i'm getting so repetitive. i love you guys. i love writing this fic. thank you for making it a process worth loving.
as a note, from here on out i wanna just stick a blanket warning on this fic for emotional/psychological abuse and the effects thereof, because well, james. specific chapter warnings will still appear when i, using my best judgement, deem them necessary.
enjoy, and thank you so much again!
There's nowhere in DXS that Mac is more at ease than down on one of the lower floors in R&D. The labs are lit with a kind of calm, blue toned overhead lighting and the banks of tables and equipment remind him of when he'd been in college, getting his degree in Engineering and Chemistry from CalTech. He doesn't have his own space down in Research – James would never hear of it – but he's ingratiated himself to enough people down there that there is usually an empty lab he has access to and permission to come and go from as he pleased. Most of his time at DXS when not on active assignment or doing some kind of training is spent down here.
The morning shift head of security, a terrifying woman named Heather who has a soft spot for him, told him once that more than one new recruit without much access to or interaction with field agents thought he was a ghost, spreading rumors the place was haunted by an agent killed on duty.
"It's how you flit around down here at all hours, you know," Heather told him one morning over the cappuccino he'd picked up for her on the way to work that day. (It paid to be on the good side of security and maintenance, he'd learned quickly.) She wiggled her fingers at him and arched one eyebrow. "Haunting the place."
He rolls his eyes at the memory, picking up a small screwdriver off the table and twisting a component of his latest project a quarter inch clockwise. He's in Whittacker and Tam's workspace today – probably his favorite of the Research labs he had access to. He likes them, the odd team of development techs whose primary focus was improving existing tech to work more efficiently, and they have a pretty tricked out lab too - perks of being two of the highest performing scientists on DXS payroll. It's probably why they haven't been told off too harshly for letting him be down here either. Mac had been half sure after he was late to his first meeting with Jack that the Director was going to crack down, forbid them from allowing him access or worse, give them a reprimand in their files. It's happened before, but these two are the crown jewel of R&D, which he supposes grants them more leeway than the more junior lab rats.
Mac blames this track of thought, the day he'd met his newest partner, for how his mind drifts back to their most recent mission together. The mission itself wasn't remarkable in its danger or difficulty; pretty run of the mill stuff, insofar as anything he does here can be remotely considered 'run of the mill'. That isn't why it's sticking in his mind, refusing to leave him be. It was Jack. Jack is hands down the most baffling person Mac has ever worked with – well, except maybe O'Reilly, but he'd been the bad kind of 'baffling', the kind that meant he'd ended up taking a shot at Mac himself the day their partnership fell apart and he'd been summarily fired. Jack is… good baffling, if that's an appropriate descriptor.
For the most basic level, he's reliable. He's reliable to the core, predictable and steady and unruffled by just about everything. No matter what came up - whatever 'harebrained nonsense', as the one before him had described it, Mac asked him to participate in - he never wavered. Sure he might look at Mac like he's nuts, might loudly complain that there was no rhyme, reason, or sanity to what they were doing, but he did it anyway, and he never let his guard fall off Mac's back the entire time. Which brought him to their most recent mission, the one that won't leave his head.
Jack had been standing guard outside where Mac was dealing with the actual mission objective itself, a fairly typical setup for them, when Mac had heard someone coming down the hall in the opposite direction. He'd then been confronted with a choice, much the same choice he'd had the day in Croatia that he'd been shot and Jack had flipped completely out about it, overreacting to a scratch and demanding to be read in immediately in any future danger, no matter the actual threat level. With this incident in mind, and all of the previous times when Jack had swiftly and soundly dispatched an issue before it became too pressing (sometimes before Mac even knew it existed, and wasn't that just unnerving as hell) along with it, Mac hesitated for only a moment before he refocused his attention on the task at hand, speaking quietly into his comms unit.
"Jack, I've got incoming."
And that had been the end of it. There had been a brief scuffle outside and Jack poked his head in the room, eyes doing a quick sweep before landing on Mac himself.
"You good?" he'd asked, and Mac had looked incredulously back at him, nodding with an element of 'duh' to it that he's sure didn't make him seem particularly adult, and Jack had nodded, satisfied. "Alright. Well, it's handled out here, you just keep doin' what you're doin', don't worry about anything else."
The part Mac can't get out of his mind is the fact that, after Jack had said that, he kind of… didn't. His attention had been split, of course, monitoring his perimeter with his peripheral vision and listening hard for every sound, but he got the feeling it was more out of habit than a sense of actual danger. Maybe it's the length of their partnership – already having spanned close to three months, far longer than his previous two partners, one who quit after their first mission, and the one James had fired when he'd fired Patti. Mac shuts that line of thought down quickly, swallowing around the lump in his throat and blinking hard. The tiny filament he's been working with snaps under the sudden pressure of how hard he'd gripped it and he cringes, dropping it onto the table surface.
Maybe he misses the previous Deputy Director more than he'd thought he did – more than he'd breathe a word of to anyone except maybe Bozer, who hardly knew half the story of what really happened in the purge. Even more than his partner's implication in the double-cross, he'd taken Patti's betrayal hard. It hurts to think about, even now, months later. He likes Matty, he does, but Patti had been there for years, working with James at DXS since Mac was still in college.
Forcing himself away from that particular topic, Mac carefully lifts a new filament out of a container and refocuses on Jack, on their mission. That alertness, what he remembers being described as 'hypervigilance' from one required after-action visit with a psychologist employed by DXS, had remained, but out of habit, too ingrained in him to turn off just like that. It was a shock to realize that, when Jack told him 'I've got this', Mac had actually believed him.
It's not a feeling he's entirely comfortable with, if Mac is completely honest. James had cautioned him about it repeatedly in the beginning, with his first partner and then again, after that first partner had…
After.
"They aren't here to babysit you," James had said, in the severe, intense voice that meant it was the Director talking, not Mac's father. "Your partner is here to make sure you don't miss something that will tank the mission or get someone killed. Get you killed, god forbid. But don't for a moment think that you can take your eyes off your surroundings. You can't ever be sure they're going to do their job, at least not enough that you can take your eyes off part of yours."
And he'd taken that to heart, and only slipped a few times since then. He'd paid dearly for his complacency too, his lapse in judgement allowing him to believe he could just hand over part of the mission to his partner and not have it come back to bite him. The reminder twinges in the side of his neck and Mac's hand goes up to it, rubbing over the scar that still aches sometimes, nerve endings that had been torn through by the bullet that nearly killed him never quite healing right. The consequences of trusting a partner is paying attention come steep.
Maybe, with where it keeps taking him, it's better if he stops thinking about past missions and partners at all. He's got his project down here, nothing on the docket for today, and to the best of his knowledge, James is on another continent assisting another team on an active mission. Whittacker and Tam are off rotation for the day, and Mac is free to spend as much time down in the lab as he wants. Maybe he'll even go home early, have a movie night with Bozer like he's been promising he'll make time for long enough that he's starting to feel guilty about it.
Leaning back in his chair, allowing himself to get lost in the project at hand, Mac relaxes in increments. He stops and flexes his fingers every now and then, his hands cramping slightly from the delicate work he's engaged in. Time slips away as he twists the softball-sized device to one side and the other, trying to figure out where he's going wrong, why it isn't functioning yet. Far from discouraging him though, the problems make him excited, little zings of energy running down his shoulders like a physical sensation. So wrapped up is he in what he's doing that when Jacks voice finally cuts through his focus, it's pretty clear he's had to say Mac's name more than once in a bid to get his attention.
"Mac!"
The volume of the word finally snaps Mac's attention off what he's doing and the device in his hands goes clattering down to the table, shoulder muscles seizing sharply up into startled tension. It takes several moments for his breathing to stutter back to a start, and he looks over at Jack, heart thundering in his chest like it's trying to break out.
"Sorry," the man in the doorway says, cringing, and to his credit, he seems like he actually is. It lacks the sarcastic bite of the way James would snap the word when he had to track Mac down here, I'm sorry, Angus, was I interrupting you?
"It's okay, I was just…" Mac waves a hand at the tools and pieces of hardware and circuitry on the worktable. He doesn't finish the explanation of what he'd just been doing, figuring that Jack didn't actually care, and he'd already had to stand there for long enough waiting to get Mac's attention, he didn't need some technical explanation of what he'd been doing down here. Not when Jack had obviously been looking for him for a reason, and he wasn't supposed to be down here in the first place. "It doesn't matter. Sorry. What did you, uh… What did you want?"
"We were gonna go over some training stuff, remember, they wanted us to get used to the new communicators before we have to use 'em in the field or whatever."
"Oh. Shit." So much for an empty schedule for the day. "Is it really…"
"Tuesday, my man, it is indeed. I know, sneaks up on you."
Mac squints at him, searching the words for a biting edge, a hidden reprimand he was supposed to glean from the rather placid, unbothered words themselves. The other shoe is going to drop any moment. There's only so much patience you can have with someone in a day, and despite having hardly seen him, Mac has already made several missteps with Jack today. They haven't had a major argument since Croatia, but he supposes it's a matter of time. And Jack knows he's been spoken to about this before, snapped at by James for this very reason in front of him the day they met, and several times after that to boot. Mac is not supposed to be wasting time 'mucking around in R&D', he's supposed to be focused on his actual job, and now his partner has had to hunt him down through the building in order to do that job. Jack has every reason to be pissed.
Jack... does not look pissed. He's leaning in the doorway, posture completely casual, not so much as frowning. His gaze is directed not at Mac, with the impatient, irritated look he'd been expecting, but rather at the table, at the half-finished project laying on it.
Figuring he should probably put that away so he can avoid wasting any more of Jack's time, Mac sits up straighter in the chair, looking around for the wheeled storage cart his favorite R&D team let him keep in their lab for his projects. He begins to sweep the pieces together to put away, apologizing again as he does.
"I'll be ready to go in a sec, I just gotta-" Mac swears again as one of the pieces, a short, round-ended screw, rolls off the table and goes skittering across the floor. "Sorry."
"That's four 'sorry's in like two minutes between the two of us, which is about three too many if you ask me," Jack says, seeming completely nonplussed by Mac's flustered disorganization. "Here." He's picked up the screw and walked over, setting it back down on the table.
Mac, growing more rigid, tenser with every step towards him Jack took, forces himself to calm down. Jack doesn't seem mad, and okay, sometimes people can be really good at hiding it, but his experience thus far has taught him that at the very least, when Jack is mad, you'll know about it. He's not the type to obfuscate what he's thinking unless it's for a mission, and it's made getting used to him easier than some partners Mac has had in the past.
"Thanks," he mutters, going to put the screw away in its compartment in a tray slid out from the wheeled storage unit but stopping when he hears an odd rolling sound. He looks to the side and frowns, confused.
Jack has pulled a chair over from a worktop across the room and is now sitting on it backwards, arms loosely folded over the back of it. He's scanning the contents of Mac's tray with interest, and waves a hand at it when he notices Mac looking at him.
"Don't stop on my account, you can keep going with your… What is it you're doing down here actually?"
Mac narrows his eyes at Jack. "Are you…" He hesitates, swallows, then finishes the question. "Are you asking because you actually want the answer, or?"
"Of course I'm asking 'cause I wanna know the answer, why else would I be asking?"
Now, despite the air that he gives off sometimes – probably deliberately, if Mac's hunch is correct – Mac knows for a fact that Jack is not an idiot. He is well aware that there are far more reasons to ask a person what they're up to besides a genuine desire to know the answer, and so he's either playing dumb for whatever reason, or he's specifically asking why he in particular would be asking if he didn't want to know – a direct challenge to Mac to either accept the question or call him out for ulterior motives.
It's a gamble, and one he isn't entirely sure will pay off, and he can't for the life of him come up with an explanation for why he takes the risk, but Mac gives it a shot. If this blows up in his face, well, the stakes are pretty low. He might get yelled at or told off or reported on to James but at least the cost won't be a blast nearly severing his carotid artery. It's much safer to push boundaries here, in the lab, where the worst that can happen is another writeup for being 'out of bounds'.
"You know those security doors with the fingerprint scanners," Mac starts slowly, wary eyes fixed on Jack, looking for any hint this conversation is about to go south.
"Sure do," Jack says, voice easy and relaxed, seeming genuinely engaged in the conversation.
"We have ways of getting around them, but I think with some combination of like… 3D printing technology, we can make a better system that has less hiccups and less risk of setting off alarms." Sensing himself getting excited about the project, Mac tries to reign it back in, forcing himself to shrug and cut off the longer explanation before it goes any further. "Y'know, it's whatever, just some idea I had the other night. Whittacker and Tam let me mess around in here when they're not using it, it's a good brain exercise I guess. Anyway, didn't we have training we needed to do?"
The quicker they get out of here, the less straining of Jack's patience Mac is going to have to do today, and while it's working out so far, interesting data to add to his existing information about his partner, there's no guarantee on when it will run out.
"Oh, that? That can wait, it's not important," Jack dismisses immediately, waving like he's physically shooing the task off the agenda. "I wanna hear more about this 3D printer doohickey you're putting together here."
"Doohickey," repeats Mac flatly. He doesn't understand what's going on and it's an uncomfortable feeling.
"Yeah."
Blinking hard, wondering absently if he might be having some sort of hyper-realistic dream, or maybe a stroke, Mac starts to explain. He tells Jack about the project in short, halting pieces, ready to be abruptly done having this strange, easygoing, pleasant conversation at any moment. That moment doesn't come. Instead, Jack encourages him to keep going, to show him what the components actually do, why he thinks it's going to work.
The longer he talks, Jack continuing to ask interested, serious questions, the more Mac relaxes. He feels his shoulders ease, coming down from where they'd practically hunched up around his ears.
After about forty-five minutes of just chatting, answering questions, Mac hears the chair roll again and looks over. It was kind of nice while it lasted, but Jack is… rolling himself over the dark-washed floor to the radio Tam leaves next to her station, flicking it on. It hums to life softly, strains of music floating through the workspace.
"Do you mind?" Jack asks when he notices Mac is watching him, wide-eyed and mouth slightly parted in a question he can't find the words to ask.
"No," he says, when he registers what it is Jack has asked him. "It's fine."
Jack flashes him an honest-to-god thumbs up and turns back to the radio, fiddling with the station dials. Mac predicts where he's going to settle without meaning to, expecting Los Angeles ninety-five point five, the classic rock station, a moment before Jack locates it.
Mac has to admit after a while, silently and within the privacy of his own mind, that it's kind of nice, working there in the lab with Jack watching him in relatively non-obtrusive fascination. It's weird and he can't quite figure out what kind of motive Jack might be operating with, but figuring that whatever it is, he can deal with it when it comes up, Mac just lets it happen. The company is actually pleasant, with Jack asking smart questions about what he's doing and actually paying attention to the answer. It's clear he doesn't really understand what Mac is doing with his project, but he thinks it's interesting, and wants to try and get what he's doing. It reminds him of Bozer, in a way, of when he's tinkering with the toaster or something and his roommate is plaster-casting his latest movie prop.
It's when Jack pulls out his phone, and Mac catches the sound of what he thinks is Candy Crush before he clicks the volume to silent, that he comes to the conclusion that really, Jack does intend to just… sit here, hanging out for what appears to be the foreseeable future. He'd figured that, given what he does for his day job, most things probably should've lost the ability to surprise him by now, but he supposes there's exceptions to every rule, and maybe this is it. Mac can diffuse a bomb that would make a lot of garden variety EOD techs cry, but he can't figure out this weird easygoing partner with the cowboy accent and the bizarre habit of fussing, both on missions and off. This is where he's finally stumped.
As the day ticks on, Jack finally makes it clear that maybe watching Mac tinker in the lab isn't the entire reason he's down here, when he puts his phone away and sits up in the chair, righted to its proper orientation since his radio adjustment.
"So, what went wrong on that mission that you didn't tell me about?"
The question is straightforward, blunt, and blindsides Mac completely.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he says, and he really doesn't. He knows Jack doesn't believe him, though, by the way the man's eyes narrow and a frown takes up residence on his face.
"I mean everything went just fine, but the whole plane home you had this look on your face like you were trying to solve a puzzle, when, far as I could tell, the puzzle was done and solved. And it's not your usual puzzle-face either, it's your 'I should've solved this already and it's making me annoyed that I haven't' face."
The observation strikes Mac deeply uncomfortably, like he'd been moving about his day as usual and suddenly realized his front door had been left wide open, all of his neighbors afforded a clear view right inside. He feels seen, personally and piercingly, and he doesn't know that he likes that feeling.
"I don't have a face like that," he tries, absolutely sure even before Jack makes a face at him that it's not going to work.
"Don't bullshit me, kid, we've been working together longer than any of my jobs have lasted since I got discharged, I know you have a face. So what gives? What puzzle'd we miss? You're gonna have to help me out here, because we did everything we went to do with only the routine amount of knocking heads together."
And he's right. They had done everything they went to do. Mac, though, he hadn't. There was a side request James had made of him, right before they left. He'd gotten word that there was intel in the area on a personal project of his, the white whale to James' Captain Ahab. There's a man out there somewhere in the world, a man named Walsh, who James has been hunting for as long as Mac can remember. And every time he sends Mac and his partner of the moment somewhere he's picked up chatter of Walsh's presence, he makes a point of pulling his son aside and asking him to keep his eyes peeled. So far, he hasn't turned anything up, and he can feel the cold disappointment in James' gaze every time he comes home empty handed.
James had been sure they'd had a real lead on him this time, too. Nothing.
"Everything is fine," Mac says, trying to sound reassuring. He doesn't think he quite succeeds, but he tries anyway, committing and doubling down. "Promise. I just was slower than I wanted to be because my strategy didn't work out the way I thought it would, and I was replaying it."
It doesn't feel good, lying to Jack, but since he's not likely to last past the six month mark anyway, Mac doesn't feel too bad about it either. Jack accepts the explanation, picking his phone back up and re-starting his game. Or at least, he seemed to accept it, until a few moments pass and his voice sounds again, quiet and calm but deadly serious.
"Whatever it is you're not telling me," he says, not looking up, "if it gets dangerous, you will."
It's not a question, and Mac knows it isn't a request either. He tries to smile and fails, looking back down at his own work.
"Okay," he lies. He won't, but soon, it won't matter anyway. Besides – how dangerous could it really get?
