[elmo with arms raised and fire in the background gif]
that's how i feel about this chapter, guys. i hope you enjoy reading it as much as i enjoyed writing it, your comments keep me going!
title this chapter is from sleeping at last's song 'neptune'
"You people must be fully nuts," are the first words out of the mouth of their contact's handler, Agent Evelyn Moua, before they'd even fully reached the porch. She's standing outside waiting for them, white knit cap pulled down low on her tawny-brown forehead, arms folded as she watches them reach the steps.
"...No? Maybe? What?" is all Jack can think to say in response. Next to him, he hears one of them, probably Riley, bite down a scoff of laughter. A gust of wind rushes down the street and Jack feels like his skin is burning, he's so cold. "Listen," he says, rather than waiting for an explanation about Agent Moua's odd first words to them, "can we do this inside please?"
The woman shrugs and steps back into the brightly lit inside of the townhouse. Jack lets Mac and Riley enter before he does, taking one last lingering look around at the street outside. The roofs of the houses glitter under the street lamps, thinly ice-crusted banks of snow lit up like the sequined leotard of a figure skater gliding around a rink. He shakes his head and looks away, trying to dismiss the feeling of being watched, that this steep, frozen place knows he doesn't belong here.
Stepping inside makes Jack's face tingle uncomfortably, breathless cold replaced by overwhelming warmth. It takes him a moment to adjust, stamping his feet on the mat inside the front door to try and encourage the pins and needles in his limbs to fade faster. It's not a large house, a small two-story in a residential neighborhood, and the inside feels as cozy as a house would need to in a place like this to keep a person from freezing over inside. Most of the trappings of the operation being run by Agents Hansen and Moua are likely hidden in the next room over, or up the narrow staircase to the far left, just in case one of the neighbors happened to see inside the door.
There's a sound from the doorway to the right of the room, and Jack looks over to see a man who must be Agent Hansen, judging by the crutches he uses to heave himself across the rug-covered floor. A large plaster cast encases just about the entirety of his right leg, and Jack winces at the sight. He ambulates using the crutches with the kind of haphazard familiarity that comes with an impossibly unwieldy task being performed by a person who's had a fair amount of practice with it. The man crosses the room decently quickly until he's within arm's reach of the newcomers, and holds out his hand to first Riley, then Mac, then finally to Jack himself.
"Agent Curtis Hansen," he says, introducing himself. "You can call me Curtis. Evelyn met you on the porch, and that's about it for our lonely little op out here. And that makes you…"
"Jack. Jack Dalton," Jack says, gesturing to himself, then out to his young teammates. "That's Mac and Riley there."
"So, you're the poor folks from California that Director MacGyver's sending way up North, huh?" There's an almost mirthful glint in Curtis's grey-blue eyes as he levers himself carefully into an overstuffed armchair.
"Absolutely not like this they're not," breaks in Evelyn, who's got her arms folded and one eyebrow arched so high it's practically disappeared under her hat. "You should see what they showed up driving, Curt, it's some shiny, new black SUV that may as well have 'government issue' stamped on the bumper." She looks over to Jack, Mac, and Riley, and waves generally at the drape-covered windows facing out at the street. "If you go up there driving that, they'll know something's up on the spot. People like you're supposed to be don't drive cars like that. Not up here."
Almost instantaneously upon hearing her say it, Jack feels the thumping pressure of a headache begin to build behind his eyes. She must see the look on his face, because when she continues, Evelyn's voice is softened somewhat.
"I'll figure something out. Pop upstairs, make a few calls, I think I can find something for you." With that she disappears, the creaking of her footsteps echoing until they fade into the distant thumps of a person walking about on the second floor.
"So." Mac's earnest, serious voice interrupts Jack's upwards attention, and he looks over. The kid's taken a seat across from Curtis, Riley next to him on the low couch. "What can you tell us about the Northguard?"
Jack would very much like to hear this as well, and he moves to stand beside the couch they sit on, leaning his hip against the back.
"I can tell you straight off I was counting down the days until I could go home and never see any of those people again, that's for sure," Curtis says, snorting and shaking his head. "But then I guess providence intervened and I had an ice accident and well. Here we are."
Curtis goes on to talk about a group of cagey people as hostile and closed to outsiders as the landscape they've made their encampment in. It's a self-sustaining community of maybe twenty people with an additional ten rotating in and out depending on the week, shrouded in the woods outside Grand Marais, a town of less than fifteen hundred about an hour from the Canadian border. They run packages up through the national parks sitting on the border to a distributor in lower Ontario, who then passes the goods along to Canadian buyers looking to profit off of items perhaps more easily bought off Americans than sourced in their own country.
"Used to be drugs, at first," Curtis says. He's got his chin propped on a closed fist now, with his elbow braced on the arm of the chair. On his face is the look of a person in growing pain as medication for a major injury wears off, the clockwork dose beginning to taper away. It's a look Jack has seen on a lot of other faces, one he tries not to think about noticing on Mac's face more and more as time wore on.
Clearing his throat and adjusting his leg a little, Curtis goes on. "Back when they were just a baby fringe group of like-minded scary bastards looking for a way to finance their break from general society, it was drugs. But then they found out that hey, weapons can actually be a lot more lucrative going across that particular border, and also happen to be way less likely to get their own hooked on the product. Not good for business when your runners are sampling the goods, y'know? So they run a clean operation now, no drugs in sight."
Riley's actually got a little notebook out, jotting things down as Curtis talks, and Jack feels that by now familiar warmth of pride ignite in his chest like a hearth.
"We heard there was talk of something bigger coming through," Mac says, leaning forward, forearms folded over his knees. "Some kind of biologic?"
"My big break," Curtis sighs, then winces, a snort of laughter escaping him, "no pun intended, came right before my actual big break when I fell. Heard we were getting something new in, and that's when I got this." His hand goes into his pocket and fishes out a piece of paper, which he passes over to Mac.
Walking around the back of the couch, Jack leans over Mac and Riley's shoulders to get a look at the item, at the words scrawled across it.
boss is going too far. bioweapon. one month. stop him.
"It's short, to the point, and absolutely terrifying to find on your floor when you think you're being super convincing in your undercover assignment. Someone shoved it under the door of my unit," Curtis says while Mac turns the note over, examining the back side of it. There's no more too the message, just some smudges on the back where it had likely picked up dirt from the floor inside the door.
He goes on to explain that they're not entirely sure who had put the note there, but there's a strong suspicion. Two of them, in fact. The head of the Northguard, a violent man named Luke Holte with two prior convictions for assault and battery and reckless driving causing serious bodily injury, has four lieutenants who assist with the running of the organization. Two of them are his adult children, twins in their late twenties, a man and a woman. Curtis thinks, based on the form of address - "Most everyone just calls him Holte, it's just his kids I've heard call him 'boss' like that, it's a little weird." - that it's likely one of them, though he has no indication as to which one.
"So, let me just see if I'm on top of exactly what the situation is here," Jack says. His headache is getting worse by the minute. "We're walking into a remote camp full of hostile weirdo mountain people with guns and an axe to grind with the government and everybody else, and we have one potential ally whose identity is still unknown, and we've gotta find a biological weapon we don't know the location of, all in subzero weather while undercover as cult-y militia wannabes ourselves."
"That's about the long and short of it, there's just one more catch."
Sometimes, Jack loves his job. This, right here, this is absolutely not even close to one of those times.
"There's one more catch," he repeats, turning away and throwing his hands up to pace a circuit of the small living room. "Of course there's one more catch. Why wouldn't there be one more catch."
"Whatever it is, given what the note said about a month, and when I got it, they're moving it next week, so your timeline is tight. You've got about six days. Maybe eight if you're lucky." Curtis cringes. "And you're probably not going to be lucky."
"Awesome." The word Riley says is exactly the one Jack was thinking, in exactly the tone he'd been thinking it in. "That's just… awesome."
Before long, Evelyn comes back down the stairs with the news that they had a car for them, and her brother should be pulling up with it now, his roommate taking him back home after. Jack elects to go help her transfer whatever was needed to it, while Mac and Riley gathered what they were going to be taking from the collection of winter clothing set out for them on a table. He nabs a large, down-filled coat and zips it up, then heads straight for the door. Better to get this over with as soon as possible.
The cold is, somehow, worse than he'd remembered it. It's barely six in the evening but it's as frigid and hostile outside as if it were two or three in the morning. Evelyn isn't especially talkative as they approach the new car, and Jack appreciates it. It's too damn cold out to talk.
The truck is a dark, forest-green Ford F150, an older model that has clearly seen years on the road, worn but well cared-for. It does, to credit of Evelyn's resourcefulness, look like the kind of car one would imagine a man like Jack Nylander would drive, and certainly far less likely to raise eyebrows than the one they'd shown up driving.
"Got a false bed in the back," Evelyn tells him, breath fogging out in front of her as she speaks. "Pretty shallow, hard to notice unless you're looking specifically. He's a dentist but he fly-fishes, y'know, and he's paranoid about theft. Fly-fishers, they're maniacs about their gear. We had a signal booster in Curt's truck when he was up there so we could have better comms access on our frequencies, keep our surveillance equipment running. Signal's pretty garbage up there otherwise."
It's quick work to get the truck sorted. There's not much to load up, all three of them traveling rather light, which Jack is grateful for, given the weather. When he looks up, pausing for a second on the porch, the clouds up above look heavy and threatening. It's not snowing now but it will be soon, if the look of the sky is anything to go off of.
Inside the house, Mac is zipping up a dark blue outer coat, gloves tucked into the pocket, heavy waterproof boots laced up over the cuffs of his pants. He looks ready to go, but Riley is still wearing the Los Angeles-suited 'winter jacket' she'd arrived in, and Jack frowns.
"C'mon, Ri, we gotta get a move on before-"
"Actually, I'm not going." She's standing up now, shoulders back and jaw set, completely sure in what she's saying and Jack lets her continue without interrupting, because evidently some kind of conversation happened while he and Evelyn were getting the truck ready. "We were talking, and I'm gonna stay here with Evelyn and Curtis and keep an eye on things from here. They've got a really impressive tech set-up upstairs, satellite on the camp and radio chatter monitoring and stuff like that. I'm not well trained enough for this anyway and uh." Riley's face twists into something of a wry smile and she gestures down generally at herself. "I don't think I'm exactly going to fit in with a Northern Minnesotan separatist militia. C'mon."
Jack winces. "That's a good point, actually. A really good point."
"We'll keep Riley here, then," Evelyn agrees, nodding. "Monitor things on our end, stay in constant communication.
"And they won't be suspicious when she doesn't show up?" Much as Jack wants to agree, perfectly fine with keeping her out of danger when he's already got such a bad feeling about all of this to begin with. But he can't help but worry that, if they were already going to be suspicious of they showed up a day after the planned meeting, showing up one person short might be a colossal red flag.
"Trust me, they'd probably be more suspicious if she did," Curtis says. He's still in the exact same place he'd been in when Jack left the building, sitting in an awkward-looking slouch in that armchair. "We only seeded two aliases in with them to begin with, so they were always going to have way more questions about her than you. We didn't hear about her until uh… Last week, ish?"
"Alright," Jack says, relieved that there's justification to keep her out of this situation she's nowhere near ready for. "That settles it then, I suppose."
"And you'd better be going," Evelyn puts in. "I'd love to stand around and chat, you all seem like nice people, but they're expecting you tonight, so. Get a move on, right? And be careful. Don't turn your back on any of them for a moment."
"We won't," Jack agrees solemnly, meeting her eyes straight on.
They're near the door, Jack grabbing a last few items of winter clothing, a hat and some thick gloves, when he glances over his shoulder, notices that Mac isn't quite as well insulated as he could be. On an impulse, Jack snags another hat, a black knit beanie, and a grey scarf. He turns and, without thinking, pulls the hat down over Mac's blond hair, going to loop the scarf around his neck, saying, "Here, you're gonna freeze up there."
"I got it, thanks." The response is strange and strained, Mac snatching the scarf out of his hands before Jack can get it around him. Jack doesn't let it phase him, moving on outside with one last glance over at Riley, safe and warm inside the house with Evelyn and Curtis.
Jack can't ignore the odd tension in Mac as they climb into Evelyn Moua's brother's truck, the way he holds himself stiffly, turned away from Jack towards the window. The hat has stayed on his head, pulled down low over his ears, and with the scarf now wound around his neck and tucked into the front of his coat, there's not a lot of his face visible in the reflection of the window. He shakes his head and turns on the car, pulling away down the street towards the highway that will take them nearly the entire way to where they're headed. The turn off the road from Minnesota Highway 61 to the Northguard's camp isn't on any map, so they'd needed a specially programmed set of directions they'd got from Curtis.
As they drive along the harbor, Jack decides to try something.
"So what did you do for your birthday?" he asks, and Mac lets out a sigh deep enough that it's audible.
"Just let it go, Jack."
"I'm askin' cause obviously we couldn't be there to celebrate it with you, the way friends are supposed to do for a person, I hope Bozer at least knew about it. Birthdays are for people telling you they're glad you're here, y'know?"
"It doesn't matter, Jack," Mac says, a little louder. "I'm not upset you missed it. It's fine."
Jack shakes his head but doesn't push it at the moment. He focuses on the road, on guiding the car left, onto Minnesota 61 North. The road stretches dark and endless before them, the inside of the car shrouded in a thick, uncomfortable silence. Snow begins to fall just as the lights of the Duluth harbor disappear one by one in the rearview mirror, and the highway curves away into the vast stretches of sparsely populated land that lay between them and their destination. The forest opens up and soon engulfs them, and Jack feels, unease prickling at the base of his neck, as if they've been swallowed alive.
They talk, after a while. Mac has a folder open in his lap, given to him by Curtis while Jack had been outside with Evelyn. It contains information on every consistent member of the Northguard militia, though privately, Jack wonders what they're doing calling themselves a militia if there's only twenty of them. Every militia he's ever heard of before had much wider ranks - though, maybe that was just a Texas thing. Up here, he supposes, especially the further up you got, twenty people, thirty on a good day, is kind of a lot.
Mac reads information out of the folder, telling Jack about what's been collected on the people they're about to live amongst for however long it takes to sort this bioweapon thing out. The one that makes Jack instantly the most nervous is one of the lieutenants, William Anderson, who has charges in his rap sheet that make Luke Holte's look like petty messing around. Curtis left a post-it on his section of the dossier, too - one simply reading, in the agent's spiky handwriting, 'piece of work'.
They're almost to their destination, a mere thirty minutes separating the truck from the camp, when Jack makes a mistake. Or, rather, makes the final piece of a mistake he's been making in steps since they'd hardly left Duluth, but doesn't realize until it's too late. They're pulling into the parking lot of one of Minnesota's bizarrely well-outfitted rest stops, a circular building with machines inside dispensing snacks and hot coffee, when Jack makes the comment, hardly thinking about it as it slips out of his mouth.
"Please tell me you didn't just sat around in Whittacker and Tam's lab or something, because if that's how you spent your birthday-"
"Jack, just drop it!" Mac snaps, explosively loud, startling Jack into silence. His shoulders are heaving with heavy breaths, and he's looking away, out towards the rest stop's building. "Stop asking, just stop asking about my birthday, it doesn't matter."
He leaves abruptly, snatching their empty coffee thermoses as he goes, elbowing the door shut behind him. Jack is left alone in the car, speechless and guilt-sick. He really had meant to stop after a point, when it didn't seem like the jokes were doing anything to lighten the mood or get Mac to open up about why he hadn't just told them it was his birthday. Jack had resolved to let it drop at that, but he hadn't been thinking, and it had slipped out like it had been for the past hour, as he guessed what it was Mac had done with the day he turned twenty-four. Mac had shown nothing but confusion and mild annoyance, right up until it cracked and became clear just how badly the whole line of discussion was bothering him.
When Mac gets back to the car, he rips the passenger's side door open with far more force than Jack had been expecting. He'd hoped the few minutes inside the rest stop would've given the kid space and time to settle down, but evidently, it didn't end up working out that way. Instead, Mac seems more upset than before, agitated and angry. A bag of trail mix lands in Jack's lap, his refilled thermos of coffee is shoved into his hand, and Mac sits down with a thump, dropping into his seat and slamming the door. Before Jack can remind him this isn't actually their car, and Evelyn's brother presumably wants it back without new damage, Mac is talking.
"On my tenth birthday," he spits out, loud and fast, staring straight ahead out of the windshield, "my dad left. He walked out the door before I could ask where he was going, and then he didn't come back. I stayed up until three in the morning waiting for him, looking out my grandfather's window, hoping he'd pull into the driveway with some- with some amazing gift and an apology. I didn't see him again for a year and a half."
Jack doesn't know what to say. He wants to tell Mac to stop, that this isn't information he should be giving up unless he chooses to, unless he's decided he wants Jack to know. More than anything he wants to go back in time and cut it out before he inadvertently rips stitches out of a wound that is obviously still causing Mac a great deal of pain. He'd thought he'd been doing so well with that so far, with treading carefully while also not treating his young partner with kid gloves, as he came to slowly realize just what a raw, pulverized mess Mac really is inside.
In all his thinking on what he wants to say and what he could've said and what he wishes he could un-say, Jack takes too long in doing or saying anything at all, because Mac launches straight back into it. He's still speaking in that too-fast, too-loud voice, and he won't look at Jack even as he splits the man's heart into pieces with what he says next.
"Eighteen months and I had no idea where he was. If he was ever coming back. Eighteen months I didn't hear a word, if he was alive or dead, and then one day he was just… in the living room when I got home from school. And every-" Mac's voice almost breaks on the word and he swallows visibly, voice compensatorily louder and stronger when he continues. "Every day since, I have been wondering if he regrets it. If he looks at me and asks himself 'what the hell did I come back for', so- So I can get behind celebrating achievements, and lives saved, and days when the world is a safer place because of what I've done but I can't just- My birthday has never been about anyone being glad I'm here, and it never will be."
Quiet, filled with heavy, ragged breathing, and the soundless breaking of Jack's heart. His mouth is dry and his throat hurts and he's so angry he could throttle James MacGyver if the man appeared in front of him now. But instead of saying anything of the sort, Jack clears his throat and says, "I'm sorry."
Mac doesn't respond.
They drive away in heavy, aching silence, and Jack can't tell who in this moment he's more angry with, James or himself.
