Chapter Text
The first time she woke up in Landstuhl, she was confused. There had never been silence before like it. Grimacing, she lifted a hand to her head, pressing her palm to the gauze wrapped around her forehead and to her ears.
Her vision swam, pain pulsing behind her eyes, even in the low light.
Synapses in her brain fired nowhere to nowhere and the IV line in her arm prickled but nothing quite beat the continuous pounding at her temples. For a long moment, unable to turn her stiff neck, she wondered if she was alone.
And then Jim dodged into her line of vision, and handed her the first note he had written in large blocky letters on a piece of loose leaf.
Do you remember what happened?
“There was a bomb,” she answered once her eyes focused long enough to read the words, and then jerked in her hospital bed when she could feel her voice in her throat, but the silence continued.
Jim smiled nervously, handing her the next piece of paper.
You have a concussion. You have some hearing loss.
Swallowing hard, she managed to shake her head. “Not just some.” Blinking back tears, she looked directly at Jim for as long as her eyes would allow. “Is it permanent?”
He ripped another piece of paper out of his notebook, writing on it before showing it to her.
They don’t know.
She smiled wanly. “I guess it’s good you didn’t get there early like I asked.”
And so she didn’t even grieve. She just enrolled in ASL classes and tried to keep running, from Will and to wherever her feet would carry her.
She’s put up with the gossip blog. She’s put up with Page Six. Landing himself on the cover of TMI with the cover reading My Night With Will McAvoy: Sex, Drugs, and Guns in big yellow letters is not something that MacKenzie is willing to put up with.
The steadily rotating door of attractive women is one thing. Having one of his dates go to Nina Howard with a report that he’d leveled a gun at her while high off his ass is a whole other level of “be ready to be featured on every late night show and have your credibility peeled off of you like a second skin” that she cannot believe she’s being forced to endure.
But that’s not what she’s focusing on at the moment.
(For the most part, anyway.)
It doesn’t make any sense. She knows Scott. There’s no way Scott would let Will sign a contract with a noncompete clause unless…
Forcing herself to remain calm, it takes all her months of speech therapy to get her voice to remain level. “Hang on. You’d never allow a noncompete clause in your contract. You couldn’t stay off the television for five minutes.”
Will freezes, looking back at her.
“It got,” he starts, and then looks away. “Put in.”
Of course.
“When?” she asks, keeping her face and voice coolly neutral. “When, Will?”
“When I renegotiated my contract,” he answers quietly, after a long pause.
It takes each and every of her twenty-six months of reporting from combat zones to remain calm. “To be able to fire me at the end of each week.”
There’s a longer pause this time, and she can see Will struggling to come up with an excuse, a way out, a solid lie.
“Yeah.”
Will hates her so much that he’s willing to ruin his career just to be able to ruin her.
MacKenzie is willing to put up with a lot. But if Will is just going to continue self-destructing in the hopes that he can bring her along with him, she’s not going to stay and watch. But that’s not what has tears threatening the integrity of her vision.
She still loves him.
Crossing her arms she plows out of his office, ignoring the way she knows Charlie and Don are looking at her, ignoring the defenses she knows are rising on Will’s tongue—they’re all valid, she’ll give him that. She’s the cheating ex-girlfriend who was brought here against his will. He had every right to find a way to get rid of her.
Will follows her out, for whatever reason, reaching for her wrist which she promptly yanks out of his grasp, whirling around to face him.
“Jesus Christ how much do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you,” he counters, pouting.
She’s in love with a twelve year old.
“You allowed a noncompete clause in your contract?” she wails. “Three years—you were willing to stay off TV for three years? When was the last time an anchor stayed off TV for three years and ever came back?”
Will cross his arms, no longer exactly looking at her which only encourages her to take a step closer, raise her voice just a bit louder. Everyone knows already. anyway. And what’s the point of fighting with him if they’re not going to fight about the same thing that’s been hanging over their head for three and a half years now?
“Have revenge sex with every woman in the tri-state area for all I care but keep it out of goddamn newspaper,” she seethes. “Some of us have moved on.”
Or should. She really, really should.
“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that,” Will says shortly.
“I can leave,” she says, hands flurrying around her face and she has to stop herself from signing along with what she’s saying, reminding herself that just because she’s panicking doesn’t mean that she needs to do this. But it’s almost Pavlovian at this point, to connect this level of anxiety to being deaf. “You can do the same show another producer.”
For a few seconds he stares at her, unblinking, before responding.
“We can have that discussion.”
“Why don’t we have it right now?”
This conversation is going oddly similar to the way they broke up.
But it boils down to this: Will’s not all in. Of course he’s not. He’s not the same person he was three, four years ago. And neither is she. So maybe it was nice of Charlie to try, but this was never going to work.
“Yeah,” Will says, unfolding his arms when she decides that this should be moved back into his office and brushes past him.
Across the bullpen, she sees Jim in the conference stand, a look of dampened concern on his face. Do you need me? he asks, and she halts.
“Yeah. Some of us moved on three and a half years ago and forgot to tell me,” Will continues, turning on his heel to follow her, and then notices she’s stopped, following her line of vision. “And—Jesus, would you stop doing that?”
“Doing what?” she asks, ire rising as she gives Jim the sign to just hold on.
Jim shrugs, still looking at her uncertainly when Will says, “Your secret language, the constant hand signals across the room—”
Her head snaps back to Will, and she narrows her eyes. “They’re not secret hand signals perhaps if you bothered to give a damn and learn—”
“You hear fine, Mac!” he yells, exasperated.
For several prolonged heartbeats she can’t breathe. Without thinking, her hand fumbles for her hearing aid, her fingers skirting along the hook over the back of her ear.
To his credit, Will realizes what he’s said nearly as soon as he’s said it.
But she still feels anger rising and breaking over her and just like Mac can’t fathom ever telling him about the night in the private hospital in Paris after the surgeon was able to give her some of her hearing back she can’t fathom explaining to him what it was like waking up in the military medical center in Germany, communicating with Jim on endless pieces of paper as absolutely no one would commit to telling her whether or not she’d ever hear again.
The pure terror that she felt for weeks, until Jim started catching on to ASL and for the first time in a month she wasn’t alone.
“No, I fucking don’t!” she screams.
And then, fingers still on the hook of her hearing aid, rips it out of her ear and curls it into her palm.
The world goes silent, and she can see the fuck form on Will’s lips.
“I really fucking don’t because you see, without this, I’m getting ambient noise out of one ear because eighteen months ago I was five feet away from a bomb when it went off, shattering the bones in my middle ear,” she says, because she’s sure Charlie never told him and she’s sure Will never went looking for the news reports on the UN bombing. “Do you know how many bones are in there? Three.”
She holds up her fingers directly to Will’s face, and she would smile at the fact that she’s managed to surprise him if she wasn’t so furious.
“The malleus, the incus, and the stapes. The surgeon in Paris was able to partially reconstruct the malleus and the incus. The hammer and the anvil.” She can feel her voice wavering and she knows she’s yelling but has no idea how loud; she presses her hand to her throat, fingers still curled tightly around her hearing aid. Will looks afraid, and all she can think is good so for maybe half a minute he can think about how afraid she’s been the past year.
“I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing for seven months. I still can’t—sixty percent in one ear Will, and you can’t be bothered to stay out of the tabloids or learn how to fingerspell.”
Will is speaking and she can’t be bothered to try to figure out what he’s saying because this is it, right? They’re going to have a discussion about her leaving. So maybe she should just get all of this out before she walks out of his life again.
“Without this,” she says, and his lips stop moving when she holds up the hearing aid to nearly his eye level. “I’m stuck trying to read your lips and for a man who’s paid to be on TV five nights a week you mumble a whole fucking lot!”
He says something, and her eyes despite everything see you know it’s not like that—before she looks at his eyes, not his mouth and her hands rise and she starts signing along with what she’s saying.
“No Will, I can’t hear you right now. Isn’t that a joy?” Her voice falls, by what measure she can’t say. “So how about you read my lips—”
Someone tugs on her arm and she jumps, huffing.
It’s Maggie.
“What?”
Hands shaking, Maggie looks directly at her, clumsily figuring through the handshapes of the alphabet after she forgets the sign for Congress.
“Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords,” she says slowly, fingerspelling it out, “has been shot in the head at an event in Tucson.”
An eerie calm settling over her, MacKenzie slides her hearing aid back into place.
And then with no explanation, Will is all in, sending Reese back to the forty-fourth floor.
“Mac get in here with Charlie right now.”
“Is everything—”
“Right now,” he interrupts sharply, staring down at his cards.
Nearly tripping over herself, Mac follows Charlie out of the control room and into the studio and by the time she’s situated out of frame she can tell Will is angry. But he points directly at Charlie.
“You tell Leona that if she wants me out of this chair, she better bring more than just a couple of guys.”
Charlie is stunned for a moment, but quickly recovers. “That’s exactly what I’ll fuckin’ tell her.”
“I’m not fucking around Charlie!” Will shouts, gesturing, and Mac is no longer (and quite possibly was never) certain of what she’s witnessing.
“Feet of fucking steel.”
Then Will looks directly at her.
“Mac—”
She regrets it. Not that it’s a new feeling, always thrumming, pounding like a pulse inside her ears. “I’m sorry—”
“It’s not your fault.”
He throws his hands wide, trying to reassure her.
“—I fucked everything up!” she yells, eyes watering. Because it is her, constantly unable to calculate consequences and the blast radiuses of emotional explosions and she thought she and Will were strong enough to tell him about Brian but it was only because she wasn’t smart enough to keep away from Brian, or strong enough to keep her mouth shut.
“It’s gonna be alright.”
His blue eyes wide and honest, hair slightly mussed (she tamps down on the urge to run to the desk and brush the errant wave back into place), she almost believes him.
After Sex, Drugs, and Whatever the Fuck Was the Third Thing he keeps his womanizing out of the tabloids and the newsroom. Mac doesn’t know if Will is just dating more discreet women, or if he’s settled on one, or what. But the spectacle of polished professional women looking for a bankroller ends on that low note and every Tuesday marks another week where Will’s face isn’t splashed on the cover of a tabloid.
Wade brings her to more and more events, galas and speaking engagements and opulent parties, and it’s a little bit like being on Will’s arm, except no one knows who she is where Wade brings her.
(It’s funny, but she was always the more famous out of her and Will at award shows. Will is the face of ACN, but she’s the brains and at the Peabodys and National Press Awards its her who gets the attention and it all balances out because Will has the Correspondents’ Dinner and the Emmys and with Wade she’s the inspiration porn girlfriend who can move her hands as a party trick, and everyone thinks it’s oh-so-adorable that Wade is trying and learning to sign.
More often than not, it’s frustrating.
And then proudly Wade tells whoever they’re in front of that she’s an executive producer, and he’s been on the show one-two-three-four-five times and CNN is looking at him, too, and local affiliates at ABC and CBS.)
It’s almost like before.
Just with the wrong man.
(But that’s like before, too, but MacKenzie already knows she’s good at making mistakes over and over again and somewhere along the line turning them into the right thing, maybe.
It’s not like she has to marry Wade.)
And it’s all going so well until Charlie pulls her and Will out of a pitch meeting and tells her that Wade is being looked at for a congressional run and then she’s back on uneven ground, trying to convince Will that she didn’t mean it like this—
“No one in his right mind would risk losing you.”
Will leaves the room before she can react.
Which is a good thing, because she has no idea what to say.
Almost like clockwork, Tony Hart gets in on the game. But of course, if Charlie worked it out then so did the Lansings and Tony has always had a thing against Will and so while she’s hardly surprised it’s mostly her fault, for selecting staff instead of Sloan. But at least that time she only indicted herself.
Because it’s easier to walk the thirty feet between her offices than wait for Will to yell her name, she winds up leaning into his doorframe, biting her lip as she waits for the explosion.
“She really wasn’t ashamed to say she had Bieber fever?” Will says gently, posture unchanged.
If she looked at her BlackBerry, she’d have four missed calls, seven text messages, and one email from Wade. At some point she’ll hear him out, and she doubts it will help convince her that this isn’t entirely her fault.
“It’s alright,” he says, even more gently.
Her eyes draw to the carpet and while every cell in her body is telling her to flee, Mac just wants to stand here a while longer, and let Will tell her everything will be just fine even though nothing is ever just fine when women like her are put into this position.
“Now I’m the one putting us in the tabloids,” she murmurs, exhaling harshly.
“I’m more pissed that he insinuated that you can’t do your job. Anyone who knows you knows that you’re infuriatingly stubborn,” he answers evenly.
Now, I’m sure Ms. McHale is a fine reporter, but all things considered I don’t think she’s fit for the control room anymore.
“I think Tony was insinuating that you’re just a love-stricken imbecile.”
Not that I have anything against deaf people, or the disabled community, but how can a woman with traumatic hearing loss do a job that involves listening to anywhere from three to ten people at one given moment? I think Will McAvoy is in over his head. Or head over heels—
“That too.”
“And I’m the incompetent adulterous whore with an agenda,” she comments, trying to be calm, trying to be even. She should be, everything’s been going wrong for four years now, all at her own hand. She should be used to this by now. And then, without knowing why she says it, and definitely not looking at Will, she adds, “Which is, in fact, not far off from what Brian called me once, so kudos to them.”
So what? You’re going to ride his dick all the way to the control room? Mac, be less transparent.
“Mac?” Will asks, startled.
Still looking down at the floor, she mumbles, “Not everyone is as nice as you, Billy.”
Then heads back to her office to continue ignoring Wade’s attempts at communicating with her.
By lunchtime it’s not just ACN Morning its Vanity Fair and half a dozen editorials and shortly after lunch it’s Nina Howard who, she’s certain, has dug up reports on the bombing and deduced that there were threats, credible threats, made by the TTP against the officials working in the UN office and she sent Jim there anyway.
Oh fuck it.
She sees it in her sleeping hours enough anyway.
Let the story run.
Eventually she tells Wade to meet her after the broadcast. After reading his emails and texts, after listening to his voicemails. After the universe hands her one more fucking thing and the battery of her hearing aid shorts out twenty minutes into the broadcast (the pack of Duracells in her purse is empty, of course, and so is the one in her desk) and Mac has to debate the finer merits of lip-reading and relying on the instant closed-captioning being accurate and if maybe Tony Hart wasn’t right.
You deserved a lot better, Jim signs to her after telling her that Wade is waiting.
Laughing a little, she squints at unmoving lips of the guest that Will is interviewing, and then sighs.
I deserved what I got, she replies, turning away from the screen and unclipping her mic kit.
She’s useless.
Touching Jim’s elbow, she asks, Can you finish out the show for me?
Like always, he nods and sets himself to the task.
Wade is waiting on the balcony, and she goes out into the snow and frigid temperatures in just her cardigan. The wind is howling, she supposes, snow blowing into her face and being this high above the ground can’t help.
She knows her stilettos on the concrete make enough noise to alert him to her presence, so she waits for him to turn around.
At first he plays the fool.
But for all she’s already been humiliated and humbled today, she doesn’t have time for that, nor room left to tell him to speak slowly, to try to use what little ASL he has to talk to her. MacKenzie has pride enough left for that.
“This was never gonna work you and me. You wasted my time,” he says, and she refuses to let herself shiver, to admit that she is anything but immune to his words, to the cold, to all of it. “So I got something out of it. Some screen time so I’m not a complete nobody, the pretty and deaf girlfriend to score points with the disability activists—”
Which is the moment she decides she doesn’t need to find out the rest of his speech.
“In this order: leave, lose the election, go to hell.”
She lost Will four years ago.
She’s still losing.
Will’s hand touches her waist; she almost made all the way back to her office without anyone stopping her.
But, of course—
“Where did you go, you were gone the whole last block?” he asks, once she’s jerked herself around to face him.
His eyes narrow.
“What’s wrong?”
“The battery in my hearing aid shorted out,” she tries to say. “I couldn’t be of any use in the control room, so I just—”
“Yeah… that’s not it.”
His office is closest, so that’s where they wind up and she stands where he leads her, rooted to the floor with her arms awkwardly wrapped around her folio, pressing it to her chest where she already feels too exposed, too vulnerable.
If she keeps standing here like this, he’ll have to leave her alone, because she can’t hear him and if she keeps looking down—
Will’s fingers curl under her chin, and he lifts her head until they lock eyes.
“Mac?”
She sighs.
“Wade met with the D-triple-C five times. He’s running for Congress. So I broke up with him. Just now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not,” she mumbles, rubbing a hand over the pulsing at the front of her head, not looking at him again because if she looks she won’t be able to keep talking and sometimes silence is the kindest gift of all. “Right. I forgot. You only like it when you’re the one upsetting me. Punishing me. Whatever. I’m fine, I’ve learned my lesson, I’ve gotten precisely what I’ve deserved, six months of someone using me.”
It’s not a Friday, but maybe he’ll keep this in mind for the end of the week.
Will doesn’t like talking about the break-up, or the three years she was gone.
Maybe if she just keeps talking, Mac thinks, but she honestly has no idea what to say after today. All she knows is that tomorrow will be worse, with Nina Howard’s article on the front of TMI calling her incompetent and dangerous and if News Night is to have any credibility at all before the week is out, he should just fire her now.
“I’m just—just leave me alone,” she says, looking up at him briefly.
Just long enough to catch his lips form the words, “We’re in my office.”
So she tries to leave. But again, Will’s hand is gentle on her waist, pulling her back to him. His hands frame her middle, holding her in front of him. Gently, of course, because Will would never hold a woman in place, and it’s his gentleness that keeps her, makes her lift her eyes to his face so she can lip-read what he’s saying.
“You didn’t deserve that,” he says slowly, and Mac is grateful she can’t hear the tone of his voice.
She knows he sounds like he did this morning.
Shrugging, she tries to keep eye contact. “I turned out to be the woman with access to airtime and the deaf girlfriend to earn brownie points with the voters.”
Will’s entire demeanor changes, his face hardening, his shoulders dropping, his fingers curling in against her sweater.
“Wait, he—brownie points?”
“I think he said score points, actually, but I was lip-reading, so I don’t know.”
For a long moment, Will just gapes at her.
“I’m going to make sure he loses that election.” He lets go of her waist, not quite stepping around her but stepping back, moving towards the door. “Actually if he’s still in the building, I’ll—”
“No.” She steps with him, forward as he goes backwards, not quite reaching out for him but not quite letting him go.
“No, I’m not letting him get away with using you like this,” he says, or so she assumes, telling him to slow down. He does, looking at her with a determined set to his features. “I’m going to put his head through a wall.”
She takes one deep breath and then another, blinking back the tears that suddenly burn her eyes.
“I got what I deserved,” she tells him, not as coolly as when she told Jim, her cheeks coloring at the strain she can feel in her throat.
Will stops.
“Why did you go to Peshawar?” he asks, slowly and carefully forming the words, so she can’t pretend to not understand him.
“I don’t know.”
Her voice isn’t steady, she can feel it wavering in her throat.
(There’s no good way to explain what it’s like to have thirty-seven years of pride on how you speak, practicing inflection and diction and the way you shape your syllables so you become a good interviewer, acceptable on-air talent, a formidable journalist—to take all that and have it reduced to vibrations you press your fingers against your throat to feel.
This is what she hated the most about those seven months, the sudden and violent lesson about how important vocal cues are and just how easily she began forgetting people’s voices until they were distant echoes.
Including her own.
There’s no good reason to explain that she watched News Night after the surgery because she had forgotten what Will sounds like. How do you forget how the man you love speaks? The bare bones of his accent remained, the general shape of the words, even the timber.
But his voice was gone.)
Gentle again, by choice, Will pushes the backs of his index and middle fingers under her chin.
“Look at me.”
Voice failing her, MacKenzie shakes her head.
“Yes you do.”
Will looks at her so softly. “What did you deserve when you sent yourself to Peshawar? Mac?”
The world silent and still, she shatters.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s shaking. Dehydrated, possibly, and cold. Standing in Will’s bathroom where he brought her when it became apparent that the crying wouldn’t stop after five minutes, seven, ten.
She hasn’t cried like this in years, didn’t cry like this when she first woke up in Landstuhl, has no idea why she’s crying like this now when at some point the intern she sent out in search of the proper battery for her hearing aid will return.
All she wants right now is to hear Will’s voice and she can’t so instead they’re standing in his bathroom, his arms wrapped all the way around her while as it comes and goes in waves, the calm settling for a minute or two before the sobs resurface, grief shaking her in a way it distinctly didn’t in the aftermath of the explosion.
Cheek pressed to his chest, she can feel him speaking.
When she finally calms, and stays calm, she realizes why Will was talking. Stepping out of the circle of his arms, she looks to where her folio fell to the floor when she at last gave up her grip on it.
Open, laying against the tile.
IT’S NOT.
And then she’s not breathing at all.
Following her gaze, Will stoops to pick it up off the floor, folding the notepad so that it stays open before resting it atop the sink. The tears rise again almost immediately, her breath hitching.
You were there.
Mouth dropping open, her eyes go from his hands to his face back to his hands. When did you learn to…?
Our F-I-G-H-T last M-O-N-T-H had a point, didn’t it? His signing is unpracticed and unfluid as he struggles to push through letters and then the pointed gestures. Slow, and jerky, but deliberate. If I want to keep you around, I learn to sign?
“Oh.”
Her mind forces the word through her lips without a thought.
Will is undeterred, if not thoroughly awkward. But she knows he doesn’t like to do things that make him vulnerable, or look unpolished and imperfected, but he’s doing this for her and she has to press her fist to her mouth to prevent a sob from escaping.
You had a good point. I hired a T-U-T-O-R. I want to keep you around. You were at N-O-R-T-H-W-E-S-T-E-R-N. Why didn’t you tell me?
I wanted to see you, she responds, biting her lip to prevent a descent back into crying, reminding herself to keep to beginner signs and self-explanatory ones. I thought you saw me. And then when I realized you hadn’t I didn’t want you to be mad at me.
Swallowing, Will turns the notepad to the next page. BUT IT CAN BE. His fingers trace the letters, and she would give anything to know what he’s thinking, but his face is inscrutable.
You didn’t D-E-S-E-R-V-E what W-A-D-E did, he signs eventually.
She shrugs. Well, he was right. I was just—
Just what?
I… Her hands stutter in front of her, uncertain.
“Mac.”
Will lifts a hand to stroke her cheek, brushing away fresh tears. Closing her eyes, she lets that be all she knows for a few seconds. Across Afghanistan and Pakistan she’d been left wishing she had just slowed down back in Manhattan, committed Will better to memory.
Sighing, she looks at his face. I mean that I never moved on from you. I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t tell you about B-R-I-A-N to break up with you. I had never been in relationship as serious as ours and I thought that’s what I was supposed to do and I—
Too fast, he signs, unable to decide if he should look at her hands or at her, but he’s given up the look of absolute indifference whenever she speaks about this and maybe that’s enough.
A shuddering exhale escapes between pursed lips and she slows herself, soothes her shivering nerves and trembling hands. Exhaling again, she begins to speak as she signs. I can’t tell you why I went back to B-R-I-A-N when we were first dating. All I know is that I fell in love with you and then I ruined it and I ran away from it and now I’m—I’m like this. I hurt you brutally and it’s my fault.
I’ve hurt you too, is his quick and clumsy reply.
She rolls her eyes. I deserved it.
No, you didn’t. His body juts forward, posture sure, even as he stares at his hands, shaping them into disjointed words.
Wilting, her lips tug into a smile that feels preemptively defeated. But, I love you. I haven’t moved on. And W-A-D-E knew. That’s why he—
His hands stop talking and instead slide into her hair, and half a breath later his mouth is on hers. Her fingers splutter out —broke up with me, before her arms wrap around his waist, and she pulls herself flush against him.
What starts out of desperate quickly becomes measured, urgent but not hasty. His tongue traces her lower lip and she opens her mouth to him, trying very hard to ignore that anyone could walk into his office right now but very much not wanting to this kiss to end. Convinced, perhaps, that she’s not going to flee, Will’s hands move from her hair to her waist, to her hips, very briefly to her ass before resting safely on the small of her back.
Abruptly, he pulls back, looking at her with a stunned expression on his face.
Then nervously, he looks at his watch. I have to go. I have to meet with someone, but I’ll be back. Soon.
Blinking rapidly, she tries to catch his hand in hers. “Wait, what—”
But he’s already gone.
It’s Gary who suggest that Will’s gone to meet with Nina Howard (or a date, she thought originally, because she just dumped Wade so she can hardly fault him for finding someone to get into bed with on Valentine’s Day although now it seems he’s been spending his evenings pursuing something other than women) and Mac believes that she’s going to strangle him until Neal tells her that corporate didn’t pay for Amen’s release.
That someone did.
(That being said, if Will throws another fifty-thousand to keep her face off a tabloid cover on top of the quarter of a million he’s paid to prevent Amen from being held and tortured, she might actually kill him.
It’s a sweet thought, but she’ll kill him.
She’s crafty. She can do it.)
Five minutes after Will leaves the intern she sent out to CVS returns, and as quickly as she can rip open the packaging on the batteries, her hearing returns (as much as it’s going to, that is) and as she’s listening to Neal worry about Will paying money to terrorists, she gets an idea.
Standing fifteen feet or so away from her with his hands on his hips, Will surveys the long line of staffers with checks in hand before turning around to face her.
I fucked everything up, she signs slowly, because they still have so much they need to talk about.
It’s going to be alright, he signs back.
(A kiss doesn’t solve their problems, but it’s start.)
MacKenzie does her best not to notice Maggie elbowing Tess and Tamara, gesturing to the fact that Will has become proficient in ASL.
She definitely ignores the staff’s reactions (Neal’s wide grin, Jim’s affronted look of shock, Martin’s gasp) when without missing a beat, Will signs, You were spectacular tonight. I never stopped loving you.
A wide smile splitting her face, she steps into his arms again.
“You didn’t give her any money?” she asks, holding Will’s arm captive where it’s slung across her breasts.
His breath his hot in her ear, whistling in her hearing aid when he sighs. “I paid Nina Howard absolutely nothing. Do I have to show you the voided check?”
“I—no.”
Laughing, he nuzzles the side of her face, curling himself more tightly around her side. It’s strange; he’s always slept on the left side of the bed. But if she wants to lie on her back, like it’s more comfortable too since the explosion, a hip abduction pillow between her legs, then he needs to be on her right.
They’ll talk. Not tonight, when they’re satiated and sleepy and half-euphoric, but sometime soon. They are talking, just not about anything that can’t be spoken about in low tones, their faces inches apart.
Will presses his mouth to her shoulder, trails a chain of kisses up her neck.
“You can keep talking, you know,” she says, lifting a hand to stroke his hair. “I may talk a big game, but I kind of like it when you don’t shut up.”
“Are you sure you want me to know that?” he asks, snorting.
Humming, Mac combs down where she’s assuming she’s aggravated his cowlick.
“When I woke up from surgery in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, and they put in the hearing aid for the first time, I was so overwhelmed,” she begins, her nails scratching lightly over his scalp. “I spent half a year in absolute silence. If you’re unprepared for that, it’s just… and I spent months wishing I had called my mother one last time, or listened to one last song, and for the longest time I wished I had been able to hear your voice.”
The back of her throat burns, and she stares at her ceiling until it passes.
To his credit, Will says nothing, just fans his fingers out over her belly, his hand spanning from the divot of her pelvis to her ribcage.
“So after my mother and sisters went back to their hotel, I got out my laptop. It was two in the morning and it took a little finagling but I found a livestream of News Night. I had almost forgotten what you sound like. I couldn’t live having forgotten,” she finishes quietly, turning her head towards him when he makes an indistinct noise. “What?”
He kisses her cheek.
“Before Northwestern, I’d almost forgotten your face. Not that I wouldn’t be able to recognize you, but I couldn’t remember the exact shape of your nose, the way your eyes crinkle up when you smile. The little freckle, here.” Leaning up on his elbow, he moves his hand from her stomach to where her jaw meets her ear, and then traces the slope of her jaw down to her chin. “I thought you were a hallucination. That I saw someone who looked enough like you for my brain to back-fill all the details. As much as I… that scared me. That I could have forgotten what you looked like.”
Looking down at her, he studies her face before leaning down to brush his lips against hers.
“But it was me,” she murmurs.
Will laughs quietly.
“But it was you.”
She falls asleep not long after his soft spoken proclamation.