With the mission over, and what passed for justice done, Mac sat, pretending to sleep as the others dozed. Stress, grief, the mission to bring a mole and murderer down, had exhausted the whole team. Everyone else had started to nod off a while ago.
But Mac still felt wound tight, like an overtuned string on his ukulele.
After the funeral, he told Bozer and Desi Jack's death hadn't sunk in yet. That he was just going to keep busy and he'd be okay. And he'd seen the look they'd given him when they thought he wasn't looking.
It was starting to sink in now, and instead of the gears of his mind grinding to a halt, the machine in his head sped up.
Jack. Why didn't you call? Why didn't you get backup?
Mac's eyes burned behind closed lids.
Why the Hell didn't you let me go with you?
A gasping breath escaped his tight control.
He forced himself to try and breathe more slowly and deeply. But his body didn't want to cooperate.
Maybe he needed to go splash some water on his face.
He cracked one eye open, checking on the status of the rest of the team.
Finding them all out cold, so fully asleep that even Riley was silent instead of snoring, he got up carefully, making his way to the bathroom to get a moment's privacy and some cold water to master his emotions.
Once the door was closed, and he was alone, he fell into the Jack Dalton-sized hole he'd been ignoring for days. It swallowed him up with its emptiness. He couldn't even breathe.
Suddenly, Jack's voice was there with him, so perfect, Mac could almost smell the man's cheap aftershave.
"You're gonna turn blue if you keep that up, genius."
He half expected to see Jack standing over his shoulder in the mirror.
Mac wished he hadn't glanced at his reflection. The pain he saw in his own eyes made it lance through his whole being. But at least it made him take a breath.
Unfortunately the breath let all his emotions come flooding back in along with the air. And for a change, Mac didn't try to stop it, didn't think about it. He just disappeared into it.
When he came back to himself, he realized he was sitting on the floor. His face was hot and he knew it was puffy if only because his sinuses were absolutely cemented shut.
He couldn't go back out into the cabin looking like he'd spent … however long he'd been in here … crying like a kid.
"Now don't start that nonsense," Jack's voice piped up. "Not like a kid. Like a guy who's lost damn near everything he's valued, over and over again for three decades."
"You know pointing out my age just highlights how old you are," Mac replied before he could stop himself. He ran his hands over his face, rough with dried salt from tears he wasn't going to think more about. "Great, now you're really losing it, Mac," he mumbled to himself.
He felt the pitch of the jet change ever so slightly. It was as familiar as rounding the last turn before his driveway at home. They were almost back in LA.
Determined to get himself together before their approach woke up everyone else, he got to his feet.
"Oh, Hell," he whispered.
The sink was broken. Not damaged. Broken.
No wonder his hands hurt.
"Ummm," he mumbled, trying to figure out what to do to cover this up.
He absolutely couldn't let anyone else see what he'd done in here. If Matty caught wind of it, he'd find himself on compassionate leave with nothing to distract him from his loss but more reminders of it.
Broken sink aside, he splashed his face with cold water to remove the visible signs of his loss of control. Then he blew his nose, by his calculations, roughly seven million times. He followed that with more cold water.
With his sinuses and eyes somewhat clearer, he realized that not only had he busted the sink, he'd cut his hand open, too. It wasn't bad, but he'd gotten blood on his shirt, so even if he could cover up the bathroom being destroyed, there was no way anyone, especially Bozer, was going to miss the rusty stain on his clothes. Well, maybe the busy plaid print would hide it.
They were close enough to home that he needed to deal with this quickly.
First things first.
He used the first aid kit from under the sink to bandage up his hand. It wasn't bleeding much, but enough to be a problem.
Once that was tended to, he stared at the vanity for several long minutes.
"Your Boss is gonna be pissed," Jack's imaginary voice supplied helpfully.
"She's not gonna find out," he answered absently, trying to get a look underneath the shelf to see if there was anything he could use to conceal the problem until he could maybe sneak back on the jet for a more permanent solution.
"Oh, I didn't mean Matty. I meant Russ. This is kinda his jet, you might remember."
Mac swore, a Dalton-worthy curse. "Well, I'd managed to forget about it for a hot minute, but thanks for the reminder, pal."
He caught himself off guard with a soft laugh. He wasn't losing it. How often had he, or Jack for that matter, imagined conversations with their partner when separated on a mission. As often as they could be complete opposites in their personalities and behaviors, it was kind of those differences that made them work, made them friends. Even if it also occasionally made them want to strangle each other.
A rumble of turbulence through the aircraft gave Mac a flicker of an idea. When the jet shook again, a little harder this time, Mac actually grinned.
He braced himself for the next shake of turbulence, grateful for its timing. He'd just make a bunch of noise and then claim he'd lost his footing and that's how the sink got broken. He'd probably avoid looking Bozer in the eye when he said it. But it was better than anything else his brain, or his imaginary partner, had supplied so far.
The jet rocked unpleasantly again and Mac prepared to kick the cabinet and bang around, but was stopped by a soft tap on the door.
"Hey … Mac?"
Mac froze. Then he sighed. "Yeah, Ri?"
"You okay?" she whispered.
"I … yeah. Of course I am."
"You … um … I got startled awake and…" she trailed off.
"Probably the turbulence. Or me because of it," he said a little stiffly. "I fell right on my ass and broke the damn sink on my way down."
The lie came out naturally enough, but a blush crept up his neck and ears. He almost wished Russ had been the one to knock. He liked Russ. He really did. But lying to him wasn't lying to family. Not quite. And it certainly wasn't like lying to Riley.
She responded to his fib with a soft snort. "Are you really okay?"
He glanced at himself in the mirror again. Satisfied he no longer looked like a guy who'd completely lost his shit, he opened the door. "Nothing damaged but my dignity," he offered with a self-deprecating grin.
"Are you sure?" She gestured at the splotch on his shirt.
"Not you, too," he chuckled.
"Not me what?"
"Just because we are down a mother hen does not mean you get to take over the job."
"I'm not being a mother hen!"
"Says the lady who just zeroed in on the world's most insignificant stain with laser-like precision."
She glanced at his bandaged hand, but didn't comment on it. He knew then that she knew he was being less than truthful. All she said was, "I guess that's fair."
He wondered how much of his meltdown she'd heard and he was unbelievably grateful to her for not calling him out. He was afraid if he had to explain himself he'd start bawling again.
The jet was suddenly rocked with another wave of turbulence and Riley fell into him. The others started coming around and their pilot announced that it was bound to keep up for most of the rest of their approach.
Mac and Riley sprang apart when the others stirred. They started back over to the seating area. "What happened to you?" Desi demanded, coming to her feet.
"Careful, Dez," Riley warned playfully as she sat down opposite Mac. "I just got read the riot act for the same question and I'm the one he woke up by being Olympicly graceful a few minutes ago."
Russ's eyebrows raised and drew together, "Are you quite alright, Angus?"
Mac shrugged. "I think so. But this old bucket of bolts threw me off my feet." He grinned for effect. "For a billionaire, you fly cheap."
"You gonna let him talk about your baby like that, Russ?" Bozer asked, keeping up with Mac's pretense that things were fine here. Mac knew Boze was well acquainted with Mac's if-you-pretend-it's-normal-for-long-enough-it-will-be philosophy.
One of Russ's eyebrows climbed higher than the other. "That depends…"
Riley laughed. "He means he broke your bathroom. Not metaphorically."
"Yeah, sorry about that. The vanity got damaged when I grabbed it on my way down." Mac held up his bandaged hand. "But if it's any consolation, it fought back."
Mac tolerated everyone's ribbing about being the least graceful spy in history for the rest of the flight. He even managed to keep up giving Russ a good-natured hard time about aircraft maintenance.
Mac might not have been able to sell the story on his own. And he didn't have Jack there to distract anyone from what was going on with him. Without Riley's intervention, he figured he'd have had to deal with intolerable levels of concern from Bozer and Desi, not to mention questions about his fitness for duty from Russ, and worse, Matty.
When everyone was caught up in various stories told entirely at his expense, he met Riley's gaze and gave a subtle nod of thanks.
She tipped him a wink that was so pure an imitation of Jack it hurt. Its meaning was as clear as the voice he heard in his head to go with it.
"I've got your back, kid."