A/N: Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed Part I, or favorited, or followed. The response to this was overwhelming! Thank you all. Thanks again to Aly and Meg for helping me!
And Meg for editing for my concussed ass. Those of you who follow me on tumblr know why this part was late—this morning while trying not to step on my four-year-old niece or the dog I didn't manage to avoid the corner of the bathroom cabinet and thwacked my temple pretty hard, and spent most of the morning and early afternoon at my GP's and the radiologist's. Thankfully, I had Part II written already, it just needed editing, which Meg volunteered to do. However, now I can't make any promises about when Part III will appear.
PART II: CAUGHT IN A DREAM
Under the waves, caught in a dream
Lover, can you hear me breathing?
Under the waves, now that I'm giving up
I can let the current carry me.
Jim's asleep. Will's not entirely certain how, but he is. Or is doing a fine job of pretending to be, or maybe Jim is rational enough that he has worked himself into sleeping because he knows that he won't get the chance again soon. But Will's nerves are not so easily nor logically calmed, especially not now.
(Or ever.)
But Jim being asleep provides him with the cover to finally examine the object he had hastily stowed into his carry-on. (Not that either of them had had the time to pack luggage to check, Jim having grabbed the duffel he kept in his office—MacKenzie's office, really, Jim had hardly removed any of her things, had kept it like a shrine to what used to be—in case of stories breaking overnight, and Will had just thrown a few things into his briefcase with the intention of buying whatever he may need once they land in Germany.) He still doesn't know why he didn't just open the goddamn drawer ten months ago, when she was saying goodbye to him in his office. He had unlocked it moments before she had walked in, and he had… he was at least going to show it to her. That he had kept it. Torn up the receipt and kept it because it was going to be her, it is going to be her, it's always going to be her.
But he had lost his nerve at her dispassionate farewell, her seeming pronouncement of the end of their relationship sum total, and that had been the end of it. But looking back, Will wonders if maybe it was dispassion feigned to cover up hurt. Where he found anger, MacKenzie had always found nonchalance.
She had cried out for him.
It keeps replaying over and over again in his head.
It's the real reason he doesn't want to sleep, he thinks, hands shaking as he shakes the black velvet box out of the Tiffany blue packaging. If he sleeps, he'll see her, face contorted in pain, screaming.
He used to have nightmares of it, when she was in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Green Zone. He still has nightmares of it—Syria, in many ways, is more dangerous than when she went off to embed the first time. She has no marines to protect her in Syria, no military protection. Had no marines. Had no military protection.
Someone dropped sarin gas on his MacKenzie.
(On rebels. And civilians. In Damascus. But MacKenzie was there, she's a civilian reporter.)
(Not that she's his MacKenzie. No, he made quite sure of that over the past, what, six and a half years, now? They've been apart far longer than they ever had been together in the first place. Physically apart for half of their knowing of each other, too.
And he just… is keenly aware of how badly he's fucked this up.)
And she…
Screamed his name while writhing in the back of the transport, while the poor girl who had been hired as her assistant held her hand. It was… the precise contents of his worst nightmares. Not that she… she rarely screamed his name, in these nightmares, the ones since she went to Syria. She just… would scream. And scream, and scream, covered in blood and sweat and dirt. Or in the nightmares that would render him completely unable to move upon waking, would lay silently on a road in a neighborhood flattened and scattered to debris and detriment, eyes wide upon, limbs splayed like a marionette with its strings cut. Lay, unable to wake. And he would be left, shaken, in bed, waiting for his BlackBerry to ring for Charlie or Jim to deliver the worst.
She screamed. He watched her scream, covered in blood and sweat and dirt.
On… film.
They land in Germany in six hours. The flight to Ramstein will be short. Will has been checking his phone every twenty or thirty minutes or so since take off to make sure… She took off her mask. And he knows, they all know, from Genoa, just how… and if she inhaled it…
They used sarin.
He doesn't take the ring out, just opens the clamshell box and stares at it. He knows why he took it, but not what to do with it. Give it to her, Will supposes, in one manner or another. Not necessarily… he won't propose, not when she's refused to speak to him in ten months. But it's hers. It's meant for MacKenzie. And if she won't have him, she should have it, after all the shit he's pulled. Have it to keep, or sell, or…
To know. That he didn't return it.
He'd written that, of course, in email after email. That he had kept the ring, that he had lied to her, that he was sorry, that he didn't know why he had lied, why he had hurt her, why he had wanted to hurt her. That he had kept the ring in his desk for a year and half, closer to two and a half, now, with the intention of…
Will groans silently, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, letting the ring box snap closed and fall onto his lap.
She screamed for him.
It doesn't make sense, after what he did. It doesn't make sense, and he wants to believe that she, after all this time… it's been nine years, since she first came to work as the EP of News Night. He's been in love with her for nine years. He's wasted so much time. He'd starting seeing Habib again after she left. Weekly, even. Going to all the appointments he paid for, to figure out why the fuck he…
I love you. And I forgive you, not that you need my forgiveness anymore. I am in need of yours. I think I forgave you a long time ago, but refused to let myself see, and instead tried to even the scales only to tip them in your favor. Please, dear MacKenzie.
And signed his name, again and again and again or shortened it to his first initial or just, lately, me, when it felt less like he was writing to Mac and more like he was just chronicling his guilt in a diary.
He read her emails, finally.
And now she won't read his. Perhaps, though, Will figures, if she is truly indifferent, then would have read them, and turned him away. Her staunch refusal to even… it did indicate a level of emotion that would… and the ring, if she had not, that day in his office… and her repeated assurances that she had fell in love with him…
He never stopped loving her.
(Your name, idiot.)
Maybe she has never stopped loving him.
It's a childish hope, but one that, in the past few hours, Will has begun to cherish.
Maggie is the one who winds up with the footage, after downloading it from Jim's email to a flash drive. No one should see it. It's Mac. It can't just be delegated out. She's not going to farm this out to an assistant, or some late-night editor she doesn't know, she's not going to… it's Mac.
Sloan is still in Will's office with Charlie. Jim had told everyone left in the bullpen, what had happened before it was put on the wires, before he and Will left for JFK to catch the first plane to Frankfurt. People were returning from home in droves, the newsroom coming back alive despite the hour.
With both Jim and Will gone, she supposes its Don and Elliot's show now, but it's still… this is News Night, and Mac. Even if Mac's nearly a year gone. Even if Mac told Maggie not to come to Syria to work with her, like Maggie had offered, months ago. Because Mac, Maggie thinks, wants the family to stay together. Because Mac is coming back. She's going to come back, she had planned on coming back. Why else would she tell her and Jim (and Gary, she thinks, offered) to stay with Will?
Mac has never abandoned them. Maggie, everyone, watched her beat herself up day after day for three years, watched her tear herself down after Genoa. Of course Mac had to get away, she was going to self-destruct if she didn't. And Maggie… is intimately familiar with self-destructing.
(Her hair is longer now, faded to a strawberry blonde that she's trying to keep up with, along with her therapy appointments. She sees Will's therapist, has been since Will shuffled her into therapy when she finally broke down entirely after Mac went to embed. She has hair appointments every five weeks to touch up her roots and therapy every Tuesday morning, and sometimes she has lunch with Will where neither of them say very much at all, but they make a strange little family, the two of them, somewhat apart from the rest of the newsroom with Mac gone.)
It's hard to watch—an understatement that leaves out how the footage leaves Maggie shaking, working her jaw while she tries to keep going through it. At a little past 34:15 she cuts the film, and puts the first three-fifths or so onto a drive for everyone to use. After that, no one should ever see it. Mac deserves that. Anyone… its basic human decency. No one should see Mac like that. She tucks the (one) drive holding the raw footage into her pants pocket, and starts editing together a segment for the show from what's been saved onto Jim's computer. She'll go down to the actual editing bay later when it empties out when the morning shows are done with prep, but for now what Jim keeps software-wise on his desktop is enough.
They'll need someone to do the voiceover, and with Will in Germany and Sam and Mac out of… commission…
Maggie mentally starts going down the list of correspondents and contributors, working, forcing herself to keep working, while more and more of the News Night staff returns to the twenty-fifth floor in the middle of the night. Who was good enough?
A knock at the door startles her.
"Sloan."
She's been crying.
"That's it, right?" She asks, not entirely able to look at Maggie, or the computer, as if she can't trust what's on Maggie's face or the screen. Which Maggie thinks is probably fair. "The uh… Charlie said they caught it all on tape, and sent it to Jim. That Mac… that Mac told them to send it to Jim."
"Yes."
"So you—" She stops, and shakes her head. "How—how bad is it? Have you—? Will, before he left, he didn't say, and I didn't think to ask—"
Maggie swallows hard. "I have it cut before she… if you want to watch it, Sloan. I'm putting together a segment, so there's a version… there's an edited version, you don't have to watch the raw footage."
Sloan doesn't quite know how to take that, Maggie can see, hesitating in the doorway. "I should."
"You don't have to." And if she's not ready, she shouldn't. Sloan's never seen… Maggie doesn't think Dr. Habib would be overly-impressed with her own reasons for watching Mac throw up and convulse in the back of a car, but Maggie has at least seen… Sloan shouldn't watch it if she's not prepared, mentally. Or if it's because she feels an obligation.
(Which is entirely hypocritical, but Maggie supposes that's why she and Will have grown close these past months.)
"Will did," Sloan protests, face hardening. Will and Sloan had fallen away a bit, when Mac had first left. And then somehow repaired their relationship. Maggie doesn't pry, but she does know that Sloan emails Mac and Will doesn't ask Sloan about it.
"That's Will," Maggie said slowly, because she's not sure if that's an argument to make. "You can watch the footage I'm putting on the air."
"I just… is she… I can't even. You know, we did the research. With Genoa. How quickly sarin can kill someone. And how. I remember the acronyms." Sloan keeps talking in stops and starts, finally stepping out of the doorway and sitting in the chair in front of Jim's—Mac's—desk, clasping her hands on her lap and still not quite looking at Maggie. "What did she look like? After, when—I remember reading about the pupils, and—"
"Sloan, if you want to watch it, I won't—I can lock the door. And I won't—I can do whatever you need me to do." She doesn't want to influence Sloan either way, and she's trying to choose her words carefully, but it's not easy, not with Sloan looking like she might crumple at any second and Maggie feeling like the floor's given out entirely, but she doesn't want Sloan to do this for the wrong reason, or push herself too far. "But she—It's hard."
Sloan gulps down a sharp inhalation of air. "Charlie just got another call from Meg, at the embassy. Dan, their camera guy… is sick, but he's not… his mask vented correctly, but he didn't… Poor girl is—she's Mac's assistant. And now she's running—she said that the medevac got off the ground without any problems, and that Sam's vitals are stable but Mac is having problems with her oxygen saturation. The doctor at the embassy said they'll probably need to set up a chest drain once they land in Landstuhl so she doesn't develop pulmonary edema, or throw a clot, or air embolism, or…" Her voice trails off. "Something. I can't remember."
"Where's Don?" Sloan needs his support. They've been together almost a year. And as the EP, he's going to…
"On his way in," she answers absently, before her eyes finally focus in on Maggie. "I should watch it before he comes in."
"All of it?" Maggie clarifies, slowly still.
Sloan nods jerkily. "All of it."
Sloan gets sick fifty-two minutes in, diving into the bathroom. Stopping the video and minimizing it, Maggie creeps into the doorway.
"How am I going to report this?" Sloan asks, resting her head on the rim of the toilet seat. "We're going to have to report it."
"I'm cutting the footage. No one else has to look at it, I can produce the segment."
Sloan nods, not yet up to lifting her head. Switching on the tap, Maggie fills a cup with water for Sloan to rinse her mouth out with.
"I can… do the voiceover, too."
"How many times have you watched it?" Sloan asks quietly.
Maggie sighs, carding a hand through chin-length hair. "Three. All the way through."
"Do the voiceover. Do everything. And do not—do not—let anyone else see Mac like that."
Don arrives a little after that.
Sir Edward has said maybe three words to him, which Will expected, but Lady McHale ("Susan, dear. You know you can always call me Susan, William. We've known each other for far too long and love MacKenzie too much, and you, darling James, we meet in Landstuhl again.") holds his hand until Mac is finally moved out of recovery to the ICU.
Will knows that Jim has been to see Sam Hahn (and that they've been friends for years, that Sam embedded with them back in '07, was with Mac and Jim in Islamabad), and Will knows that he should visit her, but he feels rooted to this chair in the private waiting room that the Ambassador has secured for them with his credentials.
The credits for News Night are scrolling, and he hasn't blinked since what feels like the middle of the D-block, hasn't paid attention since Elliot finished the coverage of the attack in Ghouta at the end of the B-block. Maggie did the segment. Well, Elliot and Sloan both handled the segment, and Elliot reported that two ACN contributors were hospitalized in the attack ("We're saddened to report that two of ACN's own, Samantha Hahn and News Night's own former Executive Producer, MacKenzie McHale, were caught in the attack and are currently being treated for sarin exposure at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families."), but Maggie was the voiceover on the segment on Mac's footage.
He's too exhausted to work out what he should make of that.
Will doesn't realize that he's drifted off until Lady McHale squeezes his hand, standing and letting go to smooth imaginary wrinkles from her slacks. "Sorry dear—the doctors have taken her off the ventilator and she's breathing fine on her own, so they're going to try to wake her up and perform a neurological exam. Ted and I are going back with her doctor to see that she's fine, but we're absolutely done in and plan on heading back to our hotel room after that."
He waits for Susan to sweep out of the room in search of the Ambassador before leaning over and shaking Jim's shoulder until he jerks out of the seemingly uncomfortable position he's been sleeping in. After that it's a tense forty minutes until Mac's parents reappear in the doorway, looking greatly relieved.
"No deficits," Susan announces. "That they can see. She's asleep again, but they've taken her off the sedative."
"And Mackie's blitzed out of her mind, so there's that." The Ambassador scrubs a hand over his face. "Two chest drains, and dilaudid. Cocktail of antibiotics to try to prevent the pneumonia that's already developing. I helped negotiate a treaty to prevent this from happening, you know—anyway. Not important. The hospital will give us a ring if we're needed. Otherwise we'll be back at noon." He looks hard at both them; MacKenzie's father is, while neither particularly tall nor broad, an imperious kind of man in his early seventies who had come across his ability to intimidate through nearly three decades of Cold War diplomacy and an uneasy retirement with his only child sending herself off into warzones. Even now, he is well-pressed, posture-perfect. "William. James. You are both on her health forms as next-of-kin, so they should let you back to see her when visiting hours start at 8. I would advise you both to get some sleep."
They don't.
Will puts two hotel rooms on his credit card for when that inevitably becomes a pressing issue (it is pressing, but seeing Mac is more important than sleeping) but otherwise settles in to wait until visiting hours begin. Jim wanders off for a little bit and returns with coffee.
"I wasn't here the first time," Jim eventually volunteers. "They only let me go as far with her as the naval base in Karachi. But Sir Edward and Lady McHale offered to fly me here when they heard that I was the one who got Mac out of the riot. Which is a bit of an exaggeration, because Mac was doing just fine until she decided to pull the knife out of her stomach and that was after we were away from the crowd."
Will flinches. Jim is probably doing this on purpose. And… touché.
"By the time I got here the waiting room bit was over with." Jim pauses, and then his voice softens. "She called out for you the first time, too. I tried to call, but… things got very chaotic, very quickly. And I had to hang up."
Jim sighs, leaning his head back against the wall, tilting his chin up.
"She loves you. She was just pissed. And scared, because she's spent a lot of time idolizing you and punishing herself. And when Mac's scared…"
"She runs," Will finishes. He doesn't do much better, so he thinks he and Mac are pretty even on that one.
"She likes the storm. Someone once, one of the marines we were embedded with, called her a storm-braver." Jim stops, taking a long breath. "I think she braves storms so that she doesn't have to think about what she's leaving behind. In hope that she won't be the same person that she was when she went in, so she won't miss what she's left behind. But she came back to you once."
Her hair is much longer than he's ever seen it; Will guesses that she hasn't cut it since she left. The fact that that's the first thing he notices when he walks into her private room in the ICU must be his brain protecting him, because when he finally starts noticing the other things, they overwhelm him.
The worst-case scenario was always her coming back in a box. Or not at all. He knows that the places Mac gets herself into, there isn't always a body to send back home. So this isn't… that. But looking at her like this is… she looks like a corpse. Or would, if it weren't for the steady rise and fall of her chest, the steady report of the heart monitor.
She's still.
He doesn't remember the last time he saw her like this—unmoving, motionless, inert. It's been seven years since they last slept in the same bed together, so maybe then, but the MacKenzie he remembers was frenetic, always moving, a perfect storm of energy and intelligence and capability and shrewdness that he very easily fell in love with. But she's static now, weighted down by monitors and tubing connected to machines and bags and there are little rashes, on her eyelids and near her lips, and he knows that it's from adhesive, because Mac has always been allergic to the adhesive on band aids so he thinks that means they taped her eyes shut at some point and the aggravated skin around her lips means that she was intubated.
She was like that, on Election Night. Or was… she was slowing down, haltingly becoming paralyzed by anxiety and guilt. And maybe she had to start running, had to brave a storm, or whatever Jim's metaphor was, to keep herself from shutting down entirely. Because of him.
MacKenzie is a woman who can make her own choices, Habib's voice rings in his ear. And… okay. That's true, she could have stayed, both times, but both times he didn't really make it easy for her. And he knows, now, that when she told him about Brian it wasn't some ploy to make him break up with her. Because telling her about the ring wasn't to make her leave. And because, he has to remind himself, like an alcoholic flipping a token between his fingers, that guilt and absolution is not a zero-sum game.
MacKenzie had made her choice. And so had he.
And except for everything they had done wrong, they had done everything right.
And she almost died.
Could still die, he corrects himself, thinking of all the possible complications from pneumonia and the convulsions she would be having for the next few months, bronchospasms and potential air emboli and…
This is why he needs to put it to rights. Right now. Because he lost his nerve, the last time, and while he isn't entirely to blame for Mac shuttling herself into one of the most volatile countries of the world, his decisions played a large part in hers.
And he needs to put it to rights because he loves her. And you don't… hurt the people you love.
When she finally wakes, it's slow-coming.
For a while, Will thinks she might just drift back to sleep, but eventually she stirs enough to open her eyes. They don't say anything—she looks at him, confused, eyes a little unfocused, pupils blown wide by the heavy dose of opioids her doctors have her on. And then slowly, she reaches out to him, fingers sliding on top of the blanket. Reaches out to him like she's not entirely sure that he's real, moving in little increments, eyes brightening in a way that makes him want to cry when she finally reaches his hand.
"Will?" she whispers, her voice flagging like a whistle, and soft in the way that sand is against smooth stone.
"I'm here," he says, shuffling his chair closer and enclosing her hand in both of his. "I came. Do you know where you are?"
She sighs a little, eyes focused on their hands. "Germany. My parents... earlier... they told me. And I remember. A little."
"Yeah."
"The Syrian government used sarin," she whispers sluggishly, clenching her eyes shut and then trying to get them to open wide and stay that way. "Did—did Jim get the footage?"
He reaches up with his other hand, brushing his fingers down her cheek. She weakly tugs him closer, and he moves to sit on the bed. "Yup. He got it. He's here though, out in the hallway. He wouldn't stay in New York."
"Oh," she says then, startled. "You're here."
He laughs a little, then. Fondly, because she's coming alive again, even if it's only in her eyes, her fingers tightening around his... and because she's completely wasted. "I'm here."
"I'm not hallucinating," she says, not entirely certain.
"You're not hallucinating," he confirms tenderly, leaning to brush his lips against her forehead.
"I thought I was dying… so I…" She frowns, craning her neck to look up at him, so he sits back so she doesn't have to. "I didn't read your emails. Not because I hate you, but because I knew I'd… I'd go home if I did. To you. Home. And I wanted to be angry, for a bit. Like you were. I didn't like it very much. I don't know why I did that. And then I was dying and I hallucinated you."
"It's okay." He rubs the back of her hand with his thumb. "You waited three years for me."
"It's really not," she murmurs, still looks at him like she's not quite sure what to make of him being here. Not that he blames her, or anything, but it's a little unsettling, and he's exhausted, and also happy, and the past day has been too surreal.
And then she laughs, indelicately, as one doped to high heaven does.
"Someone dropped sarin. On me. That shouldn't be funny, but it's pretty funny."
Will doesn't really know how to respond to that, so he tries to direct Mac to something less about the absurdity of the universe. "I read your emails."
She frowns again at that, furrowing her brows. "I didn't send you emails."
"From Afghanistan, sweetheart. And Pakistan. The Green Zone. I read them."
"Oh." She sighs, and then winces. A machine at one of her side hisses in response, a terrible mechanical sound and her cheeks color faintly. "I think it was comeuppance."
"What was, honey?" He keeps touching her. Carefully, painting love onto her skin.
"The bombs had stopped, so we went out. But there was one more…" She pauses, shakes her head slightly, closing her eyes. "The sarin, I mean." Realization dawns on her face, and her eyes snap back to his face. "Wait, you… so why didn't you read them before?"
He chuckles at that, but answers quite seriously, in the end. "Because I'm an idiot."
"No you're not." She pouts, rather adorably, trying to shift within the narrow bed. Will tries to focus on that rather than the central line extending out of her blue gown, the various monitor nodes attached to her chest. "I wouldn't be in love with you if you were an idiot."
(Her loving him is beyond reason, his brain lets her blurry-eyed words rush out without processing them, because for him the universe has always been neatly divided into two's, and even though he's trying very hard to unlearn what he taught himself as a child to survive, for both their sakes, it's overwhelming and he's exhausted and so much and he thinks, strangely, that good things are sometimes harder for him to take than bad.)
"I was an idiot, honey," he tells her gently, stroking her cheek.
"Stop calling me honey."
"You like it when I call you honey."
Her mouth purses, eyes narrowing. "You're being sweet so I won't get mad. Quit it."
"No, that's not—" he begins, frustrated, telling himself that he can't get angry at her. That he won't be angry at her; and he's not, not really, mostly at himself and old mistakes assigned to them both. He takes a breath, unlearning, overwhelmed. "I'm being 'sweet' because I love you," he begins again, voice low. "And because someone, as you pointed out, dropped sarin on you, which, darling, was not comeuppance but a war crime, because Genoa wasn't your fault, it was Jerry's, and a federal judge can back me up on that."
And then he finds that he can't shut up, because he's been internalizing this since they left to get on the plane, actually much, much, longer, and it comes bubbling up, because she needs to know now, even if she's so high she won't remember, because he'll just tell her again, and again, every damn day of the rest of their lives, if she wants him to.
"And because about twenty-four hours ago Jim got a phone call that you were in critical condition and all I could think was how I was such a fucking idiot ten months ago for letting you walk out of my life again—"
"Wait, Will—" She tries to interrupt, blinking rapidly, but if he stops now he'll lose his nerve, and he can't do that to her again, not now.
"—For making you walk out of my life again," and it really starts coming out, and one hand is cupping her cheek, the other is lacing their fingers together and she's not fighting him, just staring at him with something that might be wonder, but is probably shock, "when I could have just told you that I kept the ring, that I've been keeping the ring in my desk for two and a half years now, because I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
"What?"
"And I'm never going to stop loving you. And I'm never going to hurt you again. Well, okay, I can't promise that, that's a stupid promise, but I'm never going to intentionally hurt you ever again." He realizes, vaguely, that he's just rambling now, but she's alive, and she's beautiful, and she's alive. "Because I love you, I've—I've been in love with you, for almost a decade now, so as far as I can tell it's not stopping, ever, and I don't—I don't want to stop loving you, even if I could, and I'm pretty sure that I can't—"
"What in the fuck is happening right now?" she whines, almost wailing (would be wailing if her voice was stronger), entirely confused.
Right.
Dilaudid.
Shit, is she even going to remember this? She remembers talking to her parents a few hours ago.
He slows down, lowering his voice, licking his lips before starting over. "I kept the ring, MacKenzie. I didn't return it. Because I love you. It's yours, if you want it."
She smiles, widely and a little bit crookedly. "Are you proposing to me?"
"Well, not really," he laughs, relief flooding his chest, washing away dread he hadn't realized was weighing down his lungs. And then remembers how ridiculous (and serious) the situation is. "You're pretty wasted. So you can't actually, you know, consent to marriage right now."
"Yes," she says, assuredly, the goofy smile still on her face, almost dissolving like sea foam into her pillows. "I'm saying yes."
This throws him off, because she really, shouldn't. It doesn't make sense.
(She loves him. How? What?)
And once she's weaned off the drugs, she might regret this, and she can't just go announcing this to people now, like Jim or her parents, if she wants to take this back later. "Honey, MacKenzie sweetheart, not that I don't want to marry you, because I do—I really, really, do, but you're on a very high—there is a very high concentration of pain medication just blowing through your bloodstream right now, and we haven't even spoken in ten months, we have a lot to work out—"
"Billy, I'm going to marry you," she giggles. "I've wanted to marry you for seven years now, even after all of our shit. We're getting married. You can't back out of this now."
"I have absolutely no intention of backing out of this. I just want you to—"
"We're getting married," MacKenzie declares, slitting her eyes at him in a way that is completely final, "you floofy-haired nitwit, and that's the end of it."
Will doesn't know how to respond to that, except to chuckle, pressing a kiss to her cheek. "Yes, dear."
He still doesn't know how she'll react to him once they start weaning her off the narcotic, but right now, he's feeling better than he has in a year.
Possibly in his entire life.
(It feels like his future is a thing exists again.)
Thanks for reading!
