i'm gonna get so repetitive but i'm gonna say it again anyway - thank you so much for giving this fic a chance and thank you for your enthusiasm about it! it keeps me going with the long haul of writing in front of me - it's going to be a long one that's for sure. (title, for those playing along at home, playlist wise, is bastille's 'power'.)

chapter warning: there is a focus on blood and injury in this chapter, though it's not extremely graphic or serious.


For another moment like the one when he'd first heard gunfire, Jack's heart stops. It stays still for longer this time, in the absence of clear and present danger, skin going cold and the air stilling around him. Mac has been shot. Jack's partner has been shot. The gravity of the situation, of exactly how badly Jack has failed, careens down into him swiftly and soundly, knocking the breath from his chest.

While he was outside, looking at trees and wearing ridiculous glasses, his partner was inside being attacked, he's been shot and now he's wounded and bleeding and Jack just… didn't notice. The entire time they'd been picking through that building, the entire ride in the car, standing here now waiting for exfil to arrive, his partner has been bleeding. And not once, that entire time, had Mac seen fit to tell him about it. It's hard to pin down exactly which part of that Jack finds more disturbing - the fact that his partner was shot and this had escaped his noticing for an extended period of time, or the fact that Mac had deliberately concealed being shot with such a degree of success after first deciding to conceal this fact.

It occurs to Jack after a moment that he's just standing there dumbfounded and he really ought to be doing something, and that kick-starts him into motion.

"You're bleeding." It's a flat statement, and Mac glances down, his hand covering the stain automatically.

"Whatever," he mutters, and Jack can't believe what he's hearing.

"Not whatever, you're shot, get over here." He reaches as he speaks, taking a step towards the kid with his hand out. Seeing the approach, the hand moving to pull the side of the jacket away and expose the wound, Mac reacts sharply. It's like some kind of invisible concussive blow has forced him away from the gesture. His body curves in on itself, turning away from Jack's hand, taking one long step back.

Jack has seen that kind of behavior before, the kind of look on the kid's face now. That wide-eyed, frightened, defensive, angry look. He's seen it on cornered animals, on people in situations where they feel backed into a wall and threatened. Anger pulses up in Jack's chest, replaced quickly with worried fear, swapping out with anger again, and around and around. It's impossible to sort through, this muddle of feelings, and so he just backs off, before he makes the situation worse. He wants to demand Mac to show him the wound, and he wants to yell at him for not calling for help before it could've been dealt, and none of that would do anything but make things worse, so Jack backs off and turns away.

Okay, Dalton, he tells himself sternly. Okay. Assess the situation. First and most important question - how badly is Mac hurt. Clearly, if he's still conscious and coherent and upright, the injury, factually speaking, cannot be that bad. He can't be losing too much blood, or he'd look a lot worse than he does, and Jack would've seen it before now. Most likely, it's just a graze, the bullet just close enough to carve a small, shallow trench in Mac's side.

Having now established with a fair degree of certainty that Mac is unlikely to drop dead before the helicopter arrives to pick them up, Jack refocuses. He takes a deep breath, counts to three, then to eight for good measure, and looks back at Mac. The kid's still standing there with his side turned defensively towards the car, face hostile and guarded. It doesn't look like he's moved at all since Jack reached for him, and he doesn't unfurl or relax his tensed body until several more moments pass in stillness, the only sound the ambient noise of the meadow around them.

"How bad is it, exactly?" Jack's question is measured and deliberate, even and calm, and Mac keeps looking at him wordlessly for a few more moments before moving.

His hand, flecked with neon green spray paint and smeared red, pulls back his jacket so Jack can see for himself. There's a long, thin rip in Mac's button up shirt, over his ribs, the surrounding material moderately soaked and stained red. Blood has seeped down into the waistband of his pants, creeping slowly down his thigh, but it hasn't reached his knee, and Mac's coloring is mostly good. A little pale, a bruise forming faint and high on one cheek, but overall, he looks mostly okay.

Mostly.

As mostly okay as a person who's been shot can look.

"See? Not bad," Mac says, only barely this side of a snap. He's once more taken up with his refusal to look Jack in the face, instead staring off at a distant mountain ridge. He lets the jacket fall back into place but doesn't cinch it around his torso this time.

No point in hiding it, Jack supposes. The jig is up.

Really, it should've been up long before this. Before they even left the building, he should've known about what happened. If he'd been doing his job right - his job that, as Matty has so intently reminded him, was at least eighty percent keeping Mac alive and in one piece to do his job - then the first thing he would've done is assess the damage. He'd heard gunshots for crying out loud, why he hadn't even asked if maybe Mac had gotten hit, trusting instead that he would self-report any trouble, which is never a safe bet with field agents, he's learned that the hard way, is beyond him-

The train of thought ferociously berating Jack for falling down on the job abruptly screeches to a halt when he realizes something. Why hadn't he asked if Mac was hit? He did. Maybe not in those exact words, but he had definitely stopped, before they'd so much as left the interior office. Sure, it was a little belated, but he hadn't even let five minutes go by without requesting a status report on whether or not Mac had been injured in the firefight. Fire-statuette fight. Whatever.

And when he'd asked, Mac had answered. 'I'm fine.' He'd stood there, bleeding from a gunshot wound he couldn't possibly have evaluated yet for severity, and said to Jack's face that he was fine. He'd lied.

"You lied to me." The accusation is out before Jack can stop it. And, really, why should he stop it? It's the truth, and now that he's been assured that Mac isn't about to keel over at any moment, anger is back to the dominant feeling in him, overtaking concern and even confusion by miles.

"Excuse me?" Affronted is nowhere near strong enough a word to describe the expression that's overtaken Mac's face. "I did not lie to you."

Amazing, how he keeps digging himself deeper into Jack's bad graces. Usually, being shot would be enough to save any partner of his from the doghouse, but with Mac seemingly unwilling to so much as acknowledge what happened, it's not working this time.

"Bullshit! I asked, back at Halilovic's base, I asked you if you were okay. And you lied straight to my face. You were in an altercation with a man who shot you – and don't even get me started on the fact that you did not so much as touch your weapon to fire back – and not only do you not notify me immediately of the hostile threat, you lied when I asked if you were alright. When I directly ask you for information about the status of your health you need to answer the question, and tell the truth when you do."

"I said I was fine, yeah," Mac retorts, his own hackles up at the direction this conversation is taking. "Because I was fine. I'd been grazed but I was still mission-capable and so when you asked me if I was alright, I saw no reason I couldn't still fulfill expectations of me on this operation. I was injured, sure, but I was fine. I am fine. You had exactly as much information as you needed, I could keep pulling my damn weight."

Before Jack can have the opportunity to illustrate exactly how 'mission-capable' and 'fine' are in no way the same thing, and when he was asking, he had been asking about Mac's wellbeing rather than his ability to continue 'pulling his own damn weight', he's interrupted. The distant whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades comes over the horizon, and grows closer by the moment. Exfil team Echo Romeo is here to retrieve them, to spirit them out of Croatia and back home to California.

Making a snap decision, given they are barely six weeks into this partnership, and this will be his first meeting with Echo Romeo, Jack points at Mac.

"This conversation," he says, hoping his tone accurately conveys how much he is very much not at all joking, "is not over."

Apparently having located his sense of self preservation, Mac doesn't roll his eyes, though the intent is palpable. He pulls his jacket fully closed and zips it, displaying no intention of allowing any of the exfil agents and their First Aid kits anywhere near the injury. Jack is out of the will to fight him on it for now, and doesn't take any initiative to point it out when Echo Romeo sets the bird down and they both climb up into it. If any member of the four-person team inside the small aircraft notices the blood on Mac's hands or his pants, they don't say anything about it.

Jack gives the stern-faced woman sitting across from him a tight smile and settles in for the tensest helicopter ride of his life – a strong statement, given his history. The trip, devoid of any kind of conversation, offers him the opportunity to mull over what's just happened. Some of the frustrated angry feeling in his chest is fading. It's not gone by any means, but it is retreated to the background enough for other things to start creeping forward. There's a sick feeling in his gut that nags at him, vague and unsettled, and the more he thinks about it, the more oddly he feels about the events following the arrival of Halilovic's footsoldiers. At the very least, there seems to have been some kind of miscommunication with Mac about what exactly Jack's role here is, and how it's going to work with his own.

It's with this unsettled, slightly nauseated feeling still bothering him that Jack disembarks the helicopter, and it persists on the flight home on the plane waiting for them at the nearest airstrip. It's still there when they land in Los Angeles as well, when they're back in the main building, just the two of them in a long, empty hallway.

When they arrive back home, it's late enough that the day-to-day operations of DXS have ceased, non-essential personnel returning home. There are a few people around still; there always are, night security patrolling or restless agents in the gym, on-call exfil asleep in their wing or technical analysts assisting an operation on the other side of the world from their computers. For the most part, however, the place is deserted, offering Jack the opportunity to speak to Mac with a moderate expectation of privacy. Of course, there's another edge to that sword as well, and it means there's nothing else around to distract from the argument they'd been having in Croatia, still hanging half-finished in the air between them.

Priorities, though.

"You should go to medical," Jack says, eventually, breaking the awkward, thick silence. "Get that checked out. Stitches, if you need 'em."

Of course, he should've probably predicted how that recommendation was going to land.

"I'm not going to medical."

Matty really did get him this job and this specific assignment with the sole and focused purpose of driving him completely out of his mind. This kid had to be in on it, this nepotism hire with the surfer-boy haircut and gadget-y pocket knife, participating in the world's most elaborate prank and laughing with Matty about it on the weekends.

"Why," Jack grinds out, closing his eyes tightly as he says it, "for the love of God, are you not going to medical, Mac?"

When he opens his eyes again, he sees the belligerence he'd been expecting, but something else too. The cornered look is back, the hunted-animal fear from when Jack had reached for him before.

"I go to medical, they make a report. They make a report, the Director sees it."

My dad sees it, Jack hears, unspoken under the title.

"Okay. And then… What? Help me understand here. Help me understand why you got shot and are now refusing to see the on-call doctor."

Jack is doing his best to be patient, to keep calm and approach this rationally. Something is clearly going on here, something more than just Mac's personal vendetta against Jack's patience, nerves, and sanity. Maybe he's, if the pun can be excused, gun-shy about stitches after whatever happened to his neck. It had obviously been serious, if the scarring left behind is any indication, and he would've spent more than a minute in the hospital for that one. Maybe he's going to get written up for not using his weapon to defend himself, or… something. There has to be something that will make this make sense.

"I just… It doesn't need to turn into some big thing. I can deal with it myself. I know enough to know what needs stitches and what doesn't, and this doesn't. I can handle it myself, and it stays between us. Medical doesn't have to deal with it, nobody needs to make a report about it. Okay?"

There's defiance in the question, but nervousness too, as if Mac knows that if Jack decided to radio down to medical right now, there was really nothing he could do to stop it – and, more to the point, Jack's own after-action report could give him away too, should he make an entirely truthful one. Weighing his options, his anger and frustration and the nagging feeling that something isn't what it seems here, the tenuous peace that's forming between the two of them, Jack makes a decision.

"Okay. But I'm making sure it's not bad enough to make stitches."

Mac makes an odd face at him, like that was somehow farther than the last thing he'd been expecting, and nods once, repeating back, "Okay."

'I'll deal with it myself' turns out to mean 'I'll raid the supply closet where the exfil teams stock their go-kits out of'. Mac gains access to exfil's wing of the building with a keycard that he sheepishly explains to Jack he'd cloned off a friend on an exfil team, a woman for whom he'd once fixed a malfunctioning break room coffee pot that maintenance wouldn't replace.

Jack leans against one of the racks containing hermetically sealed suture kits and more gauze than you can shake a stick at and watches Mac with barely disguised curiosity. Mac goes straight to a specific shelf and pulls a stepladder over to it, sitting down on the second-lowest rung so he doesn't have to balance against one of the shelves while undoing his shirt. Once it's opened, it's clear that his assessment had been accurate. It's not the shallowest of cuts but it isn't gaping either, and while it has to be causing him a world of hurt, it won't need stitches. Mac fumbles around on a shelf behind him for what turns out to be a bottle of peroxide solution. He then looks up and waves a hand at Jack and the shelving behind him, who hands him a packet of gauze when he figures out what's being requested of him.

Mac tears the packaging open with his teeth, wetting the produced gauze pad with peroxide and pressing it over the bullet graze extending a good six inches over his ribcage. With horrified fascination, Jack notes that while his face blanches and his jaw clenches, Mac doesn't hesitate or flinch. He's certainly dedicated to maintaining his reputation and ego in front of his father, if this is the lengths to which he'll go to avoid admitting being wounded on a mission.

Once it's been sufficiently cleaned and sterilized, Mac looks to the shelf he'd originally walked directly to, fumbling around until he comes up with what turns out to be a roll of steri-strips. He applies them with careful, steady fingers, closing the injury quickly and efficiently. Finally, he waves for more gauze from Jack, who passes him one of the larger squares, which is then taped over his side. The only hint left that Mac was shot that day is the blood still staining his clothes. Even the marks on his hands are gone, alcohol wipes unfolded to clean his palms of the evidence of the field medicine he's just performed on himself inside a walk-in closet.

Throughout the whole bizarre ordeal, not a word is exchanged between them. Once it's over, Mac buttons his shirt back up, heedless of the blood staining it and the rip in the side, and holds his arms out, a challenge to Jack.

"Satisfied?" he asks, irritated exasperation steeped into the single word.

"I guess," Jack fires back, matching tone for tone. Before Mac can get up, though, he speaks again, modulating his voice down to one less likely to instigate a further argument. "Before you go though, we gotta talk about that. That cannot happen."

"I didn't let it interfere with the goal," Mac protests instantly, looking offended. "I did my job. Everything turned out fine."

"Yeah, sure," says Jack, moving quickly past that utterly irrelevant point, "what I mean is you cannot get shot and then not tell me. You can't get in a fight outnumbered four to one and not tell me. Hell, you can't be seeing hostiles approaching and decide you're just not going to tell me. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

The Director's voice flashes into Jack's mind, his summary of duties.

"Make sure he doesn't get himself killed or tank the mission because he doesn't notice some glaring threat."

It's followed immediately by Matty's voice, the reminder that's been dogging him ever since he saw the blood on Mac's shirt.

"Your job is to keep him safe. Your job is to keep that boy alive."

It's contrasted with Mac's voice now, contrasting that very order.

"I don't understand what you're so worked up about, our mission was a success!" The fact that he's making this claim with a bloodied shirt and the packaging from the gauze taped to his body to keep the rest of that blood inside it, is so absolutely ludicrous that Jack nearly can't help himself, barely restraining an incredulous laugh.

"No!" Jack's voice is higher both in pitch and volume than he planned on letting it be, but he doesn't stop to reign it in before continuing. "Your mission was a success, but mine wasn't. Because you got shot."

"I was grazed. Barely," Mac tacks on, and Jack really, truly, genuinely does not want to know if he made that clarification because he actually believes it isn't that serious or because Mac was just trying to get a rise out of him.

"And if that man had just barely had better aim, we may not have gotten you to exfil in time. You almost died, Mac."

"And?"

"And nothing! You could've been killed on my watch!"

Something in Mac's face shutters and hardens and he snaps back, echoing Jack's words to him, "Well I'm sorry if my almost being killed on your watch interfered with your job."

That just about strikes Jack dumb, and he asks before he can stop himself, "My job?"

"Watching over the mission, you know, making sure nothing passes by when I get too focused to pay attention. Making sure nothing I miss screws up the goal."

The way Mac is talking, it's like he doesn't know what Jack's job actually is, and it leaves Jack speechless, unsure how to clarify things.

"No, Mac, it's you. You are my job. Watching out for you."

"I know," Mac says, face bewildered like only one of them is talking sense and it isn't Jack. "You watch for what I miss, patch the holes I leave in the mission."

"That's not what I meant at all. You're really not getting this, are you?" asks Jack. His chest feels tight and anger is fading into something else, something worried and more than a little sick, like on the helicopter back but worse. Something is not right here. Mac isn't getting it at all, and Jack doesn't know how to explain it to him.

It's almost funny. Jack has been on the other side of this conversation before. Not that long ago, actually. Except, when it had been Matty, trying to impress on him how important it was that the focus, the primary and if necessary only focus of his job was to keep Mac alive, Jack had already been on the same page, and didn't need to hear it.

Matty had caught him, before they left on their second mission, the one whose subject Jack can barely recall for its banality. She'd stopped him in the hall as he was jogging to catch up with Mac, who was already halfway out the building. He'd been irritated at the time, not wanting to disrupt the tenuous, stony peace that existed between him and his partner, but she'd seemed serious. Her gaze was focused hard and he quickly quelled any protest, choking it back down his throat.

"Your job," she'd said, "is to keep him safe."

"Yeah," Jack agreed, the word drawing out into two syllables in his confusion. "I know, Matty."

"Listen to me." Matty's hand grabbed onto his wrist, her fingers tight and insistent. "His focus is the mission, your focus is him. Do you hear me? Your job is to keep that boy alive."

"I know," he repeated, and tried to smile at her in a way that was reassuring. Maybe she thought it was their first mission in the field together, or thought Mac was so distracted and tunnel visioned on jobs that he was in constant danger. Either way, it was more annoying and insulting when she'd said it than anything else. But now, after all of… that, it sticks in his mind like one of the burr seeds the dog would bring in after spending the afternoon running in the field.

Matty hadn't been worried about Jack not understanding the function of his job. She'd already known that Mac didn't.

"Okay," Jack says, eyes roaming around, as if searching for a better way to explain this, a way that will make what he's trying to say finally make it through Mac's skull. "Let me put it this way. Every time we get to the end of a mission," his hands are cupped in front of him, indicating a point on an invisible line, then gesturing swiftly back towards the beginning of this hypothetical segment of space, "and there is less blood in your body than there was when we started, then I have failed, alright? My job is to make sure that the condition you leave this building in is the same as when you arrived. So just. Next time, you tell me immediately and you let me handle it. Understand?"

The look on Mac's face says 'no, I don't understand, and I don't even understand why we're having this conversation', but at least he doesn't say as much. Despite the bewildered expression, he nods, and says shortly, "Yeah. I get it."

No, you don't, Jack thinks as he watches Mac turn away. But I'm gonna keep at it until you do.