Chapter Text
Objectively, it was a good broadcast; Sloan and Elliot are more than capable, and even if they weren’t, they used the script that he wrote for it himself. And Mac produced it, as she has all but a handful of News Night broadcasts since she was hired, and he hasn’t seen the inside of the newsroom since end of broadcast, Thursday.
Neither has he seen Mac, but he’s trying to not think about how that could possibly be detrimental to his wellbeing.
Tries not to think, which has been a five year exercise in self-loathing and futility. He thinks about Mac, whether she’s around or not. Whether he can stand to look at her, or not. Whether he can stand to look at himself, or not.
It starts to rain, and the image on the screen cuts from live footage at the 9/11 memorial to Terry Smith in Washington before the flowers and candles laid out in front of the reflecting pools turn to despairing wet piles of sentiment. Will pushes his chair back from the dining room table, mutes the television, and stands. Grabbing his half-full tumbler of scotch, he leaves behind the script.
There was a time he could bury his misery with sex.
(Or in sex... he doesn’t know. All he knows is that it doesn’t work with any other woman, and he’s done the legwork on that one.)
That time was when he was with Mac, and he could simply deal with his emotional problems by planting his face between her legs and remaining there until the noises she was making could assure his self-esteem for another three or four days.
He could always count on her being responsive in bed—talkative and descriptive or just plain loud, tactile and grasping, figuring out what she wanted and how to teach him to give it to her, if not just taking it outright. The memory of how she sounds on the cusp of orgasm has stayed imprinted in his mind, those high breathy sounds, and then he would taste her climax in his mouth as her hips jerked up, her legs crossing behind his head. And he wouldn’t be thinking about himself at all, his nose and mouth and cheeks covered in MacKenzie as she screamed and moaned and clutched the sheets, his hands steadfastly pinning her hips to the mattress or cupping her ass to bring her close enough to suffocate every sense except the ones that lead him to her pleasure.
Absently wandering his living room, he takes another gulp of liquor and watches rain streak down the windows. This apartment is two blocks from Ground Zero, but the one he lived at the time of the attacks wasn’t far either. Just in a less expensive area of Tribeca.
The night of September 10, 2001 he was on eight o’clock with Ed Marsh and eleven o’clock with another anchor whose name he honestly cannot remember anymore, ten years out, and didn’t have to show up at work the next day until ten. When at 8:46 AM when Flight 11 hit the northwest facade of the North Tower he woke fifteen minutes before his alarm, and stood at his bedroom window in wondrous disbelief at the sight five blocks down and hundreds of feet up. By the time Flight 175 hit the South Tower fifteen minutes later, he was already fighting his way uptown to the newsroom.
Ten minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, Ed Marsh’s executive producer was sitting him down behind the anchor desk. He wouldn’t leave it—except for a few shell-shocked five minutes that his mind refuses to provide any recollection of to this day—for seventeen hours. He doesn’t remember how many days he spent in the newsroom, before Charlie put him in a company car and told him to go home, or to a hotel room, or to a girlfriend’s and not come back for forty-eight hours.
He stood in his bedroom, just looking out at the ruins, their new place on the horizon.
(The attacks came a month after his mother’s death.)
Now he can see the Statue of Liberty from his balcony. Which was wholly accidental, because his only concerns in buying this apartment were “does it look nothing like the place he all but shared with Mac?” and “does it have a doorman and private elevator?”
Not that either of those apparently matter, he thinks, when the private elevator dings and he hears someone enter the entryway of his apartment.
“What?” he grouses, refusing to move from the center of his living room where he’s certain he cuts a striking figure in drawstring pajama pants and ratty t-shirt, a glass of scotch in his hand but not too far from his mouth.
He hears stilettos on hardwood and immediately relaxes.
“Don’t you what me, jackass,” she replies, quick and sharp and coming into view as she allows herself into his apartment. Her shoulders are pointed and sharp, limbs stiff, and he frowns pointedly until he realizes that she’s soaked through.
“Why are you wet?” he asks, bringing his glass to his mouth before he can mention how her cream silk blouse is now transparent and clinging to certain parts of her anatomy that he could be described as more than fond off.
Mac glares at him, dropping her purse on his kitchen counter. “It’s raining.”
“Don’t you have an umbrella?” She’s dripping all over the hardwood, but he’s already decided to not care and instead focus on keeping his eyes on her face.
“The forecast didn’t call for rain, so no,” she answers shortly, pushing her hair back from where it’s plastered to her forehead. “This is from the taxi to your lobby, and—that’s not the point.”
“Yeah, why are you here?”
Not that he’s complaining, yet. A little tipsy, but not complaining. At the moment, Mac has more than enough ire for the both of them, shaping her body into unhappy angles and lines as she tries to tame her wet hair into a ponytail.
Stepping out of her shoes, she gestures wildly towards him. “Because you didn’t answer your phone.”
“Really, Mac?” He rolls his eyes, and takes another swallow of scotch, ignoring the vaguely uncomfortable feeling in his stomach that may be the ulcer or the way that Mac is looking at him right now, her expression a mix of anger and dismay.
“Well,” she begins, drawing the syllables out in her mouth as she steps closer to him, “less than a month ago I found you on your bathroom floor covered in your own blood and vomit, so on the off-chance you weren’t swinging from your shower rod, I figured I should check it out.”
“Fair.”
His response misses the mark at nonchalance, and while the urge to drink away the awkwardness is strong, he suspects that Mac will question tonight’s alcohol consumption if he continues cradling his glass so close to his mouth. Swallowing hard around nothing, he places it down on the end table, his gaze catching on the curve of her waist and moving upwards before he can stop himself.
She’s wearing a pink bra.
“Do you want a towel?” he asks, forcing his eyes off of her. “Change of clothes? A drink?”
“What?”
He wants her to stay, like he regrets not letting her do when he first discharged himself from the hospital and she tried to invade his guest room, muttering under her breath about pouring all his alcohol down the sink and setting a timer for his meds and ordering groceries for food that was actually a part of the diet the doctor recommended. Mac would have stayed, and he would have made concessions to her.
“You’re shivering, Mac.” She is, and it’s bothering him in the way that his arms want to wrap around her, draw her closer. “I’m not about to just kick you out onto the street.”
After learning that she never got the voicemail, learning that she was at Northwestern, learning that she also staged the reappearance of sorority girl—
It was easier to crowd her out of his apartment in the hopes of crowding her out of his thoughts.
(It didn’t work.)
“How nice of you,” she says quietly, and he can tell that she’s off-balance, that she was ready to put up a fight. Instead, she looks down at her feet, shifting her weight between them. “A towel is fine, if you can just point me—”
“I’ll get it,” he offers, pivoting in the direction of the closet where he thinks the linens are. Thinks, because he’s never cared much about this apartment, except the fact that it had nothing of Mac in it, but she’s standing in it now.
She snorts, starting in the opposite direction that he’s moving in, and his knee complains when he pushes off too hard to keep up with her.
“I know where your housekeeper puts them, me asking was mostly just for show.”
“How do you—I don’t even know where she puts them.”
Shrugging, she walks in front of him and into his bedroom. “I came by for clothes and a few other things while you were…”
Breath catching, he can tell she’s trying to find a tactful way to say after you got your stomach pumped in the middle of the night in a midtown ER and the doctors decided to keep you sedated until the threat of serotonin syndrome passed.
He finds it for her.
“Unconscious?”
“Indisposed,” she corrects, voice lacquered in false cheer. Will can’t see her face—lingers a few feet behind her as she opens a closet next to his dresser that he thinks is deceptively large—but imagines that if she’s smiling, it’s wide but doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Not many have, since she was hired. “She’s very nice. How the hell did you get her to work for you?”
“She’s employed by a service. I called the service. Actually, I think Scott called the service.”
He honestly has no idea—the housekeeper appeared in the rubble Mac left behind, one day showing up in his apartment to do the laundry that had been sitting in his bedroom for months and clucking over the dishes soaking in the sink long enough for the water itself to start molding over. There’s a barbed half-moment where he almost lets the insult formulating in his head slide off his tongue, but he stops himself. He doesn’t want to fight with her tonight. Instead he looks at her in stuttered breaths and heartbeats, not quite meeting her eye.
“Ah.”
Bending at the waist, she scrubs the towel she’s taken from the closet over her hair.
“Mac, just borrow clothes if you’re gonna stay for a bit,” he tells her. It’s an entirely self-indulgent suggestion, one that builds the appearance that she’s who she used to be to him but with none of the emotional sacrifice on his part. Mac can look the part for a few hours while her skirt and blouse hang in the shower to dry, and he’ll have the image of her like that to frame in his mind for the next few months, until he thinks up the next thing to stave off the self-loathing and half-formed thoughts of reconciliation.
Moments of weakness.
“Do you want me to stay?” she asks, her face a portrait of surprise.
(Yes, but it’s a lesson on semantics. Because it’s never that she came back, but that she was hired. He won’t ask her to stay, but he’ll offer her something else. It’s easier, this way, sharper and more precise in his intentions.
He can’t ask her to stay but he doesn’t want her to go.)
“Do you want a drink?” is his next offer, because he hasn’t spoken to her since Thursday and if she goes home he’ll just keep thinking, and it’s a delicate balancing act between the thoughts and the real thing, and if the real thing sticks around long enough she might remind him why forgiving her isn’t a good idea, so he’ll take the risk. Or so he tells himself, not looking at how her damp hair curls over her shoulders. “It was a good broadcast, by the way. Sloan and Elliot did a good job.”
The surprise on her face melts away, and her expression is once again captured by determination. “Tell them that when you come back on Tuesday.”
“I will.”
“They wanted to make you proud.”
“I said that I will,” he says, harder, because she hasn’t accepted the drink or the clothes. “You did good tonight. I mean, you’re good every night. But I could tell that you were really—”
“Really what?”
His mind skips over half a dozen adjectives, affixing to spectacular and he waves a hand in front of his face, banishing it away.
“Something,” he finishes lamely. “It just be because I’m, you know, your anchor—”
“My pain in the ass, you mean.”
But Will smiles, because she opens the door to his closet too roughly, blindly fumbling for the light switch.
She’ll stay.
“Your smart, capable, cogent anchor,” he continues, sitting down on the side of his bed and then, when his spine droops, falls backwards onto the mattress. “But I could, you know, tell that your fingerprints were all over the broadcast even if it was my script.”
Sloan and Elliot are good, but they aren’t as practiced with MacKenzie as he is; that makes him happy and he wonders if it should, wonders if her fingerprints are all over him, or if it’s something more brazen like her lipstick on his collar.
He used to like it when she marked him.
It wasn’t like he didn’t leave his own, secretive bite marks on the insides of her thighs, the sides of her breasts. All contact leaves a trace, some more indelible than others, and Will thinks the problem might be that MacKenzie’s have always been able to come out in the wash. Unlike his father, she never did the favor of leaving behind any scars for him to point to as evidence of pain well-earned.
“My fingerprints are all over every broadcast,” she counters, and he can hear her rummaging through his things. He’s excited, or maybe calmer, or maybe he just needs more scotch in his stomach. “You’re my pain in the ass front man. I’m the brains of the operation. Or maybe the heart. I’ll let you be the brains, so you won’t try to shove your law degree in my face which I know is what you’re about to do, Billy—”
“I am not,” he interrupts, lifting his head from the bed and allowing himself to sound petulant. “Okay, maybe. But I accept.”
Mac snorts, shaking her head, appearing in the doorway a moment later with a button down and a pair of his boxers in her hand. “Can I just—?” she asks.
“Yeah go ahead.” Will expects her to head into the bathroom, or the guest room, or anything that isn’t reaching behind her to undo the zipper of her skirt and letting the wet garment fall to the floor. “...And just feel free to strip in front of me.”
“How many times have you seen me naked?” she asks, staring at him with one eyebrow raised.
Sighing, he lets his head fall back again when she begins to unbutton her blouse. And then lifts it again, because he can’t help himself. He doesn’t notice it right away—his bedroom is darkened, only the bedside lamp illuminated, the rain dampening the ambient light fighting its way through the windows. The closet light is on, but with Mac standing in front of it now, it only casts her in more shadow.
“What is that?” he asks, his eyebrows pinching together.
She winces, clutching the borrowed shirt over her abdomen. “What is what?”
“On your stomach.”
A long and jagged stripe of scar tissue, curving up from her bellybutton to her hip on her right side. The what isn’t the mark itself, the what is the story of how it was made, and this scar is long and nasty and makes him sit up all the way, heart pounding with the phantom of alarm for a danger that has already come and gone.
Mac drops the shirt, affecting an air of nonchalance that is practiced and stiff. “Wait, you never heard about the—”
But her face looks like it can’t quite decide on what mask to take, and her lips pause, unable to formulate the tactful phrasing of whatever is going through her head.
“The what?” he asks, trying to be softer, as he should be when she’s standing frozen in only a pair of his boxers and her bra. “Mac.”
Should he go to her? Why did she come to him, tonight? Was it concern for his safety, or something else? Or if not else, then more? Is it the same reason he wants to pull her closer, keep her in his clothes, in his bed?
Will watches as Mac folds herself into something smaller, shaping her body into concave lines and soft angles, before shivering, straightening her back, and becoming the size of herself again. Stay, he thinks, the errant thought beating wildly in his chest. Stay, and let me warm you up again. You can be small here, if you want.
“I was in Islamabad in ‘09 covering the Shia protests,” she says finally, like it’s something that she wants to be proud of but can only take pain from.
Will realizes how little she speaks about her time embedded, in comparison to Jim, who speaks enough about it for the both of them.
And then he places it, her scar on an old autopsy report on a murdered jogger in Highland Park.
“Okay, that looks like a—”
He was a prosecutor.
“A couple of them got violent, thanks to tear gas thrown by the military police,” she says, not letting him say it for her, so he falls silent and becomes smaller for her, curling his shoulders in, curving his spine until he's small and slumped in. “I caught a knife in the stomach and took a brick to the head when they realized I was filming them. Whoever they turned out to be. They stole my camera.”
Mac drifts closer, the button down shirt fisted in her hand.
“Where the fuck was Jim?” he asks, because his mind isn’t ready to think about MacKenzie and gas, MacKenzie and a knife, MacKenzie and brick to the head. There are so many things he’s thought about these past years, in conjunction to her, and none of them like this.
“What part of tear gas escapes you?” she says defensively, and then swallows hard, eyes darting over the top of his head and beyond him. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, MacKenzie, this thing is huge.”
He’s trying to not sound panicked, but he knows he is, and wonders if he should just shut up for her sake—he’s already caused her enough distress this summer as it is.
“They stitched me back up,” she murmurs. “The budget cuts hurt more.”
“Okay, but this looks like it was serious. Really serious. Did they take you to Landstuhl or were you treated in one of the local hospitals, I mean—?”
Sighing, she reaches down for one of his hands, and places it on the scar. The tissue beneath the skin is rigid, unforgiving to his touch, and he rubs his thumb lightly over the curve of the wound. The blade was six inches, or about, he thinks, measuring where the assailant pulled it out at an angle. The assailant attacked her from the side, and was in motion, walking past her perhaps. Or the assailant was running. The assailant was left-handed, and either shorter than or the same height as her.
He feels like he’s going to throw up.
“I was back on the job a few weeks later,” she answers.
(A question he didn’t ask.)
“Were you supposed to have been?” he questions, voice pestering, because he’s afraid that if he’s too gentle she’ll break.
“Says he who signed himself out of a hospital AMA less than three weeks ago,” she quips with a smile of something akin to relief. “No. So, you know, let me keep you from making my own mistakes.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to that, and for once, says nothing at all.
Sighing again, Mackenzie drops the button down, letting it to the floor, and sits next to him on the bed. Squeezing her eyes shut she lies back like he was a few minutes ago. After a moment’s hesitation, he lies beside her.
“Does it hurt? The scar.”
“You’re asking after prodding it?” Laughing, she scrubs a hand over her forehead but opens her eyes, looking at him, her pupils wide in the dim light. “It’s mostly numb. But I have some adhesions which hurt sometimes. I have medication for it. But it’s the least of my worries, most of the time.”
His hand glances over her waist, a fleeting touch he intends to be comforting but, unsure if she wants to be touched now, aborts. Until he sees her visibly relax, and slowly, watching her carefully, he reaches down to take her hand.
“How was it not major news that a CNN reporter was attacked in Pakistan?”
The same reason that Elliot being attacked in Egypt wasn’t major news, he supposes, and opens his mouth to answer his own question when Mac speaks instead.
“Because I didn’t let it be,” she says, looking up at the ceiling. “They were pretty pissed I wouldn’t consent to being a headline. The budgets cuts after that probably should not have been as much of a surprise as they were, but I was also recovering from catastrophic blood loss at the time.”
“Mac…”
Squeezing his fingers around hers, he tries to stop staging the stabbing in his mind.
“My heart stopped twice on the medevac to Landstuhl,” she tells him evenly, shuttering a look of shame that briefly takes hold of her features, and he holds her hand even more tightly. “Jim knows more about it than I do. I didn’t see a white light, or anything. I think they just pushed more fluids and epinephrine. I tried to read my chart, once, but not a whole lot of it made sense.” Blinking rapidly, she giggles, and finally squeezes his hand back. “Oh, really. I’m fine. And when I’m not fine, I have Xanax.”
“That doesn’t negate the fact that you almost died.”
She almost didn’t come back.
“I honestly don’t remember that much of what happened. Really, Will.” She smiles, biting her lip, and he wonders what the fuck is going on in her head right now. “I remember waking up on a lot of drugs, with twenty-eight stitches in my abdomen.”
He thinks it was more than that, but he understands. And as much as he’d like to draw it out, interrogate it, her pain and anxieties and secrets, he understands. Besides, lying side by side like this is overwhelmingly intimate enough.
Will still has no clue why she showed up at his apartment tonight, though. “So, besides making sure that I wasn’t hanging from my shower rod—why did you think I’d be hanging from my shower rod?”
She rolls her eyes, and then exhales loudly, looking entirely too weary for a woman who’s not yet forty. “I am aware of the significance of tonight’s show for you. And how much you wanted to do it.”
“I can handle myself, Mac,” he replies, knowing he’s proved the opposite recently, and if he panicked over something that almost killed her two years ago she should be able to worry over something that almost killed him four weeks ago. “Or, regardless, it took like two months to get myself to a bleeding ulcer last time. You’re here a little early.”
But all Mac does is huff a lopsided breath, and let go of his hand.
They lie next to each other without saying anything. He wonders if he should, if he should ask her what she wants him to say, and then say it. Wonders if he should feel this way, because he’s been forcing himself not to since she didn’t return the voicemail but now he knows she never heard it. Wonders what it means that she hasn’t asked him about it tonight.
Was she really that worried about him?
He listens to the rain, tries to wash out his thoughts. It was a good broadcast. She just wanted to check in. Mac has already proved that she cares. And if her clothes weren’t a wet heap on the floor, she’d already be gone.
He listens to breathing beside him, letting the minutes of silence pile up between them.
“I just—I mean, the night that Osama bin Laden died, it felt like—I felt like—” The words form in her mouth half a thought ahead of what she can piece together in her mind, and he takes her hand again. “I spent almost a year in the tribal areas, getting shot at by al-Qaeda members and near the blast radius of al-Qaeda bombs, I had friends who were casualties of al-Qaeda, and that night was... I think that felt like what tonight was supposed to feel like for you. Like what we’ve been doing has been worth it. That we’re still here, despite of what we’ve been doing. What it’s done to us.”
Will wonders if this is what he missed while he was high, what he’s missed all along—what made her spectacular. Or maybe the high gave him clarity enough, remembering his earnest promises and the way he touched her in reassurance.
“That was a good night. The night we got Osama was a good night,” he says absently, stroking his thumb over her knuckles.
They reported it first, and twenty-six months in a warzone became worth it. Squinting into the darkness, he wonders what tonight was supposed to be, for him. His career in broadcast news has been an accident of fate, hinging on the deaths of three thousand people. A terrible coincidence that MacKenzie took and shaped four years later into something meaningful, until it ended.
(But she came back, he reminds himself.)
The attacks came a month after facing his father at his mother’s funeral, and he got behind the desk for seventeen hours and did as Charlie asked, doing his best to convince five million viewers that it would all be alright, that they would make it through the night.
And now here they are, ten years later.
Sloan and Elliot did a good job, he thinks. The staff. They’ve all done good jobs, and now he’s taking the hit to protect them. Because that’s what he does.
He turns his head towards Mac. “You’re not asking about the voicemail.”
“You’re emotionally compromised tonight,” she says with a shrug.
“I’m not… emotionally compromised.”
He was a little buzzed when she first walked into his apartment, but he’s not even that anymore. Mostly right now he wants to stay like this, in the half-dark of his bedroom, with her, until he stops thinking about stab wounds and homicides and crime scenes and painkillers and booze. Because he loves her, he does, but it feels like there’s a weight on his tongue that won’t let the words out.
He’s afraid. And has been, for a very long time.
“Do you want me to ask about the voicemail?” she whispers.
Uncertain of how to answer, he rolls onto his side and wraps his arm over her waist, watching her face the breadth of the motion, watching for her assent. Blinking wide-eyed, she gives it, letting go of his hand to move so she can rest her head on his chest.
Her hair is still damp.
The skin of her stomach is raised with gooseflesh, and he reaches down at the foot of the bed for the warm cashmere throw that his housekeeper folds over the end, and wraps it around them.
He doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t ask again; he almost wants her to.
“Your heart stopped. Twice. And what—what else didn’t get reported?”
She shrugs, and he doesn’t ask again.
A few minutes later, he hears her take a deep breath.
“I’m just saying, I know that tonight was going to mean a lot to you and I didn’t want you to be alone, because of your mother and I mean, no one’s ever done seventeen hours in the chair covering something like the attacks and you were at Ground Zero and—”
“So were you,” he says, almost accomplishing what he’s wanted to do for years and not thinking about it, and finds that he’s not afraid.
“What?” she asks, thoroughly confused, and lifts her head from his chest.
(Or maybe the fear he’s been feeling since she came back is that she’d leave again, so he tried to make her do it on his terms. But he can’t think about her leaving again, collecting another scar like the one on her stomach.)
He looks at her face for a long moment, the smudge of black beneath her eyes from where the rain made her mascara run, the indentation on her bottom lip from worrying it between her teeth, the look of honest and earnest confusion in her gaze.
“Mac, ask me about the voicemail.”
Biting her lip, she rolls onto her back, pillowing her head on his bicep.
“What was in the voicemail?” she asks quietly, with a tinge of uncertainty.
Closing his eyes, he makes himself say the whole thing before he loses his nerve.
“It was… Hey, it’s me. I swear I’m not saying this because I’m high, and if the answer is no then just do me a favor and don’t call me back or bring it up or… anything. But after tonight, I really wanna tell you… that I’ve never stopped loving you. Or at least I’m pretty sure that’s... ” All that’s relevant of that part without being redundant. “And then, I asked, Do you… do you still love me? Or can you? You were spectacular tonight… And then I think I actually said can you believe we got Obama? So… yeah. I love you. And I’m never gonna hurt you again. Because you’ve already been hurt enough.”
Keeping his eyes closed, he holds off her reaction.
Because MacKenzie came back, but she also left. And he’s given her plenty incentive since she came back to not want to be with him, a great many reasons quite recently.
Her hand lands on his cheek, the backs of index and middle fingers tracing down to his jaw, so he lets himself look at her, and sees the etchings of concern on her face.
“So have you,” she says.
He doesn’t know what that means.
“MacKenzie?”
She smiles, happiness creasing the corners of her eyes. “I love you too. Just so you know.”
“Thank god,” he breathes, and she giggles, letting him wrap his arms around her waist and roll them onto their sides.
She lowers her voice, so he can barely hear her over the rain. “Never stopped, either.”
He lifts a hand from her waist to wipe a blot of makeup from the ridge of bone circling under her eye. His gaze tracing from her mouth to her eyes and back, he watches her face smooth back into a weary countenance. But still she smiles, in a small and quiet way, the smile reaching all the way to her eyes.
“I’d uh—really like to kiss you, now.” He moves his face closer to hers, nuzzling her cheek. “If that’s permissible.”
Her hands slide up and down his back, and she laughs again.
“You should definitely do that,” she whispers, her eyes almost crossing as she tries to look at him. “I’d really like it if you did that.”
So he does.