He was up again a few hours later. He lay there for a while in the not quite dark enough to sleep curtained excuse for a room, wondering just who the hell was on duty who thought it was okay to watch … whatever it was … at the volume at … He glanced at the clock. Only nine pm. He guessed he couldn't complain too much.
He heard his phone's muted text alert buzz and move it slightly on his bedside table. He stretched to get it and wound up curling on his side, breathing carefully through gritted teeth. He couldn't decide if it was a muscle spasm, the puncture wound in his thigh, or the effects of sleeping on one of Medical's poor excuses for a real bed that had sent the stabbing pain all the way to his toes. And frankly he didn't care. He was already fed up with feeling like garbage, and being some place where he wasn't allowed to get out of bed and do something to distract himself from it.
Finally, he eased himself onto his side just as his phone buzzed with another text. He was just picking it up when the call came in. He answered quietly. "Hey, Jack."
"Hey, bud. How you doin'? I tried texting you. I know nobody else hung around to keep you company, so I got a little worried."
"I'm alright," he said, shrugging without even realizing he was doing it, just like Jack was there to see the gesture. Not interested in being interrogated about the specifics of his condition this evening, he asked. "So, does Riley's dad seem like he's on the up and up or not so much?"
Jack was quiet for a long moment. That meant not so much. It also meant that Jack didn't really want to talk about it. "There's definitely more goin' on here than I'm particularly comfortable with, man. I don't like it."
Mac concealed his snicker at Jack's most frequent choice of phrasing around all things Riley that he couldn't somehow control and make better for her. He chose to respond with a problem solving approach. "I guess knowing what we know, that was bound to be the case … What're you doing about it?"
"I was thinkin' of stickin' to the bastard like white on rice, but … There may be other players … I'm not sure what I wanna do. I'm sittin' here thinkin about it."
"Creepy stalker in the parking lot is not a good look, Jack. She'll freak out if she catches you there."
"I know, I know …" Jack sighed.
"So, go stakeout the guy's motel. You know you love a good stakeout, Jack. Like vacation. With old man butt pillows."
"You're hilarious, kid."
"So you don't want to go check out his living arrangements more closely?"
"I meant about the butt pillows. I do kind of want to follow him a little more, but …"
"You are not coming back here to watch me sleep. Not happening, Jack."
Jack was quiet again. Mac could tell it was the Jack having an argument with himself kind of quiet. This was Jack feeling guilty about leaving him here to fend for himself, so to speak, but also not wanting to leave Riley at the mercy of whatever crap her dad brought to LA with him. Mac tried again.
"Seriously, man. It's hard enough to sleep here in the middle of the floor, pretending that curtain constitutes anything more than the most basic illusion of privacy. I wouldn't have been awake to take your call, but I'm pretty sure the nurse on the floor is watching Game of Thrones on her work tablet. I don't need you staring at me making your Porkchop face."
"Hey, I left like you said. You're not allowed to start back up the nickname crap again." Jack paused. "Angus."
"I don't hate my name. You can call me whatever you want," he said, not entirely convincing. Then he added, "And I said if you didn't go take care of your own stuff I was gonna bring it back. I'm just sticking to my word."
Jack chuckled. Mac getting a little … well, shit, he used some fancy word for the way he got when he had to put a fine point on things that Jack couldn't quite remember, meant he was feeling better. And the fact that he was doing it to joke around with his partner said that better was quite a bit. Woe to the medical staff at Phoenix, he laughed to himself.
"Alright, kid. Fair enough. I'll stay on bad dad duty if you still promise to get some rest. And maybe don't give anybody too hard a time tonight."
"All hard times I give are proportional to the amount of hassle I've been given to start with, Dalton." Jack started to craft a reply when Mac almost whispered, "Gotta go, man."
"What's the ma—"
"Night nurse. I'm all cooperative patient-ed out. So, far as she knows I'm sleeping … Good luck."
Mac ended the call before Jack could reply and turned onto his good side (which was maybe a relative term right now, but at least the one just ached from simple muscle fatigue and not a self-inflicted stab wound). He slid the phone under his pillow and closed his eyes, just as the nurse brushed aside the curtain to look in on him.
He thought maybe he'd dodged that particular annoying bullet, but he felt a hand on his arm seconds later and a soft voice apologizing for waking him, but saying firmly that she needed to get updated vitals. He sighed, but put up with it.
Then to reinforce how very unreasonable it was to wake a guy who was supposed to be resting just to verify he wasn't dead, he rolled back on his side and closed his eyes. His body apparently knew something that his brain hadn't gotten around to acknowledging yet, because he quickly drifted off again.
Mac slept fitfully. The overnight nurse tried to pretend it was because of the effects of the gas. Mac assured her it wasn't. It was being pestered, and fussed over, and generally handled more than he was interested in putting up with on his most patient pain free day. Which today was not.
He got pretty grouchy around two in the morning, when for what felt like the millionth time, he was woken up because someone had left orders for his vital signs to be taken every two hours, and blood every eight.
He finally snapped, "No, I don't want anything to help me sleep. I want to be left the hell alone. Go wake up whoever left the damned orders and bug them!"
He puffed out an exasperated breath, pulled up the blankets and rolled over onto his other side, almost letting out a yelp when he put pressure on his bad leg, but keeping it to himself, because that had been a very satisfying equivalent to slamming a door.
"So, Nurse Sullivan's assurance that you were feeling cooperative was inaccurate. I wonder what she'll say about it," the woman said, clearly not wondering at all.
"Wake her up and ask her!"
He was not going to open his eyes again. Not even for the end of the damned world at the moment. He heard the nurse sigh dramatically and leave, and he almost smiled to himself.
He woke late the next morning to find that head nurse standing beside his bed. She was looking down at him, trying to appear as stern as possible, but he could see the smile in her eyes. There was only so yelled at you were going to get by someone who looked like they might want to laugh at you.
He made a very determined effort to roll smoothly onto his back and start raising the head of the bed, just like he didn't hurt in at least ten places he could identify without thinking about it. "Morning, Sully," he said pleasantly, as though he didn't know there was a nasty note on his chart.
"Morning, Mac," she offered, just as pleasantly. "How did you sleep?" she asked, baiting him to answer, whether honestly or not he couldn't be sure.
He decided to go with honest.
"Great, once I got your flying monkeys to stop doing your dirty work for you," he replied, but he said it with what he hoped was an appropriately good-humored smile.
She couldn't quite stop herself from laughing at that. "So, I'm the Wicked Witch of the West now? I've graduated from just being bossy and mean. I'll have to put in for a raise."
He laughed, too. "You probably should." He paused for a minute, face creasing with a question he wasn't sure if he should ask because the answer might be disappointing. "So, how is the me going home today thing looking?"
A wry smirk quirked up one side of her lips. "That depends."
"On what specifically?" If there was some checklist he had to tick off, he was going to get to work on it more like now than later.
"One whether or not you're going to let me get a set of vitals and labs for the doc to review this morning."
Mac just shrugged. "Sure, if it'll get me out of here."
"It's that easy, huh?" she gave him an actual disapproving look this time.
This time he grinned. "Hey, you didn't wake me up in the middle of the night."
0-0-0
By the time Phoenix Medical actually cleared him to leave, it was getting late. Jack offered to come give him a ride home, but Mac insisted that he was fine, that he didn't need a babysitter, he was just trading one bed for another infinitely more comfortable one.
After listening to a list of Jack's admonishments, he just promised the older man that he really would take it easy and he encouraged him to stick with his Elwood chasing project. One of the Phoenix staff would drive him home. What he would never say out loud to Jack was that he wanted to watch whatever was on that film alone. That whatever it was, he was worried about it.
When he got home, it was dark. Jack called again to make sure his partner was doing what he was supposed to. Worrying about your buddy dying once in a week was more than enough, he said. Mac just said all the right things, things he knew by heart were an effective shield against Jack seeing through it. In reality he was tired and he hurt, and he knew that feeling wasn't just there for a day or two, but could linger for a couple of weeks.
He gathered what he thought he might need and headed out onto the back deck. Setting up a projector wasn't that big a deal. Jack often liked to joke that all he needed to save the world was a pocket full of paper clips. Mac didn't know about that, but he did know that he could watch that restored fil with nothing more than a few office supplies and some odds and ends for his hiking backpack.
When he saw his own much younger self flicker to life, he had a moment of surprise, and not-quite-disappointment. He'd expected something earth shattering on here. Who hid an old role of film under the floor in a lockbox if that film was a kid playing with his dad.
Then he was sucked in by the scene. He remembered this, he thought. It was just an evening in his dad's workshop. When he was a kid, they did that all the time. He'd always been welcome in that space even when he was very small. His dad would patiently teach him about all the tools and materials while he worked. And as soon as he was old enough to used them, his father had let him help. Actually, he'd probably let him start helping well before he was old enough by anyone else's metric, just so he'd have something to do, to keep busy with, after his mom died.
Where did that guy in the video go? A small bittersweet smile flitted across his face, but was quickly replaced when he thought, 'Not just literally either'. He wanted to know how a loving father who could put that smile on his kid's face could up and abandon him on his tenth birthday of all days.
He was starting to feel a familiar and altogether unwelcome lump form in his throat. He'd seen enough. Like everything else on this weird search for his father, the film was another dead end. He was about to stop and take everything apart, when something caught his eye.
What the …
He looked at the film harder. The image that had first caught his eye hadn't gone away.
"What?" slipped out of his mouth without him even realizing he was talking to himself.
No, it can't be.
Mac did what he could to stop the film and adjust the image of the frame he stuck the real on.
"Matty!?"
He got up and walked closer to the screen, as if changing his perspective might somehow change the conclusion he'd already reached. If he'd been thinking clearly, he would have managed to be grateful for the fact that he was barely limping anymore.
Mac's sadly nostalgic expression dissolved into one of simple anger. As he stared at the image, which was undeniably a reflection of Matilda Webber, his expression transformed into one of white hot fury.
Then, just like it had taken on heat from his thoughts, the film bloomed its disintegration onto the screen in front of him.
"No, no, no, no, no, no!" He dashed over to the shoe box projector and blew out the fire that was already catching.
It didn't do any good. He thought the whole reel might be melted. He slammed down his fist in anger and frustration, and sat down hard on the stool he'd brought out here for the very purpose of watching that film. Partially because the short near sprint had hurt like hell and had black dots swimming in front of his eyes, and partially because if he stayed standing he thought he might be sick, not from the after effects of the nerve gas or his injured leg, but from the unchecked rage he was currently feeling.
Matty had pretended she'd barely even heard of him when she joined Phoenix. And now he knew she'd lied right to his face, over and over again.
He didn't know what this meant.
But he was sure as hell going to find out.