i am NOT happy with how long this took to finish. i just finished my first semester of grad school and that, i think, broke my brain for a while. anyhow here i am! belated holiday greetings: chag sameach, happy hanukkah, and a merry christmas to anybody out there celebrating that.

chapter warnings: discussion of a semi-detailed nature of how mac got the scar in his neck. involves gun violence. also, discussion of the death of a parent.

(chapter title from sleeping at last's 'atlas: eight')


If Bozer were asked to list all of the reasons he doesn't like Mac's job, it would be a pretty lengthy list. The fact that he doesn't have any clear idea of what it actually is ranks pretty highly, and so do days like these ones. Long, uncertain, off-kilter days where Mac is just gone, off somewhere he can't talk about with no real idea when he's going to be home. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's a week, one time it was almost three weeks. Bozer doesn't like to think about that one - Mac barely said a word for several days after he got home.

It's not like Mac is the only person Bozer ever hangs out with. His parents don't live too far away, it's a driveable trip in less than half a day and he'd spent a weekend with them just after Mac left, catching up on their respective lives and learning alongside his dad a new trick his mom had just figured out with pie crust. He's got a Dungeons and Dragons group that meets every other week, and a writer's feedback circle he stumbled onto at his favorite local coffee shop. There's a poet, three novelists, another screenwriter, and a memoirists, and Bozer likes them immensely. He'd had two of them, the poet and one of the novelists, over to watch some deliberately bad movies and make fun of the non-existent continuity just two days ago. But having Mac gone like this, it's different.

The house feels empty and echoing, nobody sleeping on the couch every other day when he gets up in the morning, other car still and untouched in the driveway. There's some significant, crucial piece of Bozer's life that just isn't there, and it feels off. Never mind the worry that eats away at his mind, wondering what kind of injury Mac is going to come home lying about this time. Will it be something like a bruise, low on his jaw or high on his arm, or will it be worse? Or will it be another thick pad of white gauze, taped over the curve of his neck down onto the top of his shoulder, removed after a few days to reveal fresh scarring, explained away with a car accident, an IED that blew Mac's transport car off the road.

He still doesn't know if he believes that explanation. Doesn't know what the alternative might be, and most of the time doesn't want to know. If there's one small, small mercy to this charade Mac keeps up about his job, about the 'think tank' he works for that Bozer is sure doesn't actually exist, it's that whatever Mac actually does, he doesn't know about it. There's a timer counting down on the lie, Bozer is sure they both know there is, and for the moment, he supposes he'll allow himself to hope that whatever he's imagining, it's much worse than the truth. Whatever that turns out to be.

This trip is longer than the average. It's more than a week before Bozer hears the by-now familiar sound of Jack's car, pulling up to the sidewalk outside. He scrapes the sheaf of papers he'd been working on together off the cushions of the couch, depositing them on his desk and making it into the front hallway just in time to open the door before Mac can.

They stand there for a moment, silent on either side of the threshold, and then Mac crumples. He lurches forward and Bozer steps quickly to meet him, stumbling back just far enough to bring them both into the house. Bozer fumbles one hand blindly around until he catches the edge of the door, shoving it just hard enough to encourage it to swing and latch closed, then turns his full attention to Mac.

Mac's face is currently buried against the front of Bozer's shirt, holding on with one arm while the other seems to have lost momentum halfway there, fingers caught and hanging onto the open side of Bozer's hoodie. His posture, curved and cracked at the foundation, has erased the five or so inches Mac has on him in height, leaving him seeming small and wounded, and Bozer's grip tightens around him in response. The hug feels exhausted and desperate, like Mac is putting the last reserves of strength he has in him after whatever he's been doing in the last week or so into it.

These are the moments, even more than when Mac is gone for days, even more than when he comes back with butterfly bandages over some cut on his arm and a limp he thinks he's hiding, that Bozer is the most afraid. The most certain that, one day, this secret job is going to take his best friend away from him for good, and all he's gonna be left with is some cover story he won't know what parts of to believe. One day all he'll have left is a million questions, not even a body to bury.

Or, in an option leaving Bozer wondering which one is worse, as he stands there hugging Mac so tightly he can feel the tiny tremors running through him, all that's left of Mac will be a body. He'll come home one day and this job, whatever he does on James MacGyver's orders, will have taken the last piece of him that made him who he is, and he'll spend the rest of his life a shell. He'll be lost somewhere he won't ever return from and Bozer won't have the tools to even start looking.

For now, though, Bozer thinks, blond hair brushing his chin and the force of someone else's living, breathing lungs expanding and contracting pushing at his chest, he still has time. There's still time to find Mac before he's lost for good, one way or another, and Bozer is nothing if not determined. And besides. He's got a distinct feeling he's got a powerful ally in Jack Dalton now, and for the first time in a long time, he feels like the scales might be tipping, away from James and whatever he's pulled Mac into and back towards home.

By the time Mac sniffs and clears his throat, stepping back and looking away, he's still shaking. Shivering, somehow, despite it being as warm in the house as it always is. He looks embarrassed, about what Bozer can only begin to guess, and so he does what he does best in these moments, when there's something going on in Mac's head he can't talk about that is clearly causing him pain.

Bozer puts on his most determined smile, grabs his roommate by the arm, and pulls them both deeper into the house. There's a two thousand piece puzzle on the coffee table, cut into pieces barely larger than a quarter, and Bozer has been picking at it for the better part of the duration of Mac's latest trip. He gently pushes Mac down onto the couch and takes a seat beside him, launching into how he was pretty sure this particular puzzle, a landscape of a sunlit grassy hillside and a powder blue sky dotted by colorful kites, was designed by someone with the specific goal of making people lose their minds trying to complete it.

For a long moment, Mac just looks at the puzzle, and Bozer gets an odd feeling. His sentence, by that point having lost track of what he was actually talking about, rambles down into silence, just watching Mac's face.

"What is it?" Bozer asks eventually, rather than what he wants to ask. Rather than 'where did you go on that trip', rather than 'where did you go just now', rather than 'what the hell happened out there'. Rather than 'what can I say to get you to quit'. "What's going on, Mac?"

A long, distinct shudder rolls over Mac's shoulders, and he blinks hard. He tears his eyes off the puzzle and looks over to Bozer, and the smile he wears is barely deserving of the word.

"It's fine, Boze," he says, voice light and very clearly a lie. "I just haven't seen a lot of sun this week, is all. It snowed the whole time, basically, we just… Anyway. Let's see if we can make some progress, shall we?"

They work in quiet for a while on the puzzle, until Mac's hands waver over the board enough times in a row that Bozer knows he's about to fall asleep sitting up. Just before he can be the one to admit he's tired and they both ought to head to bed, Mac himself straightens up, putting a sky piece with the edge of a yellow kite back down on the table. He takes the words right out of Bozer's mouth, and they come out in an exhausted mumble, muffled behind his hands, that they should both go to sleep.

He doesn't move, though. Doesn't get up off the couch to shuffle back to his room, hiding away like he does sometimes after trips like this, the ones where it takes hours for all of him to completely return. Instead he sits there, head tipping back and hands falling from his face to land in his lap. Mac's attention rolls to the size and he watches the Los Angeles sky out over the porch, the rest of the city alive and expanding forever outside their house.

"Are you okay?" Bozer can't help but ask the question, though he isn't in the least bit optimistic he'll actually get any kind of honest answer. To his surprise, Mac looks right back to him, and after a long, heavy pause, he responds.

"We almost lost Jack."

Bozer feels suddenly as cold as Mac looks, and his throat goes so dry he can't force out a response. There is so much information both present and missing from that sentence, and he doesn't even know how to begin responding to it. An odd impulse grips him and Bozer just barely refrains from going for his phone, calling Jack himself just to hear the voice of the man he's grown to like so immensely. But Mac had said 'almost' and so he's got more pressing things to worry about, like the fact that his roommate looks like he's about six inches from having a breakdown the likes of which Bozer hasn't seen out of him since his first security detail had been killed. Before Bozer can regain the ability to talk, to figure out what to say next, Mac repeats himself.

"We almost-" There's a sudden, cracking instability in his voice, and he stops, swallowing visibly. A tremor quakes his lower lip and Mac looks away, down at his hands. "Something went wr- went wrong. On the job we were out on. It was really close, and Jack… One minute he was right there next to me and the next I thought he was just gone. I thought he was dead."

Mac is talking vaguely, avoiding specifics, and the ferocity with which Bozer hates Mac's job in that moment is loud and hot. It's obvious, in the tone of his voice, the shaking that comes and goes in strength, that Mac is very upset, and yet he can't even truly talk about it. He can't explain what he'd seen, why exactly he'd thought Jack had been killed, and thereby can't process it, at least not here and not now.

Only one of Mac's security details had been killed before, and when Mac could bring himself to talk about it at all, he'd only ever said it had been an IED. That had been the day Bozer knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing he was being told about Mac's job was true, and that one day, it could send Mac home in a box. It's eased his mind and his heart, having met Jack and gotten to know him over the last few months. It's made him just that much less scared that any moment he's gonna get a phone call from James MacGyver, and end up at a funeral with a hundred questions that will never see answers. But if Jack dies…

"Y'know what the worst part is?" Mac asks the question in a quiet, distracted tone like he's not entirely aware he's still talking out loud. He's staring out at middle-distance now, somewhere beyond the porch, and Bozer wonders what he's seeing. Where he's gone back to. "After I got done being scared he was gone, and we were on our way back here, I realized what that meant. Exactly what him being- being gone like that would mean, and I… I don't know. I got scared all over again. I'm still scared, and I don't know how to handle this, because I just… I don't want him to go."

It's barely audible, the admission, and an embarrassed flush sits high on Mac's cheeks. He won't look at Bozer, even after he's said it, hands twisting white-knuckled in his lap like he's just confessed some terrible secret. And now it's not Mac's job Bozer hates but his father. He wants to get up and walk out of the house, he wants to drive to where James lives and do… something. Something to make him understand what he's done to his son's ability to trust, to love, to feel anything . Make him understand and then make him pay.

Bozer clenches a hand into an achingly tight fist and then releases it deliberately, extending his fingers one by one until he's calm enough that the anger won't show in his voice.

"I don't think he's going anywhere," he says, and it's the truth. All indications Bozer's seen so far say that wild horses wouldn't drag Jack away now. Bozer hasn't seen anyone look at Mac like that in a long time. Protective and proud. Paternal.

"He may not plan to," Mac goes so far as to admit, and that's a larger leap of progress than Bozer thinks he's entirely aware it is, "but he may not get offered the choice."

There's nothing Bozer can really say to that, mostly because it's true.


It's a beautiful day in Los Angeles. Jack can't stop looking out over as much of the horizon as he can see, face turned up into the welcoming warmth of the sun's beams. It's warm for this time of year, seventy degrees with a light wind, and normally, Jack wouldn't be wearing any kind of coat. He's opted for a light jacket today, though, still dogged by the memory of the bitterly frigid temperatures in Northern Minnesota. Mac seems to be feeling much the same way, coat pulled close around his body, arms folded tight across his chest. He's got an odd look on his face, glancing around at their surroundings, and Jack supposes he can't be blamed for it.

"So," he says, hefting the picnic basket he'd packed before he picked Mac up onto his other arm, "I bet you're probably wondering why I brought you here."

"Yeah," Mac says, the word drawn out as he raises his eyebrows at Jack. "It's a cemetery, man, it's a little weird." He doesn't sound as sarcastic or amused as he probably would under normal circumstances, if the mission they'd just come off hadn't been the way it had. As it stands, he's subdued and quiet, not making any joking prods at Jack about his chosen location for a picnic. His shoulders are curved down and his posture is nothing of its normal near-military rigidity. Mac is exhausted. He looks like the walking wounded, and that's partially why Jack's brought him here today. The other reason, well.

Jack's eyes flick down to scan headstones when he knows he's almost at the right one, and stops in front of his intended destination.

"I figured," he says, beginning the explanation as he billows out a truly cliched checkered red and white picnic blanket to spread over the grass near the foot of the grave, "since you trusted me enough to let me come meet your family - say hello to Bozer for me by the way, he still owes me a Sorry! rematch - I should probably introduce you to mine." Jack sits down slowly, giving his knees time to adjust, until he's leaned back against the massive marble wall behind him, spanning some ten feet and at least a foot thick. It's anchored into the ground and he's not worried about knocking it over by resting against it. "Mac, I want you to meet my dad, Jack Dalton Senior. Dad, this is Mac, my partner at DXS."

For a long moment, disturbed only by the breeze and the sound of a car on the long driveway some hundred or so feet away, passing and quickly fading into the distance, Mac says nothing. He stands next to the picnic blanket, shifting from foot to foot, and looks from Jack, to the headstone, and back again.

"Well, come on, sit down and say hi. Don't be rude." Jack keeps his voice light and conversational, patting the picnic blanket next to him.

With halting, uncertain movements, Mac does as he's told and sits down, easing back incrementally until he too is reclined against the massive slab of stone. He looks at the carved name in front of them, and Jack follows his line of sight, reading it as well, although he knows what it says. Jack S. Dalton Sr, of the United States Air Force.

"I thought you were from Texas?" As soon as he says it, Mac cringes like he regrets it. It seems for a moment, his mouth slightly parted and his chest rising with a large inhale and the preparation for a thousand walkbacks and apologies.

"I am," says Jack before he can start. He doesn't mind answering questions about his life, not when it's Mac asking them. "But my dad wasn't. He grew up here, and when he was in the Air Force, he spent a long time stationed out here too. See about three headstones down that way," he points to the right, down the rows of graves, to another familiar one, "is my Uncle Sean. Sean Tolliver, they were stationed together, served together for years. My dad, was an only child. Never had brothers or sisters, and his parents passed away when I was pretty young - they're buried out here too. Pretty sure there was nobody, aside from my mom, that my dad was closer to than Sean. And then, a couple years before my dad got sick, Sean was in an accident, and we lost him. So when dad passed away, my mom decided to have a headstone put up for him in the family plot in Texas so she'd have somewhere to visit, but decided to have him buried out here. Where he grew up, where most of his family was."

Jack looks around, at the green of the grass and the pale sunlight breathing life into the clear, infinite blue sky. It's not a bad place to spend eternity, he thinks, the slightest tang of salt from the ocean never quite gone from the air. His dad had loved California - maybe that's part of why Jack himself had ultimately landed out here.

"Anyway," he says, breathing from the reverie. "I come out here and talk to him whenever things go bad, whenever I manage to almost beef it on a mission." Jack shrugs, shelving the look on Mac's face at the reminder of his near-death experience to unpack later. For just a moment, Mac's face had screwed up in a look of hurt and fear, like he might be about to cry. But it's gone just as fast, and Jack isn't out to try and make him cry today. "He's good at keeping secrets, my pops, y'know, won't breathe a word to anyone. Wanted to introduce the two of you. Bring you out here to say hi."

"Well, then, I guess, h- Um." Mac clears his throat, shoots a glance at Jack, and tries again, a deep frown creased in his face as he speaks to the stone. "Hi, Mr. Dalton. I'm, uh. Mac. It's nice to meet you."

It's sweet, really, how sincerely he's trying. There's a look of earnest seriousness on his face and it makes Jack's heart give a sharp squeeze, a kind of ache he's getting used to around Mac, these days. It's an ache that speaks to a deep fondness, and a distance between them that Jack just doesn't know how to bridge. Mac is more than just his partner, just the nepotism kid Jack had been assigned to protect. He's someone Jack has come to love fiercely, and he is in a kind of pain that Jack is only just beginning to think he's catching glimpses of.

The ache in his chest only surges again with what Mac says next, quiet and unprompted, just spoken straight out into the air with an awkwardness that only serves to bolster its sincerity.

"My mom got sick, too." Mac's hands are twisting in his lap, eyes cast down from Jack Sr's headstone to his own crossed ankles, stretched out in front of him. "She died when I was little." It's some kind of odd, uncertain olive branch of sorts, a hand held out in understanding and solidarity of having lost a parent the same way Jack did. For a moment, Jack closes his eyes, and a small, out of place smile almost makes its way onto his face.

Instead, he reaches out, following an impulse before he can talk himself out of it, laying a hand high on Mac's far shoulder, palm half on his neck. Jack squeezes lightly, then leaves his hand there, holding the side of Mac's neck in a loose grip. There's something of an odd feeling under his touch, and it takes Jack a moment to figure out what it means, and when he does, he goes completely, totally still.

It's the scar on Mac's neck, creeping down onto his shoulder. Jack's got his hand right on top of that scar. This has the potential to go very, very badly and so Jack opts to continue holding still, practically not breathing, while he waits to see what Mac is going to do. Mac has also gone still, not shifting at all beneath the touch, but he also doesn't jerk away. Strangest of all, the thing Jack finds the most eye-opening and hopeful, he didn't flinch. Jack has his hand, bare skin pressed to knotted scar tissue, on the place where somehow, sometime, someone's violent action had nearly taken Mac's life. And he hadn't flinched.

So, heart beating loud in his own chest, Mac's pulse faintly, barely distinguishable under Jack's thumb, he decides to take another risk. Leaving his hand where it is, he asks, in a mild, casual-as-possible voice, "Does it still hurt?"

Neither of them need clarify what he's asking about.

"Sometimes," Mac says, tired and strange. "I get aches. Especially when it's cold. Like, really cold."

"Oh."

Jack thinks about Minnesota, about sheets of snow fluttering down like the down of a burst pillow covers a bedspread. About a temperature gauge reading negative thirty, and Mac's hand, up near his head, prodding and massaging under the collar of his coat. He lets his thumb begin moving, sweeping in gentle strokes over the side of Mac's neck, the devastating wound under it strange and uneven against the rest of his skin. Mac shivers a little, a tremor running through his body under Jack's hand, but he still doesn't give any indication he wants that hand off him. If anything, he's leaning slightly against it, pushing into the touch.

"It happened in Sweden."

The explanation comes like the one about his mother had, unasked for and freely given. Jack keeps moving his thumb, back and forth in a small pattern, but otherwise does not move, doesn't make a sound. He's afraid if he changes anything, Mac will spook, and they'll never get through the conversation they both need to happen. Mac keeps talking.

"I was with my partner at the time, Karen English, we were on a job in Stockholm. I was working in an alley, while Karen kept a lookout. It was supposed to be easy, but we hadn't been working together too long, and I was nervous. I kept getting distracted, focusing on stuff I shouldn't have been, taking my eyes off my goal. Eventually both she and my dad got sick of it. I had my dad yelling at me through comms in one ear, and my partner yelling at me from the end of the alley in the other so I just. I focused. She had the perimeter, they were both pissed, time was running out so I had to focus."

The breath that Mac draws in is deep and heavy enough that Jack can feel it. It shakes too, another tremor running through him, and Jack's thumb goes still, his grip tightening just enough to remind Mac that they're here, together, in the cemetery in Los Angeles. They aren't in an alley in Stockholm. It's a strange, fleeting hope, but maybe, just as he'd done when he'd sat at the edge of the bed and stroked his hand over the back of Mac's head where he'd been struck by Will Anderson, Jack thinks maybe the warm, gentle press of his palm over that scar might do something to take some of the pain away from the memory of its infliction. It probably won't. But Jack has to at least try to tip the scales.

"She walked away to deal with something else. I still don't know what it was. But she didn't tell me she was leaving, and when I heard footsteps, I thought they were her. Next thing I knew, I'd been shot. I almost bled out, I was in intensive care for days. Nicked my jugular I guess."

Jack doesn't have any trouble believing that. He can feel the scope of the scar himself, imagine the damage it must have done when it was fresh. It's a terrifying thought, for a whole host of reasons, and Jack himself can't suppress a shudder. Mac's shoulder, the one closest to Jack, the one he isn't in contact with, moves up and down in a small shrug.

"I never saw Karen again. My dad was pissed at us both, but her a little more than me I guess, so he fired her on the spot. I don't know where she ended up."

"He shouldn't have been mad at you at all." The words are out before Jack can think about whether or not they're a good idea, and honestly, a large part of him doesn't care. Mac needs to hear this, and Jack needs to say it. "He was more mad at her, whatever, you got shot Mac, because you trusted your partner. He had no business being mad at you at all."

Mac doesn't answer. He doesn't concede the point but he doesn't refute it either, and though his trapezius muscle goes tense under Jack's hand, he leans into it just a fraction harder, too. Jack lets his thumb move again, like he could wipe away the memory of that blood-drenched alley, the memory of James MacGyver's indefensible anger. And even if he can't, give Mac something else to frame his world by, a different factor for the equation he's constantly using to calculate the odds of things going for better or for worse.

They sit there together for a while longer, the sound of the breeze rustling in the branches of a nearby tree the only sound breaking the calm of the day. Soon, Jack will open the picnic basket and distribute sandwiches, pickles and spear slices of bell pepper. But for right now, at least, he can't bring himself to move yet. So he sits there, keeping his gentle hold on Mac's neck, and allow the warmth of progress to chase away lingering memories of snow.