When James pulls up outside of Mac's house and lets him out, it's late at night. Neither of them says a word to the other the entire drive over, and this does not change as Mac gets out, shutting the door gingerly behind him. He walks to the front porch without looking back once, though he's hyper-aware of the sound of James' car pulling away down the street.
The question of how the hell he's going to explain the state of his face to Bozer is one that only occurs to him far too late, with his key already in the door. Adrenaline jolts through his chest as the door swings open and he braces for the question he's not going to be able to answer - what happened to you?
By some stroke of luck, though whether it's good or bad luck is undetermined, the house is dark and silence inside. Bozer must already be asleep, shut in his own room, and the building holds the hushed peace of night-time.
Maybe it's for the best. Mac is desperately avoiding the memory of the evening, trying in vain to shove it out of his mind every time it surfaces unbidden, and he doesn't know that he'd be able to talk about it, to explain how exactly he ended up bleeding. He couldn't've lied to Bozer about it, but the truth is something Mac doesn't think he could've said out loud. Bozer would've figured it out for himself, but he'd have added two and two together and come up to twelve, arrived at the conclusion that things were much more serious, much worse than they were.
Maybe it would've been better if Bozer had been there, if Mac had been forced to confront what James had done, confess it to someone who would've immediately done everything in his power to keep James from ever having the opportunity to do it again. There's no question in his mind about that. If Bozer found out, it all would stop there. What happened tonight, Mac is sure it won't happen again, but if his best friend knew, it wouldn't even get the chance to.
The question is moot, however. Bozer is asleep, and Mac slips through the house unnoticed. Once safely in his own bathroom, he stands in front of the sink with his head bowed and the water running, carefully not risking a glance upwards. He doesn't think he can stand to see himself in the mirror, see the immediate aftermath of the violence that he'd experienced not even half an hour earlier. The red smear on the back of his hand is bad enough, not to mention the maybe half-dollar coin sized stain that's grown on his sleeve from the effort of keeping the blood from getting on anything in his father's car.
Methodically, robotically, distanced from everything physically happening, Mac wets a washcloth and dabs at the corner of his mouth. What's left of the blood cleans quickly, there not having been much to begin with, and if there's any left behind, well, he'll deal with that tomorrow.
Without a single glance in the mirror and no idea what he currently looks like, Mac walks into his room and collapses onto his bed. A pulse of pain shoots through his cheek when the side of his face hits the pillow, and he sucks in a sharp breath. As he lays there in the dark, silent room, his brain is churning. He can't make sense of what's just happened.
Factually speaking, sure, he remembers the sequence of events.
He and James had their latest argument over a minor detail of the plan. Mac got tired of being told in a hundred different ways to disregard the life of the operating agent in favor of pragmatism and efficiency. James tried to shut him down. Mac got stubborn. James hit him. It's not complicated.
It just doesn't make sense, and Mac doesn't even know how he feels about it. He can't believe it happened. He can't reconcile that it actually happened.
Sleep comes in fits and bursts, restless and interrupted.
When he finally wakes all the way up in the morning, ten seconds pass where he doesn't remember. Ten seconds of calm quiet stretch out through the still air of Mac's room, disturbed only by the vague sense there's something he's forgetting. It's a common enough feeling that it doesn't ruin the feeling, though, of stillness. Peace. Ten seconds of peace.
Ten seconds is all he gets, though, and the memory crashes abruptly into his awareness, the violent moment from the night before replaying itself inescapably. It's such a clear recollection it may as well actually be happening again. The crack of James' palm connecting with the side of his face rings in his ears, and Mac flinches sideways into his pillow, breathing hard and scrunching his eyes shut.
Several minutes of battling with himself, and Mac drags his exhausted body out of bed. He walks to the bathroom and stands at the sink, hands braced on white ceramic, trying to talk himself into looking up. There's no way around it. He has to see how bad it looks, what the damage is. Before he can figure out what to do next, what the hell he's going to say to Bozer, to Riley, to Jack about what's wrong with his face, he has to know what's actually wrong with his face.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, reminding himself that he's stared down things a hell of a lot scarier than this, Mac looks up into the mirror and sees-
Nothing. There's nothing. Where James had struck him there's no bruising, no purpling marks of broken capillaries starbursting up his cheek. When he leans closer, looks intently at the left side of his face, there's some swelling, barely noticeable, and a bit of redness, tucked into the corner of his mouth, but that's it. The cut from his teeth isn't visible. It would be impossible to tell if you didn't already know, just by looking at him, that someone had very recently hit him.
Now that he's looked, Mac can't look away. He stares at his own face, a slightly delirious thought crossing his mind that maybe it hadn't happened at all. Maybe he'd dreamed the whole thing. His hand shakes a little when he raises it, pressing his fingers into his cheek and feeling his heart skip a beat when a pulsing pain erupts under the pressure. So no, then. It wasn't some kind of terrible dream. It had happened.
It's a thought that shadows him all morning, following behind him as he leaves his room, walks around the empty house. Bozer is already gone to work, and Mac himself isn't needed at the Foundation that day, left to bounce around the house left to his own devices. It happened. It was real. It happened.
Mac exists in a sort of haze, walking aimlessly around the house, starting tasks and leaving them half finished. He can't seem to concentrate on anything. Following rote steps he's walked a hundred times, Mac makes and eats a breakfast he can barely taste, spends maybe thirty minutes working on his bike, loads a handful of dishes into the dishwasher. All the while, in the background, the knowledge that he's running from something he doesn't want to acknowledge, hiding from the fact that it happened, it was real, it happened.
In the middle of rewiring a video-game console whose power port had been intermittently not working, the thought dawns on him. He should tell Jack. He should call Jack right now and tell him what happened, about the argument, all the arguments that had led up to it, the way this one had ended. Mac had agreed to tell him, if he gets to be in danger. But…
But Jack had been talking about the mission, not about the increasingly volatile relationship between Mac and James. Besides, what danger? Yes, there had been violence, his father had gotten tired of being ignored and hit him pretty hard, and it had hurt damn bad at the time, but there isn't even a bruise left behind. There is no evidence one could find without close inspection, knowing what they were looking for. Just a little cut on the inside of his lip that bled for fifteen minutes and only hurts when he disturbs it. That's not danger.
It's wrong. Mac's not naive, he's not blind, he knows it's wrong. He knows what James did to him is bad, that it never should've happened, that it was cruel. Abusive, even. Dangerous, though? It wasn't dangerous. Mac's hurt himself worse in a chemistry lab. There are a dozen small scars all over his body, remnants of experiments that went sideways on him, leaving permanent reminders behind. This? He doesn't even have a visible bruise from this. And it's not like it's going to happen again.
Before he can think any more on it, Mac's phone starts ringing. Thinking it might be Jack, some sixth sense prompting him to call at this precise moment, he picks it up, glancing at the caller ID.
Dad it says, and three letters have never looked more foreboding. James' final words to him the night before, 'we'll talk about this again tomorrow', come back to mind, and Mac swallows hard. He doesn't want to answer. He doesn't want to hear his father's voice. Then again, all he's been able to hear all day is his father's voice, running on a loop of disappointment, correction, rebuke.
"What?" Mac says when he answered. The word comes out louder than he'd meant it to, harsh and echoing in the empty house.
"I was thinking about your approach," James starts, immediately off about the plan. The argument they'd been having the night before. The one that'd ended with-
"I'm not coming." Mac interrupts him in the middle of a tangent he'd hardly been following, having a world of trouble understanding what James is saying, why. How they're back here talking about this plan when things had gone the way they did. When James had done what he'd done. "I'm not coming over there to keep helping you work on this damn plan when you won't even tell me what it's for. We've been building a mission to break into a compound and steal something out of an office and you won't even tell me whose office it is and what we're stealing from it. So I'm done. I'm out. I can't do this."
"Angus," James starts in a tone Mac has learned to hate.
For the second time in as many minutes, Mac interrupts him, saying, "No. I'm not helping you steal something when I don't even know what it is or why your Agency wants it. Hell, for all I know, you guys are the ones I'm usually working against not for."
"An encryption key."
"What?"
There's a short, audibly frustrated sigh from the other end of the line. "If you're going to be like this about it-" Like what, Dad? Be like what? Say it, it can't be worse than anything you've said to me already- "then you should know, it's an encryption key."
"An encryption key to what?"
"The man who runs the criminal organization that owns the compound we've been planning the breach of stole a lot of highly sensitive documents and digital cache codes from us in a sting gone wrong," James elaborates. He sounds annoyed at being asked to explain himself, but at least he's doing it. At least he's answering Mac's questions. "They don't know that one of the disks they have, hidden under a top layer of data on old missions that never really happened, is an encryption key that can be used to access information on the identities and orders of upwards of a dozen deep-cover Agency operatives."
"So you need to steal it back before they realize what's on it," Mac summarizes. He's gotten up at some point off the couch he'd been sitting on before the phone rang, pacing around the living room and then off down the hall, dispersing anxious energy without a clear destination in mind.
"Exactly," says James. He sounds relieved. "We need to steal it back, and our plan has to be flawless. Otherwise it's game over for everyone implicated on that disk. I told you before, there's a lot of lives at stake, and I wasn't kidding. These are good people, good men and women that I know, I've worked with. If we don't get the disk back before they figure out what it unlocks, they're all dead. Time sensitive doesn't even begin to cover it, so I need you back over here, tomorrow."
"Time sensitive, I get," Mac agrees. "What I don't understand," Other than all of it, "is why you need me on this with you. You've been so insistent that I help you with this, that it's just me, that we don't read my team in, that we don't get help from people at the Agency. That it's just us. But everything I can do, you can do too, probably better." You're gonna need to stop acting like you think you're smarter than me and everyone else real quick, says James' memory. "I don't have specialized skills. I don't have prior knowledge or even baseline knowledge of who you're up against, seeing as you won't-"
"Can't."
"Can't tell me basically anything about them." Mac stops back in his own room, having meandered the entire length of his house over the course of the conversation. "There's no reason you need me on this, so why are you so… What does it matter if I help? Why do you need me?"
"Look, Angus," James sighs through the phone, and there's that tone again. Something in the way he says the name is making Mac nervous. The way James says his name always makes him nervous, like whatever is about to follow, it's going to hurt. "I didn't bring you into this because I needed your brain. I could've done this without you, I didn't need you for the plan, not you specifically. That's not why I did it. I did it because you're my son and I love you and I wanted to spend time with you. Connect over something. I can't see what's so bad about that."
I love you.
Mac's lungs constrict and his breathing stutters to a stop. It's the first distinct time he can remember hearing those words coming out of his father's mouth. He's sure it must have happened when he was a child, before James left, but he can't remember it if it did.
"Anyway, I've said my piece. I'll be there to get you at ten tomorrow, either come out to the car or we're done. Your call."
It's an out, much like the one James gave him when the work on the plan had begun. 'If you don't want to be here, go right on ahead and walk out the door, Angus, you're free to leave.' It's in Mac's court now, just like it had been then, to decide whether or not to be the one to take on the responsibility of ending a relationship he'd been working so hard for. There's a voice in his head screaming at him, telling him that not even twenty-four hours previously this man had hauled off and slapped him across the face so hard he'd bled, what the hell is he doing even thinking about going back there?
"I'll see you at ten," Mac says numbly, his own voice sounding far, far away.
The room, in the absence of the phone call, is eerie-quiet.
"You idiot," he mutters out loud to himself. He drops the cell-phone on the bedspread and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. Dully, distantly, his cheek aches. "You idiot, why would you do that? What's wrong with you? Why would you do that."
The incident - you mean when your dad hit you last night because he got tired of you and your attitude, that incident? the same voice in his head pipes up - feels so unreal it's hard to convince himself it actually happened. It seems so much like a horrible figment of his imagining, the reality of what James had done too strange and awful to rationalize.
There's a real question as to what's harder to believe - the fact that James hit him the night before or the fact that James told Mac he loved him five minutes ago.
Life had been far easier when neither of these were things he had to think about, but the confluence of both of them has Mac feeling like his world's been upended and turned inside out. He doesn't know how to feel, or what to do, how to handle any of it, and he isn't proud of the decision he makes, which is to try and put it out of his mind completely.
So the rest of the day passes in a dissociated haze, and when ten o'clock the next morning rolls around, Mac ignores the feeling like TV static in his chest and gets in the car.