Mac leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling, puffing out a long, exhausted breath.
The first twenty-four hours had simply been him alone in a holding cell. It had been clean. And there'd been a working sink and toilet. The water from the sink had even been cold, so, while he'd had no cup, he'd been able to drink as much as he wanted with cupped hands. He hadn't been allowed any sleep, of course. But he'd been expecting that.
For a lot of people, all the time alone would have been part of the torment. For Mac, it was like a safe familiar space in which to collect himself for what was coming. Mac often found other people difficult, overwhelming, chaotic. Being alone, even in less than pleasant circumstances, was pleasant by comparison.
When his brain started to try to throw out the lonely hours in O'Neill's camp in Afghanistan as a means of occupying itself he just shut it down with something he'd been doing since he was a kid; listing the elements in descending order and imagining their reactions with their periodic opposites.
Now, he'd been in the active interrogation phase for probably around fourteen hours. He was exhausted, hungry (and worse thirsty), and (maybe worst of all) bored. The periodic table had lost its charm several hours ago, right around the same time his hands and feet had started going numb from being cuffed and shackled to the table in the stark interrogation room.
Ten hours to go, he reminded himself. Give or take. Watts had very subtly cued him in to the time on a couple of occasions. It had been a while and he knew his sense of time was skewed by fatigue and low-level dehydration. But he still had a pretty clear sense of where in the day it was. Then he sneezed.
He hoped fervently it was just the dry air in here and not that he was catching the cold that was making its rounds among the stretched-too-thin recruits. Mac looked back at his interrogators and Watts raised an eyebrow at him. "Get you a water?" he offered. It had the expected edge. Watts has no idea Mac had saved his ass when the shoe was on the other foot, and Mac had no intention of telling him.
"I'm all set, thanks," Mac said comfortably.
"You don't look so hot," Walters observed.
Mac shrugged. Who would? he thought, but didn't say. Not talking at all had started to make him overly focused on the code word and he'd begun to worry it would just slip out. Now he was occasionally offering up innocuous phrases, more to keep himself grounded than anything else.
"You're really close now," Watts observed and Walters threw him a glare. Mac wondered if he'd lost track of time and was nearer the release mark than he'd thought. Then he wondered if that was a ploy the two men had worked out to get him to cough up the code word. He was pretty sure the latter was the case when he saw the look they exchanged.
"Time is relative," Mac finally replied. Then his exhausted brain rummaged around for something to entertain itself with. "In fact, it might not even matter at all."
Walters raised an eyebrow and took a drink of his coffee, a bite of the sandwich he'd brought in hoping to drive his subject to distraction with thoughts of food. "Huh?"
Mac shifted in the chair, trying to get even marginally more comfortable, but instead sending shooting pains of inactivity down his legs and up his back. He kept his affable expression in place though. Compared to what he'd been though, this was nothing, less than an annoyance even. "Ever hear of the Simulation Hypothesis?"
Blank looks said no. Mac adopted the tone he knew drive Jack and Bozer both crazy, especially when they'd been hoping to get a rise out of him.
"Variations of the Simulation Hypothesis have existed since antiquity in firms like The Butterfly Dream, but Nick Bostrum has popularized the modern iteration of it over about the last decade or so. Even Stephen Hawking finds the idea intriguing, but more on probabilistic terms than philosophical ones."
Mac launched into a complicated, math-heavy, explanation. After a while, his interrogators stopped interrupting with questions, as that seemed to send him even further down the rabbit hole of facts, figures, and philosophies. What it also unfortunately did was point out just exactly how dry his mouth was, too.
He cursed under his breath the next time Watts offered him a water and his first impulse had been just to say yes. He hadn't really wanted this damned job anyway. He'd liked working at Ainsley's. And there hadn't been any new actionable intel on O'Neill in months. He hurt all over from sitting. His stomach now felt by turns hot and cold from lack of food. The thirst though. That was the worst. Because it was familiar. It tasted like Afghanistan, like being back in that camp. One word was starting to seem a small price to pay to get the hell out of here.
He'd very nearly opened his mouth to say so, too. Then he saw them exchange another look, this one almost smug. Screw it, he thought. I've lasted this long. Might as well ruin their day lasting a little bit longer.
So instead of saying anything else, he clammed up again. He'd talked himself out for now, and he was tired of them throwing every little detail they'd need able to glean from his life from kindergarten on up into his face whenever he paused. He needed a new mental distraction.
Jack had been telling him for a couple of years now that maybe more people would like his beloved periodic table song if it went to a better tune than some crappy old timey musical. Mac had given up trying to convince Jack that Gilbert & Sullivan wasn't crappy a good while back. But he'd also started trying to match the lyrics to something Jack would deem acceptable for a long while, too. He'd made some progress with Thunderstruck while he'd been O'Neill's prisoner, but it always seemed to fall apart at the chorus. Mac took up the effort again now, letting his mental music drown out the voices of his classmates.
When Glover called an end to the exercise an indeterminate amount of time later, Mac knew two things. One, he wasn't going to get the elements to play nice with AC/DC. And two, even if he didn't want to let them, he was going to have to accept help from the two security people she brought in with her. His legs were not going to take him as far as the infirmary until some circulation returned to them.
Late that evening, instead of being turned loose to make his way there on his own, Mac was escorted back to his apartment by two security personnel from the school, told he had twenty-four hours all to himself, and then left at his door.
He limped inside, legs still stiff, got a Gatorade out of the fridge, thrilled he'd left an extra there, downed it in several long gulps, and flopped onto the couch with an arm thrown over his face in the dark living room, without so much as unlacing his boots. After a minute he said, "Hey, Jack."
A soft chuckle. "How'd you know I was here?"
Mac smiled into the crook of his arm. "Where else would you be, Sarge?"
"Fair enough. Ain't you gonna ask me if I'm sure no one from the school saw me get in here."
Mac shook his head. "You're too good for that."
"How you doing? And I'm guessing 'successful' at least enters into the answer since you're not packing for an early flight home."
Mac uncovered his face and rolled onto his side in the direction of Jack's voice. "Yeah, an whooboy did I pissoff Glover when she came to cut me loose."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Told her I couldn't remember the word otherwise I'd have cracked hours ago."
"Are you serious?" Jack asked. Mac heard him sit forward on the worn out springs of … the chair; that was the sound of the easy chair that was diagonal to where he was currently stretched out.
Mac laughed a little. "When have you ever known me to forget anything, old man?"
"I didn't mean that. I meant you pokin' that particular she-bear, ya big dumb genius."
"Probably not my best idea, but damned if it wasn't worth the look on her face." Mac sighed. He wanted another drink, but he didn't think his legs especially wanted to carry him as far as the refrigerator. When Jack asked what was wrong, Mac frowned. He hadn't meant to be noisy enough to tip anyone off to his current less-than-okayness. When he realized saying what he was thinking out loud would probably mean he didn't have to make himself move, he sighed, and did so.
Jack didn't say anything at first, just went and got Mac the last sports drink from the fridge, thinking that he should have thought ahead and restocked the kid's supply. When he got back to the darkened living room, Mac was sitting up on the couch, massaging his legs. Jack knew his hands were stiff, too, so he opened it before passing it to him. "Thanks, man," Mac said gratefully, taking the drink and taking a long swallow.
"You want me to go out and get you some more?" Jack offered.
"Nah, I'm alright. The thirst is more psychological at this point. I got fluids in the infirmary."
"That sucks."
"Yeah, nothing so disheartening in that environment as someone already bitching about your veins before they've made a single attempt." Mac chuckled and added, "And suddenly you're glad you washed out."
"It is a strangely happy thought yeah." He paused. "So another, what, four days to go now?"
Mac nodded, "Mmmmhmmm," around his last swallows of Gatorade. "Which means there's almost no time between me and the final. Fatiguewise I'm going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage, but I'm pretty confident." He paused. "But since I know there has to be more to you showing up than just checking on me, since it's a pretty big risk, I figure you've got something else on your mind."
Jack swallowed hard. Sometimes that kid's brain was too sharp for Jack's own good. "O'Neill," he began.
"I figured," Mac said. Although until he'd caught the vague smell of Jack's cologne in the apartment no such thing had even remotely crossed his mind.
"Patty says he's back stateside. And planning something big, and …" Jack hesitated. Training was already a lot of pressure.
"And we're on his shitlist?" Mac finished for him, with a sigh.
"Well, yeah, that about covers it," Jack agreed.
"So … Patty actually sent me tonight. The higher ups don't know it, but she said she isn't willing to risk you getting grabbed by O'Neill's people again, no matter what the board thinks. School or no school, I've got your six, kid. We'll get read in to what's up as soon as we're back in LA. And she may want to send us out of town for a little, just as a precaution she can hide from Oversight by calling it an assignment."
Mac was thoughtful. Jack heard him draw a long slow breath, then let it out the same way. "Thanks," was what he finally came up with. "I'm gonna get some sleep, okay?"
"You've earned it, kid," Jack agreed. He watched Mac's dark shape move down the hall to the bedroom. He listened to the door close, then saw the sliver of light flare to life at the bottom. Jack would have been surprised if the light hadn't come on. Mac had developed a habit of almost always sleeping with a light on over the last several months.
For his own part, and maybe because of his profession, jack found himself comfortable in the dark right now; keeping watch. He moved silently through it and set the alarm he'd fashioned for the door that he thought Mac would certainly approve of when he showed it to him. Then he settled in for the thin rest of someone on light guard duty. He never really went to sleep, just closed his eyes and prepared his mind for whatever might next come their way.
When Mac was up with terrible dreams of Afghanistan a few hours later, Jack was the one to shake him awake.
