A/N:This was originally an attempt to fill in the gaps for Mac's POV from the end of 2.03 through Will breaking up with Nina (so a little into the time jump in 2.06) that very much exploded into being something else. I'm not quite certain this is episode filler anymore... in the sense that this is expressly what I want canon to be, although it's definitely an exploration of things that I find potentially interesting. This part is very Mac-centric. I mean, the whole fic will be Mac POV so I suppose that makes the entire fic Mac-centric, but this part especially. This is a companion piece to The Sadder But Wiser Girl, with that fic serving as an intralogue of sorts between the two parts of this fic.

Warnings for death, violent imagery, suicide ideation (vaguely), and blood. If you dislike original characters, this is not the fic for you. (Although I do hope the OCs are suitably Sorkinesque.)

A great many thanks to the group of people who supported me endlessly while writing this, tumblr users: superspies-and-apple pie, pipsinthesuburbs, fragmentedvisions, wondertwinc, mcmacthenewsroom.

PART I: ONE DOOR SWINGING OPEN

It happens by accident, mostly.

Winter starts early, when the East Coast is slammed with a Nor'easter and nearly twelve inches of snow for Halloween. It seems to taper off, after, leaving New York City dreary and grey for the last few months of 2011, all stark concrete sidewalks, dark skies, the bright fluorescent lights inside the city's skyscrapers silhouetted against grey clouds.

What she writes is not a love story. Nor is it something that's particularly warm on a winter's night, but MacKenzie writes it all the same, after the first tabloid story breaks and the senior staff has no idea how to react to the notion that their boss has been dating Nina Howard, the woman that tried to tank them all, for a little over two months.

And… after she sends herself back to weekly appointments with her therapist.

Have you tried writing?

She's tried running. Miles and across the sea and back. And she's tried grinning and bearing it, and breathing through it, and yoga, for a bit. And despite being wholly British in ancestry (despite some tiny drop of Irish somewhere along the line hundreds of years ago, for the name), she isn't really fond of tea, so she hasn't tried that. Besides, it was when all caffeine started to do was make her heart pound in her chest rather than raise her to any level alertness that she decided she had a problem.

So no, she hasn't tried writing.

It's always been more of Will's arena, truly.

She tries it anyway, after half a bottle of red. Don't ignore what happened with Will, her psychiatrist told her. But don't make it entirely about him, either. Sift through your own wreckage. It's like on an airplane. Put on your own mask first. If you take it apart, what does it become?

So she opens her laptop and stares at an empty word document, which she's already saved and re-saved under different file names a few times, before settling on , for subtlety, of course. Mac considers going through her external hard drives—years of footage, every story she filed from the Middle East, typed up notes and carefully-organized pictures and maps and—but instead types these words:

In 2005, I left the DC bureau of CNN, started working for News Night in New York City, and fell in love with Will McAvoy. In 2007, I ruined it. This is what happened after.

The next day at work is unbalanced; she watches Will through the lens of where they were five years ago, her mind muddling through her last week as the EP of News Night, two weeks after the end of their relationship.

As it turned out, my contract didn't stipulate that I needed to give two weeks' notice. So when it became apparent we would be unable to have any sort of relationship, I immediately tendered my resignation. Charlie Skinner, the president of the news division, convinced me to stay a week. The week only wound up convincing me that I needed to go. Far, and away. The show had gone on before me, it would go on after me.

Head hunters from CNN had been trying to contact me for nearly six months. So one morning, I forced myself to reply to their email. The next day I forced myself to dress nicely, curl my hair, and do my makeup, and go to lunch with them at an Upper East Side bistro. I moved to Atlanta that Saturday, staying in the spare bedroom of someone I'd once worked with at ABC.

I think people assume that I embedded as a conscious effort to punish myself. That's not exactly correct. I took the first job that was offered to me, due to my experience in Chechnya, diplomatic connections, and adeptness for languages. No matter where I ended up after News Night, I'm certain I would have found a way to self-flagellate. I'm a very determined and resourceful person. I would have found a way.

Thankfully, CNN just handed one to me without me having to ask.

Jim stands by her shoulder during broadcast, and every time she looks at him out of the corner of her eye she sees the ruffled twenty-four year old sweating through dress shirts in the thick Atlanta heat, petitioning her to be embedded.

Her story with Will is a short story; there's no love, no glory, no grand crescendo. She looks at Jim, a Senior Producer worth his weight in silver and gold, and feels nothing but pride. A man going places.

Jim, this show, these people, are the best thing she's ever done.

She writes whenever she can, and rarely about Will.

Setting to disentangle three years of her life, three years of herself, from Will is not simple work, nor kind work.

She carves out the parts of herself that Will inhabits, the parts she has let run wild and untamed if only by the virtue that they belong to him, and examines them, reshapes them to make the edges less sharp, less damaging, and tries to fit them back into herself.

She must make the pain her own, and not let herself tie it to him at all, because if she tethers her self-loathing and guilt to him, she will never let it go. She will never let Will go, and after a month of her staff looking at her like a thing to be pitied and petted, of Charlie's motivating speeches—the boy is an idiot—and Sloan's clumsy attempts at consolation—here, I have a friend, you should get drinks, I think you'd have a lot in common—she thinks she needs to learn how to let him go.

She doesn't want to.

But she knows that tethering herself to Will, in the past five years, has mostly brought her pain, and to the brink of self-destruction several times over.

Maybe the time has come to let go.

Maybe the time has come to consider her penance paid, but the parts of her that she's cut out are jagged, fractured, and leave her off the even keel. She's not sure of which parts of herself to hold onto and which parts to let go, her relationship with Will has been imprinted in so much of herself.

So she writes.

Not about Will, but the people she knows she holds onto.

Jim, she writes about.

Meeting him her first day in Atlanta, four weeks after Will kicked her out of his apartment, one week after handing in her letter of resignation at ACN, five days after accepting a position as the point person for CNN's embed teams in the middle east, the day after moving to the city. How he called her ma'am and she corrected him, and how desperate he'd been to impress her, to get her to take him along with her to the Germany, and the Green Zone after that.

And Molly, the girl with ginger hair from New Jersey. Fragile in her own way, after a rough childhood that formed a patina that coated her features in a brittle hardness that Mac now knows gives way to a dazzling smile, a wicked sense of humor, and a bold heart. Twenty-two, she had been three months into her first job after college, and assigned to be her assistant. Brilliantly efficient and skilled at reading people in a way that she never allowed to be wrong, because for thin redheaded girls from rough homes, it's a skill you perfect early on.

And Danny, her cameraman from Boston, a young widower in his mid-thirties with no children but a slew of nieces and nephews. Quiet and clever and quick and far too good at any and all card games.

Captain—now Major—Noah Mason from South Georgia, and the first unit they were embedded with. Noah, a recent divorcee with no home to go back, his ex-wife his high school sweetheart who won their hometown in the divorce. Who sat up late at night with her, smiling a sad smile of his own. A ring made out of tinfoil, and half-desperate attempts to frame their halves into a whole of something, anything that would allow them to keep breathing, each fighting a war they didn't wish to be in.

The boys and men he made his brothers and his sons, rejecting promotion after promotion to stay in combat with them. Various attachments and other embeds, the marines in Islamabad. Doctors from MASH units and from Landstuhl. The Pakistani medic who saved her life.

And then the others: the ones she writes into the past, the ones she knows she has to let go of.

No one laughs at god in a war. No one laughs at god when they're dying. Zack's death came on a Tuesday, and his was the first. Not the first death in the unit, but the first death that I saw.

It started as a routine patrol in a secluded section of the Khyber Pass. Two Humvees, and then a dozen marines on foot as we made our way through the mountains back down to Landi Kotal to where we were, for the moment, based. At the most dangerous part of the trek, with the mountain range to our backs and the waning sunlight obscuring what would be the best vantage points for any sniper, Noah ushered us into the caravan.

A few minutes later gunfire was exchanged. But by that point, having been embedded for six months, we were beginning to be adept at handling the report of gunshots and IEDs and shells. So long as the caravan kept moving, there was nothing to be overly worried about. So we didn't worry.

And then the Humvee, on an order from Noah, stopped.

In early 2008, the Taliban in the Khyber region had, through several different channels, secured rocket launchers. Which was how, as the sun was descending behind the mountains and with the Taliban's tactical advantage dwindling, we found our Hummer on its side on the road, the metal sheeting on the outside blasted open, the edges crinkled, gnarled, and blackened.

Zack had thrown himself over Molly, and in the next moment we were being dragged out of the vehicle by Johnno and Frankie.

I wish I could say that I wasn't panicked. But four months in Peshawar hadn't prepared me for the mountains. When the second shell hit the rock formation above our heads, Johnno covered me the best he could as debris and sediment rained down over us. Molly screamed, and the sound of returned fire rang out. I looked up, and there was blood streaming down from her hairline, rivulets of it running into her eyes, a clump of hair and skin missing from two inches above her temple.

Zack picked her up over his shoulder and we all retreated to where the company was reassembling, and one of the other marines had discovered a cave—low, and wide mouthed, it was our best and only bet at waiting out the insurgents. We wouldn't be able to light a fire inside, but like most caves in the region, there was hope for access to running water. Zack immediately gestured for Danny and I to crawl under the lip of the entrance, and helped us bring Molly inside, before running for our medic.

Torso crunched under the short ceiling, trying to keep Molly calm and pouring all the water in my bag into her eyes to wash out the blood, I could barely remember how to breathe.

In seconds we were bookended by marines—one group moving forward into the cave to secure it, the second at the front, manipulating the ruined Humvee to provide cover as a spray of bullets rained down on us, all the while Molly tried not to scream, confused and concussed and in pain, and Danny continued filming. Jim was with us moments later, helping Tina carry her bags into the cave.

If only Molly's head wound had been the worst of it. Twenty minutes later—Mac checks Danny's footage, forcing herself to watch Molly's head flounder in her lap in the dimly-lit cave as Tina worked to sterilize the wound and remove the flesh singed off her scalp—there's a tremendous metallic screech, and in the aftermath their hideout is flooded with men. Mac watches herself, in the video, look up when Noah and Johnno drag Zack over to Tina.

"Him first," Noah said, calm and frantic all in one breath. "We got the base on the radio."

Tina had looked at Zack for all of five minutes before shaking her head at Johnno, who went to find Noah. I slid my arms out of my jacket and gently balled it under Molly's head, leaving her with Jim and Danny before moving over to Zack.

I spoke about triage a few pages ago—you treat the ones you can save.

And Zack knew—I had just watched him wave Tina off and back over to Molly. But he let me gather him into my lap all the same.

I had known Zack for six months at the time of his death. He's already been written into the pages of this story—my charming Midwestern boy who called me old mum and carried my bags, let me bum his cigarettes and showed me pictures of his little sisters in the letters that arrived at the base on a monthly basis.

Molly had trounced him at strip poker on more than one occasion.

Barely nineteen and raised in a small Catholic town in Ohio, he had been largely apathetic to religion, socialized too heavily in it to remain faithful after his father walked out the door when he was seventeen. Zack was cocky, the kind of boy who knew he was handsome, and turned down a scholarship to play football for Ohio State after a glorious career at a regional high school to join the marines to send money home for his mother and little sisters—the result was a strange and pleasing amalgamation of smugness, pride, and a complete lack of faith in the staying power of his personality.

Zack craved attention, and knew how to get it.

Marines write letters to keep on their persons in the event of their death. In the last hours of his life, in a damp, dark cave, Zack decided the one to be sent home to his mother wasn't good enough. Wasn't heartfelt enough. Wasn't funny enough. Just wasn't enough.

Fingers shaking, I pulled the letter out of the pocket of his uniform, and struggled to read it with my flashlight as it began to lose power.

"I need to write something about god," he said. "My mother would want to know that I found god, if she couldn't be there. She'd want to know I wasn't alone."

Weeks earlier, we'd all discussed god.

"We all die alone," he had said, and laughed like he didn't care, like it was a point to prove, showing us the rosary his mother told him to keep with him on duty.

"Is that what you think?" I asked, more out of habit than anything else, trying to push him into conceding what he was really thinking. I wouldn't really, but it was only a few of us—Zack, Noah, Danny, and myself. The baby of the group and the village elders, the three of us being the ones he was always trying to impress.

He shrugged, worrying his fingertips over the prayer beads. "People just pass through." And then he considering the rosary some more. "If there is a god, I don't think he has as many rules as people like to think. I don't think he, or she, I guess, cares that much. And I don't think they have as much control as people think, to comfort themselves."

"He has to have rules, though," Danny said, cleaning the lens of the video camera. "Don't you think?"

"I guess." He curled his fingers around the long strands of beads, and then tucked them back into the cargo pocket on his left leg. "Seems like a dumb system though. How do we know if you've broken one? I've heard priests say shit that because someone takes the Lord's name in vain he gets lung cancer. I'm not a fucking doctor, but I'm pretty sure that one's on smoking."

Noah paused in bringing his cigarette to his lips, squinted at the red-tipped smoldering end, and shrugged, taking a hit off it anyway. I looked up at him the best I could with my head resting on his shoulder.

"What? You tell me every day I'm gonna get shot for being a dumbass. Might as well."

I made an indignant noise, taking the cigarette from between his fingers and taking a long drag of it myself. (Embedding had made smokers of all of us. Circumstance and stress in ways I had never encountered before.) "No, I say don't get shot for being dumbass."

"You still think I'm a dumbass," Noah groused.

Zack laughed. "Well, if Mum says it, it must be true, Cap."

"Shut up and go back to your pretentious god discussion," he ordered, rolling his eyes. "You all need to go to church."

Unlike a lot of us, Noah had never questioned his own faith. Of which I was, I can say, quite jealous, to have a bedrock like religion that will never crumble from underneath you, will be there to keep you from falling. But I'm an Anglican raised in every country except England. Regardless, neither of my parents are especially religious people, and I doubt I would have been one of those children straight-jacketed into tights and taffeta and bundled into a pew every Sunday no matter where we lived.

So I rolled my eyes at him, Captain Noah Mason from South Georgia. Then again, it was also PFC Zachary Holland from Laurelville, Ohio, population 543 and a hell of a lot of corn and one very domineering Catholic church. But we all react to our circumstances in different ways.

(Except for war, apparently, which just makes everyone take up smoking.)

"Goin' to Mass was never my problem," Zack complained, although I could tell he was starting to get uncomfortable. "They practically took attendance in my hometown. One church. Five hundred people. And my Momma was a Sunday School teacher. But seriously though, people don't get cancer just because they sinned. Pretty sure that's not what Jesus died for."

"You do well in Sunday School?" I asked, teasing.

He smirked. "Got a gold star on all my reports."

"Nepotism," Noah coughed, stubbing out the butt in the dirt.

Zack pouted.

"Be nice," I warned Noah, pinching his leg.

"Rules though," Danny reminded us, moving on to taking the camera apart, trying to scrub out the dirt and sand that stubbornly clung to every crevice. "It's a valid question. I mean, look where the hell we are."

It was strange to look back to my childhood and find the makings of all of this. Remembering late night conversations I'd overheard between my father and other Ambassadors and dignitaries, the complaints passed between embassy staffs in the their native tongues they thought an eight-year-old couldn't understand, the crease in my father's brow while he ironed out agreements and stopgaps. I was in Berlin when the wall fell, but it the Cold War was still crumbling in Afghanistan.

And other things, of course.

"I think we know we've broken one of god's rules when we can't put it back together again," I had said quietly, picking a hole in my pants.

I couldn't put Zack back together, or help any of them, really. So, petting his hair, I pulled my notebook from my bag, and flipped to a clean page. "What do you want me to write?"

On page 78 of the word document, she says that Zack reminded her of Will, and realizes she's gone 77 pages without writing his name at all. And then she erases it. She may have been first drawn to Zack because of his similarities to Will, but her love for Will does not get to own her affection and grieving for Zack.

"I want to go home," he told me when we were done. I couldn't see much of him, where we were, but his forehead was cool and slicked with sweat under my hand, and I could see, glinting in the low light, blood dribbling from between his lips.

I kissed his forehead. I'd never really thought of myself as a maternal person, but being around a dozen or so college-aged boys out of the lot had shoehorned me, at times, into the role of den mother. That night, I fulfilled it gladly. "So do I."

"How do you do it?" he asked.

"Do what?"

"Act so brave," he said, eyes fluttering closed. Where his mother's rosary was folded between his fingers, I clasped my hand around his.

"I have nowhere to go home to. I have to be brave," I answered honestly.

He frowned up at me, exhaling loudly. It rattled in his chest. "Old mum—"

"We're all here for our own reasons, right?"

Nodding at that, he let it pass, eyes glazing over. He didn't speak for a while after that; by that point he was in and out of consciousness, and Noah and I couldn't do anything but comb our fingers through his hair, administer the morphine from Tina's kit, and pray. I found myself feeling out the beads on Mrs. Holland's rosary, reciting prayers I'd abandoned after secondary school.

Nominally Anglican, the words aren't all that different.

But all I've ever learned from religion is that if there is a god, the only way we know if we've displeased him is if we can't put something back together again. Our punishment is being forced to look at the parts of our lives and hold the broken pieces in our hand, knowing that they'll never fit back together again. Like slavery, and genocide, and dying nineteen year old boys.

Humans are fragile. Tissues, sinews, bones, hearts.

In time, Zack groaned, and Noah and I looked over him expectantly. In the corner, Molly and Jim watched warily.

"I'm gonna go home now," were Zack's last words, mumbled and drugged.

Zack passed quietly, two hours before the medevac arrived. At the end, Noah and I brought him to the back of the cave, where it was warmest, and wrapped him in everything we had. It was an internal bleed—when we palpated his abdomen it was thick and stiff with blood. He had taken a blow to the sternum, cracked his ribs and pierced his liver. He shivered relentlessly, but was beyond pain.

His body laid on my legs until my thighs were all pins and needles.

I don't remember letting go of him.

Sometimes she writes about herself.

She paid for his funeral. She writes that—she sent the letter home to his mother, with one of her own and the rosary. Paid for the funeral, and set up scholarship funds for his sisters. And still emails them, sometimes.

She doesn't remember Zack's body being taken away, but she remembers Jim picking her up off the ground and wrapping an arm around her, and how hollow she felt.

That night, after they finally returned to base and she had ushered Jim and Molly into bed—Danny could take care of himself—she and Noah had sat out in the mess, sharing a cigarette.

Mac finds it hard to put who Noah is to her into words.

I suppose in another time and place, I would have quite happily married Noah Mason. But that's not who we could be, then. Instead, he was the first person who heard my story in its entirety, shrugged, and told me that humans are preternaturally disinclined to find the people who are best for them at that moment.

Or in shorter words—we fuck up.

I think we both knew that were we not both already heartbroken, it might have worked. If I wasn't self-loathing and struggling to breathe with the guilt I carried, I could have loved him as more than my person. But we were partners for a time, leaning on each other and taking care of each other. We shared cigarettes and secrets, minded the others, and very occasionally, he dragged me down off of bars in clubs in Germany and held my hair back while I sobbed so hard that I puked.

We've grown apart since, in some ways—in the sense that we no longer frequently talk. But in no way does that lessen our understanding of each other.

We stayed up that whole night, and I held his hand while he called Zack's mother and held his hand as he worked his way through a pack of cigarettes, and tried to keep his fingers from shaking while he mainlined caffeine and nicotine. The next morning, they went out on patrol again.

Molly, Jim, and I cooked them breakfast, and the younger marines greeted me with their customary kiss on the cheek while taking their powdered eggs and heavily salted bacon, fresh bread and instant coffee. Noah lingered, bracing his hands on my hips from behind, and buried his face in my hair.

He needed a wife.

That wasn't who I was to him, but I understood.

Sometimes I needed a boyfriend. Noah was the person who was the best for me at that moment. And I think, somehow, I was the person who was the best for him. And at times, it was enough to save me from my self-loathing, and actually like myself, allow myself to breathe. To have someone to lean on, someone to be my partner. It wasn't sexual. Was hardly romantic, each of us lacquered with sweat and packed into Kevlar. We were best friends.

Noah was like coming up for air.

January is moody and cold.

MacKenzie learns that if she drinks enough Jameson while tucked up under her blankets, she can write a thousand words on a weeknight and ten thousand on a weekend.

More words if she's angry at Will, fewer words if she's sad.

It takes her weeks to begin to believe that they're the right words.

She spends Valentine's Day with Molly, who takes the train in from New Jersey and shows up at her door with a sardonic little grin and two bottles of cheap red wine.

"Do you want a copy editor?" she asks from the living room an hour or so later, take out boxes strewn across the floor and coffee table.

While not petite, per se—standing at tall at five feet, ten inches tall—Molly is still a doe-eyed, willowy girl with soft features and a sweet smile. She speaks with the kind of high clear voice one would expect from a gingery redhead with big blue eyes and a sweet smile, who stands with her hands clasped at her middle, feet splayed like a ballerina's.

But it is—and I mean this in the best way possible—a trick. She hides an instinctual skepticism of people by mirroring them. In essence, Molly has mastered the art of cold reading, which makes her an invaluable journalist, in many respects. But her tendency to mirror also makes her almost impossible to get to know.

She assumed she would be my assistant for the four months I was in Atlanta and then be reassigned once I shipped out. When I asked her to come with me—I think that was the first time I saw something behind the glassy countenance. The second time was during one of her first solo interviews with a UN official who was determined to give her the run around. She dropped the mirror so hard it shattered, switching so suddenly from his friend to a bold and direct interviewer, twisting and bending him to her line of questioning until he had no choice but to concede to answering.

Mac turns from her fridge, and sees that Molly has her laptop open where she left it on the coffee table and is hunched over off the couch, scrolling through her word document, the rim of her wine glass pressed to her chapped and bitten bottom lip.

"Oh, I'm not publishing it."

Molly Thompson is going to be a news anchor one day, and a very good one at that. I just have to drag her back from the clutches of print journalism first.

She keeps scrolling, and Mac comes around from her kitchen with her own very large glass of wine in hand to collapse into the couch next to her. Peering over her shoulder, she sees that Molly's in the middle of the story of how she had to teach Jim how to sew a button after the one at the fly of his last pair of pants tore off in the middle of five day excursion into the mountains. And then she scrolls down to the four of them making shadow puppets in a cave, Molly directing Jim's hands into something wickedly naughty, Jim whining.

(Danny had it, as usual, on video. And Mac knows she looks haggard, in most of the footage, most of the pictures—strung out, eyes dim, hair a mess—but maybe it worked because none of them expected her to be happy, even if all Jim and Molly wanted to do was please her.

Sometimes they made her happy anyway.)

Molly skips ahead a dozen or so pages, landing them in the middle of hearing that they had won a Peabody. Another jump, and they're stuck in the Green Zone, huddled in a closet while shells explode outside their door, Molly humming Gershwin to keep herself sane and Mac stroking her hair.

It's strange to think that Molly is only a year older than Maggie.

"You could," she says, wine glass still pressed against her lips, eyes moving rapidly across the screen. "It's needs—I mean, I can tell it's stream of consciousness. But if you edited it so it moved in a more linear fashion, is what I'm saying. I could put you in contact with my agent. I mean, I know you know people—"

Mac glares at her, firm, and Molly gives her back a sheepish but not-at-all-ready-to-concede sort of smile. As if Molly being an expert manipulator wasn't a part of why Mac liked her in the first place.

"I'm just saying, is all," Molly continues, starting to laugh, starting to drop the act. "You need footnotes."

Mac leans forward and tries to close the lid of her computer, but Molly steals it away before she's able, sliding to the end of the couch and setting her glass down onto the end table with a clink, giggling.

"You are the nosiest," Mac sighs, contemplating her wine before taking a large gulp.

"I ran your life for three years, old habits die hard." Molly flashes her her biggest I don't give a fuck, I'm going to be a little shit smile, the one that's all teeth and gums, lips static and pulled wide. "Has Jim seen this?"

Hell, she hasn't even told Jim about it. Noah, yes. Molly knows now because she's a snoop. Her therapist, of course.

"No," she answers.

Molly raises her eyebrows, pursing her lips together before looking back down at the screen, her mouth shaping itself into a smile again. "Oh Jesus, Frankie and Jim's obsession with Stacy's Mom."

Those are three weeks of her life that she's never getting back. There are some songs that just aren't wanting acoustic versions.

"It's not about what you want, Mac. It's about what you need," Jim said, lying back onto one of the card tables in the mess, plucking out a bare-bones version of the song's melody. Frankie began to sing along with him soulfully, until Molly kicked in the legs of the table so it collapsed under them.

I shrugged, going back to my crossword. "At least it's not Wonderwall."

Rolling on to the floor, Jim tried to adjust his guitar. "Well, here's—"

"You're fired."

Leaning back against the couch, Mac has the perfect vantage point to watch Molly seeking out random pages in the word document, and wonders why she hasn't commented on any of the more difficult things that she's written, dredged up the deaths or shoot-outs or nights spent huddled together, praying for back-up.

And then Mac realizes that Molly is deliberately scanning for the happier moments they had when embedded.

Molly's trying to cheer them both up.

"Aw, you included the List for Life." Mac snorts. That was a shit show of long manic nights, deadlines, personal and professional fuck ups, all recorded into a Mead notebook. A survival guide, she thinks she called it, for the sleep-deprived, overworked, and socially awkward. "Simpler times, when everything had a rule. Number 472: No selling your subordinates into bondage, including but not limited to marriage, for the sake of securing a source. Oh, Jim. He was so whiny about that."

"He should have studied his Urdu harder," she muses. Everything was much higher stakes back then; the statute of limitations on when you could start finding things funny was short. Irreverence was just how they coped.

Will doesn't do irreverent. At least not where her mistake is concerned. He does flippant and angry, but never irreverent.

A gale of laughter escapes Molly's lips, and Mac looks up to see her putting an index finger between her teeth, crinkling her nose. "I forgot about the time we had a wet tee shirt contest."

Oh god.

"With approximately a dozen other marines." They'd been in Kandahar, out walking the rounds with the marines, and it had started to pour. By the time they returned to base their tee shirts—pilfered white men's undershirts—had soaked through. Rather than leering, Frankie and Johnno had stripped and joined them, boasting that their abs were more impressive than what was in Molly's sports bra. "And we lost."

"Don't we have a picture of that?" Molly asks, looking up, eyes brightening. "You should put in pictures. Hunky marines sell. Marine Corporals Francis Delgado and John O'Connell. And my Major Noah Mason."

Mac nods along appeasingly, rolling her eyes.

"I'm not publishing anything, Mol-ly." Mac won't say it's something her therapist suggested; Molly's looking to ameliorate her loneliness tonight as much as she is herself, and if she mentions it's a coping mechanism Molly will put up the mirror. Besides. "It's—I mean, don't you want some of things that happened to you over there to, you know, not be read about by complete strangers? You have a name, Molly—a Peabody, a Pulitzer, a PhD."

Her lips quirk into a small frown. "I don't mind," she answers, like Mac should already know. "I trust you."

She shakes off the frown, grinning brightly again.

Here we go.

"And it's a book, Kenzie."

Will comes in the next day with a hickey on his neck, so Mac spends her morning hiding in her office. Most of the day, actually. With a brief excursion to have lunch with Charlie, and then take Maggie on a walk (a checkup, on her, really) to Starbucks after that. Then an hour-long meeting with graphics, and a half hour in an editing bay with Tamara and Tess.

"I could take dental impressions off his neck. Which would be a shame, because then they could be used to identify her body," is Sloan's way of greeting her when she gets back.

"I'm fine, Sloan."

And she kind of is, in a way. She and Molly drank so much last night that all they could do was lay on her bed and giggle, sifting through pictures from their time as embeds, after watching some of the footage from their less stellar moments, an outtakes reel that Danny had edited together years ago… which had turned into the drinking game which had left them unable to sit up.

(One sip for: Mac and Noah parenting someone, Molly not so subtly hiding her crush on Noah, Jim flubbing his name on camera, someone sleeping on someone else in an uncomfortable position, Noah putting his hands on his hips, Danny ducking out of frame.

Two sips for: Belting out a song at 3 AM to stay awake, Molly and Mac miming at each other from across a room, Jim and his guitar, Noah chugging coffee, Frankie gets another tattoo, Zack carrying something for Mac.

Finish your drink for: a google alert for Will McAvoy, Molly rolling her eyes at the google alert, Jim being oblivious of the google alert and... somebody gets injured and gives the camera a thumbs up.)

I think we all knew that Molly's steadfast determination to pair me with Noah was just misdirection on her own part. Except, of course, Noah himself. And then there was misdirection on our part—being one of a handful of women in a marine outpost has its own dangers. He didn't like the politics of it, but Noah often expressed interest in me as a way of getting the others to leave me alone. Like I said, we were both dealing with our own heartbreak. And honestly, even removing how he would go out of his way to treat me in front of certain officers and Sergeants, we might have been mistaken as a couple anyway.

I'm not entirely certain when that changed. It must have happened so slowly that Noah and Molly were halfway a couple before any of us noticed. But with the clock ticking down before the four of us would be re-assigned to Islamabad, the two of them finally dropped their acts.

Noah carrying Molly through base bridal style after she sprained her ankle jumping down off a Jeep wasn't anyone's idea of subtle…

And then spent at least half an hour laughing about how the first time Noah had proposed, it had been three hours before their transport was due to leave, and with a ring made of tinfoil. And then snorting at Molly's proposed DEFCON system for shit that would get Will into the tabloids, and the time Molly broke Mac's BlackBerry instead of letting her see Will on the beach with Erin Andrews.

"You need to have some revenge sex," Sloan suggests, which isn't too far off from Molly's "fucking ESPN Barbie." Although Sloan would never suggest that she stop "wasting time pining over tall, blonde, and Midwestern and try stacked, brunette, and southern."

Nor would Sloan ever call Will a "five" and suggest that she could "hook herself a ten."

(Molly never really found a reason to hold back, unless Mac was well and truly upset.)

"He's not," Mac answers, rounding from where Sloan sits in front of her desk to behind it, sitting. "He is allowed to date. He is allowed to move on."

Sloan continues on, unimpeded.

"No. Not really. He's an idiot. And have you seen what she buys him? He's wearing a—a tan sweater of doom or something, today." Mac lifts her eyebrows almost into her bangs, but doesn't deny that Will did dress better when Nina wasn't purchasing additions to his wardrobe. "Revenge sex. Someone who would really get at Will—oh, do we still have Lonny's number? He was kind of into you. What ever happened to Will having a bodyguard?"

Sloan looks off into the bullpen, eyebrows pinched together.

"Will paid more to cover the insurance premiums so he wouldn't need one," starts, vaguely remembering a conversation they had back in August. And then shakes her head. "Not the point. I don't want to have revenge sex. With anyone. Or Lonny." She doesn't want sex at all, really. It's not worth it. Wade made her feel empty, she learned her lesson. But still, she tries to lift a corner of her mouth into a smile for Sloan. "He'd probably crush me."

Sloan doesn't look so convinced.

"Okay…"

Mac sighs, pulling apart the newspaper on her desk by section before dragging out her notes from the 11 o'clock rundown. When she looks up again, Sloan is still giving her the same pitying look that people have taken to wearing around her for months now.

(Well, not everyone. Jim knows the routine, even if he doesn't know that she's burying herself in their time as embeds to keep busy.

Is she running? Is Will running?

Have they just gotten to the point where they're running away from each other?)

"Stop looking at me like I'm about to fling myself off the balcony," Mac protests. "Am I jealous? Yes. Am I miserable? A little, for a few hours a day. Am I going to be an adult about this? Yes."

Sloan laughs. "You called her 'the Gossip Girl' the other day."

Mac tries not to laugh, but fails, and then regroups, pointing her highlighter in Sloan's direction. "That's different, he wasn't thirty feet from me when I said it."

"We were in Hang Chews, with the staff." Jim's been dragging her out after broadcast, and recently Maggie and the rest of the girls have gotten in on the game, and where she and Will used to seclude themselves near the front, the staff sits her down in the couches and around her. "Well, they arguably started it with 'the Wicked Witch of the Lower West Side,' so—"

But honestly, it's one thing outside the workplace.

"Don't you have a show in half an hour?" Mac says, cutting her off. "Zane's going to—"

Sloan pauses, eyes focused on a space of air a foot or two in front of her face, before nodding, and standing. "Right."

She follows Sloan to the door, giving her a tight smile when she leaves. Quietly, she shuts the door to her office, but not before catching Jim's eye from across the bullpen.

He gives her a cheesy smile, and she rolls her eyes back, giving him a thumbs up.

I'm injured, but I'm fine. That's what it means, and it started the first time we got caught in something. We had been in Peshawar for a month, and the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines were assigned as security for a meeting between FATA leaders and a Marine General. An incendiary device went off outside the perimeter, where I had been talking to a few marines taking a cigarette break.

Jim and Molly were closest to it. As I ran to them, another went off, and I pitched down to the ground as hard as I could, getting the air knocked out of me. When the smoke cleared, I realized we'd all gotten hit. Molly took shrapnel to the arm where she'd shielded her face, Jim to his shoulder, myself to the calf. They could stand, I couldn't. The most I could do was give them a thumbs up before moaning and curling up into a ball.

It became what we did. It didn't matter how bad we were hurt. If we brushed it off, laughed it off, told each other we were okay, then we were okay. Molly hitting her head, spraining her ankle. Jim getting shot in the ass. Danny having a roof fall in on him. It could be worse. Almost getting killed in Karachi, the near hostage situation. We were rattled, but we had to be strong. And believe me, I'd have given anything to be weak and foolish, given anything to break down. But I couldn't allow myself, wouldn't allow myself. I trudged on because I believed I didn't deserve the pain, buried it deep and did my job.

Even when I was stabbed; there's footage of me, in a morphine haze in a hospital bed in Germany, giving Danny a thumbs up with the heart monitor clipped to my index finger.

She's not coming undone.

She's had the right words all along.

It hurts, but she's still standing.

By page 164 it's a book, no longer, something she does for her therapist and for herself. It's her book, even if it doesn't have a title. It's her book, a part of herself that she's letting go.

"Why does he even like her?" Noah asks, having caught her on Skype very late in the evening her time and at the start of the workday in his, in Stuttgart. Mac sits up in bed, readjusting her laptop so she's giving Noah something besides a view of her cleavage.

She shakes her head, barely pausing in her typing. "Gentlemen prefer blondes."

"No, seriously," he looks up at her over his reading glasses, not satisfied with her deflection. Neither of them are in a war anymore, she notes. And now Noah rides a desk for voicing his opinion too many times (she wonders, often, why he doesn't just retire, but Mac supposes there's honor in staying with seeing a losing battle to its end) and she does broadcasts where she and Will pass barely twenty words to each other before he slips out at the end of broadcast. It's a blessing, really, that he won't bring Nina to the newsroom.

She tries to ignore Noah's stare in the box in the corner of her laptop screen. "Kenzie—"

"Nina doesn't question him," she answers shortly, attenuating her syllables into sharp little exhalations of air.

"What?"

"I push him. She doesn't," Mac says, trying to sound dispassionate. And then she sighs. "She's safe, she encourages him to be the man he was three years ago, validates who he was before I was back in the picture. Who he'd be if I left again. Who he might be if I left again."

"Are you going to?"

She might leave again. Her contract is up next April.

Making a high-pitched noise of distress, she buries her face in her hands again, before slotting open her fingers to peer through at Noah's face on the screen. The expression he wears is distinctly one of concern, but it's not worn in a way that crowds her.

Brian hasn't been the first or last person to ask her if Will is ever going to come back.

"He's a grown man, Noah," she says, voice muffled by her hands. This is good though, she thinks. Maybe it's good that Will's with Nina, its good he was with Erin Andrews. Because if he can be happy with them, then there's nothing left to fix. "He doesn't have to love me. He doesn't have to want to be with someone who wants him to be the best he can be. He can be with someone who enables him, and enjoy it. He can love her. He can even marry her."

Noah doesn't look as convinced, tapping his pen restlessly while reading his way through a file. "What about you?"

"I can leave," MacKenzie says, like she believes it. In the abstract, it works: she sells her apartment, and packs up her things. She takes a job elsewhere, and leaves the job in someone else's hands. Jim is almost as old as she was when she first EP'd News Night. And maybe if News Night and Will weren't the beginning and end of her career as an executive producer, it could be less of an abstract.

Will wouldn't even be surprised, she thinks. She's never stayed anywhere for more than three years at a time.

Noah gives her one of his strange little laughs, the kind he gave her when she first showed an adeptness for sparring, and drinking whiskey, and being able to sit through getting a tattoo on her ribs without so much as squirming once. "Is that what this is, then? Your exit strategy?"

"My—"

Pride, is what it is.

And she hordes it, the pride that Noah has in her. Because it's so unlike the pride Will has in her, in her work, in her capabilities as a producer. Noah brokers in different parts of her soul, pieces she at first refused to share with Will out of what she thought was deference to him, to what she did. Now MacKenzie thinks she doesn't show Will because those three years are not the woman he fell in love with.

It's a large part of her problem, she knows—she's not the woman he fell in love with eight years ago. Regardless, the woman who he fell in love with eight years ago cheated on him. In the end, Mac thinks, it hardly matters who she is, or isn't.

Will has Nina.

Perhaps she stayed away too long, allowed herself to be molded into a new shape that doesn't fit against him anymore. But he's changed too.

Noah, used to filling in the gaps in their conversations, keeps talking. "Well, I couldn't turn up anything for you on that Operation Genoa, and you thought—"

"I know." And now Genoa is tabled. And her… book, well. (Memoir?) She doesn't know if she wants to publish it. But she could, and probably live off the profits for a little while.

She gets a strange sort of glee, thinking about Will reading it. Reading all of the shit she put herself through, all the fucked up things she did. She knows the manuscript would sell. Her name has already sold tabloids. So has his, thousands of copies more, and the thought of him buying her book, the thought of him sending his agent, or his agent's assistant, to buy the book…

God, she still wants to hurt him. Push him away and take ownership of it this time. What the fuck does that make her?

No. She won't.

Noah looks at her expectantly through the computer monitor.

"Yes, it's my… exit strategy." But it's more than a book. There's a goal, here. Sift through your own wreckage. "I just left, last time. Ran away. I want to be able to leave without wanting to come back. Without thinking that I owe him anything. I want to be able to leave without running away."

"Are you considering leaving?" he asks, and Mac realizes she's suggested it, with a degree of certainty, twice, in less than ten minutes. "Seriously? Because I don't have to tell you that your German is far better than mine, and Stuttgart in spring is the perfect place to wait out the aftermath of the publishing of a tell-all book. He won't be able to reach you in Germany, I promise, I have a ton of men with guns and there are fences and stuff."

"Guns and fences and stuff," she muses, although the idea of Will trying to gain access to her fortress and being denied entrance is the kind of image she's needed, recently, when she's been denied so much of him.

"And then you can take me on all the vacations we would talk about when we were sleeping in holes in the ground," he says, jabbing his pen at the lens of his webcam. And Mac remembers. Nights on the cold, damp ground, looking up at the stars, unable to sleep. Greece, they had eventually decided on, watching grey wisps of their breath reaching upwards. Mac sighs, watching the expression on his face change, and knows he's about to change the conversational thread. "But can you leave? I know what it did to you last time."

Swallowing hard, she stares somewhere between her laptop screen and her keyboard, fingers roving restlessly over her keys. Looking at what she's just typed, she swallows again.

It was entirely Molly's idea, and at twenty-two, she was to be rarely denied any of her flights of fancy. She and Jim often found themselves lumped in with the younger of the marines, with Noah and I shepherding them here and there. So on occasion, we indulged them.

When we were in Stuttgart for Christmas 2008, Molly decided she wanted a tattoo. How Jim, Danny, and I got talked into getting matching tattoos with her, I'll never be entirely certain, but there is definitely a three-inch in diameter compass rose etched into the skin over my right ribs that isn't going away anytime soon. Either way, I was the woman who sent herself all the way to warzone after a bad breakup when most women just get a dramatic haircut, or go blonde. A tattoo was quickly becoming among the lesser of the things that I had done.

I realize, of course, this doesn't explain the next three that I decided to get over the course of the next two years.

The compass rose under her right arm, Pink Floyd lyrics on her left ribs, under her breast, the tarot card on her left hip, and the tiny butterfly perched on the scar from her knife wound. Tattoos are the least of her secrets from Will. Well, not secrets, she amends. She wrote him emails—the secrets she keeps from him are done so at his own choosing, too.

"Maybe…" She takes a breath, and Noah waits, patiently filling out paperwork. She has to start saying these things out loud to people other than her therapist, and Noah is the best place to start; Molly is too young, Jim works for both of them, Danny has just gotten his chance to start over himself. No, it's always been her, and Noah. "Maybe he's no longer the person I need, the person who makes me the best version of me, and I need to let go."

"Maybe?"

Considering dropping her head back into her hands, all MacKenzie can do it is give a dry laugh. How long ago had she been forcing Noah into doing this himself? Do you think Molly cares that you have baggage? Do you think that maybe Molly doesn't care that she's young, that she could get whoever she wants? She wants you, and pushing her away isn't doing either of you any good.

And it isn't like they haven't spoken about his first wife, the divorce.

Leaning back against her pillows, she groans, screwing her face up at him when he lifts an eyebrow at her.

"I still think he's the person I need," Mac says, her voice sounding too forlorn to her own ears; the conversation is starting to feel like picking at a scab. "But I don't know if he's the person who's best for me. And I don't know if I'm just saying that because I'm hurt, and because I'm jealous—"

He cuts her off there.

"Are you still the person he needs? The person who is best for him?"

"Yes," she replies without thinking.

"Do you think he will ever forgive you and let you be that person? Not if it's fair, not if you understand that he can't—do you think he will ever forgive you?"

Mac opens and closes her mouth around a few attempts at an answer, trying to mold her thoughts into something coherent and objective at 3 AM.

"I don't know anymore," she settles on. Which hurts, like a festering sort of wound, like the scab picked, because around the time of the September 11th broadcast, she was so sure. And even a bit after. Back when they were still playing games over the voicemail, and then she had to go and ruin it. "So I have an… exit strategy. Should I need one." Biting her lip, she looks up at her ceiling, and then out at Times Square through her window. "I just feel so shitty about it."

"You're allowed to try to keep yourself from getting hurt." He won't say what he wants to until she's looking at his face on the screen. Stalling for a few more seconds, wedging her teeth against her bottom lip, she tries to focus her eyes out on the fluorescent billboards before looking at her laptop again. He waits, and she nods. "You're allowed to not need his forgiveness. You're allowed to move on."

And then it breaks.

Tamping her hand over her mouth, she tries to push it all back, but cries heave up from her chest.

"I don't want to."

Reclaiming, and letting go.

Sifting through her own wreckage; it's her and Will, and then it's her own stabbing, and Nina's Pakistan story (if that doesn't hurt enough already, it's tied up in Nina fucking Howard, now), and Zack's death and the explosions and sleepless nights they spent under cover, praying for shelter to hold, praying for dawn to come.

She can't live like this, among the rubble of her life.

And unless Will wants to fix it, that's all it'll remain, and she's losing faith in their friendship, now. Their professional partnership.

If you take it apart, what does it become? Which pieces are broken, which pieces are whole? Which do you hold onto, and which do you let go?

Sleep is escaping her, and she remembers, last time. Three years of sleep deprivation plus emotional and physical trauma and the nervous breakdown that sent her home. The failed psych evaluation and with it, her personal failures were lumped in with her professional ones.

Until Charlie's phone call.

She wants him; MacKenzie McHale will always love Will McAvoy. It's tried and tested and she's endured every stupid thing and she'll keep enduring. Because it's what she does, now.

It hurts, but she doesn't know how to learn to do the alternative and she's started to want to.

Noah sighs, and she knows that he will be gentle with her. "I… I know."

He stays on the call until she falls asleep.

She can pinpoint the exact week she stopped assuming she would make it out the warzones alive.

Her own emails to Will have become her best source.

They hurt, but she reads them and takes them back. Reading them makes them hers, for her, for this thing that she's writing. Some are hastily written, dropped adverbs and strange syntax; others are mechanical, tightly-scripted recitations of the day's events, of shootings and deaths and IEDs. Bodies gone unrecovered, hands gone cold. Each punctuated with explanations and apologies.

Some aren't as bad, some make her laugh.

No one laughs at god in a war. Jim got shot in the arse today though, and that was pretty funny. Nothing large, 9 mm from a pretty long distance. Molly and I held his hands while the medic took it out. It was an unlucky turn, but we've all just decided to keep telling him he should be grateful he wasn't facing the other direction.

He's a good kid. They're all good kids. He brings me coffee every morning, and thinks I take it black. But it's fine. I've gotten used to it. You should see me now.

So she takes those back, too, because god knows she needs to smile more.

But then the others—

She's drinking merlot from the bottle on a Friday night when she finds her emails to Will. Eventually they're cross-referenced with stories they filed, and footage, a few pictures, and MacKenzie honestly can't figure out why then. There was no trauma, no pebble to launch the landslide. It was just something that… happened.

Some of the guys here are on their third tours of duty. I've been here fourteen months; no idea how they cope with it. Even if they don't agree with what they're doing here, even if they've only signed up to feed their families, there's this sense of timelessness to them, barely thinking farther than the order they're following, to getting to the end of the mission, before hitting some sort of mental reset button. It's like they exist in a land between the living and the dead, hitting reset over and over again. Death is easier to cope with when what you're living doesn't have consequences.

Lately I've started to understand how they feel.

It was easier, in a time where she felt like she had nowhere to go home to. London, to her parents, yes, but she'd never lived in England. She'd be better off in Greece or Russia or Germany, but she would have given anything to be welcome in New York. And maybe that's why she had believed Charlie so easily when he'd told her Will wanted her to come back to her old position at News Night.

But for so long Manhattan, going home, was a door closed on her.

It was easier to stop dwelling on going home, to hit reset.

And MacKenzie knows she did it after she came back, too. The contract she signed, giving Will the right to fire her at the end of every business week, just gave her a new starting point.

Make it to Friday, reset.

She's irreverent to consequences.

She talks to her therapist about it, the next time she sees her. Every Wednesday morning at 9AM, in Dr. Laura Eisenberg's office on the thirty-sixth floor of a midtown sky rise.

The first twenty-five minutes is spent with her worrying out loud about Maggie, and the possible ramifications of Genoa, that stress. And then when she sees the clock inching towards the halfway mark, she makes herself bring up what Noah said, what she's been writing about, thinking about.

Running away. And she feels so guilty, still. About what she did with Brian, and then leaving, and then coming back. Wade. Hurting Will, again and again.

Some nights she lays in bed and looks up at the ceiling and wonders what if I had died, before dragging herself away from the idea that thatwould be her penance paid.

"I think I'm doing it again."

Laura's corner office is two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows; Mac walks along one of them, watching midtown west rush off to their morning meetings. It's the middle of March, and the sidewalks are dotted with women in brightly-colored spring jackets, men with umbrellas tucked under their arms. The weather this morning called for rain, but none has come yet.

"You're allowed your coping mechanisms," Laura counters, pen scratching over the legal pad she takes notes on. Mac knows she's drawing, not actually writing anything down. It's strangely calming.

"I don't want to have to cope." Pressing a fingertip to the cool glass, she pauses, and reconsiders. "I feel like I'm stunting myself."

"How so?"

She chooses her words carefully. "I'm wondering if it's not just another version of running away. If it's—Noah called it an exit strategy. And I've been thinking about it, since. What if he's not wrong?"

"Do you want to run?" Laura asks, in a way that is both conversational but not at all, frowning at the sketch on her notepad. Mac likes Laura; she's unassuming, but still blunt.

Mac turns, folding her arms under her chest, chewing on her bottom lip. "Yes. No. There are people here—Jim, he followed me here. I wouldn't leave him behind—Charlie, Sloan, Don, Maggie, god, Maggie. The staff, I can't just walk out, we have Genoa that we're sitting on and they trustme—"

And because anytime her thoughts start spinning like a whirligig, Laura knows how to pull out the right piece to get them to stop. "Do you feel tied down by them?"

"No, of course not," she answers immediately. She wants to be in the newsroom with them. The staff is—the staff is family.

"You didn't mention Will in your list," Laura points out, before reaching for the thick manila file where Mac knows the shortlist on her neuroses is kept. Running her tongue along the front of her teeth, Laura thumbs through it quickly, finding the piece of information that she wants. "In your file it says the first time you left, it was easy. There was no one else in New York to stay for. You didn't have many friends. That before Will, most of your friends were Brian's, so when you two broke it off—"

Mac nods along. "I lost most, all, of my friends."

Laura turns the page. "And because you didn't disclose your relationship with Will to HR—"

"I wasn't your typical celebrity girlfriend, no," Mac finishes quickly, starting to pace along the windows. "And he wasn't a celebrity then, not really. He didn't sign his first million dollar contract until after I left, didn't get the kind of audience he has now until after I left, didn't get invited to the parties—"

Laura gently, but with firm tone of voice, reroutes the conversation. "I mean that you couldn't really go out. And didn't. So you never replaced those friends, and couldn't get too close to anyone at work, either. So when you left, all you left was Will. But now you have a family, of sorts. A home."

"I suppose—yes."

"And you built it."

That's not entirely—

"Well, Will too—"

Laura gives her a quieting look over the rim of her tortoise shell wayfarers. "It didn't exist until you came back and hand-picked a staff." Mac stops, and stares, and Laura continues. "Are you—like you said, are you the person they need? The person who makes them the best versions of themselves?"

"I let Jim go to New Hampshire and I let Maggie go to Uganda, so no, probably not." Just like how she let Molly and Dan convince her to let them all go on the supply trip from Murree into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, even when she knew the risks. And she should have known, then, and there's no one to blame but herself. She was their field producer. It was her job to say no, just like it was her job to say no to Jim and Maggie.

(God, the fucking Pakistan story. It still makes her want to throw up to know that Reese and Nina were hacking her phone so far back that they got a voicemail from Molly—she thinks it must have been Molly—about it. The documents were confidential, Noah assured her. Even if they were no longer embedded with his unit he would make sure they were… there's no other fucking way.

Will had to choose Nina Howard.

Out of all the women in journalism…)

"Could you leave?" Laura asks, jolting her out of her thoughts.

"What?"

"If you wanted—could you? Could the show go on without you?"

She opens and closes her mouth around her own self-doubts. "Of course. I trained them so it could."

"Did you do that so you could run?" she's asked in return.

"No," Mac replies immediately. "I did it because I wanted to. I did it for the same reason I took Jim and Molly with me."

"Loyalty," Laura simplifies, rimming her mouth with the capped end of her pen.

"Yes, loyalty."

I'm crazy about loyalty. That only came around after Will. The family, the friends, the loyalty. It's among the wreckage, but it's something that she's holding onto. It's hard to think that something good came out of her and Will falling apart.

"To Will. The one thing you perceived that you lacked." Mac stops pacing again, contemplates the chair catty-corner to the couch. "Which is why you're so hard on yourself now, about running. Do you think you owe him? What—five years later, now?"

"Almost six," Mac corrects. "Six in June."

"Do you think you owe him?"

She makes herself say it; they've been working on this, week after week. Since Nina started. Since the writing started. "No. I don't think I owe him for that. I owe my staff, to be a good boss. I owe it to Will to be his friend, although, I don't know if I am anymore. His friend. Either way I owe it to him to be a good EP. And I think—besides what's happened to Maggie, I think I'm doing a good job."

Laura nods, taking down actual notes.

(That's when Mac knows they've reached the 'has stopped bullshitting' part of the session.)

"But you think you're stunting yourself?"

"I find myself living day to day a lot, writing instead of—I'm just—I'm lonely." She folds her arms under her chest again, swallowing down a deep breath. "And I have friends now, here and outside of New York, but I'm lonely."

Laura nods. "You want a partner. That's normal. Healthy, even, to a want a partner. Romantically, platonically, however. And Will, even though he's out of reach, romantically, he's been your partner. Now he's Nina's." In the pause after that sentence (Laura does that, ducking her head into her notepad, letting things sink in that never really ask for her to react openly) Mac dips her chin, and turns to look out onto the pavement again. Laura's not wrong. "So you think you're falling back into old coping mechanisms?"

Mac rapt her knuckles softly against the window before turning back to Laura, jerking her head in a way that connotes the affirmative.

"The last time you felt like running, you ran and you didn't look back. You didn't even look forward." Laura bites her lip, tucking her legs up under her, trying to decide the best way to say what she's thinking. "MacKenzie, a healthy person doesn't make the decision to run away to a warzone for twenty-six months to punish herself for a bad breakup."

She doesn't continue until Mac nods. And they've been over this, it's nothing new.

"I'd wager that even before your breakup with Will that you were depressed. You didn't have a lot of friends, and you were the youngest executive producer in broadcast news for a headlining show, and you had a boyfriend with severe mental health issues."

Mac can feel Laura's eyes following her when she at last crosses the room and takes a seat across from her, folding her hands into her lap, focusing her eyes on her cuticles.

"You were under an immense amount of stress, and you still are. You're just better at dealing with it. You're doing better. Two years ago you were in the middle of a manic phase at the tail-end of a nervous breakdown that you'd been putting off for god knows how long." Laura gives her a small laugh, warm and encouraging. "Well, you probably do."

Dropping her head towards her lap, Mac almost laughs with her.

"You want a better coping mechanism? You already have it, and you're already doing it. Investing in your people. Invest in your friends. Hold onto them. Spend less time writing at home in bed. You're doing a really great thing with your writing—start transferring it to your real life, find what you want to hold onto. You're not just at News Night for Will. And you can't just exist to do the news."

"Yeah."

"I know you think it's the only thing you're good at."

MacKenzie nods.

"And if you do decide to leave—at this point, I don't think it'd be running away. Mac, you're planning your future and you're realizing that maybe it doesn't have Will McAvoy in it, which is why you keep hitting the reset button." Again, Laura lets it sink in, flipping through a thick ream of paper in her chart. She licks her lips before reading out from it. "It says here, in the excerpt you emailed me yesterday—Opening a door to the possibility of death inched closed the door that reminded me that I had no home to go back to. A home that wasn't lost to a hurricane or flood, but to my own folly. A home that wasn't a place, but a person who had every right to never forgive me for my actions. That's not what you're doing now, Mac. Back then it wasn't a choice, that's what you had, to cope."

Mac connects the dots, before commenting, half-sardonically. "So you're saying I should open the door to my future?"

"Not in that prose," Laura says, lip curling the tiniest bit; they both laugh, and Laura's expression softens. This is one of their better sessions, she doesn't feel as small as she usually does.

Often she leaves her therapy appointments struggling to reassemble herself into something large enough to be the boss of a staff of over a hundred, large enough to manage a control room, a conference room.

"Just… coping mechanisms exist outside of what we're coping with. What you're running from this time is different. And you're not getting shot at by the Taliban, so… but sooner or later you're going to have to make a decision. Not saying you can't revisit that decision, but make it. Your life will be easier, even if you're not necessarily happier."

"So your advice is to go to lunch with a head hunter?"

A smile splits Laura's face, and she shrugs, twirling a lock of black hair around her finger. "I mean, if it's a free meal…"

Mac laughs. It'd probably be a better way than revenge sex to make Will jealous, but she couldn't do that to Charlie, or the staff.

Laura looks down at her watch. "Hour's up. Have a good day at work."

His father dies the next week, and she puts him in the car after broadcast, lingering on the sidewalk in front of the AWM building long after his driver pulls away.

No one's laughing at god when they're saying their goodbyes.

Will never got closure.

And for the first time in months, she felt like his partner tonight. He looked at her helplessly when she smiled sadly down at him at the curb, seemed like he wanted to ask her for more, but he was the one who put up boundaries.

This isn't on her. She's his executive producer, and that's all.

And tonight, it hurt him more than it hurt her.

So she inhales one more deep breath of spring air, and heads back up to their floor to clean up after Maggie's fuckup with the Trayvon Martin 911 tape and talk to Charlie about this new piece in the Genoa puzzle.

By Monday it's apparent that none of the tabloids have gotten wind of his father's death (Mac thinks they have Nina to thank for that, and she's honestly relieved) which is a sigh within the newsroom, because Will doesn't want to go to the funeral and doesn't need sympathy tweets or cards or any of that other bullshit, and she tells the staff to carry on as usual when she gets into the office early that morning.

Maggie stops by her office first, carding her fingers through blonde hair that looks like it needs to be brushed. "I just wanted say again, I'm sorry that—"

"It happens, Maggie."

I nearly got four people killed. Six, including you and Gary.

Maggie tries to smile, gesturing with the coffee cup in her hand. "Anyway, I brought you coffee. I asked Jim how you like it—anyway. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

She crosses from her door to her desk in a stilted gait, carefully placing the Starbucks cup on her blotter. Mac knows ACN has a company policy about seeing one of the clinical psychologists for a mandatory twelve sessions following an event like what happened in Uganda, but she doesn't think Maggie has seen anyone since completing them. She isn't quite sure how to go about suggesting that Maggie continue seeing someone, and she'd give her Laura's card but she's pretty sure that her swanky psychiatrist is a bit out of Maggie's price range.

"I believe you," Mac does say, in what she hopes is a reassuring tone of voice.

Unlike herself, Maggie learns from her mistakes instead of stumbling into them again and again and letting others repeat them under her advisement.

Maggie looks surprised though.

"You do?"

"You only make that mistake once. Or, well, the good ones do. But you're on the of the good ones, Maggie. Otherwise you wouldn't still be here." She takes a sip of the coffee—Starbuck's strongest blend, no milk, two sugars. The way Jim makes her coffee. Smiling conspiratorially (and a bit tiredly, she didn't sleep well this weekend and Will didn't call her at all) she gives Maggie a task that will hopefully make her morning a bit better. "Can you do me a favor and make sure Neal isn't staffing the book out to Jenna again?"

An hour later, Maggie comes back into her office with a look of concerned confusion on her face.

"So, I used to be Will's assistant," she says very carefully, lacing her fingers together at the waist of her skirt.

Mac nods, looking up from the New York Times.

Maggie wrinkles her nose, clicking her teeth together before awkwardly proceeding forward with the conversation. "His sister Liz just called me. Apparently she tried to reach him all weekend but couldn't, and she still had the extension to my desk, from when I was, well, his assistant, so—"

Goddammit, Will.

"She called you," Mac finishes for her, pushing back the sleeve of her blouse to look at her watch. 10:23 AM. Will should be getting in soon. These days, he usually arrives at 10:50, and Mac doesn't want to think about what's causing the late nights that have been pushing back his arrival time the past few months.

"Yeah." Maggie shifts uncomfortably, looking at a spot above Mac's left shoulder. "I—do you know her? What do I do? I have her on hold."

Mac sighs, and then pulls her glasses off her face. "Transfer the call in here, I'll talk to her."

Will winds up being fifteen minutes late for the rundown, hungover and looking like hell. She kicks him out and tells him to call his sister. Monday is also lunch with Nina, who shows up for the first time in the newsroom, willingly oblivious to the pointed stares. Mac is in the control room when she arrives, and Joey quietly clues her in before she leaves to go back to her office, so she idles by one of the panels until they're gone off to wherever.

Tuesday Will awkwardly apologizes to her for putting her in a situation where she'd have to talk to Liz (who is very much not fond of her, not that Mac can blame her) and she accepts.

Wednesday, she sees Laura for her weekly appointment. Nina comes to the newsroom again at the end of the show to pick Will up. The staffers are more oblique this time. Mac refuses their invitations to get a drink with them, working in her office until 11:30 before heading down and finding Don the only one still at the bar.

Thursday, she wakes up to her cell phone ringing, and Molly yelling in her ear something about the ACN morning show while Don texts her the same. She's out of bed, slipping her arms through the sleeves of a blouse by the time he hits the light stand.

Jim is in her office when she storms in at 9:15, and three other staff members follow her in within minutes, faces all varying degrees of gaping surprise.

"I don't know," MacKenzie says on a violent exhale, waving them back out the door. "Go do your jobs."

Jim hesitates at the door.

"I honestly don't know," she tells him, voice milder, rifling through her desk for the medications she forgot to take before walking out the door.

And the thing is—

She wasn't even angry at first. It was so uncharacteristic that she was afraid, at first, because she knows this has everything to do with his father. And just, ugh, fuck because she knows Nina isn't good for him, knows she been encouraging him to use the audience as a crutch, and she can't fucking stop it from happening, but News Night is her fucking show and she owns his air time, and just fuck.

Pointedly, she directs her thoughts away from the notion that if she had been there for him, if not for Nina—

Jim nods.

"Where is he?" she asks, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. "I don't care. I'll yell at him if I see him right now, and his father on Friday—I'm going up to talk to Charlie, don't tell him where I am."

That's a shitty thing to ask of Jim, but she's had him do worse for her.

"Wilco."

When she gets to Charlie's office she's greeted with a smile, and the news that Nina Howard is now among Will's collection of ex-girlfriends. When she returns to her office forty-five minutes later, there's a cup of coffee on her desk that she assumes is from Jim, until she drinks it.

Milk, three sugars.

The name on the cup is Dulcinea.

I knew them all, individually. Molly of course was my assistant, and Danny was behind the camera in the studio when he wasn't being farmed out to a field producer, and Jim was lurking in the corner of every control room, or so it seemed, when he wasn't petitioning me to let him embed. I knew that Jim and Molly had gone to college together, marched in the marching band together, majored in journalism together, occasionally saw Jim perched on Molly's desk outside my office before she would shove him off with a sharp rebuke, telling him to go back to work. I knew that Danny and Jim were friends, because I'd see them with their heads bent together walking out after a broadcast.

I had no idea I'd be stumbling onto the cable news version of eating lunch in the band room by trying to seek solace during lunch in a darkened and empty editing bay. Then again, like most people in high school eating lunch in the band room, I was trying to avoid showcasing how few I was friends with (none) or being cornered by someone trying to get me to do something (produce their show), and so were they.

"Sorry," I stammered out, immediately backtracking on my assistant and the two junior staffers.

Molly shot up, kicking out the chair she was resting her stockinged feet on. "No! Stay. If you want, I mean. We're obviously not the cool kids' table."

"I'm not really sure that I'm a cool kid." I realized the implication of what I said, shaking my head. "Not that it would be slumming it here, or something. So long as you don't try to sell me on working for Wolf Blitzer, who is currently waiting at your desk for me to come back from my meeting."

"Oh, so we're waiting him out?" Molly asked, holding a clump of fries inches away from her mouth. "Or I could go scare him off."

"I don't think I'm contractually allowed to do that while you're on your lunch break," I replied, edging into the room and shutting the door behind me, clutching the sandwich I bought in the cafeteria. It seemed like months since I'd last had a normal conversation that wasn't about my suddenly turbulent personal or professional life, and I was coming up on one.

Jim snorted. "I'm pretty sure she's contracted for indentured servitude."

"If it was an indenture she'd be paying off a debt to CNN," Danny, who was slumped into two chairs, face to the ceiling, quipped dryly.

"CNN owes me," Molly grumbled, gesturing for me to sit.

"It owns me," Jim groaned. And then, like he had been doing for weeks. "Mac, take me with you. You're taking Danny."

Danny, who had previously been embedded with UN peacekeepers in Africa, had been assigned to me as my videographer from the outset, and the CNN executives I had met with gave me the latitude to assemble the rest of the team on my own. And the more anchors like Wolf Blitzer and their high power producers spoke to me, begging me to stay (not that I resent them for it, I'd do the same thing to Molly two years later, as well as others, it's just a part of the game), the more I wanted to go.

Go, get out of America, get away from broadcast stations and the politics and throw myself into being an embed, the war. Try to forget, or at least try to change myself. Into what, I have no idea. Someone, I suppose, who would have been worthy of staying in Manhattan. At least I hope that's who I am now.

But I was so tired. Summer 2007 was blisteringly hot, muggy, and tiring, and I wanted out from the Atlanta humidity and my own emotional exhaustion. But first, I needed my team.

Molly snorted. "She's not even taking me with her, and I'm ABD on the subject. Why should she take you?"

"I have experience," Jim protested.

(I may have been desperate, but I still had some standards. Jim, if you read this, you know that I love you with all my heart and have never once regretted hiring you as a field producer or promoting you to senior producer for News Night.

Still, honey…)

I sighed, remembering back to Jim's resume as it was when he handed it to me. "You graduated from the University of Georgia in the bottom ten percent of the J-school, completed no internships except a last ditch attempt at the school paper, and have been bounced between field and desk producers since you came to work here three years ago. Why should I take you?" He seemed startled. I almost shrunk back; I hadn't hardlined anyone like that in months, my own personal failures monumental when compared to anyone else's. I had become timid, and used it as another reason to hate myself. I was confused, looking at the pieces of myself and not knowing which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of and as a result just lingered in self-loathing and abnegation. It was easier, in a way. I wouldn't actually look at myself until years later.

Until writing this, really.

I shrugged, crossing my arms under my chest and sliding lower into the chair. "Honestly. Give me your best pitch."

Molly perked up at that, abandoning her fries.

"Wait, can I—?"

"Sure." Molly was aggressive. I wasn't sure on her self-confidence, but she faked it when it was necessary, which was good enough.

Slowly, she placed her fries down on the computer desk in front of her. "Why?"

"I'm feeling magnanimous today."

I was feeling more desperate than magnanimous, but in a way that felt like I was rapidly figuring something out.

"She means that the cafeteria had chicken salad," Molly said, quirking a little grin—Molly knew far more about me than I knew about her, and instead of feeling guilty, I decided to start trying to rectify that.

"They did." I smirked, despite myself. "And garden herb Sun Chips—"

"I did put some in your desk drawer," she said, like a vague reminder.

"—and you can come with me to Afghanistan."

All three of them froze. Molly, before sitting straight up, feet flat on the floor, blue eyes forcing themselves wide. "Wait. Seriously?"

"Yes."

And suddenly, I felt better than I had in half a year. Jim, of course…

"Wait, she doesn't need to pitch—"

"Molly's right," I hedged, shrugging. It was a rattletrap kind of decision, appointing an assistant with little recent experience to an embed team, but if I was going to well and truly run away, I wanted people who deserved the experience going with me. "She's ABD on post-Soviet Middle East relations, graduated summa cum laude in her undergrad, has worked abroad for MSNBC in Pakistan, and remembers what chips I like. She gets to go. You, on the other hand—What do you have to offer me?"

"Experience in the field," Jim answered immediately, thoughtlessly.

I scoffed. I'd looked over Jim's portfolio a few times, besides what he'd already told me before. Jim was the sort of kid who did exceptionally well in high school, but peaked—academically, I mean—there. College was too big of a pond for him, and in my opinion, wasn't practical enough. So instead my Jim did marching band, where he met Molly, and did things like study abroad in the Arctic where he'd be sent home for having a sexual encounter with an Eskimo. And then scramble senior year, putting together a slapdash resume and using his limited contacts to secure a position as an assistant to a CNN field producer after graduation.

"Fluff pieces on the Midwest don't really cut it for me."

"I've been on the scene for three F5 tornadoes, and Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan, and the Platte Canyon High School hostage crisis," he argued. Molly and Danny were both nodding along like they had heard this before.

"Still domestic," I chided. "Gimme your best shot, Harper. Whaddya got for me?"

On his face, I could see that he was changing direction.

"Loyalty," he said, very seriously. "Where you go, I will follow. No questions asked."

"No, we're not telling that story," Jim protests, squirming across the couch to try and get his hand over MacKenzie's mouth, but Maggie, with a hand on his chest, pushes him back.

Mac laughs into her whiskey. "I thought you looked rather dashing in a flower crown. Jim's a sucker for orphans."

"You played soccer with them in the street!"

"Yes," she nods seriously. "While the girls who didn't want to play put flowers in your hair." Sinking back into the cushions, she addresses the group still tucked into the back corner of Hang Chews, ignoring the look of chagrin on Jim's face. "It was very sweet. Jim couldn't speak Urdu at all, so Molly, another embed, and I let this group of little girls who had crushes on him show him around."

She remembers their names, written into the margins of her notes on the effects of drone strikes in rural areas.

Amira, Firdous, Izdihar.

Jim resigns himself to the story being told. "Mac is leaving out the part of the story where she tried to marry me off to the widow who ran the orphanage."

"For the story, man! And she was so attracted to you, for reasons completely passing my understanding—besides, you should have studied Urdu more before we landed in Murree. Molly's was so much better than yours."

"Molly has a photographic memory!" Jim complains over Maggie's cackle.

"Well, that's your problem," Mac demurs, finishing her drink. She briefly considers getting another and knows any of her boys would buy her a drink today (the broadcast was incredibly awkward for all of them, and while Will dumping Nina would otherwise, she thinks, be cause for celebration, but the morning show debacle has just made the whole day a mess of emotional avoidance) but decides against it.

She's still angry, and doesn't want to drink to the point where it's amplified and sloppy. At least not in front of her subordinates. They deserve better than that.

That can come later, when she gets back to writing.

She's pissed at Will, so it'll be a "more" kind of night, hunched over her MacBook in bed with every TV on, fingers clacking away on the keyboard, drinking whatever the hell is in her pantry straight from the bottle.

"My Pashto—"

"Yeah, yeah," she waves him off, debating the bottom of her tumbler before finally settling down onto the low table in front of the couch.

But Jim's not done. "Mac is leaving out the part of the story where she cried when we had to leave them behind."

"A little," she concedes, crossing her arms under her chest.

She had been looking at the footage last night, after she got home late from the bar. It was the kind of night where she just wanted to look at cute pictures of little children, write about one of the few happy times she had in her time as an embed after the stabbing. She'd actually gone to sleep quite content, distracted from the moral and ethical qualms about Genoa, and Nina Howard—

The phone call at eight the next morning ruined that.

"You said you wanted to adopt at least three of them," Jim says, and Mac doesn't miss the way Maggie's expression falters in comparison to Tess and Kendra's.

"I would make a fantastic mother," she banters back nonchalantly. God, though, how fucked up was she at that point? A month away from the supply run, her nervous breakdown? Jim and Molly and Danny trailing after her like she might splinter apart at any moment, and they weren't entirely wrong. But for a few days, they were living on the edge of a golden world. "I still have their drawings hanging on my refrigerator and everything and do not give me that look, I know Danny showed you how to press flowers—"

"They were a gift!" Jim has to bat Tess' hands away from his head where she's twirling his mop of hair around a finger, swooning mockingly at the idea of Jim being kowtowed. "From orphans! Little orphan girls with braids and big eyes, who you wanted to adopt."

Mac brings the story to a close for Maggie's sake after that, the transition made easier when Sloan makes an appearance, complaining loudly about one of the new wardrobe consultants. Kendra and Tamara take sympathy on her, and they all grimace when Sloan lifts the hem of her blouse to show a pattern of pinpricks visible even in Hang Chew's low light.

Mac lets them steer the conversation, watching them pull Sloan down into a seat, fight over the next round of drinks, squabbling like siblings.

Laura was right, she has a little family.

A few minutes later she's dragged back into the conversation with Neal commenting on her shoes in relation to Sloan's obsession with Gucci, and suddenly Gary is defending them because of his own situation with Nike and everything is about Neal's cardigan problem until it circles back to making fun of Jim's hair.

Sloan asks who's up for another round and MacKenzie decides that's her cue to duck out.

It's been a day.

And while she likes these moments with her little news-family, her skin is starting to crawl as her buzz is beginning to fade, and she just wants to get home, to the quiet, scrub off her makeup and change into pajamas.

"Alright, I'm leaving you lot to get drunk." She stands, brushing imaginary folds out of her skirt before reaching for her purse, fighting to keep her smile on her face, exhausted all of a sudden. "I expect you all to be over your hangovers by the first rundown."

"I'm too much of a champ to get hangovers," Gary comments, getting up out of his seat to help her into her coat.

"I know Gary," she answers, smiling appreciatively and patting him on the chest. "But some amongst you are mere mortals, Tamara."

Smiling wider at Tamara's That was once! she waves goodbye to the group, and makes her way to the front of the building. Don, sitting at the bar, catches her arm. "Hey, you okay?"

"Me? I'm fine."

Don looks like he doesn't entirely believe her, but their relationship is based mostly upon a mutual understanding that happy endings just aren't a part of their stories and the fact they they will continue to grin and bear it so he doesn't push it.

"Will apologize?" he asks, tapping his pen lightly against his notepad.

"To the staff."

And he did, earlier. Will's not very good at apologies, but he got through it. And now she wants to go home, because she's played her part for the staff who met her down here, expecting her to be happy, so she was happy, and now she wants to end the day and go home.

"Not to you?"

"I don't want to talk to him yet."

Don shifts on the barstool, taking a quick count of who's nearby. "He was looking for you after the show. But you got out of there pretty quickly."

That she did, whipping her headset off as soon as they were clear and Joey and Jim and Tess watched her sweep out of the control room, blowing past the doors before Will was out from behind the anchor desk. Purse, keys, jacket, and she was out of there before he could corner her in her office or in the hallway between the studio and the bullpen, hands in his pockets and eyes cast low.

She's waited almost six years. He can wait a night. Let her be angry for a night.

God, though, is she even angry? Whatever it is, it's under her skin, coiling and releasing and she can smile through it, but she wants to scream, at something, anything.

She won't.

She has the book for that now, and she thinks she is calmer, these days. A little more even-keeled, less anxious, now that she's sorting through her thoughts, cataloguing them and realizing her time the Middle East has been dogging her more than she had assumed.

You have post-traumatic stress disorder, you idiot. Of course it does.

But it's always been easier to cling to what happened with Will. Always running, MacKenzie McHale. Setting her thoughts spinning instead of confronting what's happened. Run away to punish herself for Will, to run away from Will, stand at attention for two years taking Will's punishments as they're meted out to run away from what happened in the middle east. Isn't that why she took the job in the first place? If everything was alright with Will, then she'd be fine.

She's not. And two years down the line, she can accept that.

In the morning she'll tell him it's fine between them. Or what passes for fine, nowadays, the lies and carefully carved half-truths. Guarded smiles and hesitant interactions.

And that's not on her.

If she's learned anything the past week, that's not on her. She fucked everything up, yeah. But he hasn't fired her yet and being his EP comes with certain expectations if they're going to do their jobs.

She's going to forgive him, and it weighs her down inside. But what is six months with Nina Howard compared to what she did?

She gives Don an irreverent smile, scuffing her shoe on the floor. "Will can apologize to me tomorrow morning when I feel less like I'm going to hit him, and I'll forgive him. I mean, what the fuck was he thinking? ...don't answer that." Don gives her a short laugh, looking back down at his production notes. "Where is he?"

"Charlie was giving him a man to man talk," he answers. "Sloan spoke to him earlier."

"And?"

"Apparently about you," he says with a shrug.

MacKenzie feels her eyebrows knit together. "And you know this—"

"Sloan and I talk," he replies, palms held up in front of him. When she doesn't respond, he looks up and rolls his eyes at the interrogative grin on her lips. "Don't look at me like that," he says, which only makes her roll her eyes again. "I mean, hey, he and Tabloid Barbie are over, right? That's a big 'fucking finally' from everyone around here."

She sighs, not happily. It's relief, but the wrong kind. Will not being with Nina won't mean anything. "So it would seem."

They both half-turn out of habit when the door opens, Don lifting his eyebrows at her questioningly when Will passes through them for the first time in months. Mac bites her lip, trying to fight the immediate urge to run.

"I'm going to go," she mumbles, watching until Will is close enough to their crowd, until she can hear Sloan's oh, she just left a few minutes ago.

"Yeah." Don squeezes her arm looking up at her before shaking his head almost imperceptibly at someone across the bar.

Mac squeezes her eyes shut.

"Go, Mac. You look like you're about to vibrate out of your skin."

Locking her jaw, with widened eyes she casts Don one last look, and walks calmly out of Hang Chews and hails the first cab she sees.

Always running, MacKenzie McHale.

I couldn't stop hyperventilating. Something had broken inside of me and everything that I had coiled tightly for those three years was unspooling; I had pulled the pin on my own psyche. I lost track of how many times I lost consciousness. I faintly remember Jim and Molly getting me into the shower back on base, Jim propping me up while he washed blood out of my hair. I can't remember what he was saying, but he was talking nonstop.

It was my fault, and I say that objectively. I was the producer, I signed off on going to get the story. In the pursuit, the four of us were almost killed. Two marines were killed. I was resilient enough to handle failing myself. But I had been with Jim, Molly, and Danny for far longer than I had been with Will. And I signed off on what could have been their death warrants. I knew the supply trucks would probably be raided. I knew the area, I knew the route from Murree into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

But the story was big.

It was my fault, one hundred percent, and I unspooled.

She spends the rest of the night writing herself to the end of the story. Too anxious to sleep, she rushes her mind away from her doubt over leaving Will in the bar—he saw her, of course he saw her, and he knows she's avoiding him—and into the past. Anxious already, she writes the ending to her cautionary tale for others.

I knew that as soon as CNN caught up with us, I'd have to take the psychological evaluation I'd been avoiding since the stabbing, and I would fail. And our positions would be terminated, and I would be sent back to the United States. And by then, I had stacked up dozens of other things to be running from, besides Will—the explosion, Zack, Felicia in the Green Zone, sleepless nights in Baghdad, Jim getting shot, the night the roof caved in under the grenade, Chris losing his leg in the field, Molly's face when she was grabbed in Islamabad, the stabbing. And then hiding under Cartwright's body, taking his gun, and killing the Taliban fighter while Alvarez struggled to keep conscious. While we waited for backup.

It all unspooled, finally and violently, thousands of sharp fractures spinning out until I felt like a pile of broken porcelain on the floor. I had to stop running.

I don't quite remember that night, which my psychiatrist says is to be expected from a mental break. I know, from what I've been told, that Jim sat and held my hand. I know that Molly got ahold of Noah. I know it was kept off the wires, but our point person in CNN Atlanta heard anyway.

I don't remember anything until Danny eased himself next to me in bed with the laptop hooked up to the satellite phone. He sat me up, made me drink a glass of room temperature water, washed my face with a cold cloth. I don't know if he said anything. Probably not.

It was 5 AM in Islamabad, 8 PM in New York City, and Danny had found a stream for News Night. I hadn't watched since I was chained to my bed in Landstuhl, and before that it had been over a year. In Landstuhl, I was in the burnout of a morphine haze, and it took Molly twenty minutes to walk in from a cigarette break and change the channel before the beginning of the C block.

We watched the entire show. I cried through it.

But I stopped panicking.

In fact, MacKenzie's pretty certain she called Will a fucking idiot at some point during the broadcast when he refused to push an interview as far as it could go and ask the right questions. And then she laughed, and couldn't stop laughing, and Jim brought her a cup of coffee from the first pot of the day.

She slept, for a bit. And then woke up to a CNN attaché waiting for her.

She failed the psych evaluation, and that was the end of it.

Two weeks later she was being sent home.

That was the beginning of March.

I don't know how the news of my diagnosis, or failed evaluation—"patient displays erratic behavior reminiscent of PTSD, it is recommended they are unfit to be embedded at this time"—got out, but it did, and I was unemployable. I visited my parents in London for two weeks, and on March 20th, got a phone call from Charlie Skinner, who had heard I'd been dumped by CNN.

Since Charlie is a masterful sweet talker, I found myself booking a ticket to Evanston, Illinois, and purchasing a ticket to the Northwestern media panel for March 26. You all know what happened—it currently has 12 million hits on YouTube.

The signs, what he thought was a hallucination, and how she'd fled back to her hotel room after, willing her to phone to ring. But nothing, and she watched him do mediocre news for another week before he flew out to St. Lucia.

And so Will became the anchor in broadcast news that no one wanted to EP for. And I was the EP in broadcast news that no news anchor wanted—including him. So naturally, Charlie offered me the job behind Will's back. He didn't find out about it until his first morning back in New York. Which was, coincidentally, my first morning back in New York, and when I found out.

I can remember my phone conversation with Charlie from the night before, pacing my DC hotel room staring frightened at my packed luggage while he fed me a Don Quixote metaphor, about tilting at windmills instead of feeding the lowest common denominator. And when it became apparent I'd have to convince Will to let me to stay, I knew I didn't have option. It was this, or my career was over.

I quoted "Man of la Mancha" at him and claimed it was Cervantes, so I'm inclined to say it wasn't off to a very good start.

She writes what she can remember of her speech in his office that first day, when she was doped on a very high dose of anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants, manic and desperate.

"Yeah. That did nothing for me."

I didn't recognize him. Which was fair, since I didn't quite recognize myself anymore. Hell, I had fucking tattoos, scars from stabbings and shrapnel wounds. I was a stranger inside and out. At least he looked the same, sounded the same.

Now, I suppose it's become relevant to tell you the date of this conversation: April 20, 2010. The first day of the BP oil spill. Jim was one of the first reporters to hear from a source that Halliburton had no idea how to cap the well. Even then, it was a struggle to get Will to trust us enough to run the story.

He did, eventually, and said the four most beautiful words someone like me can hear:

"Throw out the rundown."

(He also said "Can you start two weeks early?" but you get my point.)

Which is the story of how I got the job the second time around. That first broadcast back was the first piece back into place. Rifling through the debris and finding one whole shard. I felt like I could breathe again—at least we could work together. Three years before, we couldn't stand to be in the same studio together.

Silencing her BlackBerry again, MacKenzie kicks her legs out from her tangle of sheets and reaches for the bottle of Jameson on her nightstand, trying to remember how full it had been when she came home, before looking at her clock.

3:42 AM.

She decides to finish. She's going to finish the fucking thing, and forgive Will in the morning.

I lied to him, again.

It was about Brian, the first time. "Yes, I'm single," the first time. This time it was the ultimate f-word. Fine.

"I'm fine."

Charlie had tried to buy sympathy for me with him, and at the elevators Will asked me about it—

"Charlie said that you're mentally and physically exhausted."

I could have said yes, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Yes, I was stabbed, yes I watched men and women die, yes, I killed one myself. I held a twenty-two year old girl while a medic pulled shrapnel out of her leg. That kid you just called Scooter has saved my life more times than I wish, has seen me at lower lows than you ever have. Yes, I'm exhausted. Just let me do my job. You make me feel sane. You're my last chance.

I hugged my binder to my chest and stared at my shoes, willing myself not to cry. It had been so much easier, earlier, when he was determined to belittle me. I was already doing a pretty good job of that myself.

But now, after broadcast, he was all warm smiles and easy posture, talking about old times like he didn't hate me for what I'd done.

What was I supposed to do?

I didn't deserve his sympathy, or his kindness.

"I've been exhausted since I was thirty," I told him. "Everyone's exhausted."

When it's finished, her eyes red and burning, she wipes her nose with the back of her hand and stares down at the word document. 72,528 words. 290 pages, in five months. She wonders if that's even healthy.

She emails it to Laura. And then to Molly and Noah. Jim and Danny, because it's probably time.

Lastly, Maggie.

I know we don't talk about it, and I know you probably don't want to talk about it, and I'm not going to make you. But here's my story. You can put it back together again.

—M.

Because she knows what it's like to learn to be lonely, and she doesn't want that for her.

MacKenzie doesn't get in the next day until twenty minutes before the first rundown, which she knows Will is going to interpret as avoidance rather than having fallen asleep at 4:30 in the morning after chugging a bottle of water and taking two ibuprofen.

And after crying into her pillow for at least half an hour after slamming her laptop closed and then having to get up to find a dry pillowcase because leaving the wet one on felt like defeat, but that's neither here nor there.

She finds Will sitting in the chair across from her desk, looking bedraggled, hair finger combed into a blonde mess.

"Are you okay?" she asks, setting her things down.

Jim stalks into her office before Will can respond, placing a cup of coffee on her desk and, with his back to Will, gives her a look that is an offering, plain and simple, to interfere. She stares at him until he leaves, an eyebrow lifted. I'm fine. Moments later he exhales through his nose and leaves, shutting the door behind him.

And so she knows he's read her book. Or at least has started to.

"Sometimes I forget how well-trained you have him."

Mac hums, watching Jim return to his cubicle. "He never needed training." Folding her arms at her waist, she turns her attention back to Will. "You look terrible."

"I didn't sleep." Scrubbing his hands over his face he leans back into the chair, and then looks at her. "Neither did you."

Sighing, she tilts her head, debating at least half a dozen answers while considering the ceiling. "I don't like not talking to you. I would have yelled, but your father died a week ago and I'm pretty sure the two events are connected."

She forces herself to lift her eyes, meet his, dropping them only once he gives her a nod of confirmation.

"Still, I shouldn't have done it."

"No."

Another sigh, before she collapses into her desk chair, sliding the coffee cup towards her, snorting softly at the doodles he inked into the cardboard sleeve.

"I'm sorry," he says weightily, because it's for more than just the morning show. Because she bends, and he breaks.

And like she knew she would, she caves to him.

"It's alright."

She doesn't care if the loneliness kills her, or if she's caught waiting for the rest of herself for something that never comes. She's in the same place she was in a year ago; she doesn't know if he's going to come back.

But the truth is simple—

She doesn't want to love anyone else.

A/N #2: In a lot of ways the past few months this fic has become my baby. I've poured a lot of myself-my own experiences with trauma and PTSD-into it, so it's a little nerve-wracking for me to give it up and publish it. I guess basically what I'm saying is thank you for reading, and I would be really, really appreciative to receive feedback.

Part II will encompass the months following Election Night Part: II and will hopefully be posted in the next two weeks.