Chapter Text
“So she went?”
Will shifts in his seat at the table in the corner of his office, not quite avoiding looking her in the eye but not quite managing to maintain any eye contact, either. “Well, it was Mac who was specifically invited. So yeah, she went.”
“Is she allowed to do that, as an EP? I mean, isn’t that a bit unusual?” Nina asks over the plastic lid on her Starbucks latte, the pink of her lipstick imprinted on the rim.
Seated across from him, she looks largely out of place in the newsroom. But since Mac left on Christmas Eve, she’s been visiting him at work more and more.
“The British Ambassador to Pakistan is her godfather,” he explains, trying to not sound as oddly defensive as he feels. “She and the NATO delegate in charge of the fact-finding mission had the same tutor teach them French back when their fathers both worked in the British embassy in Moscow. Mac’s whole life is a bit unusual.”
So is his own, although a distinctly different kind of unusual. But Nina is normal, and their childhoods pass as something close enough to resembling each other that she doesn’t think to question his own. Whereas Mac has always been able to seek out the disruption of normal, and even if her queries were never pointed, he knows she knows. He’s told her.
“So it’s because they know her?” Nina asks, not pointed at all.
Will lifts an eyebrow.
“It’s because she’s the expert on the war in Northwest Pakistan. She spent twenty-six months in the region as a foreign correspondent with CNN. The last time we sent green people out—it didn’t go well.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” she’s quick to say.
It wasn’t, and he knows that. He knows it was Mac’s call as executive producer to send Maggie and Gary to Uganda, and she was the one who signed off on it. That doesn’t make it her fault either, since sometimes a gunman just shows up at the door of a school full of children or your father gets drunk at the distillery on the family farm and beats your mother for correcting him on how much money the hands are owed in their paychecks this Friday.
Mac may have spent two years in violence, but he was born in it.
It’s cruel, but as a system, it seems to be wholly random.
And it happens.
“Mac feels like it was hers,” he says, beginning to feel like this is a conversation he and Nina should not be having. “Besides, it’s not exactly my place to tell her no.”
Her smile is concerned. “She works for you.”
“That tends to be a sore point between us,” he says with a snort, lifting his own coffee to his lips.
“Her working for you?” she asks, eyebrows puzzling together. “You’re the managing editor, aren’t you?”
Will thinks he might do better not explaining the finer points of his relationship (working or otherwise) with Mac to his girlfriend. Not that she doesn’t know them, anyway. She used to report on those facts.
“Mac wanted to go back to Peshawar, and it’s a three-week NATO fact finding mission,” he says, trying to think of a way to deftly point out the differences between Mac’s career and Nina’s, or even his own. “Last night she had an interview with a member of the Pakistani Taliban. No one else could go over there and get us that kind of stuff, she’s unbelievably—”
“Good?”
Nina is clearly amused. Crossing her legs, she leans forward.
“Reckless. But yeah, good. That too.” He knows she’s noticed his insomnia, the late night phone calls to Mac that are morning phone calls for her. And he knows Mac probably finds them annoying, and he knows Mac can handle herself, but regardless. “I can’t think of anyone else in the newsroom who has the contacts and sources to get a high ranking member of a global terrorist group to talk on camera to Western media.”
She nods. “She’s amazing.”
“Charlie thought it was a good idea.”
It was Charlie that Mac got on her side first, before even broaching the idea with him. Rationally he knows it was so she knew that they would have the funding for it, but he can’t help but think she was expecting that he would have to be persuaded. But the way that Charlie keeps looking at him, even now that she’s left, Will doesn’t know if Charlie wanted him to tell Mac to go or ask her to stay.
“It is good for Mac,” Nina says, finishing off her latte and setting the paper cup down on the table.
He laughs again. “She’ll get a Peabody for last night’s segment alone.”
And he’s already written out a check for the three hundred dollar submission fee. Will wonders what you get for someone when they win their third Peabody, if it’s leather or silver or gold, or if you just apologize for having spent your entire career inside the studio.
“So I guess you didn’t want to tell her not to go?” Nina asks, and he almost remarks on her tone before remembering that last night he was complaining about how he doesn’t like the way Jim handles being in his ear during the broadcast.
“Why would I want to?” Will can think of five distinct reasons off the top of his head, and two of them are the scar from the knife wound she got in Islamabad which he somehow only found out about a month ago. “She was excited.”
He hasn’t seen Mac that excited since the night of the American Taliban broadcast.
“You need her here as your EP,” Nina argues, referring back to their conversation the night before, if him complaining about Mac’s absence from the control room constitutes a conversation between two people. “I mean, not that Jim isn’t good. But three weeks is a big gamble on ratings.”
“I’m not… worried about the ratings,” he says, looking down at the table as he shifts in his seat again. “This is the sort of thing that Mac—that we want, for the show. Tomorrow they’re going up into the mountains and she’ll be the first American journalist to talk to tribal leaders in years.”
But Nina doesn’t look as impressed as he’d like her to be, only more concerned. “I just can’t see that making you guys likeable. I’m sure they have some things to say about US soldiers that won’t play too well with your viewing audience.”
“I don’t care,” he replies, probably too quickly. “I mean, I do care, but Mac wants—”
She smiles. “Mac cares about Northwest Pakistan more?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“And you care about Mac. More than the viewers.”
“It’s a good opportunity,” he says. “For all of us.”
Since he was attacked in Egypt Elliot hasn’t been too keen on leaving the country for foreign coverage. And even if she wasn’t born to violence like he was, Mac was born to this sort of instability, proxy wars and weaponized extremists and fragile administrations. It might not be good for her, as much as it’s not good for anyone, but she knows it.
It’s given her two Peabody’s, after all.
The Pearl-Continental was their second choice in hotel, after the Emiraat was booked by all the diplomats and delegates traveling to Peshawar. Their second choice, since he and Mac had been there when it was bombed in 2009, having dinner with a UN official that she had known from childhood when gunmen stormed the building.
“I’m fine,” she assures him, trying to adjust the webcam on her laptop. “They’ve changed the carpeting and everything.”
Jim is hardly reassured.
When Mac first received the offer from her godfather to put her name in with his friends in Islamabad as the go-to reporter to cover the NATO mission and talks, he assumed that he would be the one going with her. Not Neal. Or Maggie , who’s barely holding it together and isn’t even finished with her mandatory twelve sessions with the company psychologist after Uganda.
“How’s Maggie?”
Mac procures a sheaf of paper from outside the left boundary of the frame, studiously pretending to read the top report. “Why would the carpeting upset Maggie?”
“You know what I mean.”
He has a feeling that Mac is enrolling Maggie in her own trauma recovery program, which involves burying your trauma in even more trauma, in the hopes of winning a Peabody, and then using the trophy to tunnel your way out of the trauma. Jim’s seen that regimen of pain before, and he only hopes that it concludes before anyone starts day-drinking in their sweatpants in a bowling alley.
Failing that, he hopes that Maggie has better wrist technique than Mac ever did.
“She and Neal are downstairs sitting in on a meeting of NATO and Khyber Agency officials. They’re going over the itinerary and regulations for tomorrow, including what to do in the event of an IED blowing us all to hell or an ambush,” she says, fiddling with the alignment of the camera on her laptop. “I imagine I’ll see how ready she is when they come back to the room.”
“Why aren’t you sitting in?”
She snorts. “I think I remember what to do if the Taliban attacks.”
“Yeah, well.” Looking up, he makes sure that no one else is listening in on this Skype call, and then cranes his neck to make sure that Nina and Will are still in his office. “Don’t get shot in the ass.”
“You better hope I don’t. We’ll be holding a memorial for my ass,” Mac mutters, picking up the reports again, actually reading them this time. “How’s the rundown looking for tonight?”
“I emailed it to you already,” he says, certain that she already knows that but wants him to go over it again so she feels less neurotic when she picks it apart verbally rather than in an email with a large wall of text. “And you’re probably important enough to be kidnapped, now.”
Not that he wants to see Mac in a fuzzy video with a bag over her head, but he’d like to see Will a little more engaged with the fact that Mac is once more in a warzone, and less engaged with a certain gossip blogger.
Who, when he turns around in his chair again, is exiting Will’s office on his arm.
“Is that Nina?” Mac asks, the corners of her mouth twitching into a frown. “Has she started coming by since I left?”
“Yeah, you should see how Gary gets anytime she walks into the newsroom,” he says, smiling wryly.
A column of honey blonde hair falls over his shoulder.
“Just Gary? You look like you’re about to go into an apoplectic fit.”
He sighs. Every damn time. “Tess, don’t you have a guest to prep?”
“Hi Mac!” Behind him, Tess wiggles her fingers at Mac’s face on his computer screen.
“Hello.” Mac’s frown shapes into a grin. “What’ve you got?”
Tess looks down at the notepad in her hands. “Ahmadinejad’s meeting with Hugo Chavez on the first stop of his Latin American tour. I’ve got a Georgetown professor who’s an expert on Venezuelan politics and a spokesperson from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Any tips?”
Sitting back in the chair at the small hotel desk he figures that Mac has commandeered as hers, she pushes her hair off her face. “I would concentrate on Chavez’s support of Iranian nuclear power. Don’t let the academic push you away from human rights, either.”
“Thanks,” she says, scribbling another line into her notes. “Good luck tomorrow! Today?”
Nine hours ahead, he’s going to say, before Mac cuts him off.
“Tomorrow. It’s not midnight here yet,” she says, waving when Tess nods appreciatively before heading back to her desk. Mac trails Tess, her eyes tracking behind him, before returning her gaze to where his face must be on her screen. “See? You’re doing great.”
“You could have called Jerry Dantana back up from DC.”
He really should be in Peshawar with her; Neal and Maggie won’t fight her if she tries to do something like pretend she hasn’t been stabbed.
“If I never see Jerry Dantana again it will be too soon.” Mac says on a long exhale, her nostrils flaring in annoyance. “And if you hadn’t felt the need to flee to New Hampshire back in September I’d have brought you along, but—”
“You’re letting Maggie flee!” he hisses, trying to moderate his voice down. “To Peshawar! Where I got shot in the ass!”
Shrugging, she waves him off. “Yeah, but I’m here.”
He knows his expression is less than enthusiastic.
“You were there when I got shot in the ass.”
“She’ll be fine. She listens to my directions better than you ever did,” she deadpans, arching a brow at him like a threat. But he’s certain he’s already a cautionary tale for many a Private on why when the Sergeant says to stay down, you stay down. And it’s not like he could embarrass himself that much more to Neal and Maggie.
He laughs. “And yet you leave me your control room.”
For a brief moment, she looks as if she’s about to supply him with a sharp retort, but then her face shutters. Turning around in his seat again, he sees that Will’s returned from escorting Nina out of the building.
“Go back to work, Jim,” she says, forcing a smile. “And re-work the c-block.”
“Wait, what—”
But she’s already disconnected the call.