When he'd walked into the War Room, he'd been expecting to be helping ship's crew do some problem solving. That still meant lives on the line, but he'd been expecting a seasoned professional or two who'd understand engineering lingo, maybe have been through something similar, or if not this sort of life or death dire, might at least have experience with high pressure situations and some physical danger.
What he found was a scientist who was young … maybe even younger than he was and he was still trying to prove himself enough to lose nicknames like Baby Einstein. Zoe Kimura didn't look like she'd spent a lot of time in the field yet, or at least if she had, her experiences had never included potential icy death in the dark, thousands of miles from anything that resembled home.
His first order of business was to get her thinking about surviving rather than the very high potential to not. After he got a look at the most pressing problem in front of the whole ship, he started her off with something that he both needed and knew would engage an orderly scientific mind. "Okay. Now, Zoe, what I need you to do is make me a list of everything on board."
He was hoping as he went through explaining what he needed that he would see some of the panic start to back out of her eyes, some of the tension to leave her shoulders, so he'd know she could focus and follow his instructions to get her and her students out of trouble.
But he didn't. It worried him. As the list started coming together, and his team started trying to duplicate it from things they had around the office, he turned over in his mind what she might need to get to that place between fear and thought, where she could just get into autopilot and work. That's where he spent a ridiculous amount of his time, so figuring it out shouldn't be so damned hard.
He'd have to just keep working the ship problem and hope a solution to the Zoe being too scared to operate as effectively as he needed her to problem would present itself as he got the fuel pump on the generator fixed. So that's what he started to do.
Cage stopped him before he even got the first step explained. When he turned to look at the screen, he felt so badly. Zoe looked lost. Not just lost but in the dark, too. Sometimes it was easy for him to forget just exactly how most people's brains worked. Hell, have the conflict in his life originated with that very tendency. "Zoe, I am so sorry," he began. "I'm goin' way too fast, aren't I?"
"No, no, no!" she hurried to assure him. They didn't exactly have time to spare, she thought. And she moved to try to do what he'd started to explain. She started talking faster and faster about how she knew they were running out of time. She kept throwing wide-eyed glances at him through the laptop. He finally realized what he needed to do.
"Guys," he glanced around the War Room. "Can I have a second?"
For a split second, Matty looked like she might refuse, but then everyone just filed out and she was the one to close the door firmly behind them. Mac's jaw clenched for just a second, and he swallowed hard, pushing down the feeling he knew had settled into Zoe's chest with the responsibility of those other lives set on her shoulders.
It was a feeling he'd gotten used to after all these years, but he couldn't say that the panicked nineteen-year-old he'd been the first time the rubber really met the road in Afghanistan didn't sometimes like to make a guest appearance in his thoughts. Or his dreams. Once he'd gotten something resembling his game face back in place, which only took a second, he turned back toward the monitor. "How we doin', Zoe?"
Without a room full of people staring at her, her frozen look for not-quite-checked terror, collapsed into a more mobile expression. Tears were close, and she couldn't hold onto the sound of them anymore. When he summed up how she was feeling so perfectly, so sympathetically, she smiled just a little. He was speaking from experience. He didn't have to say so. The admission was in his eyes. And he wanted her to see it.
So it felt just a little easier to admit that she felt like she was coming apart at the seams and didn't know what to do to glue herself back together. MacGyver gave her a long look. Then he seemed to make a decision. "Alright. Then, let's take a break."
He turned and found the stool Riley had brought in and planted himself on it, forcing himself to relax his shoulders, smoothing his face to appear purely conversational. It took an intense effort that was almost physically painful, but he could tell from her response that he was pulling it off.
When she said she was a glaciologist, she looked almost embarrassed. Mac's smile eased into one that was more genuine than just carefully reassuring. "You're talking to a guy who once broke into a lab at MIT to sneak a peek at a frozen ice core from Greenland."
"Really?" her feigned disbelief was so amused, so genuine and her interest in what he'd risked getting kicked out of school to look at was so real, that she relaxed almost completely, forgetting for a moment that she was on a sinking ship in the Arctic, and her students were depending on her to get them home.
Son of a bitch. He liked her. She was someone he would want to count as a friend. That was going to make this harder, he thought. He started spinning on the stool, his need to be moving, to be working the problem overriding his efforts to just reassure Zoe.
She seemed to think it was just a conversational sort of fidgeting and grinned at him. "It's not often I meet someone who can out-geek me."
He grinned at her, starting to rise. "Well, Zoe, I out-geek pretty much everyone."
She laughed and he dropped back down on the stool, sensing that she needed just a little more time. "Can I tell you something stupid?"
He assured her that among geeks, not much was going to sound stupid.
"I'm seriously craving ice cream right now."
"Ice cream's good. Why is that weird?" Connecting to something normal was almost essential when you needed to ground yourself in the middle of a crisis. Bozer's waffles were something he'd thought about almost incessantly when he was in the war.
That one thing seemed to be the thing Zoe needed most. To feel normal. Even for a second. She rubbed her hands together and got up, ready to work.
Mac hesitated for just a second, making sure it was really okay for her.
When she assured him she could keep up now, could focus, he directed her to go get the tool kit. She grinned and got a pretty burly multitool like the one he'd gotten Jack for his last birthday out of her pocket. They shared a momentary real smile, a spark of connection.
And he knew the look in her eye. If he could fix that pump sitting there in that office space with the knife he'd shown up with, she could do it where she was, where it really mattered.
He looked up at the screen and met her eyes to give her the next instruction and when he saw she was still smiling, he was sure of it, too.