not gonna lie i've been looking forward to this chapter since this fic started. i hope you all like it as well and i've done justice to what i was trying to do.

title this chapter is from radical face's song 'personal giants'.

a brief chapter warning: significant focus in second half of chapter on mac's grandfather's death and its impact on him.


Jack isn't expecting it when Mac says it, milling around in the briefing room waiting for James to come and let them know where they'll be heading on their first mission as a complete team. Mac has been giving him odd looks all morning, but there's not much Mac does that isn't odd in one way or another, so he'd been trying not to read too much into it. It bursts out of him like a nervous dachshund who's broken free of its owner's leash, though, and once it's out, Mac looks like he might choose to take it back if he could. Jack can't really see why - it had just been an invitation to dinner at his place with him, Bozer, and Riley in attendance. Then again, nothing is ever really 'just' anything when it came to Mac, especially things of a personal nature.

Moments after the invitation was issued, Mac still looking nervous beyond all belief, Jack is pre-empted from being able to answer when James walks in and the briefing starts. Jack barely has a moment to say, "Yeah, I'll be there," and they're off to their first official mission with Riley. Mac looks relieved, but the anxiety hasn't entirely gone away. Any lessening of the impending doom look on his face is a win in Jack's book, though, and he'll take what he can get.

The mission is a resounding success, and Jack comes home feeling proud of his team's work, and looking forward to spending time with them outside the office. He's also looking forward to officially meeting Mac's roommate, the one he's seen a handful of times from up the driveway, heard stories about from Mac, but never directly interacted with. They've been home for about forty-five minutes, and Jack is just about to leave the room they've been bringing James up to speed in, follow Mac and Riley out into the hallway, when the man steps in front of the doorway, stopping him.

"Dalton, wait," James says, and Jack's hackles go up immediately.

"What?" he asks, trying not to sound too defensive, let any amount of a snarl into his voice. Jack is finding that his patience with James grows thinner by the day, waning with every cold interaction he sees between the Director and Mac, until it's only attachment and loyalty to the kid himself that's keeping him from butting heads with his boss every time they share space in the same room.

"I heard you, earlier, when my son invited you over to his house."

It had been just a little too neat, the timing of James' arrival in the room, and Jack can see it now, the Director standing outside and listening into the conversation happening within. For a moment Jack thinks James is about to tell him not to go, citing some nonsense rule about whatever he can come up with to keep them from interacting outside of work, and he's ready to argue, to protest and point out that he has no right to decide what either he or Mac does outside of this building, but that's not what ends up being said at all.

"Angus's roommate. Wilt Bozer."

"What about him?" Jack asks, frowning deeper. Wherever this is going to go, it can't be good.

"He doesn't know what we do here," James says, something Jack was perfectly aware of, thanks very much, then goes on. "It's not going to be exactly difficult to keep it from him, you're not dealing with some kind of Sherlock Holmes type character. Frankly, I don't know what's kept he and Angus so close for this long, it's not like they're on remotely the same level, intellectually. He's a nice enough kid, sweet and great with a camera, but my son just operates on a different level, which I'm sure you know by now. At any rate, just, please try and not say anything in front of him that'll blow the secrecy of this whole organization, do you hear me?"

"Loud and clear," Jack grinds out, forcing a smile onto his face. It's a disrespectful way to talk about one's son's best friend, and it actually makes Jack more excited to meet him. His distaste for his boss has grown to such a degree that by now, if James doesn't like somebody, that's practically a recommendation in Jack's book. But, for Mac's sake, he can't kick the hornet's nest, so he makes himself thank James before beating a hasty retreat outside.

When they pull up outside Mac and Bozer's house, the interaction is still fresh in Jack's mind, and he rolls his eyes as he walks up to the front porch. It's not like his plan had been to bust in the front door and introduce himself by going, hi, my name is Jack Dalton, I work with your roommate at a top secret spy organization where we jet around the world disarming nuclear bombs and rescuing diplomats while embassies are under siege, love your living room decor. Please.

The living room decor is, actually, pretty interesting to look at. Bozer shows him around with an easy-going energetic excitement that endears him to Jack basically immediately, and Jack looks around with interest, taking in his first look at the place his partner lives. It's happily cluttered with the detritus of a home occupied by two college-aged boys, some of the knick-knacks and decorations certainly taking a more whimsical bent. Jack is particularly fond of the polar bear in the front hallway, presently wearing large round sunglasses. Bozer keeps of a steady stream of chatter as they meander from room to room in what he refers to as 'the grand tour', and the longer they go, the more at ease Mac seems.

By the time they make it all the way back around to the kitchen, Riley is out back trying to get the fire started in the fire pit they apparently have on the back patio, and Mac is rummaging around in the fridge looking for drinks to fill the cooler sitting on the counter full of ice. The whole place has a homey, lived-in feeling that is far from what Jack had been afraid of the first few weeks he and Mac had worked together. He'd imagined Mac living in some cold, empty apartment by himself, missing all those personal touches that make a place a home, or, somehow worse still, living with his father. It had been a relief to be informed the answer was neither, and he lived with an old friend, and it's an even greater relief to actually see inside the house itself.

Speaking also of the old friend.

Bozer looks over his shoulder out the patio sliding doors and winces, abruptly calling out, "Hey, Mac, I'll handle that, do you wanna go make sure Riley doesn't light anything but the actual fire pit on fire out there, looks like she's kinda…"

Mac abandons the fridge with a wince, leaving swiftly out the door to where Riley is crouched next to the fire pit set in the back deck, doing… something with kindling and fire starter. Jack watches with a dubiously raised eyebrow for a moment, before catching sight of Bozer out of the corner of his eye. What he sees on the young man's face instantly grips his attention, all activity outside put out of his mind in favor of what's going on in front of him.

The moment the back door slid closed, separating them from Mac and Riley and muffling their voices beyond comprehension, something in Bozer's face had changed. His casual, bemused smile is gone, and he's looking right at Jack with an intensity that feels like it's making the air in the room thinner, just a little harder to breathe. It's deeply unnerving, and before Jack can ask what's going on, because it clearly isn't an actual concern about Riley's ability to safely light a fire, Bozer speaks, cutting him off.

"I know you don't work for a think tank."

Jack's breath catches entirely in his chest, his blood running cold. The assertion is firm and unyielding, crashing down onto the mood of the night like an anvil. He's completely sure about this - and he's right. But he's not supposed to know that. Again, before Jack can speak, needing to gather his wits about him after being blindsided with the last thing he'd expected Bozer to say, he goes on.

"I don't know what the hell it is you actually do," he says, words swift and hard, like he's been thinking about this for a while, and now that it's started to come out, there's no stopping it, "and I'll tell you right now I am not happy I'm being lied to on the daily about… just about everything. But that's not what I need you to understand right now."

"And what is that?" Jack asks, finally getting his act together enough to speak. This was not supposed to happen. He'd assumed James' vague picture of Mac's roommate as some clueless kid without the attention span to piece together anything important was probably not entirely accurate, but he wasn't expecting to be confronted the instant they had a moment alone together. He's spent his entire career honing his ability to predict someone's next move - indeed this skill has kept him alive year in and year out - but for once, he has no idea what this kid is about to do next. To say it's a disconcerting feeling is a massive understatement.

"You're his security detail, bodyguard, whatever, at least that's the version I've got. Is that basically what you do?"

Wordlessly, Jack nods.

Bozer nods back, shooting a glance outside as if he's verifying they can continue at least for the moment to have a private conversation. He turns back, looking resolute in his decision to keep going, though for the first time, Jack catches a glimpse of an undercurrent of nerves. And, really, it makes sense for him to be nervous. Objectively, he's a young man in his early twenties who is by and large living an average life, who has cornered and is confronting a trained, dangerous man who does some mysterious job he knows he's being lied to about. It must be important, if he's willing to do that.

"I need you to promise me you're gonna do your job and keep him safe," Bozer says, just a hair of a waver in the firm confidence of his voice. It makes the command sound just this side of desperate, like it's an order and a plea at the same time. "He's my best friend. He's my family. I need you to make sure he comes home, okay? Because he's never gonna be half as careful as he needs to be. So you need to be twice as careful to make up for it, do you get that? You need to watch out for him. I need you to promise me you're going to, because whatever you two are involved in, I know it's dangerous, and I have a feeling it's getting worse."

Jack is, again, struck speechless. He has the sudden, sharp thought that the nerve it takes to have this conversation is not the kind of nerve he would've had at twenty-three. Jack has more respect for Wilt Bozer right now, ten minutes after meeting him, than he has for James MacGyver after eight months of working for the man.

"I promise you," Jack says, trying to sound as steady and reliable as possible, meeting Bozer's eyes head-on, "I will do everything in my power to make sure he makes it home. I promise."

For a few more moments, Bozer stares at him, scrutinizing Jack in a way that makes him feel like he's being evaluated for something. Whatever it is Bozer was looking for, he must find it, because his posture relaxes and he looks away. He walks over to the fridge and starts putting sodas and beers into a small cooler to bring outside.

"Y'know," he says as he works, voice gone quieter, all trace of demand or confrontation gone, "I've seen him go through a lot of… whatever you are. Security details or whatever James makes him call you when he talks to me. This is the first time in a long time I'm not nervous every minute he's out of this house. The way he talks about you, the things I've heard, I dunno. It sounds like you might be the best thing that's happened to him in years. Whatever it is you guys do." Bozer closes the fridge and notices the expression on Jack's face, defensively asking, "What?"

"You're a lot smarter than he gives you credit for, aren't you. James, I mean," he elaborates, when Bozer looks more confused.

At the clarification, Bozer snorts, and the amount of contempt in the sound is a little jarring.

"Most people usually are," he says, shutting the lid of the cooler with more force than is strictly necessary.

Watching him, taking in the look on his face coupled with the tone of his voice and the derisive snort, Jack feels like he's just learned quite a lot. Not about Bozer, necessarily, but about James instead. This whole day is turning out to be very illuminating. If Bozer, who just stood in his living room, practically shaking with nerves, and used the fact that he has completely on his own worked out that there's a massive lie happening under his nose to order a man he's never met before to keep his roommate safe, has that much venom in him for that roommate's father? Something is definitely very wrong.

Jack already knew that, of course. But with every nail driven into the coffin that is his regard for his boss, he gets more sure that soon it's going to tip over from something he knows into something he can't stand any longer, and needs to do something about. When that time comes, though, at least now he feels reasonably certain that he's going to have someone else on his side, if Bozer's dislike of him is anywhere near as strong as it seems.

As Jack walks out to join Riley and Mac on the back patio, Bozer takes a moment to just lean against the closed door of the fridge and catch his breath. His heart still feels like it's thundering eighty miles an hour in his chest, and it's a miracle he hadn't stuttered or stumbled at all during what he had to say to Jack.

It was the sort of thing he'd never said to any of the previous people Mac had worked with, the ones that made it eventually to the house to meet him in the first place. Most of them had come and gone before that, or been far from the sort of people you want in your living room talking to your roommate. Even of the ones he'd met though, barring Mac's first partner, none of them had been like this. There's a way Mac talks about him, a trust Bozer barely recognizes in his cagey friend, that gives him a good feeling about the man, and that coupled with the by now numerous he supposes highly edited stories of Jack fishing them both out of trouble had prompted him to finally speak. To confess what he's known for a while now - that the think tank story doesn't hold water any more than a fishing net does, and he's done standing by while Mac walks out the door every day into god knows what.

Without being able to actually do anything, and without being willing to confront Mac about it directly, at least not yet, Bozer had settled for ensuring that at least the person responsible for keeping Mac alive knew that there was someone watching him. That much at least was within his ability. Jack had taken it pretty well, all things considered, and now all Bozer needs to do is convince his nervous system he wasn't actually about to die, and they could all get on with their night.

"Pretty nice place you got here for a couple of young guys like yourselves, how'd you find it?"

Jack asks the question after dinner, while they all sit around the fire, contentedly and tiredly chatting about nothing much in particular. Bozer winces, wondering what Mac is going to say in answer to that - he's certainly not going to take the lead on that particular story. To his surprise, what Mac actually ends up saying is… Well.

The truth.

"It was my grandfather's house, actually." Mac is looking at the fire, an old-fashioned glass soda bottle dangling loosely from the fingers of one hand. He isn't looking at Jack, or Bozer or Riley for that matter, but neither is he hesitating, telling the story Bozer hasn't seen him willingly talk about in years. "He left it to me in his will, when he died. I spent a lot of time here growing up, guess it already felt like home."

For a moment it seems like that's where it's going to stop, and Bozer would understand if it did. Even that much is hard for him to talk about, never mind the rest of it, the context of how Harry's death led directly to first Mac moving in and then Bozer himself. It doesn't.

"He died when I was nineteen," Mac continues. He's picking at the label on the bottle now, thumbnail catching over the damp paper bearing the name of the soda company until a long strip tears straight through the center of it. He doesn't seem to notice, continuing to scrape around the edges, certainly not looking anyone in the eye. Bozer is so surprised he couldn't bring himself to interrupt even if he'd wanted to. "I was devastated. He did a lot of work raising me, he was a massive part of his life. And the night before his funeral, my dad and I had a massive fight. I wanted to join the army, like my grandfather had done, I wanted to help people in a way that mattered. EOD. I was in school, though, and dad said over his dead body was I not going to graduate, and we ended up screaming at each other for more than an hour, so I left and spent the night here, and it just… stuck. I've lived here ever since."

Silence hangs over the back porch, and Bozer can see Mac start to regret it, sharing what he'd allowed out into the open for Jack and Riley to see. It seems like he's almost ready to get up and go back inside, flee the remnants of what he's told them like he never should've done it in the first place, when Jack speaks up.

"Well, it's a beautiful house," he says, like this is a normal conversation. Like any of this at all is normal. "I can see why you'd want to stay here."

Mac smiles, faint and distant, like he's still caught in the past, and the conversation moves on. Riley talks about her new neighbors, the ones across the hall with the new baby and her luckily pretty soundproof walls, but Bozer's mind is stuck somewhere else, likely the same place Mac's is.

The days immediately following Mac's grandfather's death had been some of the toughest Bozer has ever seen him through. He'd gotten the phone call while home with his parents, some hour, forty-five minutes away from where Mac lived in Los Angeles with his father. The news of Harry MacGyver's passing hit him hard, as he remembered many a weekend spent at the man's house, always staying there rather than with James when he and Mac had sleepovers as children. He'd probably seen more of Harry than he had of James the entire time they were in school together, especially after the disappearing act James pulled when they were ten.

He'd gone down the day Harry died, and then gone home, at the urging of his parents to let Mac and James make arrangements together, grieve as a family. Bozer hadn't felt quite right about it, something telling him he should've stayed, and then he'd gotten that second phone call. The one where he could barely make any words out around Mac's choked, sobbing breaths, and though it was already eleven-thirty at night he'd told his parents he had to go, gotten in his car, and drove straight to Harry's old house. Mac was on the deck in the back, collapsed over by the railing, his phone still in his hands, and they'd sat there together until nearly two in the morning, Bozer sure that were it not for his arms, holding Mac tight to his chest, his best friend may have shaken right apart at the seams.

Following that had been long, terrible days of wandering around in the house on autopilot, trying to figure out what to do with Harry's things. Bozer remembers those days, but more than the days, he remembers the long, terrible nights in the beginning. He remembers laying on his back in the dark with Mac curled tightly in on himself next to him, remembers sleeping with a hand extended carefully across the space between them to rest, palm warm and steady, over Mac's side. Eventually they'd cleared out the study and turned it into a bedroom, officially moving in together mostly by default when they realized neither of them actually wanted him to leave, but for a week or so, they'd slept side by side, and Bozer had hoped that it was enough to keep Mac afloat.

Grief and Bozer were old, familiar friends. He'd spent years feeling loss around his shoulders like a heavy, woolen blanket, pulling at his ankles like cinderblocks tied to them. It was a large part of why he'd been so adamant with Jack earlier - he knows what losing a brother felt like, and doesn't think he could bear to have his life and his soul so violently ripped apart a second time. He'd barely survived the first. It had made him uniquely suited to being around someone devastated by loss, but there was still a part of the equation that was unknown territory, that Bozer didn't know the first thing to say about and couldn't empathize with at all. James.

Mac been in as much pain as a person could be in losing what had essentially been a parent. He'd been grief stricken and so had James, he supposed, so of course he dealt with it like he dealt with all personal trouble - shutting himself off and away, especially from his son. The few times Mac and James spoke over those first few weeks were brief and explosive, always ending with Mac shutting his phone off and throwing it onto the couch, locking himself in his room and refusing to come out for hours. The army thing came up again and again, even after Mac had dropped it completely, James demanding loudly enough for Bozer to hear it from the other side of the room why his son insisted on being so selfish, on trying to hurt him like this right after his own father had just passed away.

Any amount of sympathy Bozer had for James disappeared in that moment. It hasn't come back since. Not that there had been much to begin with. He'd been just as unpleasant when they'd been kids as he was now.

Shaking his head, Bozer tries to clear his mind of grief and pain and nights spent laying there in silence while Mac sat next to him, shaking and trying to cry as quietly as he could. That had been years ago, and they didn't speak much of how he'd come to live here now. At least not until tonight, when Mac's new partner had asked about the house and Mac, for some reason, had actually answered. It's that more than anything that gave Bozer a good feeling about the man, honestly. Over the top of the fire, as Riley and Mac continue talking, Jack's eyes catch Bozer's and the two of them look at each other for a moment. Jack nods, and Bozer nods back, an understanding passing between them.

When Mac leaves for work the next day, going out into whatever terrifying unknown he can't or won't tell the truth about, Bozer feels just a little less of the anxious fear grip his chest. Wherever he's going, whatever he's doing, Jack is with him, and Bozer knows Jack is going to keep his promise.

He'd better.