and here it is folks! the beginning of my favorite mission in this fic so far. i hope it lives up to whatever hype i've given it. please disregard timeline weirdness because we are cherrypicking canon at best here and doing as we please.
enjoy!
(title from the mountain goats song 'the young thousands')
Christmas and New Years come and go, the winter holidays passing without much fanfare at DXS. Riley takes the opportunity to spend the week of Hanukkah at home with her mother, and Jack himself goes home to Texas for several days to be with his parents and sisters at Christmas. He entertains for a moment the idea of asking Mac to come with him, but dismisses it fairly quickly. The kid's still so skittish, he can't imagine any kind of invitation to spend a major, generally family-oriented holiday with Jack at his childhood home was going to be met with anything but suspicion and an anxious declination of the offer.
Jack has been working on it, the way Mac holds himself at such a distance at the same time he gets the feeling the kid needs someone next to him before, one of these days, he crumbles completely. He's been spending as much time with Mac when not actively on missions as possible, making a point to make as much casual contact with him as opportunity allows for, bumping his shoulder and tapping his back to get his attention. Trying to teach him through exposure and repetition that Jack is a safe person, that there can and will be safe people in the world, in his world. It's not entirely clear what kind of an impact it's having on Mac internally, but Jack has started to notice him tentatively reaching back, and so he'll take it as a win.
The other day, Mac, completely focused on some tinkery little thing he'd been working on, thoughtlessly reached out and whacked at Jack's arm with the back of his hand to get his attention and wave him over, freezing immediately once he realized what he'd done. Jack had been as calm and nonchalant as possible, while inside he'd practically been doing cartwheels, and things had settled after a few moments. It's been different since then, something in Mac looser, less rigid and carefully wound.
They all return from their various trips over the holidays and things proceed as normal. Mac doesn't talk about what he did with his time while Jack and Riley were gone, and Jack can only hope he'd ended up spending it with Bozer's family or something. It's a better thought than imagining him alone in an empty house, or worse, alone with James. Jack doesn't push the matter, and continues with his quiet crusade to treat Mac with enough constant, persistent kindness that he stops reacting to it like he's surprised.
He's got admit it's a little frustrating, seeing how easily Riley managed to cement herself into a place in Mac's life where it's not uncommon to see them leaning over each other while reading briefing folders on the plane, having quiet conversations that stop as soon as someone else comes within earshot. It's been much longer that he's been here, and Mac still looks at him half the time like he's not sure if Jack is about to turn on him at any moment. But Jack tries to tell himself it's nothing personal, that he probably has James to thank for this more than anything else, and it's really quite a good thing that Mac and Riley have hit it off so well and so quickly.
They're circling each other at the moment, in a gym by Riley's apartment, with Jack calling coaching and instruction from the side. Riley is turning out to be just as quick a study at hand to hand as she was with tactical driving, and she's landed a couple of decent shots on Mac today.
"Remember what we talked about," Jack tells her right as she ducks, avoiding the world's least likely to actually hurt you swing Mac had just aimed at her. "Yes! Exactly. That's it. Best defense to an attack is to not be there when it lands."
Over her shoulder, Riley flashes him a quick smile. His chest puffs out a little, proud and pleased to be doing this with her. No matter how much he loves the other parts of his job, this is probably his favorite, clandestine and against orders though it may be. It's the happiest he can remember being in a long time, spending an early morning in a gym with these two kids of his.
These two kids of his, he thinks again to himself and snorts, shaking his head. As if he, in any world, had any claim to either of them, any reason to look at these wonderful young people and call them 'his' in any sense. But, well, what no one else hears outside of his head can't hurt them, so Jack lets it rest for the moment and tries not to interrogate the thought any further.
Not that he's offered much of a choice, given what happens next.
When his phone rings and Jack looks at the screen, noting the caller being 'Director MacGyver', he has to close his eyes and count to three before answering it. He does this in order to calm his immediate temper upon seeing so much as the man's name and avoid doing something really unwise, like greeting his boss with something along the lines of, 'Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, sir.'
"Dalton," he says instead, waving a hand at Riley and Mac who have stopped what they're doing and are watching him curiously.
"Where are you?"
Jack looks around the gym, past Riley and Mac, and out the window at the busy street outside. "Grocery shopping."
"Well, hurry up and finish, be at the office within the hour."
"Something come up with the job we're leaving on this afternoon?" Jack asks, waving again at Riley and Mac to keep them from asking any of the questions he can see burning in their eyes. Nothing has been explained about this job yet, only that they were to meet in the briefing room, all three of them, packed up and ready to take off on the jet by three in the afternoon.
"Yes, the timeline has been escalated by a significant amount. Just get here and be ready to go as soon as you can." With that, the Director hangs up the phone, and Jack is left wondering what he's about to walk himself into.
Within seconds, Mac's phone starts ringing, and after a much similar conversation where he claimed to be 'fixing the microwave at home', Riley was prompted by her own phone call to identify herself as 'in a pilates class'. By the end of what had to be no more than five minutes, all three of them have been summoned with an alarming degree of immediacy into the office. Jack swallows down the sense of foreboding sitting like lead in his chest and sets about getting them all home for a few minutes at least to grab a few things, then heading in.
They're barely in the building for two minutes before the Director is ushering them all outside and into an unmarked agency car. Mac is in the passenger's seat, a lap full of folders that had been dumped on him the moment he sat down, while Jack and Riley sit in the back, none of them quite sure what's going on.
"Pass those out," the Director says in a clipped voice and Mac does as he's told, handing two of the folders with their names Post-It noted to the front back to his two teammates.
Unable to help himself and not really giving a rip about whatever dramatics would lead the Director to want him to wait, Jack flips the folder open and is immediately confronted by a driver's license and a passport, both of which bear his photo and half of his name. Jack Nylander, the ID says, and craning his neck, he catches sight of Mac's fake driver's license over his shoulder.
Mac Nylander. Same last name.
Jack feels his pulse skip a beat, just for a moment, and he cannot begin to articulate how bad of an idea he thinks this is. He's been given an undercover identity that has the same rather unusual last name as Mac's and given their ages, it's a very short leap to the logical conclusion of what's going on here. He's about to go undercover as Mac's father.
There is not a single problem Jack himself has with this. He doesn't balk for a moment about pretending to be Mac's dad. It's been going on a year, which doesn't feel like long enough for this heavy ache in his chest every time Mac is in the slightest danger, every time the Director so much as looks at him harshly. But at the same time, Jack's known for a while now that he cares a lot more than he was ever supposed to. He lost the ability, somewhere along the line, to convince himself this is just a job, that Mac is just a job. That it wouldn't take more than wild horses to drag him away and leave the kid with this job and a father Jack trusts with him less and less by the minute. No, Jack has no problem with this cover. It's not himself he's worried about. It's Mac.
Mac who looks at Jack like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop every time it's been long enough for him to convince himself that Jack's patience with him can't possibly last another second. Mac, who'd stood next to the car in Budapest, shivering in the cold, and resolutely insisted 'he didn't hurt me' in the tone of someone who had been hurting so bad for so long they couldn't hardly identify the feeling any longer.
At this point, it hasn't been nearly long enough, and Jack hasn't made nearly enough progress with Mac to make going undercover as his father to be anything but a mess in the making. Best case scenario, this is an awkward mission that sets Jack back in the progress he'd been making with Mac who knows how far. Worst case scenario, well. Hopefully it won't be the worst case scenario.
"Undercover," Jack muses out loud, glancing at Mac out of the corner of his eye. "As Mr. Nylander and his-"
"Nephew," the Director breaks in, bringing Jack's line of thought to a halt.
They've rolled to a stop at a red light, and in the moment of stillness, unable to help the impulse, Jack looks to the man, who is staring straight at him with an unreadable, hard expression on his face. There's something deliberate there, and Jack can't help but feel like he made that call, sending Jack and Mac under as uncle and nephew rather than father and son, on purpose. Jack has a few hunches as to why, but it isn't going to help anybody to get into it now.
"Right," he says back, keeping his voice neutral. "And where, exactly, are Mr. Nylander and his nephew, and uh," looking to his left, to Riley in the seat behind the driver's seat, he reads the name off the license she holds up for him, "Riley Bailen, headed to?" He squints at her license then down at his, and flips open the passport too, just for good measure. The place of birth on the passport is the same as the issuing state on the license. "Also, there a reason for the Minnesota IDs, cause-"
"Because that's where you're heading, Dalton, if you'd give me a second to explain what you're headed out on before we actually get to the airport."
"Airport?" Mac asks, eyes snapping up off his folder, at the same time that Jack asks, incredulous, "Minnesota?"
In a move that Jack deems probably wise, Riley doesn't say anything. She busies herself flipping through the rest of the papers in the file, resolutely not looking at anybody else in the car. Jack waits for the Director to elaborate, wondering with an acidic irritation if the man is making them wait on purpose, some kind of petty lesson about patience or whatever. After a pause and a moment where the Director demonstrates his displeasure with the driving of another car on the road with a loud, abrupt blast of his horn, he launches into the explanation.
As he talks, Jack's weird feeling only grows. They reach the airport, and the hurried explanation is cut off, though they're told any additional information they might need will be in the folders they were given. Any questions that may come up after that can likely be answered by the contacts they'll meet on the ground in Minnesota, a DXS agent and his handler. It doesn't feel like enough, not for what they're about to walk into, and the fact that this case has apparently been brewing for weeks without anybody but the Director being any the wiser. Personally, Jack would've preferred a heads up about… this.
Jack distractedly stands in line with Riley and Mac at LAX, where they're being forced to fly out of due to a routine flight-check discovering a problem with the altimeter of the jet they were supposed to be taking, with a timeline too tight to wait for it to be fixed when the techs thought there might have been a deeper problem. He moves forward slowly, with the line, and thinks about what they're about to walk into. What, he thinks, as he looks down at the passport he's stuck his ticket between the pages of, Jack Nylander is about to walk into.
What he's about to walk into is a separatist militia operating in the North of Minnesota, referring to themselves as 'the Northguard'. They've been in operation for years but only began cropping up in greater prominence on law enforcement radar for the last fourteen months or so, when their low-level weapons deals across the Canadian border began picking up, getting more serious in frequency and content. The Northguard smuggled arms across the border from Minnesota into Ontario through the vast swaths of forest that span the United States-Canadian border in that area.
DXS had an operative stationed with them for the last few months, working his way higher into the ranks of the small, tight-knit organization, trying to figure out exactly what they were smuggling and exactly who it was going to. It was a long-term, low-pressure assignment for a relatively low-level agent, one Curtis Hansen, until it began to heat up, at the news that there may be a new weapon coming into the camp in the next few weeks. Something serious. Something biologic, maybe. Which is almost the exact point at which a wrong move on an icy street left Agent Curtis Hansen with a broken femur, completely out of commission as far as the op went.
For the last few weeks, Agent Hansen had been working on establishing cover, under the guise of not wanting to leave the Northguard down a man, for Jack and Mac, as neighbors of his father's growing up. The story was that Jack was the oldest of the large Nylander family, born in Minnesota and living for a good portion of his childhood in Texas, explaining the accent. Then, as a young adult, he'd moved back to the Midwest, right around when his sister had her son, Mac. Now he was theoretically looking for work farther up North, having experience in the oil fields in Texas and working construction and security in the Twin Cities. Which is when his 'old neighbor Curtis' told him about an opportunity perfect for a good old, homegrown Minnesota boy looking for a job, and a place to help teach his wayward nephew the value of good, hard work.
The Northguard is waiting for them, due to arrive that night, and are paranoid at best. According to Agent Hansen, the paranoia is getting worse by the day, so risking being late is not the kind of footing they want to start off with. Which is what lands Jack here now, in LAX with Mac and Riley - whose own last-second cover identity was taking the form of Mac Nylander's girlfriend, Riley Bailen, a fact which had them both making eye contact and pulling faces at each other for the split-second the Director was distracted by traffic.
Jack is looking around, trying not to seem too nervous in the TSA line, flicking the edge of his boarding pass with his thumbnail. Behind him in line, Riley and Mac seem somewhat more at ease, joking with each other about something he hadn't caught the beginning of. It's the beginning of a very long day, and especially given the time difference between the West Coast and the Midwest, they're already running on borrowed hours. He sighs and checks his watch for maybe the fifth time in as many minutes, the second hand creeping agonizingly around the face.
By the time they make it through ten hours of flights and layovers and land in Duluth, Minnesota, a city perched in icy hills on the shore of Lake Superior, it's already dark outside. It gets dark early this time of year across the country, but something about the odd blue light cast from the city across the behemoth of a lake makes it seem darker still out here, in a state Jack has to admit he's never actually been to before. He can't say he likes it, either, from the moment they touch down on the tarmac. The land outside looks cold and distant and he doesn't understand the rows of smiling faces in front of him, seemingly so happy to be here.
It's then he remembers that Jack Dalton might not like snow, but this is the homeland of Jack Nylander, so he plasters a similar smile over his face, and tries to act like it.
"You two ready for our first big undercover job?" he asks, as they get settled into the car they'd had waiting for them at the airport. Mac nods absently, looking out the window around at the scores of cars around them, while Riley looks less sure. Jack can't say he blames her - she's only been here a few months and doesn't have nearly enough training for this. Hopefully, it'll just be a quick in-and-out, given Agent Hansen did most of the legwork for them already - no pun intended to the poor guy's busted leg.
The drive from the Duluth International Airport to the safe-house mission base of their laid-up agent and his handler is relatively short, not twenty minutes to the outskirts of the third largest city in Minnesota. To Jack, who's gotten so used to Los Angeles crowds that nothing really phases him anymore, that doesn't mean much at all, and he takes the opportunity to scope out the darkened landscape around them.
It's a very good thing that Jack has spent as much of his life as he has globetrotting in the name of international security, because it means the snow packed hard into a shell over the road's asphalt isn't really giving him trouble, driving wise. Handfuls of bundled up residents brave the streets and sidewalks around them, ducking between stores and cars in brightly colored parkas. Jack squints around at them as he drives through icy streets. Some of the trees lining the roads still have the glittering white lights usually put up around Christmastime wrapped around trunks and bare branches, though their light is dimmed by the snow that weighs down upon everything. It must have fallen during the day, because while none is actively accumulating, it lines every shoveled pathway in mounds at least a foot high, if not higher.
Makes a person shiver just to look at. It also makes Jack very, very glad that they're supposed to have sufficient winter gear ready and waiting for them at the safehouse of Agent Hansen and his handler.
"It looks like Northern Exposure out there, I think that man's coat is actually a foot thick. Welcome to Cicely, Alaska, folks…" Jack mutters, then glances to the passenger's seat, hoping the joke would've diffused some of the awkward stiffness that's clung to Mac since their cover story was explained. It didn't. In fact, he looks fully mystified as to what Jack is talking about, prompting him to repeat, "Y'know. Northern Exposure. The show with the-" And it dawns on him. Jack shakes his head, looking back to the road. "Of course you don't know, what am I talking about. You've never seen Northern Exposure, you're twenty-three."
"Twenty-four."
As the car grinds to a halting stop at the red light, Jack looks back over at Mac, sure he must have heard wrong. "Sorry, what?"
"I'm twenty-four."
For a moment, as the light goes green and the car slowly picks up speed, Jack just accepts it. Okay, so he'd been wrong about Mac's age this whole time. The dossier he'd been given on the kid had the wrong information, and Matty had misspoke when they'd talked about it and- No, that couldn't be it. Why would the dossier have been misprinted? Why would Matty have been wrong about that?
"Since when," Jack can't help but ask, trying to figure out what is possibly being lost in translation here, "are you twenty-four?"
Silence, during which Jack makes eye contact with Riley in the rearview mirror. She shrugs helplessly, evidently also having no idea what's going on. She probably also is wondering why he's making such a point out of it, and truthfully, Jack himself doesn't really know that either. It just unsettlingly bad, in a way he can't quite articulate, to be wrong about such basic, fundamental information about Mac.
"Since the thirteenth," Mac says, voice completely flat and increments too loud, like he'd forced it out.
"The thirteenth? As in the thirteenth of January? As in," Jack does the quick math in his head, "as in not even two weeks ago? Are you telling me your birthday was twelve days ago, we missed your birthday, and you just…" At the conclusion of the successful turn onto a steep, quiet residential street, he takes a hand off the wheel, gesturing through the air of the car to make his point. "Didn't say anything?"
"Oh look," Riley interrupts before Mac, who's gone unnaturally still and is staring stiffly out the window, refusing to look at either of them, has the chance to even try to respond. "Isn't that the address the Director gave us? I think our Agent's handler is waiting for us on the porch." She opens the door and gets out of the car, and Mac follows her too fast for anything more to be said on the subject of either his age or his birthday.
Okay, fine, Jack thinks, frowning and following them outside. The bitter, vindictive cold of the air nearly stops his first breath in his lungs and it takes all the calm and composure in his body not to choke on it. But we're not done talking about this.
And they aren't. Not by a long shot.
