Chapter 1: Prologue
Chapter Text
Five-year-old Angus MacGyver paused on his way back out into the yard. He could hear voices in the other room. It was Auntie Gwen, his mom and dad. That was expected, but the tone was tighter – worried and scary – than usual. He’d felt the pressure growing lately, felt the adults trying to keep it from him, trying to make it seem like everything was okay. He suspected nothing was, but no one would tell him anything because he was “just a kid”. He wanted to be grown up so he could know things!
He crept closer, trying to be quiet. Listening is how you learn things, that’s what his mom said.
“I think our best bet is a vehicle. The fuel fire will explain the unidentifiable remains. I’ll meet you at the coordinates, take you to the bunker. James will put on the show, and then, in a few months, he’ll make an ‘it takes a village’ argument to leave MC, and he’ll bring Angus to join us.”
“Angus doesn’t know anything about all this,” his mom said.
“I should hope not!” Auntie Gwen said. “He’s five. That age, they give away secrets without even meaning to.”
Angus almost gave himself away, upset that his Auntie Gwen didn’t believe he would keep a secret. He’d show her! He’d never tell anyone he heard this conversation.
“And he needs to stay with me. OPI will be suspicious if I just quit my job. A suddenly single parent needing to quit a dangerous job and move closer to family, that they’ll buy.”
“I don’t want to be apart from you and him for months!” His mom cried. Angus wanted to run to his mother and make her feel better. He hated people being upset!
“I warned you about sharing File 47 with anyone, let alone everyone. They’ve already tried once. It’s this or they will succeed.”
“But couldn’t we all be in the vehicle?”
“No, because OPI would investigate if I were in the vehicle,” his dad said impatiently. “We’ve been over all this already, Ellen.”
“You said you were willing to die for 47,” Auntie Gwen said. Angus gasped, and quickly shoved his fist in his mouth to muffle it. “So, what’ll it be, are you going to die for 47 without having accomplished anything? Or are you going to stick to the plan and live for 47?”
Chapter 2: Orientation
Chapter Text
“Hey! I’ve seen you running through here this time of day every day this week, haven’t I?”
“Uh, yeah, um, yes, sir?” Mac gasped out as an adult sprinted up alongside him. “Is that not okay? I didn’t see anything—” Mac couldn’t imagine any other reason some strange adult would interrupt his morning run. Then again, he couldn’t imagine any reason why his running route around campus would be a problem.
“It’s fine. How far do you run?”
“I, uh. I’ve been running 10K this week, but once classes start on Monday, I might have to drop to 5K, depending how early classes are.” Why? Mac wanted to ask. He’d already talked to the men’s track and field coach and their cross-country team was set for the year, so it wasn’t that. (Mac had thought it might be a good way to make friends without his social awkwardness showing up too quickly.)
“I’m the conditioning coach for the football team,” the man explained.
“Oh, I’m not a football player,” Mac interrupted. That was one experiment he had zero interest in repeating.
“I’m not trying to recruit you for the active roster,” the coach assured him. “The team had a lot of trouble with conditioning last year – coming up empty late in games and late in the season. We’re going to get the team out running a couple days a week to build endurance, but I need a pacer. I use my watch to check my pace when I run, but I’m not consistent – I start too fast and fade late, exactly what we don’t want the boys doing.”
Mac waited patiently for him to continue, but he didn’t. “So… what does that have to do with me?”
“You run at a consistent pace, first mile and last.”
Mac wondered whether he should be creeped out that someone had been paying that much attention to his runs this week without him noticing. “Sure,” he said slowly.
“If you’re willing, I’d just like you to lead our runs. Just start your 5K run from the field at say 6:45 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. You don’t have to interact with the team at all if you don’t want. That’s my job – and the rest of the coaches – I just want to be able to tell them to stay with you, that if they’re ahead of you they’re pushing too hard, and if they’re falling behind, they need to work harder.”
Mac considered. He was going to run anyway. 6:45 was a bit later than when he’d been heading out this week, so that wasn’t an issue. The dorm to the field was about his usual warmup. He’d have to look at a 5K route over the weekend anyway.
“Sure, I mean, we can at least give it a try. If it doesn’t work for me, can I quit? Or if the weather or whatever or I just don’t want to run that morning?”
“I’m not going to like it, if it’s working for us, but you’re volunteering to help out, so there’s nothing I can do to you if you don’t show up.”
“Okay, sure. See you Monday, then, I guess?”
📎
Mac still was not a football player. The team mostly ignored him. He mostly studied them. The various positions were fairly cliquey, in his opinion, receivers running in a pack that never mingled with defensive backfield (if that was even the appropriate term – Mac doubted it), both sets of linemen trailing well behind. Mac saw how some of the players were constantly showing off, trying to outrun Mac’s pace, despite their coach’s repeated lectures on the lesson of pacing. He saw how some grumbled about the early hour and the distance (far more than the 100-yard field that they played on) and the pace Mac set.
One of the most persistent complainers was the punter, who was also one of the regulars to fall behind the pack and even out of sight of Mac. “There are two of us on the team whose job literally involves not running,” the punter pointed out. “Why do we still have to do this?”
“On the team are the key words,” the coach replied, long-sufferingly.
Mac wondered who the other person was whose job didn’t involve running. He also wondered about the dark-haired man who consistently ran right beside him, matching his pace exactly, and seemingly effortlessly. He looked to be in his thirties, unlike all the others, except the coach who had recruited Mac to this job. The players didn’t defer to him like they did to the coach, but he also didn’t seem to belong to any of the position groups.
One morning, they were both early to the field. Mac stretched his hamstring, figuring if he’d arrived early, he’d probably skimped on stretching without realizing it. “So, uh, it’s probably none of my business, but the run doesn’t seem to faze you like the others – you’re not showing off because you’re faster than the pace, and you’re not struggling to keep up, or complaining about the early hour, or anything, and you’re well…”
“Ancient,” he finished for Mac, with a disarming grin.
“You’re not!” Mac protested, even though “old” had been the word on the tip of his tongue.
“For football? I am. For bein’ a junior in m’second year o’eligibility? I’m ancient, an’ I know it.” He leaned over sideways, stretching a different muscle group. “I keep forgettin’ you ain’t part o’the team an’ don’t know m’whole story. Texas born an’reared in case you ain’t heard it for yourself. Played all through high school. D-I was sniffing, but not offering a hard sell, so I was probably going to end up D-II anyway. Except, the one thing I was clear on was that I needed a break from school. I was also really clear that while the cowboy thing’s in my blood, my Pops is runnin’ the Ranch still an’ even a couple hundred acres ain’t enough space for the both of us to not be buttin’ heads every minute of every day. So, I went ahead an’ enlisted. Then three years became five became eight became more, an’ ‘fore I quite knew it, I was red shirtin’ for a D-III program at 30, on the GI bill, not a full athletic scholarship. So, yeah, this ‘run’, where you’re pacing us at, what 8-minute miles?” Mac nodded. “With no gear, at quarter to an hour past Reville? This ain’t nothin’.”
📎
“What are you working on?” Another student asked as she unpacked her bag at the other end of the lab bench where Mac was setting up an experiment.
“Failing my fluidization lab, apparently,” Mac confessed.
She laughed. “Well, I’d say so – given your textbook is open to the section on slope stability. Need some help?”
Mac shook his head. “Not really. It was a joke, I guess? We were doing a lab on fluidization in class today and I asked the professor what would happen if we applied slope stability principles to the problem. Just curious, you know? But he just said that if I applied those principles to the day’s lab, what would happen is that I’d fail the lab.”
“So, you did the fluidization lab to appease him, but now you’re still curious,” she guessed.
“Exactly.”
“Here, you’ll need this,” she said, pushing her textbook over to help him create the slope.
“Thanks…” Mac trailed off, realizing he didn’t know her name.
“Nicole Carpenter. Nikki,” she supplied, offering a hand.
“Angus MacGyver,” he returned with a grimace. “Mac. Pleasure to meet you.”
📎
An hour and a half later, Nikki called it a night. “Thanks for the loan,” Mac told her, sliding her textbook back across the lab bench.
“Not a problem. Some evening I’ll have to show you around the Catacombs, where the real experiments the faculty shoot down happen.”
Mac smiled. “Sure; I’d like that.”
Once she was gone, Mac set about cleaning up his experiment.
He was walking past the other occupied lab bench when he stumbled. He never missed a step when he was out running, but put him inside and he tripped over his own feet too often for his own liking. He fell into the bench, causing a spike of pain in his hip. He heard glass shatter and tried to back away, but ended up going down in a heap.
“Mac! Are you okay? Is that my blood or yours?” The grad student – Mac thought, based on age, unless she was a non-traditional student like his friend (Were they really friends when he still didn’t know the man’s name or position on the team?) – exclaimed.
Mac wondered briefly how she knew his name before realizing she probably overheard him introduce himself to Nikki. Then her question registered. He hadn’t thought he’d run into her, or dropped anything on her, but if she was bleeding… “I’m sorry! Are you okay? Of course, you aren’t; you said you’re bleeding!”
She smiled reassuringly, like he was the one hurt. “I didn’t say I was bleeding,” she told him. “I asked if it was my blood. My research area is in DNA reconstruction, so this is all blood product,” she explained, waving to the unbroken experimental materials. “Are you okay? You aren’t cut from the glass anywhere, are you?”
“I, uh. I don’t think so?” Mac carefully detangled himself from the mess he’d made and carefully unbuttoned his overshirt, stripping it off and shaking it out to dislodge any glass shards. His undershirt was whole and unstained, which seemed to confirm the blood was her research, not his.
While they were cleaning up the mess, he learned her name was Franklin Malory, Frankie. He apologized again and asked if there was anything he could do to make it up to her.
“Well, it’s a set back to my timeline, so you can come by the lab in the evenings and help me with my research, if you want to help. If you aren’t down in the Catacombs with Nikki.”
“Of course I’ll help,” Mac promised.
Frankie hummed. “A little unsolicited advice from one typically oblivious nerd to another?”
“Hunh?”
Frankie ignored his confusion. “She was flirting with you.”
“What? She wasn’t…. Was she?”
Chapter 3: Germination
Chapter Text
Mac dutifully helped Frankie with her research, asking questions and fetching test tubes, mostly. The work she was doing was fascinating and would have significant applications in law enforcement. Frankie was hopeful it would also have medical implications.
“I get where being able to reconstruct a degraded sample is valuable to police, but what’s the medical implication?” Mac asked. “The sample’s not degraded.”
“Not at the source, but not everywhere in the world has a fully functional genetic diagnostic lab.”
“Fair, but the places that don’t also aren’t going to have this state-of-the-art DNA reconstructor, either.”
“No, but places without access can send samples to the labs, and the labs can still process even if it’s degraded from shipment mishandling or delay. But that depends on the receiving lab having the ability to reconstruct, which they won’t if I can’t figure out something with the right consistency,” she admitted, audibly frustrated.
Mac pressed, curious, for what exactly the problem was.
“Gelatin has those properties, doesn’t it?” Mac asked.
“You mean, like Jell-O?”
Mac shrugged. “I mean, the blood won’t be blood-y at the end, and I’d want to be particular sure there were no children in the lab, because it’ll probably color about like cherry Jell-O, but dessert aside, it could work, couldn’t it?”
“Maybe?” Frankie mused, trying to think it through.
📎
After the morning run, the second Friday of September, Mac’s unnamed friend pressed two tickets into his hand. “Tickets to the home opener tomorrow. Bring a friend. Wear our red or silver, if possible. If not, don’t wear blue or gold.”
Mac had an MIT T-shirt he could wear. That was easy enough. Bring a friend, though? This football player whose name he still didn’t know was one of the closest he had.
He ended up asking Nikki that evening as she led him down a dark stairwell to the Catacombs. He’d expected her to say no – she hadn’t shown any interest in sports. Then again, he probably hadn’t either. He hadn’t mentioned his runs with the football team to anyone. “Sure, why not?” She agreed. “Come on. Let’s see who’s here tonight.”
A classmate of Mac’s, who went by Smitty, was down there, working on an experiment on combustibility. Mac was immediately enthralled. He had to admit he loved things that exploded.
📎
Thanks to the stadium announcer, Mac finally learned his friend was 32-year-old Army veteran, MIT-Junior, playing his second year as the Engineers’ place kicker, Jack Dalton.
“Want to go?” Nikki suggested just inside the two-minute warning as the first half drew to a close.
“Where?” Mac asked, not tracking. “You mean leave the game? You know it’s only halftime, right, like there’s two more quarters….”
“I may be just a girl, but I certainly don’t need you to mansplain how many quarters make a whole! It’s just football. It’s boring and we’re winning anyway. Why not leave while it’s good?”
Mac wavered. It was boring. They were winning. But… “Jack Dalton – the kicker – gave me the tickets, and we’ve barely seen him play. I think I should stay, and thank him for the tickets after and all.”
“He’s a kicker. You’re not going to see him play more than what we have, the extra points and the kick offs.”
“There could be field goals in the second half,” Mac pointed out reasonably.
Nikki just rolled her eyes. “I’m going, anyway.”
Mac nodded. “I’m sorry it’s boring, but why did you agree to come, if you don’t like football?”
“To spend time with you, doofus. Why did you invite me when – as far as I can tell – you don’t like football, either?”
“Dalton gave me two tickets?” Mac said, uncertainty making it come out like a question. “Said to invite a friend. I’m not sure I have any… other than you and him and maybe Frankie, but, really, I just owe her for breaking her vials.”
“Is that what we’re calling it these days?” Nikki asked, throwing her arms up in the air before stomping up the stairs without giving Mac a chance to ask what she meant.
📎
When the game ended, a decisive victory for the home team, Mac made his way down to the field, wanting to say hello to Jack Dalton, so he’d know he actually came – wearing the right colors and everything.
In the crowd around the team, he bumped into Frankie. “Are you a football fan?” He asked.
She laughed. “Not as such. As you might know, I’m something of a fan of messy blood samples, which aren’t the sort of samples university research labs have on hand. University athletic departments that include contact sports, on the other hand…”
Mac gave a startled laugh. “You here to collect bloody gear from the team trainers?”
She nodded. “We have an arrangement. They’re just going to bleach or incinerate anyway. A little science beforehand isn’t going to hurt anyone.”
Jack Dalton found them then, throwing arms around Mac. “You came!”
“You have a name!” Mac replied before he could think better of it.
“Wait, what?” Jack started, then seemed to think about it. “No shit, really? I never introduced myself? Why didn’t you ask?”
“I don’t know,” Mac admitted. “It never seemed to come up. By the time I realized that I still didn’t know your name, I felt like we were friends, but then I’m consistently terrible about judging these kind of things – like Frankie had to tell me Nikki was flirting with me and I still didn’t see it – so I was worried that your opinion on our level of friendship was different than mine, and then… well, I got in my head about it.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there. And yes, I think we’re friends, too, for the record.”
“Friends then, Jack Dalton, kicker.”
Jack nodded decisively. “Friends, Angus MacGyver, pacer.”
Jack hung around for a bit longer, chatting, before admitting he needed to get out of his uniform and shower.
Once he was out of hearing range, Frankie leaned over, “Not sure how you’re going to feel about this, but, for the record, he was flirting with you, too.”
Mac blushed. “He was not! He’s like that with everyone.”
“He’s an extrovert, and he was boisterous and outgoing with all his teammates, and everyone else post-game, including you and I. And then there was how he was with you, specifically. You said you were homeschooled and hadn’t been flirted with, or watched your friends get flirted with, right?”
“Aunt Gwen must not have considered it an integral part of my education,” Mac said drily.
“And I was right about Nikki flirting with you?”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, she agreed when I asked.”
“So, the logical conclusion here is that I’m right this time, too, isn’t it?” She teased. “Oh, there’s my supplier! I’ll see you in a few hours, if you’re coming by the lab tonight…?”
Frankie trotted off to meet her “supplier” without waiting for his response, which was probably just as well.
📎
Mac grew up in a community of scientists, so he was well aware a number of species engaged in non-reproductive sex, including homosexuality, so the incidence in humans was neither surprising nor unnatural. Mac had never thought much about whether or not he might engage in such activities. To be honest, he’d never thought much about who he might eventually reproduce with, either. Until now, when, according to Frankie, he had two people flirting with him.
“You’re distracted tonight,” Nikki accused.
“Sorry,” Mac said automatically. “I’ve been trying to think about how non-reproductive sex persists evolutionarily.”
“We’re humans – smart enough to outwit evolution,” Nikki said dismissively.
“But it’s not just humans,” Mac pointed out.
“You being a nerd is cute. You trying to turn our pleasure into a scientific study is a turn off.”
Mac got the hint and dropped the subject, even though he wasn’t sure when ‘their pleasure’ became a thing. They weren’t even dating.
📎
A few nights later Nikki ditched him at the doors to the lab building to go out with her girl friends. Frankie arrived just as she was leaving. “How’s that going?” She asked as they went up to the lab.
Mac shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not even an it, at least not that we’ve talked about. But then she’ll say things like she thinks we’re together.”
“Maybe I can offer a feminine perspective, if you want to tell me about it?”
Her advice had been valuable before, so Mac told her about every interaction he wasn’t quite sure how to make sense of.
“Okay, most of us geeks do go down to the Catacombs to do experiments we’d get in trouble for doing here in the labs, but it’s also a popular place to hook up. She probably wanted to start something physical and you ditched her to blow shit up with Smitty. Also, I know you said you were home schooled, so maybe you can be excused for not knowing about kissing under the bleachers during the game, but that’s almost certainly what she was hinting for before she ditched you at the game. Do you want my advice?”
Mac nodded, eyes wide. “Please.”
“If you want to date Nikki, and kiss her, and maybe have sex, don’t leave her hanging – start. If you don’t, you don’t have to, but you do need to tell her that you don’t want any of that, before she thinks you’re leading her on, and certainly before she’s right about that.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s fair. Thanks for the advice. Sorry about going on so long about this.”
“It’s no problem, Mac. It’s nice to hear about someone who is worse at dating than I am.”
Mac blushed, embarrassed.
Chapter 4: Deconstruction
Chapter Text
“Hey, Mac!” Mac looked up from where he was sitting on a small rise in the greenspace at the edge of campus. Jack dropped down beside him. “You seem somber.”
“Mmm,” Mac replied noncommittally. “Just thinking.”
“The sort of thoughts that bear thinkin’ on the ground out of doors in November in the northeast? Where ya from that you ain’t cold out here?”
“Hm? Northern California.”
“It gets cold there?”
“Not really. Not like here.”
It was Jack’s turn to make a non-committal noise. “So whatcha thinking about out here?”
Mac sighed. “The planet’s dying, and not enough people who matter are taking it seriously. People are going to die. A lot of people.” Whether Codex enacted File 47 or left humanity to its fate. When five-year-old Mac had overheard his aunt convincing his mother to live for 47, he’d been furious that they’d thought he was too young to be trusted with a secret. Now that he was old enough to be in on Codex’ secrets, he sometimes found himself yearning for the days when he hadn’t known the plans they were putting together.
“They already are,” Jack agreed. “More’n twice as many dead from hurricanes this decade than in the two decades prior, back home in Texas.”
Mac wrapped his arms around his knees and said more than he’d risked saying to anyone outside of Codex ever before. “What if that’s how it has to be? The population graph of the human race is unsustainable. In a natural ecosystem this kind of curve never lasts. It crashes, either from predation or starvation, because the population has outgrown the resources. We’ve done that, too. We think we can outsmart the limitations, but… what if we can’t? What if a population collapse is the only way?”
“Then the whole world’s going to be grieving for the losses. It happens all sharp like it would in a natural ecosystem, we’re in for some dark times. The survivors will figure it out. It’s what humans do. We’ll see all the worst of humanity as people get scared and feel the scarcity. We’ll see all the best of humanity as people help each other through. That’s always the way.”
“You don’t care that it will almost certainly be your kindred? Between the hurricanes and the tornadoes, the wildfires and – lately – the winter ice storms….”
“Texas is a disaster magnet, no doubt. An’, yeah, I care a whole damn lot. I care every time we lose one of the herd because they panic about the air pressure an’ won’t come in to shelter before a storm blows through. If one of those storms comes for one of mine, yes, I will be crushed. But we’re Texas born’n’reared, generation upon generation. Ain’t the sort of family to run scared. Texas is home, an’ always will be.”
That was exactly the sort of non-scientific, illogical thinking that the scientists Mac had grown up around bemoaned. They considered the likelihood that those least prone to listening to science would be the most likely to die in what was to come as evolution at its finest.
When the population crash that the Codex scientists were hoping to help along was a mere construct of graphs and data, Mac understood it perfectly. Such population crashes were only natural when a population overextended its resources, as humanity had been doing for some time. Two billion dead was just a number, a fraction, a percentage. It was the only logical thing to do – the sooner the crash happened the better off the planet, and thus the survivors, would be. It was a noble sacrifice. They’d grieve the dead, and honor that sacrifice, his aunt assured him.
Mac only had a few friends, but climate change imperiled their family and communities, each and every one. Jack and his family were in disaster prone Texas. Smitty came from a coastal town in Florida that would be underwater before he and Smitty reached middle-age, at the rate things were going. Frankie’s family was spread across the northeast where the winter storms were going to get more turbulent, with deeper freezes and faster thaws, ice jams, and even tropical hurricanes reaching north and inland. Nikki’s family would be in the path of the eruption if the super volcano under Yellowstone boiled over, and science believed that inevitable.
Given that, Codex helping it along was only a matter of timing, not an alteration of destiny, right? He’d believed that when he lived there. When Nikki had pointed out her hometown, well within the minimum safe distance rings he’d memorized years prior, it had felt different.
When the deaths of those who didn’t listen to the urging of scientists was natural consequences, Mac could understand. When Jack spoke of grieving the loss of a stallion he’d raised from a colt, and staying until the governor made the evacuation order mandatory, because there was no way to evacuate the herd, Mac could understand. When putting those two things together added Jack’s name to the list of nobly sacrificed dead, Mac couldn’t understand how that could be right.
“Would you do it?” Mac asked.
“Do what?” Jack asked.
“Save the planet, save 6 billion by writing off 2 billion.”
Jack was quiet for a long minute. “Probably,” he said at last. “Ain’t like I ain’t done it on smaller scales. Mac, you know I served, but I can’t remember if I ever mentioned I was an Army sniper. Since I didn’t mention basic things, like, oh, say, my name, I’m guessing not.”
Mac nodded; he hadn’t known what Jack did, only that he’d served.
“I was good at it. I didn’t stick around all those years because no one bothered to kick me out; they wanted me to stay. Got more blood on my hands than I really want a civilian friend to know about,” Jack confessed, looking at his hands as though the metaphorical blood might materialize. “In the abstract, people get it. I shot terrorists, enemy combatants. People who deserved to die, had to die. In the reality? Some of those? Guys didn’t even know anyone was comin’ for ‘em. Just goin’ about their day-to-day, and then a bullet took ‘em in the back. One man, who’d killed so many already, and would kill so many more, so greater good. Saving six by killing two, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Mac said morosely.
Jack pushed to his feet, and then reached out a hand to haul Mac to his. “Come on. If we’re trying to solve ethics that philosophers have been working on since before the profession was named, we’re doing it somewhere warmer, an’ with better comfort food.”
Mac shook himself out of his contemplation of the wisdom of Codex’s plan. “We don’t have to.”
“Nah, we don’t,” Jack agreed. “But we can. If you want to talk about the big stuff, we’ll talk about the big stuff. Like I said, I been there, stuck between what I know is the right thing to do, and what I know is the right way to be. Tryin’a thread that needle is easier together than it is alone.”
📎
Jack had taken him to a little café just off campus, stuck him at a table next to the fireplace, and reappeared with oven-fresh oatmeal raisin cookies and hot cocoas. They’d debated philosophy and ethics without coming to any real conclusions, and Mac had recovered his wits and backed off sharing so much about Codex and the secret plans he was privy to. He couldn’t risk exposing them until he decided those plans weren’t the right – or the only – answer, and he had decided no such thing. Just because he didn’t want Jack to die didn’t mean the planet wasn’t dying.
📎
Mac’s first night home, at the Codex compound, dinner was just his family: his mom, dad, and Aunt Gwen. His dad was predictably distracted, his mind on whatever project he was working on. His mother and aunt had no doubts about his education, so asked after his friends and relationships.
“Are you dating?” His mother asked when he told stories about Nikki, choosing the ones that showed her more positively, and not highlighting the times when she was dismissive or ditched him because she wasn’t interested in what he was doing, but grew upset if he ditched her when he was uninterested.
“Not really. Frankie says she’s flirting with me, and she wants to kiss and maybe more, but… I don’t know. I just don’t feel like it would work out long term. She can be…. Cold? I don’t know how to explain it, exactly, but sometimes I’m not sure she actually cares about me at all.”
“Maybe we’ll come visit you over spring break rather than flying you out here and you can introduce us,” Aunt Gwen suggested. “She sounds like she has some skills that might be valuable for our cause, even if it doesn’t work out between the two of you.”
Mac nodded. Nikki would be just the sort of coldly practical that would appeal to Aunt Gwen, and they did need more computer specialists.
“Who is Frankie?” His mother pressed. Mac wondered if she just wanted a romance for him, or if she was thinking fuzzily of grandbabies, or only about the continuation of exceptional genetic material. He’d heard her express all three desires in the past, so it was hard to know which was at the forefront of her mind tonight.
Mac shared some stories, emphasizing Frankie’s efforts to mentor him in both science and life, the sense he had that she saw him as something of a kid brother. He knew the Codex mentality demanded he reproduce, but he wasn’t ready for that. He couldn’t say that to his family, though. His mother couldn’t leave the Codex compound because she was officially dead. His father and aunt had helped fake her death because they all believed in this cause so much. He could not say that he wasn’t ready to do his part.
He shared some stories about the experiments he and Smitty had gotten up to in the Catacombs. Smitty was neither Codex material nor a candidate for mother of Mac’s future children, so the interest was muted.
He also told some stories about pacing the football team’s conditioning runs, and his deepening friendship with Jack Dalton.
“You know that won’t be a long-term relationship,” his mother warned.
“It could be,” Mac argued, not sure whether he was arguing for friendship or something more. He’d been watching since the home opener, when Frankie informed him quite cheerfully that Jack was flirting with him. Jack did treat him differently than anyone else, so Mac had come around to her conclusion, and thought that might be nice.
“He’s brawn over brains,” Aunt Gwen pointed out. “He’s not on your level.”
“He’s not an idiot,” Mac replied hotly. “I don’t ask him to be more than he is.”
“What he is – by his own admission – is a soldier. His skills – whatever they are or are not – have been honed in war. Once the planet has reset herself, there won’t be a need for war or its grim warriors. He’s superfluous.”
“And he’ll welcome that peace, if it comes. I think you underestimate humanity’s hunger for conquest. We can’t just continue to ignore the parts of human nature that we find stupid or irrational. We’re too few in numbers to keep control of the survivors without having accurate insight into human nature, and that means accounting for all of it,” Mac argued.
He’d believed the fairy tale, growing up, that once Codex brought their plan to bear and reset the planet, it would usher in an era where science and logic ruled and war would be no more. After a semester at MIT, watching the world turn without the filter of Codex propaganda, he suspected it was a dream, a fairy tale, not an inevitability.
“There might be more need for someone like Jack, skills honed in war, but who does understand both the peril to the planet and our species and the concepts of the greater good and necessary sacrifice,” he suggested.
“The only thing soldiers are good for is killing other soldiers,” Aunt Gwen insisted.
Mac didn’t argue. That wasn’t a contradiction to his point. His point had been that there would be soldiers among the survivors, and they were likely to do what they were best at. If Codex didn’t have any soldiers loyal to their cause, power was likely to gravitate to power – and away from them.
Chapter 5: Confession
Chapter Text
Mac let out a breath he’d been holding when Jack answered the phone. “Jack… I don’t know if I can stay here.”
“Hey, Mac. You okay, man?”
“I. I don’t know,” Mac said, voice shaking even though he didn’t want it to.
“Are you safe?”
“Uh… Yeah, I think so, yeah. But I don’t think I can stay here.”
“I hear you, Mac. You do what you have to. Austin’s closest to me. Dallas is probably cheaper. You give me a date and time, I’ll be there. If meeting my family right now feels like too much, then I just need a day’s warning and I’ll meet you at Logan. I have an apartment, so we’re not bound by the dorm closure. We can go back to Cambridge. Just say the word, I’ll be there. I am here for you, Mac. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
Mac melted. He’d called Jack because he was spiraling. He didn’t feel like he had a way out, but he didn’t feel like he could stay, either. In under a minute, Jack had cut through all of that, hadn’t questioned whether he could or should leave, just promised to be on the other side. “I… um, I don’t think I should talk about it here.”
“Okay. I trust your judgment. I’m here, Mac. I mean it. You need to leave, you tell me where and when to come get you. You decide to stay, you can call me any time, day or night, and we’ll talk – or not talk, if you don’t want to.”
Mac heard a door open. Someone had probably come looking for him. “Jack, I have to go, but thanks.”
“Anytime, Mac. Take care of yourself.”
“Thanks,” Mac said again.
He needed to hang up, but couldn’t quite bring himself to hit that red circle. In the background on Jack’s side, Mac heard someone ask if everything was okay.
“I’m not sure,” Jack admitted, sounding troubled and much less calm and collected than he’d been with Mac. “Mac called, real upset. Couldn’t really talk, but said he thought he needed to leave where he’s at.”
“He comin’ here?”
“Dunno yet,” Jack answered.
“You goin’ to go get him?”
“Not yet,” Jack replied. “Maybe.”
Mac closed his eyes, trying to keep himself from crying with relief that Jack was just unquestioningly on his side, without even knowing anything. Mac hoped he’d still be so unwaveringly supportive when he knew the truth.
📎
“Where’d you go?” Aunt Gwen asked him. He’d hung up just in time.
“Here,” he answered, because it was obvious. “I just… I needed air.”
“You’re upset.”
“Yes! A nuke, Aunt Gwen? That’s going to destroy the ecosystem at Yellowstone, not save it. Life finds a way, after a volcanic eruption, even after a super volcano. But after a nuke? There’s no recovering from that, and the effects won’t just go away when a quarter of the population has died. Healthy births will drop.”
“Good. We don’t want to do this just to have the population rebound back to these unsustainable levels in a few years! As you’ve argued, human nature includes a propensity for stupidity, so we can’t count on the survivors to handle themselves.”
“What about everything non-human? You’re going to destroy the planet in the name of saving it!”
“So, you wouldn’t consent to chemotherapy, if you were diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer, because it risks the host system – you?”
“Of course, I’d do chemo, if it was the only option,” Mac said.
“This is no different. It’s too late now for anything less drastic. Just like the hypothetical cancer. If the world had listened sooner, there’d have been more targeted options, but now this is where we are. As with a chemo patient, we’re hoping that we’ll destroy the cancer without doing so much damage to the patient that the patient can’t recover, but it’s a known risk.”
Mac understood the logic, he really did. But a nuke? The whole world, contrary and conflicted as it was, could agree on exactly one thing: no one, no one, wanted to see another nuclear weapon fired in war. Two was already two too many.
📎
Later in the afternoon, he hopped a ride into town with some of the younger Codex recruits, guys who would take him into town to curry favor with Aunt Gwen, but who didn’t particularly like him, so wouldn’t be concerned when he split off from them.
He found the public library and got access to a computer. Considering that he was effectively deploying his aunt’s nuclear warhead to his own life, it was frighteningly easy to book a seat on that evening’s red-eye to Austin, Texas. He texted the information to Jack, apologizing for the early hour of his arrival.
Anytime, anywhere, Jack texted in response.
Mac nodded, but couldn’t formulate a textable reply.
He met back up with the guys at the agreed upon time and place, but told them he wasn’t ready to go back and he’d take the bus later – which would mean a couple mile walk from the nearest bus stop to the Codex compound. They accepted that easily, buying Mac at least two hours and probably three or four before he’d be missed. Two hours would hopefully be enough to get him past security. Four would get him on board the plane.
And that assumed anyone would even hunt for him. They might assume he’d “come to his senses” if they let him think it over long enough.
📎
“Mac!” Jack called to him as soon as he cleared the secure part of the Austin airport.
Mac let out a breath, feeling a weight lift off his shoulders.
Jack pulled him into his arms. Mac sank into him, burying his face in Jack’s chest to hide his tears from the passengers eddying around them. “Shh, I gotcha,” Jack murmured, warm breath stirring his hair.
“You got anythin’ checked?” Jack asked after a minute.
Mac shook his head. He couldn’t bring anything more than his shoulder bag without raising suspicions, and he wasn’t sure his parents and aunt would have let him come if he’d asked permission.
“Alright. That’s good. Fetching a bag if they take it off the carousel as unclaimed at this airport is bizarrely convoluted, but if you ain’t got anythin’ comin’, there’s no rush.”
Maybe not, but Jack’s words reminded Mac that they were in the middle of a very public airport – hardly the appropriate place for his dramatics. Mac took a shaky breath, and then a second, steadier one, before straightening, pulling away from Jack slightly.
“Ready?” Jack asked, keeping an arm around his shoulders.
Mac nodded, letting Jack lead him out to the parking garage and a well-loved GTO. Mac wasn’t sure what sort of vehicle he’d expected Jack to drive, but he did know the classic convertible was not it. “It’s beautiful.” Fossil-fuel guzzling, but beautiful.
“Pops an’ I restored her back when I was in high school. Couldn’t drive her for ages when he passed but then I figured we didn’t put so much into her just to have her sit ‘round gathering rust and dust. Think he’d approve.”
Mac just nodded.
Jack reached out, putting a hand on his knee. Mac looked up, meeting his eyes cautiously. “Can I just get a word or two here?” Jack requested. “You’re not always super chatty, but you’re not usually mute. Startin’ to worry me.”
Mac shook his head. “I just… lot going on in my head.”
📎
The sky brightened from black to predawn gray as they drove away from the city. Eventually, Jack pulled off the two-lane country highway onto a gravel and dirt road and stopped the car. There was a gate 400 meters off the road, but, when Jack got out, he didn’t head toward it.
Instead, he came around, opening Mac’s door and inviting him out of the car with a callused hand wrapped warm around Mac’s. In a few moments, Mac found himself sitting on the trunk of the car, facing east, where a few streaky bands of pink were starting to color the horizon, in the distance beyond a large expanse of winter grain.
“You said you couldn’t talk on the phone, and if you’re not ready, I get that and I’ll be patient, but I think sometimes it helps to talk it out.”
Mac nodded, but debated how much he should say. Just because he couldn’t bring himself to be part of nuking the planet didn’t mean the science was wrong, didn’t mean Codex’s plan wasn’t the only option any more. Was he ready to risk someone trying to stop them? Was he ready to be part of that effort?
“Did you come out?” Jack asked, when he took too long. “An’ your family took it badly?”
Mac shook his head. “They wouldn’t care.”
Jack’s eyebrows jumped up. “That’s a new one. I’ve heard ‘They’ll be cool’ or whatever, but never ‘they wouldn’t care’.”
Mac shrugged. “I, um, I grew up in a community of scientists. But, like, not MIT scientists. Like fanatical / radical scientists. I’d say they’re religiously scientific, if that didn’t feel like a contradiction in terms. The behavior isn’t unique to humans. It’s natural, despite what some would have us believe, and the planet’s overpopulated, so the more people who willingly take themselves out of the reproductive pool, the better. So, yeah, they really won’t care if I tell them that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since Frankie first pointed out you were flirting with me.”
Jack chuckled. “I wasn’t sure you even knew. I get the sense you’re pretty inexperienced with dating and relationships an’ all, with anyone, let alone a guy like me.”
“Yeah. And you should know, subtlety is going to go right over my head. Even when Frankie pointed out, I tried to convince her that you’re just like that with everyone, took me days – weeks – to be sure that she was right, and I still probably don’t see half of it.”
Jack nodded. “That’s okay. I can be way more obvious. I just didn’t want to pressure you, or make you uncomfortable, if you were straight or uninterested. I want to at least be friends. I’d love to be a whole lot more, but that’s up to you.”
Mac shook his head. “I… if you still feel that way after I tell you everything, we can revisit this conversation.”
“You think anything you could possibly tell me would change how I feel about you?”
Mac nodded.
Jack shook his head. “You’re wrong. But I’m here for you, and I think it’s eatin’ you, holdin’ it in, so lay it on me.”
Mac let his eyes wander over the field, and the now colorful sky, as dawn drew ever closer. “You remember when I asked you if you’d instigate the population collapse that might save the planet, back in November?”
“Sure.”
“It wasn’t hypothetical. The Codex scientists – the ones I grew up with – have been planning it for years. You know there’s a super volcano under Yellowstone?”
“Course. It’s due for doin’ something dramatic, ain’t it?”
Mac nodded. “Codex intends to help it along. An eruption would put so much ash in the atmosphere, it’d create a non-seasonal winter. It would cool the planet, Jack. Reset the clock on global warming. Save the Florida coastline. Smitty’s hometown. Galveston. The science is all there, Jack. The planet is dying and this … the odds are good. This would save it, probably.”
“But the eruption would kill people. Tourists. Park rangers. And there’d be side-effects: fires, earthquakes. And then the people with respiratory conditions who couldn’t take the ash pollution, which would carry, given that the wildfire smoke makes it from the Rockies up to us in Cambridge.”
“Nikki’s hometown would just be gone.”
Jack just nodded.
The sun was sending gold spikes across the horizon before he spoke again. “Given the conversation we had about greater good morality, back near two months ago, I ain’t thinkin’ this plan was news to you this break, so what happened yesterday that had you so upset, and unable to stay another minute?”
“I get the science, Jack. I hate it, but like it or not, facts are facts.”
“An’ the climate change facts ain’t good.”
Mac nodded. He wrapped his arms around his ribs, fighting a shiver even though it wasn’t cold. “They’re going to use a nuke,” he whispered.
“What?”
Mac knew Jack had been a soldier, a sniper, a killer, but he’d never considered Jack dangerous, until the question came out dark and deadly serious.
“To prime the eruption. They’re going to set off a warhead in one of the side chambers,” Mac explained. “Jack, that’s going to kill the planet, and it’s going to do so much harm to the survivors. Aunt Gwen says it’s like chemo for cancer. Sometimes, as a last resort, you have to do the drastic thing and hope it kills the cancer before the host. But, Jack, I can’t! A nuke.”
“No,” Jack agreed. “No one is setting off a nuke on American soil. Over my dead body,” he vowed. “Do they have the warhead already?”
“I don’t know, but they have a sure way to get it, in any case. Codex has existed for decades. Centuries, depending on what legends you believe. They’ve got people everywhere, fingers in everything. It wasn’t always this.”
“Well, I’m glad to know you weren’t always raised by ecoterrorists,” Jack said drily.
Mac blinked, in part because the sun finally bounded over the horizon and in part because he’d never applied that label to Codex. “No, um, I was. At least from six years old, when we moved. They were onto this by then. It’s why my parents and Aunt Gwen joined Codex. Something called File 47. I think my mom worked on it, when she worked at a government think tank before I was born. And then she shared it with government leaders.”
“What is File 47?”
“I think it started out just being the congressional briefing on climate change, the science on how it’s real and we have to do something or we’ll lose the planet, and if we lose the planet, that’s it for us. But then, as time went on and no one listened, the gentler, more gradual solutions got cut out because it was too late, and it became just the drastic measures. I think – I was five and only overheard part of a conversation – I think someone – don’t call me paranoid when I accuse the CIA – tried to kill my mom over File 47. But she got away, and she and Dad and Aunt Gwen faked her death in a car accident, and after we’d made a public show of grieving, Dad made up a story about quitting his government job and moving away to focus on being a single parent of a hurting kid, and we moved to the Codex compound with Mom and Aunt Gwen. And Codex has been working to implement File 47 ever since.”
“You said your mom worked for a think tank and your dad had a government job. You know where?”
Mac tried to remember that conversation he’d overheard that he’d vowed to his five-year-old-self he’d never tell anyone he heard. “Dad said something about OPI being suspicious if he just up and quit, but I don’t know what that is, or if he worked for them or what. No idea on Mom’s job.”
“Scuttlebutt is that OPI was clandestine operations. Doing the things CIA can’t do domestically, and FBI can’t do abroad, and anything else that needs doing with no one ever knowing they even existed. Got talked about like an urban legend; I wasn’t sure it was real, but if it was, the cover was supposed to be that it was think tank. I think I know someone who can help. I gotta make a call.”
📎
Jack walked down the gravel drive several paces. Mac supposed it was a signal he shouldn’t be listening in, but, while the sun was still painting the sky, there wasn’t much other than Jack to listen to.
“7652 Longhorn.”
There was a pause, like he was put on hold, or transferred.
“7652 Longhorn, and you damn well know it, Hun.”
“Got some keywords here, need you to tell me if you’ve got a vector that connects ‘em. MacGyver. OPI. Climate Change.” Jack paused, then added, “File 47.”
Jack held the phone away from his ear for a moment, as if the person on the other end was shouting, though Mac couldn’t hear that from his perch on the trunk of the GTO.
“Yeah, well, there’ll be time to burn that bridge later. Right now, I got a source with a credible threat for an empty quiver.”
Jack tipped the phone away from his ear again, but nodded and repeated, “Yes, I meant empty quiver when I said it.”
“Tomorrow, I’d imagine, if we’re flyin’, but are you sure you want us to?”
“Well, if I had the resources to accomplish empty quiver, I’d probably have the resources to track a civilian who didn’t try’n’ cover his tracks to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. I thought it was a friend thing, not a work thing, so it ain’t goin’ to be any trouble to connect AUS to me. You really want both of us to put faces back on surveillance at AUS, not to mention names on manifests?”
“Well, ‘course.”
“Hey, now. Vegas is always on the way.”
“You suck all the joy outta everything, Matty the Hun.”
“Yeah, yeah, I called you about this, remember.”
📎
“What’s the verdict?” Mac asked when Jack returned, offering him a gallant hand down from the trunk.
“Road trip. We’re going to LA for a face to face with Matty the Hun.”
“Why do I get the feeling that’s not her real name?” Mac joked to hide how nervous he was. It was one thing to believe Jack could understand the line he was drawing between agreeing with the science of Codex’ stance and agreeing to nuke a super volcano. It was another to believe someone Jack referred to as “the Hun” wouldn’t have him arrested for association with ecoterrorists.
“Her name’s Matilda Webber, if you’re bein’ formal, but she’s earned the title, make no mistake. She can help. We just have to get there.”
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that. What if my family tracks me to Austin? The airport nearest the Codex compound is small. They’ll remember me. And I told my family about you when they asked how my first semester went. I had no reason not to at the time.”
“Right, that’s why we’re going to stop by the Ranch long enough for me to grab some things, but then get right on the road, so even if your family tracks you here, we won’t be here.”
“But what if they show up? What about your family?”
“You think they’d hurt innocents?” Jack asked seriously. “I mean, obviously, the whole plan is to kill off 2 billion people. But you know what I mean. They show up, my family says you and I went on a road trip, an’ they have no idea where, your family going to get nasty about it?”
Mac considered. “I don’t think so, but I’d hate myself if anything happened to them – or you.”
📎
Jack’s sister hugged him as he tossed two duffel bags in the trunk of the GTO. He’d told Mac to stay in the car, and true to his word, had been inside less than five minutes.
“Bathroom tile never sleeps,” she said.
Mac felt his eyebrows knit in confusion, but Jack seemed to understand. He laughed. “You know it.”
“When will you be back?”
“No idea. But given the date, I’d say spring break’s probably the earliest. Now, I love you, but we gotta get going.”
“Love you, too,” she said stepping back so Jack could close the trunk and get back in the driver’s seat.
📎
Mac waited until they’d settled onto a two-lane country highway that seemed to continue straight forever before asking, “Bathroom tile never sleeps? What was that about? I mean, obviously it’s an inside joke so if you don’t want to say, I understand, but….”
Jack chuckled. “Yeah, I ain’t thought about how that’d sound to an outsider in a long time.” He sobered quickly. “You ain’t the only one who’s been holding back something on the fear that it’d change everything,” he confessed. “I told ya I was army, a sniper, and the initial three-year enlistment turned into a lot more. What I didn’t say is that I was good enough that I got an offer to join Delta.”
“Special ops.”
Jack nodded. “And those ops bring an operator to the attention of other agencies. Got offers to do some not strictly military ops. Did some of them. Then more of them. Eventually got recruited by the Company.”
“The CIA Company?” Mac clarified, wide-eyed.
“That’d be the one,” Jack confirmed, refusing to look at Mac.
“You were a spy?!” Mac further clarified.
Jack pressed his lips together in a tight line for a minute before taking a measured breath. “I am a spy,” he corrected.
Mac tried to say several things in response but couldn’t get a coherent word out at first. When he finally did, it was, at least, the question that mattered most. “Was any of it real?”
Jack checked the mirrors to make sure of what he already knew – that there was no one else on the road with them – and pulled off onto the shoulder. He put the car in park and then turned his full attention, including the gaze he’d been refusing to turn Mac’s way earlier in the conversation, on Mac. “Almost all of it, Mac, I swear. I can’t say for sure, because if a conversation got too close to somethin’ classified, I mighta deflected instinctively, but I cannot remember a time I have ever lied to you. There’s plenty I didn’t – couldn’t – share, but what I did, it was the truth. I don’t really have a cover for this one. Jack Dalton’s my real name, that was really the ranch I grew up on, and my blood-relative sister that saw us off. I really am an Army vet, using my GI Bill benefits and a bit of athletic scholarship to attend MIT. I really do like you and didn’t make friends for the sake of the mission. You aren’t my target, and us being friends ain’t helping my op any. I could answer your question, ‘All of it was real,’ and completely believe it, but I get that this situation is something of a lie of omission.”
Mac looked out the window. “I feel so….” Mac waved a hand, unable to find words for how vulnerable and betrayed Jack’s confession had left him. “And it’s hypocritical. I’m upset about you keeping a secret that you were legally obligated to keep, as if I wasn’t keeping one that I’m probably legally obligated to not keep. You are serving your country. I’m embedded with ecoterrorists. What right do I have to judge?”
Jack reached over, putting a hand on Mac’s knee. “All the right in the world, Mac. It’s only hypocritical if you can’t imagine that I might’ve felt the same way about your confession as you are about mine, and I know that’s not the case. You came out from the beginning acknowledging that these are big secrets, not just casual discretion.”
Mac raised hesitant eyes to actually meet Jack’s understanding gaze. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, Hoss,” Jack assured him.
“What… um, what do we do now?”
“Now? We finish this road trip to L.A. and we tell Matty the Hun all about your nuclear-powered eco-family. Then we help save the world, hell or high water. Somewhere in all o’it, we go back to MIT, ‘cause we both got degrees to earn. And some cold day in Cambridge, we go back to that little café where we last hashed out the big stuff and we figure out if there’s any future for anything between us. I, for one, am hopin’ we can at least stay good friends, even if I’ve lost my chance for anythin’ more.”
Chapter 6: Reconstruction
Chapter Text
Despite the bombs they’d both dropped and still felt detonating in the car between them, the rest of their road trip went well. Mac found himself relaxing and actually enjoying himself as the miles stretched on.
At their last stop outside of Los Angeles, Jack had Mac pull a GPS unit out of the glove box. Jack fiddled with it, pulling up a previously entered address. Mac doubted Jack would save anything CIA-related to a device he left on a civilian farm, no matter how much his family knew about the true nature of his employer, but Mac also had no idea when Jack had put the address in the device – he’d had no idea the device was in the glovebox to begin with.
Much to Mac’s amusement, Jack talked back to the GPS, conversationally, as if he expected it to understand him, culminating, as they neared their exit from the interstate, with a frustrated Jack asking, “How the hell you expect me to do that, in this traffic, with a civilian ridin’ shotgun?”
“Recalculating,” the GPS replied cheerfully, when he proved unable to get across the many lanes between where two interstates merged and the exit they were supposed to take.
“I take it you could have made the exit, if I weren’t in the car?”
“And the situation called for tactical driving, which it don’t. I wouldn’ta hit anyone, and no one woulda hit me, but you never know how someone who ain’t trained for it is gonna react, so I can’t say for sure the car I cut in front of wouldn’ta slammed on their brakes or that the car behind them, or any of the ones beyond that wouldn’ta failed to follow suit. No cause to create an accident today.”
Mac muffled his laugher, since the GPS was trying to give Jack new directions.
Once they were off the interstate, the navigation got better. Not that the traffic improved, but they were onto a city grid layout, so even if they couldn’t get into the turn lane, they could keep going another block or another, until they could make the turn (and then another and another to get back to the street they should have turned on originally). Their path ended up being more of a corkscrew than minimal distance route, but they pulled into a parking garage between two office buildings without incident.
📎
The reception area Jack led them into was exactly what Mac imagined a modern office reception area would look like – bright white and glass walls, well-lit and airy, plenty of space that still managed to funnel them to the desk. Mac noticed the only way past the desk was an airport-like security checkpoint, the only thing to mar the modern civilian appearances. He could see elevators beyond the checkpoint.
“Hello!” The woman at the desk greeted them warmly. “How may I help you?”
“Jack Dalton to see Matilda Webber. No appointment, but she’s expecting us.”
The woman tapped on her keyboard, apparently verifying. She nodded. “Yes. I just need to see your ID.”
While Jack pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, she turned to Mac. “And you are…?”
“With me,” Jack answered briskly, handing over his driver’s license.
“I gathered that. I just need a name and ID for our visitor logs.”
Jack started to argue, even as he accepted his ID back. Mac pulled his ID out, but didn’t hand it over, opting instead to put a hand on Jack’s arm. Jack looked at him.
“You trusted this Matty Webber, of all the people you know, with this. If my name being on the visitor log here was a problem, don’t you think she’d have made arrangements?”
Jack’s jaw was set and tight, but he nodded once, sharply. Mac handed his ID to the receptionist. She looked it over, verifying that he matched up with his ID, and then handed it back, along with two visitor’s passes.
📎
They were met on the other side of security and escorted up to an office on the third floor. Mac started a little – given Jack’s commentary – not to mention nickname – Mac had expected someone physically intimidating, physically Jack’s equal – but quickly schooled his features. No doubt she’d built a personality that dwarfed (Jack would have intended the pun, Mac knew) her body from a young age. Mac had experienced enough bullying in the one year of public school and one semester of college to be glad he hadn’t experienced the other twelve years.
“Dalton, I swear. Thought your mission was as close to being put out to pasture as they could manage without shipping you back to Texas.”
Jack nodded. “That’s about the size o’it,” he acknowledged.
“And why come to me anyway? They can’t have left you without a handler.”
“I got one. He’s young. Green. Happy to take the assignment, figurin’ someone like me’d make his career. He wouldn’t have a clue what to do with this, if I took it to him, an’ won’t have the clearance to hear how it pans out. ‘Sides, this ain’t got a thing to do with my actual mission, so I ain’t even keepin’ anythin’ relevant from the kid.”
“Alright. Sit, both of you. Start from the beginning.”
So, Jack did, starting with the conditioning woes the team had experienced last year, and the coach mandating the morning runs, and recruiting Mac to pace, and Jack and Mac – as the only two with nothing to prove and no difficulty accomplishing the task – befriending each other.
“Dalton, I have a day job,” Matty interrupted. “When I said start at the beginning, I meant the File 47 / Empty Quiver beginning, not your whole Christmas letter.”
“I still don’t really know what ‘empty quiver’ is, but I think the story’s all mine,” Mac acknowledged. Jack nodded for him to go ahead, so Mac started with that conversation he’d overheard and kept secret for thirteen years, and the events that followed that seemed to validate his five-year-old understanding, and that he hadn’t misremembered or misinterpreted in retrospect, and then the philosophy, science, and plans that he’d been taught in twelve years in the Codex compound.
“Why now?” Matty demanded suspiciously. “Why come forward now? Members of cults don’t suddenly shake off brainwashing. Extremists indoctrinated from birth don’t renounce their beliefs.”
“I’m not doing either,” Mac acknowledged. “Codex isn’t wrong on the science. I don’t dispute their reasoning. I don’t dispute their conclusions about the necessary outcome. But I can’t be part of the means they’re proposing. My aunt said the ends justify the means, but not these means. We can’t nuke the planet to save it.”
Maty was unconvinced. “Why Jack? My own personal opinions about him – everyone’s personal opinions about him – aside, he is the definition of competent. He didn’t break cover until you did. You had a burning desire to tell someone your relatives were planning a nuclear attack on the planet and to try to stop them and you picked… the kicker on the football team?”
“I, um. I don’t make friends very well. Nikki wants to kiss me, and stuff, but she doesn’t care about me. I couldn’t go to her with anything serious. Frankie wants to prevent the next Ebola, when a plague would be in perfect keeping with Codex’ philosophy. She’d never understand how it could look anything but black and white to me. But Jack… he found me one day during the semester when I was feeling dark about how all of this was going to impact people I knew, people with real names, people with real loved ones. We’d talked about the morality of it, in broad strokes. About whether sacrificing some to save the rest could ever be right and good. Of everyone, he was the only one I thought might understand and not hate me for my association with Codex and for not being willing to completely denounce them.”
“Very well. I’ll take it from here.”
Jack rose to his feet at the dismissal, so Mac followed suit.
“What do you want us to do?” Jack asked.
“Go back to campus. Finish your mission. Finish your degrees.” Mac wondered if the tone and severe expression made him think there was an implied “Go f’yourself or each other, for all I care” or if he was projecting his own growing interest in the older man. “Settle down in Texas. Sell bathroom tile.”
Jack snorted, ushering Mac out of the office ahead of him. Then, as they retreated to the elevators, Jack started to laugh. “All this and I never did answer your question, did I?”
“Which one?” Mac asked.
“About what my sister meant when she said, ‘Bathroom tile never sleeps.’”
“I guess not,” Mac agreed.
“Military special ops pretty much don’t include a cover story. Their philosophy is ‘Don’t get caught’. If you do, bluff. If you can’t, name, rank, serial number. Joining Delta isn’t a huge secret – they don’t recommend you be real public with it, but we’re allowed to tell family, encouraged even. We just can’t say where we’re deployed, when, or how long. The Company’s completely different. We’re not supposed to even tell those closest to us that’s what we do, so they issue us all a ‘day job’. Mine says I’m a bathroom tile salesman. It’s pretty deep – like my W-2 says I sell bathroom tile. The IRS identifier for the employer tells the truth, but even the local tax professional probably doesn’t know enough to unravel the coded identifier. Of course – I think you know me well enough to understand – that occupation reads patently ridiculous to anyone who actually knows me.”
Mac nodded.
“So, my family knew I was Delta, and then I got out of the military and didn’t come home to my beloved state of Texas and the family ranch, but instead apparently took a job out of state selling bathroom tile. They drew the only reasonable conclusion, of course. I can’t confirm or deny, and I never have, but they know. Especially since I get calls and have to leave suddenly for work emergencies. My cover isn’t plumber or mold remediation or hazmat, so my work emergencies aren’t getting called to bathroom crises. The bathroom tile is the end of the recovery – that sale can absolutely wait until next business day in every case.”
“Right,” Mac understood the bathroom tile part of things. He wasn’t entirely clear how it connected for the spy driving the convertible.
“‘Bathroom tile never sleeps’ was sarcastic at first. More ‘does anyone actually expect us to believe this?’ Over the years, it’s grown into something more, a code within a code, if you will. It’s
- “I know you know I know you’re lying.
- “I know you know I know the truth.
- “I know you can neither confirm nor deny.
- “I know you’re proud to serve our country.
- “I know you hate lying to us.
- “I know you do it to keep us safe.
- “I know you lie so we won’t worry.
- “I know you know we still worry.
- “I know wherever you’re rushing off to, whatever you’re going to be doing, it’s dangerous.
- “Stay safe.
- “We love you.
- “We’re proud of you.
- “Go – but come home.
“all at once. When these things come up, I don’t have the time to have that whole conversation, and I really can’t have it anyway, and they know that, so this joke about it actually being a bathroom tile emergency is a stand in, for all the things we can’t say out in the open.”
“They love you. Even knowing that you’re a spy and you lie to them about the most basic things?”
Jack nodded. “Family does; they understand, as best they can.”
Mac frowned. “I don’t think mine will.”
“Understand, you mean?”
Mac nodded. “My parents and my aunt gave up everything for File 47, for the future of the planet, for my future, and I’m going to throw it all away because I don’t agree with the method?”
Jack shook his head. “This ain’t Pops and I arguing over the grain to oats ratios we’re going to store up for the winter feed.”
“I know that,” Mac acknowledged. “I’m not sure they will understand that.”
Jack nodded. There was no real argument he could make. “I’ll be here,” he promised instead.
📎
When they got back to MIT, they did their best to settle back in. The college football season was over, but Jack joined Mac on runs – every day now, instead of only half, since he didn’t have to participate in other conditioning activities. Mac couldn’t accuse the other man of ghosting him – he still answered every text and agreed to any plans Mac suggested – but Mac felt the distance.
Mac wished the start of the spring semester would hurry up and arrive, because that would bring Frankie back to campus, and she understood relationships better than he did, and could explain them to him. He tried to think about Jack’s behavior like she would.
Finally, he sent a text to the only other person who might be able to help him make sense of Jack’s behavior. Are you trying to give me space to process or something?
Yes. I suppose I was being too subtle again, huh?
Sorry I’m bad at this.
Nah, Mac. It’s not all on you.
So… we can have that date at the café you said we’d have back in Texas? That was the oddest thing – Jack had made that plan and then not followed through. Or do *you* need time and space to process?
Nothing you told me changes how I feel about you. Thursday, after our run? Like 8:30? And is it a date?
I thought that’s what we were supposed to be talking about.
Copy that. Not-quite-a-first-date date. Meet you there?
Deal.
Mac felt better already. He’d been overthinking it, reading his worst fears into Jack letting him take all the initiative.
📎
Their not-date at the café was awkward, but reassuring, and ended with Jack asking Mac out on a proper date – brunch on Sunday at a mom-and-pop place Jack knew off campus.
Mac wanted to call his mom or Aunt Gwen or Frankie or someone as he was anxious about his outfit and his first-ever date.
At Jack’s suggestion, he’d called his family and reassured them he was safe and had returned to campus early, and just needed some space. After all, the nuclear option was a lot to wrap his head around. They’d accepted his explanation, reminding him that life would come from the deaths, but he wasn’t sure he could pretend they had a normal family relationship anymore, the kind of relationship where he’d call them about something trivial like his outfit for a date with someone that they’d told him they didn’t approve of as a long-term mate.
Frankie would coo and help, but he hated to make a nuisance of himself. With a sigh, Mac dressed in what he thought was his best option and then, for the sake of his nerves, snapped a picture and sent it to Frankie. OK for a first date (brunch)?
Jack or Nikki?
Jack.
<3 <3 <3 You have to tell me everything next week!!
Mac rolled his eyes, but didn’t have time for anything else. Jack would be there any second to pick him up for their date.
📎
Jack wrapped an arm around his shoulders, guiding him back to the car after their brunch. “What are you doing this afternoon?” Mac asked, to make conversation.
“Probably gonna see if the Giants can do what m’Boys couldn’t.”
Jack chuckled, but it wasn’t mean, at Mac’s look of utter confusion. “Going to watch the NFL playoffs, Philadelphia Eagles at New York Giants. Given my team’s the Dallas Cowboys, the Eagles are my sworn enemies, so I’m rooting for New York. Want to come over and watch with me?”
Mac flushed, but knew he had to tell his new boyfriend the truth. “I…um… I don’t actually like football? It’s, um, boring?”
“It is not!” Jack laughed harder. “Has anyone taught you the game? It’s not the easiest sport to learn just by watching – especially by watching an average D-III team play in the stadium.”
Mac shook his head.
“I want to say up front – you don’t have to like or understand football for me to want to be with you. You probably do have to swear off rooting for Philly, because I don’t think we could handle being on opposite sides o’that rivalry,” Jack teased, “but otherwise, we’re good. If you do want to come over, I think I could teach you to love the game as much as I do, but if you’re still bored at the half, I promise we’ll watch something else, or I’ll swing you home if you just want to go. If you’ve had enough o’me for now, I can take you back to the dorm or anywhere else you want to go now. I get you maybe didn’t plan on this date being a whole day affair.”
Mac considered as Jack opened his car door for him with a sweeping bow. He did want to spend more time with Jack; he enjoyed the older man’s company. He’d suffered through every home game the Engineers played that season. He would survive a half – or a whole – game more. Mac had his doubts about Jack’s ability to make him love the game, but their relationship would be easier if Jack was successful, since the sport was obviously important to the jock. Mac had to let him try.
📎
Jack parked the car outside his apartment, started to reach for the keys, but then turned to Mac. “I know it’s my doorstep, not yours, but… can I kiss you?”
Mac blushed, but nodded shyly.
Jack cupped his cheek in one hand, leaning slightly across the console to kiss Mac gently. Mac didn’t know what to do with his own hands, or his nose which was clearly in the way, or if there was a right way to kiss back.
Jack eased back slowly, and Mac blinked, feeling a little dazed. He looked down at where his hands were tangled in his lap. “Was it terrible?” He asked anxiously.
Jack caressed his cheek. “No, Mac, it was not terrible.”
“…but I didn’t know what to do with my lips or my nose or my hands or….”
Jack nodded sagely. “Practice helps. You’re a quick study with most things; I have no doubt this will be the same. ‘Specially with such an excellent teacher,” he tacked on teasingly, finally releasing Mac and pulling the keys from the ignition.
Mac laughed, a little giddy.
📎
The game started out dramatic, with a long kickoff return just as Mac and Jack were getting comfortable. Mac ran cold and Jack ran warm, so Jack set the thermostat lower than Mac would have. As a result, Mac ended up sitting right beside Jack basking in the warmth of the hot-blooded Texan, without consciously making a decision to cuddle with his new boyfriend. Jack put an arm around his shoulders, seemingly content with the arrangement.
The promising opening stalled quickly, but when the Giants kicked a field goal, Jack had a thoughtful expression. “What?” Mac asked.
“Well, one of the ways to make football more fun for non-fans is usually to do shots for every score, but you’re still underage.”
Mac nodded. “Don’t let me stop you, though.”
Jack shook his head. “No, it’s not that. I was just thinking, instead of shots, we could do smooches for scores, but you’ve been pretty clear about your inexperience and I don’t want to pressure you.”
Mac considered the proposal thoughtfully. “You said I’d get better with practice?”
“That’s generally how it works, yeah,” Jack agreed.
“This would be good practice.”
“It would.”
Mac nodded, leaning up a bit to place a tentative kiss on Jack’s lips. Jack kissed back, lightly, not pushing but letting Mac lead.
📎
“Wait, I thought you couldn’t score from a penalty,” Mac protested when the announcement of a flag for intentional grounding resulted in a change to the score.
“You can’t,” Jack agreed.
Mac glared indiscriminately at him and the TV, since the Giants had just done exactly that. Jack, laughing, gave him a quick smooch for the score and then sat back. “Two rules at play here,” he explained. “The first is the intentional grounding penalty. As a quarterback, if you’re contained inside the tackle box – basically straight back from where you received the snap – and you’re in danger of being sacked, you have to at least pretend you’re throwing the ball to someone. It doesn’t have to be catchable, but it has to be in the vicinity of an eligible receiver. If not, getting rid of the ball to avoid a sack is a penalty. Intentional Grounding, like the ref said. Most penalties have a yardage attached – you know, 15 yards for personal foul, five for pre-snap penalties – but there are a couple that don’t have a yardage, they just get enforced as if the thing you were trying to avoid happened.”
“Spot fouls,” Mac said. He knew about that from watching Jack play. “Pass interference is like that.”
“Yes, DPI is the common one – gets enforced as a catch at the spot of the foul. Intentional grounding is like that, too. It’s enforced as a sack at the spot of the foul. No points associated with the penalty. Like you said, you don’t get points for a penalty.”
“But they did,” Mac pointed out waving to the screen, and the 7-5 score.
Jack nodded. “The second rule in play is the definition of a safety. If the defense backs a team up and tackles the ball carrier in the back endzone, that’s a safety and it’s worth two points. If the ball carrier happens to be the quarterback on a passing play, tackling them is called a sack, but same rule.”
“Right; I get that,” Mac agreed.
“So, if you take that play in the endzone, and instead of the pass to nowhere, the Giants succeed at sacking McNabb back there in the endzone, that’s a safety. So, when you put it all together and enforce an intentional grounding penalty as a sack at the spot of the foul, which was in the endzone, the result of the play is a safety, so the Giants get two points from the play, even though points aren’t awarded for penalties.”
“Any other weird lies in the rules?” Mac asked.
Jack laughed. “You mean the way you can get two points for failing to do something, rather than actually accomplishing anything?”
“What!”
“If the offense fumbles the ball out of the back of the endzone, that’s a safety, too. Of course, if the defense recovered that fumble in the endzone, it’d be a touchdown, so it’s often fairly intentional on the part of the offense, once the ball is loose.” Jack laughed easily at Mac’s expression. “The game’s not all about big dudes trying to kill each other in the trenches.”
📎
A second field goal in the final minutes of the half led to Mac leaning in for another kiss. Jack reached up to cup Mac’s face in his hands and tilted his head a little bit. “Try’n angle yourself jus’ like this,” he advised.
Mac blushed, but did, and found his nose and Jack’s fit together far less awkwardly. “Thanks,” he whispered shyly when they separated.
“You’d’ve figured it out, but the way the scoring in this is going, we mighta been a little bruised before you got there. If we’re watching the rest of the game?” Jack asked. “I did say we could watch something else if you still weren’t a fan after the first half.”
It was obvious to Mac that Jack wanted to watch the whole game, so he nodded. “It’s okay. We can watch the game.”
“We’ll make a fan outta ya yet.”
“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” Mac warned.
“‘Less you want omelets,” Jack agreed.
📎
“You ever think about it?” Mac asked, as the announcers made a big deal of the Eagles’ kicker setting an NFL postseason record.
“About making the pros, giving up the secrets and lies for more money than anyone has a right to? Nah, not much anymore. In high school, yeah, sure, all the time. ‘Sides, we’d never have met if I was an NFL kicker, and that’d be a pity.”
Mac blushed. “Flatterer.”
Jack grinned. “Usually works out well for me.”
Chapter 7: Annihilation
Chapter Text
While the NFL season ended just three games after their first date, Jack continued to find excuses for them to “practice kissing”. One particularly cold day in what should have been spring, Mac was curled up in Jack’s lap. Nominally, they were watching Die Hard, with kisses for each yippee-kay-yay.
Mac squirmed, trying to find a more comfortable position, without leaving the warmth of his boyfriend’s arms. Jack was semi-hard beneath Mac, and getting harder, but that was only half of Mac’s difficulty finding a comfortable seat. The bigger issue was that he was more than semi-hard.
Jack tightened his arms around Mac, mouthing at his jaw. “I’m conscious of your inexperience, an’ I don’t want you to feel at all pressured, but we can do something about this situation, if ya want.”
Mac made a sound he couldn’t even describe. “I’m supposed to wait for marriage.” Mac had known this conversation was coming, but he’d still been dreading it. Jack was more experienced than he was, and wouldn’t share his philosophy on waiting. He was afraid he was going to lose Jack over this, over the Codex philosophies he couldn’t bring himself to renounce.
Jack was quiet for several painful minutes. He nuzzled Mac’s neck. “I don’t want you to think you have to defend your beliefs, because you never do. Especially when we’re talking consent: no requires no explanation. But I am curious. Usually, the notion of virginity until marriage is a religious ideal. I know you said Codex was ‘religiously scientific’ but I ain’t gotten the sense you or your parents are particularly God-fearin’.”
Mac nodded, glad he wasn’t facing Jack for this conversation. “It’s not about purity. It’s about maturity and pregnancy. And population control. You remember when I said that my family wouldn’t care that I was involved with you, because portions of the population willingly refraining from reproduction is good for our overcrowded planet? Unwed people are likely to be younger and less cautious than their wedded counterparts. More likely to accidentally reproduce.”
“Fair. Counterargument: married or not, nothing we do is going to result in accidental reproduction, unless you’ve got another big secret in your back pocket. Or front pocket, as it were. Not that that’d be an issue for me, mind.”
“No, no,” Mac confirmed. “Anatomically male – we’re not reproductively compatible, it’s true.”
“But still waitin’ for marriage?” Jack confirmed.
Mac sighed. “I don’t know. Still waiting for now. It’s how I was raised, Jack. I don’t know how to just give it all up, even if I have agreed to help you and Matty stop them from nuking the planet.”
“I get that it’s hard,” Jack said, and then snorted when Mac groaned. “Sorry, that pun was unintentional. The bottom line here is that it’s your call. And there’s a lot o’room between practicin’ kissin’ and accidental baby makin’ that I’d be happy to explore with ya, if you ever find yourself feelin’ curious.”
📎
Mac came back inside after stepping out onto the balcony of Jack’s apartment to take the call from his mother. Jack gave him a warm smile and a cold drink. “We still good with the plan?”
Mac nodded. “After finals, you’re coming home with me to the Codex compound. Aunt Gwen did recruit Nikki back when they came up to visit campus at spring break.”
“I wouldn’t call Nikki completely sold. She’s agreed to see the compound, hear the full pitch. She hasn’t agreed to nuking the planet, yet.”
“Well, that’s something. But, really, Jack? You’re monitoring her communications? Isn’t that spying on U.S. citizens, and against the CIA’s mandate?”
“The Hun ain’t Company any more. It’s not against her mandate, and she’s running this op. Besides, the rules tend to get real hand-wavey when domestic terrorism and nuclear weapons are under discussion.”
Mac still frowned.
“It is mostly a computer program doing the surveillance, Mac,” Jack assured him. “It scans for keywords, like Codex, and climate change, and File 47, so the only recordings or emails that get flagged for an actual human to review are the potentially relevant ones. Her private correspondence is still largely private.”
“I get it, I do.”
“You’re just too good a person to like it. I get that. I only mentioned it because I don’t want you to doubt your judgment of her character – I know you two are friends.”
“More were than are, to be honest. Once it became clear that I wasn’t interested in falling into bed with her, she’s pretty much ghosted me.”
“That could make this summer interesting.”
“Especially since my parents and aunt think she’s a more appropriate match for me than you.” Mac looked at the floor before forcing himself to meet Jack’s eyes. “You need to understand what’s likely to happen. They’re going to campaign for Nikki and I to get together, even in front of you, even knowing we’re dating.”
“I thought you said they’d be good with you and I being together – population control, an’ all that.”
Mac nodded. “For a short-term relationship, or for most people, yes, that’s the philosophy, but population control isn’t the whole picture. We don’t just need to manage the population curve, we also need to solve the world’s problems, and that requires that the – hopefully small number of – people being born are the right people. Public schools teach evolution as survival of the strongest, but humans became the most dominant species on Earth not by being stronger or faster, but by being adaptable, by being smarter.” Mac shook his head. “This is going to sound so narcissistic.”
“What? Saying the world needs more people like you in it? You saying it probably does sound that way, but I’m right there with your family. More people in this world were like you – smart, but still kind, and funny, and amazing – the world would be a much better place.”
“I just… you should be prepared. They’re going to push me pretty hard about my duty to reproduce, and won’t be shy about pointing out that science doesn’t allow it between you and I. Aunt Gwen, at least, is likely to extol all of Nikki’s virtues as the other half of the equation.”
Jack nodded. “I’ll be fine, Mac. I do this for a living. Sometime – and it doesn’t have to be soon, if you’re still working it out for yourself – I would like to have a conversation about how you feel about your supposed duty to reproduce and what that means for us long term. I love kids. The same science that says you and I can’t be the only biological parents of a single child together also gives us some options that could allow us to raise a child that is biologically yours. And if Nikki’s the other half of that biological equation, I’m not necessarily against it, but I’d want to be sure I understand the emotional equation we’re entering.”
“Is it terrible of me to say I think Nikki would be a terrible mother? I mean, the genetic match Aunt Gwen is pushing I completely get, but actually raising the product of that union?”
“That thought crossed my mind, too,” Jack admitted, pulling Mac down on the couch with him. “It’ll be fine. I’ll say what I have to say to convince them I understand the biological imperatives. And I won’t hold anything they say, or that you have to, against you when this is all over. That’s a promise. If we’re still doing this. It’s your call. Are you still good with the plan? You don’t have to be. If you don’t feel good about moving forward with this plan, we’ll find another way.”
“Matty said—”
“Matty said this was the best way to go. That don’t by any stretch mean it’s the only way, and you are a civilian with no training in this sort of thing. An’ that’s before we factor in the family o’it all. You’ve got every right to back out.”
Mac shook his head. “I can do it. And I can’t let them nuke the planet, even to save it. Even if they’re family.”
📎
Mac, Nikki, and Jack traveled from MIT to the Codex compound together. Auntie Gwen greeted them, offering a sincere “Welcome home, Angus” before turning to her recruit.
“This is unbelievable,” Nikki breathed, awed.
“They built a whole city down here,” Jack agreed.
Mac thought he’d prepared Jack for the compound, but he apparently neglected to clarify how much of it was underground, out of reach of government interference, immune to the sorts of climate disasters climate change or Codex’s schemes planned to bring to bear.
“Your reputation precedes you, Ms. Carpenter,” Aunt Gwen informed Nikki. “You’ve already got a lot of fans around here. Would you mind accompanying me to our tech room?”
“Not at all,” Nikki replied. “That’s why I came out here, after all. To see if this was something I wanted to be involved in after graduation.”
“Or sooner,” Gwen said in open invitation.
“So what now?” Jack asked Mac as the pair walked away.
“Come on. I’ll show you where the guest rooms are and then we’ll see.”
They made it about halfway to the intersection Mac was heading for when they were intercepted by Mac’s parents. After polite reintroductions – not that James and Ellen MacGyver couldn’t guess that the man with their son was the boyfriend he was bringing home to meet he family and not that Jack wasn’t well briefed on the targets of his mission even if they didn't remember each other from the MacGyvers’ spring visit to Boston – Ellen indicated Jack should follow her.
“Wait,” Mac protested. “We’re a package deal.”
“You and I have other business to attend to,” James told his son firmly.
Mac knew the tone. “We don’t have a choice,” he told Jack apologetically.
“Right,” Jack accepted.
“I’ll s… I’ll see you later.” Mac hoped it was true. He’d known there would be some vetting, testing of Jack’s intentions toward him and toward Codex. He’d hoped they’d have more time to get settled. Now he’d just have to hope Jack was as good as he thought he was and could sell Codex on his commitment to its ideals, and to Mac.
“Okay; okay,” Jack repeated gently, clearly trying to reassure Mac with a look that ached to reach out and hug him but wasn’t sure of the protocol. “An’ where are we off to?” He asked Ellen, offering an arm like the most gallant of southern gentleman.
Mac’s mother’s eyebrow went up, but she took his arm, answering mildly, “To meet Leland.”
Mac winced but his father was already heading in the other direction and it wouldn’t do to be caught lagging too far behind.
📎
Jack had to admit he didn’t like the desperation lacing Mac’s tone as they were separated. They’d talked about this, though. Mac had told him to expect it. He wouldn’t be allowed to stay if the leadership of Codex thought he was a risk to their operations (he was). Mac had told him about Leland, the leader of Codex. Jack was better prepared than usual. He’d be fine. He just hoped Mac wouldn’t spiral before Jack got back to him.
“So you and my son…” Ellen said.
Jack hid a grimace. Leland wouldn’t be a problem. His boyfriend’s mother, on the other hand….
“Love each other very much,” Jack answered. “At least I love him very much, and I think he feels the same. I know he’s told you about us.”
“My son is a very special person. He deserves the world.”
“An’ I’ll do everything in my power to give it to him,” Jack answered honestly.
“But you can’t. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I probably do, but if I’m supposed to answer your concerns about our relationship, maybe you’d better tell me exactly what they are.”
“Mac’s brilliant.”
“He stands out even at a school full of folks who are supposed to be pick of the crop,” Jack agreed. “He sees the world differently. I love that about him.”
“He has a duty. The world deserves him at his best. Not distracted by frivolity.”
“We talking about football or romance?” Jack asked bluntly. It was no wonder Mac could be awkward talking about anything that wasn’t pure science, if this roundabout conversation style was his model as a child.
“Football certainly – though I doubt even lust would get him to repeat that failed experiment – but also a relationship that can’t possibly be fruitful.”
“I suppose that depends on your definition. It’s true Mac and I can’t produce viable offspring between just the two of us, but I wasn’t raised to see that as the end all and be all of a relationship. Science gives us options that mean a relationship ain’t at all prerequisite for reproduction. The relationship’s about the life that happens around it. From where I stand, there’s plenty of future for Mac and I that could be wonderfully fruitful.”
“The future needs his brilliance to be passed on.” Jack wasn’t going to argue that, not with Ellen, or Leland, or even with Mac. He was going to argue – with Mac – that Mac was more than his brain and deserved to be treated as wonderful in his own right.
Fortunately, his lack of response wasn’t awkward as they reached Leland’s office and Ellen made introductions before retreating. Jack sized up the primary target of his mission. The man was trying hard to give off the eccentric, mad-scientist vibe, but to Jack it read a little too calculated. This was a worthy opponent.
“The years 1347 to 1351,” Leland quizzed out of the blue.
“The Black Plague in Europe,” Jack answered. Biologics gave him the heebie-jeebies, and mortality tended to be compared against the original biological devastation. “Over 20 million people died.”
“And what happened after that?”
Jack thought for a minute. Almost a thousand years of history happened after that. What part of it would this man want? “The Renaissance,” Jack guessed.
“And?”
If The Renaissance was the right answer, Jack had no idea what went with it.
“Codex,” Leland informed him when he was silent too long.
“Codex dates back to the 14th century?” Mac hadn’t mentioned that.
“I know. It's hard to believe, huh?”
“How is that even possible?” Jack asked. He hadn’t meant to ask it out loud, but surely ecoterrorists couldn’t have hidden under the radar for well over 600 years.
“Well, a group of people got together back then with a singular purpose: to protect the planet from plague, from famine, and – excuse my French – dumbasses, like the people in power today. A lot of amazing science had just come out of the Middle East, but Westerners needed a... bit of a push. So, we funded a lot of the Enlightenment. Things were really clipping along for us. And then, of course, things took a turn for our dear Mother Earth.”
Jack nodded. This part of history got taught differently in rural Texas, but Jack knew what Leland meant. “The Industrial Revolution.”
“Kid's good,” Leland snarked, but he sounded approving nonetheless. “Everything went all pear-shaped after that. Plastics were invented. We were worried when they started splitting the atom.”
Everyone had been. It wasn’t often a weapon was created that was so horrific even the military was terrified of it.
“But we found that chain reactions do come in handy. You remember World War I?”
Compared to The Plague, the Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution, that was modern history. “‘Course.”
“Franz Ferdinand. Guess what. He was Codex.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up. Damn, this group had reach. Or had had reach, at least, but if Mac’s intel was good, and they really could secure a nuke, they still had it. To shake off his unease at the idea of a nuclear warhead in the hands of anyone but his own or a friendly military, people bound by procedure and rules of engagement, Jack turned to the painting displayed prominently. “Is that a J.M.W. Turner?”
“Yes, it is. Look at that sunset. He was influenced by the 1814 eruption of Mount Tambora. Spewed gas and ash up into the sky. Volcanic particles in the stratosphere probably diffused the light. Used to be Mother Earth could protect herself with an eruption. Cool the Earth back down for the next couple of years. That's not the case anymore. Things have gotten out of hand. There's just too damn many of us.”
So even the art was propaganda. Jack hadn’t really expected less. “Please, tell me what I can do to help.” He hoped Leland’s answer would be different than Ellen’s. He had no intention of breaking up with Mac or even pretending to, except as an absolute last resort.
“You got 20 people on a lifeboat meant for ten. You're sinking. You're not gonna make it to shore. What do you do?”
The real Jack Dalton would be the first to jump, and encourage other strong swimmers to do the same, leaving those who required the raft for survival to stay with it, while he and others who stood a chance took their chances. But this was a test, and Mac had told him enough of Codex’s philosophy that he was certain of his answer.
“You throw the ten weakest out. And the strong can row us back to shore.” You nuke the planet, killing a quarter of the population, leaving the resilient to survive.
“Very good,” Leland approved. “Have a nice day.”
It was a dismissal. Jack debated asking where he was supposed to go, having been summoned to this test before Mac could give him a tour, but decided not to press his luck. Besides, exploring wouldn’t hurt.
To Jack’s disappointment, a Codex foot solider – for all Mac’s claims that his family didn’t approve of Jack’s military past, Jack could perceive no other appropriate description of the young man’s role in the organization – was waiting outside the door and led him to a room where his bag had been delivered.
“Any idea where Mac – Angus MacGyver – is?” Jack asked his guide.
“Not part of my detail to know,” the man replied.
“Fair enough,” Jack replied.
📎
Jack wanted to explore the codex compound, but his guide lingered in the hallway – a guard, as Jack had assumed – making it unlikely Jack would be able to wander freely. Instead he unpacked, getting settled as if he was any normal guy visiting his boyfriend’s home for a week or more.
He was finishing up, debating maybe going exploring, guard and all, when he heard Mrs. MacGyver and Mac coming down the hall.
“…you can finally see the world the way I see it,” Mac’s mother was saying.
“The clock's run out,” Mac admitted reluctantly.
“We are mere days away from a long winter's night. And I would rather you not be left... well, left out in the cold.”
“I never did like the cold,” Mac joked before sticking his head in the doorway. “Hi Jack! How was Leland?”
Seeing Mrs. MacGyver lingering, Jack answered, “He’s even more eccentric than you, Hoss. We’ll get along great, I think.”
Mac laughed, but Jack heard the relief.
“Dinner in 20, Angus. Just the five of us,” Mrs. MacGyver informed her son before departing.
Mac watched until his mother was well out of hearing and then came further into the room with Jack and lowered his voice. “But how was it, really?”
“Did you know Codex has been around since The Renaissance?”
“That’s propaganda,” Mac replied. “I mean, yes, an entity that was science over politics and called itself Codex has existed since then, but that organization didn’t put their thumb on the scale nearly as aggressively as the modern organization. The Codex of the 1500s would never have sanctioned the killing of a quarter of the world’s population.”
“But they’ve had time to get people into power, people who might grant the modern organization access to the warhead they need for that cold winter’s night your mama mentioned.”
Mac shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. I called you because I have no doubt of their ability to pull it off, anyway.”
“As you were coming down the hall, your mama mentioned ‘mere days away’. That’s not a lot of time to talk your family out of this, win hearts an’ minds an’ all that.”
“I’d hoped for longer, but it makes sense. If we’re trying to generate an early winter, skip a summer or two, it makes sense to do it at the start of the season.”
📎
Dinner was just the five of them – Mac, Jack, Mac’s parents, and Mac’s aunt. Before long, the conversation turned to Mac’s abrupt departure after the holidays, and his dismay over Codex’s plan to prime a super-volcano with a nuclear warhead, contrasted with his evident willingness to go ahead with the plan now.
“So what changed your mind?”
Mac sighed. “My mind’s not changed,” he said honestly, “but I can't find a hole in the logic of File 47. I hate it, but I don't have any other solutions. You are right, Mom. I’m really glad you all taught me enough to be able to think critically and set aside feelings for facts. And that you had patience with me while I came to terms this spring.”
“So am I,” his mother said. “File 47 was always for you, because you deserve the world.”
“And the world deserves you,” Aunt Gwen agreed.
Jack did his best to not frown, but he couldn’t help wondering if that felt like a burden, an impossible weight on his shoulders, to Mac. All parents sacrificed for their kids, of course, but it was one thing to let a dream job go in favor of stability and hours that fit with the school bus schedule, and another to orchestrate the death of billions.
📎
“So not kidding about the ‘mere days away’ bit,” Jack murmured for Mac’s ears only as they joined the rest of the Codex faithful in a large room just three days after they’d arrived.
Gwen was at the front, and all eyes were on her.
“Friends... every single one of you has made this day possible. It's time to go to work.”
Mac shivered.
“You okay?” Jack asked him. He was trained for this. Mac was not.
Mac startled, apparently surprised at being addressed. “Yeah, fine.”
“Let’s do it!” Several in the crowd cheered.
Gwen motioned for quiet. “All right, for security reasons, each team has separate instructions, to be opened only once you are on the road. Everybody will be traveling a different route to attract the least amount of attention. I'll be directing the ops from here in the bunker.”
Jack noted Nikki and several of the other people he’d identified as being techops were already seated at a bank of computers on the side of the room.
“What was is lost...”
Apparently familiar with this rallying cry, everyone around them echoed Gwen. “What was is lost...”
“...but from death comes life!”
Well ain’t that a way to justify genocide on a scale the planet’s never seen before.
And yet, the crowded room echoed with their response. “...but from death comes life!”
Codex had found itself hundreds of fervent believers. Ain’t that always the way, though? Fanatics wrap their message in just enough truth to make it appealing and then convince good people to go just a little further, just one step more, until they can’t see how far they’ve gone. Really, Codex wasn’t any different than any other terrorist organization he’d gone after before. The ideology was unique, but the methods, and the convictions of its followers, were the same.
Amid the gleeful cheering, Jack looked at Mac. “Still think you can change her mind?”
“Yeah, I think our best bet right now is just go along with this plan and see if we can figure out a way to stop it.”
That right there was Jack’s problem with this whole mission. “What plan, Mac? We're flying blind.”
Mac was spared answering by Gwen herself cutting through the crowd. “Hey, thanks for helping us out. We can really use you out there. Sorry to... keep you in the dark.”
“Don't suppose you could let us know what we're in for?” Jack asked optimistically.
“This is how Leland does things, but it's for our own good.”
Always is, in a group like this, Jack thought. “Right,” he said mildly.
📎
Jack, Mac, Mac’s father, the codex foot soldier who had been Jack’s escort/guard the first day, and two others were assigned a van. Jack offered to drive, expecting to be refused. To his surprise, the others looked relieved that they could focus on last minute preparations.
Once they were out beyond the compound’s perimeter, James MacGyver opened the envelope he’d been carrying, pulling out a map and directions, the first of which he relayed to Jack.
Their route took them to an old warehouse where they were supposed to retrieve several buckets of cement. The buckets weren’t where the instructions indicated. James MacGyver was displeased with their failure to execute, to put it mildly. Jack wondered what Mac’s childhood had been like, if the man had expected such flawless perfection out of everything his son did. (They had followed the directions faithfully, after all.) The others had spread out to see if the buckets had simply been moved since their instructions were generated. Jack did the one remaining thing there was to do, and called back to the bunker to let them know their mission had hit a snag. This could be a test after all. Leland and Gwen would expect a soldier like him to properly communicate a delay in the mission timeline.
While he was awaiting further instructions from Gwen, his Matty-issued comms crackled to life. “You've got a helicopter approaching from the south. Can a helicopter transport a nuke?”
Jack was about to answer in the affirmative when Matty herself chimed in. “Not this one. That’s a Cobra attack helicopter.”
“It’s a trap,” Jack realized out loud.
Mac broke off his debate with his father to frown perplexedly at Jack. “What?”
Jack raised his voice, using a tone and pitch he thought he’d left behind when Sergeant Dalton received his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. “Everybody needs to run now!”
“What are you talking about?” James demanded.
“They’re gonna blow up the warehouse.” Jack wished he knew who “they” was. Did Leland doubt his – or Mac’s – loyalty? Did Matty’s superiors doubt his – and Mac’s – ability to end this plan without mass casualties? There’d be time to find out later, if they survived now. “Everybody needs to get out of here now. “Let's move! Let's go!”
Finally, with the helicopter in sight, James realized the danger. “Go, go, go! Code red!” Whatever that was, it got the Codex faithful scrambling.
Jack realized, horror-struck, that he, James, and Mac, were further from the door. They wouldn’t make minimum safe distance in time. Jack cast about. “Mac, over here. Come on!” He grabbed Mac by the wrist, tugging him insistently into a locker, pulling a piece of corrugated metal over the opening behind them. “It's gonna be loud!” He warned. It already was.
And then the missile struck. Off target, thank God, but close enough. Jack heard the crackle of flames. He prayed Mac hadn’t comprehended the agonized scream of at least one person not making it out of range, especially since he thought it might have been James’ voice.
Then there was silence. Jack basked in it for a second, but the heat would only grow as the fire(s) burned toward them. They needed to get out of the building. Jack peeked out.
When he sat back, Mac looked at him. “We can use the metal as a heat shield,” the younger man suggested.
Jack just nodded. It was their only chance. He didn’t like the odds, but the odds of surviving a Cobra helicopter’s attack were lower, and they’d done that already.
They made it most of the way to the exit before the metal heated to an unbearable temperature. “It’s too hot! Drop it!” Mac cried over the roar of the fire around them, just as Jack was about to suggest it.
They dropped it and raced for the exit, running at their top speed, which turned out to be as evenly matched as their paced conditioning runs. Side by side, they staggered away from the building into the comparatively cool summer breeze.
When he could hear anything over the fire’s roar, Matty’s roar returned to his ears, demanding he check in. “We got out, Matty,” he assured her. With no Codex personnel around, he could speak freely.
“Only you could've survived this,” she huffed.
Jack turned to Mac. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Mac gasped. Jack couldn’t tell yet if it was the exertion or the smoke inhalation. “Anyone else in there alive?”
Jack shook his head. “Everyone else ran for the doors. Think we were the only two inside when it hit, and nothing that’s still in there is alive.”
They staggered back to the van they’d arrived in, fortunately outside the blast radius.
“What do you want to do?” Jack asked.
Mac picked up the instruction packet. “There’s directions here for where to go next. If we’re going to stop the plan – if Cobras didn’t take out everyone else, too – I think we have to keep going.”
In Jack’s ear, an analyst told him – or Matty with the line open, Jack couldn’t tell – that a convoy had just left the Codex compound. “That’s got to be it,” Matty said. “That’s the nuke.”
“Keep me posted on speed and direction. We’ll have to intercept that convoy,” Jack answered.
He turned to Mac, who hadn’t reacted. Mac’s gaze was fixed on something out the window. Jack followed his gaze and winced. The victim of the scream he’d heard was visible beyond the blast crater. Mostly charred, but the face still recognizable, since the flames had caught him from behind. It was indeed James MacGyver.
“Oh, Mac. I’m so sorry,” Jack said honestly. He hadn’t particularly liked James MacGyver personally, professionally, or as a parent of someone he cared a whole lot about, but Mac – as far as Jack could tell – absolutely had loved his father.
Mac didn’t blink, didn’t react at all to Jack’s words. Jack had seen this in warzones. He reached over, gently turning Mac’s head to face him, not the remains. “I know, I know. Don’t look. You’ve seen enough,” he assured him.
“Jack,” Mac whispered brokenly.
“Right here,” Jack promised. “I’m right here. And I know this sucks and you ain’t trained for any of this, but we do got to make some decisions in the next few minutes. Intel says the nuke is on the move. Can you get your head clear and focused and do you still want to go after it? No shame in sayin’ no, given the situation on the ground here,” he assured him, adding the caveat for Matty’s benefit. Losing a team member like this would be grounds to abort, let alone a family member.
Mac closed his eyes, no doubt trying to stop himself before he started to cry in earnest. When they opened, they were bright with both tears and determination. “If we don’t stop the nuke, a lot more sons are going to be mourning their fathers, and fathers their sons. One is too many. I can’t let them kill 2 billion, not even in my dead father’s name,” he said resolutely.
Jack nodded.
Mac’s eyes flicked to the charred corpse. “Do we… can I have a minute?”
Jack nodded silently. It would take the analysts a minute to determine a likely course for the convoy, and they were at least an hour ahead of it, if it was going the same place their group was meant to take the cement.
Mac got out of the van, hunkering down near the remains. Jack’s heart broke, but Mac’s goodbyes to his father would give Jack some time to alert Matty to the situation so she could have appropriate backup if Mac’s ability to compartmentalize didn’t match his resolve.
📎
Mac wavered as he approached the body that had been his father. He wondered what he should do. Taking it with them would be sentimental nonsense, but the thought of just leaving it laid out as a buffet for scavengers made him queasy. They didn’t have tools or time to bury it, not if they were going to stop the end of the world.
Mac sighed. “You taught me I could fix things, but… I don’t know if I can this time,” Mac admitted. His father had taught him so much, but had never quite managed to be what or who Mac needed him to be, leaving their relationship more adversarial than Mac wished – that their last words to each other were a fight over Mac’s failure to do the impossible was oddly fitting.
“I really wish you or Mom or Gwen was here right now. I wish there was time. I wish we could talk about what to do. With your corpse. With the warhead. With the planet and the population crisis. Dad, you used to always say that thing: The only real failure is never having tried at all. I always took it to be your way of telling me you still loved me, even though I always felt like I could never succeed in your eyes. Anyway, I'm gonna try something,” Mac said, resolve hardening even more than it had when Jack asked him. “It means risking everything. Everyone I love. I know – and I believe – science is driven by cold logic, by equations you can test and duplicate. But humankind's greatest leaps forward were all born of instinct and intuition, by the belief that the impossible was within reach. So there comes a time to put aside all logic and trust your gut and do what you feel is right. And I’m sorry if it’s throwing everything you and Mom and Aunt Gwen have worked for decades to do ‘for me’ back in your faces, if it’s dishonoring your memory and legacy, but I just can’t feel that nuking the planet is right.”
Mac pushed himself back to his feet and turned toward the van. Jack was waiting there, leaning against the driver’s side door, his eyes worried and sympathetic, but not judgmental. Seeing Mac look his way, Jack opened his arms. A hug wouldn’t fix anything, but Mac was learning from Jack that sometimes it was okay to do things just because they felt good, not because they served any purpose.
Mac sank into his boyfriend’s everything-is-bigger-in-Texas hug, letting tears fall for just a moment. The body needed release.
When he straightened, he wiped his face on his arm. “I, um, I don’t know what to do with him—with the corpse, I mean. We can’t stick around to bury him, and we don’t have the right tools anyway. We can’t really take him with us, but ….”
“Matty sent a team to scout for the other Codex members who fled the Cobra attack. She wants ‘em for questioning, and to know we didn’t just stop this plan to wipe out a quarter of the world, but the whole organization. I already asked her to have them casevac your father,” Jack said reassuringly.
Mac wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but as long as someone was going to take care of the remains somehow, Mac could live with that. “We have to go.”
“We do,” Jack agreed, but he didn’t make the first move, instead waiting until Mac stepped away to get back into the van.
📎
“Matty’s analysts have been following the convoy. We can intercept it about twenty miles from here. It’s heading for the construction site in Yellowstone that our instructions had us taking the cement to. I’d love to think that without the cement the whole plan’s a bust, but I assume that’s wishful thinking?”
“Um… yeah, I think so,” Mac said after a moment’s thought. “The dig site is at a dam near a side vent to the super volcano under Yellowstone, if I remember right.”
“Someone want to confirm on one’a them geo-thermite maps?” Jack asked the analysts.
He could hear the Hun roll her eyes, but it was Mac who corrected absently, “Geothermal. Anyway, the plan would be to detonate the warhead into the side vent, priming an eruption.”
“The big one the Yellowstone nerds’ve been threatenin’ for a while now?” Mac nodded. “So what’s the cement for?”
“Concrete. A barrier, I assume. To direct the blast, and to give our people – Codex’s people – better odds of getting out.”
“‘Better odds’? There ain’t an exit strategy for your own people?”
“In the most perfect version of the plan, probably. But plans go awry. The folks chosen to actually detonate the warhead are probably comfortable with the possibility of this being a one-way trip. Hoping to get out, but knowing they’ll be closest and a lot of things can happen between them and minimum safe distance.”
“What is minimum safe distance?” Jack asked as an analyst confirmed Mac’s memory of the Yellowstone geology.
“What’s the definition of the term or what’s the value for this situation?”
“Looking for the number,” Jack answered. “We used an abbreviation in the military for it, ‘cause no one wanted to think too hard about what that number meant, but I know the term.”
Mac shrugged uneasily. “Depends on the size of the warhead. And the size of the eruption. I don’t know. We got specs on the warhead?” Jack had told him Matty’s people were discretely checking on the nation’s stockpile, trying to determine what was missing.
“No,” Jack relayed, “But when we come up on the convoy, if you can get in the back of the truck, get an ID number, the analysts are standing by with specs.”
“‘Get in the back of the truck,’” Mac echoed as they pulled out onto a larger road in the middle of the convoy, to an angry blare of horns from the trailing vehicles. “I don’t suppose the plan includes us or them stopping while I do so.”
“You know Codex best. You think the driver of that truck is going to stop for anything, short of the destination?”
“No. An assignment like this would go to someone Leland trusts completely. Probably Roman. I want to say Gwen’d be on the detonation team, but I don’t understand where the Cobra helicopter came from and what its mission was. If Leland lost faith in me or you or my family, maybe he held Gwen back in the bunker, like she said?”
📎
“You got a plan?” Jack asked as Mac unbuckled his seatbelt.
“Yes. No. Well, like 60% of a plan, which is pretty good for me.”
“Yeah, but the other 40% of your plan is doing 55 on a road that needed to be repaved three years gone.”
“Closer would help,” Mac replied, pulling himself out the window onto the hood of the van.
“I’m going to miss you and hate myself if you get yourself killed,” Jack muttered to the empty passenger seat.
Mac made it into the back of the truck successfully – Jack saw that much before a perfectly executed PIT maneuver sent the van spinning off the road. “Dammit!” He yelled, fighting for control of the van on the grassy shoulder.
One of the Codex trailing vehicles had peeled off just before Mac climbed out of the van. The second had hit Jack and apparently lost traction itself. Jack could see the engine smoking where it had fetched up on the median. That vehicle wasn’t going anywhere, but he might be able to use it to tow the van out of the grass, if he could commandeer it.
Mac needed him to catch up, so that’s what Jack was going to do. He drew his sidearm from the holster at the small of his back – the easiest place to hide it from civilians while still maintaining ease of access – and went to commandeer the other vehicle.
📎
Mac hunted along the warhead, trying to find an ID for Matty’s analysts that would give them a size specification on the warhead more accurate than “big”. Suddenly his way was impeded by another person in the back of the truck.
“Mac! This isn’t your detail,” Aunt Gwen informed him sharply.
“No, my detail got shot up by a Cobra attack helicopter.”
Gwen looked away.
“You knew? Dad is dead!”
“I didn’t know, not ahead of time. I’m sorry about James. Leland—”
“Leland did this? And you still pledge loyalty to that man?” Mac had never been particularly fond of Codex’s ringleader. Knowing he’d ordered the strike only confirmed Mac had been right about him all along.
“The ends will justify what had to be done.”
“Who are you trying to convince? Me? Or you? Is that what you’re going to tell my mom, your sister? Your husband is dead, but it’s okay because the ends justify the means! Gwen, it's not too late to put a stop to this. This couldn't be what my mom wanted when she first wrote File 47.”
“Nobody wants this, Angus. It's what's necessary.”
“I can't believe that,” Mac informed her. “Sometimes you just have to give people a chance.” People like Jack, and Frankie, and Smitty.
“We gave people a chance. They failed. The world is dying.”
“Then give me a chance to do it the right way. It doesn't take the whole world.” Well, it would, eventually, but that wasn’t what he meant. “Sometimes you just need that one person that you can count on. Who you trust. And, together, any problem can be solved.” He’d thought things were impossible when he’d called Jack that day this winter, but he’d trusted him, counted on him, and Jack had been there to help him solve the problem.
“I wish that were true.”
“You know it is. I can see it. This isn't who you are. This isn't who my mother hoped you'd become when she agreed to live for File 47.”
“Not the place I'd pick for a family reunion,” Leland’s attack dog, Roman, interrupted, joining them in the back.
“I've got this, Roman,” Gwen snapped.
“Got what, exactly? Your supposed-to-be-dead nephew hiding in the back of our truck?” He shoved Mac.
“No!” Mac heard his aunt cry out, but he was rather busy trying to catch on to anything as he was thrown toward the open back of the truck.
“Angus!” She screamed as he went out the back before finally latching on to the back of the vehicle.
“Mac! Take my hand.”
She meant well, he knew, but he couldn’t beat Roman in a fair fight. He had a plan, though. Or 53% of one. It would all come down to Jack catching up after Codex had forced him off the road just as Mac made the jump from their van to the truck.
“I still believe in you,” he told Gwen and then let go, dropping painfully to the road, and rolling to protect his head and ribs.
“No! Mac!” Then the truck was gone, speeding ahead to the dam and the objective.
Mac tried to catch his breath and couldn’t. Before he could assess whether it was broken ribs or something more benign, he heard tires screech and curled up to protect himself if he was about to be run over.
Instead, the next thing he heard was a familiar Texan twang. “Mac!”
Mac unrolled, lying flat on his back for a minute. “I’m okay,” he decided, lifting a hand up for Jack to pull him to his feet. Jack did so, but didn’t refrain from eyeing Mac up and down to make his own assessment. “We need to find that nuke,” he reminded his boyfriend.
“Matty, are you still tracking that convoy?”
“Actually, I know how to find it,” Mac piped in. When he’d said they needed to find it, he’d misspoken. He meant they needed to go get it.
“You do?” Jack asked, surprised.
“Yeah. Before I fell out of that truck, I managed to jam my phone under the loading ramp. I assume Matty’s analysts can find it.”
“Yeah, they’re on it,” Jack confirmed. “Let’s get you back to the van. Maybe stay in it this time?”
“You’re the one who said I needed to get in the truck.” Mac swallowed. “Leland ordered the helicopter attack. He murdered my father. Tried to kill us, and the other two Codex guys with us.”
“Aw, Hoss. I’m sorry.”
“Me too. Not as sorry as he’s going to be when we’re through with him, right?”
“Right.”
📎
“Stay here; I’m going to scout,” Jack ordered, parking the van at the dam, not far from the truck.
He returned a few minutes later. “One lookout. Truck's empty. They must have already moved the bomb. Let’s go. Stay behind me.”
As they entered the inside of the dam, Mac spotted a map. He tugged Jack’s hand to stop him. “I knew it. Okay, see there, directly under the dam?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“It's a side vent to the volcano's magma chamber. It's a thousand feet and some change down, but it's right there.”
“They want to aim a nuke at a river of lava?” Jack sounded skeptical, even though he’d sounded like he believed Mac when he’d sketched the plan to prime the volcano with the warhead before.
“No, I think they're gonna blow a hole where the dam is. What they want is this river. Massive amounts of water flood into the hole that they drilled, right into the magma chamber. Pressure builds, and boom. Water triggers the eruption.”
“That sounds fun. Let’s go stop that from happening.”
“Let’s,” Mac agreed.
📎
They heard voices ahead. Jack motioned for him to stay while he scouted ahead. Mac did so reluctantly, but Jack was only gone a minute. “Good news is, I got a look at the warhead. It's a B61.”
“And you can disarm it?” Mac asked hopefully because the other option was… ill-advised.
“No chance,” Jack said. “I pulled Overwatch duties for bomb nerds, never was one myself.”
So ill-advised it was. “Okay, well, I could, um. What I can do is build a shaped charge to interrupt the chain reaction.”
Jack’s eyebrows hit the ceiling. (Mac was almost surprised he couldn’t hear them.) “You want to blow up a nuclear bomb?!”
“Yup. But, hopefully, we just get a good old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill explosion, no nuke going off, no mushroom cloud. If I can find the right materials, it should work. I think. Follow me.”
“Well, if you're sure,” Jack said sarcastically, plainly not sure himself.
📎
“Hey, Jack. I, uh, found some of Codex’s drilling equipment. And, uh… everything I need to finish my build,” Mac called out as he explored the room while Jack kept a wary eye on the hallway.
“I want to believe you that that’s a good thing,” Jack replied.
Mac got to work building his device, explaining, “A nuclear explosion is initiated by a very precise conventional explosion. This pushes the fusible material together to start a chain reaction, but if the material doesn't go together in just the right way, you might only get a partial reaction or even no nuclear explosion at all.”
“So how is... whatever you're building supposed to work?”
Mac thought he’d already explained that, so he cast about for terms that might be more accessible for Jack. “Like a gun. I'm gonna aim it directly at the nuke, and it should interrupt the chain reaction. The time-delay fuse will give us enough time to clear the building before it goes off.”
“Hey, Mac? How’s it coming? Intel says Codex is bugging out.”
“Ready,” Mac answered. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
Jack nodded grimly. “I do. They're getting out of the blast zone. They armed the nuke.”
Before Mac could confirm that was his analysis as well, Roman leapt out of a shadowed nook, attacking Mac again. “Twice in one day? What’s the matter? Didn’t get your daily live goat dropped in your cage?”
It probably wasn’t the smartest thing Mac had ever done to antagonize a stronger, better trained, opponent, but Roman was Leland’s lapdog, and Leland had ordered the attack that killed Mac’s father. Anger was a stage of grief, right?
Fortunately, Jack hauled Roman off Mac into a sleeper hold and then ziptied the unconscious man to a ladder.
📎
They found Gwen near the room where the warhead was primed. She’d armed it herself; Mac had expected that was her role, but with Leland ordering his and his father’s death, he hadn’t been sure.
Jack easily pinned her to a wall. “Go, Mac, do what you got to do so we can get out of here. I got her.”
📎
“How many others are still down here?” Jack demanded. Mac was out of his sight, and the room he was in had multiple entrances.
“Just Roman, but he should have passed you.”
“He tried. Why should I believe you? Why should I believe that you didn’t chose Leland over your own family? Some computer nerd you’d just met over your own nephew?”
“I… I did all that,” she confessed. “I saw the data, and I lost hope that people could change, that... that they could be better. I know that Angus showed you a better way. He showed me, too. He's my family. I want to help him. And more than that, after everything my sister’s sacrificed for File 47, everything I encouraged her, pressured her, into sacrificing for File 47, when all she wanted to do was make the world better for her baby, I can’t go back to her and tell her we succeeded, but I let her husband, and her son, die to do it. Please, there’s not much time.”
Jack debated, but the truth was he could subdue her again easily. There were plenty of other Codex soldiers that Mac wouldn’t be able to fight off on his own. Jack needed to get to him.
He let Gwen go.
“We have less than six minutes, and it can't be disarmed,” she informed him.
“I know. That's not the plan.”
Mac looked up, smiled weakly at them both. “Interrupt the chain reaction.”
“Smart kid,” Gwen praised and Jack wanted to punch her. She’d been Mac’s school teacher his whole life, from what Jack understood. Surely, she knew how smart he was! She’d probably taught him the very science he was using against her scheme.
Mac looked up, panicked, holding a bit of broken something-or-other. “The time-delay fuse. It must have broken when he attacked me. I'm gonna have to set it off manually.” His expression broke, but his voice didn’t. “This is a one-way trip. I need you guys to get as far away from here as possible, as fast as you can. The time delay won't work. I'm gonna set it off myself.”
“Mac!” Jack started to argue.
“Don't think! Just run.”
Jack didn’t. Gwen, too, stayed, kneeling beside Mac. She covered his hands with hers. “Angus. Go. I can do this.”
“What? No, I...”
“There's no time. Let me do this. Please. For Ellen.”
They both had tears in their eyes, but Mac sagged. “You connect this to, uh...”
“I know. I got it. You deserve the world. And the world deserves you. Go. Run. Now!”
Jack didn’t wait for Mac to agree, hauling his boyfriend bodily to his feet and dragging him along. If it was all a ploy and Gwen was going to do nothing and let the nuclear explosion happen, they’d be dead no matter what. If she tried, and failed, they’d be dead no matter what. If she succeeded, and they stuck around long enough to be sure, they’d be dead, too. Time had run out. The only thing left to do was run as hard as they could, as fast as they could, as far as they could.
📎
Mac reached the top of the stairs and open air. Jack thought he had – just two steps to go – when the shockwave reached the bottom of the stairs and tossed him forward. His leg cracked against the lip of the stairwell and then against the post holding up the railing as he tried to roll out of the way of the blast. He knew the nauseating pain meant it was broken and had time to scream his favorite impressionable-nieces-and-nephews-curse: “Friday in Shiozowa!” before the sound wave caught up and swallowed his more colorful language.
When he could hear anything but the explosion again, it was Mac’s frantic voice. “Jack! Jack!”
“’m here, Mac! By the stairs!”
Mac found him. Jack did a quick visual assessment. Bruises, scrapes – the blast wave had probably shaken the surface Mac was running on, taking his feet out from under him – but nothing serious.
“Come on,” Mac said, offering Jack a hand up. “I don’t know how well the infrastructure is going to hold up. We should get out of here before it crumbles.”
“We should, but I ain’t ambulatory,” Jack explained.
Mac turned his own assessing gaze on Jack. “Oh, oh, shit,” Mac said, looking a little green. “We should, um…”
“We should do a lot of things,” Jack said, “but this ain’t the time and we ain’t got the supplies, so you’re going to be my crutch. I’ll walk you through it.” Jack intended that pun, thank you very much.
“That’s going to hurt!” Mac protested.
“Me or you?” Jack asked. “This is one of those times where you could try a ‘this will hurt me more than it hurts you’ line. It might even be true. I got a decent pain tolerance and this ain’t the first time I’ve had to get myself to medevac all busted up, but I also got a mouth that don’t know how to quit. Still, like you said. Can’t stay here, in case the whole thing crumbles out from under us.”
Chapter 8: Reaction
Chapter Text
The first order of business was getting back to the van. It hurt them both, just as Jack had predicted. The second order of business was splinting Jack’s clearly broken leg. They had a well-stocked first aid kit in the van, with some pain relief, and everything they needed for the splint except the supports. Mac had no trouble finding branches the right length. Actually applying it definitely hurt Mac more than Jack – the old soldier was able to focus on the pain relief that would come from the bone being realigned; Mac couldn’t help but focus on how much pain he was causing.
They were both breathing hard, trying to gather themselves. Jack managed; Mac broke into open sobs.
“Hey, hey. I’m going to be okay,” Jack assured him.
Mac nodded weakly, trying to rub his eyes on his arm. “We left Roman down there.”
“Yeah, yeah we did,” Jack acknowledged softly. “If he had any luck left him, he was still unconscious when the blast wave reached him.”
“I… I didn’t like him. At all. But I didn’t want him to die. I didn’t want anyone to die.”
Jack nodded. “If we’d had time, we’d’a brought him out, and Gwen. It was him or us. I know that don’t make it okay, but it is the truth.”
“What am I supposed to tell my mom?”
“About Roman? Or Gwen and James?” Mac sobbed again. Jack pulled him into his good side. “Tell her they died trying to make the world a better place. Tell her you still love her. Grieve together. Tell her you’ll be there. Know I’ll be here. Whatever’s next.”
“Hospital’s next. Your leg needs to be set properly.”
“Not arguing. Am pointin’ out that you gotta drive, ‘cause it’s my pedal foot. An’ if we wanna make it in the same three pieces we’re in now, you’re head’s gotta be in the right place to drive.
📎
“What happened here?” A doctor asked Jack.
Jack hummed. “We were out near Dixon Dam. Dunno what happened–couldn'ta been the dam failing, because there was no flood after; couldn'ta been mucha an eruption, because there was no lava or forest fire. All I know is one minute I'm going along, next minute I got thrown off my feet into something hard enough to break my shin, and then got tossed around a bit more.”
Mac noticed Jack’s eyes were on him, not the medical personnel. He nodded to let Jack know he understood this was their story and the truth was going to end up classified. Jack’s story was a good one. It wouldn't be possible to hide that something had happened at the dam. Jack’s story wouldn't contradict whatever story was eventually given, nor would it give local authorities any reason to think they might know anything about what happened, if they tried to investigate despite the federal handling of the incident.
📎
The fourth order of business – or fifth if you counted Jack soothing Mac's meltdown as three and the hospital visit for four – was being debriefed by Matty herself. She questioned Mac about every detail, going over all of it so many times he wanted to snap, “As I said before,” but Jack didn't seem perturbed and he was probably in increasing pain every time Matty went back to the beginning.
Eventually she turned her full attention to Jack. She didn't make him go over things as many times, except for one time when she glared at him and muttered the name of a movie Mac recognized but hadn't seen.
Mac didn’t understand the reference. Jack grinned like a cat that caught the canary and calmly went over the portion of events she asked about again.
At last she sat back, apparently satisfied. “First off, I do need to say ‘Well done.’ This was not the personnel we'd have put on such a mission, if we'd been able to plan it, but you two delivered, averting a crisis the likes the world has never seen.
“We have a Nuclear Emergency Support Team excavating the Dixon Dam site. Although Gwen managed to stop a full-scale nuclear explosion, we still need to sweep the area for radiation. So far the team has found no evidence of nuclear leakage, which suggests the explosion was entirely conventional without even a partial reaction.”
“Thanks to Mac,” Jack said.
Matty nodded. “As I said, well done. The Codex bunker's empty. Cleared out. Looks like Leland took the rest of Codex into hiding. We destroyed their infrastructure and their plan, but everything you two have told me says Leland is still a dangerous man. When he surfaces, we'll be waiting.”
“He won't,” Mac said. “He won't surface; he'll go deeper underground. You'll have to watch for patterns that fit prior Codex behaviors.”
“We already are,” Matty assured him. “Jack mentioned you asked about James MacGyver's remains. They'll be cremated, per his stated wishes, and returned to you and your mother. I am sorry for your loss, Mac. I knew James personally. In fact, he recommended me for my current position. While I don't agree with the choices he made later in his life, I still believe he was a good man who loved his family as best he could, so I want you to know that I am genuinely and personally sorry for your loss, Mac.”
“And I for yours,” Mac said softly. “Gwen?”
Matty shook her head. “The team hasn't finished the excavation.”
Jack put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You know there ain't gonna be anything to find, not if she stayed with it. Without the time delay…”
Mac swallowed hard and nodded. He did know. “Has Mom been told?”
“I believe so. Certainly the team debriefing her knows and will tell her. Mac, you need to understand there will be consequences for your mother. File 47 started when she was employed by the federal government. It wasn’t hers to do with what she would. She also falsified records.”
“Her ‘death’,” Mac guessed.
“And life since. And then there's her involvement with an ecoterrorism organization. There will be a lengthy sentence. How lengthy will depend on her cooperation with the investigation and prosecution of the remainder of Codex.”
“Am I going to jail?” Mac asked. He was Codex, too.
“No. Your age when you were brought into Codex and your cooperation with the government in preventing disaster are being taken into account.”
Mac considered all Matty had shared. “Nikki? She was barely part of it, but she was part of the final plan.”
“She has options. A sort of work release, where she works for the government for a couple years in exchange for a clean record. The right attorney and a sympathetic jury could get her off. Worst case, I can’t imagine the sentence being more than five years.”
Mac nodded. That made sense. He looked at Jack, not Matty, before asking his last question. “Did they find Roman?”
Jack sighed. “Yeah, Hoss. They recovered some remains.”
“When the forensic investigation is through, the remains will be cremated and returned to next-of-kin. It's easiest on the family that way.”
“Does the report say, um, does it say if he was conscious? Did he know it was coming?”
“I haven't read the autopsy report yet,” Matty said. “It may not say, but, if it does, I will let Jack know.”
“Thank you,” Mac said.
“You are going to forgive yourself, right? No matter what the report does or doesn't say?” Jack pressed. “Especially since, if we’re going there, I am the one that knocked him out, the one that cuffed him to that ladder so he couldn't escape if he woke up, the one who left him.”
“I'll try.” It was the most Mac could promise.
📎
“You sure you want me to come with ya?” Jack asked as they approached the building. Mac nodded silently. Jack grabbed his sleeve with one hand to stop him. “Mac, this ain’t an exam question. You don’t gotta give the answer you think I wanna hear. I ain’t gonna be hurt if you want to visit your mom alone. Are you sure you want me to come in with you?”
Mac just nodded again. That part he was sure about. He met Jack’s searching gaze, but wasn’t sure what the older man would see there.
Jack’s expression softened. “Are you sure you want to go in there?” Mac’s eyes dropped to the ground as he shook his head.
“No, you don’t want to go in there, or no, you’re not sure.”
“I don’t know,” Mac answered miserably.
“Alright, that’s fair. Let’s go sit on that bench by the door an’ talk it through.”
“Not like I have a choice,” Mac said as he trailed Jack to the bench beside the door.
Jack grunted as he did the hop-dance required to turn himself around and lower himself to a seated position with crutches and broken leg. “Always got a choice. Choices might have consequences, and one choice might have more unbearable consequences than the other, but it’s still a choice. Now, I got thoughts, but I ain’t gonna share ‘em, until you’ve exhausted all your thoughts and ask me for mine. I am gonna say right up front, whatever choice you make, and whatever reasons you got – or don’t got – for making it, it ain’t gonna change anything about how I feel about you or how I think of you, even if you don’t pick the option I would, okay?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Mac said, not sure he really believed that devoted-to-his-family Jack Dalton wouldn’t think less of him for bailing on his mother, but it was reassuring, if it was true.
“What are the reasons to not go in there?” Jack prompted.
“Jack, I … what I did. She sacrificed everything for File 47. She’s made it her life’s work to bring this about and I stopped it. And she did it for me, so stopping it was… ungrateful at best.”
“You ask her to do any of this for you?”
“No, of course not.”
“So, it was a choice. Her choice, to do this for you, without consulting you about whether you wanted it.”
“Yeah, but gifts are like that. You’ve heard my family say ‘you deserve the world’. For my mom, it’s also ‘you deserve a world’, not a dying planet, not some last gasp outpost elsewhere in the solar system where everything down to the air we breathe is artificial. A whole, living, thriving, real world.”
“You deserve that. So does each and every one of the other 8ish billion people on the planet, and the billions born before them, and the billions born after them. Lots of people deserve lots of things, but we don’t all get them. You’re a nerd, you oughta know the quote: ‘Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? [Until you can,] do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.’”
“She thought she could. Give death, and life.”
“Mmm,” Jack agreed. “And some that she probably thought deserved life died, so maybe she couldn’t, after all. Anyway, is that the whole reason to not go in there, you being worried about her reaction?” Jack said, his voice carefully neutral.
Mac nodded. “Yeah, basically.”
“‘Kay. Why go in, then, if you don't wanna find out how she's gonna react?”
“Because I don't wanna find out how she's gonna react?” Mac asked. “I mean, she’s in prison. She wouldn’t be – Codex would’ve pulled it off – if I hadn’t turned against Codex. Surely she’s… at least disappointed, maybe furious. Probably furious. I love my mother, my opinions about nuking the planet notwithstanding. I don’t want to disappoint her, or anger her, or find out she hates me, because Dad and Gwen died in vain – died without Codex accomplishing the mission. But, like you said, I made a choice, one she didn’t ask for or indicate she wanted. Choices have consequences. Refusing to face them is immature at best, and cowardice at worst.”
Jack hummed. “Not sure I’d put it so harshly, but you sound like you’ve got convictions about this, and it sounds like those convictions involve going in there at some point, so the only question is whether it’s now or later.”
“Putting it off isn’t going to make it better.”
“True. So, final verdict: you want me in there or not?”
“I want you in there.”
📎
“Angus,” his mother greeted him with a soft sigh. “I wasn’t sure they’d let me see you.”
Mac nodded, sitting awkwardly opposite her as Jack leaned beside the door. “Did they, um, did they tell you about Dad, and Aunt Gwen?”
“They believed in the cause they died for,” Ellen said calmly.
“Aunt Gwen stayed behind to detonate the conventional explosion that disrupted the nuclear reaction. So I could get out.”
“She believed in the cause she died for,” Ellen repeated. “The world deserves you.”
“So that’s just it for you? You’re not… mad at me? Upset about Aunt Gwen’s death? Dad’s? Nothing?”
“Angus, you are my son. I will always love you, even when you make decisions I don’t agree with. File 47 has always been for you, because you deserve the world. I grieve for our dead, and our persecuted kin in the fight to leave your generation a planet that can sustain your own children, but your father and your aunt and I were always willing to die for this, and for you. I won’t belittle their sacrifice by pretending otherwise.”
📎
“Are you okay?” Jack asked as they went back to the car.
“I don’t know,” Mac said, shaking his head. “You’re the expert. Can anyone be that sanguine, under these circumstances?”
“Some people are true believers. Your aunt Gwen struck me that way. I was surprised she came around at the end. I hadn’t thought your mother was this passionate, but, yeah, she read honest to me, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“So she’s just going to serve her sentence and be okay with whatever fate has in store for her?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes when true believers are caught, they get irrational about trying to finish their mission. Escape attempts, violence, ranting at trial, an insanity defense. Some have faith in the ultimate outcome and are exactly as sanguine as she appeared. We won’t know until the trial is over.”
📎
“Jack?” Mac started tentatively, sitting at the breakfast nook of the safe house where Matty had put them up until she was sure she didn’t need anything more from them to secure indictments against the members of Codex who had been arrested.
“Yeah, Hoss?” Jack replied, checking on a pot of simmering something. Mac was glad Jack seemed to like cooking, because Mac was terrible at it.
“Matty said she’d return Dad’s remains to me – legal next-of-kin, with Mom in prison – but what about a funeral?”
“What about one?” Jack asked, sounding a little distracted.
“Is there even a point to having one? Will they let Mom come? The only other family he might have would be his father, but I don’t even know if Grandpa Harry is still alive, or how to reach him. I haven’t seen or heard from him since Mom’s ‘funeral’. Codex can’t come, because they’re either in prison or in hiding.”
“And DXS will stake out the service, if there is one, hoping grief will make someone stupid enough to show their face,” Jack agreed. “Matty’s human, so she might let them attend the service before she arrests them, but that’s it.”
“And anyone, like Matty, who knew him before Codex, is probably government – at least I never heard him or Mom talk about any friends who weren’t ‘from work’ – and they wouldn’t come, right, because of the whole ecoterrorism thing?”
“Probably not,” Jack acknowledged. “Matty would. An’, for the record, if a service is something you want or need, I’ll be there for you.”
“I don’t know,” Mac said. “Doing nothing feels wrong, like forgetting he lived, or denying he died. But a funeral in an empty church makes me queasy the same way leaving him for the forest animals did.”
Jack washed his hands before answering. Drying his hands, he leaned against the counter, facing Mac. “When I worked in South America, and Matty was my handler, my partner was a woman named Sarah Adler, who I loved and thought was The One. An’ she loved me, so that was great. But our five year, and definitely our fifty year, life plans were not compatible, so she ain’t exactly ‘the one that got away’, but I also still care so deeply about her, even though I ain’t seen her in years. Part of why she joined the CIA was because she had no one to care if she died for her country. Orphaned early, aged outta foster without ever finding a family to care past her 18th birthday. A decade from now, it comes out that she turned traitor and got killed when the Company tried to bring her in, I’m probably the closest thing she’d have to next-of-kin. Might still be her emergency contact. An’ yeah, funeral in an empty church’d feel wrong. Doin’ nothing’d feel worse. Her friends – all coworkers – wouldn’t turn out because the bosses get fidgety when ya associate with people accused of terrorism, treason, or espionage against the US. I’d probably do something grave-side, in that case. Or wherever the ashes were gettin’ spread.
“Dunno if that really helps, but that’s the scenario I see you being in. At least in the broad strokes, both your parents have all three strikes against them: the ecoterrorism; taking File 47 and turning it over to Codex is probably getting charged along the lines of giving aid to the enemy which is, you know, treason; the revealing of classified information included in the file and with regards to the warhead Codex was able to acquire is probably a violation of some provision of the Espionage Act. So yeah, only people like Matty, who are secure enough in their role, or who don’t give a damn, are going to show. But you, your mom, Matty, an’ me, an’ maybe someone who got a fancy degree in knowing what to say when someone dies, could do something contained that wouldn’t have to be awkward.”
“Yeah,” Mac nodded. That felt better than any of the ideas in his head.
“Okay. I can text Matty after we eat. She’s done services like this before for our fallen who ain’t got nobody. She could help you an’ me, who ain’t ever had to plan a funeral between us, with the planning.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Mac admitted, relieved.
📎
As Jack had subtly implied DXS might, Matty’s assistance planning a memorial for James MacGyver included not excessive but not minimal publication of the obituary / funeral notice, in an attempt to draw out Codex supporters. Mac ignored the undertone. Consequences of his actions, and all that.
Two days before the service, Mac’s cell phone rang. The number was unknown, Los Angeles area code. Mac, waiting for Jack to finish showering after their run, had nothing better to do than to answer it.
“Is this Angus Macgyver?” The voice on the other end was old, but resonated in Mac’s mind.
“Yes, sir. May I ask who’s calling?”
“This is Harry MacGyver, James’ father. Your grandfather. I don’t expect you remember much of me, not with the way your father cut ties to ‘start over fresh, with Ellen gone’, but I saw the notice in the paper, that he’d died. I know you’re of legal age, but you’re still a young tyke to be alone in the world, so I asked the young upstart at the senior center if he could do anything with that www-dot thingy, that might help me find you.”
“I remember you, Grandpa Harry,” Mac said, leaving all the rest of it alone, starting with the fact that his mother wasn’t dead, and his father had cut ties to take his son to join a terrorist organization, and just… the “double u, double u, double u, dot” of it all. He couldn’t help thinking Jack was going to like his grandfather.
“Well, that’s good. I don’t drive anymore, but if no one’s laid claim yet, I’ll sign up to get the senior center van to take me out to the service for my son.”
“We could pick you up,” Mac blurted out before he could think better of it. “My, um, my boyfriend and I, I mean.”
“That’d be mighty kind of you both, considering I’m practically a stranger, blood notwithstanding.”
📎
“What was I thinking?” Mac demanded of Jack. “Grandpa Harry can’t come to the service! Mom’s coming! With prison guards, to make sure she doesn’t try to escape!”
“You don’t want to tell the man that his son made some…questionable decisions, Matty’ll do that part for ya,” Jack said calmly. “It’s his kid. He has a right to be at the service. And you wondered if your grandpa was still alive. Now you know, and he wants to be part of your life. That seems like a good thing, even if the internet’s beyond him.”
“What are your family reunions like that you’re so calm about this?!”
“Chaos. Pure, unadulterated chaos. Best thing in the world. You’ll find out, someday, when I bring you to one.”
Usually Mac would blush with pleasure and embarrassment at Jack’s easy conviction that they would be together for the next … whatever, but today he was too flustered. “I can’t do this.”
Jack came over to hug him. “You don’t got to. I mean it. Matty’ll tell him what he’s allowed to know. We can call her right now and give her the head’s up that the bait she dangled for Codex caught unintended fish. Family’s precious, Mac. No sense in pushing away what of it you’ve got left.”
📎
When it came time for Jack to return to MIT for the football team’s preseason activities, Mac went with him. “You aren't actually going to play this season, are you?” Mac asked. He wasn’t a doctor by any means, and biology was his weakest science, but surely Jack’s broken leg wasn’t healed enough for a full contact sport like football, even as a kicker.
Jack chuckled. “Oh, no. But I still gotta show up and go through the motions to get the hardship waiver. That means I get the athletic scholarship this year as if I were playing, and I get another year of eligibility, which conveniently means I can stick around until you graduate, so it’s worth doing, rather than just declaring my football career is over.”
“Is it? Is your playing career over?”
Jack shrugged. “I’ll let you know when the docs clear me to start kicking again, but the end was always nigh. Wasn’t ever going pro, and always figured I was going back to CIA or Delta after I graduate anyway. If the injury takes somethin’ from me skill-wise, it’s not the end of the world. I feel like a broken record, but I mean it: don’t blame yourself. I signed up for this.”
“And your CIA mission?”
“Still working it. This little side jaunt with DXS fit into the school break where I wouldn’t be doing anything with that project anyway.”
📎
Mac hadn’t considered how much of the events at Dixon Dam and the subsequent Codex trials had made the national news. While the government prosecutors had offered deals – in an attempt to keep things under wraps – many of the Codex personnel, including Mac’s mother, had refused, wanting the trial and likely news coverage of rare treason and terrorism charges to proclaim their message.
Some of Mac’s classmates thought it was super cool that they knew someone who actually grew up in / belonged to a “cult”.
“Did I?” Mac asked Jack. “I wouldn’t call Codex a cult – it was the cause, not Leland, that kept people together – but I’m probably too close to it.”
“Yeah, Hoss. Sorry, but yeah, you did. And, frankly, your parents knew it when they joined, and brought you, a minor, into Codex.”
Some of Mac’s classmates were cautiously supportive of Codex’s platform: “Not that I’m condoning killing billions of people, or nuclear warfare, or anything, but someone has to start taking serious action on climate change, and our government has proven they won’t, without a sharp shove. Maybe this is exactly the wake up call Washington politicians need?”
Mac doubted it. He supposed that was Aunt Gwen’s cynicism ingrained in him, but the United States government had such a strong stance on negotiating with terrorists; how could they both continue to charge Codex members with terrorism and take action that suggested Codex’s core beliefs were right and true? If anything, Mac expected the government to dig in more strongly on the side of climate change denial.
Some of his classmates were suspicious, especially since he couldn’t and wouldn’t deny either climate change or the population crisis and the urgent need to do something about both. He was a child when introduced to Codex, all of his immediate family was Codex, he agreed with Codex’s basic philosophy – looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must still be a duck.
“As if my mom isn’t in prison, probably for life. As if my dad isn’t dead, cremated, and spread in Los Padres. As if my aunt isn’t dead, in my place, with no time for farewell and unrecoverable,” Mac complained bitterly to Jack. Jack just hugged him.
📎
Mac finally lost his temper one night in the lab, helping Frankie. He was trying to proof her thesis, but one of the other students in the lab was hounding him about his refusal to denounce Codex’s beliefs.
“If you won’t refute the opinions of terrorists, how do you expect anyone to believe you aren’t a terrorist?”
“Because this is not about opinions,” Mac shot back. “It's about science. Our planet is in trouble. That’s not the opinion of terrorists, that’s scientific fact. Surely you don’t deny climate change?”
“Of course not.”
“Surely you can’t deny that both the current population size and current population curve are utterly unsustainable,” Mac continued. He saw the other student’s hesitation, not wanting to admit he wasn’t well-versed on the subject, but not wanting to give Mac the upper hand by denying something that would make him appear stupid or uniformed. “If you need to do research to form an opinion on that point, by all means. We can continue this conversation when you’ve educated yourself.”
“But facts aren’t actions. Facts don’t plan to kill billions.”
“But they will,” Mac pointed. “These facts will kill billions. They’re already starting to. Codex just wanted to do it all at once.”
“Knowledge must be applied to turn willingness into action.”
“When you can accurately quote that unoriginal thought, and know who you got it from, I’ll continue this debate with you. Until then, I have work to do.”
The other student mumbled something dark, gathered his things and abandoned the lab.
“I know I’ve heard the general idea, but I confess, I don’t know the quote or source you two were referencing,” Frankie admitted.
“‘Knowing isn't enough. We must apply. Being willing isn't enough. We must do.’ Da Vinci said that. And my mother,” he added softly.
“I’m sorry about your family, Mac. I probably should have said something sooner, but I thought you might not want to talk about it, especially with how often everyone else seems to be on you, wanting you to agree with their stance on the matter.”
Mac hummed. “Codex is right on the science. I’m not sure they’re wrong that the only hope is to drastically reduce the population before unnatural natural disasters do it slowly for us. I am sure that detonating a nuclear warhead is the wrong answer. My mom’s in jail. I don’t argue that she’s guilty of the crimes that put her there, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. My dad is dead, almost literally consumed by his desire to enact Codex’s plan. I’m not going to say I’m okay with that just because I wasn’t okay with the plan. My aunt died so that I wouldn’t, while I stopped a plan she’d given her whole adult life to building. That’s my burden to bear. I’m glad she chose to help me stop Codex’s plan at the end, but I’m still sorry she’s dead. It’s just not as simple as us vs. them!”
Chapter 9: Rehabilitation
Chapter Text
Jack, Mac, and Frankie took to watching the Engineers’ home games together. After the games, Mac and Frankie kept each other company while Frankie awaited her degraded blood samples and Jack congratulated or commiserated with his teammates, depending on how the game went.
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving, Mac?” Frankie asked.
Mac froze. His mother's imprisonment and his father's and aunt's deaths were never far from his mind, but somehow it hadn’t registered that he was homeless.
Thanksgiving wasn't even the problem–he could stay on campus–but then there would be the end of the semester and the end of the academic year after that and the rest of his life after that.
“He's comin’ home with me,” Jack answered, having apparently returned in time to hear the question.
“I am?”
Jack shrugged. “I assumed. ‘Less you've got a better offer?”
“No,” Mac blurted out awkwardly. “I mean, no, no better offer. Thank you.”
📎
Looking back, Mac knew Jack had tried to warn him. Thanksgiving with the Daltons was chaos, pure, unadulterated chaos.
Mac could barely remember when he'd lived with just his parents in a single-family dwelling. He had lived most of his life in the Codex compound, constantly surrounded by people, and then in the dorms at MIT, amid an even larger student population. Thirty people shouldn't have been anything. But he'd always been a loner, struggling to make friends. He was not at all accustomed to dozens of people who genuinely cared about him. To offers to get him a drink, or a refill, or snacks, just because they were getting up anyway. To questions about what he wanted to do or eat. To genuine interest in hearing about his interests, likes, and dislikes.
Finally, he had to make his escape, sneaking out as unobtrusively as possible to the front porch.
“You okay, Hoss?”
Mac jumped.
Jack chuckled. “Sorry, Mac. Forgot that without the crutches or boot, I can actually sneak up on people again.”
“I'm glad your leg’s healed,” Mac said.
“Me, too,” Jack said with feeling, leaning against the porch railing. “We're a bit much, ain't we?”
“Everyone's been great,” Mac assured him, not wanting to give the wrong impression.
“Nana Beth'd have our hides, otherwise,” Jack said dismissively. “A large, demonstratively affectionate family ain't what you're accustomed to. I know that. Ain't no shame in acknowledging facts. And, on that topic, ain't no shame in stepping away to take care of yourself when you get overwhelmed.”
Mac snorted. “That's why you came right after me?”
“I came right after you because the effort you put into sneaking out said you felt like it wouldn't be okay, and I wanted to tell you it was, and offer you some options, ‘cause I know you won't ask for anything.”
Mac frowned at the ground, fighting his instinct to apologize.
“You can ask, of course,” Jack said. “If you just want some quiet time to yourself, I'll leave you be. You want the quiet time, but not the alone time, I'll go send one'a the dogs out to cuddle with you. By now ya know they're all monsters for a good pettin’. We can go for a walk. We could practice ridin’, if you wanted one more lesson without an audience. We could sneak upstairs an’ practice kissing some more.”
Mac would be okay with any of the options. He didn’t want to take Jack away from his family, though. More than he already had.
“Uh. All of it? You said there'd be a ride tomorrow before the Cowboys game and dinner? So, an extra riding lesson would be good. Maybe this afternoon when I need a break,” he suggested, flushing with embarrassment at his inability to keep up with the Daltons both socially and in the saddle. “And we will practice kissing during the game, like usual, right?”
“If you want. Wasn’t sure how you'd feel about PDA, but I'm here for it, if you are.”
Mac would think about that later. “You've said the sunsets here are great, so maybe we could plan a walk for then?”
“It's a date,” Jack confirmed. “So, you want me to send one of the dogs out now, or when Mama gives the ten-minutes-to-food warning?”
Mac shrugged. “Whichever.”
“Take your time, Mac,” Jack encouraged him, pulling him into a half-hug before slipping back inside.
📎
“Let Buster out with Mac, will ya, George?” Jack asked the cousin closest to the door when the impending-lunch warning came.
George did, sidestepping Buster’s million-miles-an-hour tail with practiced ease.
“He okay?” Jack’s cousin Nick asked.
“He’s fine. Wasn’t raised in a family like this.”
“Duh,” Nick snorted. “If he was, you’d be there instead of here. Just wondering if we gotta tone anything down accordingly. We’re a lot for most o’the rescues we all bring back to the ranch.”
“Mac adapts,” Jack assured his family, letting his inner Texan slip out a bit more than he did with strangers. “He’s doin’ fine with all’o us. Just was feeling a lil’ overwhelmed, so he stepped away to get his bearin’s. We’ve got a plan to break up the rest o’the day and part’a tomorra, so it ain’t so much. Just need all ya’ll to let him – let us – step aside when he needs the break.”
They all nodded – twenty-plus people all in the same space got to all of them, from time to time, and they’d all taken a break the same way Mac was before – but George didn’t let the conversation drop. “It’s just, he tried so hard to sneak out, an’ you didn’t come back lookin’ too well kissed, so I ain’t thinkin’ he was sneakin’ for the romance o’it.”
Jack sighed. “His history leaves him prone to thinkin’ people won’t like him if he makes a burden of himself, an’ that people’ll take anythin’ he does all personal. He didn’t want any o’ya’ll to be offended or think he doesn’t like ya, if he said outright that all y’all was gettin’ ta be a bit much for ‘im. I disabused him o’the notion, don’tcha worry. If you say anythin’, he’ll just get more self-conscious, so just let him think he’s stealthy.”
📎
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do after graduation?” Jack asked Mac as they stretched for their morning run one day in early spring of Mac’s senior year at MIT.
Mac shrugged. “I want to do something real, something that makes a difference in the world. That part of Codex’s philosophy, and my aunt’s, and my mother’s, I do believe: the world needs to be saved from itself, and if I have the skills and will and intelligence to do some part of that, I have a responsibility to the world, the rest of humanity, and the future of humanity, to do it.”
“As do we all,” Jack agreed. Codex’s philosophy had never been objectionable to either him or Mac. It was their methods that were unacceptable. “What are you thinking that looks like? Working for a non-profit? Research, staying at MIT or some other institution? Can’t tell me there ain’t plenty of think tanks lickin’ their chops o’er you.”
“Several,” Mac confessed, blushing. “The service part of things calls to me. Especially if I’ve been talking to Grandpa Harry, or you’ve been telling war stories.”
“You are not joining the Army.” Mac couldn’t even classify Jack’s words as incredulous. It was an order, pure and simple.
“It crossed my mind. I could solve real problems for real people, make the world better, maybe.”
“You could get dead.”
Mac shrugged. “Being useless is worse. And don’t you try to argue that with me, Mr. Serving My Country Since 18. But no, I’m not joining the Army. Even soldiers who aren’t in front line positions must go through Basic, and I, um. I really don’t like guns. Pretty sure any recruiter would laugh at me if I tried to enlist voluntarily and apply for conscientious objector status at the same time.”
“Pro’ly.” Jack sighed. “I, uh, I don’t wanna put this idea in your head, ‘cause you could get dead this way, too, but the Hun’d skin me if I didn’t extend her offer.”
“You talked to Matty? Something up with the trials?” A couple of the Codex trials were still winding their way through the legal system, even after three years.
Jack shook his head. “No, nothing like that. She heard the Company an’ I parted ways.”
“You left the CIA?” Mac gasped. “Why?”
“I went rogue when I went to Matty ‘stead o’ my own chain o’ command with your intel on Codex.”
“I thought you said your handler wasn’t senior enough for the Codex case.”
“He isn’t, and with reason to believe Codex had fingers throughout our government, enough to get hands on a nuclear warhead without anyone raising an alarm, I couldn’t trust just anyone to act on the intel. But the official take on it is that if I can’t trust my chain of command enough to follow it, how can they trust me to ever follow it? And if they can’t trust me to behave, how can they use me?”
“But if all this is about the Codex fiasco, why did they wait to boot you until now? Or did this happen a while ago and you just didn’t – couldn’t? – tell me?” Mac asked, trying not to feel hurt that he was just hearing about all this.
“They waited for me to finish the mission, the one I came to MIT for in the first place. Wrapped it up the first part of this semester, and so now I’ve lost my last bit of usefulness to them, so they cut me loose.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to blame yourself, either for the Company’s decision, or for me being at loose ends, waiting for you to finish your senior year. But now Matty’s got this offer for us, an’ I gotta get her an answer, one way or the other.”
“What’s the offer?”
“She’s been working these past few years to clean out Codex personnel from our agencies, so she’s got an opening at DXS for another field team. Since the cat’s outta the bag already with you, she thought we might wanna take that opening.”
“Field team? What’s that mean? I mean it about guns, and I don’t think I’d make a good James Bond.”
“You probably aren’t a good enough liar for a CIA-level spy job, true. Your aversion to guns apply to me carryin’ and usin’ ‘em to have your back?”
“Not to the same degree,” Mac said uncomfortably.
“Then maybe we can make something work, if you’re interested.” Jack spent the rest of their run explaining what a DXS field team job might look like for both of them.
“I do want to serve, and solve real problems for real people. I don’t want to hide away from the world and the world’s problems in a research lab or academic lecture hall. That’s been my biggest frustration at MIT – it’s all so theoretical – and this would let me do all that in a very tangible way.”
“In a very dangerous way,” Jack countered. “You could get dead, Mac. I ain’t kiddin’. We both could.”
📎
The DXS job brought Mac and Jack back to Los Angeles. Mac’s grandfather deeded the house to Mac when he found out they were moving back, but frowned the first time Mac mentioned Jack living with him.
“I don’t know how I feel ‘bout my grandson living in sin under my roof.” Jack and Mac both stiffened – the older man had never seemed to have any objection to their relationship prior to this, but they’d both had enough encounters with homophobia to be wary. “In my day, a man put a ring on it, before moving in.”
Jack chuckled, relaxing. “When I put a ring on it, I’d like it to stick, an’ that ain’t certain until we get something goin’ at the federal level,” Jack answered.
Mac looked at him wide-eyed. “You’ve thought about it?”
Jack smiled warmly. “I love you, Mac,” he reminded the younger man softly. “Don’t plan on going anywhere. Yeah, I’ve thought about it. Your granddad ain’t the only family we’ve got with opinions about what things we do might be appropriate without us bein’ married. Matter of fact, I recall you tellin’ me a time or two, that you were raised with a notion that certain things oughta wait for marriage. I can respect that desire to wait, but I also figure I can fix the ain’t married part, least in some places.” He turned back to Harry MacGyver. “I ain’t put a ring on it, I acknowledge that, but I will vow to you that it ain’t a lack of commitment to your grandson, if that makes you feel any better.”
Chapter 10: Epilogue: Post 2x1
Summary:
Episode tag to 2x1: DIY or Die
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Once Samantha Cage and Matty had left the war room to continue their interrogation of the Ace of Spades, Mac frosted the glass and turned to Jack, crossing his arms. “You want to tell me anything?”
“About?” Jack asked, looking honestly puzzled.
“The leg injury.”
Jack opened his mouth to deny it, but Mac scowled at him. “I watched you kick for three years, Jack.”
“With a football, not a cobbled together mess,” Jack argued. “It wasn’t even up to Deflategate standards.”
“So, you swear, on Papa Dalton’s grave, that there’s no leg or foot or ankle or anything injury that you haven’t mentioned to me or the… what do you say when I’m dodging them? … ‘the perfectly nice and sorely underpaid to be dealin’ with you folks down in Phoenix Medical’ that caused you to miss that kick?”
“Well, now, let’s not be getting ahead of ourselves. Swearin’ on Papa Dalton’s grave’s a big thing.”
“Uhhuh,” Mac said knowingly. “Now tell me where and when you got hurt.”
“It’s really nothin’, Mac,” Jack promised. “Just got my foot caught on a baling wire in that hay truck we smuggled in with; hyperextended my Achilles on my plant foot a little. Ain’t anything I didn’t do every couple of months when I was playin’. Just needs some ice and heat. Be fine tomorrow. That I will swear on Papa Dalton’s grave.”
Mac considered and then sighed. “I trust you,” he said at last. “Let’s go home and get you settled on the couch with ice or heat or whatever.”
“We better grab dinner on the way, at least take out. You cookin’ when you’re already tired ain’t going to be conducive to me relaxin’ on the couch.”
Since the glass was still frosted, Mac didn’t feel unprofessional for sticking his tongue out at Jack. He was tired, and he was a terrible cook on a good day. Better to let someone else cook for them tonight.
Notes:
If Costumes of October: The Jock & The Nerd fits into this universe at all, it's as a future post-script, so go read it again now.
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