A/N: I would recommend that you all blame the multitude of people on tumblr who encouraged me to write this. Except Meg, who yelled at me incessantly in google docs while I was writing this, wanting to hit me over the head because anytime she leaves me alone for any amount of time I do something drastic like drop sarin on Mac or kill her.

Also I know I'm behind (erm, really behind) on responding to comments on my other fics. I will be getting to those shortly. I promise.

Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don't have to fear it

"Into the Mystic," by Van Morrison

It comes down the wire a little after four in the morning. The intern doing the overnight book doesn't recognize her name, but gives pause out of professional consideration at the yellow iNews alert that a CNN field producer has been stabbed and killed while covering a religious protest-turned-riot in Islamabad. And then sighs sadly when, twenty minutes later, NBC gives a name and face to go with the headline.

MacKenzie McHale, age thirty-six. A brunette with a short angular face and doe-like hazel eyes. In the picture NBC has chosen she's smiling, unassuming, with a headset on. And then the intern squints, leaning in closer to the screen. In the picture MacKenzie McHale is also wearing an ACN lanyard, which has an ACN ID attached to the end. The intern does a quick Google search, and clicks on the dead producer's Wikipedia page.

Former executive producer of News Night with Will McAvoy.

Which is when the intern prints out another copy of the NBC report, picks up the phone next to her, and calls Ellen, Will's assistant.

"Hi? Elle? Sorry, I know it's ass-early in the morning. It's Maggie. I think you should hear this."

He has her Google alerted, since MacKenzie's calls and emails to him in these past few months have been few and far between.

Charlie blinks at the seeringly bright screen of his cellphone, rubbing his hands over his eyes in a childish attempt to erase the text off the screen. Sighing heavily, he sits up before looking at the report again, feeling it begin to sink down onto his shoulders.

CNN journalist murdered in Islamabad Riot; MacKenzie McHale dead at 36.

"Goddammit."

Getting up and out of bed, he drags his feet to the kitchen, beating his coffeemaker's timed brew.

McHale, a multiple award-winning producer, has spent the past twenty months reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just a few months ago she was accepting her second Peabody, but this morning while covering a Shia protest in Islamabad's Twelfth Zone…

How in the hell is he going to tell Will?

UPDATE, 4:22 AM: Unconfirmed sources report that McHale was declared dead upon arrival to Kulsum International Hospital. She is reported to have sustained a massive knife wound to her abdomen from an unknown assailant. No suspect is in custody, although many have been arrested in connection to the protest.

Just… what the fuck?

UPDATE, 4:57 AM: We can confirm that MacKenzie McHale has died from injuries sustained while covering a Shia protest.

Closing the window on the internet browser on his Blackberry, he dials the number for the NBC division president to get the number for the editor who green lighted the report.

"Hey, Ron. I know the sun isn't even up yet, but you know that Mac was one of mine, and—yeah, if you could, I'd really appreciate it."

He's called into Charlie's office as soon as he steps foot into the newsroom. His assistant—Ellen? Emily? He thinks its Ellen—hands him one of her lime green sticky notes with her strange looped handwriting on it, informing him that he is to go straight to Mr. Skinner's office, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Shrugging his jacket off, Will scrolls through the gossip blogs, wondering what kind of mess he's gotten himself into this time. He didn't even go on a date last night, let alone with someone with a big enough name to land himself in hot water with a tabloid. When those are clear, he googles his name, but doesn't have the time to look at the results, because the elevator dings open and he steps out into the hallway, turning towards Charlie's office.

"Hey—"

"Go right in," Millie says, waving him through.

Will frowns, letting the hand holding his BlackBerry drop to his side. "Do you know what this is about?"

The secretary clutches the phone away from her ear, sympathy shaping her brow. "He just said to tell you to go right in."

Huffing, annoyed now (and a bit worried, but shoving it down), he pushes through the door and into Charlie's office. "Good morning," Will says, half-mumbling, unlocking his phone again. And then when Charlie doesn't respond, looks up, freezing at the expression on his face—the lines hardened with grief, eyes pinched in pain, lips formed into a solid line. "What happened? Is it Nancy? Sophie—?"

"MacKenzie," Charlie says, before swallowing hard.

Will scoffs, battering back the images that immediately clamor from the deep, dark, corners of his mind—MacKenzie facing down the barrel of a gun, MacKenzie bleeding, MacKenzie being thrown like a limp ragdoll to the ground. "I don't want to hear about — what, she got a paper cut? Stubbed her toe getting out of a Humvee?"

Charlie's mouth, if possible, solidifies into an even straighter line. "Will, I think you should sit down."

No. He doesn't want to hear about Mac, he doesn't want to hear Charlie's speech about Mac, and forgiveness, and talking things out, and he's doesn't care about whatever Charlie's latest ammunition is, about whatever bruise Mac's gotten tripping over her lack of consideration towards other people. "I told you, as I've told you a hundred times, I don't want to hear about Mac."

"Sit down," Charlie orders him, voice rising slightly before leveling off.

He makes a vaguely irritated gesture in the direction of Charlie and his desk, rounding away from it, examining the closed door. "I have a meeting with Reese, Charlie—"

"MacKenzie's dead," Charlie yells, retracting his voice into something smaller, but no less urgent, halfway through.

And then nothing.

He feels nothing.

Nothing at all, until Charlie directs him into the chair across from his desk, forcing him to sit, forcing a tumbler of what is probably bourbon into his hands, which he doesn't realize are shaking. Then it feels like he's a hardened shell whose insides have collapsed and crumbled, rotted away with no one ever bothering looking beyond the outside, because the outside can walk and talk and anchor a broadcast and keep people out.

Just like how he wanted it. Until now.

(Would she have come home?)

"When?" he manages to get out from his clamped-down throat, tossing back the liquor, not tasting it at all. MacKenzie is dead. Mac is dead. "How?"

Charlie half sits on his desk, folding his arms under his chest. Shakes his head, taking an uneven breath, and then reaches back to a piece of paper on his blotter and extricates his reading glasses from his jacket pocket.

"This morning," he starts, voice strangled. And then stops. Clearing his throat, he starts again. "She's been in Islamabad, covering a series of religious protests. At approximately three in the morning our time her team got caught up in a Shia protest that turned into a riot. MacKenzie was stabbed in the abdomen. She was taken immediately to an area hospital, but by the time her team could get her out of the riot and to the hospital she… an NBC camera crew and a senior producer were also in the area. They followed to the hospital and heard that she had—that MacKenzie was unable to survive her injuries. They sent it down the wire. Four o'clock, our time."

Charlie takes the empty glass out of Will's hand, and places it on top of his desk. "Will? Can you hear me?"

It's absurd.

"She's dead?"

Nodding, Charlie offers him the printout of the NBC report. Numbly, Will takes it, staring at the paper but letting his eyes glaze over until the letters blur into a line of fuzzy grey. "MacKenzie is… MacKenzie died."

Exhaling a trembling breath, he forces his eyes to focus on the article.

The picture NBC decided to use is from when she was working for him. Working for News Night. She's smiling. And happy. And so, so beautiful. And pretending to be in love with him.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that she was pretending, because he loved her. Because Will still loves her, even though it's been over two years since he last saw her smiling, happy face, her big hazel eyes, her hapless expression.

He loves her, and she's gone. Not gone and he can hate her, feel the anger boil up every time he sees her name in a byline, rant and rave about her, drink until he forgets her name. Not that kind of gone, not anymore.

Gone and lifeless, grey and mottled, a corpse on a morgue table thousands of miles away from home. Gone and her parents are going to bury her, even though Mac wants to be cremated, have her ashes scattered somewhere foreign, over the verdant grass or hot sands or blue waters of one of the many road stop nations the McHales lived in during her childhood. Gone and irretrievable, gone and he'll never stumble into her at a conference or a party if she ever had the nerve, the gall, to come back to New York. Gone and he can never pretend to be indifferent, to speak to her like she's a stranger.

MacKenzie's gone.

"She got herself killed."

As reckless with her life as she was with him. With their life together, their show. With what they had, and now MacKenzie is gone and she's never going to come back to Manhattan, or him, and he's never going to tell her—

"Don't say that," Charlie says softly. "I talked to Ron, the NBC division president, he called the team on the ground and they said that it—"

He's never going to tell her that he still loves her.

It used to make him so angry. Angry enough to hate her, to drink a fifth of whiskey, throw every remnant, every trace of her out. Throw a half-empty bottle of her perfume into the trash so hard it broke, seeping out through the wicker and into the floor, so that the spot would always smell like her. Even through the rug he bought to try to cover it up.

Fracas. MacKenzie wears Fracas. Her mother and all the Ambassadors' wives wore Chanel No. 5. It reminds her of the Cold War. Reminded her. MacKenzie wears Fracas. Wore Fracas. When she first started staying over she'd always forget to bring it, so he bought her a bottle to keep in his apartment.

MacKenzie is a spot. A stain. An invisible indelible fucking mark on him, after he started throwing his scars away. And it used to make Will angry.

Now it makes him—

"She was just swallowed up by the crowd. You know how these things happen, Will. Crowd crush. Mac got in deep and in minutes a protest turned into riot and she was separated from her team. By the time they found her she was on the ground, a knife sticking out of her stomach."

Will coughs, trying to clear his throat. Coughs again, staring down at his hands, before bringing one of his hands up to his face, covertly whisking away the moisture under his eyes. "She sent herself in there?"

"Will," Charlie chides him softly, lacing his fingers together in front of him.

"She left!" he protests, wiping under his eyes again. "She left, Charlie. What do you want me to tell you? She told me that she spent the first four months of our relationship sleeping with her ex-boyfriend, and then she left."

A look of shock washes over the older man's features. "MacKenzie—"

"She cheated on me, and she checked out." His voice sounds strangely compressed to his ears, and Will realizes he's crying, actually crying. It's been years since he's cried in front of anyone, it was MacKenzie when his mother died and then before that his mother herself. John would just hit harder if he started crying, if any of them did. Will doesn't cry, but he wipes tears away from under his eyes. "She didn't die—I don't know what romantic delusion you have going on your head Charlie, but Mac didn't die crying for me, or something. She died exactly where she wanted to be, in the middle of a story, disregarding the consequences, ignoring that she could get hurt, or that other people could get hurt—"

"Will." Charlie's voice has softened.

His has become calloused, unconcerned. Or, he does realize, a poor attempt at calloused and unconcerned. "I don't care."

"Bullshit, Will," Charlie says, but there is no force behind his words, grabbing the box of tissues off his desk and pushing it into Will's hands.

Will sits there, staring at the box in his hands, while Charlie speaks to him in comforting tones—or an approximation thereof, since Will thinks nothing could make him feel better at the moment, except maybe going home, rolling up the corners of the rug, and lying on the spot on the floor where it smells like her—offering him the opportunity to go home. Let Elliot fly solo tonight on the show. Take a few days.

Because MacKenzie's died.

He's been pacing the hallway for hours. If he stops, then it's real. If he sits down, then he has to think about it. Jim's not ready to stop and think about Mac bleeding out on the concrete. He can think about holding her in the car ride to the hospital, he can think about holding her hand in the trauma room, and trying not to throw up in the marine helo to Landstuhl. But he can't stop. He can't think about anything else.

Mac's parents are in Cabo.

Mac's parents are in Cabo, and they are not picking up their phones, and he can't find the number for their five star hotel, but Jim can't wait to let them wake up and turn on the television to see this. He's already called CNN, who should be calling everyone else, but he can't get into contact with her goddamn parents.

He's talked to CNN, he's raised his voice to an NBC executive for breaking the story (that was a surreal experience), and he's just, he can't stop.

Billy. Please. Billy, please. You have too—I'm sorry. I love him. Please, Jim, you have tell him, please, Jim. Billy. He can't think that I—

"Tell him yourself," Jim mutters, laughing dryly and scuffing the linoleum tiles under his boots. Leaning his forehead against the wall, he stares at the number on the dial screen of his phone. Call Charlie Skinner at ACN, Ron McCaul had told him on the phone. My secretary can give you his number. But he called in a panic about her, you have to let him know. Call him, or Will McAvoy. She used to be his producer, but I'm sure you know that. They were close… Sheila can give you his number too.

He had called Will McAvoy.

Billy.

Spoke to a girl named Maggie, who told him very nervously that Will was up in Charlie Skinner's office, had been for almost an hour. So he thanked her and dialed the other number Mr. McCaul gave him.

Seriously, Jim thinks. He's an AP. The marines joke about how he's Mac's lapdog.

Her blood is on his shoes.

You're sorry and you love him. I got it, Mac. Just hang in there, Mac. Hang on. Tell him yourself.

Taking another deep breath he hits the send button on his cell phone. Mr. Skinner's assistant picks up the phone on the second ring, giving him no time to prepare himself—but honestly, it's probably better that way—so hurriedly Jim explains who he is, why he's calling, tripping over his words. He hears her shout for Mr. Skinner, and then the click as the call is transferred.

"Mr. Skinner," he says, not waiting for a greeting. "I'm the AP who was travelling with MacKenzie McHale. I was with her when—"

"Are you okay, son?"

He takes a breath that clogs up his throat. Don't stop, Jim tells himself, pressing his palm against the wall of the waiting room he was led to when he arrived a little less than an hour ago. "Yes, sir, but I'm calling to say—Ron McCaul at NBC gave me your number—"

"What's your name?" Mr. Skinner asks, voice reassuring and calm in a way that makes Jim want to slow down, want to stop.

He kicks the wall, jerking back.

"Jim Harper, sir," he answers quickly, plowing on. "I'm calling to let you know that the NBC team got it wrong."

"What?" a voice he recognizes a little too well from television says.

Jim feels his eyebrows knit together. "Sir?"

Mr. Skinner coughs, and then there's a brief exchange that's too quiet for Jim to hear. "You're on speaker, I apologize. With Will McAvoy."

Relief floods his bloodstream, and Jim's back curls and relaxes. "I—okay—good, I tried calling him first." It seemed more important, at the time. He means, if Mac was about to die with this guy's name in her mouth, he should probably be first on the phone tree after her parents, right? "She—MacKenzie's alive. She was airlifted to Landstuhl by a marine medevac. The NBC team doesn't speak very good—their Urdu is shit, sir. They mistranslated the word 'left' for the word 'died,' somehow, a colloquialism, I guess, and then when they saw she wasn't a patient—"

"Are you kidding me?" Mr. Skinner asks, almost shouting with the same sort of indignancy that Jim himself felt an hour ago.

(Now he's mostly just tired, but he doesn't know anyone here or even have a change of clothes or any Euros, or a credit card, so he's a special kind of shit out of luck.

But less out of luck than Mac.

Who, according the surgeon who came out to speak with him twenty minutes ago, is pretty lucky, so Jim will take that.)

He shakes his head, even though the two men on the other end of the line can't see him. "No, sir. I wish, sir. I really need her parents to pick up the phone, sir. I've gotten NBC and ABC to kill the story, but—"

Will McAvoy swears loudly.

"I know, and um, Mr. McAvoy—"

"Will," he corrects, voice soft in a way that sounds like he's been caught off-guard.

"Sure, um. She was… when she was still… awake. She said she's sorry. And she loves you. And that she never stopped loving you, and it was a mistake, and she wishes she could take everything back, or something like that," he tries to explain without dredging up the memory again, instead picking at the blood caked under his fingernails. "She was slurring a lot. Or at least I'm assuming she was talking about you. She kept saying 'Billy' and it just kind of seems like the most logical explanation." Jim's aware that he's rambling on, but he keeps going anyway. This is important. This is… Mac almost died today. "But Mac likes to remind me that I don't know anything about women, or relationships, so I'm just going to… stop talking now."

There is a silence that is painfully awkward.

At the end of which, Mr. Skinner clears his throat and asks, "How is she?"

He swallows hard again, which is beginning to hurt, from all the yelling and abject crying he's done today.

"Six inch entry wound to the abdomen. Perforated bowel, lacerated spleen. They're performing a splenectomy and a bowel repair but they're worried about necrotic tissue, but I don't—Mac's lost a lot of blood, most of it on me, but they think she'll pull through." The doctor asked a nurse to bring round a pair of scrubs for him to change into, but all things considered, there's no rush. Jim sighs, laughing bitterly at the irony. MacKenzie McHale, one-woman institution of journalistic ethics and the patron saint of triple confirmation, and it's her death that gets run on unconfirmed sources. "And then probably torch NBC headquarters. Or make me do it, 'cause she'll be pretty out of it…"

"You're in Landstuhl?" Mr. Skinner confirms, after another unleavened conversation with Will McAvoy that Jim can't quite hear.

"Yes." Jim leans his back against the wall, trying to avoid—as he has been—the row of chairs that look like they might be just comfortable enough to sleep on.

"How much longer is she supposed to be in surgery?" Will asks, and Jim strains to listen, but can't quite get a read on his voice.

"The last doctor I spoke to said another four to six hours, depending on how much of the bowel they can save. They're pretty optimistic."

Mr. Skinner heaves a very audible mollified sigh. "But she—MacKenzie's going to be okay?" he asks, still trepidatious in a way that sounds hardly perfunctory and definitely concerned.

"Yes."

"Thank God," Will murmurs. Jim thinks he must have moved closer to the phone, because he can hear him better than before.

But he still can't get a read on him (goddamn news anchor, Mac had to fall in love with a news anchor, and not even a good one at that), so Jim clacks his teeth together, before hesitantly saying, "Mr. McAv—Will. Listen. I don't know what she did. But Mac, the Mac I know, she carries it with her. And she loves you. I didn't know who you were until I was trying to… until this morning. But she loves you. Enough that she was about to die begging for your forgiveness."

Jim opens and closes his mouth around a few aborted ways of continuing.

Rapping his knuckles against the wall, he shrugs. "And I just—I know it's rough, and I'm being kind of a huge asshole right now, guilting you like this. But she—I know she's tried to contact you. And maybe, just maybe, you still feel something for her. If you could just—when she wakes up, could you call her?"

The third time she wakes up is far less violent than the first two times. Slower than when they first weaned her off of anesthesia, kinder than the surgeons pushing her awake in recovery, asking her questions, performing a neurological exam. Less jarring than waking up to Jim in blue scrubs squeezing her hand so tightly that her fingers tingled, less infuriating than hearing that three major stations had reported her as dead, but he had taken care of it, had called her parents too.

Less terrifying than, "I spoke to Will McAvoy. He's on a plane. He should be here in a few hours. He uh… he said that he loves you."

The third time she wakes up is far less violent than the first two times, but so much more nerve-wracking.

Of course she remembers what his hand in hers feels like.

"Your hair's gotten longer," he tells her, although it sounds less like an observation and more like an attempt to hide. He sounds exhausted, voice splitting over hard vowels, and huffs a sound that could be a laugh, clasping her hand more tightly. "I can tell when you're faking sleep, Mac."

Smiling in a small way, Mac squints her eyes open, blinking until she adjusts to the fluorescent hospital lights. Will has no idea what to say, and neither does she, so they must forge ahead with some cheap likeness of normalcy.

"You haven't seen me in two and a half years, and that's the first thing you say to me? That my hair's gotten longer?" she whispers, voice as dry as her mouth. Her hands are folded over her chest, a heart monitor clipped to her index finger. Will's leaning over her, almost, perched on the side of her bed, one hand in hers and the other curling around a lock of hair. "When did you get here?"

"About forty minutes ago." He looks worn, ragged around the edges with his hair mussed and sweater rumpled, eyes red-rimmed. "I sent that kid of yours to a hotel. It looked like he could use a shower and a real bed."

"Thanks," she murmurs, breathing heavily through her mouth. She can't quite feel much of anything, but her head seems clearer than the first two times she was awake.

"He's a good kid," Will tells her gently, sounding like he's agreeing with her rather than making a value judgment, which only confuses her. He reaches behind him to adjust the light controls on the bedside remote, and MacKenzie opens her eyes a little wider now that the room is darker.

She nods. "He is."

"He left his wallet in Pakistan." A nervous smile tugs at the corners of his mouth.

Snorting softly, she closes her eyes and imagines her earnest, haggard Jim getting on the medevac with her without a second thought for what would happen to him once he was dumped in Ramstein. "He would."

Squeezing her eyes tightly before opening them again, she frowns as she continues to try to reassemble her morning. Her mouth tastes like dirt and plastic, throat sore and raw, lips torn and chapped. The needles in her arms only serve as distractions. Not just the needles—the report of the monitors, the hospital workers milling outside her open door, the lights overhead, the stiff bleached sheets, the sterile gown, Will's very physical presence pressing up against her waist and hips.

Every sense is amplified, every touch lighting up thousands of synapses, every sound deafening, every sight blinding, and it pulls her thoughts apart so that very little can make sense.

"What's wrong?" Will asks, frowning.

Eyes dropping to his wrinkled collar, she carefully licks her lips. "I'm just… trying to figure out… my head is all jumbled."

His face softens more, if that were possible. Folding her one hand between both of his, he looks unsure for a moment, and then asks, "Do you remember what happened?"

Mac does her best to shut everything else out, ignore the smell of disinfectant, the cloying taste of it in the air, the hiss of the air ventilation, the blunted feeling of the large bore IV needle in her arm. Just focus on Will, she tells herself, licking her lips again.

"We were Islamabad," she begins, eyebrows creasing, still focusing on his collar instead of his face. This is all so much. "Our handler was going to take us to a protest, he knew one of the organizers. I was gonna talk to him."

"Yeah." He nods, sadly she thinks, rubbing warmth into her fingers.

Swallowing dryly, she sorts out her thoughts. "I followed our handler into the crowd, and we got separated from the rest of the team. And then the crowd started getting violent… police got involved, I think. I got separated from our handler." Her voice gets higher, thinner. "And… I shouldn't have gone into the crowd. I shouldn't have—"

"Shh… no, Mac. It's fine, you're going to be fine." He brushes his lips against her knuckles.

She shakes her head again, the amplified feeling pooling in her chest as it comes together, sharper and clearer and coherent. "I stopped watching the people around me. I panicked. I was looking for our handler, or for Jim, and then—"

She could have died. She should have died, by all rights. It was quick and it was sudden and her head was craning above the rush of the crowd, looking for Ibrahim and suddenly her body couldn't hold her up, and she clawed her way through bodies to the fringes, collapsing down onto the concrete when her stomach began to burn, crying out numbly when she brought her fingers down to her waist and back to her face to find them covered in her own blood.

Will strokes the backs of his fingers down her cheek, gently trying to draw her attention out of her thoughts. "Its okay, Mac," he urges her, quietly frantic in his own way, face creased with worry. "It's not your fault. You did everything right."

"I wasn't paying attention," she mumbles, closing her eyes trying to ignore the tears escaping from the corners.

He brushes them away. "Hey, you panicked, that's normal. Except for what you did wrong you did everything right."

He doesn't say anything after that, and Mac hesitantly opens her eyes, breathing as deeply as she can, trying not to cry. His face is almost inscrutable, confused and bewildered and she can't quite figure what else.

She looks up at him nervously. "What?"

His features settle into a look of mitigated uncertainty. Sighing heavily, he leans forward and kisses her forehead for a long moment. "Don't worry about it. You just gave us all a scare."

She swallows, again, and a flash of recognition crosses his face. He reaches for the bedside table and helps her take a few sips of water.

"Will? Why are you here?"

For a second he looks stricken, and she considers not making him answer, distinctly beginning to feel like a bath toy circling the drain. She should just go back to sleep. Will doesn't owe her any answers about why he came.

(She remembers calling out for him, begging Jim to tell him what she's been writing him for months. She had wanted to die for months, wanted something to give, something to break. And she got her wish, bleeding out on the city pavement covered in dirt and sweat and her own blood, and immediately wished it back.

In the long stretch between the knife slipping into her stomach like a knife through butter and finally losing consciousness in the trauma room, Mac wanted nothing more than the chance to make it home and somehow prove herself to Will.

Stop punishing herself. Start doing something to fix it.)

She lowers her eyes from his face to his legs.

Fingers curling under her chin, he lifts her gaze up to meet his eyes. "I thought you were dead, MacKenzie. For an hour." His voice is low, and considered, even if the expression on his face is unsure. "And I realized that you and I… we're not finished. And then Scooter called Charlie, and you weren't dead, and he told me… what you were saying as you were… I thought if I deleted your emails and didn't listen to your voicemails then it would be finished. And you're not supposed to get upset, so I'm gonna stop talking now, but I love you, okay?"

"I fucked it all up," she whispers, barely audible. She bites her lip.

Will shouldn't love her.

He shakes his head. "Not by yourself," he tells her, vehement. "We're not finished Mac. Not by a long shot."

Eyes burning, she has to drop her stare then, sniffling. Head swimming, she holds his hand as tightly as she can, trying to catch her breath as her heart rate begins to elevate and the bland dullness in her abdomen abates into a coiling kind of pain.

Some sort of alarm is set off, and her morphine drip beeps. In seconds, she feels muddled and numb.

"Did someone talk to my parents?" she asks, struggling to stay awake.

"Their flight lands in ninety minutes." Will pets her hair again, lets go of her hand, and brings the blankets up higher, leveling them to her chest. "Hey, you sleep. I'll be here. I'll be waiting."

Her eyes drag themselves closed, but before she can fall back asleep all the way, she hears a phone vibrating.

"Yeah, she woke up for a few minutes. I was able to talk to her. She's... she'll be… I'll take her home. We can start her part time, or something. Until she gets back on her feet. And she'll probably want to bring her people with her. That Jim kid. He mentioned a few others."

It looks like she'll get her chance after all.

I'm going to go duck for cover now.