As he stepped through the door, Jack was happy to see that the entire cabin was not as disorderly as Mac's bedroom. However, the number of half finished unidentifiable projects discarded on just about every available work surface was almost as concerning.
"Um … So …" Jack paused, trying to decide how to put this nicely. Deciding there was no way, he plunged ahead. "You've been busy, what, not finishing things?"
"They'll get finished," Mac said defensively. "I'm just going with where inspiration strikes."
"Mmm," was Jack's noncommittal acknowledgement.
Then something occurred to him, just a little test.
"Hey, man, I hate to ask, but I forgot to bring my pack with me when I was … checking up on you …" he trailed off lamely.
Mac gave him a hard look, but then just indicated a door, and he stopped to unlock it. It opened on the basement stairs.
Jack went on. "You got anything I could throw on a sandwich or something, man. I'm starving. I forgot to eat this morning … And I don't remember when I ate dinner ... Like I feel a little shaky."
Clearly, from Mac's immediate concerned expression, he'd sold the genuineness of the comment, despite how completely disingenuous it was. Jack had eaten a monster breakfast at the local diner this morning and come away with the waitress's phone number to boot.
"Um … yeah … I should have asked. I'm sorry. Let's go get you something first. The kitchen's this way …"
Mac indicated the hallway to the left and he led Jack to the small eat-in kitchen, making Jack sit down while he went over and opened the refrigerator.
Mac stood there for a second. The he went to the dish drainer and managed to find a clean glass. He got ice out of the freezer, water from the tap and handed Jack the glass. Jack forced the knowing smirk to stay off his face. He said carefully. "Anything is fine, man. I just gotta eat something. I'm gettin' a killer headache."
Mac nodded and got a slightly frantic look around his eyes. He went back to the fridge again and opened it, almost like he was hoping circumstances had changed. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, reinforcing Jack's impression that the kid looked like a middle teenager, rather than the full-fledged adult he was. "Um … there's nothing great in here … Um … Hang on a sec …"
Mac closed the fridge and darted out of the room, like he was on an important mission.
Jack waited until Mac was gone down the hall before he got up and went and opened the refrigerator. There was a mostly full gallon of milk that look suspiciously like it had decided to be cottage cheese a while ago. A six pack of twenty ounce Gatorades that looked reasonably sanitary. A carton of eggs that looked vaguely soggy on the outside. And some moldy cheese.
He heard Mac returning with a brisk pace so he sat back down at the table. Mac came in, sat down, and handed him a reasonably decent looking protein bar. Jack took it but didn't open it. He just eyeballed the kid in a way that let Mac knew he was in some hot water with his former partner. "I appreciate the gesture Mac, but I don't want to eat all your hiking supplies. Some cheese and crackers, or like half a pb and j would more than do me, kid."
Mac avoided Jack's eyes for a minute, then he sighed almost inaudibly. "I kind of need to go grocery shopping … That's your best bet. Um … or we could go out, get some lunch at the place in town … The Flame Thrower, I think the local burger joint is called …" Then Mac grinned like he'd just figured out how to get himself off the hook. "If you can eat their bacon cheeseburger with ghost chili aioli they pay for your whole table's meal, drinks, dessert; the works!"
Jack smiled slightly. Classic Mac deflection, but if he could get the kid into a restaurant, odds were he'd have at least one decent meal while Jack was here. Jack decided right then that he wasn't going to bring up DXS. Angus MacGyver was in no shape to get pulled into the intelligence community right now. If for no other reason than Jack was pretty sure in his current overly thin and clearly sleep deprived state, he'd never pass the damned physical.
"I can get us a free dinner then," he replied with a grin.
"Dinner?" Mac asked, suddenly looking a little uncertain. "I thought you were hungry, man. No reason to wait."
Jack gave him another long look that caused a slight 'oh shit' expression to flit across Mac's sharp features. "Mac, bud, it's like five thirty, man. It's early dinner, but dinner just the same."
Mac unconsciously bit his lip for a second. "Guess I should be paying more attention to the clock." Then his eyes widened. "Oh, hell!"
He hopped up from the table and darted out of the room, back in the direction of the basement door.
Jack shook his head, smiling a little. Mac's brain was usually fifty places at once. Unless he was working a problem.
Correction, unless he was working an important problem.
Mac wasn't someone who could be distracted with the mundane. His brain was always going at a million miles a minute, as far as Jack could tell, and it was usually splintered in a million directions. Jack couldn't decide if that was ADHD or PTSD, but it was probably something with an acronym, if his experience told him anything.
But … when something of consequence, like, for example, a bomb, presented itself, Mac's focus was like a laser, was surgically precise, almost scary.
Jack decided to follow Mac and see if his general distraction was about to blow up or burn down his current residence. Jack half chuckled to himself when he thought at least that would give him an excuse to get the kid to LA where he could keep a better eye on him now that he was with DXS in the LA office.
When Jack clomped down the oddly spaced, shoddily built open wooden stairs into the surprisingly well-appointed finished basement that Mac had clearly turned into a lab of sorts, and that opened up on a fairly extensive library with a number of desks with computers in it.
Funny, Jack thought. This was not new construction. But the door and the stairs said rickety old basement where that dude from Saw was probably riding his big scary tricycle around. This had been some sort of office space for a long time.
Instead of commenting on that, Jack stepped up next to where Mac was hurriedly turning down flames on bunsen burners and adjusting the height on what Jack thought he remembered were called ring stands. "Don't tell me you decided to go all Heisenberg just because y'all don't work for the government anymore," Jack drawled.
"You know who Werner Heisenberg …" Mac trailed off and then laughed. "Okay, you watch Breaking Bad. I should have known."
Jack was too busy squinting at a glass container full of clearish green liquid to pay any attention to Mac's implication that there was something wrong with just losing yourself in a popular TV show. Or maybe Mac's issue was with the name Heisenberg from his tone of voice. Sounded like maybe there was a real Heisenberg Mac thought was important.
Jack glanced at Mac. "Whatcha makin' here, flubber? Because if you could make flubber that would be pretty cool."
Mac snorted laughter. "It's not flubber, Jack. My grandfather's truck keeps overheating. I'm working on altering the properties of radiator fluid to see if I can change up it's temperature sensitivity and viscosity to produce a better result."
Jack frowned, knowing Mac knew plenty about working on equipment. "Why not just rebuild or replace the radiator?"
"I've already done a rebuild, but it's still happening. Since I wasn't able to fix it mechanically, I figured I'd try chemically."
Jack just nodded, leaning a little closer to the container. "I guess that makes sense … You sure you ain't makin' flubber though, 'cause …"
"It's definitely not flubber." Mac shook his head. Then he had another nicely distracting idea. "We could sorta make flubber though."
Jack glanced at him. "Really?"
Mac grinned, ignoring Jack for a minute to adjust some more of his apparatus. "Yeah, we could make a non-newtonian fluid and …"
"A what?" Jack asked sort of absently.
Mac answered just as absently, checking the temperature on several of the solutions with a digital thermal probe. "A non-newtonian fluid is a fluid that does not follow Newton's Law of Viscosity. Most commonly, the viscosity (the gradual deformation by shear or tensile stresses) of non-Newtonian fluids is dependent on shear rate or shear rate history. Some non-Newtonian fluids with shear-independent viscosity, however, still exhibit normal stress-differences or other non-Newtonian behavior. If you create one and expose it to sound waves, especially ones with a fair amount of low frequency rhythmic noise, they dance like flubber."
Jack decided to just pretend any of that was in English since he was actually more interested in the green liquid in front of him at the moment anyway. "Oh, yeah, how do we make it?" Jack reached out his hand, wondering what might happen to this flubber looking stuff if he agitated the container, regardless of what Mac said.
"Um … well, we'll have to stop at the market when we go out for dinner. You need basically equal parts cornstarch and water for what I have in mind and …"
Jack suddenly yelped and glass shattered.
Mac spun to see his large Erlenmeyer flask full of his latest completed distillate broken on the floor and his former overwatch clutching his hand with his eyes squeezed shut, which didn't stop the tears from squeezing out at the corners. "Jack!" Mac's voice was somewhere in between annoyed that Jack had disrupted his experiment and horrified that his friend was hurt.
Mac quickly turned off the bunsen burner and stepped carefully toward Jack, crunching over the broken glass and radiator fluid (sort of radiator fluid, anyway). "Hey, man, you okay? That was really really hot."
Jack opened his eyes and looked regretfully at Mac. "Yeah, no, I'm alright. I didn't think it could be that hot. It wasn't even bubblin' like it might boil."
Jack's voice was so tight with pain Mac knew Jack's initial statement was bull. Still he heaved a slightly frustrated sigh. "Jack, I told you it was experimental radiator fluid. Regular fluid boils significantly above the temperature of water, something like 223 degrees. This stuff, you probably just grabbed a five hundred degree …" Mac stopped himself. "Let's see it."
"It's fine," Jack repeated, completely untruthfully.
Mac ran a frustrated hand through his abundant hair. "Jack, that's not how getting burned works. Heat transfer just happened, no matter how tough you think you are. Kind of like bullets just go through you if you're in the way. Let me see your hand or I swear I will start explaining the Laws of Thermodynamics and I'm going to expect you to do the math."
Jack rolled his eyes. Suddenly Mac sounded like the disapproving older brother. Jack thought maybe the kid was just mimicking his tone from their last encounter, the phone call where Jack had asked if Mac was going back to school after his grandfather had passed and Mac said he didn't know. Bringing that up was probably not going to enhance his chances of getting Mac to listen to him about his concerns (not to mention Miles's worries). Instead of pointing out the irritating role reversal, Jack forced himself to let go of his throbbing hand and let Mac get a look at it.
Mac sucked in a breath through his teeth. "That's nasty, man. C'mon back upstairs. I've got a decent first aid kit kicking around somewhere … if I can remember where I put it the last time I needed it …"
Mac preceded him up the stairs, frowning and trying to remember the last place he'd had the first aid kit. There'd been nearly slicing off the tip of his finger trying to make his own electric knife … The converting the grill to his own version of an infrared cooker incident … the chainsaw thing … That's where it was. The garage, Mac realized with certainty.
He made Jack stand at the sink running cold water over the hideous blisters on his hand while he went to grab the first aid kid from the garage. As he looked around he had to acknowledge that he could see why Jack was wearing that familiar protective look right up until he'd scorched the hell out of his hand. Unfinished projects were everywhere. And the place looked practically unused, unlived in.
Mac sighed and shook his head. Maybe it was time to follow through with what he'd been thinking about lately. But the thought made him nervous, twitchy. He'd deal with that after he had Jack Dalton out of Brother Bear mode and sent back to wherever he'd dropped out of the sky from. He didn't need a babysitter, damn it.
By the time he had the non-stick bandages out of the bag he was actually more worried about Jack's burn than about getting rid of his former partner so he could go back to brooding (not that he was actively admitting to himself that that's what he'd been up to in the six months since his grandfather's death). "Hold still a minute," he practically growled. Jack was fidgety and in pretty obvious pain. When Mac finished taping the loose bandage down, he stood. "You stay here and keep that elevated. I'm gonna go get my jacket and keys."
"Ah, Mac I hate to back out on dinner, bud, because believe me I'd like to know you actually ate some, but I'm not real hungry any more. This kinda hurts. Sorta killed my appetite."
Mac rolled his eyes, but his face slipped into a familiar fond grin. "Yeah, I figured. Which is why we're gonna drive to the emergency room and let somebody look at that and probably hand you a giant pile of antibiotics and pain pills."
Jack immediately got his defensive look. "I don't need an emergency room over breaking a little beaker …"
"It was an Erlenmeyer flask. And it gave you at least second degree burns. Which require medical attention." Mac paused. "Go ahead and justify avoiding medical attention for a clear emergency to me." The statement was a dare. Jack glared in response. "I can't just throw you over my shoulder the way you did to me two Christmases ago when we got blown up, but if you remember the last time you went full stubborn Delta dumbass,in Nari Saraj, I rang your bell pretty good and I'll do it again."
Jack almost chuckled at that. "I thought we agreed that we were never going to mention either of those incidents again?" he asked with a little humor in his voice.
"I'll try to put them back under wraps if you just go get in the damned truck and let somebody look at that."
Jack nodded, thinking that he wanted to say Mac was overreacting. But he knew that for starters Mac would just respond that he learned it from the best, and also, Jack was starting to think a couple of Vicodin wouldn't exactly be the worst thing to have, given how his hand was now throbbing.
Mac went and turned off his experiment's various heat sources, got his keys, and drove Jack the nearly forty minutes to the nearest emergency room. He'd nearly forgotten just how much Jack hated to admit to being hurt, and even more how much he detested hospitals. Mac sighed, thinking he could relate.
Waiting for Jack's prescription for the predicted antibiotics and pain medication, Mac took a paperclip out of the container on the desk at the nurses station and started mangling it as he sat next to the much more heavily bandaged than before Jack. "You okay, kid?" Jack asked, frowning at the expression on Mac's face.
"Yeah," he replied, sounding hoarse for a moment. He cleared his throat. "I'm fi …" He trailed off. He wasn't fine at the moment and Jack could obviously tell. It would save time and close the subject faster to just be honest. "I … um … I hate this place." He said it without any real emotion.
Jack's head was tilted to one side like he was trying to figure something out. "You hate a hospital? Color me surprised, kid." He said in the gently teasing manner he often used to get Mac to open up and talk about something if the kid got too tight-lipped. Mac just gave him a small smile and didn't say anything else. Jack decided to try again. "Seems like this is more specific than your usual though. Especially since you're not the one being tormented by the scrubs squad."
Mac swallowed hard. "This is where my grandfather died, Jack," he offered without much more emotion than he'd spoken with a few moments before. "I … It was a depressingly familiar experience." He shrugged. "Your pills are ready," he tipped his chin in the direction of the counter where a young man had a small paper bag and a stack of papers that Mac was sure Jack was never going to read. "You sit. I'll get them."
Jack contemplated Mac's back as the kid talked to the pharmacy tech. That was a lot for Mac to admit to, to talk about. Jack decided he was going to keep the rest of the evening very low pressure. He'd have to watch himself, because he still wanted to lecture the kid silly about his state of affairs, but he knew that was a first class ticket to Mac shutting down. He'd learned that the hard way early on over in the Goat Farm.
When they got back in the truck, Jack decided he'd just focus on maybe getting Mac to eat some dinner. Now that the pills the nurse had brought him a while ago had kicked in a little, Jack felt reasonably certain he could eat something, too. "So you still want to hit up The Flame Thrower and see if I can get us a free ride?" he asked casually.
Mac glanced at him as he started the struck, letting it run for a minute and peering at the temperature gauge, deciding it had been sitting long enough to behave itself. Mac tipped him a smile. "I don't know Jack, I think you've suffered enough from heat tonight."
Jack laughed at that. "S'pose you might be right about that, bud," he chuckled.
Mac put the truck into gear and started pulling out of the parking lot. This wasn't a terribly populated area, but you could tell it was a weekend night because the emergency room was starting to get busy, a phenomenon Mac had noticed over the months of trips here with his grandfather.
"Where are you staying?" Mac asked.
"The Blue Sparrow Inn. They don't serve food though, bud. I been eatin' at the diner up the street."
"Which has nothing to do with the pretty redhead who pours the coffee I'm sure," Mac grinned.
"I got that lovely lady's digits this morning, pal. So … Yeah." Jack smiled at the memory and then winced as he bumped his hand against the seat belt buckle. "Sssss," he hissed.
"Yeah, about that," Mac nodded at Jack's had, turning to get back on the interstate. "I'm not dropping you off … We're gonna pick up your stuff. You can stay with me tonight. I can drive you back to the airport whenever you're booked to fly out."
"I can drive my … Okay, that sounds good," he conceded after Mac just half turned and raised an eyebrow at him.
"After we get your stuff, I'll just pull into the market and get some groceries. I can cook you some dinner, then you can pass out from those pain pills and snore and keep me up all night. It'll be just like the bad old days," Mac teased, not wanting to admit that he sort of liked the idea of having company tonight.
Jack could see it, but didn't comment on it. "You mean to tell me one of the things you can do with that ginormous brain of yours is cook? Because I never did see any evidence of that the whole time we worked together," he said.
"I can cook!" Mac said defensively.
"Really?" Jack teased, with a smirk.
He thought Mac might have actually flushed a little at his skepticism. "Well, I mean, not really … But I could get some frozen pizza and throw it in the oven," he shrugged. He wouldn't admit it out loud, but that's pretty much all he ever did if he wasn't just eating protein bars lately. Not that he never had a premade salad or some apples or something, but for him it was either whole food he didn't have to cook, or innocuous premade somethingorother that he didn't have to think about.
"Sure, kid," Jack agreed, pretty sure he knew exactly what Mac was thinking.
He was heartened by the off of dinner and a place to crash, say nothing of Mac revealing just what had him looking so tense back at the hospital. He was pretty sure he could get Mac talking, even if it was just about his random projects. And Jack had a couple of days to work on him.
It wasn't much.
But it was a start.