More Important
By: AndiKaneUnderwood
The grenade comes through the window and Mac doesn't hesitate.
He throws himself at the bomb, picks it up, and pitches it right back to the people currently making his life Hell.
Mac turns, throwing his hands over his head in feeble protection.
As the grenade goes off, Mac's hands begin to shake. When he stands, Jack is staring at him with a look of concern because Mac could have died.
The blonde hides his shaking hands by threading pale fingers through his hair and trying very hard to work through the fact that he just freaking did that without having a panic attack.
Jack understands, and does not point it out, a fact that Mac is eternally grateful for because pointing it out is liable to send him straight into the thing he was trying to avoid.
The first thing he does to get away from the panic is move closer to Jack (Jack is his lifeline. His anchor when things get bad. When things go sideways, Jack is who he searches for. Should Jack end up dying on one of these mission, as Mac fears he one day will, Mac will be unable to continue) and Jack moves closer to him to provide the safety for Mac to gather his thoughts and composure.
Riley wisely stays back as she knows Mac needs time to recover from what he'd just done (Riley is also a lifeline, just in a different way. If Jack is his anchor, the Riley is shore, waiting patiently for him to come home where she will welcome him with open arms and do what she can to piece him back together with Jack by both of their sides) and she keeps the others at bay as well.
Jack stays there, his gaze hardening when the Marines look to ask a question.
They stay there for five minutes before Mac is pulled, far too soon, from his thoughts to focus back on the mission.
Jack knows that when they get back to American soil, Mac will break down in the safety of his own, or Jack's home. Jack will question his partner later. Right now they have a job to do.
MacGyver~MacGyver~MacGyver
Mac wakes up that night in a bed that is unfamiliar.
The bed is cold and white and unforgiving.
He hears a buzz in his ears before he is told by his superior that he has been given a chance to try again.
He asks what he is to do, what he has to try for again.
He asks what is going on.
The voice in his ears does not respond.
A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision.
He turns and his best friend is standing there with his arms crossed over his broad chest and the same smirk frozen on his face.
He asks his friend what he is doing here.
He does not receive an answer.
The voice tells him he has two minutes to save his friend, and then begins to count down.
Mac looks frantically around the room to find what he is saving his friend from, but finds no hostile weapons or people.
Then with five seconds until the deadline, a grenade is launched into the room.
There is not enough time.
The world goes dark and Mac understands.
He had failed to save the most important person in his life.
He had failed to complete his mission.
He had failed Jack.
MacGyver~MacGyver~MacGyver
Mac wakes up at ten minutes until one in the morning in a bed that is as familiar as his own. His ears are ringing, his body drenched in sweat, and a scream cutting through his lips.
He can taste the blood there, where he'd cut it on his teeth after a near miss from the second bomb.
The ringing is from the grenade he'd thrown back, the one that had almost given him a panic attack.
The sweat is from the nightmare he hadn't quite convinced himself he'd woken up from. As are, he quickly finds, the tears that run down his cheek and drop gently to the old t-shirt he wore.
The scream, however, is what brings Jack Dalton running to the room in sweatpants and carrying a hand gun.
Mac briefly thinks it's ridiculous, but all he wants in that moment is to be told it will be okay.
"Mac." Jack speaks it like a command, but the blonde man knows different.
Jack is asking him to tell his friend what had made him so upset.
"It wasn't the grenade." Mac says. His voice is rough from the crying he'd done as the nightmare came to a close.
Jack nods, he'd known that, if it were a grenade then Mac wouldn't have woken up screaming.
"What happened?" Jack asked, sitting down on the bed next to his hurting partner.
It is over three hours before Mac finds the courage to answer.
MacGyver~MacGyver~MacGyver
Angus MacGyver is too damned young when his grandfather tells him that his mother is dying.
MacGyver spends the whole rest of the day trying to find a way to save her through the complex mathematic theories he is so fond of.
When he cannot find an answer, he spends whatever time he has left with his mother.
She lived on until his fifth birthday when she simply couldn't hold on another moment.
MacGyver swears to his grandfather that he will never again celebrate the day his mother died.
Angus MacGyver is ten when his father tells him that he is leaving and will not be coming back.
His father hugs him tightly and tells him that there is no equation to fix what he is doing and makes MacGyver promise not to try.
When he does promise, his father gives him a smile and then gets in his car to leave.
He looks back only once as he nears the end of the drive way and he waves at the son his is abandoning.
MacGyver tells his grandfather that night that he will not be left vulnerable anymore.
Angus MacGyver is almost sixteen when his grandfather becomes too ill to properly take care of him.
MacGyver runs to his friend Bozer's home in tears because he does not understand why all the people he love are being taken.
When he finally goes back home, his grandfather tells him to forage on as he knows that MacGyver must do.
He then smiled and with his last breath told MacGyver that his heart was too big to be kept in a box under lock and key. He reminds him that he is still loved and the people he loves have not truly left him until MacGyver no longer remembers him.
MacGyver tells Bozer that he will be joining the army in his grandfather's memory and Bozer tells him that when he comes home, Bozer will be waiting.
Angus MacGyver is seventeen and disarming bombs in Afghanistan when he meets the Delta man who replaces Pena as his overwatch, Jack Dalton
He is just turning twenty-one when he nearly loses him.
MacGyver~MacGyver~MacGyver
Jack does not hesitate to bring his brother into a loving embrace. Does not hesitate to remind him that while the nightmare may have seemed real, Jack is still here and he will not be going anywhere any time soon.
Mac allowed himself to sit there and take comfort in that fact that Jack is alive.
Neither of them get much sleep until the sun begins to rise again for its journey across the sky.
Neither of them really mind either.
But then, some things are more important.
