well well well folks, welcome to chapter two! i'm trying to keep a good five chapter buffer up of written and edited fic, and it's been going swimmingly so far - guess people wanting to read this brainchild of mine is motivating me to write it faster! anyhow, enjoy chapter two, and drop me a line if you liked it! (ps, for those following along my writing playlist for this fic, this chapter titled from electric president's "we were never built to last".)


Agent Angus MacGyver arrives in the conference room and subsequently Jack's life twenty minutes late and out of breath like he'd run the entire way there. He's blond, with the same blue eyes as his father, and he looks like he's maybe sixteen years old, gangly like a colt that hasn't quite grown into its legs yet. When his arm moves back, guiding the door to swing shut, the side of his brown jacket slips up and Jack is taken sharply aback by the sight of a gun strapped to the boy's hip, harsh lines of dark metal a stark contrast to the rumpled cotton of his blue button-up. He looks too young to have a gun, let alone know how to use it.

Babysitting the nepotism kid, Jack thinks incredulously. This is unbelievable. Matty literally has me babysitting.

The kid doesn't spare a glance for Jack, looking immediately at the Director - at his father, Jack supposes.

"Sorry," he says, and he sounds just as breathless as he looks. He doesn't look especially guilty or remorseful, though. Just maybe a shade anxious. One hand goes down to his side to tap at the leg of his pants, fingers twitching restlessly. When he comes in contact with the gun, MacGyver Junior cringes, switching hands, tapping at the leg without the weapon strapped to it. He acts like he isn't used to the weapon, surprised to find it there.

"Excuse us for a moment," the Director says to Jack, tone placating and tight like an overworked host conducting midnight check-in at a hotel.

His smile then disappears as he opens the conference room door and steps out into the hall, gesturing for Agent MacGyver to join him. He does, and the two of them stand just outside the door, conducting a hushed conversation Jack can't help but overhear. The floor to ceiling glass windows that compose this particular conference room aren't exactly soundproof, and Jack is not too shabby at lipreading.

"Where were you? You were supposed to be here half an hour ago." The Director's voice is tight and tinged with both irritation and embarrassment.

"I know, I know, I was down in Research, Whittacker and Tam were having an issue with the-" Agent MacGyver's hands flutter in front of him, waving in thoughtless circles as he speaks, only to still sharply when he's cut off.

"I'm sorry, do you work in Research? Did I assign you to R and D and then forget about it?" The most dangerous kind of question. One that needs no answer, already having its own foregone conclusion, but demanding one anyway.

"No, but-"

"Then why were you down there when you were supposed to be up here meeting the guy who's going to keep your ass alive on your assignments? That is, if we can even persuade him to take the job after you've just demonstrated a flagrant lack of respect for his time and effort. You have to take this seriously, Angus, this isn't science camp and you aren't ten."

Jack closes his eyes and stifles a groan, breaking his focus on the hushed conversation happening outside. This is just fantastic. The nepotism kid messes around in the tech lab all day and shows up half an hour late to important meetings. Not what he'd been hoping for in a partner, not in this line of work. Even granting that this was the young son of his somewhat uptight boss, Jack had expected different. When he sees her next, he and Matty are going to have a lot to talk about. That is, if his partner doesn't get him killed in the interim.

After just long enough that Jack's neck is starting to feel stiff from the awkward tension, the Director and his new partner re-enter the room. The Director's jaw is tense and his apologetic smile is tight, body language rigid and displeased. There's a light flush sitting high on the young agent's cheeks as he trails in after the older man. He looks like a chastised child and it's not a reassuring appearance for an agent to have, especially one Jack is about to be asked to put his life in the hands of on missions.

"I apologize, Mr. Dalton," the elder says. "Let me introduce you to your new partner, my best agent. This is my son, Angus MacGyver."

There's a slightly lofty tone to the way the Director presents him, a tilt to his chin and a quirk to the corner of his mouth, a pride Jack can see as it seeps in every corner of the man. It's the same look Jack has seen at old car shows. Never on the faces of the mechanics with oil under their fingernails, standing beside retooled machines they spent hours, years rebuilding, but on the faces of the styled men in business suits, hair shinier than the cars they stand beside, cars that always manage to somehow, in their lines and harshness, look angry. No sooner has the thought occurred to him but Jack is shaking it away, a little embarrassed by the grandiose analogy. Maybe he's judging the Director too hard and without enough reason, reading too much into a father being proud of the achievements of his son.

"Nice to meet you, Agent MacGyver," Jack says, forcing any thoughts of car shows and weird feelings out of his mind. He holds out his hand, and the kid looks at it blankly for a second before jolting into action like a robot malfunctioning, accepting the offered shake. He doesn't grip like the Director had, like he was trying to demonstrate… something, by squeezing the life out of Jack's hand, and that's gotta be something, at least.

"Hi," his new partner says back, and nothing more than that.

"Alright," announces James after a few beats of uncomfortable silence hang over the three of them. He looks around, peering out the door and down the hall like he's waiting on someone to come around the corner, some new obligation to make itself known, urgent and abrupt. "I'll leave Angus here to finish up your tour, let the two of you get to know each other a little."

With that, he's gone, the door of the conference room swinging shut behind him with a whisper, polished glass edges fitting together so neatly there's barely a sound. Jack is left standing alone in a room with Angus MacGyver and absolutely no idea what to say to him.

"Your dad's told me a lot about you on our little walk-around," he says, keeping his face at a careful baseline of a neutral-positive, polite smile. Maybe flattery will help defuse some of the odd tension in the room - the kid's gotta be used to people kissing his ass, given who his father is. "He says you're the best there is, and I'm lucky to be working with you."

Jack's new partner's eyes narrow and his mouth tugs downward in distaste. Not the result he'd been going for. Exactly the opposite of the result he'd been going for, actually, and not one he would've predicted, given the prompting.

"He didn't say that," MacGyver the younger says. The statement is without inflection, no defensiveness or accusation, merely a fact.

Which, Jack supposes, is fair, because no, the Director hadn't said that, or anything of the sort. They'd barely spoken about MacGyver at all on their partial tour of the building, in fact, aside from the first remark about his lateness to the meeting. How MacGyver himself came to that conclusion, however, means one of two things. Either Jack is a much more terrible liar than the fact that he's survived undercover assignments for years would indicate is possible, or… Something else.

"Okay," he admits, watching MacGyver's face carefully, looking for changes, hints at how he'd known. "You're right. He didn't."

The room lapses back into that stiff, unnatural silence. Jack can't remember a time he had a first day of work get off to this unexpectedly rocky of a start, not even when his first day of work was in an actual warzone. At least when he was working Overwatch with EOD overseas he and his newly assigned tech would know that by the end of the day they'd likely be getting shot at together. That has a way of getting you to put aside your differences with a person, at least enough to do your job effectively. Now, though, the highest stakes Jack and Agent MacGyver are looking down the barrel at together is the other end of a half-finished tour of the building.
It leaves a lot more room for stony silence, that's for sure, room that MacGyver seems to be capitalizing on in spades. He's not even looking at Jack, gaze trained somewhere past Jack's shoulder, and with a stubbornness to match his youth, he isn't talking. Deciding that at least one of them has to be the adult here, and it's clearly not going to be this kid, Jack straightens his shoulders. He plasters on what he hopes is a chagrined enough smile that the lie he'd been caught in will be if not forgotten then at least forgiven, and tries again.

"So," he says, in a friendly tone he hopes MacGyver won't instantly see through as forced, "about the rest of that tour then?"

The tour is not a hell of a lot more comfortable than just standing in that room had been, but at least there's a focus to it, and at least MacGyver is talking now. He leads Jack around the areas of the building he and the Director hadn't gotten to yet, pointing out the wing almost exclusively occupied by exfil's facilities, separated from the main offices by a door without any windows or markings on it.

From there, they head down a staircase to the very point of contention their first meeting had started on - R & D. MacGyver's face visibly lights up when they reach the labs, and people start greeting him by name as they pass. Upstairs, nobody had really said much, making a few seconds of eye contact and passing by quickly. Once or twice, someone waved and said hello, but that was the extent of the socializing they'd done with the agents.

"Hey, Mac," says a woman with buzzed short dark hair and a turtleneck sweater, and MacGyver actually smiles back at her, stepping towards the doorway she's standing in. She'd gotten up and darted to the door when she'd caught sight of them, grinning. Behind her are rows of computers on desks, and Jack catches a glimpse of satellite information spread across screens, coordinates and data flashing by too quickly for him to make heads or tails of. The woman talks to MacGyver in quiet, excited tones, a background hum faded into the sound of the banks of computer monitors. Jack looks over right as she glances over at him, and her mouth snaps shut.

"Hi," she says to him, grin faded, leaving behind it an uncertain look of 'should I be nervous or shouldn't I'. "You're the new agent, huh?"

"That's me," Jack answers mildly. "The new agent. Jack Dalton."

"Nice to meet you, Agent Dalton," she says, making no move to shake his hand or introduce herself at all. Instead, she turns back to MacGyver, and says to him, in the rushed, stilted tones of a person who's been interrupted by someone who wasn't supposed to hear the contents of the conversation, "Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks, y'know, for the help, and things seem alright now."

She steps back into the room without another look at Jack, and MacGyver doesn't explain what kind of help she'd been thanking him for, or what things weren't alright before that were now.

There's not a lot in the rest of the hallway, just more rooms of computer technicians, working on digital forensics and long-distance intel gathering. The computer operations are based out of the second sublevel - more easily temperature controlled for sensitive equipment than an above-ground floor - and the building designers seem to have done their best to make it seem as sunny as possible. The walls are a light, faint yellow, like faded out ochre, and the lights aren't the kind of fluorescent cafeteria lighting Jack is used to seeing in government buildings of any kind. They've got a pretty decent setup here at DXS, as far as the building went, so the job had that going for it at least.

At the end of the hallway Agent MacGyver stops abruptly, dead in his tracks so fast that Jack nearly runs right into him. There's nothing around them but the door to an out of the way stairwell and some unobtrusively painted sections of wall, no one around to hear whatever it is the kid's about to say. And, judging by the set to his jaw and the way his eyes flit around the entire featureless hallway before landing on Jack's face, making steely eye contact, it's not going to be anything good.

"If I were you," the kid says finally, "I wouldn't get too comfortable."

Jack's eyebrows shoot up, incredulous. "Excuse me?"

"Here. At least in this role. My partners don't… They don't last long."

It makes Jack want to scoff, to look around for cameras in case he accidentally got hired at some reality show or soap opera instead of a covert agency. Except that the tone MacGyver spoke in is enough to give him pause. It's not dramatic, or lofty, lacking the kind of teen-like angst the words themselves imply. Instead, MacGyver just sounds… bored. He sounds bored and exhausted and flat enough that it can't be anything other than a plain truth, and Jack finds himself wondering how many of these tours he's given.

"I've had four this year," MacGyver says, answering his unasked question, still in that tired, bored voice. "You're lucky number five. Or you are at least until you quit, or get transferred, or… something. Whatever. Just don't get too used to anything, is all I'm saying. You're not going to last."

That last bit, bored or not, sounds like a challenge, and it makes Jack square his shoulders. He's never been one to back down from a challenge, and a job he was unsure he wanted not twenty minutes ago is starting to look like a really enticing opportunity. One he's going to excel at. You're not going to last, he says, Jack thinks. We'll see about that. There's a reason Matty asked him to do this, rather than any of the dozen of people she knew that she could've recruited to take this place. He doesn't scare easy, and she was right. A challenge is exactly what he needs.

"Alright," is all he says in return, eyeing the kid and wondering what type of a person it takes to go through four partners in a year, whether it was their idea or MacGyver's demand or the Director's verdict that sent them packing. Maybe some combination. "Let's just finish the tour, okay?"

MacGyver turns away without a word and heads up the stairs.

Jack runs into Matty on his way out that day, sitting on the front lawn with her face turned up towards the sky. She looks like she's enjoying a moment of calm in a storm, a rare instance of stillness, and Jack would hate to interrupt that when it seems like she's not getting much of it these days. He's all set to go on his way, drive home and process what he'd seen and heard and who he'd met on his own, when Matty speaks.

"Don't just stand there, Dalton, have a seat." She doesn't so much as open her eyes, still leaned back on the bench, posture relaxed.

Jack does as he's told and sits down next to her. He's got to admit it's a nice day outside, and the sun is a welcome change from the artificial if tastefully chosen lighting inside of DXS.

"So how was the first day?" Matty asks. "How was meeting the Director?"

"Never mind the Director," Jack says, unable to help himself now that the opportunity has been offered to him. "What kind of actual babysitting gig did you get me signed up for? My 'partner', Matty, is about fifteen years old-"

"Twenty-three."

"Oh that's better. He's legal to drink, but if we ever need to rent a car the premiums are going to be through the roof. And he's had four partners this year? Four?"

"I know." It's said with a sigh, and Matty's eyes open now. She turns to look at him, and she looks tired. "And I still don't have the full story on all of them, the partners he's had, but he's not some primadonna demanding his partner be replaced every time they're not instant besties, okay? There are reasons. His last partner was fired when the Director cleared house, I told you. The one before that was transferred by the Director, and I think the one before that quit after their first mission together." Matty frowns, squinting into the middle distance and tilting her head. "Or was it the other way around. Regardless, my point is, if it were anybody else, I would take a look at that track record and say run, run for the hills."

"But you're not, you're saying 'come work here, Jack, come work with the nepotism kid who goes through partners like my momma's dog goes through rawhide, really it's a favor to you to bring this job to you'."

Matty's withering look indicates she didn't necessarily appreciate his half-hearted imitation of her voice, but the fact that she doesn't make him regret it further indicates she must be even more tired than she appears.

"Yes, that's what I'm saying." She shakes her head and looks back out away. There's a woman walking slowly down the path at the edge of the lawn, looking up at the sky and meandering like she has all the time in the world. Matty's eyes track the woman for a long time, an odd expression on her face. "I'm telling you, Jack, that kid, the 'nepotism kid', as you keep calling him, he's something else. Put him with the right partner, and who knows. I've never met anyone like him before. It's like he exists on a whole different planet, and whatever he sees there, it makes him see what's here differently."

"He's really that good?" Jack tries not to sound too skeptical.

Matty turns her attention back towards him and says nothing for a long moment. Her eyes, piercing and direct, are evaluating, measuring, searching for something. He can remember this look. It's one she'd given him often, back in the day, and he's never been able to figure it out - what exactly it is she's looking for, or if she ever found it. He can't figure it out this time, either, and maybe it's for the better that he doesn't know.

"No, he's not," Matty says finally. "He's better."