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bloodfromthethorn · 10 months

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Some Assembly Required

Filling in a few of the prompts for @rosieblogstuff's June MacGyver Flashfic Writealong.

Also on Ao3

For a genuine, certified genius, Jack didn't think he'd met anyone as goddamn stupid as Angus Macgyver. The kid had brains and statistics and sheer, unstoppable determination in spades, but even after eight weeks in the field as a government agent he still hadn't quite picked up the habit of not charging headlong into active gunfire. He'd been warned about it repeatedly and occasionally with diagrams and yet, here they were again. Sure, Mac had insisted that he had a plan and, yes, technically his actions had been directly responsible for both neutralising the gunmen and incapacitating their target ready for capture, but it was the principle of the thing.

He genuinely didn't seem to grasp that the mission didn't matter to Jack if it got Mac killed.

Bizarrely, it made Jack think of flat pack furniture: the kid had all the right parts to become an incredible agent – clever, bold, determined, good – but getting it all to come together just right was still going to take some work. Some assembly required, as the saying goes. Which, on reflection, was pretty ironic considering Jack was sure Mac could put together an IKEA bookcase the same way that math whizzes could solve Rubik's cubes. All he'd need to do was blink and boom, there'd be a Kallax in the middle of his living room.

…He might be getting off-topic.

The point was, the kid had the potential to be good. To be great, even. Jack was damn near certain that with the right guidance and a long enough lifespan to get some experience behind him, Mac could become one of the finest agents the US government had ever seen. The only problem was, he didn’t seem particularly invested in living long enough for that to happen.

If it had been the first time, Jack might have been willing to let it go as youthful inexperience but if twice was a coincidence and three times was a pattern, then what did that make six times? In Jack's book, nothing good. Certainly nothing that he could allow to stand any longer. It had been a pressure point of their partnership ever since Mac graduated from spy school – with flying colours, needless to say – and it was long past time they sat down and dealt with it like adults.

At least, that's what he would have said if Mac hadn't rabbited the second he had the chance.

To be fair, hours later and more level-headed, Jack could admit that Mac was having a rough day. He’d had to tolerate Jack yelling in his face in the field, followed by getting the silent treatment the whole flight home, despite Mac’s multiple attempts at having a civil conversation. Then he’d arrived back in LA only to be absolutely reamed by Thornton for a solid twenty minutes, locked at Attention, staring straight ahead as the words washed over him. He hadn’t complained, he hadn’t flinched. Hell, he’d barely even blinked.

And then, entirely unsurprisingly to anyone who’d been paying the slightest bit of attention, he’d done the one thing Jack hadn’t wanted him to: he’d taken himself home alone, and hadn’t been heard from since.

In hindsight, he should have expected it. Mac was more open and pushy with Jack than with just about anyone, but he still had moments of doubt. Moments when Jack's rough edges had him concerned he'd somehow overstepped a line and ended up with him backing off like he was afraid he'd only do more harm if he stuck close. In their year and a half together, Jack had seen it a handful of times and it never failed to make him feel like an ass. Mac's trust in Jack's abilities was immense and nearly unbearable, but at the same time his belief in Jack's affection for him was fragile and gun-shy. All it took some days was a few harsh words, and the kid would retreat into himself like he'd been hit.

After a long, stressful mission that was capped off by Jack kicking off over Mac's repeated failure to watch out for his own safety? Of course he'd make himself scarce.

It was, coincidentally, the exact same reasoning for why Jack wasn't about to let him shut himself away.

He showed up at Mac's door roughly two hours after they'd landed back in LA. He'd been able to use the flight time to write most of his after-action report since he'd been looking for distractions to avoid talking to Mac, and debrief had been pretty short and sweet from his side. A quick detour to the showers to wash off the worst of the grime, and here he was, ready to mend some bridges. All he needed to do was keep his cool, the way he hadn't out in the field. He could do this.

On opening the front door to find the house eerily still and an opened first aid kit scattered across the kitchen counter, Jack rapidly started revising that statement.

“Mac?” He called out, automatically putting one hand on the sidearm tucked into the back of his jeans just in case. “You in here, bud?”

There was a long, tense pause. Then, quietly from down the hall, “Bedroom.”

Jack was moving before Mac had a chance to reach the end of the word. He didn't sound distressed or in pain, though there was definitely a lowness of tone that spoke of despondency, or perhaps resignation. He sounded a thousand miles from being happy that Jack was there.

Mac’s bedroom door was ajar, so Jack pushed it open with light fingers, still battling down the swell of adrenaline and panic so that he could at least try to start this conversation from a rational position. The room beyond was empty. “Mac?”

Fortunately for everyone involved, Mac didn’t give him long enough to freak out further before he appeared, whole and seemingly well, in the doorway to the ensuite. “Here,” he said lowly, raising one hand in a vaguely sarcastic wave. “What are you doing here? I thought you wanted to head home to get some sleep.”

“I– uh,” Jack started haltingly, automatically scanning Mac for anything that would justify someone scavenging the first aid kit and coming up empty. The dissonance between what he’d feared and the truth of what he could see before him clanged hollowly in his gut. “Uh, yeah. But I wanted to make sure you were alright first.”

Instead of rolling his eyes like Jack had expected him to, Mac just sighed. “I’m fine. Tired.”

“I’ll bet.” He paused, evaluating how he could push without forcing Mac to retreat even further. “Sorry, I’m not trying to get all up in your business, I promise, but– I saw the first aid kit and I thought… I dunno. Maybe something happened?”

Considering he’d walked up to Mac’s front door with a firm plan in mind, this was already going terribly. In all the time since they’d been back in the States, Jack had never felt so viscerally unwelcome in Mac’s home, and his own confusing jumble of emotions was certainly not about to help matters. Mac looked… exhausted. Worn down. Like Jack was just another in a long series of things Mac had had to put up with, when his daily quota for dealing with shit was already maxed out. Abruptly, Jack wondered if he hadn't actually made a huge mistake in coming here.

“It's nothing,” Mac responded woodenly. “Just a scratch.”

Jack's eyebrow crept up. “You trip and fall on your way through the door or something?”

“No, it's– Look. Why are you here? You seemed pretty keen to be rid of me earlier.”

It was Jack's turn to sigh, mentally rallying all the talking points he'd cued up on the drive over. “That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about. I owe you an apology. What you did back there was reckless as all hell and we do need to have a conversation about how you handle yourself on missions, but I shouldn't have yelled at you, and certainly not when we were still in the field. It was a shit way of handling my own panic and worse, it was absolutely the wrong way of trying to correct you. I'm sorry about it. I'll do my best to make sure it doesn't happen again.”

The apology felt lessened somehow, delivered as it was across the wide emptiness of Mac's bedroom. Neither of them had moved from their posts by the room's respective doors. It was a far cry from the friendly chat around the firepit Jack had half-expected.

The strain of it compelled him to continue. “You know, I forget how new you are to this. When we're out there and you're doing your thing, it's so hard to remember that you've only been doing this a few weeks. I shouldn't be surprised when you make a bad judgement call because you don't know any better yet. That's my bad, and I'll work on it, I promise.”

Mac still stood, unresponsive, gazing back at him with a faintly blank expression. He looked surprised, to a certain extent, but anything more was guarded away too carefully for Jack to parse. It was more than a little unnerving considering how easily Jack was usually able to read him.

“Mac?” He asked gently, caught off-guard by the complete lack of response. He’d expected either anger (likely) or warm relief (substantially less likely), so the absence of both felt out of place. Mac wasn’t usually one to take things like this lying down. “You okay bud?”

That drew a reaction out of him, finally, though not entirely the one Jack had hoped for. A line appeared between his eyebrows and he bit his lip for a moment, evidently weighing up what he wanted to say. And, of course, it was only now that Jack properly registered the kid didn’t just look tired – he looked pale. Alarm bells sprang into life so loudly, he nearly missed it when Mac finally responded.

“There’s something I should have told you. You’ll be mad.” That was the only warning he gave before Mac reached up to tug at his loose-fitting shirt – one of Jack’s, he realised distantly – pulling the neck wide enough to reveal the neat line of stitches marching over the rise of his trapezius. The skin around it was red and puffy, freshly irritated. “One of those bullets got a little closer than I’d thought,” he explained before Jack could demand answers. “It’s shallow and it’ll be fine, but I know I should have told you about it.”

Jack’s first response was, unsurprisingly, to just about lose his shit. Finding out Mac was hurt was never an easy transition, but finding out he was hurt and that he’d purposefully hidden that fact? In any other circumstance, Jack would already be yelling. But.

But.

He’d already made that mistake once today.

It didn’t help that it was obvious that was precisely what Mac was expecting from him, and that he’d already braced for it. He'd acquired that vacant, distant stare familiar to soldiers the world over who knew they were about to get the dressing down of a lifetime. Mac knew he was in trouble and he knew he couldn't talk his way out of it, so until the yelling was done, he'd checked out of the conversation. He'd just let it wash over him and do nothing more than hope that none of it was vicious enough to get through his armour. It was the same expression he’d worn when facing down Thornton.

Except maybe Jack wanted to be done making that mistake. Maybe this time he could do what he should have done back out in the field. It wouldn’t make up for what he’d done, but maybe that wasn’t the point.

“Ah, kid,” he said softly and tried not to wince when Mac’s head came up sharply in surprise. “What have you done to yourself?”

He crossed the room slowly, like he was trying to approach a spooked horse, but it didn’t seem necessary. Mac had frozen in place to watch him. The view up close wasn’t actually as bad as he’d feared; as promised, the wound was relatively small – just skimming through the very top of his shoulder – and Mac had done a good job on the stitches. The wound was bad, but it could have been so much worse.

Jack’s hand skimmed lightly over the ball of Mac’s shoulder, watching carefully as the damaged skin shifted and the stitches held. He’d still far rather that they’d been put in by a medical professional, but it was done and done well, so Jack made himself let it go with a quiet sigh.

“You take some pain meds?”

Mac nodded.

“And you cleaned it out good?”

“Yes. Honestly, I didn’t even know it was there until I got home and I… I just didn’t want to have to go all the way back to the office.”

Didn’t want to have to face Jack or Thornton again is what he didn’t say, but Jack fought not to let the sting of it show on his face. It was nothing he didn’t deserve. “Okay,” he said instead of arguing. Mac twitched in surprise again. “Just make sure you keep an eye on it for infection. If it gets worse, you’ll need to see a doctor, alright?”

“I can do that,” Mac said haltingly, clearly caught off guard. He let his shirt – Jack’s shirt – fall back into place, hiding the offending stitches from view. “I promise, I didn’t know about it before.”

“I believe you,” he said simply. It wasn’t the conversation he’d come here to have, and against all odds, the gunshot wound was somehow the lower priority topic. It was a testament to how badly the day had gone that Jack could admit that.

Mac’s faint relief was palpable in the thin air between them and Jack hated to break it, but it had to be done. “We do need to talk though. About earlier.”

Instantly, all of Mac’s slack muscles snapped taut. He straightened up sharply, but didn’t speak.

All on Jack then. Okay. “Like I said, I didn’t handle it well earlier and I’m sorry for that. I shouldn’t have yelled. But we do need to talk about you putting yourself in danger like that. You can’t be doing it, Mac. Not if you want to stay in the field.”

Carefully, Mac stepped away. Ostensibly it was so he could perch on the end of his bed, but it was pretty clear it was so he could put some distance between them again. Given that they’d probably need it, Jack couldn’t fault the decision.

“I didn’t take this job to be safe,” Mac said at length.

“You didn’t take it to die young neither.”

For the first time since Jack had arrived at his door unannounced, Mac showed a hint of frustration with a sharp sigh. “I’m not trying to get killed, you know.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re trying all that hard not to. Mac, you ran right into the middle of a gunfight. No vest or nothing. That scratch on your shoulder is nothing compared to what could have happened if you’d been even slightly less lucky.”

“I know that, but it worked, didn’t it?”

“That wouldn’ta mattered if you’d got killed doing it. Do you understand that? The mission don’t mean anything if I’m bringing you back to Bozer in a box.”

It was a low blow and the scowl on Mac’s face said he knew it. Still, he didn't snap back right away, something pensive buried in his expression beneath the frustration. The thing was, Mac knew he’d fucked up. He knew it wasn’t the first time either. Every time he put himself on the line, he saw his own failure in the abject panic that threatened to tear Jack apart at the seams, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He saw a path forwards and he took it, without ever really wanting to consider what it might mean for himself.

In truth, he missed his own competence. He’d been a bad soldier, with his personal brand of conscientious objection and his chronic inability to follow orders, but he’d been an incredible EOD technician. He’d had some of the best stats in US Army history and he’d been quietly proud of that every day he’d woken up in the hell of the Sandbox. He hadn’t had a lot to feel proud about, lately.

“I know,” he admitted lowly, dropping his gaze to stare hard at the floor between them. The last of his failing energy bled out of him in a rush. He slumped where he sat. “I know.”

Silence sat between them, Jack too surprised by the resigned admission to come up with anything intelligent to say and Mac too shamefaced to continue defending indefensible actions. Eventually, Mac decided that the only way forward was the truth. It couldn’t hurt more than the secrets had done, surely.

“I don’t know that I’m cut out for this job,” he confessed. “Doesn’t feel like I’m doing all that well.”

Jack just barely refrained from snorting before he realised Mac was entirely serious. His eyebrows pinched up in strained disbelief. “Man, are you kidding? You’re the best recruit I’ve ever seen. Do you have any idea how many agencies would kill to get someone with even an ounce of your talent?”

Mac huffed, unconvinced.

“Look,” Jack pressed, caught out that this was something he even needed to say. Maybe he’d been being too hard on the kid all along. “I wasn’t joking when I said I forget how new you are to this. You’ve got some improving to do, sure, but that’ll come with experience. For someone who’s only been out of spy school two months, you’ve been doing insanely well. I mean it. I’ve never seen anyone adapt to this work better than you. There’s people who’ve been in the business for decades who couldn’t do what you do.”

He paused for a minute to let that sink in – though he had a sneaking suspicion it wouldn’t for a long time – then opted for a softer tone. “If you decide that you don’t want this job, then we’re out, no questions asked. I’ll fight Patty myself before I let her put you in the field when you don’t want to be there, but if it’s a matter of you thinking you’re not good enough? I promise you that you are.”

Mac’s whole body seemed to judder at that, eyes bright and wide. He looked lost, desperate for something – anything – to cling to. In the heat of his own anger, Jack had somehow missed just how much the day’s mishaps had shaken his partner.

Slowly, he crossed the space between them and crouched down to put himself on eye level with where Mac was sitting. He didn’t reach out, wary of touching when it may be unwelcome, but tried to put on his best reassuring expression. “You hear me Angus? You’re doing just fine.”

There was a long, expectant pause and Jack felt his heart faltering in his chest before Mac gave a very hesitant nod, accepting the comfort if only just. Jack breathed out in a rush. Without stopping to let himself think about it anymore, he sat up and leaned in to pull Mac into a hug, pressing his head down against Jack’s shoulder and holding him there. A few heartstopping moments later, Mac reached out and wrapped his arms around Jack in return.

“Thank you,” he mumbled quietly after a long moment.

Jack just squeezed him a little tighter, mindful of his shoulder. It was still a long road ahead of them, but Jack had never been so certain of anything as he was that Mac was strong enough to take it. The kid had never once let a little hardship slow him down, and Jack was determined to be beside him every step of the way, ready to lend a shoulder to lean on whenever he needed it. He might have been too focused on everything else to notice the cracks starting to form in Mac’s supports, but he wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

“It ain’t nothing,” he told him. “We’re going to be okay, hoss. Promise.”

#MacGyver #angus macgyver #jack dalton #Rosie's June MacGyver Flashfic Writealong #fanfiction #my fanfic #some assembly required

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