Mac didn't want to open his eyes.
He knew where he was.
Well, not exactly where, but he knew it was a hospital, from the sounds, from the stiff mattress and crinkly pillow. From the sound of Jack talking softly on his phone nearby.
He was sickly certain Nikki was dead.
If he opened his eyes, Jack was just going to confirm it for him. If he stayed like this, it didn't have to be true yet.
The thought itself was blunted, fuzzy around the edges. It was an unpleasant haze of pain medication, and probably a sedative, too, if his perception was even half accurate. He started rifling through his memories to orient himself, and avoid the inevitable contemplation of the hole in his life where Nikki belonged, to go along with the one in his chest, that ached dully even through whatever they were giving him.
He wouldn't let his mind go back to how he got there, but he remembered being in the water, remembered realizing he'd been shot. He also remembered thinking it was probably superficial because he could breathe on his own and his heart was still beating.
Then Jack was in the water, too. There was a blank space in his memory for awhile. Then, he thought maybe there'd been a helicopter. He remembered hurting, remembered it suddenly becoming hard to breathe, then more blackness. He could pick out some disjointed hospital stuff from a heavy cloud. Jack talking to him, but what he'd said Mac had no idea. Then this.
He wondered just where the hell he was. Then he wondered if maybe he was wrong about Nikki.
Part of him shied away from knowing. Then, almost predictably, his grandfather's voice chimed in, You can't hide from the truth, Gus. Truth'll always find you. Whether you want it to or not. And if it has to chase you, it'll more than likely make you pay for the inconvenience.
Mac sighed.
That was enough of a cue to his partner that he was awake because he felt Jack's shadow fall over him. "Hey, kid. You back with me?"
"Mmm." His eyes really didn't want to open. But he made them. "Yeah."
The way Jack was looking at him, he knew. He felt his throat tightening, the lump forming there too much to swallow past. No! he growled at himself. Then he heard an unwelcome, but shockingly helpful at the moment, voice from his past. Put it in a box.
Good idea.
He cleared his throat. He wasn't hoarse. That was an encouraging sign actually. If there'd been any kind of significant surgery, he would be. He also wasn't laying flat, so he guessed maybe some of the tightness in his chest wasn't just restrained emotion. "Where are we?" felt like a safe question.
Jack frowned at him, but it wasn't in irritation, rather concern. He pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat down in it. "Switzerland."
Mac nodded, wincing when the movement hurt all down his left side. "How bad?"
"Well, the bullet missed all the most important stuff," Jack began. "It broke some ribs. Impact collapsed that lung on the way here, too, which ain't…"
"Is the canister gone?"
Jack's frown was taking up his whole face now. "Yeah. Yeah, it is, and…"
Mac interrupted again. "When can we get out of here?"
"You're gonna need to hold your horses, kid, and…"
"So Thornton can't just get us exfil? Because while I'm not going to disparage Swiss healthcare, there's no reason we can't be back at DXS. Then we could at least debrief and be part of…"
Jack put a hand on his arm. "Thornton doesn't want you under any more stress than you have to be, kid. And right now, transport would be stress and the pressure changes would be rough on your lungs. She'll get ya home when it's safe to move. And she's arranged all the time off you need."
"I don't need…"
Jack suddenly looked like he might break down. "Mac, buddy…"
"Don't," Mac snapped suddenly. "Just don't."
"I'm so sorry, Mac."
Mac's eyes hadn't gotten the memo from his brain about putting all this in a box and they filled, then spilled over. "I said, don't."
Jack quickly dragged a hand over his own eyes. "Okay. Okay, kid. Whatever you need."
Now that it was out there though, it was like a dam had burst. "Did they …" His breath hitched, but he made himself keep going. "Did they find her?"
One of Jack's hands wrapped around his and the other squeezed his good shoulder. "No."
The idea of a funeral with an empty casket was … he couldn't … There hadn't been enough of a body to bury when Al died either. All your fault. He wanted to deny it, but his brain just kept throwing irrefutable facts at him. About Alfred Pena. About Nikki. Hell, about his mother. And the only conclusion it could come to at the moment was that one way or another, he'd been at least partly responsible for all of them.
"Are they even looking? Or is Thornton more interested in the canister?" Angry with DXS was easier than sad all of a sudden. Because if this was his fault, it was Thornton's, too.
"They're looking."
Mac's eyes narrowed. "Why aren't you looking?"
Jack couldn't make himself explain that he'd been benched with a concussion, and also that he'd been afraid to do much as let Mac out of his sight since fishing him out of the drink in Italy. Despite world tilting dizziness and a damn near blinding headache, he'd paced outside the surgical suite while they'd removed the bullet, which was thankfully lodged between Mac's ribs rather than tearing around in his chest cavity. If Mac wanted to blame him, that was okay with Jack. Because he one hundred percent blamed himself.
He tried to keep all that off his face, but he clearly wasn't successful. Mac half started to sit up. "Ah, hell," he gasped. A shaky hand covered his eyes as he collapsed back onto the pillow. "I'm sorry, Jack. I didn't mean…"
"It's okay, kid. I … I'd go if you wanted me to, but I've..."
"Been sitting here all night?"
"Maybe."
Mac took a couple of careful breaths and moved his hand away from his face so he could meet Jack's eyes. "You okay?" Mac asked, realizing that he hadn't before.
Jack shrugged. "Got a pretty good bump on the noggin. Little hypothermia maybe."
"Maybe? It was freaking freezing."
Mac's effort to move away from the more difficult topic of Nikki and the rest of the failed mission fell a little flat, but it was enough for both of them to pull back on their emotions a bit.
They passed a moment or two with a familiar joking bitching about their dip in the lake. Then Mac succumbed to another bout of coughing. The burning in his chest wasn't confined to just the bullet wound. It felt like his ribs were made of broken glass, and he was awake enough to notice another sharply aching spot in his side where they'd probably reinflated that collapsed lung Jack mentioned.
Jack was on his feet next to the bed, hitting the call button.
Mac wanted to tell him not to overreact and call in half the staff in the whole hospital. But it suddenly occurred to him that Nikki had been shot, too. That whatever pain he was feeling, she'd most assuredly felt. And then she'd gone down into the dark, freezing water. Alone.
The coughing turned into a ragged sob. When the nurse came in, Jack just told her that he was in a lot of pain. He hadn't contradicted him. She seemed to need some sort of confirmation from him.
He bit out, "Yeah. It hurts."
It wasn't a lie.
It just wasn't the sort of pain she meant.
She'd immediately injected something into his IV and he felt the fog settling back over his brain. Normally he'd have avoided that by any means necessary. Right now, he welcomed it.
He knew she fussed around him for a few minutes, and he fuzzily answered some questions. When the meds finally pulled him under completely, he thought maybe sleeping was just how he wanted to stay.
0-0-0
Over the rest of the next week and a half, Jack got more and more concerned. As Mac started to recover physically, he did worse and worse emotionally. Well, not in any way that anyone who didn't know Mac would have noticed.
In fact, the medical staff thought he was the perfect patient. He was quiet, but answered all their questions. He took any medication he was presented with. He ate whatever they put in front of him. He didn't ask when he could leave. Not once.
It scared the hell out of Jack.
This wasn't Mac.
This pleasant, compliant, pale young man, who seemed content to just stay in this Swiss hospital until he was old and grey, was a ghost.
And the less like himself Mac seemed, the guiltier Jack felt. He'd let the bad guys get the drop on him. Nikki was dead. There was no doubt about it in the minds of any of the DXS recovery team. And Mac was seriously injured. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, but it was still pretty damned bad. And he'd gotten himself a nasty case of pneumonia on top of everything.
Jack could barely look at Mac after the phone call with Bozer. Thornton has said she'd handle it, but Mac said no, Boze would be more suspicious if he didn't call.
He'd gotten his friend on the phone, tolerated Bozer freaking out about Mac not being home when he'd said he would be. Then he'd just told him quietly that there'd been an accident.
His voice was almost toneless. "I'm okay, Boze. I hurt my shoulder a little. But Nikki. She didn't make it."
The way Mac sounded like he was just reading a headline from an uninteresting article, it made Jack sick to his stomach.
"I'll be home in a couple days, Boze … I've gotta go."
Jack had taken the phone from him. "Mac, buddy…"
"Why don't you go back to your hotel, Jack? I need some sleep."
Jack had gone, but not before the barely concealed sobbing breath Mac buried in his pillow reached his ears.
0-0-0
The flight home had been quiet, too. The nurse from DXS that Thornton had sent to travel with them on the jet kept shooting Jack significant looks. When she'd brought him some medication mid flight, his tired eyes flicked to hers. "Thanks." And he swallowed the pills without any further comment.
She'd sat down next to Jack after that. "He's not okay."
"Yeah."
"So … why don't you do your partner thing and annoy him into being himself? It's kind of freaking me out."
"Believe me, I've tried."
"Have you? Because you don't seem okay either."
"I'm fine."
"Yeah. He said the same thing." But she let it go.
When they got to DXS, Mac was expecting a debrief, but instead Thornton just sent him to Medical so her people could confirm he was healing well. He'd shrugged and gone without any argument. The conclusion was that he was still fighting an infection and needed rest and continued medication before they could even talk about rehabbing his injuries.
Thornton has asked how long, and finally Mac's voice had some color in it. "A while. I'm going home. I'll let you know when I'm ready to come back."
Mac had walked out then. Jack had given Thornton a wide eyed glance and just followed Mac to the parking garage.
About half way to Mac's place, Jack finally mustered the courage to ask, "You planning on going back at all?"
Mac didn't turn from the window. "I don't know."
"You okay?"
"I don't know."
They pulled into Mac's driveway when Jack asked the question that was really bothering him. "Are we okay?"
Finally Mac looked at him. "I … yeah. Of course we are."
Mac looked like he meant it. He sounded like he meant it. But Jack couldn't accept that he meant it. To him, it sounded like another, "I don't know."
He went around and got the car door. Mac groaned as he shifted to get out of the car.
"Here, lemme help."
Mac needed to feel a little normal now that he was home. "I got it. My legs aren't broken," he smirked.
What Jack heard was that Mac didn't want him close. In his head, Mac booting him from his hospital room hadn't been about the young man's need to cry over his losses without an audience. It had been that Mac blamed him for Nikki's death. Mac's quiet hadn't been about his grief, it had been about not wanting to talk to the man who was responsible for his pain, physical and emotional. None of that was true, but Jack Dalton was really good at Irish Catholic guilt. "You sure?" Jack asked tentatively.
Mac gave him a funny look. "Yeah." He started to get out again, then gasped in pain. "Jack?"
Jack quickly leaned in and helped him up. Jack winced at Mac's hiss of pain as he stood.
"Thanks, man," he said when he finally got fully upright.
"I gotchu, kid," he said reflexively. Then the idea that he couldn't claim to have Mac's back hit him again. "Mac, I'm so sorry for…"
"Quit apologizing, Jack." He stopped. That was sharper than he'd meant to sound. "I just can't talk about … everything."
He'd missed the funeral by being in the hospital and Mac was entertaining some guilt himself. He'd normally have just annoyed the staff until they practically thrown him out. Or he'd have just left against medical advice and been there. But he hadn't been able to face it.
"Okay," Jack said colorlessly. "Want a hand up the steps?"
He didn't. But Jack was clearly struggling with something. Mac didn't want to talk about it, so he thought maybe letting Jack help would help Jack. Or something. "Yeah. Yeah. That'd be great."
He let Jack help him inside. Even let him help him as far as his room. Jack read it as things just being different between them. Broken.
"I'm gonna get changed and crash, I think."
"Okay, kid. Holler if you need anything."
Mac's brow creased. Jack looked exhausted. And Mac knew he felt guilty about Nikki's death, even though that was ridiculous. "Maybe you should take off. Get some sleep yourself, pal."
Jack froze for just a second. "Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right, pal."
Jack left Mac to get changed, closing the door behind him. Bozer came in just as he was getting ready to leave. Shit.
Bozer rapid fired questions at Jack. About the business trip. About the accident.
Jack listlessly related their cover story. Bozer knocked on Mac's door, very much wanting to hug his hurt and grieving best friend. Mac didn't answer. Bozer cracked open the door. Mac was already passed out, his face pale against the pillow. Bozer closed the door.
"He looks awful."
Jack nodded. "Yeah. He does." Jack sighed "Being in the front of a car in a head on crash will do that to a guy."
Bozer glared at Jack. "And where were you?"
Jack shook his head. "In the back seat. I should've been driving. Should have been paying attention. But I wasn't."
Bozer's expression softened a fraction. "You get hurt, too?"
Jack shrugged. "Concussion. I'm good now."
"Mac really gonna be okay?" He eyed the firmly closed bedroom door.
Jack swallowed hard. It was hard not to just tell Bozer the whole truth right now. Mac was a long way from okay. But, he'd failed at his job of keeping his team safe. He wasn't going to fail at maintaining their cover, too. "It's just his shoulder, Boze. Busted up his ribs a little. It was a bad wreck, but … The docs fixed him up real good. He'll be alright." He sighed. "Physically, anyway."
Bozer frowned at the door again. "Did he at least get to say goodbye to her?"
Jack shook his head. "It was pretty much instant. And he missed the funeral"
"You gonna stay and help me keep an eye on him?"
Jack shook his head, a hollow feeling settling into his chest. "Nah, Boze. I think he needs some space."
Jack left, getting his phone out of his pocket, and dialed Patricia Thornton.
