on one hand i would apologize for how long this chapter got, but on the other hand once you read it i'm sure you'll understand why i didn't want to leave things off in the middle of this one.
also, it's worth noting that i have no idea what it's like to work in a hospital and what the protocols are, and the medical and hospital information in this chapter is based off my best-effort internet research and a healthy amount of 'making it up for the sake of the narrative'. apologies to any nurses or other industry professionals reading this.
now, onward, time for mac to WOEFULLY misinterpret some things!
(chapter title from owl city's cover of a dear evan hansen song, 'waving through a window')
(warnings: serious illness, hospitals, generally a pretty heavy chapter.)
It's been almost a week.
Thanks to his shoulder and wrist, the team has been benched, save for a few projects in IT Riley has been asked to assist on. Mac doesn't know if Jack has been called in to work on anything or help out with any kind of training exercises, because that would require him to have talked to Jack since the night of the review, which he hasn't. He has been camped out at home for the duration, moved to hiding by his own cowardice and inability to face the truth.
If he were honest, Mac has been suspecting it for some time now - definitely since Amsterdam when Riley had told him she thought the Director of mishandling things on their missions. Riley's narrow-eyed scrutiny of the Director's choices, the private meetings between Jack and Matty that they both seem to think Mac doesn't know about, and now his last real conversation with Jack, all the questions the man had been asking, about reviews, about James… The scale has tipped, and the truth has crashed down, and he knows what all this means, the implications it has for the best partnership he's ever had.
What it means is that none of it had ever been about him at all. Not protecting him on missions, not hanging around him when they weren't on assignment, not picking him up in the morning and driving to work together… Jack is here for James. Not for Mac. Mac wasn't even the mission, he was the mark, the contact, the inside informant who unwittingly became means to an end. Except…
(Except for the way Jack had held him, in the dying light of the evening sun, cradled the back of Mac's head in a strong, fighter's hand and sat on the ground with him for far too long. Except for the green hoodie, now thrown over the back of the chair in Mac's room where he'd tossed it after storming inside, the one Jack had dressed him in when he couldn't dress himself without help. Except for the hazed, choppy memory of Jack being there, over and over, when he woke in the night not even a week ago.)
It's all so confusing, evidence warring with feeling and Mac caught in the middle. He pinballs over the course of days, snapping from hurt to angry to guilty. Anger feels the safest, but guilty feels more right, and hurt is impossible to stop, and underneath it all is foolish, foolish, foolish.
There's only one thing he knows for sure, and that is this. The next time he sees Jack, he's going to ask, and Jack is going to tell him the truth. And so Mac is avoiding him, because he doesn't know if he can handle facing that last piece of confirmation, that everything he'd been finally allowing himself to hope for had never been real at all.
One way or another, it all comes to a head tomorrow. Tomorrow they are back in the field, for a lowkey surveillance mission that isn't supposed to take longer than forty-eight hours. Mac has been just barely cleared by DXS medical to return to regular activity with a strong caution that if he takes risks with his injuries, his shoulder especially, he puts himself in jeopardy of permanent damage, and James isn't wasting any time. In less than a day he's going to be forced into a room facing Jack, and he'll know for sure.
All morning, the anticipation of the following day looming over him like a thundercloud with the promise of a downpour in its belly, Mac has been keyed up. He's working on his bike in the living room now, testing the capacities of his wrist, which luckily seems in complete working order, if a bit sore. Bozer isn't home and the house feels empty and echoing around him, something off and wrong about the air itself. Eventually, Mac gets up and switches on the radio, fiddling with the dial and settling on a station, going back to what he's doing. The music helps, and he feels more relaxed, finally getting into some kind of groove, until it all comes to a screeching halt.
The music, which Mac hasn't entirely been paying attention to, has come to a pause while the hosts of the station introduce an ad break, "You've been listening to Los Angeles ninety-five point five."
Los Angeles ninety-five point five. Classic rock. Jack's favorite station, the one Mac has gotten so used to hearing in the car, in Whittacker and Tam's lab when they let him use it, at home when his partner is just hanging out, that it's become background noise, a comforting blur.
Before he realizes what he's doing, Mac has dropped his screwdriver, stood up, and switched off the radio so sharply his palm stings from how hard he's hit the button. He can't stand this anymore, has to do something, anything, so Mac decides to go for a run. Running has helped a lot in the past, on days where he needs to get out of his own head, to push his body far and hard enough that all he can feel is the sun and pavement.
Leaving his house and heading for the park at the peak of the nearby hill, Mac takes with him only his wallet, even his phone remaining in his room. He doesn't want to be haunted by the text message on it, unopened and unanswered, Jack asking if he wants a ride in to work the next morning. It's an unseasonably hot day outside, and the lack of practice has him at a slower pace than he's used to, and Mac pushes himself harder, speeding up as the asphalt begins to incline up the hill. His shoulder aches, deep and steady, but it's not bad enough to stop him, so he keeps going.
Along the way, he passes by a few others out for exercise of one kind of another, outpacing all of them quickly. The sun beats relentlessly down, shimmering up off the pavement and reflecting back onto him like the sky and the ground are in a conspiracy to bake him between them. By the time he crests the hill, seeing the park a little ways off in the distance, Mac is starting to feel… off. His breathing is uneven and slightly ragged, and his muscles are beginning to hurt in a way he's not used to as part of the usual consequences of running a few miles. It's when he turns his head to follow the sound of one nearby jogger calling out to another and is overtaken by a wave of dizziness so strong he nearly loses his balance entirely that Mac knows something is wrong.
With his head swimming and his throat dry and parched, Mac decides to head for a gas station. A bottle of water will do him some good, dehydration likely the culprit for the uncooperative malfunctioning beginning to overtake his body. As he goes towards where he remembers passing one a small ways back on the road, Mac feels rapidly much worse. His heart beats fast and shallow, his chest feels tight, and breathing is becoming progressively more difficult.
Slowing down, Mac decides to just walk the rest of the way. The building is in sight now, and he swallows against his sandpaper throat. It's getting hotter and hotter now under the unforgiving sun. The day must be reaching over a hundred degrees, and Mac is confused as to how it happened this fast.
Crossing the street towards the gas station, Mac stumbles. He's at the opposite sidewalk, going to step up onto it, when his knees give out and he collapses hard onto the ground, catching his palm and skinning it on rough concrete but managing not to hit his head in the process. His injured shoulder, folded awkwardly under his body, protests loudly, and his vision greys and fades in and out. Mac can't seem to focus, can't get his legs back under him.
Distantly, he realizes someone is talking to him, an alarmed voice growing closer and closer until it's right over him and someone's hand is on his shoulder. At the unfamiliar touch, Mac flinches sharply away, curling in on himself on the ground. It's too hot. The ground is too hot, the air is too hot, his lungs are too hot. Mac feels like he's dying, like in minutes he's gone from mostly-okay to burning alive. Somewhere in the part of his brain that's still maintaining any amount of situational awareness, he thinks he can hear a siren getting closer.
There are questions now. People are asking him questions, questions Mac can't answer, because he hears the words themselves, sure, but they fall apart into sand as soon as he tries to understand them. Paramedics, probably, hands now all over his body, pulling him onto his side and stretching him out over the hellfire ground, someone saying 'sir' loudly and clearly in his ear over and over again.
'Wallet', he catches and comprehends, and then 'sir' turns into 'Mr. MacGyver' and Mac shakes his head against the gloved hands trying to hold it still.
"Mac," he manages through a raw, arid throat, mouth finally cooperating enough to speak. "It's Mac. Mac."
'Mr. MacGyver' thankfully turns into 'Mac', and the paramedic's voice snaps into clarity just in time for him to hear her say, "-taking you the hospital, okay? They're gonna take good care of you, just hang tight."
Then suddenly, the voices rise in pitch and volume, overlapping and overtaking each other as Mac's awareness fades away again, with a greater finality this time. The last thing he feels is the ground falling out from under him, and then all that's left is fire.
An indeterminate amount of time later, Mac resurfaces slowly and barely into a shallow consciousness. His entire body feels fragile and light, like anyone or anything could blow him away or snap him in two and he wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. The fire is gone, now, but ice seems to have replaced it, and he's far, far too cold. Mac's fingers twitch slightly at his side as he tries to feel around for the green hoodie he knows he still has, but they won't move farther than that, which is a shame, because now that he's remembered it, he really, really wants that hoodie.
The air smells of antiseptic and there's a small pinching feeling in his elbow, and these things in combination is enough for Mac to identify that he's in a hospital. His eyelids feel too heavy to drag open when he tries, barely cracking them to peer around. There's a woman with dark hair standing next to him trying to talk to him, but Mac is out again before he can answer her or ask where the hoodie is or why he's so cold.
The next time he wakes, it's a blond man, standing where the woman had been, noting something down on a monitor. Something feels wrong. Mac feels like something is deeply, deeply wrong. He's in a hospital and he doesn't remember why and he feels like he's freezing, like there's a foot of snow and ice pressing his body down into this unfamiliar bed, and there's a man he doesn't recognize standing next to him. There's no one else in the room, upon a quick survey, and it's this that finally drives Mac into a panic.
Alone. He's alone, and doesn't want to be, and he's incapacitated. If someone were to try anything right now, he'd be helpless to stop them, and the thought, crashing into what cognition he's wrestled ahold of, is terrifying. His breathing quickens, chest jerking in faint gasps under the heavy blanket, and there's something else underneath it, too. Buried under the fear is a bone-deep ache, a pain and sadness he can't name. Until he can.
Jack. He wants Jack.
Jack should be here, Mac thinks with a jolt, hand twitching again. Jack is always here when he's in pain, not a time he can think of in their partnership where Jack left him while he was hurting. Not on a mission and not at home either. The last time Mac had been in pain and scared and not sure what was going on, Jack had wrapped him in his own sweater and zipped it around him and told him he was safe, that everything was going to be okay.
Since the blond man is still here, and hasn't tried to hurt or kill Mac yet, Mac tries to ask him. His mouth feels clumsy and numb, as uncooperative as his twitching hands. Call Jack, he tries to say, please, I need you to call Jack.
The man doesn't understand.
Please, Mac thinks, tries to say, barely hears his own voice come out in a frightened, breathy jumble, "Jack. Call Jack."
There's a reason, Mac knows there is, why Jack isn't here, and he can't think of it right now, though it makes him that much more scared. Did something happen to him? Is he okay? The man still doesn't understand, and Mac shakes his head, grits his teeth, and then tries again, as clearly as possible, "Please, he should be here, I don't know why he's not here. Please."
Apparently giving up on trying to understand the man, dressed in what Mac thinks might be a nurse's uniform of dark green scrubs, leaves, and Mac's head tips back. His eyes feel wet and he's shaking all over and he can't make it stop, so he just lays there and breathes and tries not to feel so scared. It doesn't work. He still can't find Jack.
Brooke Arroyo hasn't been at work for very long. She's been on-shift for maybe twenty minutes, the coworker she's taking over briefing her on the emergency department's handful of patients before taking off, and is just getting settled when a voice calls to her. Looking up, she sees a blond man walking rapidly towards her, an anxious frown on his face. It's Kip Hawthorne, the new nurse on her shift, nice but still very green and obviously at this moment in time, out of his depth.
"What's going on?" she asks when he reaches her, and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the patient room he's just walked out of.
"Our heat stroke guy," Kip says, referring to the patient in room seven, twenty-four year old male brought in by ambulance who collapsed on a run from apparent heat stroke. "He's awake and he's kind of freaking out, I don't know what to do. EMS said he had no phone on him when he was brought in, right?"
"Yeah," Brooke confirms, closing the chart she'd been working on when he'd arrived. This is clearly going to be more involved than a quick question about hospital protocol or the location of supplies. "There wasn't one on him or in the immediate area, why?"
"He's asking me to call somebody and he's getting pretty worked up, but I can't figure out what the name is or anything. Guy's pretty out of it, we've got him on benzos because the cooling blankets started making him shiver so hard that Trish thought he was going to chip a tooth or something."
Rounding the counter at the nurse's station at the center of the ward, Brooke pulls up the file on room seven in the system. She presses a few keys and then reads off what she finds to her nervous colleague, standing across the counter from her now, shifting from foot to foot.
"So for Angus MacGyver, we have listed here an emergency contact and a health-care proxy. Same person, James MacGyver, says it's his father. He's the one Trish called when he was brought in, right? The card in his wallet?"
Trish, the nurse who'd handed off the shift to Brooke not even half an hour ago, had told her that when bed seven came in, there had been a card in his wallet, requesting that in case of an emergency, the number on it be called. The woman had said they'd done so, but the guy on the other end didn't seem particularly interested, which Brooke thought was an odd characterization. Apparently, once he found out that MacGyver the younger was going to be okay, he'd said to call if things took a turn for the worse, and hung up.
"James, that has to be it," Kip says suddenly, snapping his fingers. "The name he kept trying to say, it had a J-A sound. That has to be him, poor guy was asking for his dad."
"Well if it's going to calm him down if we can get the guy on the phone," Brooke tells him, standing up and walking back around the counter, towards the room of the person in question, "then we should do that. Let them talk for a minute if he's coherent enough to speak. He's not going to do himself any favors if he panics."
Once in the room, Kip hovering awkwardly at her shoulder keeping an eye on the vitals of the patient the paramedics informed them insisted on being called 'Mac' right before he passed out, Brooke runs through a few orienting questions. He's weak and hard to understand, but he seems by now able to speak and respond to basic questions, so she can't see the harm in letting him talk to his dad, if that's what he needs to relax and let the treatment do its work in bringing his temperature back down to a safe level. Picking up the corded phone in the room, Brooke dials for him and then hands him the phone.
Looking over her shoulder as it rings, Brooke motions for Kip to step out, and moves into the hall herself to give him some privacy. She waits just outside though, watching in case he passes out or needs help. He talks inaudibly for a minute, his face scrunching up into a distressed frown when the person on the other end responds. To be honest, as insistent as he'd apparently been to get James MacGyver on the phone, it doesn't seem like it's helping.
It actually seems like it's making him worse, to the point that Brooke, upon noting that his vitals are rising rapidly, decides that enough is enough and this needs to stop now. This is her patient, and if this phone conversation is harming him, then it needs to end before things can get worse. The moment she re-enters, though, the call seems to have come to an abrupt end, and the phone is now held in Mac's lax fingers, on the bed at his side. One of the cooling pads laid over his overheated body has slipped somewhat, and she walks over to straighten it out, hanging the phone up while she's at it.
"Was there somebody else you needed us to call?" Brooke asks, now doubting that they'd got it right in the first place. Maybe Kip had been wrong, and his father wasn't the intended recipient of that phone call at all, the thought enough to set her teeth on edge.
"No," he says, wobbly and faint, not looking her in the eye. He's got the fragile, wrung out look of somebody who would definitely be shaking if it weren't for the drugs in his system suppressing his body's instinct to try and keep itself warm. "No. Sorry."
"It's fine, really." Her voice is calm and professional, reassuring in a way she's cultivated over the years she's worked here.
"Sorry," is all he says again, and then he's trying to move, unsuccessfully attempting to shift onto his side.
Wordlessly, Brooke helps him turn and repositions the cooling blankets. His temperature, according to the readout, is coming down fast now, and they won't need them much longer, which is a relief. It had been seriously dangerous when he'd come in, dehydrated and delirious from hyperthermia. Now he seems at least calm, curled onto his side with his non-IV arm pulled up towards his chest. Mac's breathing is, however, Brooke notices with a slight frown, trembling in a way she doesn't think the benzodiazepines in his system can help with.
Soon enough, she has to leave because she gets paged that there's a new patient ready to admit to room three. A glance backwards when she reaches the door shows her the kid in the bed seems barely conscious again, drifting into what she hopes is some kind of restful sleep. It seems to her like he needs it, badly.
Mac isn't sleeping but he would prefer it if he were. He's cold and he wishes again that he had that hoodie with him, could wrap himself in soft, bright green fabric, the logo of a hockey team he couldn't name a single player of splashed over his chest like a habit you inherit from your parents. Over the last several minutes, he feels like he's come back to himself somewhat, but exists now in that in-between stage of being on medication - the regular kind that he doesn't have an adverse reaction to. It's that place where Mac is aware of what he's doing and saying but unable to keep the tight rein on it he usually does. It's the reason there are tears leaking slowly down his face now, causing the hospital-issue pillow under his cheek to grow damp.
It's the reason he hadn't been able to hold back the question, once he realized the person the nurses had called for him was not the person he so desperately wanted.
Where's Jack?
He can still hear his own voice, pathetic and thin and whiny, and the dead pause that followed before his father answered, asking, "Dalton? You had the hospital call me so you could ask me where Dalton is?"
Not that Mac had meant for the hospital to call James at all, but that was entirely beside the point.
"He's not here," he'd said, words slipping out tripping over each other.
"Why would he be there?"
"Dad." It had been the only word he could find in his vocabulary to make it out of his mouth in the moment, a plea carried on a breath, and he can still hear the sigh that had rushed in a whoosh of air down the phone. The voice James had answered in had gone firm and patient in a way it usually didn't, not since Mac was young any way, the tone he'd always used to explain parts of the world Mac didn't understand or hadn't encountered yet.
"Look. Of course Dalton isn't there, and I'm not about to call him and tell him he's supposed to be. It's his job to keep you safe on missions. You're not on a mission right now and, since you ran yourself into heat stroke, you've been called off your assignment tomorrow. It's not his job to babysit you in the hospital or hold your hand when you get yourself hurt like this."
Mac hadn't been able to respond. Not until the nurse had already taken the phone. He told her no when she'd asked if there was anyone else to call, despite the deep, resonating loneliness. Even after she's left, Mac still isn't sure who he'd been talking to when he'd said 'sorry'.
Of course Jack isn't there. Mac remembers now what he hadn't been able to before, the reason there's a void beside his bed where his partner should be, would be and has been every time he's been hurt. He's Jack's job, in more ways than James knows. He's an assignment, a job, an informant, and imagining anything more is wishful thinking born of what an old partner had once disdainfully referred to as 'blatant daddy issues'. The anger at how soundly he's been used and deceived flares up again from this morning, but Mac is too tired to keep it alive, and it dies, until all that's left behind is confusion and hurt.
As the day wears on, Mac's temperature continues to wear down. They stop the medication, and his head clears most of the way up. By the time he's authorized to go home, it's fast approaching evening. Once he's strong enough, and sure he won't say anything he shouldn't, he calls Bozer to come pick him up.
It aches deep and guilty when he's able to tell the truth about what happened to him for once, and Bozer smiles a tight, plastic smile that says, as clear as if he'd shouted it, I don't believe you.
Jack is distracted.
He's managed not to think about it for much of the day as he and Riley did drills on tailing and evasion. She's getting good at it too - he's been scaling down how easy he's taking it on her, and she keeps shaking him far before she should have, staying on him even though sometimes he slips into his training and uses a maneuver she's not supposed to be advanced enough to keep following through yet. If this keeps up, Riley is going to be one of the best tactical drivers Jack has ever seen, and the thought makes him glow warm with pride.
They're at a park now, taking a break, and Jack is supposed to be giving her a few more surveillance pointers, but he keeps checking his phone. Eventually, he realizes he was supposed to be talking, and the silence has grown long and pointed around him, and when he looks up, Riley is staring at him.
"It's Mac," he says in a sigh, answering her unasked question. "He won't answer me."
"Things are weird with you two," Riley tells him frankly, blunt and straight to the point. "I can feel it. What the hell is going on?"
"We got in a…" Fight isn't even the right word. Fight would imply Jack had taken some active part in it, or at least understood what was going on. So it hadn't been a fight But it also wasn't just another one of the moments where Jack steps wrong and accidentally comes up against some part of Mac he didn't know was raw and wounded, jabbed his sometimes-lacking tact into a hidden bruise. Those moments pass too quickly to hardly address them, like Mac is too embarrassed to admit they happened at all. This had been different. This, continuing out over days, is different.
"So, what did he say, then?" is what Riley asks when Jack haltingly gets out as much of the story as he feels he's able to tell her. "Like, what were his exact words before he left the car?"
Jack is a trained operative whose memory is often relied on to keep them alive and more than that, he couldn't escape reliving that moment if he tried. He's been chewing on it night after night, searching for the moment things went wrong. So he recounts it for Riley, the odd anger that had surged in Mac and the words that had heralded its arrival.
Sorry to disappoint you, Jack, but if you want to get a crack at him, then you're gonna have to do it some other way.
Good luck finding someone else to answer your questions about the Director.
Just go, Jack.
"He knows."
"What?" Riley's statement came so quickly and surely that it takes Jack by surprise, leaving him feeling half-winded.
"Our investigation. It's obvious. He knows. I told you he'd figure it out, and it sound to me like he just did."
Well shit. Maybe he'd figured that out himself too and just didn't want to admit it, because it makes everything so much worse, so much more complicated. Jack had wanted to be able to choose how to tell Mac, but he supposes that would've required him to figure out what he would've said or done in the first place, and now it's all blown up in his face and he doesn't know how to make it right.
Riley looks at him long and hard and says, as she gets up to throw the wrapper from her sandwich into the trash can and start back towards their cars, "You'd better figure that out. Getting him through this is going to take all of us."
She leaves for her meeting with Matty to go over some of her notes on the files, see if any of it will turn up anything when ran against that name Jack had heard at the end of the review. Jack himself starts off for home, pausing in his car to check his messages in the vain hope that maybe Mac has answered. There's no message from Mac, but to his surprise there is one from the Director. It's short and to the point, leaving him with more questions than he'd had before he read it.
Your team is called off. Mission reassigned.
There's no reply when he texts back to ask for details, and Matty doesn't have any when he calls her either. Still nothing from Mac.
Guilt is turning into worry when he gets a phone call from Bozer, and he's back in his car speeding towards the house before his partner's roommate has finished saying 'heat stroke'. It's a new record for how fast he's gotten from his apartment to Mac's place, and he doesn't want to think about what kind of traffic laws he left in tatters behind him. Bozer is waiting out front when he gets there, arms folded across his chest, face twisted in a way Jack has hardly ever seen out of him. He looks worried, and on top of that, kind of pissed.
"Heat stroke?" Jack asks as he approaches down the walkway. "From a run?"
"That's what he told me anyway." It's immediately obvious that Bozer doesn't believe it, and Jack doesn't know whether to buy it himself. "I have to go, the class I'm TA'ing is tonight. I'd have just stayed, but he told me to just go, and he's not taking no for an answer. But I'm not leaving him by himself like this either. Do you have him?"
It's said in the same kind of bold, challenging tone Jack remembers from the day they met, almost verging on hostile in a way he hasn't heard out of Bozer in a long time. Rather than take any kind of offense at that, Jack instead nods, and says, "I've got him." He turns to go inside but is stopped when Bozer's voice sounds again.
"Hey."
Turning to look at him, Jack waits.
"Whatever the hell happened with you two, fix it." It's an order, from someone with no ground on which to be giving Jack orders, but is doing so anyway, and daring Jack to call him on it. "I haven't seen him like this since you got here and I don't like it. So whatever happened… Fix it. I'm serious." Without waiting for any kind of reply, Bozer whirls around and leaves, getting into his car and starting the engine.
Going feels not unlike walking into a minefield - and Jack would know. The house itself is quiet and empty, Mac found outside on the back porch, slumped in one of the wooden deck chairs they have out by the fireplace. He looks worn and sick and he's- Jack's breath catches in his chest when he sees what Mac is wearing. His legs, curled half up onto the chair with him, are clad in grey sweatpants, but what Jack is focused on is the sweater Mac is wearing. He's got Jack's Dallas Stars hoodie on, the vibrant green fabric serving to further wash out his ashen face, the Jack-sized garment just big enough on him to make him look that much smaller.
Once he remembers how to breathe, Jack walks over and sits down in the chair next to Mac's. For a long moment, he is very quiet and very still, breathing in the rapidly-cooling air in forcedly steady inhales and exhales.
"You're investigating him." The words are dull and resigned, almost completely toneless. Flat. Dead.
It's pointless to ask who Mac is talking about, and Jack just nods, clears his throat, and says as steadily as he can, "Yes. I am."
"You and Riley and Matty. You're investigating him, all three of you."
"Yes."
A longer, heavier silence. Jack risks looking to the side and sees Mac has curled tighter in on himself, that the hoodie, unzipped, is pulled around his chest, his hands gripping the edges and tugging it closer like he's trying to hug himself with it. It's enough to break a person's heart, looking at that, and Jack wishes he could take it all back. All of it right from the start, when Matty asked him to do this to begin with. As soon as he thinks it, though, he knows it's not true. This needs to be done. For Mac's sake more than anyone's, there was never any other way.
"It's okay to be mad at me," is what Jack eventually finds the strength to say. "I'd be mad at me. Hell, I am mad at me."
"I'm not." It's quiet and sounds almost surprised when he says it.
"What?" Jack definitely is surprised, and not as reassured by that as he could be.
"I was, maybe. Tried to be. Thought I could be. But I'm not. I just- I just wish-" Mac laughs, wet and rueful, and Jack hopes it was actually a laugh and not the sob it sounded like it choked off into, halfway through. "I just wish you were a little less good at your job."
It's going to be a chilly night, the opposite of the excessively warm day that has landed them here to begin with, but that's got nothing to do with the cold that's settled into Jack's lungs, lungs that don't cooperate fast enough for him to say anything before Mac goes on, in that halting, hitching voice.
"It's the job, I get it. I'm the job. You're investigating the Director, my father, and you needed- needed information and I was the one you could get it from, so getting-" He stops like he's run out of breath, panting for a few empty seconds before starting again, Jack once more too slow to stop him. "Getting close to me was the best way to-"
The reality of what Mac is doing washes over Jack like someone has walked across his grave. Mac is rationalizing himself around the exact wrong conclusion, talking himself into understanding, logically and practically, that Jack had never cared about him at all, and had a good reason for lying and pretending he had.
"Stop it." Jack can't help saying it, impulsive and loud, and though he hates himself for the little flinch, the slight duck of Mac's chin down into the hoodie he wears, he couldn't stand to listen to any more of it. "You've…" Jack shakes his head, looking for what to say here, the magic words that will make it right. "You've got it so wrong I don't even know where to start, kid."
Now, Jack actually gets up out of the chair. This doesn't feel like a conversation for which he should be reclining. He crosses the scant space separating them and crouches down next to where Mac is still curled in his own deck chair, looking away. It gives Mac the high ground, something that may help him feel a little more in control here, and allows Jack to act on the instinct he's been feeling since he first set eyes on Mac, looking drained and fragile, the instinct to be close. He takes a deep breath, forces himself to stay calm, and starts talking.
"Matty asked me here because I was someone she could trust to help her figure out what was going on at DXS. We brought Riley on because we needed someone with her skillset that we could count on to keep things quiet. And yeah, we came to the conclusion that the most likely source of the errors that keep happening, the things that get overlooked, the miscommunications, all the stuff that's done or not done or done badly that keep putting you and everyone else in danger, is the Director."
His knees are starting to ache somewhat from his awkward position on the patio floor next to Mac's chair, but Jack isn't about to move. Not when doing so would put distance between them, in a moment where he can't afford to risk that. Not if he wants Mac to understand, to really hear him.
"Keeping you alive, that's my job with DXS. Investigating your dad, yeah, that's my job with Matty. But caring about you? Taking care of you?" There's a faint stutter of the half of the hoodie logo Jack can see, the half not tucked under the other side, and Mac still won't look at him. Maybe can't.
There are precious few moments in life where you know you are at a turning point at the exact moment that you reach it. This is one of them. What Jack says next is going to have a massive impact on both of them, on the future of their partnership, and undoubtedly on Mac as a whole. He doesn't know what he's doing, can't figure out how to say this, and oddly finds himself missing his mother. Kathleen Dalton always seemed to know exactly what her children needed to hear when they needed to hear it, and Jack has no idea how she'd done it.
Jack wishes he could call her now, get her on the phone and ask her how she did it. He wishes he could hear her voice and tell her, momma, I need your advice, see, I got a boy of my own now and he needs me, and I don't know what to do. The thought washes over him, imagining saying to her, I hurt him. I didn't mean to, and it couldn't have been avoided, but I did, I hurt him, and I don't know how to make it right. Please, tell me what to say to make it right. But Kathleen isn't here, and Jack is, so he's going to have to try to make his own way through.
"None of that is a lie and none of it is a cover. Honestly, the rest of it would probably be easier if you meant less to me. I'd have told you sooner, for one, because I wouldn't have paid as much attention to what it was gonna do to you to find out, how it could hurt you."
Taking a risk, Jack pushes himself off the ground, knees aching as he stands. Mac flinches and curls tighter into himself, and even as he feels guilty and sick at the sight, Jack thinks maybe this could be a good thing. Teaching him that someone bigger and stronger than you didn't always have to be a threat could be a good thing. It could help teach him that sometimes it means something else. Still bracing most of his weight on the ground, unsure how much the chair could take, Jack props himself against the arm rest of where Mac sits, and keeps talking.
"I meant what I said, y'know." His voice is soft and carries easy over the still air. "When I was standing on that pressure plate. I don't regret you. The only thing about this I regret is that, because we couldn't tell you, you figured it out yourself and thought our investigation meant I was using you to get to him, that I didn't really care about you just for you." There's still one more thing left to say, maybe the most important thing. "I'm sorry, kid. This shouldn't have come out the way it did, but it did, and it hurt you, and I'm sorry."
Slowly, hesitantly, giving Mac plenty of time to pull away or indicate that he doesn't want to be touched, Jack reaches out. Mac, while obviously noticing, stays still and lets him, Jack's hand coming to rest on the side of his neck, holding on gently. It's a surprise when, in response to no directional force on Jack's part, Mac suddenly pulls himself over, sitting up and turning to face him, then leaning back against the other side of the chair. His head lands against Jack's side, above his hip, hand leaving the side of the Dallas Stars hoodie to tangle fingers in the hem of Jack's shirt.
For the space of a few surprised heartbeats, Jack doesn't so much as breathe. He stays perfectly still, then, noticing the hitching of the slumped shoulders, slides his hand up from Mac's neck to his hair, a light, protective hold. Incrementally, Mac starts to relax, until his body is limp, held up by the structure of the chair and by Jack, whose other arm drapes down to press a palm against his curved, shaking back.
"I'm sorry," Jack says again, barely above a whisper, bent down over the golden head braced against the bottom of his ribcage. All the strength has fled Mac, but one big, hard shudder runs through him anyway. Jack sweeps his thumb over Mac's hair, brushing the shell of his ear, a reassurance along with another apology, this one silent. At this point, Jack feels like he could almost collapse himself, guilt and worry present but paled in the relief that this hasn't broken them, that this inquiry into this toxic, dangerous man hasn't cost him something precious and irreplaceable.
"We're gonna have to talk about this tomorrow, okay? The investigation, and what it means," Jack says eventually, for himself as much as for Mac, a reminder they both need that this isn't over yet. He waits for the nod, the shifting of the face still pressed into his shirt, the ruffle of hair against his palm, before continuing, impossibly gentler, saying, "The reason I didn't get a phone call when my partner was in the hospital today." Another, more hesitant nod, like Mac had maybe thought Jack forgot about that - as if he ever could.
Right now, though, it can wait. Mac, though obviously weak and still sick, is in no immediate danger, and the investigation can be tabled, at least for tonight.
Above them, the first star of the night has struggled through the light pollution and industrial smog surrounding the heat island of Los Angeles. Jack looks up at it, that pinprick of glittering hope that's forced its way through near-insurmountable darkness, and makes a wish.
