alrighty here's where it finally kicks into gear! there's some canon typical levels of violence in this chapter fyi, and the warning applies here on out, as missions happen.
thanks so much for your support so far and please don't hesitate to drop me a line or come say hi on tumblr, i'm at altschmerzes!
chapter title from we the kings' 'ally'.
The first mission that Jack goes on with Agent MacGyver goes unremarkably. It's a pretty lowball assignment if Jack were to give his honest opinion on the matter, though he can't say that's entirely a bad idea. Coming out the gate with a brand new, untested partner, especially one as totally unreadable as MacGyver, is enough to make Jack nervous enough already, he can't imagine his nerves would've survived if it had been fate of the world huge on top of that. As it stood, it was a simple information retrieval, get in, get a zip drive stuck under the lip of a planter containing a fake fern, get out again.
There's only one moment where things get rocky, and it's entirely interpersonal. On the plane in, sitting across from his new partner, Jack makes the mistake of calling the kid by his first name. Angus. It's a ridiculous name, but Jack supposes MacGyver himself can hardly be blamed, so he was going to try. The moment the name left his mouth, though, he knew he'd made a mistake. MacGyver's shoulders go rigid and the muscles of his jaw clench, communicating without a word that Jack has just made a major misstep.
"Okay," he says slowly, carefully. MacGyver hasn't bit his head off or snapped or said anything to indicate he doesn't want to be called by his first name, at least not by Jack, but he doesn't have to say. His body language is enough. "Not Angus then. Can't just keep calling you MacGyver though, not with two of y'all running around, and if it's all the same to you, I'm gonna save full names for my boss."
No answer except a very slight roll of MacGyver's eyes, like he thinks Jack is being ridiculous.
"Mac," Jack settles on eventually. "I bet that's what your friends call you, yeah?"
Now, MacGyver does answer. His head snaps over to look at Jack directly and after a few moments of quiet, he says, "Yeah. It is." He doesn't, however, follow that up by saying that he and Jack aren't friends, and so obviously the nickname is off limits. Either he doesn't much care who uses it, or he's warming up to his new coworker. Regardless, Jack will take it.
"Okay then," he says. He has a feeling not unlike the one you get after successfully navigating a theoretically nonthreatening piece of land that nevertheless may contain a landmine. MacGyv- ...Mac looks away, back down at some book open in his lap, nothing to do with the mission at hand. And it's smooth sailing from there.
Their second mission is similarly nondescript. Were he asked even as shortly as a month later, Jack is sure he won't be able to recall details, for the simple fact that there aren't many to recall.
The third mission is where it all goes straight to hell.
It seems, at first, like it's going to be just as fine as the first two had been. All the intel is laid out there in those nice neat folders Matty is so fond of, not a page out of place or piece of information missing. Mac has his folder spread open on the table in front of him on the jet, studying building blueprints that Jack knows he's already been over half a dozen times, index finger of his right hand tracing entrance and exit routes while the fingers of his left tap out an absentminded rhythm against the armrest of his seat. He's focused intently, forehead crinkled in a way that strikes Jack with the absent thought that he's going to be left with permanent worry-lines before he's thirty.
As Jack watches him study the map, Mac's hand, the one tracing the paths, leaves the page and comes up to absently cup the side of his neck, rubbing at it like the muscle aches. Probably the angle he's got it at, going over those papers. Makes Jack's own neck hurt just to look at it, so he looks away, back down at his own folder. He wonders, thumbing the thing open again, how many successful training wheels missions he and Mac are going to have to run together before they would be allowed to try anything involving any actual risk.
Granted, this one is a step up from the first two, and he understands the need to test out a new partnership - no promise of Matty's would ever measure up to his own display of skill and focus - but Jack is beginning to chafe at retrievals. This will be the third straightforward retrieval they've gone on in a row, and he's tired of it.
They're headed to Croatia, to a semi-abandoned building that contained DXS hardware from when an international arms dealing operation had been actively using it to house both workers and hardware. It wasn't an extremely successful operation, so they'd not moved on it while they were able to use the shipments to track other, more dangerous targets, but one thing it had going for it was the tendency of those in charge to be very careful about their safe houses. They were moved every so often, the entire enterprise scooped up and transplanted somewhere else as soon as the bosses started to get fidgety. When this happens, DXS needs to go in and retrieve their surveillance equipment before it can be found as the building is cleared out and its contents catalogued.
That is where he and Mac are being dispatched to now, to scrub the nearly abandoned hideout of DXS's presence before it can be discovered. When the organization, headed by a man named Simon Halilovic, moved on to a new location, they returned periodically to the old one, clearing out remaining items until all that was left was a stray corner of paper here and there, maybe a forgotten cable. This didn't hold very high priority, so they tended to ship out low-level recruits to handle the cleanup, and it was only every few days. Recently, they've grown sloppy. Predictable. Forgetting to vary intervals and allowing DXS to foresee when the last stronghold, what used to be a small office building, long since abandoned of its original purpose, would be empty.
Today is a day they won't be there, and today is the day DXS will scrub every trace of its presence from the building. Jack leans back in his seat and flips another page over, studying the list of equipment to be retrieved. A few button mics. A transmitter in the walls intercepting and cloning incoming communications. A few miscellaneous bits and bobbles from your average middle-grade priority surveillance op. A breeze, in and out in around or under ninety minutes. Mac will head inside while Jack goes around the exterior of the building, snagging the last couple of cameras from the perimeter and keeping an eye out, on the off chance Halilovic's men decide to come early.
The plane lands fine in Croatia, and the drive out to the site itself is easy enough, though weighted in uncomfortable silence. Mac is wordless and stony in the passenger's seat, eyes fixed out the window, watching the countryside. Jack is fine with that. Let him brood all he wants; he'll get tired of the quiet eventually and start opening up, and then maybe they can finally have a little fun on these missions. He focuses for the moment on driving, on parking the car up in the treeline where it can't be seen from the main road.
It's a mild, placid day. Not a breath of wind stirs the long grass Jack wades through at the edge of the forest that creeps further down towards the building every day. It's been years since the building was abandoned from its original purpose and the landscaping caretakers moved on to other jobs, and it shows. He picks over the unstable ground, reaching into a pocket and slipping a specified pair of sunglasses onto his face. The lenses are formed with a special coating allowing him to see the stripe of paint marking the trees with DXS surveillance equipment planted in them.
For all that he'd like to get back to the kind of high-risk high-reward, fast paced work he signed up for, it's a pretty nice day. Walking along the threshold of the foliage, sweeping his head back and forth to look for marked trees, is almost meditative. There's certainly no chatter in his ear to distract him from whatever thoughts might drift by while he walks. He and Mac are equipped with communicators, earpieces and mics, but, not surprisingly, the kid hasn't said anything since they parted at the path to the building. All is quiet on the Western front.
The gunshots shatter the still of the afternoon and Jack's heart stops.
It kicks back into gear again, galloping erratically and quickly evening out into a determined, steady beat as he shuts down any instinctive panic in favor of pragmatism. The shots came from the building, a short burst of three, and no more follow in the moments it takes Jack to cross to the door. He enters gun up, guarding himself, flashlight braced under it. He hisses his partner's name into the mic, and no answer follows it.
It's in the far East hallway he finds the first body. It's one of Halilovic's men, Jack recognizes him from the briefing, one of the grunts sent around to do cleanup. He wasn't supposed to be here. Nobody was supposed to be here. And it would've been better for him if he hadn't been, if the looks of him is any indication. There's a discarded can of what looks to be spray paint on the ground next to him, a burst of neon green across his face, disrupted by the brown-red blood from his broken nose. His chest rises and falls, but the movements are labored and shallow. He's out cold. No longer a threat.
"Mac," Jack says in another harsh whisper. "Agent MacGyver, respond, now."
A long moment elapses without an answer. Jack continues down the hall. Passes another body, heaped over on its side. Another one of Halilovac's. He can't tell if this one is breathing and he doesn't stop to check.
"Everything is fine." The response comes belated and almost annoyed sounding, and Jack's grip on his gun spasms momentarily tighter, incredulous.
"Fine? Fine? Situation report," he snaps, turning into the last stretch of dusty, worn carpet separating him from the main office, where Mac is supposed to be digging in the wiring to separate what DXS put there from what was there originally. Who knows what he's actually doing, given nothing else that was supposed to be happening was actually going the way it was supposed to be.
Nobody was supposed to be there aside from them, none of Halilovic's people in the area for another two days. If, on the off chance someone aside from he and Jack did approach the building, Mac was supposed to alert him immediately. The unconscious men in the hall, the gunshots, Mac had clearly known they were there. And still, not a word across the mics to the man whose first and most important job was keeping him alive.
Sure, Jack had been outside pulling cameras out of trees, but that wasn't his first job. Not on this mission, or on either of the two before it, had a part of the actual mission been Jack's top priority - his top priority, as he'd been reminded by Matty not that long ago, is ensuring that Mac is able to complete his portion and live to get up and do it again tomorrow. And yet it took the sharp report of gunshots, a wordless mechanical screaming that alerts all within earshot that something terrible has happened, for him to find out that his mission was under threat. That wasn't how it was supposed to go, and Jack is not happy.
Before Mac can comply with the requested sit-rep, the doorway to the interior office crosses into view, and Jack bursts in, gun drawn. Needlessly drawn, it would seem, as the two arms dealers who managed to make it all the way inside, farther than their compatriots Jack had passed on his way in at least, are already downed. Mac stands above them, turned partially away from Jack, shoulders heaving with exerted breath. He looks over and shrugs, dropping the item still hanging in limp, bloodied fingers. It clatters to the floor, and Jack squints at it, trying to make out what Mac seems to have taken out half of Halilovic's people with.
It is, to the best of what he can tell, some kind of decorative statuette that may have once personalized somebody's desk, left over from when this place had been an office building. Marble, maybe, but it's hard to tell, as old and chipped and bloody it now is. Frowning, Jack's eyes go to the gun on the floor next to the man, and then up to Mac's hip, the one facing him. Sure enough, the kid's weapon is still secured there, untouched and useless to have defended him from any of his would-be assailants. There's a strange smear of rusted copper streaked with an electric, lime green on the knee of his jeans, too, and Jack connects it instantly to the man in the hall with the broken nose and the spray paint.
"Still want that situation report?" Mac has the audacity to ask, and Jack closes his eyes before his vision can white out with how angry he is.
"Did you get everything?" Jack grits out rather than answer. It had been a rhetorical question anyway, the one Mac asked - the situation was pretty clear, report or no.
"Yeah. It's done," Mac answers. His voice is tight and strained and he's still turned away. He sounds mad.
What it is he's angry about, Jack doesn't know. Maybe that Jack didn't see them coming, maybe that he had to get his hands dirty, whatever. Regardless, they doesn't have time to stop and figure it out. They've gotta get out of here before Halilovic's men miss a check-in, or more of them arrive. The truck is still parked up in the treeline, with the equipment from Jack's perimeter sweep sitting in a black duffel bag not ten feet from it. All they have to do is pull the last two cameras Jack hadn't gotten to yet down out of the last two trees and they could be off to the exfil pickup location before Halilovic was any the wiser.
"Let's get going," Jack says, turning towards the door. "I've just got two more to grab out of the trees out there and we're good to go."
As he's about to step back through the threshold he's just come through, something makes Jack stop, a hesitation and a question lingering too persistently in his mind to ignore. He pauses in his tracks, looks behind him to where Mac is just beginning to cross the room to follow.
"You're alright, though?" he asks, anger fading as guilt sets in. That should've been his first question. The moment he came through the door, his first question for his partner, who seemed to have just brought a statuette to a gunfight, should have been 'are you hurt'. The reaction he gets is not one he would've predicted, not since he thought they were making actual headway. (But then, seeing as Mac hadn't so much as radioed in when the fighting started, maybe they weren't making nearly as much progress as Jack had hoped.)
"I'm fine," Mac snaps, pulling his jacket tight around his body and glaring at Jack. He motions as if to encourage them both out the door, and just like that, the guilt is gone and the anger is back. "Let's go."
"Well, okay then. Let's just get out of here."
Not, in Jack's opinion, a question that warranted such a prickly response, unless Mac took the inquiry into his health as some sort of indication that Jack was trying to undermine his skill. Which hadn't been the point at all, but that's not an argument they have time to have and frankly, Jack doesn't have the patience at the moment either. They're already set for quite the conversation about this little incident later, so that part can wait too.
Jack leads the way out of the building. His senses are on high alert, still rattled from having missed the approach of Halilovic's goons. That's part of the point of having partners - nobody can have eyes everywhere all of the time, and that way there's someone else to let you know when something's gone wrong. It is this way so you can stay safe but also so that you can have their back. Jack, today, had not had his partner's back. Of course, he would've if he'd known, but he didn't. Mac didn't see fit to tell him, and he'd been unable to do his job as a result.
The recalcitrant young man himself follows behind Jack on their way out, making enough sound with his footsteps that it's clear he's still following. Jack doesn't turn around to check on him, too focused on making sure he knows where he's headed, that he doesn't miss any threats on the way. Maybe he should have. Maybe, if he'd known, he would have. But he doesn't, and, facing forward, eyes cast upward, Jack steps out into the bright light of day.
The other two coils left up in the trees are short and easy work, which is good, because Jack's attention is split. His mind's only half on what he's doing, the other half watching for approaching cars or people. Mac stands back by the car, out of sight from where Jack works, and there's no guarantee he'll say anything if he does notice trouble - though perhaps that thought is uncharitable, and Jack regrets it a moment later. Even granted that he hadn't radio'd when Halilovic's men arrived and the altercations started, Jack doesn't believe that Mac would keep information to himself when it could endanger them both. It just doesn't seem possible. Matty would never have brought him onboard if that were the case.
It's not until they're in the car on the way to the exfil site that Jack's guard finally starts to if not come down then at least relax somewhat. The building is far, far in the rearview and his shoulders begin to unknot, muscle tension relaxing as the thrill of the gunshots and the bodies in the building slows into the relief of a mission accomplished, if with a few hiccups along the way.
Mac does not seem to be relaxing at all. He's bunched up in his seat with his arms folded tight, leaning against the door of the car. It's weird posture, closed off and defensive, and if it were any other time, if this were any other partner, if he hadn't just gotten a swiftly and harshly rebuking response when he'd inquired as to Mac's welfare earlier, Jack would've tried to figure out what was going on. Maybe the fight was getting to him - Jack can't forget that throughout the entire violent encounter, through taking down four men on his own, Mac hadn't touched his gun.
Every so often, as he continues the drive towards the exfil pickup site, Jack glances away from the road towards Mac in the passenger's seat. The kid doesn't move from where he sits, watching silently out the window. With the way he's turned, his head angled away, the collar of his jacket is pulled away a bit, exposing the side of his neck.
There's a scar, on the side of Mac's neck, down near his shoulder. It's usually covered by his shirt, and Jack's only caught glimpses of it before, but he can see it now, fairly clearly. It's long, maybe four inches or so until it disappears underneath the back of his jacket, and looks like it's more than a year old, but new enough that it must have happened in the short time he's been an adult. Jack has a moment of wanting to ask, to find out what happened, if maybe this is why he's so cagey after his encounter with Halilovic's lackeys.
But before any ill-advised questions can slip out during an already tense and high-strung day, Mac looks to the side and catches his expression, snapping, "What?"
"Nothing," Jack answers. Annoyance spikes back up and he grits his jaw, focusing on the road. They're only five more minutes away from the exfil site and it passes without a word exchanged between them.
There's nothing more for it once they've reached pickup but to stand there and wait for the helicopter to arrive and take them to the main airport they're leaving Croatia by. Jack paces, while Mac stands next to the car, jacket pulled tight around his body and arms still folded around it. After a few minutes, Jack figures maybe now is as good a time as any to have that conversation about what, exactly, had happened on this mission that needed to never happen again. He wants to know exactly how soon Mac had spotted the strangers approaching, what was going through his mind when he decided that the danger he was in was something his partner didn't need to know about. Jack stops in his pacing, turning back towards the car, hands on his hips, ready to launch into it, when he's stopped.
Mac shifts away, leaning back against the car, and when he lifts his hand from where it was folded against his side to check his watch, something catches Jack's attention. There's something on his palm. Jack narrows his eyes at it, trying to make out what's out of place about the skin of his hand. It looks like paint, or like blood from the fight, but something's not right. It's too fresh.
Mac turns to the side, looking out over his shoulder, and as his jacket lifts, Jack sees it. His shirt is dark enough that it's hard to see unless you know to look for it, but there it is. Blood, more of it, on his side. And not cast-off either, not anything that could've come from the damage inflicted with Mac's knee and the statuette. This is source blood. Mac is bleeding, a red stain spreading out from his side and soaking down into the waist of his pants. Those shots Jack heard, the ones that alerted him to the problem, snap instantly back into his mind. One of them must have found its mark.
