should have just told her that he kept it, but that would be worse in a way. I bought the ring to hurt you, but kept it in case I ever figure out how to forgive you so I can propose with it. So no, he can't tell MacKenzie that. He needs to figure out what the hell he is going to tell her, though, when they finish this after broadcast, because he never wants to see that look on her face ever again.

Why in the fuck did he even—

Getting shot at, getting blown up-

She got hurt. Because he told her to get the fuck out of New York, and in true MacKenzie fashion, she hit the ground running. Out of New York, out of the country, away from every broadcasting hub where he might run across her, and into a warzone.

He had to remind her that she hurt him first, but that he got the last word.

I wasn't a very good person, when you first met me.

He wasn't that great, either, when she came back from being embedded. And she loved him anyway.

But that was her fault. She was the one who went away.

Scrubbing his hands over his face, he almost laughs at the ridiculous hypocrisy of that statement.

Mac's taken the blame for all of her actions and mistakes, and what he knows of Brian Brenner, he probably didn't help her be the beacon of good ethics or stern and empathetic boss that she is for their staff.

And I'm not—I'm not making excuses for myself.

No. Okay. He can't either.

Later. It wasn't just dating later.

Just… fuck.

He startles when Jim raps his knuckles against the outside wall, and then enters his office without waiting for an invitation.

"What's up?" Will asks, leaning back in his desk chair.

Biting his upper lip, Jim walks slowly into the center of the room, looking like he's thinking something over. Inclining his head forward, he looks Will square in the eye, before saying quietly, but fiercely, "I don't know what you said to her, and honestly I don't care. I won't quit, because she needs me here, but make her cry again and I will make your life hell in every single way I possibly can that doesn't compromise the show. She made me promise not to do anything in response to the shit you give her, and I haven't until now because I respect Mac too much."

Staring intently, Jim tilts his head forward, thinking, considering. Pursing his lips, it looks like he's extracting the words from his mind with care, still debating whether or not to share them as he speaks them. "It was gonna be a rough day for her, besides whatever stunt you just pulled. We spent three years getting shot at by insurgents working on Osama bin Laden's orders."

Getting shot at, getting blown up. Will makes himself nod to Jim, who takes a deep breath, nostrils flaring.

Somehow, all Will can think of is how he called Jim Scooter the first day they met, and how angry Jim looks now, angry and older, even if his shirt is still rumpled, shirt wrinkled and tie crooked, hair desperately needing to be combed.

All Will can feel is a nebulous wave of terror washing over him, again and again.

"I was there for her when you weren't," Jim quietly seethes. "Remember that."

As quickly as he came in, Jim leaves without so much as a backwards glance.

Reaching shakily for the cigarettes at the top of his desk, Will decides that he's definitely going to go to his appointment with Habib this week.

Thanks for reading!