AN: Slightly more crossover with Scorpion in this compared to 3.18, SecDef to Grandpa. This is set prior to the start of 3.18, SecDef to Grandpa, for a change.

MACGYVER'S RESIDENCE

LA

Beth shook her head fondly as she was unanimously nominated by Bozer, Riley, Jack, Matty, Diane and Cassian to go inform Mac that dinner was ready.

(He was in his room Skyping Valerie, a fourteen-year-old child prodigy from his hometown of Mission City that he mentored – Beth had met her over Skype last time, and Valerie was brilliant and adorable and reminded her quite a bit of herself when she'd been that age, just with a greater love and affinity for engineering.)

She knocked on his bedroom door.

'Come in.'

Mac's voice sounded rather flat, which made her brow furrow with concern.

Had something happened to Valerie?

Surely if something had, Mac would have come out and told them, recruiting their help to make things better, however they could?

Beth opened the door and slipped inside.

Mac looked up at her, looking like someone had stolen all his toasters, and disparaged his favourite leather jacket, his mother, paperclips and duct-tape all in one breath.

The worried look grew more prominent.

'What's wrong, Mac? Is Valerie alright?'

He sighed and gestured to his laptop screen.

'Remember how I told you Valerie came down to LA for that program at CalTech last week?' Beth nodded. Mac had managed to find a few hours to have lunch with her and her dad and take them on a brief tour while they were in LA. He sighed again, the someone-stole-my-toasters look returning with a vengeance. 'She met someone. A boy.'

That was said with the same distaste as anti-vaxers or knock-off WD-40. Beth hid a smile, and patted him on the shoulder gently.

'What's his name?'

'Ralph. He is also fourteen, nearly fifteen, and a student at CalTech.' She understood the implications. 'He is apparently very awesome, understands her weird and seems to like it. He has an incredible mother, and a stepfather with an IQ of 197 and several other adopted genius aunts and uncles.'

Beth smiled.

She would have loved to have met someone like that (and their family) when she was fourteen, nearly fifteen.

Those teenage years were hard.

They were hard for everyone, but worse when you were different. When you felt like you didn't belong.

She knew she'd been really lucky. She had a brilliant engineer for a father, and a chemistry professor for a mother. West Lafayette, where she'd grown up, had been full of the children of academics and the like.

But still, there'd been many a time when she'd felt alone, even with all of those blessings.

And there were always bullies.

From what she'd heard, Mac had had it far worse. His mom had died when he was five, his dad had abandoned him when he was ten for eighteen years, and then there was Donnie Sandoz and his gang…

She knew he had to understand what having a friend (or potentially more) like Ralph meant to Valerie.

He simply cared so much for the girl that he was going a little, well, honestly, Jack on him.

(Riley complained frequently – albeit fondly – about Jack's overprotectiveness.)

Carefully, checking that she wouldn't disturb anything, Beth perched on the edge of Mac's desk.

Mac looked up from where he was glaring at his laptop screen as if it was this Ralph and he was interrogating him about his intentions when Beth sat down on his desk. She glanced at the empty bowl that usually held paperclips next to her and gave a fond, exasperated smile (he'd used them all and forgotten to buy more – organized and good at planning, he was not), then raised her hands to her hair and started pulling bobby pins from it, letting the ends of the two French braids that she'd pinned up around her head fall free. She dropped the brass-bronze bobby pins into the dish, and gave a slightly sheepish little smile. Mac smiled back at her, and reached for a couple of the pins, fiddling with them to give his hands something to do.

There was comfortable silence for a moment, save for the sound of Beth's bobby pins falling into the dish and Mac picking them up again, one by one.

(There were a lot – fifteen, precisely – in her hair.)

Eventually, she broke it, speaking gently but firmly, with conviction.

'It means a lot, to have someone who's like you, someone who makes you feel like you aren't alone, that you belong…especially at that age.'

He nodded in agreement. They both had had that experience and knew what they were talking about. Then, he shrugged, her bobby pins forming some kind of interlinked structure in his hands.

'I know, but…she's not even fifteen.'

That was said with quite a bit of daddy-on-the-porch-with-a-shotgun in it.

Or rather, given that it was Mac, daddy-on-the-porch-with-a-stun-gun-or-a-death-ray-that-doesn't-actually-cause-death-or-a-DIY-lie-detector.

Beth reached over and poked him in the sternum with a little more force than usual.

'I had a boyfriend when I was fifteen, and he was two years older than me.' Mac told that little voice in his head that wanted to know more about this boyfriend to shut up. He was clearly an ex. No longer relevant. And it'd been thirteen years. Beth shrugged a little sheepishly. 'And um, well, apologies for opening old wounds might be in order, but…didn't fourteen-year-old you pine over your chem lab partner, lose a bet to Bozer and then have to ask her to Prom, leading to her turning you down coldly and revealing that, very cruelly, she was only nice to you so you'd do all the work in class and her homework?'

Mac rubbed the back of his neck, giving a wry smile.

'Boze told you about Darlene Martin.' He smiled, reaching out to pat her knee. 'And you don't need to apologize, I got over her years and years ago.'

Beth smiled back, patting his hand gently, before she hopped off the desk and gestured to the door with her head.

'The hot dogs are ready, we should get back out there before…'

Her cheeks flushed a little and she made a vague gesture with her hands.

He nodded in agreement, even as his ears burned slightly, and got up from his desk chair.

I know. I know. I know.

Trust me, there is nothing you can say that A, hasn't already been said to me, and B, I haven't told myself.

It's just…timing is everything.

The right moment hasn't happened yet.

And I am enjoying this in-between, you know.

I'm as sure as I can be that she is too.

So what's the harm of taking it slow?

It's just kinetics, not thermodynamics.

He stashed her interlinked bobby pins in his pocket.

You never knew when they'd come in handy.

AN: Mac, you're running out of excuses…though there's a touch of foreshadowing there for future events. Stay tuned!

And yes, I shall always ship Ralph/Valerie. And pretend that Walter and Paige finally did get together for good and have a stable, happy, low-drama relationship sometime in the future of the Scorpion timeline.