This chapter was a beast to write, but here it is now, and I hope you enjoy it! Feels like I've finally got my mojo back and I am so relieved.
I really gotta say - I am so excited for what's coming next.
(chapter title from sleeping at last's 'goes on and on'.)
It's a nice day. Even compared to the standard for Los Angeles, it's a nice day. The sun, rising with the lengthening morning, shines unimpeded by the faint dusting of clouds that are scudding across the sky, shepherded along by a steady breeze. Riley has the windows of her car rolled down as she navigates the residential area surrounding Mac's street. She'd opened them as soon as she'd left the freeway, hoping the cross-wind would create some kind of placebo effect on her mind, sweep away at least some of the cloying haze of agitation clinging to her.
It doesn't really work. There's a lot to be worried about, all of it too heavy to be carried out on a steady rush of fresh air. On Riley's phone, tossed in her bag in the passenger's seat, is the cryptic message from Mac that had summoned her to his house this morning, claiming that there was 'something important' he needed to discuss with all of them. That alone would have been enough to set her nerves on edge and twist a faint nausea in her gut.
Even so, it isn't just that alone. Despite the odd text and the fact that she hasn't the faintest idea what he meant by it, Riley's mind is more occupied with something else, something that's been weighing hard on her since yesterday. What she's most concerned with, the topic that won't leave her thoughts for longer than a moment, causing the tension in her jaw and the occasional skip in her heart, is Matty.
When Riley had last seen the woman the night before, she'd been looking much better. Under the watchful eye of exfil Sierra November team lead Lucia Sosa, Matty had seemed to recover fairly quickly. Lucia ran some kind of test out of a kit that Riley didn't know the purpose of - and wasn't about to ask, with everything else going on around her - and the results in combination with Matty's assessed symptoms had led to a quick diagnosis of what she'd been dosed with. From there, Lucia had given her something and followed it up with a lot of bottled water and a recommended check-in with Medical.
The suggestion of Medical had caused brand new concerns for Riley - she couldn't be totally sure, but she'd have been pretty confident in guessing by this point that keeping Director MacGyver out of the loop on this sort of thing was pretty high on everyone's priorities lists. Somehow, it just didn't seem like a good idea at all for him to know about what happened to Matty on that mission. What almost happened to Mac. Better for everyone if he was kept out of it.
The problem was if the Deputy Director were brought into Medical after this sort of event… There would be no keeping that quiet. It's not like Mac's emergency contact paperwork, which had been easy enough to sweep under the rug given the combination of the Director's general disregard for most daily goings-on at DXS and the man's less than stellar reputation amongst that department in particular. A mission follow-up visit for the Deputy Director herself? No way would the Director miss that.
Riley had chewed on her reservations regarding that plan until she could no longer stand it. Just when she'd been about to interrupt the quiet, serious conversation between Lucia and a significantly recovered Matty, she'd caught part of it that stopped her in her tracks. Lucia mentioned offhandedly, as if it were simply a given, that she would send the on-call doctor from Medical to Matty's office to be ready for her when she got there. She added that the on-call today was, according to what she'd looked up on the tablet in her hands, the kind carried by all DXS exfil teams to reference necessary information on the fly, Dr. Adrien Fitzpatrick, and they could be trusted to keep things on the down-low.
When she'd mentioned this, none of her exfil teammates had so much as batted an eyelid. They seemed to completely take Lucia's plan in stride without question of who they might want to be keeping things 'on the down-low' from. Not once did anyone specifically request that Sierra keep this incident from the Director's attention, and the fact that Matty didn't bring it up even when she was fully lucid again led Riley to believe that these people are already on their side.
It was a relief to be able to witness that in action. For all that Riley knew, practically speaking, that they had people in their corner, a growing faction within DXS ready to support Matty's leadership once she manages to get the Director removed, it's been a purely academic concept. Until that exfil trip home. Seeing it in person was different. Good different. The kind of different that makes Riley think that not only can they gut this place from the inside out, but that there will be something left over afterwards that they can build with.
That had been what she tried to hold onto, when she got home last night, and when she got up this morning. It had helped, but it hadn't worked completely, and the closer Riley gets now to Mac's house and whatever new calamity might be waiting for her there, it helps less and less. Relief and determination melted away from where it had been taking the edge off her fear until all that was left was the fear.
Riley parks with the distracted, autopilot movements of someone who has done it a thousand times before and has far more important things on their mind. And what's on her mind is Matty, still, Matty who is - judging by the car parked in front of Riley's on the street - waiting for her down in that house with Mac, and Bozer, and Jack. Riley knows she needs to go down there, go inside that house and confront whatever is in there, whatever condition Mac and Matty will each be in, but for a long moment she sits frozen, hand still on the gear shift, light dappling through the leaves above her and across the steering wheel.
Even though Matty had rapidly been on the mend the last Riley had seen here, there's still something about having witnessed her in that condition at all that's Left Riley unnerved and disquieted and almost afraid of seeing her again. The woman had been so… unsteady, and that's a word Riley had never thought was possible to apply to Matty of all people. She'd always seemed, in a word, untouchable. Even Mac didn't seem like that, with his plans that always worked in ways Riley couldn't understand and didn't think should be possible.
More times than Riley cares to reflect on, Mac has come home to California with bruises and stitches, blood dotting the collar of his shirt or flecked in the hair behind his ear. Mac is a lot of things, sometimes seems like something beyond human, but he isn't untouchable. Neither is Jack, though Riley had often tried to tell herself he was. She knows he isn't stone. She's seen him bleed. But Matty…
If they can get to Matty, what hope do any of the rest of them have?
The thought catches sharp in Riley's chest and she can't stand the feeling a moment longer, so she flings the car door open and steps out. She stands beside her car, the light wind lifting strands of hair and tickling the back of her neck, and takes in a deep breath. Closing her eyes, Riley releases the breath slowly, then turns toward the house.
Just as she'd thought from the cars parked outside, Riley is the last to join them. Bozer answers the door before she'd had the chance to knock, clearly having been watching out the window when she'd pulled up. He smiles, but it's unnatural and it doesn't reach his eyes. Mac, Jack, and Matty are waiting for them in the living room.
Matty looks like herself again. Granted, a version of herself who maybe didn't get any sleep last night, but she looks like herself, and it eases some of the tension in Riley's shoulders. Unfortunately, the relief doesn't last very long. Not when she moves from looking at Matty, serious but determined, to looking at Mac. Mac doesn't look much like himself at all.
There's a recorder in Mac's hands, jittering in the air as the knee his elbow is propped on bounces rapidly up and down. He's staring at it, not looking at anybody else in the room, barely acknowledging when Riley sits down at the end of the couch.
"He found it on the counter this morning," Bozer explains. He doesn't sit, he stands at the side of the couch next to Mac, arms folded tightly across his chest and mouth creased into a freaked out frown. "It was just sitting there, when we got up. I didn't see it last night when I went to bed, so sometime during the night someone must have…" Though he doesn't finish the sentence, nobody prompts him to. They don't need him to. It's clear what must have happened.
Still without contributing a word to the conversation, Mac holds the recorder up in the air, more delicately and with more trepidation than when he handles bombs - Riley would know, she's seen him do it - and he presses 'play'. The song fills the air, chilling it sharply, until Mac hits another button, stopping it and letting a thick, pressing silence take its place.
"He really had to go and bring my man Cash into this?" It's Jack that breaks it, with a joking question that falls flat and elicits not even a slight chuckle from anybody else in the room. He doesn't keep trying, which is how Riley knows he's really rattled.
"Is there anything else on the recording?" Matty asks, and Mac shakes his head.
"We played it all the way through," Bozer tells her. He's looking at the device in his roommate's hand like it's alive and threatening. Like it might explode and kill them all. "There's no talking, no weird feedback, nothing else. Just that song. It was paused right before the one part when we found it, the. You know, the- 'you can run on for a long time', that bit. Kinda felt like the whole message was basically right there, y'know."
"Hell of a message," Jack says. He's sitting on the coffee table across from Riley and Mac, Matty in an armchair to the side, all of them looking at the recorder or, holding it, Mac. "Pretty clear though, I'll give him that."
"Him?" Riley can't help but cut in. "So we're thinking this is probably-"
"Murdoc, yes. After what he said to Mac when their paths crossed in San Miguel, it's obvious he's got something of an obsession. It's possible it's someone else, obviously, I'm sure you've got no shortage of enemies given your work at DXS-" Matty looks at Mac as she says it, and he confirms with one short nod, "-but given the note that was left with the student who was killed in Sarajevo, it seems like his style."
There's a short, meandering conversation that follows, discussion of Murdoc and the work Matty has been doing to track down as much information as possible on the internationally wanted hit man they've figured him out to be. It's agreed that despite the appearance that there isn't anything further on the recording, Riley is going to work with one of the techs from analytics to be sure there's nothing odd in there they simply can't hear. As involved as she is in the discussion of what is undeniably a threat, left presumably by a man from whom a threat is a very dangerous thing indeed, Riley can't help but be somewhat distracted too. Because the person the threat was obviously aimed for hasn't been participating at all. He's just sitting there, leg bouncing rapidly, staring off at nothing with his jaw set in a hard line.
All in all, Riley is pretty satisfied with the plan of attack they come up with. She's feeling far better than she had been on the drive over, better than she's felt since things went so badly south the day before. It doesn't last.
"That's not it," Mac says suddenly. It's the first thing he's said since Riley arrived at the house, and it stops the room dead in its tracks. "Or that's not the only it. It's not really the main reason why I needed you guys here."
After the initial shock wears off, Riley has to admit she probably should have seen that coming. This is the sort of thing he probably could have told them about over the phone, and as upsetting as the recording would be to find left in your house overnight by some unhinged contract killer, it doesn't explain Mac's behavior. He's not acting like somebody dealing with a nightmare. He's acting like somebody walking death row.
Looking around the room shows Riley that nobody else seems to have any more of an idea what's about to come out of Mac's mouth than she does. Even Bozer seems mystified. It makes Riley anxious, every pinging nerve that had finally calmed down amping right back up again, worse than before.
"There's something I haven't told you guys." Mac's voice sounds odd. It sounds stiff and empty but strained, like he's forcing everything he can out of it. Scraping it clean and gutting it until all that's left are the words and none of whatever is that's behind them, crowded up in his chest and caught in his throat. It's not quite working, though, pieces of it escaping around the seams, leaking out into the unsteady words. "Something important. Something you're gonna think I should have told you a long time ago, something you might hate me for not telling you until now, and you'd- you'd be right to. But I need to tell you now so please just let me get through telling you before anyone starts yelling."
A pin dropping in that room would have been deafening. Mac won't look at His leg has stopped bouncing, knee going still from where it had been jittering erratically before. Sitting in his lap, Mac's hands are twisted together so tight they shake slightly and his elbows are tucked close to his sides, making him seem small. The thumb of his right hand scrubs over his left knuckles repeatedly, pressing down hard. Riley's heart skips in her chest, her own hands balling into fists, nails biting into her palms. Bozer looks like he's about to pass out, and Jack's face is creased in a frown so deep it makes her face hurt to look at it. The only one who looks like she's remotely handling this well is Matty, whose expression is completely impassive, blankly professional.
And so Mac tells them about Jonah Walsh.
Soared straight past scared, Mac sits there, terrified, and tells them the whole story, from the beginning up to yesterday, everything he knows. His voice and his hands shake as he talks about his father's partner, his father's best friend, a man named Jonah who is out there somewhere and who gets joy out of toying with a man he'd once called 'brother'. Mac tells them, staring at the wall over the chair Matty sits in, that they'd only met a few times, when he was very young. James had been gone a lot even then, and he'd rarely brought friends around.
Then, around sixteen years ago, James and Walsh's partnership had imploded, and Walsh had gone completely off the rails. He'd turned sides - or had always been rogue right from the start, Mac has never been completely clear on that - and disappeared. It had become beyond a personal vendetta for James. Right from the moment he'd learned the truth, he'd been completely obsessed. It was the reason he'd taken off on Mac's birthday when he'd been just ten, tore around the world chasing after Walsh for eighteen months before finally coming back and throwing himself into DXS with renewed fervor. It was their resources he'd needed, and so he'd advanced his career at the agency with single-minded focus, until he'd been promoted to Director and handed free reign over DXS and every tool at its disposal.
Mac was brought into his father's personal mission to find Walsh as soon as he'd joined DXS after college. That news is enough to grit Riley's teeth even harder, and she's afraid she's going to crack something when she hears what came next, how after the death of Alfred Peña things had kicked up to a new degree of intensity. Mac describes with a renewed tremble in his voice how James had used his first partner and training agent's death to effectively mark the end of his training period, and after that, he'd been in the deep end whether he'd wanted to be there or not.
"For a while there he was just sort of… messing with us," Mac says with a soft, humorless snort. A shiver rolls through his shoulders. Nobody else says a word as he swallows and clears his throat, voice fractionally stronger when he keeps going. "Letting us get almost there, one time we caught him on a security camera and he looked right at it and waved. It drove… It drove dad wild, I never saw him so angry in my life. I think he about passed out when we saw it the first time. Then one time we got a little too close, dad swears up down and sideways he saw Walsh in person, on a bridge in Venice, and it must have spooked him because he disappeared after that, we didn't get a single hint of him for a long time."
It had been, Mac explains, shortly before the infiltration into DXS had been uncovered. Then, with the chaos of that nightmare, and how deep underground Walsh went, no indication of his whereabouts resurfaced until the early days of Jack being onboarded as Mac's new partner. Once the heat died down sufficiently, Walsh must have decided it was time to throw James off permanently, and the way he'd chosen to do that was the death of his son.
Mac's voice, as he explains his theory on the return of a man he'd once been introduced to as 'Uncle Jonah', is stone. Riley swallows a convulsive cry of shock and horror before it can jolt its way out of her chest. Pacing behind the couch, Bozer's not quite so successful, and Mac flinches at the small, frightened noise he makes.
Walsh was more cautious after the close call, taking far fewer chances, and it had made James increasingly frustrated as time went on. Mac explains that there had been a day, early in their partnership, that Jack had come down to where he was working in Whittacker and Tam's lab and asked what puzzle he'd been thinking about. The mission they'd just returned from, he tells Jack directly, though he still doesn't look the man in the eye, his focus landing somewhere around Jack's shoulder, had been one where James thought there was a concrete lead in the area. Mac didn't find anything, James had lectured him about it for fifteen minutes straight before ordering Mac out of his office, and that's what he'd been upset about when Jack found him.
"You were there, in Budapest," Mac tells Riley, gaze skating over the top of her head. "When we went to extract that Canadian engineer, Libby Parker. There was solid intel that Dr. Parker came into contact with Walsh."
"The pictures in the car," interrupts Jack, the first person besides Mac to speak since the story began. "When we were waiting for exfil, that's what you were showing her. You wanted to see if she could pick Walsh out of a lineup. When I asked, you told me it was for a 'side project' and that's what you were working on, wasn't it? Trying to see if she could ID Walsh."
"She couldn't," Mac confirms. He turns his left hand over, the thumb that had been scrubbing at his knuckles now digging deep into his palm. "But she picked out somebody who was a close contact of his, and we got some decent intel from that, so it wasn't a complete failure."
It turns out, Riley comes to understand as Mac keeps talking, growing somewhat hoarse as he forces himself to keep going with obvious effort, that there have been a hundred times, a hundred little times where Walsh had been just around the corner of what they were dealing with and Mac had never told them. Not once had he breathed a word of it. Walsh had been the trump card that had backed up Mac's threat to resign if he'd been forced to carry a gun, and he'd been the reason James had initially wiped Mac's medical file. Jack had overheard the name during that argument, though he'd forgotten it in the haze of the argument he had with Mac immediately afterwards.
Riley can see the guilt in Jack as he remembers this, nodding slowly along. She can't really find it in herself to fault him for it. A lot had gone on that day and in the week following, and they were all juggling so much that it was hard to keep any of it straight. If Mac notices Jack's expression, he doesn't betray so, though she can't imagine she did. For him to have seen the look on Jack's face, he'd have had to be looking at Jack's face, which he isn't doing. He's not looking at any of their faces, and it's this that worries Riley maybe more than anything.
"And then Bosnia happened." Mac sounds exhausted. It makes Riley want to interrupt, to tell him to stop talking, shoo him away into his room to rest or into her car so she can drive them both down to the pier where the only thing they have to worry about is keeping their hair out of their eyes when the sea wind whips through it. She knows she can't, though, knows they have to hear this and somehow also knows that Mac needs to say it, so she purses her mouth to keep any interruptions shut inside and lets him keep going. "Zachary Wright, the kid who died there, the note left with him. Dad was sure that was Walsh."
"I was never allowed access to the debriefs with Agents Luther and Paiz," Matty says. It's clear from a glance around the room that they'd all wanted to interject there, but Matty had been the only one able to corral the words together to actually do so. "When I asked, the Director just said he 'had it handled' and walked out of the room."
"He explicitly ordered me not to tell you anything about it," Mac tells her, though he still doesn't look her in the eye. He's looking down at his own hands, shoulders slumped and chin dipped towards his chest. "It was always… very clear that Walsh wasn't something I was ever allowed to talk about to anyone, but that time he went out of his way to make sure I knew not to say anything to you about it. He interviewed Alicia Paiz and Chanelle Luther himself with a sketch artist, didn't even tell me what came out of that interview. I think he shut me out because I told him he was wrong, and he knew it was true."
"How did you know it wasn't Walsh who'd left the note?" Once again it's Matty who's found both the words and the composure to get them out coherently, and Riley is grateful.
"The way it was written. The name it used." Mac shakes his head. His eyes drift out across the room and out the sliding doors onto the deck. Riley follows his gaze but can't tell what he's looking at, or indeed if he's really looking at anything at all. The look on his face is distant, and she's got the feeling that whatever he's thinking about, it's not here. "The note said 'MacGyver' and Walsh… Walsh always called him Jay. But he wouldn't listen to me, and I'd bet anything that when he was gone for the next week, he was in Sarajevo, mining for anything he could find on Walsh. He didn't tell me what was going on that time before he left. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't, but that's usually what he's doing when he takes off like that."
The sound of a short, tense breath huffed out through gritted teeth and the sharp turn of Bozer's pacing tells Riley exactly how he feels about James MacGyver's habit of taking off. Mac's knee takes up moving again, jolting up and down faster than it had been before. He reminds Riley of a spring coiled tighter and tighter, and she hopes he can get through the rest of whatever he has to say before he coils so tight he snaps.
Luckily, he does. Talking faster and in shorter, clipped sentences that are a far cry from the usual excited ramble Riley has grown fond of hearing when Mac really gets going. He finishes the long, exhausting exhumation of what's been lurking behind and underneath so much more of her time at DXS than she ever could have predicted by circling back to the reason they need to know in the first place. The investigation. Mac confesses that he'd left things out when telling them about his past missions, anything to do with Walsh and the Director's single-minded drive to smoke him out once and for all.
It makes sense, when Riley reflects on it. She remembers going through files with him, watching the odd microexpressions that flickered across his face, the tension in his jaw that came and went around strange pauses and fragmented answers to questions she had the feeling Mac didn't want to address at all. At the time she'd chalked it up to the fraught history he had with partnerships before Jack and the overall stress of helping them investigate her father. Now she knows better and she can see it plain as if she'd known it at the time - the way Mac had been self-editing in real time, censoring and clipping carefully around the edges of what he couldn't tell them.
"But I had to tell you now," Mac says. He sounds tired, speaking in the voice of a man who's just run a marathon or gone days without sleep. Years without rest. "After what happened to you, Matty," his eyes flick up for just a fraction of a moment, making a split second's guilty eye contact for the first time since they've been here in this awful, seemingly endless meeting, "I couldn't stand the thought that I could be keeping something from you guys that could get one of you hurt. No matter who told me to, or- or what my life might look like if I disobeyed."
A heavy silence falls over the house. Bozer's stopped moving, his pacing footsteps stilling behind the couch. There's a tilt to Matty's head that Riley's learned means she's processing a lot of information really quickly. Jack's hands, braced at the edge of the coffee table he's still sitting on, are gripping the wood so hard his knuckles have paled. And Mac… Mac looks like he's about to have a panic attack or simply jump up and run at any moment.
"What does he look like?" Riley asks, the question sudden and unexpected even to herself. She couldn't help it. Sitting there while the specter of a shattered partnership and an obsession crushing the air out of every pair of lungs in the room just wasn't an option any longer. She had to do something, and this is the first thing she'd thought of. "I mean, we should probably know who it is we're dealing with, right?"
Nodding, Mac separates his hands with some effort. One goes to the back of his neck, yanking momentarily at the ends of his hair, the other covering his eyes. Still nodding, he says, "Right. Yeah, just- Just a minute." In a moment, he's up and then he's gone, and the space left behind where he'd been sitting beside her yawns loud and empty.
If he hadn't been given the excuse to leave, even just for the length of time it takes to retrieve something from his room, Mac doesn't know what he would have done. Sitting there in the living room, it had been getting harder and harder to keep any amount of composure at all. Maybe Riley had picked up on it, and that's why she'd intervened, but whatever the reason, Mac is relieved beyond words. His chest catches around breaths that burn his throat as he opens his closet, craning his neck towards a top shelf he rarely looks at.
Focusing on the object he's looking for is good. It gives him a direction for the frenetic energy buzzing in his fingertips, the attention that would otherwise go to the question rattling around his head on a loop.
What did I do? What did I do? What did I do?
There's a box, high up on that shelf, shoved off towards the corner where he hasn't touched it in months if not longer. Pulling it forward and tipping it carefully down so he can reach it without it toppling and spilling its contents everywhere, Mac gingerly sets it down on his bed. There's not much in it, which makes locating what he's looking for simple and quick. Before taking off back to the living room, Mac allows himself a moment to stand there alone and look at it, a slightly faded rectangle of stiff, glossy paper.
It's a picture from a long time ago, one Mac could never really explain why he'd saved. James doesn't know he has it, and Mac shudders to think of the reaction he'd have if he ever found out. It's the only photo he's ever seen of his father and his partner, from before things had gone so unbelievably wrong. There's writing on the back that he glances at, words he's read a hundred times over in a handwriting he doesn't recognize but knows the owner of thanks to one three letter clue, a nickname he's never heard of anyone else ever using.
Jay & Jonah, it reads, ballpoint pen that's nearly worn completely through in the loops of the twin J's where the scratch of the ink had lightened off the page somewhat, Cliff's retirement, '93.
On the front are two men, one lean-built with a mop of curly, dark blond hair, hand slightly blurred where it was captured mid-grab onto the fabric of the second, taller and stockier man's shirt. There's an arm slung around his neck in a friendly kind of half-hug, half-headlock, and Mac can see the moment as if he'd been there: someone calling out for their attention, Jonah pulling James over with him with an exuberance matching the wide grin on his square-jawed face, nearly knocking him off balance in the process. The people in that picture are young, and happy, and it makes Mac sick to look at them.
Walking back out into the living room and sitting back down on the couch, the picture in Mac's hands feels as delicate and friable, as lethal as any bomb he's ever handled. There's some low conversation happening between Jack and Matty that pauses when he returns but resumes as he hands the photo to Riley. She looks at it briefly, eyes scanning the image, then passes it off to Bozer, standing behind the couch by her shoulder.
The talking continues, fuzzing out for a moment as the rush of his own pulse surges in Mac's ears, and before he's realized what he's doing consciously enough to stop it, he's reached out and grabbed onto Riley's hand. The static in his head doesn't go away - if anything it surges fractionally louder - and so instead of letting go, Mac holds on tighter. It feels almost like he's trying to tell her something that he can't even understand himself, shaking fingers digging into the back of her hand until he's worried he might be hurting her. Except that when he goes to relax, to pry his hand away, she won't let him. When Mac tries to loosen his grip, Riley tightens hers, and he loves her for it.
In that moment, Mac loves her so much it feels like his heart is crushed there between their hands, fingers tangled through vessels and ventricles. He's still trying to get used to this kind of love, alive and writhing and just short of agony. Before he'd thought it was just something about Bozer that sparked it in him in flashes. Some kind of inexplicable connection between childhood friends who've known each other so long that there's a version of themselves nobody else ever will know. Now, he thinks it's something else, something he's slowly mapping the shape of with cautious, reaching hands.
The picture is back in his possession now after making its rounds of the room, held up delicately as if he thinks it might blow away into dust if too harshly disturbed. Mac has held it just like this a dozen times over, studied it in the light, turned it to the side hoping maybe a different angle would turn up what he's looking for there. It's something in his father's face he's always been trying to find, though without being quite sure what it is.
Maybe what he's looking for is that love, the love he's just, in the split second between his pulse and Riley's where their wrists are pressed hard together, named family. Mac has imagined that he's seen it there before, squinting at this picture of James and his partner, has seen it before as well in a handful of old pictures the few times he's been able to look at them.
Pictures of James with Mac's mother, Ellen, before her death, the odd photo of James as a child with his own parents, in this lone surviving picture of James and Jonah Walsh. Mac's looked for love in them and thinks he's found it, and wonders now what it says that he's never seen the shine in James's face in those pictures anywhere in his own memory.
It's a sharp, cruel thought - which one of them had it been that caused the change? Had it been James, or had it been something about Mac himself? He either can't or doesn't want to find the answer.
So absorbed is he in the picture, in all the complicated and messy things it kicks up in his chest, that Mac doesn't see the hand until it's fully entered his vision. It arrives with the looming presence of someone leaning over the back of the couch by the shoulder on the opposite side of where Riley sits, and Mac flinches, chin jagging to the side and breath hitching.
Jack, who has to have noticed, doesn't say anything about the flinch. What he does is touch Mac's shoulder, his hand strong and steady in a stark contrast to the way Mac feels like he's made of tissue paper, about to tear into tiny pieces or just flutter away. Jack holds onto his shoulder, thumb brushing the scar with the casual ease of having done it now a dozen times over, and looks past Mac down at the picture.
"Looks like a completely different person, huh?"
Mac looks at it too, the printed copy of a face he's supposed to know almost as well as his own, and says, "I barely recognize him."
It's true. Whoever the man in that photo is, the one with his father's youthful face broken out in that wide, bright smile, a handful of Jonah Walsh's t-shirt grabbed in the world's least antagonistic fist to keep upright in that off-balance sideways hug… Whoever he is, or was, or might have been, Mac is sure they've never met. He leans slightly back, pressing into the steady warmth of Jack's hand. It doesn't move, the hold on him tightening just a fraction.
When Mac lurches suddenly forward, Jack lets him go easily. Mac holds the picture out to Matty, unsure why he's doing it but knowing with an abrupt certainty that he can't have it in his possession for a moment longer.
"You should have this," he tells her, voice loud and sharp in his own ears. "Take it, put it in your file on him or something, but just, please-"
Getting out of her chair and crossing the short space separating them, Matty takes the picture without question. "Thank you," she says, tucking it away in a pocket of the bag she'd shown up with. As soon as it's out of sight, something in Mac's chest eases slightly. Before he can return to his seat, though, Matty's hand closes around his wrist, keeping him there. "Thank you," she repeats intently. "I can't imagine how hard it was to tell us all of that.
Mac doesn't answer. He stares down at the floor, feeling her grip on his arm at once an anchor and a lifeline.
"You said that if we hated you for not telling us this before, we'd be right to," Matty says, referring back to the beginning of his confession, something that feels to Mac like it had happened hours ago. His face feels hot and he chokes on trying to respond, before she moves forward and relieves him of the effort, leaving no room for debate in her verdict. "I want to be very clear with you right now that there is no way any person in this room would have hated you for that. And if we had, we would most certainly not have been right to."
A murmur of agreement sweeps around the room. Mac doesn't know what to do, what to say. He doesn't know if he could move if he tried.
Matty isn't done yet. She squeezes his wrist gently and says, "You've been braver than you ever should have had to be, and I think I speak for all of us when I say I am so proud of you. Whatever comes next, whatever consequences you might see for the decision you made today, for any of this, I promise you're not going to face them alone. We'll figure it out, and we'll do it together, but I need you to believe me, and trust us. Okay?"
Looking behind him, Mac sees that Bozer's finally sat down, now on the couch between Jack and Riley. They sit in a row now, looking at him with identical determined expressions. Mac has spent most of his life learning, for one reason or another, how to lie and get away with it and, in turn, how to recognize it in others. Direct, guileless honesty stares back at him from all three of them. There's not a hint of an indication that any of them have a moment's hesitation or regret in cosigning what Matty has said. Closing his eyes and burning the image into his mind, Mac breathes in deep. His lungs expand easily and without a fight.
It feels like emerging from a thick smoke out into clean, clear air.
"Okay."
