Paris. London. In one episode of deliberate thumb-biting, even Los Angeles.
Murdoc watches in satisfaction, as his protege flourishes. Talking tradecraft to criminals as though he's a veteran of the Great Game, putting on a few more pounds of muscle, acquiring a set of perfectly-balanced throwing knives (though he refuses to give up his SAK and does more with it than Murdoc would have believed possible). They spend two weeks in Germany at the Technische Informationsbibliothek so that MacGyver can research every latest trend in the chemistry journals; he's only persuaded to leave with the promise of a return visit and a trip on Concorde. Everything the man should have had all along, he's enjoying to the fullest.
It's...nice.
XXXXXXXX
"Goodbye snowy Minnesota, hello smoggy Los Angeles," Nikki says, as she enters Pete's office. "A good thing, too. I was getting bored stiff doing those accounting audits all day."
"That's why I assigned you. If there was a grain of truth to the rumours, I knew you'd ferret it out faster than anyone else would."
"In other words, I'm too competent for my own good."
"How does a mission in tropical waters sound? We need an intervention in San Marcos. The wrong sort of democracy again, you know how it goes."
"That's more like it," Nikki agrees. "But- what was the point of this, really? We had every chance of getting Murdoc this time, and then you let him go."
Pete sighs. "Wheels within wheels."
"Two of our own, Pete. Two of our own dead for no good reason."
"Murdoc isn't superhuman. I'm not going to say it was their fault, but they were told what to expect...and if we take down HIT as a result, yes, I'd have to say it'd be an acceptable tradeoff. Besides- those may just have been Murdoc's last killings. It's all in your reports, the money and time he's spent on this unassuming barista. I think we're looking at a case of obsession strong enough to be called love."
"Pete Thornton," Nikki says, shaking her head. "You've been on Murdoc's case too long. You're actually hoping he gets a happy ending and disappears into the sunset."
"Well, wouldn't it be nice if somebody did? Because we know the good guys won't."
"There speaks a man who needs a long vacation. Go up to your cabin and catch yourself some salmon."
"After four days in the rural backwoods? Nikki, I'm going to enjoy the LA pollution for all it's worth."
"Well. Can't disagree with you there."
XXXXXXXX
Doctor Zito is not a professional killer, just an enthusiastic one. As proof of which, his death trap - a cage fastened over a six-story drop, with acid slowly eating through the support cable - is apparently impervious to any escape attempts from the inside.
The next time he accepts a contract, Murdoc privately vows, it will be on someone who understands how these things are done. Two months in was sooner than he'd anticipated, to initiate MacGyver into death as an art form- but the DXS had wanted Zito dealt with immediately after the gory LA police massacre. Always amusing, playing the right hand that knows not what it's doing against the left.
Only, a few details had gone wrong along the way. He waits in the cage and fumes.
MacGyver isn't wasting the time to look at him (good), but is staring at the gun lying halfway between him and Zito, like the fulcrum of a balance.
"Go on," Zito taunts. "Take the gun, kill me and take the key. That's the only way you'll get your lover back."
"He's not my lover," MacGyver says. "Besides, I don't like guns."
Zito laughs. "An innocent one for this business, aren't you? What a rural-" The laugh bubbles off into bloody choking, once there's a knife lodged in his throat.
"Murdoc," MacGyver says. "I'm not getting this. What's so important about the gun?"
The question makes Murdoc reconsider. If the death trap isn't internal, but external-
"Pressure plate. You step forward, no doubt it'll trigger something lethal."
"Uh-huh." MacGyver takes a few steps back, throws himself over the floor and lands neatly on top of the cooling corpse. He takes a moment to wipe the knife clean before resheathing it.
"Are you going to be all day over there? While I wait for my one-way elevator ride?"
"Good workmen look after their tools," MacGyver says calmly, removing the key and unlocking the cage. "Okay, so that worked out. He's dead, we're not, everything's good."
"It would have gone better if you hadn't made such a pig's ear of that fight earlier. I've never seen anyone punch anyone so ineptly that they manage to spin themselves around in a circle."
MacGyver's mouth twitches, as he helps Murdoc out of the cage. "I never said I had formal training- and to be honest, I was kinda distracted."
"Excuses make poor life-savers."
"I know, I know, but - okay, so the henchman's bodyslamming me against the wall, and all I could think was that this is the first time anyone's touched me since Minnesota. Sounds stupid, but- oh, hell, it felt good. I hadn't realised how much I missed that."
Murdoc huffs. "This is not an acceptable state of affairs. What am I going to do with a partner who'll get himself beaten in a fight for the sake of physical contact?"
A deliberate bit of rhetoric, to which MacGyver responds to exactly as desired; intrusion of physical boundaries, hands in intimate places. "Maybe try touching him?"
"There happens to be a corpse on the floor."
"I don't care about that," MacGyver says dismissively. "Twelve cops, and what he did to that Lieutenant Murphy- you wanted me to ask? Please. I'm asking."
"Not now," Murdoc says, deliberate in his impatience. "Help me lift him up, I want to see what happens when there's a body on that pressure plate."
They toss Zito over. The cage unexpectedly swings out (at such an angle as to decapitate anyone reaching for the gun), snapping free of its cable. The crash it makes, after plummeting through several floors, is remarkably resonant.
"No acid in the cable at all, I'll warrant," Murdoc comments. "Rather an elegant mechanism- but we had best leave before we attract any more attention, wouldn't you say?"
A postponement not precisely to be wished; but the frustrated lust in MacGyver's eyes is its own kind of satisfaction.
XXXXXXXX
"That was not what I expected," Murdoc says, in the aftermath.
(Another hotel, a far better-appointed one than anything the Twin Cities could provide. MacGyver had slept for an hour and woken up demanding vanilla ice cream.)
"Not my fault, was it?"
"Oh, of sorts...you see, I was rather expecting to deflower you," Murdoc says, turning another page of his Juvenal. "Enjoy your inept virginity, initiate you into the form with tediously loving patience. Instead, we have- competency? Even flashes of decidedly tutored genius?"
MacGyver chuckles, only a little drily. "You know I have an ex-wife, don't you?"
"I assure you, I haven't the slightest interest in your couplings with the female of the species. No, what's caught my curiosity is that you're far more practiced in the homoerotic than I had any reason to expect."
He sighs, scraps noisily at the dish. "A couple of times. I got drunk a few times."
"But not so drunk that you've failed to profit by experience."
"Course not. I can't drink that much cheap whisky, but it was an excuse...that Dalton guy, you probably ran into him once or twice. With the moustache?"
"Let me see. Alcoholic, ferociously annoying and possessing not an iota of style or dress sense- good lord, is that the way your tastes veer?" He'd known the taxi driver was important to MacGyver, of course, but- what a ridiculous blind spot.
"He was around, that's all," MacGyver says, putting the empty bowl back on the tray. "I mean, he'll - what's your word? He'll shag anything that stays still long enough. And Becky hadn't shown up then- course that'd have put an end to it anyway."
"Ah. Now that sounds more like the repressed, self-loathing Midwesterner I've come to know and love...though I doubt that even catching you in flagrante could cure your niece of her hero worship."
"Maybe I didn't think she oughta be around it, all the same," MacGyver says sourly. "And quit it with the love stuff, I don't need you to lie to me. At least not about a thing like that."
"Do you know, that's the curious thing..."
A casual, almost thoughtless lunge, and he's holding MacGyver in a headlock, so the other man's forced to look at him. "I am a professional of the intelligence business, I have murdered more people than I can either count or would care to, and despite all that- love! Childish hapless love, inspired by a middle-aged barista, that's what you bring out in me. Mythology is right, Cupid must be blind, but in the meantime...why, yes. Your abysmal accent is music to my ears, I gaze in fascination at your fingertips, and that ridiculous red pocket knife you persist in carrying makes me smile every time I see it. It is not a state of affairs I would have ever permitted myself, but I don't seem to have any choice in the matter."
A slow, smug expression crosses MacGyver's face. "If that's even half true, I kinda like the idea of holding it over you."
"My dear troubleshooter, I do believe you're getting the idea."
