A/N: Thank you for the response to chapter two! I'm so glad you're all enjoying the story. Warnings for vague allusions to child abuse in this chapter. Thus far, I'm sticking with the schedule of posting once a day (which I should, should being the operative word, be able to keep up with until halfway through the month, which is when I start having papers and such due again, at which point updates may be a bit more spread out) which I'm glad of.

Thanks to (I swear to god I'm going to reply to you all individually, fanfiction was just down last night and today was busy for me) myragumm, dandoan, Raspberry Not Pink, MoonlightGardenias, Don't Anticipate, Kate, Cellist5423, Eternally Romantic, Emeinthetardis, ally02, and TheGingerGuineaPig for reviewing chapter two! And thanks to everyone who has favorited and followed the story, as well!

CHAPTER THREE

"What do you mean they can't get us out of here any time soon?" Maggie asks, her words clumped together by nerves and terrified outrage, escaping her mouth in half-formed sibilants and crushed vowels.

Don places the phone back down onto the counter with an overly-careful kind of motion, and then scrubs his face with his hands. "They can't locate the shooter. I mean, do you know how many floors this building has—"

"No."

"Yeah, neither do I." He chokes off a sardonic little laugh. "The police are setting up a barricade. They've called in SWAT and shut off the elevators. We don't even know how many shooters were involved—"

"Just… the one," Mac wheezes, eyes squeezed shut.

Maggie doesn't know how Mac's still awake. Maggie doesn't know how Mac ran back out for her, or why she did it, or how she, how—she's not processing any of this at all, not at all, it's been ten minutes maybe, probably less, and if she processes this as it's happening Maggie thinks she'll lose it all together that this is happening again, and really, didn't she and Mac already use up their shares of bad luck? Hasn't everyone, with Jerry Dantana, with Genoa?

"On this floor," Jim says, like he's thinking of something else.

They're all thinking it, Maggie knows. This is retribution for Genoa. Will and Mac have tried to keep secret the fact that the amount of death threats that News Night receives has gone up since the retraction, but the extra security lurking around the front entrance and the metal detectors hasn't been for nothing. And while Will, Mac, and Charlie have all been wandering around the office the past two weeks with the shadow of anxiety lining their faces, what with the looming threat of a law suit and federal prosecution first and second, there has always the threat to their physical safety, looming third.

And the people who got their hands dirty with Genoa don't only work on the twenty-third floor.

Don't think about it.

They've made a lot of people angry. And if one angry person with a gun could get in, what's to say that two couldn't, or three—

They're trapped in a tiny bathroom, and Mac is alive. She's not dead, she's not… this isn't Daniel. Mac is alive, and breathing, and talking. Mac is strong. Mac spent three years in a warzone and three years putting it to rights with Will, which Maggie thinks has often been almost like a warzone of its own kind, really. Mac has been stabbed and Mac has faced down enemy insurgents and Mac has faced the fallout out from Genoa and failed relationships and—

Mac's pretty tough. And Mac has got to live through this, Maggie thinks, because she's not worth dying for. Mac's life isn't a fair trade for her own, and she knows it.

"Fair," Mac concedes.

And then Maggie notices that the gunshots have stopped, even though her brain keeps registering their echo.

Pop. Pop-pop. Pop.

"What did they say to do?" Maggie asks, wrapping her arms around her middle, as if it'll keep her fear from bleeding out, as if she can keep her wriggling insides from escaping and that if she just holds her elbows a little tighter, she can force down her panic and be tough. They were all shot at. Mac, Jim, and Don were able to dust themselves off and get off the floor. She wasn't, and Mac got shot. She has to do this, now. She has to be tough. "Dispatch—what did they say to do?"

They are trapped in a tiny bathroom, and this is what she has to focus on. This is what she can control. These are the people she can help.

"Dispatch said that they're going to clear the building floor by floor," Don answers, and Maggie wonders if anyone's going to ask why Mac told them to ignore the call from Will. (She wonders why Jim ignored her calls, and then thinks that Mac and Jim might not be so dissimilar after all. She doesn't entirely know what that means, but Mac dated Wade when she was clearly in love with Will. Maggie doesn't know what to think about that, either.) "They said… we have to wait."

"We can't wait." She gestures at Mac. "We can't—did you tell them that we can't wait?"

"I told them." His voice rises in pitch, eyes going wide in that incredulous way of his. "And they said that they can't move more than a floor at a time. We'll be the first people out on this floor. But until then, they can't risk everyone's safety."

"Are you serious—"

"No, they're right." Maggie looks down and Mac is looking right at her. She guesses there must be a look of shock, or something, on her face because Mac softens and hardens her expression at the same time; sympathetic, but unwilling to yield. She's seen it on Mac's face a thousand times before, but never like this. "They can't risk the lives of thousands of people because one person has been shot."

"The first aid kit is only in the kitchen," Jim says, somewhat out of the blue, although Maggie's sure it won't be once he finishes verbalizing his train of thought. "If we have to wait, I'm going to use sterile dressings, latex gloves. We go out, and we go out once, grab everything we need—"

"No, Jim—"

"Yes, good idea—"

Mac and Don chorus, Don nodding vehemently.

"Jim," Mac says in that particular tone of voice Maggie's noticed she reserves solely for Jim, or often Will, when they won't do what she wants them to and she's particularly aggrieved and convinced of her correctness. (It's almost like a whine, but Maggie thinks too highly of Mac to call it whining.) "I said no."

"They've stopped," Maggie says, nodding herself now, and Jim looks back to her. (It feels good to have Jim looking at her like this again, like he believes in her.) "They stopped shooting."

She went back for Daniel. She can get the first aid kit for Mac.

Mac was the one who believed in her first.

"Maybe they moved on to another floor," Don says in agreement, pacing what little space he has to pace, rubbing his bottom lip with his middle finger.

"Or maybe they're just reloading," Mac mutters, tentatively lifting her left arm to wipe her eyes. "You know, since they were firing at us with a semiautomatic rifle, I'm sure that he knew what he was doing here, which floor is the News Night newsroom—"

"The longer we wait the worse it'll be," Jim says, catching Mac's hand and putting it back down at her side and looking to Don. "We go—"

"We?" Maggie tries to keep animosity out her voice. She knows that Jim will want her to stay behind.

"Don and I."

"You're the one who knows first aid, though. You should stay. Just in case…" It seems horrible to say it with Mac laying on the floor, and fuck, there's so much blood and it's just… fuck, there's a lot of blood. "Don and I should go."

"I swear to God," Mac mutters, lifting her hand again, "if I get killed by a weapon I've advocated the banning of my entire journalistic career… one of you has to—"

"You're not going to die," Maggie assures her, trying to keep her voice from shaking on that front. "You're not."

"It'll be one way to change Will's stance on gun control laws."

"Mac!" Jim half-shouts, grabbing her hand firmly and placing it down over her belly button. For a brief moment he looks panicked, but it slips back under the surface of controlled calm almost as quickly as it appeared.

(Maggie wonders what it means—Mac will joke about her own death, in the context of Will, but won't answer the phone. It probably means the same thing as Mac being willing to take a bullet to pull Maggie out of the line of fire, but being completely unwilling to let anyone else do the same for herself.)

"I'm just saying," she counters, visibly tiring. Any energy she had garnered fighting with them leaves her, leaving her paler than before. Jim squeezes her hand, the blood on his own leaving her fingers tinged red when he pulls his away. "Dammit, Jim," she adds weakly, "I said not to be a hero."

Jim snorts. "Mac."

"Right," she murmurs, in a way that suggests should would be sheepish were she not lying on the floor in a steadily-amassing pool of her own blood. "And none of you are going out there. I don't care if—"

"You're not really in a position to stop us." Don plops down onto the toilet seat, lifting his eyebrows at Mac. His voice is an attempt at light-hearted, but is anchored by a tendril of steadfast determination.

Maggie remembers once, how Mac, during one of their round-for-rounds, had shouted at Will that the staff would walk through fire for him, and Will had shot back that it'd be for her. It had been an abstract thought at the time, but yes, she had thought at the time. She'd walk through fire for Mac, and Will too, she had thought.

And then Africa.

She thinks she'll still do it, even though she knows what it means, now.

Mac did it for her.

And Mac knew what it would mean, too.

"We're going." She licks her lips. "Don and I, we'll go. Mac, if we're gonna be here awhile then we need to minimize the chance of infection. Jim, you have to stay here."

Jim looks at her, and she wishes he was looking at her like he was just a few minutes ago.

"I can do this," she says, slowly.

"Okay," he says, like he only half believes her. But enough not to question her. Maggie thinks that might be what believing in someone might be, anyway.

(If only she could turn back the clock.)

(Just like Jerry.)

They're going.

He didn't find out until almost two weeks after the fact that Mac had been stabbed in Islamabad. He remembers sitting in Charlie's office, waiting for Charlie to get off the phone with someone, and Charlie sighing, gently replacing the phone on the receiver.

And how he'd prefaced the whole thing—

She's going to be okay.

He doesn't know if Mac's okay.

And the thing is—

Will McAvoy is a man who spent his entire childhood throwing himself between his father and his brother, his father and his mother, his father and his sisters. He knows how to take a hit, even if his self-esteem is his personal glass jaw, he can take a hit, from just about anyone, whether it's John McAvoy or a Northwestern lineman, he can take it. And he can hit back harder, even now with two bad knees and a rotten elbow, he still remembers how to drop his shoulder and—

(The only thing he's ever learned from love is how to hit back harder.)

He needs to know that Mac is okay.

Sloan's slid down to the floor, tugged him down with her and tucked her head under his arm—and took his BlackBerry away, which he realizes is probably good but he's well aware he could overpower her for it, and won't, shouldn't. He hears her sniffling quietly, and it's nothing to turn his head and press a kiss into her hair.

(This isn't one of John McAvoy's drunken rampages, and it isn't Fiona's blonde curls, but they all still have shadows creeping under the door to fear.)

He's watching Charlie talk on the phone to the police chief down outside the building. Charlie's awfully calm, which Will supposes is a credit to five years in the service and five more reporting on the Vietnam War. It's uneasy, for him. He learned how to fear silence more than the rage a long time ago.

"What did he say?" he asks once Charlie has ended the call and taken the phone away from his face.

Charlie opens his mouth half a second before he speaks. "There are a lot of causalities, but as of right now no one knows where the gunman is. No one's making any calls from any floor about a location, so he might have gone into hiding."

"Or he's just standing out in the bullpen, deciding who to pick off first." Will starts stroking Sloan's hair, mostly as a comfort to himself.

Charlie frowns down at him, but it's not like it's a secret where anyone was when the guy started shooting—he had a disguise, he probably took a minute to case the bullpen before spraying his staff with bullets.

"It's more likely he knows that the police are here," Charlie says.

Will sighs, and nods, leaning his head back against the wall.

A lot of causalities.

"What did he say about causalities?"

"Two dead security guards at the service entrance, and a third from the service elevator was taken to Presbyterian a few minutes ago."

"Was he conscious?" Elliot asks, stretching his legs out along the floor, looking up from what Will guesses is another text from his wife.

"No."

"Anything about Mac?" Sloan asks, her voice a bit muffled.

Charlie's face shutters. "No."

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