AN: Tinkerbella, this is the chapter I was talking about.

Bozer sighed, reached over to the other side of his desk, grabbed his now-lukewarm can of soda, and took a long chug.

He rubbed his temple, set down his soda can, and got back to working on the multitude of scripts that he had on the go before him.

So many ideas, half-formed ideas, key scenes stuck in his head, and he just couldn't get any of them into some sort of coherent, original storyline…

'Angus…'

Mac sighed, turning around and facing his girlfriend.

'If you're calling me that, it must be bad.'

Penny reached out and took his hand, trying to stay him as he strode determinedly towards the Army recruiting booth at the Stark Expo they were attending. They were supposed to be on a date.

'They're just going to reject you again, Mac.'

She stepped closer to him, putting a hand on his arm and looking into his eyes.

Mac glanced between the booth and his girl, torn.

It was true. They were going to reject him again. He was small and skinny, barely taller than Penny and probably not even as strong as she was (Why she was willing to go steady with him, he had no idea.). He had a list of health problems longer than his arm, and he'd already been rejected on medical grounds five times over.

He also hated guns and wasn't much into violence, despite the fact that he often found himself in fights.

But he hated bullies, and he was all for defending the innocent, defending his loved ones, defending what needed to be protected. Doing the right thing. (Hence the frequent fist-fights, much to Penny's worry.)

And the Nazis were terrible, terrible bullies. Much worse than Donnie Sandoz from around the corner.

They had to be stopped, and Mac felt a keen sense of responsibility to do his part, a guilt for staying here, safe at home with Penny, while almost every other able-bodied man of his age went off to fight the good fight.

Penny looked into his eyes, and then her eyes searched his face. She gave a sad little smile of understanding, and put a hand over his heart.

'Always knew you were a good man, Mac. The best.' She looked down for a moment, then raised her head and nodded. 'Go.'

He squeezed her hand tightly, and smiled softly at her, trying to articulate his gratitude in gestures. Then, he turned and strode determinedly towards the recruiting booth.

'You'll write me?'

Mac held his girl tighter. He was about to ship off for basic. A scientist, a German man called Erskine, had offered him a chance at the Expo, and of course, he'd taken it.

'I promise.'

She knew he never broke his promises.

Penny leaned forward and kissed him, then pulled away slightly, stroking his cheek gently with her hand.

'I'll be waiting for you.'

It had all happened so fast.

One moment, he was skinny and sickly and weak, lying in a machine, then the next, he was bigger and stronger than even Donnie Sandoz, and then the next second, Erskine was dead and a Nazi spy had seized a vial of the serum…

And now he was pursuing the man along the streets of New York, towards the docks.

He was never going to catch him.

Mac glanced around him as he ran. He noticed a short coil of rope, and some hammers…

Erskine had said he'd picked him because of what was in his heart and what was in his brain.

He'd said that he was only going to give him a body to enable him to use what he'd already had for good.

Mac threw the makeshift bola at the legs of the Nazi spy.

Mac reached out of the train, desperately trying to reach the man who'd taken him under his wing, cared for him and watched his back like an older brother, taught him about fighting and war and coping with the darkness.

His mind was seized with panic; there was nothing in the train car, nothing that he could use. He, for once, had no ideas.

When he really, really needed an idea, his brain had failed.

Jack just shook his head at him as Mac reached out even further.

'Not your fault, brother, not your-'

The metal rail that Jack was holding on to gave way, and his words faded into a scream as he fell into the abyss.

Mac gave an answering scream.

'Jack!'

Bozer's eyes widened as the young blonde man in a brown leather jacket walked into the video store he ran with a few of his buddies. (They were literally the last video store left in D.C; it was the age of Netflix, after all, but being staffed entirely by film buffs gave them a little edge over the average video store. Some people still appreciated good, old-fashioned customer service and recommendations.)

Of course he recognized the man who'd helped save New York two years ago. Everyone did, unless they'd been living under a rock, surely. Everyone knew all about him. WWII hero, frozen in the Arctic for seventy years, now a 21st century superhero. Angus MacGyver, better known as Captain America, the Man with a Plan.

But Bozer had seen enough movies to know that superheroes, particularly superheroes with that look on their faces and MacGyver's tragic backstory, definitely wanted to go around incognito, definitely wanted to have some sort of civilian life, a secret identity of sorts. Besides, his girlfriend worked for Stark Industries; before she'd transferred to their D.C offices, she'd worked in the Tower in New York, and she'd seen The Avengers at relatively-close range a handful of times. She'd told him that they were all big balls of PTSD with a laundry list of issues.

So he just walked up to him like any other customer, and asked if he'd like a recommendation.

'Now, bro, my personal favourites are over here, and my girl Riley would never forgive me if I didn't get you to watch Deep Impact…'

Mac shook his head as he made for the extraction point.

This was supposed to be a simple mission.

SHIELD had suspected that The Lemurian Star, a cruise ship, was being used to help smuggle and sell stolen classified information.

He was to infiltrate the ship as a passenger, undercover and in disguise, with his partner, both in the personal and professional sense, Nikki Carpenter, hacker extraordinaire, and retrieve the information and gather intel on the seller and the potential buyers.

Simple.

Instead, they'd discovered that Hydra hadn't fallen with the Nazis during the war.

The evil organization was alive and well.

Guess their motto was right, even if their logo is completely wrong.

He glanced around and slipped through the door. He and Nikki had split up; she had taken the data stick with the classified information and the intel, while he had retrieved all of their equipment, removing all the evidence of their espionage. They were meant to rendezvous at the extraction point in three minutes.

He arrived at the extraction point, to find that the beautiful blonde woman was already there, her gun raised. She looked a little…off.

Something stirred in the back of his mind.

How did she get here so quickly? We had to remain unseen by all the Hydra agents, and I'm faster, and I had the shorter route. I should have been here first…

Nikki pointed her gun at him. His eyes widened, but before he could recover from the shock, she shot him three times, once through the left bicep, once through the right calf and once through the upper left thigh.

He sank to the floor, eyes never leaving her face, wide and shocked at her betrayal.

She walked up to him, a smirk on her face.

'Sorry, Mac.' He swore there was the slightest tinge of regret on her face. Just the slightest. Then it disappeared. 'Hail Hydra!' She brought the butt of her gun down on the back of his head.

Mac staggered out of the elevator, and knocked on the second door on the left. He'd been here only once before, but thankfully he remembered the way. He pushed down the guilt he felt for bringing danger to their doorstep.

I have no choice.

No other options available to me.

If I don't get help, and if I don't stop Hydra, then millions of people are going to die…including them, almost certainly.

Bozer opened the door, and stared at him, eyes wide.

'Bro, what happened-'

'Everyone I know is trying to kill me.'

Riley came up to the door behind her boyfriend, and the couple looked their friend up and down, then exchanged a glance. Bozer opened the door wider.

'Not everyone.'

They helped him over to their couch.

Mac smiled wanly up at them.

'Thanks, guys, I appreciate it.' He winced. 'Riley, you said one of your friends is an ER doctor? And can you help me get a secure message to the other Avengers?'

Mac stared at the man on the bridge, the man who'd tried his hardest to kill him and his boss, Patricia Thornton, who'd thankfully turned out to be not-Hydra. Unlike a good proportion of SHIELD, including his ex-partner.

It's not possible.

But then again, I am intimately familiar with the impossible.

My presence in the 21st century, still not even biologically thirty, is supposedly impossible, and I pull off what is considered impossible by most people on a day-to-day basis.

And the evidence doesn't lie.

He looks exactly the same as he did all those years ago, on the train…except for that arm.

He took a hesitant step closer to the assassin.

'Jack!'

His friend, his brother, looked at him blankly.

'Who the hell is Jack?'

Mac and Bozer stood together in front of Nikki's grave.

She'd been killed in the fight to stop the Helicarrier launches. Thornton herself had witnessed her death and had later confirmed the identity of the body. (Mac just…couldn't.)

Bozer reached out and placed a hand on the taller man's shoulder.

'I know she was evil, bro, but it's totally okay to mourn her. She was your girlfriend.'

Mac pulled a paperclip out of his pocket, and started fiddling with it.

'I'm not still in love with Nikki, Bozer.'

The other man looked concernedly up at him, then at the paperclip heart, cut in two with jagged edges, that Mac now held in his hands.

'Bro-'

'I appreciate your concern, Bozer, really, but…I just don't want to talk about her.'

His friend nodded, and just squeezed his shoulder.

'Whenever you feel like it, bro, I'm here.'

Mac smiled wanly.

'Thanks, Bozer.'

At that moment, Riley and Thornton joined them at the grave.

The younger woman handed him a file.

'That's all the intel that anyone's ever gathered on The Winter Solider.'

Mac reached out and took the file.

'Jack Dalton. His name's Jack Dalton.'

Riley nodded.

'Sorry, that's all the intel anyone's ever gathered on Jack Dalton.'

Mac skimmed through the file. There was definitely a lot of intel in here that wasn't SHIELD, hadn't been leaked in the data dump. There were NSA files, CIA files, files from every USA alphabet agency. He raised an eyebrow at the last few pages. They were in Russian.

He looked up at the two women.

I know Riley's got some black hat stuff in her past, but she's been flying straight for years now, and Thornton's very by-the-book…

The older woman gave him a small, wry smile.

'I called in some favours for most of it.' She paused, looking more uncertain than Mac had ever seen her. 'Besides, SHIELD's gone, Mac. We answer to our own consciences now.' She looked up, gaze boring into his eyes. Her expression softened. 'And you deserve answers, and Jack deserves justice.'

Mac closed the file, and looked briefly down at Nikki's grave, then at his friends.

'I'm going to bring Jack home.'

Bozer sighed and closed the loosely-bound script he'd been reading.

He was really proud of it, actually, but it was deep in fanfic territory, rather than being an original work. It just wouldn't fly, unfortunately.

He reached for the next lot of papers. (His desk was covered in them; there was just something nice about working with real paper scripts, even if he wrote primarily on his laptop. Editing was always easier with real paper.)

His gaze fell on a single sheet, which was, unusually, hand-written, covered in messy scribbles…

Jack Dalton, town mechanic, and Riley Davis and Wilt Bozer, Mac's fellow high school seniors, stared at the blonde teenager and the literal monster truck in the garage before them.

'Kid, when I suggested that you turn that big brain of yours to fixing yourself up a car, this was not what I had in mind…'

'Bro, last week, you were riding a bicycle…'

Mac looked somewhat sheepish, and gestured towards the monster who'd taken up residence in his car, then at his friends.

'Creech, these are my friends. Guys, this is Creech.'

Riley cocked an eyebrow at him.

'You named him Creech?'

Bozer just shook his head.

He had no idea what in the world he'd been thinking.

He was just going to blame Lucas Till's uncanny resemblance to his best friend. (That's what he'd done when he wrote that weird country music-themed script set in Tennessee, complete with barn dance, of all things. Though, that was probably also partly Jack's fault…the older man did love his country, after all.)

Seriously, as much as Mac claimed not to be able to see it, Bozer was pretty sure that they were long-lost relatives. If the actor wasn't a few years older than his friend, he'd have insisted that they were identical twins, separated at birth.

He turned to the next stack of papers, another half-finished script, and started flicking through it…

Nikki glanced at her fellow 'students': Bozer, Riley, Charlie, Penny and Mac. Her eyes lingered on the lean blonde teenager the longest.

She stepped forwards, towards Murdoc, the man their 'teachers', Thornton and Jack, insisted was bad. Insisted was wrong. Insisted that his belief that mutant-kind and human-kind could not exist in peace and harmony, that mutant-kind represented the next stage in evolution and was meant to inherit the world, was wrong.

Mac stepped forwards after her, reaching out towards her.

'Nikki-'

She turned back to him and shook her head.

'He's right, Mac.'

'No-'

'You don't understand, Mac. I could hack the NSA if I wanted, as long as I was touching a device with internet access! They're always going to want to lock me up, Mac!'

He shook his head firmly.

'Nikki, that's not true. You've got a gift that you can use for good! To help people! Jack and Thornton-'

'-The world's not that simple, Mac! It's not that black and white! We don't live in an ideal world!'

She tore her gaze away from his, ignoring the heartbroken look in his eyes, and started walking towards Murdoc again. Away from him.

'I know we don't, Nikki! But we can make it better!'

She paused, and turned around, locking eyes with him.

'Not their way, Mac. Not their way. That's why I have to do this.'

She turned around again, and walked up to Murdoc, took his hand.

She didn't look back.

Bozer threw the script aside. Again, too much like a fanfic, not original enough. (And again, probably at least partially attributable to Mac's resemblance to a certain actor. And possibly partially attributable to all those years of watching his best friend be a bullied outcast because he was different.)

He grinned as he pulled out the next sheaf of papers.

Now, this one looked promising.

It was the tenth episode of the TV show that he was working on, the one that he'd tentatively titled MacGyver.

He was very proud of that tenth episode, in which the titular hero, heavily inspired by his best friend, returned to his hometown of Mission City. He was especially proud of himself for incorporating the girl that Mac mentored, Valerie, into it, and the neat little parallels with and revelations about the titular hero's past that her appearance in the script provided. And that little scene with him and Mac and Riley and Jack in the lime-green minivan at the start? That was comedy gold that also reflected the characters' relationships perfectly, even if he said so himself.

Bozer's grin widened.

He had the best idea for the Christmas episode.

Pastrami and paperclips and Christmas miracles and the Chinese and nuclear war…

Oh, and Mac had been talking about how one could make an air raid siren the other day, and hey, maybe he could work in Riley's mom (Diane Davis was awesome)…

Bozer opened his laptop and started typing.

DECEMBER 2016

MACGYVER'S RESIDENCE

AN: Yes, even more meta jokes. I completely relate to Bozer in this story; I have so many half-formed ideas and a handful of scenes in my head, I just can't get any of them into a coherent story line, which is partially why I keep asking for prompts/requests- already, those have helped me actually use some of those scenes! (Thank you!) There's one more chapter of this story left; the title is (rather unsurprisingly) Mac Graduates.