it's all coming togetheeerrrrrrrrr. i'm really excited for the next chapter guys - and the good news is that means it should be written pretty fast. enjoy, and thanks as always for reading and letting me know your thoughts!

this chapter's title is very vaguely from sleeping at last's 'south'


Home welcomes Mac like a salve soothes away the harshest edges of a burn. He stops for a minute in the hallway just outside the door, keys still in hand, jacket and shoes still in place, and just breathes it in. He stopped taking it for granted a while ago, the fact that at the end of the day, he would be able to get up and go home. Maybe he never did. His life wasn't one that had ever really leant itself to the certainty of things like getting to go home, never mind being safe when he got there.

"Hey."

Bozer's voice from the living room snaps Mac's attention up from the keys digging into his palm, the blue and green dish waiting for them on the small table, the seemingly insurmountable four feet separating the two. He makes no move to close the gap as Bozer approaches, feeling drained and rooted to the spot. It's an odd, embarrassing predicament Mac finds himself in more often than he'd care to admit - he stops moving once he's safely inside the door and then takes longer than is reasonable to find the energy to get started again. Bozer walks over, hands in his pockets and posture casual, though there's an apprehensive frown on his face as he scans Mac over.

"You okay?" Bozer asks, clearly having found something to be concerned about, and Mac figures his face must be doing something he didn't give it permission to do.

"Performance evaluation," he says shortly, shaking himself back to life and tossing the keys into the dish.

That's what he's been calling them at home since the practice started, the closest he can come to explaining reviews to his roommate. Bozer knows who is boss is, after all. He understands what it means for Mac to be evaluated by James, what sort of color commentary was likely to be involved. After all, he's been there for fifteen years' worth of James' standards and the way Mac has to measure up to him, the consequences that follow when he inevitably fails to do so.

"Performance evaluation," Bozer repeats, voice toneless, looking right at Mac. "Right."

There's a set to Bozer's chin and a frown on his forehead that indicates to Mac that there's something he's not saying. Probably a lot he's not saying, actually. Mac harbors no illusions about the mutual distaste that exists between his best friend and his father - and that on Bozer's end at least, 'distaste' is probably an overly mild way to phrase things. He's not oblivious to the fact that there's a lot that Bozer swallows down and doesn't say when it comes to James, opinions and disagreements and no small amount of anger. It's a wonder sometimes, to Mac, a guilty wonder, that it hasn't choked him by now.

Just as he's done for years stacked on years, whatever he'd wanted to say, Bozer doesn't say it, and instead gestures towards the kitchen.

"Got takeout Thai for dinner, there's leftovers in the fridge."

Mac is grateful that, when their paths cross on the way down the hall, this isn't one of the times Bozer welcomes him home with a hug. It's not that he doesn't want one - right now, actually, there's very little in the world he wants more. It's just that if he's hugged at this moment in time, so soon after a review, if he is at this point folded into the arms of someone who loves him and held tight there, like his pain is visible and important, he's probably going to lose it something awful. If Bozer hugged him right now, Mac would likely break down crying, and neither of them needs that to happen. Instead, he passes by without incident, and is soon perched at the kitchen island with a carton of curry in front of him and the paper Riley had pressed into his hand laid out on the table.

"Gonna explain your weird little paper," Bozer asks, coming around to sit across from him, "or are you saving candy wrappers to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower with again?"

"It was the Arc de Triomphe actually and no, I'm not. We got a new analyst assigned to us," he says, then winces. 'Assigned to us' isn't even remotely close to an accurate description of how Riley's permanent placement came to be.

The paper is forgotten for the moment as the extended reality of what, exactly, the hiring of a new permanent analyst means sinks in.

"They replaced Nikki," Bozer says, and Mac nods. "That's gotta feel weird."

The observation makes Mac snort a little, a humorless and instinctive reaction. "There isn't anything about this that doesn't feel weird," he says, shaking his head and staring out into space, somewhere to the left of Bozer's shoulder. "But yeah. It does feel odd, having someone else there, doing Nikki's job after what… what happened with her."

Amongst everything else that's been going on, with the purge of DXS and the fallout, James' increased paranoia, the arrival and adjustment to his partnership with Jack, the impact of Nikki's betrayal and arrest has sort of gotten lost in the mix of it. She had been a part of his life, though, and it had been an intensely personal shock as well as a professional one, when the truth about her came out. Mac had been involved with her in a way that he should've known better than to allow to happen - James made that much very, very clear when he'd found out about what was happening between them. It didn't get as far as it might have, their relationship, but it got farther than James deemed acceptable, and Mac knows he's right.

"She's a little different." Mac shifts away from thinking about Nikki to talking about Riley. She's a safer topic by far - and a more immediately interesting and relevant one. "Riley."

"I'll say, if she, uh." Bozer pokes at the now remembered paper, exposing the numbers scrawled over it. "Gave you her number on her first day?"

There's a tone in Bozer's voice that implies something that causes Mac to roll his eyes.

"It's not like that," he says, and it really isn't. His mind hasn't gone there at all, and he doesn't think hers has either. "I think she's just… I think she needs somebody in her corner. I think she needs a friend. We, uh…" It's hard to find a way to explain it without just going right out and explaining it, so Mac decides to take a chance and put it in the simplest, most true terms possible. "She was in prison. We got her on our team because she was released from prison." 'Released' being a loose term for what happened there, but as close to the truth as he can get.

In a move that is justified and frankly to be expected, Bozer's eyebrows go up sharply. "Prison," he repeats, like he can't believe what he's just heard.

"Not for anything like- She wasn't in for any kind of violent crime. It was… Think hactivist kind of stuff." Again, it's a very simple way to put a very complicated situation, but it's the best Mac can do, and he can see the gears churning over it in Bozer's brain as he tries to decide how he feels about that. Mac adds, "Matty knows her. She's worked with her before, I guess."

Though Matty hasn't been with DXS much longer than Jack has, she's quickly gained a reputation around their household as a woman to be respected, admired, and obeyed. She and Bozer have only met once, in the parking lot one day as he was dropping Mac off for work, but it was a memorable meeting, and Mac knows that Matty's opinion of a person will go a long way in Bozer's books. And if the rest of this conversation is to go the way he hopes it will, he needs Bozer to at least preliminarily accept the idea of Riley being a good person to allow into their home and their lives.

"We can't get it right all the time, I suppose." There's enough humor in Bozer's response, once he's gotten over his rather shocked quiet, that Mac deems it safe enough to move on with his next point.

"I was gonna ask you, actually," he says, and it takes every concentrated bit of effort in his body to prevent his hands from shaking. "Like I said, I think she needs a friend, and I think it'd be good for her to get to spend some time with people our age, so…"

"Bring her over, for sure," Bozer agrees before Mac has time to finish or even figure out how to finish the question. "I'll roll out the welcome wagon."

It hadn't been like Mac was asking permission to bring her over at all - that was never any kind of household rule they'd adhered to, formerly incarcerated or no. It was more that he was asking Bozer to hang out with them, to help provide some of the normalcy and friendship Mac was hoping could help ease the disruption Riley's many simultaneous transitions. He's never been in prison but he knows a thing or two about being alone and thrown about, from situation to situation you have no say in, and he knows how rocky it can be when you hit the ground, especially when you're expected to be ready to run the moment you land.

"You have a good feeling about her?"

Mac nods, and it's an agreement without hesitation. "Yeah, I do. She helped us out in a big way and we spent several hours together. Matty vouches for her. Jack vouches for her." At Bozer's questioning look, Mac shrugs. "I don't know the whole story, but I guess he used to date her mom or something. Things are a little awkward with them. But he says she's good people, and I don't know. I think I believe him." At what point, exactly, Jack's word became a trustworthy verification of the quality of a person's character in Mac's mind is left unquestioned, and Mac is glad for that. He wouldn't have an answer, and doesn't want to think hard enough on it to find one.

They both head to bed pretty quickly after that. Mac stays at the kitchen island for a few moments longer than Bozer does, sending a quick text to the number Riley gave him on the piece of paper. She answers immediately, confirming that things at the safe house seem fine, and she's been set up with spare clothing and other immediate necessities. Mac is relieved to hear this. A part of him feels oddly responsible for her, a duty to make sure that she's adequately provided for and as safe and comfortable as possible. It's not that he thinks James would leave her in the lurch after having just hired her on, but he feels the compulsive need to verify nonetheless, and it sets him fractionally more at ease to hear she's doing well.

Mac walks slowly down the hall, trying to relax before he reaches his room and rolling his shoulders as he goes. The scar on his neck has begun to ache, the way it always does when he spends too long too tensed up and finally begins to release and calm. He reaches up to rub at it, grimacing and trying to stretch it out until the pain fades away. It doesn't, and Mac does his best to ignore it. He supposes he could pop a few ibuprofen, or one of the other over the counter painkillers taking up residence in his bathroom sink drawer, but he tries to avoid that as much as possible. Too much would damage his liver, James had always warned him, and he ends up worse for the wear much too often to take medication every time something hurts. It'll pass. It always does.

That night, Mac dreams of butterflies, and of struggling, trapped behind glass, while hundreds of pairs of featureless eyes bore relentlessly into him. He wakes feeling restless and unsettled, and tries to put it out of his mind.

Bozer and Riley get along very well, once Bozer overcomes the initial tongue-tiedness that always seems to strike him when confronted with someone that pretty. On her first visit to the house, Riley is a little awkward. She holds herself stiffly and her eyes flick from object to object, seemingly cataloguing the whole room over and over again throughout the course of the afternoon. But she relaxes, too, and when Mac drops her back off at the safe house, she's smiling at him when she leaves, a little bewildered and slightly overwhelmed, but a smile nevertheless.

It takes DXS a week and a half to get Riley out of the safe house and into an actual apartment. In that time, she spends many an afternoon at Mac and Bozer's house, warming to the boys quickly and getting comfortable in their company. She turns out to have a knack for biting sarcasm and video games, and she's interested enough in Bozer's filmmaking experiments to lean over tables of molds and ask questions about their use and construction.

Things have been tense at work, between Jack and Riley. There's nothing really overt about it - they don't fight or insult each other too viciously, or dredge up old issues to rehash them in the open. But there's a stiffness in the air, odd looks shot between them when they think no one is paying attention, and it's given Mac an uneasy feeling in his gut. He wants to ask, but he doesn't at the same time, because whatever the answer is, there won't be any taking it back once he knows it. It's not that he thinks Jack has done anything unforgivable or monstrous back when Riley was a kid - some part of him balks at even the suggestion that he'd be capable of that sort of thing - but there are things about Riley that he can't ignore or deny. Some of the things about her, the way she does things and looks at people, are devastatingly familiar, and Mac knows exactly why he looks at the world like it's moments from lashing out at him at the drop of a pin. He doesn't want to imagine why she does.

They're sitting at a table in the food court of IKEA, remnants of a late lunch spread between them, when he finally breaks down and asks her.

It had been Bozer's idea to go there in the first place. The apartment they got Riley into wasn't furnished but there was, as Matty had promised, a generous stipend set aside for her to get settled. This came up vaguely while the three of them were sitting in Mac and Bozer's living room, and before anyone knew what was happening, they were all piled into the car, headed to IKEA. Before the mission to furnish Riley's apartment, thus allowing her to finally actually move into it, can commence, Bozer insists they have to stop at the cafeteria on the second floor, claiming it to be an 'unskippable IKEA tradition'. Riley hadn't known the place contained a cafeteria at all, and though she'd seemed a little dubious about it, there they all ended up.

Riley and Mac have a moment to themselves when Bozer steps away to pick a desert out of the cases, and Mac takes the opening before he can think himself out of it to say, "Jack."

"What about him?" Riley's face has gone funny, crumpled in a guarded half-frown, and Mac winces, apologetic.

"I have to ask. The reason you and Jack- the reason you're angry with him. I know he used to date your mom and it's none of my business obviously, what happened, but… was he, y'know. A bad person? Is that why you- like, did he- was he a bad person?'

He knows she knows what he's asking and though something flashes in her eyes, it isn't doubt or hesitation.

"No," she says, simply and immediately. "He wasn't. That's part of the problem. He was great." There's a pause while she looks over, and for a moment, both of them watch Bozer, who is still over by the desert case, seeming to be pondering a cheesecake or some fancy thing with chocolate ganache. "And it wasn't really his fault," Riley says, as Bozer opens the case. Her voice is quiet and a little embarrassed. "I'm not ready to forgive him, but it wasn't just on him. He's safe. I promise."

Something Mac's chest unknots and releases, relief making his skin prickle.

"Thank you," he says, feeling bad for having asked, but knowing he had to. If he'd gotten a different answer, one worse than he'd prepared for, Mac would've known he had to do something, but now… It had been such a specific answer, 'he's safe', and Mac knows what it means. It means that while he was noticing things about her, the things that meant he had to ask, she was noticing things about him too.

They don't talk any more or look at each other, but Mac taps Riley's shoe with his under the table, and she taps back, and it feels like they've come to some kind of understanding.

The three of them meander through IKEA together, and it's so normal it feels unreal. Riley carries one of those little notepads and writes item codes down whenever a decision is made, with Bozer pointing things out and Mac trailing behind them. As it turns out, it's a very good thing they'd brought Bozer along, given he has proven himself to be the only person amongst the three of them with any grasp of interior design. He makes little faces and weird noises in his throat when Mac or Riley try to suggest something that 'disagrees with the mood you've been going for,' and once it's been established that yes, Riley would like her furniture to look like it 'agrees', and no, she doesn't know how to make that happen, Bozer is deputized as the official decision maker of the outing.

So far, Riley has, with the guidance of Bozer, picked out a couch, a low set of drawers that could also function as a tv stand, and a dining room set. There are crowds of other people around them, chatting amongst themselves about their own home furnishing dilemmas, and Mac feels like if he closed his eyes, he could get lost in it. Families with young children weave around odd assortments of college students, young professionals who've bought their first home. They're all so normal. It all feels so normal.

The edge of a rug catches up under Mac's shoe, as he'd apparently stopped paying attention to where he was going, and he nearly trips and falls flat on his face in the middle of a display of a minimalist kitchen. When he straightens up and looks around, he sees that Riley and Bozer were both watching him, and one after the other they lose their ability to pretend they aren't laughing. He gives them a half-hearted glare before cracking and grinning himself. To the rest of the world, they must have looked like one of those sets of college students, meandering around for the furnishings of a shared residence, and something about it is comforting. For a moment, it's easy to pretend that's what they are.

On the way home, the topic turns again to Jack, in a much different way than it had in the cafeteria when Mac and Riley had been alone. This time is about the previous day, when he'd inadvertently been discussing the Director's assistant with the wide-eyed day security chief while the man stood not six feet behind him. From there it went on to other moments where Jack put his foot in it, and whether Riley and Mac thought he was doing it on purpose or not, while Bozer listened along, fascinated.

They drop her off at the safe-house for one last night, promising to return the next day to help put together the furniture that should be delivered in the morning. The drive home from the safe-house, explained to Bozer as the home of an Aunt in the area, is a pleasant, companionable silence, the radio playing softly in the cab of the car. It has been a good day, and Mac feels settled, more at peace after his conversation with Riley. They park outside the house, and Mac reaches for the door handle, but before he can get there, something stops him.

"You should bring him over to the house." The statement comes suddenly and without context, and Mac looks over at Bozer and frowns. At this, he elaborates, saying, "Jack. I want to meet him. You two have been partners for long enough, I've heard stories, and it sounds like he's one of the best you've had recently. Maybe the best since-" He cuts off before he can say the name, though Mac's chest throbs like he'd said it anyway. "Anyway. You should bring him by. It's past time."

"Okay," Mac finds himself saying, agreeing sooner and more readily than he'd have predicted he would've done. Bozer is right. It's past time. "I will."