here we goooooo, on with the minnesota mission! as always, a big broken record thank you from my heart to yours.
They're approaching their turn quickly. Mac knows because the specifically programmed GPS route tells them so, and because he's been seeing more and more frequent signs for Grand Marais. The markings of civilization, of sustained human life, have dwindled the farther up they get, and the snow gets heavier still in turn. A few times there's a moment where the car skids slightly on packed snow and ice and hot flashes of adrenaline spark down his spine. He and Jack have exchanged hardly a word since the rest stop, since Jack made one too many comments about his birthday and Mac lost it on him.
Mac holds himself stiff and looks resolutely out the window, watching snow fall thicker and thicker over the lake. It's too dark to see too far out over it, and it gives the impression that Lake Superior stretches out forever into the pitch black of the night, a yawning chasm that could consume him whole and leave no trace behind if it so chose. Only the occasional halogen-lit billboard breaks through the dark.
Another one looms up through the haze of snow and night, wide and bright and alien amongst the thick walls of trees crowded in on either side of the road. It's almost on them by the time Mac makes out what it says. There's a high-res image of a young man blown far larger than life, wearing what Mac has in less than half a day come to recognize as the Minnesota hockey team's jersey. He wears a number eleven on his chest and an intensely serious look on his face, staring out over the forest and pointing a hockey stick under the words in massive, bold yellow typeface.
ALWAYS AIM TRUE NORTH
"True North," Jack reads off the sign as it passes and fades behind them. "As opposed to what other kinda North, I wonder?"
It's the most they've said, either of them, since the rest stop, and Mac hopes he's recognizing the olive branch for what it is. He clears his throat, which feels dry and constricted, and tries to sound normal when he talks.
(Normal like he hadn't actually spent his birthday quietly watching movies with Bozer alone in their house, like his roommate hadn't spent the night sleeping next to him, a hand on Mac's side because it's the one day a year he can't ever stand to wake up and be alone. Normal like he's not remembering the day so many years ago when he found out for sure just how much more chasing Jonah Walsh mattered to James MacGyver than his son. Normal like he hasn't maybe just ruined whatever good thing he and Jack were building together with this partnership. Normal like the idea of breaking that bond scares him so bad he wants to douse it in gasoline and light it up, if only so he doesn't have to live with the possibility of ruining it somehow hanging over him like an anvil suspended by hope and the good will of Jack Dalton alone.)
"The North on a compass isn't actually North," Mac says, eyes still trained completely out the window. His breath fogs the glass a little as he speaks. For a moment, then, Mac pauses, waiting to be told to shut up or stay focused or quit showing off. When nothing comes but silence, he tentatively pushes on. "That's magnetic North. Magnetic North shifts, because of the magnetic fields around the Earth, it moves around. Changes. It's not the same place it was last year or the year before that. It's somewhere over Canada now, I think, in the arctic. Actual North, like along the longitudinal lines, that'll take you all the way to the North Pole, that's steady. It never shifts or changes, you always know exactly where it is. That's true North."
There's a soft, interested sound from the other side of the truck's cab and Mac risks a glance over. Jack's eyes are fixed on the road straight ahead and he's nodding thoughtfully, brow furrowed in a pensive frown.
"That's really cool, actually," he muses. "I never knew that."
Mac shrugs one shoulder. "Well," he says, hating how the awkward stiffness in his voice comes out sounding cold, almost annoyed. "Now you do."
Jack gives no response. Well. Almost no response. A muscle in his jaw twitches just slightly, and Mac looks quickly away. He doesn't need to add anything more to the turmoil built up and boiling inside his chest. If only Jack hadn't kept pressing the issue of his birthday. If only he'd been like every partner Mac had never had before who either wasn't around long enough to reach his birthday or was nowhere near giving a damn when it was.
(Except for his first partner. His first partner had cared, right up until he-)
Mac shakes his head. He can't think about that right now because if he does, if he adds that on top of his birthday, eighteen months spent wondering if his dad was ever coming home, fourteen years spent wondering about what he'd done to make the man leave, and working frantically every second trying not to make that mistake again -
Sometimes wishing he would, and that James would leave, and those evaluating, judging, disappointed eyes would finally be off him and he'd be free.
Well. He can't afford to be thinking about any of that at the moment. He's got to focus on the job at hand. Isn't that what James is always warning him about? His feelings are going to get someone killed someday.
Just before the turn to the remote road, barely ploughed and half drifted with sheets of snow, Jack opens the center console and fishes out the range-boosted phone Curtis sent them with. It sounds cartoonishly loud and echoing in the silent space between them in the truck, and Mac is half-sure someone is about to walk out of the woods and catch them making the call, know immediately that they're lying and their cover will be blown before they've even been able to introduce their aliases.
Riley answers the call. Mac gets the distinct impression she is both relieved and surprised to discover they haven't killed each other since leaving Duluth and making the call. Jack updates her on how they're doing - fine - and where they're at - the turnoff for the encampment. There's some noise in the background on her end and the call is abruptly switched to speaker, the voice of Curtis Hansen joining Riley's.
"It'll probably be Holte, Anderson, the twins, and maybe one or two others meeting you," he says, and Mac hopes the edge in his voice is just the connection. The perfect, crystal-clear connection, helped along by the specially rigged phone and the booster attuned to their equipment only, hidden beneath the shallow false bed of Evelyn Moua's brother's truck. "Even this time of night, they like to make a first impression. They'll probably be armed. Actually, y'know, you two got guns?"
"Yeah," Mac answers stiffly. As if he could ever forget that.
"Don't go anywhere without 'em. Anywhere, you understand?"
"Loud and clear," Jack tells him, shooting a glance Mac can't decipher at him over the top of the phone. "Thanks, man. We'll check in again when we're settled."
"Be careful," bites in Riley's voice, rushed like she needed to make sure to get it out before it was too late and the tenuous link between them was severed once more.
Her urgency seeps into Mac too and he wants to pick up the phone and clutch it to his ear, keep talking to Riley, hold onto her voice and that billboard and the sign pointing towards Grand Marais, anything he can get to prove they aren't alone out here. That these woods won't engulf them and the lake won't snatch them from the shore and refuse to give them back.
"Promise," Jack says in his strongest, most reassuring voice, and then the connection is gone. The call is ended and they're plunged back into silence, roaring in Mac's ears like something threatening and alive.
The sound of the engine turning over, Jack starting the car back up, is at least something to stave off that horrible echoing quiet, and Mac tries his best to look like he isn't beyond unnerved, that he doesn't want to get out and as far away from Minnesota as he can get and never come back. Stay where there's sun and sea and people in every direction.
"You ready for this?" Jack asks, and Mac nods.
"Ready."
It's a good thing the truck has a robust set of snow-tires on it, because the trek down the narrow, tree-crowded, dubiously-termed 'road' is not an easy one. There's snow and ice beneath the snow and more snow beneath that, all over a path that was never paved to begin with. The sound the snow makes compacting beneath them sets Mac's teeth on edge and he can feel the ache that's been building between his shoulderblades and creeping up his spine this entire trip intensify. By the time they see the glow of life not their own begin to pinprick through the heavy, suffocating dark beyond their headlights, Mac feels about ready to crawl out of his skin.
When the trees finally break, Mac gets his first look at the Northguard's camp. It's a small organization of small buildings, centered around one larger building which has a more permanent look to it than the rest. Lights illuminate it from the inside, as well as a small handful of the other buildings, but most of the area is dark. Porch lights on some of the smaller structures - fairly quickly identifiable as the type of mobile homes common among oil field workers and remote-site construction operations - cast a sickly yellow pallor across the snow, throwing the entire area into ghoulish valleys of light and shadow. A small semi-circle of people stand waiting for them beside the larger, main building, all four of them turning when they hear the truck approach.
Even from this distance, Mac can immediately tell that all four of them are armed. Two have handguns strapped to hips or thighs, while the other two wear rifles slung over shoulders. Three men and a woman, Mac knows who they are immediately, could probably have guessed even if he hadn't just spent the better part of the drive staring at their pictures in the dossier. Luke Holte, his twin adult children, and the unhinged lieutenant Curtis had seemed scared of in his files, William Anderson. Jack pulls the truck to a stop and pauses for a moment before they get out. His eyes search Mac's face, and Mac can't figure out what it is he's looking for. He doesn't know if the man finds it, either, because by the time he gets his wits about him to ask, Jack is opening the door and stepping out into the frigid night.
Mac follows him quickly, trying not to let it show on his face how much the cold instantly sears his lungs, leaving him momentarily breathless and off-kilter as he follows Jack over to their welcoming committee.
"You must be Jack Nylander," the man with the rifle says, holding out one gloved hand towards Jack as they come within range. "Luke Holte."
"Pleasure, Mr. Holte," Jack says, voice and face neutral, shaking the offered hand. "This is my nephew, Mac." It's just as odd as he was expecting it to be, hearing the word out loud, the familial claim to him in Jack's voice. It sends an odd prickle down Mac's neck and he ignores it, focusing instead on the Northguard members in front of him.
Holte's gaze turns on Mac, who has to fight the instinct to shrink away, step behind Jack or just take off and get out of here immediately. Instead he puts a brave face on and keeps his chin up. The man doesn't offer him a handshake, and Mac is off-put by this, but glad. If he doesn't have to put his own hand out, nobody will be able to see that it's shaking. Not only does Holte not shake his hand, he doesn't speak to Mac at all, turning instead back to Jack.
"My boy, here, Owen, and my girl, Grace," Holte says, gesturing to the younger man with the handgun and the woman with the rifle. His kids look eerily like him, with the same sandy light brown hair peeking out from under thick hats, the same sharp angled faces and thin mouths. His hand moves to the side to indicate the last individual left without introduction, the older man with the handgun, who Mac recognizes immediately from his photograph. Somehow he looks even meaner in person, jaw square and strong, flat shark's eyes boring right into them. "And this is Will Anderson."
"Thought there was supposed to be one more of you," Anderson comments, one eyebrow raising up high on his forehead. Unlike the rest of everyone standing around under the glow of the window above them, he doesn't wear a hat, and snowflakes have frosted lightly in the strands of his nearly white-blond hair. For the life of him, Mac can't figure out why they're doing this outside.
"Young love," Jack says in an easy tone, with just the barest edge to it, the hint of an eyeroll. A man the age of Holte and Anderson, meeting them on common ground over the fickleness of young hearts. "Comes and goes just as fast."
Anderson lets out a sharp snort of derisive laughter, silenced by a quick look from Holte.
"Right," Holte drawls, moving straight on over the absence of Riley quicker than Mac would've hoped for. It would seem that Curtis had been right, and it was a very good thing indeed they hadn't brought her. "My point is, you see these three? Out here you answer to me, or you answer to them, understand? You do as you're told and you don't argue. That's going to be rule number one, if you're going to last here at all."
Mac nods silently, and Jack says, "Understood."
"I'll save most of it for the morning, I'm sure you're tired from your drive up." Though the words were magnanimous, the tone was as icy as the air beginning to make Mac feel dizzy from the way the cold crackles in his lungs. "Just know, straight off, I don't care how well Curtis knows you, I don't know you at all. His word is good enough to get you in the door, but you earn your right to stay here. And you keep him," here he finally acknowledges again beyond that first look, pointing square at his chest, "in line. Your sister's boy or not, we don't tolerate lip out of kids here, and there'll be no attitude on my watch."
"Yes, sir," Jack agrees, nodding. Even as well as Mac knows him, as long as they've worked together now, he can't detect anything off in his voice, just a small twitch in that same muscle in his jaw, a flicker gone as quick as it happens.
"Anderson'll walk you to your place, then," Holte dismisses, waving his hand and beginning to walk away before he's hardly finished speaking.
The twins, Owen and Grace, follow shortly behind him, leaving Mac and Jack alone with Will Anderson, who starts promptly off in the other direction. They're quick to follow him, Mac nearly having to jog to keep up with the unexpectedly brisk pace. It's one of the mobile homes they're headed to, looking like the kind Mac has occasionally seen being driven down the highway, one of the more bizarre sights along American interstates. An entire tiny house, loaded on the back of a truck, barely larger than a camper van, driving down the road.
"Curtis's old place," Anderson announces, slapping a palm on the outside, snowflakes shaking loose and fluttering to the ground. He looks back and grins, wolfish. "See you in the morning, boys."
He disappears back towards the other mobile homes, the wind whistling through the trees and sending loose sheafs of snow skittering across the crust formed over the last fall of it drowning out his footsteps before he's gotten a hundred feet. Mac's so cold at this point it's like he can feel the shivering inside his bones, and it takes several moments longer than it should have to coordinate his feet into carrying him up the steps into the living quarters, following Jack.
It's not much warmer inside, but the walls shutting out the wind do a lot to improve the situation. Mac stands by the closed door, shivering hard and trying to regain feelings in his hands, while Jack walks over to the heater and switches it on. The thing makes an alarming rattling noise as it comes to life, then settles. It's clearly a space meant to be occupied by one person that has been adjusted to accommodate two, cramped and a little claustrophobic. A second bed has been placed where previously there may have been a dresser or a desk, barely twenty feet separating them, with a sink and a small countertop at the far end, next to a door to the attached bathroom. A microwave sits on the counter, along with a coffee pot, but not much else. Clearly, most of the living at this place was done outside of the small houses.
By the time he's done taking stock of what's present in the single, long room, Mac has regained enough feeling to move around, and the quickly acting heater has warmed the air enough to allow him to take his outer jacket off without feeling like he's about to freeze to death. A quick glance at his phone shows the temperature outside to be ten below zero, making this one of the coldest places he's ever been.
At the bed closest to the door of the mobile home, Jack is pulling out the phone he'd stashed in the inside pocket of his jacket, dialing their base in Duluth. Mac listens to the ring and tries to both warm up and calm down, to shake the dead look in Anderson's eyes and the way Holte wouldn't hardly look at him, never mind speak to him once.
When this is relayed to him, Curtis doesn't sound surprised.
"Yeah, he's always had this weird thing about kids, which to him is anybody younger than his, basically. Thinks people need to earn the right to sit at the grownups table. There was this woman and her son who used to swing by for a while before they moved East, Wisconsin I think, he wouldn't really talk to the son at all, I think it's part of why they left."
"Might play to our advantage," Mac says, trying to avoid the way that makes him feel, a sinking stone of apprehensive nerves in his gut. "If he doesn't take me seriously, I might be able to sneak around without being noticed, poke into things. Could be a good thing he won't really pay attention to me."
"Could very well be," Curtis agrees, though he sounds reluctant. "Watch it, though. Don't let him think you're trying to shirk duties or ignore orders. He's got a respect thing, too, and the younger you are the worse it is. We made my cover a solid six years older than me and told everyone I just had a baby face to get around it. Just be careful, alright?"
"We'll be fine," Mac reassures, trying not to sound as uncomfortable as he is about the big deal being made of his age, especially this close after he'd blown up at Jack about his birthday. Not to mention how he feels about another overbearing patriarchal ruling force with a very specific thing about respect having too much control over his life, though any similarity between Luke Holte and James MacGyver is not one he wants to draw at the moment.
It must work, at least enough that, shortly, Curtis gets off the phone, letting Riley back on to reassert that she has them on satellite GPS and will call if anything looks out of the ordinary, anything at all. Mac can tell she's anxious about being back in Duluth while they're up here in the middle of nowhere, and he can't blame her. If it was her up here (if it was Jack up here alone) he would be out of his mind about it by now. So he talks to her for a moment, asking if the weather down there is as bad as it is up here, if they can go back to California yet, letting them both laugh before it really is time to hang up and try and get some sleep in preparation for the day to come.
He and Jack ready themselves for bed in a silence less uncomfortable than the one in the car, but not by a large margin. There were thermal sleeping clothes packed in with the winter gear Curtis and Evelyn arranged for them, thankfully. They must have once belonged to Curtis himself, a man around their height but built more like Jack than Mac, leaving them to hang on him loosely, like he's playing dress up in an older brother's clothes. With the last of his coats left hanging on a rack by the door, Mac feels cold beyond belief, despite the heater, and huddles down under the thick bedding on the bed farther from the door, trying to close his eyes and find some measure of peace.
Before he can drift off, or at least reach some state of meditative calm, Jack's voice cuts through the dark.
"I'm sorry," he says, quiet but clearly audible in the small space with only the click and tick of the heater to interfere. "About your birthday."
Mac's chest seizes up and feels impossibly tight, like he'd have to cough or clear his throat to get any words out. He doesn't, afraid of making such a gunshot loud sound in the midst of so much silence, of this fragile moment. Jack gives it a long moment before he goes on, long enough that Mac's lungs begin to relax their constriction, and the tone of his voice makes it clear how much painful sincerity exists in what he's saying.
"I'm sorry he did that to you," Jack continues, and the tightness is back, Mac's eyes burning though it's far too warm to blame it on the temperature. "And I'm sorry I wouldn't stop pushing when I should have. We don't gotta talk about it any more than that, but I needed you to know that I'm sorry. For all of it."
"It's fine." Mac's voice rasps out in a whisper, and he hates the way it sounds, small and unsteady. He regrets snapping at Jack in the car so intensely the guilt burns, almost as much as he regrets that the topic ever came up at all. "It's no big deal, Jack, it's fine."
"It is a big deal, and it's not fine." Jack's own voice doesn't raise any higher, doesn't snap or push. The contradiction is firm but kind, and Mac hates the way that sounds too, without being able to explain why. "None of it is fine. You deserve better than that."
Instead of answering, Mac turns his face fully into the pillow and tries to hope that Jack will believe he's fallen asleep mid-conversation, instead of fallen silent because he won't, can't think of anything to say. Jack doesn't say anything more either, and the room is quiet clear through until dawn.
