A/N: I preface this chapter with an apology: I never actually knew I was capable of being this terrible. I know all rocks thrown at me for this are entirely deserved. In fact, I encourage it. I welcome it. (Those of you who have been with me from the BSG fandom will be less surprised, I'm sure.)

Thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter, and everyone who has favorited/followed! This one who goes out to Dee, who marathoned the entire show in like three days based on just pure content density from me reblogging shit onto her dash.

Also now is probably the point to remind you guys that not everyone is a reliable narrator.

She had been about to reply to him.

"Had been" in the sense that MacKenzie had barely begun to wrap her brain around the implications—which hadn't all been implications; some being rather flat-out, wholly unquantified, statements—of his words. Such as: he was sorry—did that mean that she was forgiven? And what did he mean by "we?"Their mistakes? Not just hers. Theirs. But it had been perfect. He had been perfect. And she had wrecked it.

And she—

Is bleeding out again. Just not on foreign soil this time. Even though his email has definitely put her on foreign footing.

And it has also given her hope.

And so she had laid on the floor, trying to piece together a response.

Dear Will, I'm sorry too. And then what? He knew she was sorry. He'd have to be a complete idiot if he didn't know that. He did know that. How many times had she—

I'm so glad you're all right. She is. She's incredibly glad he's all right. And...

Words have always come easier to him than her. Which, Mac supposes, is why he's the one who was a speechwriter for Bush 41 and the RNC and is now the face of ACN. They may arguably have three hundred IQ points between the two of them, but the ratio on that one definitely tips in his favor, no matter how times he tells her he only skipped the first and third grades because his tiny rural elementary school had no idea what to do with someone who functioned even the tiny bit above grade level.

She's never been able to make the words come out right. She can report the facts, yes, present an argument in its best form, but ask her about her emotions and it's like putting her thoughts in the eye of a tornado and stepping back to watch the winds overtake them and rip them apart and leave them strewn across her brain. And her, scrambling to piece them back together again. Hell, she thinks, she doesn't even fucking deserve emotions. Why should she be allowed ownership of pain over something she caused? It doesn't make any sense.

I love you. I have always loved you. Not always, I suppose, otherwise we wouldn't be in this position. Did you know that psychologists have found that, on average, it takes a person four months to fall in love? Four months. It had taken her four months to be sold on wanting to spend the rest of her life with Will McAvoy, and Mac isn't entirely certain how, when in comparison to Brian Brenner, it took her that long. It's laughable, really, how moronic she had been. It took me four months to fall in love with you. I'm average. And we both know you've always been above average. Stellar, really. I'm only just on the bell curve. No wonder you were the kid in class that everyone hated.

Her words don't measure up.

I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I'll never leave again. Please. I'm sorry.

Or at least, they don't now. She can hardly think.

She could hardly keep her fingers on the buttons of her BlackBerry, her fingers slippery with blood, the screen fogging in and out of her line of sight. Dear Will, she had typed. Because he is dear. Her dear, her darling Will. Billy. The boy most sinned against. I'm safe. And it hadn't even been an outright lie. She was safe. Her location is, even still, rather secure. The door on her bathroom, unlike the one to her office, is no joke.

She had been trying to figure out where to go from there when the first roiling coughs had started, rather small but still burning. She had been about to reply to him. And then her hands had fallen limply over her chest, her BlackBerry loosening from her grip and clattering to the floor while she had heaved for air. Jim had come up to her from behind, carefully lifting her against him, slowly inclining her until she could breathe again.

Please, she had thought, fully expecting to be reduced to begging before this was out, and Jim had tipped one of the little cups of water Maggie had filled into her mouth, slowly, carefully, circumspect. Jim. Her Jim.

Swallow, he had murmured. Mac, please swallow. Please, yes.

And then he'd laid her back down onto her makeshift pillow and she had been shivering, her body running hot and cold and her lips wet and she'd licked them, to make sure the taste wasn't metallic, because it was harder to breathe but she also knows she's in shock but she also knew that the bullet was close to her right lung. And then she'd been drifting, and felt Jim pile something soft onto her abdomen, and press down over her right side, and then nothing at all for a few moments until he'd brought her back.

She thinks she's drifting now.

In his arms, though. Jim is warm. Not as warm as Will, who always gave off heat like a bloody furnace. She always wound up kicking off her yoga pants in the middle of the night to compensate, and would wake up with one his hands stroking the bare skin of her leg from hip to knee. He probably still is like a fucking furnace, Mac thinks, wondering why she rendered that in past tense... and just... why.

She's too tired to beg. And not exhausted enough to start again. But she doesn't doubt that she'll get there.

"MacKenzie," Jim says, the start of the email. Will's switched from Mac to MacKenzie. But there's no dear or other form of greeting. But still, full name. She thinks he might mean business. Jim clears his throat awkwardly, and then begins. "I'm sorry about hurting you when I was only mad at myself. Mad at myself for letting myself think, or even subconsciously, perhaps, go through with forgiving you. Mad at myself for letting you back in. Mad at myself for not retaining some stupid moral high ground over you, mad at myself for being vulnerable around you again. I punished you for my own misgivings, when you have only proved time and time again that I can trust you. You've earned that back, and more, and I didn't want to even recognize that. I've been selfish, and at times, cruel to you, and fucking unfair. You're allowed to have expectations of me. Anything otherwise is..."

Oh, she thinks, more than a little stunned. Billy.

She encloses her hand over Jim's wrist where it lays protectively over her stomach, and squeezes gently when he stops reading.

"Keep going," she murmurs, turning her face into his bicep, her eyes fluttering closed.

"Don't fall asleep," he whispers, calm but urgent.

"Trying not to," she says a moment too late, after he's already gently jostled her in an attempt to keep her alert. "Keep reading."

"Okay." He takes a moment, Mac guesses to find his place. "I keep thinking about our loose ends. I've held out on forgiving you, but at what cost? I suppose that's the question I never asked myself. What does the moral high ground cost? What does refusing to be vulnerable cost? You'd think that a four hundred dollar an hour shrink might think of those questions for me, but that's water under the fucking bridge. And it's rather clear to me, now, that I'm a fucking moron, because I'd rather have you, MacKenzie, how we are now or whatever we become than whatever small satisfaction that being in pain over what you did six years ago gives me. You're my dearest friend and partner. And I'm an idiot. And... you were right. It's not forever."

She doesn't realize for a few seconds that Jim has stopped reading; only realizes when he shifts under her and turns her so she's tucked into his shoulder, both of their backs against the wall, angled into one of the corners of the room. Weakly, she tries to help, pressing her palms down onto the floor to shift her weight with him, and then tries not to freak out when all it does is send pain shivering up her spine, aftershocks jolting her shoulders forward in ungraceful, jerky motions. Crying out, she slumps back against him, and Jim takes a moment to soothe her, whispering sorry, sorry, sorry over and over again while he readjusts her until she's what she guesses is Jim's approximation of comfortable for her.

She's doesn't bother to tell him that it's beyond helping at this point.

"It's not forever," she reminds him, voice hoarse, when he fumbles for where he left off.

"It's not forever," he repeats back, taking a few more seconds more before, "It's not forever because you came back. You tried to tie the loose ends together. You tried, MacKenzie, and it shouldn't have just been you working on that and I'm not entirely certain that I was and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Mac, and you deserved better than that. Because you're the woman that I loved."

Loved.

And Jim knows.

And he stops reading.

"Keep going," she encourages him, clutching his shirt harder than she had thought possible, opening her eyes. "It's all right."

"Mac, he… that was..." Jim lets the BlackBerry fall to rest on his thigh, lets the screen go dark. Mac blinks at it, confused. Loved. Oh. He loved her. He had loved her. And then she'd—

"That was it," she finishes for him, the resolution to not be something that happened to Jim Harper gaining traction again in her tired mind, the thought coming together after she had allowed it to be scattered by the wind for her own desires.

She'll protect him. She can do that.

"He signed his name."

Loved.

"I'm sure he did."

She lets herself drift.

"Oh my God." Sloan claps her hand over her mouth, eyes fixed on her cell phone before lifting her chin in disjointed moments—as if she's loathe to look away from whatever's displayed on the screen—and addressing the rest of them. "They're okay! They're all okay. Don, Jim, Maggie, and Mac. They're okay."

Will swallows hard, trying to wipe the rising storm of emotion from his face. "Who's it from?"

"Don; he just texted me back." She turns the screen towards him, looking incadescently happy and accidentally puts it too close to his face, so he has to grip it with his own hand to put it in his line of vision. "Look."

He heas to read it a few times, his mind racing through the words again and again. Thank God.

"Locked in Mac's bathroom. With Mac, Jim, Maggie. All safe. Glad to hear you guys are too," Will reads, loud enough for Charlie and Elliot to hear as well. "Mine is the only phone we have. Running out of battery."

"See," Sloan says, with a huge smile pasted on her face. "Mac just dropped her phone or something. She's fine. They're fine."

And just, Thank God, he thinks, his limbs overwhelmed with a dreamy kind of numbness, his body tingling with a sudden palpable relief so strong that he loses sight of his train of thought and stares dumbly down at the BlackBerry in his hand, a half-written email spashed across the screen. Mac's safe. She's safe, and he's not too late, and he can work through this, they can work through this. She's safe, and he can explain the emails and they can work through this. Hell, he can read her own emails, from when she was embedded, all three years worth of them. Hell, he probably should. Unless she doesn't want him to, of course.

He can tell her that he loves her, has never stopped loving her.

And by God, he loves her. His hands won't stop shaking and he can't stop thinking about how much he loves her, and how he's going to tell her that, just as soon as he gets out of this stupid building and he can hold her in his arms.

A moment later, he realizes he's smiling, quite possibly for the first time in years.

He loves MacKenzie McHale, and he forgives her, and it's going to be all right.

"Sloan just asked if anyone's injured." Don looks to his right, where Maggie has completely shut down in on herself, and to his left, where Mac's breathing has become startlingly labored. And then he looks down at his phone, which reads out two-fifteen in the afternoon, and thinks, fuck. "What should I say?"

We're safe hadn't been an actual lie. Don knows Will and Charlie and Elliot and Sloan will totally kick his ass for it, but it hadn't been an out-and-out lie, which he thinks is important on some level.

He wants to say, No, Mac's been shot and is barely hanging in there after Will's last email, so tell him to haul his tall, blond, and Midwestern ass over here to fix this, because he heard Jim reading the email and no matter how quiet Jim had tried to be, this room is less than six by four feet square so there was really no escaping the latest installment in the Saga of Will and MacKenzie, and honestly, Don thinks, he's had enough sad drunken conversations with Mac in the middle of the night about their lonely hearts to make that kind of demand for her. So he wants to say that.

But his loyalty to Mac outweighs his anger at Will at the moment, so he looks to her.

"What do you want to say, Mac?" he asks, and she stirs against Jim. He resolves to call dispatch again after this. It's been forty-five goddamn minutes, they have to be getting close to getting them out of here.

The woman I loved.

That's cold, Don thinks. Even for Will. But he guesses he can't fault the man for being honest. But he can fault him for being incredibly fucking stupid, so Don is.

(He wonders if fucking Mrs. MacBeth falls under punishing Mac. Or if it falls under not wanting to be vulnerable. Misdirection, or whatever. All though, how dating a gossip columnist prevents you from being vulnerable, especially when you dump her in the ACN Morning green room, Don thinks he will never know. Will may pride himself on being rational, but he never is where Mac is involved. Don has no doubt he'd rush to Mac's side if there was a bullet to light a fire under his ass, but he'd remain too emotionally repressed to call her again after the initial panic had subsided.)

"Tell him… we're all fine," Mac answers, lifting her head to look at him.

Fuck, Mac, he thinks, remembering the vibrant, excitable CNN senior producer who had given him his first summer internship almost fifteen years ago. That summer he'd been half in love with her, following her around, fostering his self-indulgent crush on the pretty lady who'd first believed in him. Every male intern had been in love with her. They'd all been willing to walk through fire for her that summer, as New York boiled and the Clinton scandal rumbled on and Mac waxed ethical about it all.

Don thinks he still might walk through fire for her.

(Mac's asked him to do a lot of things for her, from that first summer onward. But never lie for her.)

Time to find out.

Thanks for reading!