A/N: Part II's title comes from a song called The Long Haul by No. Part II picks up at the start of the second season. Warning: spoilers for the entire series. Thank you for reading! Also, sorry if there was confusion. The page breaks got taken out somehow and I had to reinsert them into both chapters.

Part II: This helium prefers no ceiling

Time had a powerful way of exposing him. It was constant that could break through the layers with which he'd cautiously surrounded himself.

The weather was getting raw, too. It was cold and rainy for September and that could be a contributing factor, Will figured. Part of what was chipping away at his protective encasement.

Either way, he felt the armor slipping, and sometimes he clung onto it despite it being a fucking lost cause.

When Mac pressed him on why he'd concealed the truth from Sloan and Elliot, the words, "It's embarrassing," tumbled from his lips without hesitation and, for the life of him, he couldn't regret the honesty. Especially when a sense of understanding appeared on her face and she didn't question him any further about the 9-11 anniversary coverage.

He figured that was progress, allowing himself to be vulnerable in front of her.

Abe would like that.

("Of course I'm upset. Are you kidding? I'm flipping out!")

"I know," she'd said, and her exasperated validation was somehow audible over his outburst."It feels bad." )

When he got home that night, he didn't think about how MacKenzie was the only person he could disclose that sort of thing to, or about the fact that, when he noticed the wet remnants of Jameson on her lips it was all he could do not to lean forward and kiss it off.

Instead, he thought about her face when he'd exploded in the middle of the bar, her raised eyebrow a silent invitation to talk, away from everyone else.

Others would scurry away, terrified or unsure of how to approach him.

But Mac stood her ground, as always, shouting right back when he needed it.

She never seemed to falter.

He liked that.

Will wasn't an overly religious man, at least not for a standard, Nebraska-bred Republican, but sometimes he thought that God made her eyes that big and oval for the sole purpose of his unraveling.

But that was far too self-focused a notion, to say the least. It was an insane premise.

Also, it set his mind off on ridiculous tangents relating to fate and Plato and this quotation that'd been engrained in his memory since he'd readThe Symposium in an undergrad philosophy course. The one with the professor who honest-to-Moses had the leather elbowed suit jackets and the thick-rimmed eyeglasses that seemed only suitable for serial killers.

"According to Greek Mythology," it said, "... humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate beings, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves."

It just made Will wonder, was all.

Not a literal interpretation or anything, but he'd been distressingly pensive over the concept lately.

If there were any truth behind the idea that there'd been a custom-designed plan for her eyes, and for the target of their impact, then maybe she'd always been the obvious endgame in his pursuit of...wholeness.

Fuck, though.

Where the hell did thoughts like that come from? And at what point did philosophical, no mythological bullshit (to which he didn't give an ounce of credence, for the record) become this obsession simmering on the backburner of his brain?

Okay, front burner.

Will took another drag of his cigarette, told himself to stop drinking on weeknights (because this was absurd, really, these fucking cerebral excursions), and flipped on the news.

He was literally bleeding from the inside, and it was exactly these kinds of tangential distractions that made his ulcer make a world of sense.

If he watched the Troy Davis coverage long enough, he might be able to distract himself from the memory of her expression earlier tonight, wide-eyed and touched, her eyelashes steady, their flutter on pause.

His father died.

He didn't bother wondering why none of it seemed real until he told MacKenzie. When he spoke the words aloud and read her expression, that was when it sunk in.

He knew the 'why' behind that, because his entire experience with life and living had only seemed relevant circuitously through her, like she was his emotional conduit or something. He was a daft prick sometimes, but he wasn't an idiot, and everything felt heightened when she was around, ipso facto and all that.

When she showed up at his place at 2 a.m. wearing jeans and a navy sweater, an oversized bag in one hand and a full bottle of whiskey in the other, he swallowed, hard, and opened his door.

She took in a breath before he could say anything. "Look, Will. You can send me home. That's your prerogative, but I didn't want you to be alone if you don't want to be." She popped her head in, looking around as she played with the strap of her bag. He tried to get inside her head.

Mac was aware he'd been seeing Nina. It wasn't any kind of secret and it didn't need to be, and for once it wasn't something he was doing to hurt her. What she didn't know was that every time he caught a glimpse of her at work he felt a thousand guilt-ridden and artfully-phrased apologies bubbling to the surface, trying to escape. It didn't take much effort to block them, mind you, but it was as though he had to continuously remind himself that there was nothing to apologize for. That semi-regularly seeing a person who wasn't MacKenzie did not appear on some imagined list of things that were morally wrong.

Will believed in the power of thought: mind over matter, thoughts driving actions, and most of that cognitive behavioral bullshit. But his brain wasn't quite smart enough to persuade his heart out of feeling wrong anyway.

"If you're not alone, I'll just... leave," she continued, looking away from him. Mac bit her lip. He couldn't resist placing his hand on her shoulders in an attempt at reassurance. He felt... rewarded when she made eye contact again.

"It's just me," he shared, holding open the door a little further, making room for her entrance, if she accepted.

She released a sigh (maybe a relieved one, he hoped) at the promise of their isolation.

"I bought you these," she reached into the side pocket of her bag and pulled out a couple of papers. "Turns out there aren't a lot of flight options from JFK to Lincoln in the middle of the week."

She handed him a pair of printed out plane tickets, first class. Tomorrow night. Nebraska.

"The timing is inconvenient," she added. "But it was the only..."

"-Mac, I have an assistant who could've-"

"-I figured it'd be one less person for you to go through the trouble of telling."

She knew him really well, he'd hand her that and a lot more. MacKenzie's actually the only person he'd spoken the words out loud to so far and he wasn't planning on changing that if he didn't have to.

"Thank you," he said, staring down at the papers. "There are two here," he observed.

"If you don't want me there, I'd understand. I just thought I'd...give you the option." The sincerity in her voice had a warming quality, like a microwave set on defrost. He couldn't quite get past what she was offering to give him. "I thought you could use somebody there, and since I knew your father and I know your family-" she trailed off, staring at him until he responded.

"You want to be there?"

"Of course." She stepped further into the apartment, and it was only then that Will realized they were still in the damn doorway. "I mean, as much as anyone wants to be at a funeral."

"Right."

"For all the right reasons, Will. I'm not trying-"

"- I'd like that," he cut her off, saving her from finishing that sentence. "I could use you there." She smiled at his response. "C'mon in. I could use some of that, too," he said, gesturing to the bottle in her left hand. She handed him the liquor as she stepped inside and shrugged her bag off her shoulder.

She took a moment to look around his bare apartment. Her gaze ignited a fleeting wave of self-consciousness.

When MacKenzie used to stay here, there'd be things everywhere, flairs of hominess. Soft pillows and things like that. Afghans and candles. Almost-finished crossword puzzles and magazines with folded page corners.

He made his way into the kitchen when she called to him from the couch. "Pour me a double, Billy. You scared me tonight."

"I scared me tonight," he admitted, reaching into the cabinet to get a couple glasses.

His apartment had felt cold pushing five years now. Any normal person would have looked at the thermostat and been flummoxed.

Will knew better.

Despite his attempts to shut out the past, it was always the moments he tried to forget the most that were written in his memory with permanent marker, a new and improved Sharpie.

(The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.)

Psalm 23 rung through his ears in the pastor's somber tenor while Will tried to block out the barrage of recollections that lingered against his wishes.

(He restoreth my soul
He leadeth me in paths of righteousness.)

Will was ten. His father chased him down the hallway, drunk off his ass and screaming obscenities, threatening to hit his sisters. Demanding that Will get out of the way.

(Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.)

"They didn't do anything," Will had yelled. "They were just playing." He was backed into a corner, pinned down. "DON'T," he'd shouted."Please."

(Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies)

Will clenched his hands together before the blood could rush to his cheeks, trying to refocus on the memorial service. When he managed to snap back into the present, he noticed that MacKenzie's body was in close proximity, her thigh flush against his own in the pew.

(My cup runneth over.)

Why weren't you supposed to think ill of the dead? Why was this some kind of unspoken sin all its own? Will had plenty of memories, good and bad, and it wasn't as though the bad ones just vanished when the person responsible for them disappeared six feet below daylight.

At dinner that night (some buffet style restaurant, something for everybody) there was a cacophony of small talk surrounding them. Mac was shoving seasoned red potatoes around on her plate. He could tell she'd lost her appetite.

The question that left his mouth was something that had been bothering him throughout the service. He didn't realize how close it'd been to the tip of his tongue until it came spilling out under the clank of silverware and the clamor of social graces and clichéd platitudes.

"Mac," he'd whispered, leaning close. His voice seemed to echo inside his ears and muffle out a dozen other conversations. "Have you ever been scared of me?"

She laughed, this surprised murmur of a sound. "God no," she whispered, an assured certainty in her eyes. "Why on earth would I be scared of you? You're harmless."

He needed to hear that so badly that his hand interwove with hers under the table. His grip turned her palms white for a second and Will stared at the connection, mesmerized, before he released her fingers and studied her soft expression.

Her response had come quick and easy, as though the answer wasn't something that required any thought at all.

The effortlessness of her honesty made Will hope that someday he'd manage to find the ability from within to admit the following:

That he Googled her name every day she was overseas, scouring the web and hoping to find another report. Oil boom in Dubai, or Rebel fighters flee Pakistan. Any evidence he could uncover that proved her safety, however temporary.

That he still thought, every day, about the scar on her stomach. About how his hands ached to touch it. That he imagined her telling the story, closing her eyes while his fingertips brushed her skin.

MacKenzie didn't ask where his question came from. Didn't have to.

She rubbed her hand up his back before refocusing on her uneaten potatoes and the wasted sprigs of thyme.

Her touch always had a way of permeating the layers of his clothing.

Ashes to ashes, Will thought.

"It's my fault," she'd told Leona hours earlier. Mac's words still felt prickly in his brain. Most everyone he knew struggled with owning their own failures, but MacKenzie was the walking antithesis of that particular tendency. It was as though she felt she had to singlehandedly compensate for this character flaw of humanity by accepting personal responsibility for every last thing that had gone wrong.

He couldn't stop himself from calling her that night.

He'd seen MacKenzie text people regularly. Sloan, Jim, her parents. But she alwayscalled him, no matter how brief or trivial the message. He didn't know what to make of that, but he found himself doing the same. He liked to think that her rationale, like his, had something to do with auditory comfort.

"McMac," he said when she answered, trying to infuse some pep into his voice. "Can I call you McMac?"

"If you're trying to cheer me up, Billy, fair warning," she stated, her voice coated in fatigue. "It's wasted energy, though I appreciate the thought."

Will let out a breath of smoke, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray, once, twice. "It's gonna be alright," he said, but since he wasn't sure whether he believed his own words he tried a different approach. "Pre race-day polls show your guy's gonna win tomorrow."

Will could hear her faint huff through his phone. "I'll eat my hat if that makes much of a difference over the next four years."

"Yeah." She was right. Polarization led to gridlock, and party affiliation teetered on the edge of irrelevance. "You should try to sleep."

"Sleep is for the weak," she muttered; her voice hung hopeless. Will couldn't help but think that things felt a lot safer when she was relentlessly and infuriatingly idealistic.

"I disagree," he responded.

"How unprecedented."

Will felt a sadness breathing through the pause that followed.

"Mac?"

"We have to convince Leona."

"I know," he said. "Try to sleep."

Before saying goodnight she exhaled with a sound that suggested sleep was not something that was in the cards handed her.

When he pressed the end button, he imagined her face, the set line of her jaw and the slight furrow of her brow, the way her fingers were probably fiddling nervously with the hem of her nightshirt.

He wasn't with her 24-7 to know for sure, but he imagined that her smile would soon show up on a list of endangered expressions, if such a thing existed.

MacKenzie feared he was a bomb about to detonate.

She was right. She just had the wrong idea of what the explosion contained.

And...fair enough.

It was unexpected for a bomb to blast out positivity: six years of apologies and unspoken I love yous and a diamond ring collecting dust. It had all the incongruence of a piñata that poured out lima beans.

No wonder she looked shocked.

He couldn't quite believe the word "yes", so he replayed it in his head until it held no fathomable meaning, just a foreign sort of sound rolling off her tongue through a smile. It wasn't until his lips were on hers that he fully grasped her agreement.

Then she was pressed between his body and a wall, her mouth warm and eager. Hands pulled at his lapels and everything about her felt dizzying. Quixotic.

"When in the hell did you decide you loved me?" She broke the kiss to ask that and Will just shook his head.

He was breathless when he spoke, and he'd explain the details later, in all their revelatory glory, but right now he needed her to understand that, "It's not a decision. It's a constant."

(A physical law of the universe, he thought he'd said, although he couldn't be certain of anything that had just sputtered from his mouth.)

She smiled. She kissed him again! His thoughts would be comprised of sentences like that now.

Will's hand quaked as he held out the ring, but together they managed to slide it on her finger.

"Were you listening earlier?" he asked, watching as she stared at her hand as though it were an unfamiliar appendage. "When I tried to talk the staff out of resigning with us?"

"From the control room," she affirmed, voice raspy.

"Did you hear what Don said about there being principles. And responsibility?"

She nodded and met his gaze. "I don't like what they're doing," she told him. "But I'm proud of them."

"No one who used to work for me would have made that speech 3 years ago, Mac," he insisted. Jesus his voice was still shaking. "No one wantedto work for me three years ago. You created this. I can't live with anyone thinking otherwise."

She beamed up at him, pressing her lips together and motioning toward the newsroom. "We should go tell them."

"Hang on," he said, his mouth crescenting as he leaned forward. Her neck smelled like scents he'd dreamed, like the Dove soap she'd always loved. "I haven't kissed you enough yet."

She was a dance he knew by heart; she was muscle memory.

His hands explored and rediscovered. MacKenzie tasted like champagne and reminiscence and she felt warm wherever he touched.

When she laid rapid kisses up his jaw and said, "I know you're worried, but if you think there's a chance I can fall asleep before this happens, you're out of your fucking mind," he breathed relief into her mouth. Her hands reached for the buckle of his belt and by the time they were both undressed all Will could think was thank God.

His eyes found her scar before his hands, and when he paused to linger she ran her fingers through his hair.

"Battle wound," she explained, her voice cracking.

"I know," he said, and he supposed she never realized how much he'd worried, how much he'd kept track. His hand quivered as it grazed her stomach, fingertips tracing the broken tissue. Mac shut her eyes, just like she'd done in his mind all those times. She seemed delicate. Will had to remind himself to breathe.

(She was okay. She was here. She'd stay.)

Being above her felt surreal, like he was floating through the far-fetched corners of imagination, experiencing the dreams previously extinguished from the realm of possibility.

She arched her hips higher, precisely the right angle, and his whole world suddenly swelled with the knowledge that she, too, never forgot this. And when she was close, he knew what to do, and he knew the breath-stealing sound she'd make, a kind of perfection that reminded him of the beauty you get when you hit the chord just right on a fine-tuned Gibson Les Paul.

Later, her arm was draped across his chest as she slept. He tracked the steady hum of her breathing and listened to the sounds of a sleepless New York, the most trustworthy percussion. The thud of his heartbeat felt wild and alive, a snare drum in the backdrop of the city.