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Riley was a field agent when it came to being on-site for some technical hands-on, but for the most part, she manned the comms and satellites from the War Room in LA. Half of the time, it was only Mac and Jack who were sent away for a mission.She enjoyed going with them when she was sent, and she also enjoyed her overwatch position when she stayed, so if one were to ask, she wouldn’t be able to choose which position she preferred. Sometimes she liked staying home because she could avoid jet lag and get some actual sleep and not run around chasing bad guys. Sometimes she liked being over there so she could see the world, help crack some bad guy’s phone, or whack someone in the face with a bat.Regardless of where she was, though, she hated being useless on the sidelines when one of her teammates got hurt.With their state-of-the-art communications system, as long as the satellites were in position, they had near-instantaneous reception. When they whispered to each other, she could hear it. When someone in the background spoke, she could hear it. When Jack was beating people up, she could hear the crunch of knuckle against nose.So when Mac got hit, she heard it.The operative they were after had left his car in the very long driveway of a very large estate—a very large, abandoned estate. Floorboards creaked, doors hung off their hinges, bulbs flickered.Satellite coverage was excellent, so Riley had ears on the inside and eyes on the outside—and Yavanka Kravitz had not left the building, which meant he was somewhere inside. The estate was very big.Twenty-five rooms upstairs, along with ten bathrooms separate and apart from the bedrooms. Then, there were fifteen different rooms on the main floor, and a basement containing an additional ten rooms.Since it was unlikely that the guy would stay on the main floor, Mac and Jack agreed to split up: Mac would take the upstairs and Jack would go downstairs and then they’d meet back up again in the middle. They were both stealthy, careful, on guard.Jack found a concealed room behind a rotating framed canvas, activated by movement on the edge of the painting. It led further beneath the house and possibly outside, so he readied his gun, took a breath, and went down.Upstairs, Mac stayed as close to the walls as possible, because there was a less-likely chance of the boards creaking beneath him when he was closer to a support beam—AKA, the walls.All was completely quiet. Riley heard nothing but Mac and Jack breathing.And then, out of nowhere, a gasp, and something slammed into something else and then what sounded like a large object hitting the creaking floorboards, hard.Someone gasped, someone groaned, then Jack’s voice covered whatever was happening, “Mac? You all right, buddy?”So Jack was fine, which meant it was Mac who, what, fell?But then there was a dull thud, another groan, and another thud. A gasp.Mac hadn’t answered.It was Riley’s turn to ask, “Mac, what was that?”There was heavy breathing, and it sounded like Jack had stopped altogether, listening for Mac. But then there were heavy footsteps, running on the weak floorboards, and a loud smack—and Riley realized what was happening at the same time as Jack.Mac was being attacked.Chills ran down her spine, and blood drained from her face.She opened her communications window as Jack high-tailed it back through the corridors and toward Mac, and she separated Mac’s audio from Jack’s so she could more easily determine what was happening. She lowered Jack’s temporarily, so that the majority of what came through was from Mac’s earpiece.A smack. A cut-off scream. And Riley covered her mouth with her hand so they wouldn’t hear her surprised or startled noises—she instinctively glanced out the wall of windows to see if Matty was coming back anytime soon—it was four in the morning, so she was probably taking her time. But they needed her—needed her leadership, what should they do?A thud, a groan, another thud, another groan. Heavy footsteps moving away. Mac muttered something unintelligible, gasped.Jack shouted, so Riley increased his volume, “Riley, Riley! What’s happening?!” There was a smack, something soft against something hard, flesh against concrete—that was from Jack, he was smacking the wall.He didn’t give her time to answer before he kept talking, “Mac? Mac, talk to me, bud.”More smacking from Jack, and the footsteps were coming back on Mac’s.Mac mumbled again, but this time it was understandable, “Kravitz isn’t alone.” Then he groaned, a weak sound, wavered and tapered off. “My ribs…”“Just hold on, man, I’m coming.” That smacking on Jack’s end stopped, and he sounded frustrated, “Riley, I can’t open this door again. There’s nothing on this side that will open it, no latch, no—“Something shuffled, Mac mumbled, another smack, a whimper, another smack, another thud, then there was noise on top of each other to the point where Riley couldn’t distinguish what was happening, couldn’t figure out what was going on besides the obvious—Mac was being attacked—and she felt absolutely useless.“Riley!” Jack yelled at her, “Riley, come on, can you look up the blueprints, anything? How do I get out of here?”Mac’s voice was distinguishable, though—distinguishable from the muffled hits and kicks and punches and God knew what else was happening to him—how many people were attacking him? It sounded like two sets of footsteps, but Mac’s earpiece must be near an echoing shot and everything was getting tangled—but Mac’s voice, it was distinguishable from the rest—he screamed, and it got cut off.Her heart rate escalated. Her breathing sped up. Where was Matty? They needed her to tell them what to do—needed her to tell Riley what to do—there was no time, she needed to focus—she opened a new window though, and within seconds, she had the blueprints on her screen. The problem was, though, that the blueprints didn’t show a secret passageway. There was nothing. It really was a secret passageway.There was a distinct sound, a snapping sound, close to the mic on the comm, and Mac’s scream sounded like a drawn-out whine, and she just wanted Jack to save him as fast as he could, but there was nothing anywhere that revealed how to get Jack out of there—nothing on the blueprint, on the revised blueprint from twenty-seven years ago when the owner added the second kitchen, on the owner’s credit card history of payments to anybody who specialized in building things. There wasn’t time either—Jack couldn’t just stand there and wait!“I’ve got nothing,” she rushed out, “Jack, I-I’ve got nothing!”Fortunately, he figured out what he needed to do, “I’m following this hallway out and going around.” He started running.More pounding, more thudding, and Riley could hear more voices—different from Mac’s voice, but they stopped before she had her translation app ready to filter it. Mac screamed again, and again it ended abruptly. Again, she felt useless and helpless.Riley started shaking, worried that Jack wouldn’t get there in time, terrified for Mac, because from the moment he was jumped, the beating hadn’t stopped, and it’d been five minutes already.
Where was Jack?
Six minutes.
Where was Matty?
Seven minutes.There was another snapping sound, dull, not really loud, like crunching potato chips underneath a blanket, and Mac screamed again.Riley couldn’t stop her gasping inhale or her sobbing exhale, but she covered her mouth again. She didn’t care that she started crying, didn’t care that Jack heard her, or that maybe Mac did, too.Jack growled low in his throat from anger and protectiveness, and she knew that he could at least do something. He could at least get Mac out of there. She couldn’t. She was a thousand miles away in a different time zone. She could do nothing but listen and bear witness.Riley felt more useless than she ever had in her entire life.Her best friend was being brutally beaten, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Her tech was as useless as she was.Useless, useless, useless.Jack wasn’t. He was out, she saw him on the camera, came up from a hidden door about a hundred yards from the house, over in the over-grown vineyard.“Jack, I see you! You’re about a hundred yards away from the house. Go in the side entrance. There’s a staircase on the left. Mac’s upstairs somewhere, I don’t know where. I got lost when—““Riley, honey, it’s okay, you’ve done good—” Mac screamed again—an unbroken scream, a wail, low and chilling—she felt more tears fall, but Jack was still talking, “I can hear them from out here, they’re—“ There was the sound of a door opening, another drawn-out whine, pitched low, and more thudding and smacking, “—Riley, I need another staircase!”She didn’t bother asking why, just flicked her eyes across the map on her screen, “Closest one is in the southwest corner.”She heard Jack’s heavy footsteps on hardwood, running and turning corners. She heard scraping—something hard scraping on something hard, almost like nails on a chalkboard but without the high pitch. And she heard speaking—her translation app picked it up too, “Leave him. We must go now.”Another voice, “No, he has seen us. Knows who we are.”“Just kill him finally.” That third voice was calm and collected and chilled her to the bones.The beating had stopped and she could hear Jack running up the stairs.Then it started again, with what had to be a kick to the face if the smack of the earpiece against the floor was enough to go by—sounded like it was dislodged from his ear, maybe hit the wall.And then a deafening screech—the earpiece was crushed.It was up to Jack now.There was nothing she could do, no way for her to help. What was she supposed to do now?Where was Matty?She could still hear distant movements and the tell-tale sounds of a beating, but she couldn’t hear Mac anymore, and the sounds were tapering off, anyway.Jack was running around corners and down the hallway—Mac must’ve cleared about five rooms before he’d been ambushed.Before Riley could anticipate it, two loud bangs rang through the earpieces, two dull thuds of bodies hitting the floor, and footsteps, quick, running toward Jack, and another bang, another body hitting the floor, but Jack didn’t stop moving, “Mac!”There was a thud—Jack dropped to the floor—and then fabric sliding on wood—Jack slid on the ground the rest of the way, “Mac?”A gasp, Jack’s.Quivering inhale, Riley’s.She perched, still as a statue, on the edge of her seat, laptop on her lap, eyes on the War Room’s screens, breath halted.“Riley—Riley, where’s exfil?” Jack’s voice wavered, scared, worried. She didn’t have eyes on the inside, but Jack did. So she pulled open another tab as she gulped.She hadn’t even thought of accelerating exfil—or of exfil at all—it all just happened so fast, she hadn’t had time to—her laptop-to-cell call to Matty began, but Matty hadn’t had time to say hello before Riley rushed her words out.“Matty, we need exfil STAT!”
“Wha—um—okay, Riley, what—“
Jack interrupted, “Matty, Mac needs a medvac now.”Matty took a breath, then, “On it. Riley, send the coordinates to my phone.” She hung up.That didn’t take three seconds, but now all they could do was wait.She could hear Jack breathing, fast and short—he was freaking out, panicking. She couldn’t hear Mac at all, couldn’t see him, and with the way Jack was acting, she was starting to freak out, too. Was he conscious? Was he breathing? Was he alive?She had to clear her throat before she could actually get the question out, tentative and anxious, “How bad is it?”She held her breath, scared of the answer—he was bleeding internally, his ribs were all broken, he’s bleeding from a head wound and it wouldn’t stop—“Um, he’s beat to hell. His leg’s definitely broken—and bleeding. His face i-is mashed, his nose is bleeding—and looks broken. Uh, his—“ there was shuffling, moving—Jack was repositioning Mac?—“oh god, his head is busted, bleeding—“They were interrupted by Matty, walking through the door, startling Riley, and immediately, she started talking, making her way up toward the screens to get a good look at things, “MedVac en route. ETA five minutes. Guys, I was only gone for twenty minutes. What happened?”Riley answered, “Mac and Jack were casing the place out when some guys jumped Mac. He—“Jack broke in, “I went downstairs, he went up.” He gulped, breathed in then slowly let it out. “There were three. One’s still alive. Not Kravitz. I’m sorry, Matty. I didn’t mean to kill ‘em, just—”“No, Jack. You know this. Don’t worry about it.” She turned to face Riley, “What happened to Mac’s comms?”The audio boxes for both Mac and Jack were present on the scene, but Mac’s was blinking red. There was no connection from the earpiece to the receiver.Riley shook her head, no answer forming itself in her mind. She hadn’t known what was happening then, and she didn’t know what had happened now. All she knew was that the transmission had been terminated. She could say so, but the blinking red highlighting the audio box said it better.Jack answered, though, “Looks like our baddies smashed it. It’s in pieces, Ri, against the wall.”
Damn. That’ll need to be replaced.
“How did they know about it? Did he say something to either of you?”Riley reversed his audio, checking for anything he may have said that could have given him away. Jack spoke up, “No, nothing. He mumbled to us, but we barely understood it, so there’s no way Kravitz could have known.”She reviewed the audio, projecting it to her earpiece only, so as to not distract Jack or Matty. She had barely pressed play before Matty’s hand came from nowhere, gently settling on her right hand on her keyboard, stilling her movements and pulling her from her head. She hadn’t realized she was shaking.She looked over at Matty, a blurry figure in blue and black—she hadn’t realized she was crying.“Breathe,” and Matty grabbed Riley’s hands in her own, removing them from her rig altogether. “It’s going to be okay. We can’t help him from here if—“There were whooshing sounds, high-volume winds coming from Jack’s comms—the chopper was there, and sure enough, Jack hopped up, sprinted a short distance, and yelled, “Hey! Up here!”Matty grabbed her attention again, “He’s in good hands now. There’s nothing further you can do. Why don’t you—“ Nothing further she could do? She hadn’t done anything anyway. There had never been anything she could do. She’d been useless, sitting on her ass, shocked and panicked from—“—can take the couch if you’d rather.”She hadn’t been listening, “What?”Matty smiled, sad and sleepy, and gently took her elbow, “You’ve been up since five yesterday morning. That’s 23 hours. Mac’s in good hands, won’t be back here for at least twelve hours. It’s time for you to rest.”
Mac’s in good hands.
Matty closed her laptop, which shut down the programs and windows open on the screen, and it went black.
Mac was safe. She didn’t need to worry anymore, because Mac was safe, Mac was okay, Mac was alive.
She was still shaking, rattled, fazed by what happened. Perhaps if she could see him, she wouldn’t be so worried, she’d know he was okay, she’d be able to see that he was okay. Perhaps if she were to have seen the beating, she wouldn’t be feeling so rattled—maybe she was so rattled because she heard everything, seen nothing, and left everything else up to her imagination—and the story kept changing. What happened kept changing, because she didn’t know, she hadn’t actually seen anything, she was an unreliable witness.All she had of this event was her own imagination.All she knew was that as soon as she actually saw Mac being safe, being okay, alive—as soon as she saw him, she’d stop worrying.But it’d be more than twelve hours until she could see him—several hours of rehabilitation at the closest hospital, and assuming his wounds were surface wounds and didn’t prevent him from being discharged and he could leave within eight hours. That added to the fact that they were in Lexington, Kentucky, and that flight’ll take six hours. That added to at least 14 hours.Riley sighed. Two hours. She’d have to wait two more hours than what Matty predicted, and that was if Mac was discharged within eight hours. She still didn’t know how bad it was—how bad he was—No.She was tired, and her imagination would go wild if left unchecked. She really did need to sleep.But she was strung too tight to do so. She’d just end up laying down for hours.Matty had the right idea, though—she brought Riley a drink, of what she had no idea, but the look on Matty’s face said it was some form of sleeping draught.She smiled, and grasped the cup, “Thank you.”She was wrong. It was Scotch.She downed the whole cup and laid down on the sofa, setting her computer on the table.Matty smoked the windows and closed the door.~Mac spent fifteen hours in the hospital in Lexington before he woke up, and an additional seven hours after that. He had a concussion, internal bleeding, multiple broken bones, a myriad of bruising all over his body, and a burst eardrum.Jack, of course, blamed himself for not being there, for not getting there on time, for even suggesting the split up, but Riley talked sense into him, told him that there was no way any of them could have known there were other people inside the building, that splitting up was a good idea—it just went bad—and obviously, that Mac wouldn’t want him blaming himself that was completely out of his hands.The flight was right at six hours, and Mac rested in his bed at home, while Jack, Bozer, and Riley stayed around to check up on him.Poor Boze hadn’t even known what was going on, hadn’t been awake when it all went down, so when Riley couldn’t sleep at the Foundation, she went to inform Boze. She woke him up, but he didn’t care and she wasn’t sorry. After explaining the situation, she crashed on the couch and he went to work. She woke ten hours later to the smell of chicken fried rice on the stove, not take-out.Seventeen hours later, Jack wheeled a very doped-up Mac through the front door and straight to the bedroom, coming out minutes later reporting that Mac was sound asleep.“He’ll be okay. Nothing permanent. Matty’s given him a month’s leave. She said, and I quote, ‘He’s not coming back ’til I say so, and I’ll say so when he’s ready.’” He chuckled, sent a worried glance in the direction of Mac’s room.
So, he’s not over it either.
Relieved wouldn’t be how she felt when she realized that, and she wasn’t glad, but she was glad that she wasn’t alone in her emotions. Jack, too, was still unsettled.Made sense; if Riley was rattled from just hearing it, Jack must be even more so, because he saw the aftermath, and he was with Mac the last 30 hours. Mac was attacked 30 hours ago, woke up multiple times since his initial hospital run, had a six hour flight home, and was still groggy when arriving home?Riley hadn’t asked for the specifics yet, neither had Bozer, both figuring that Jack or Mac will tell them if they needed to know—she hadn’t asked for specifics, but it must’ve been bad. Seeing with her own two eyes that Mac was okay wasn’t dispelling the anxiety in her gut. She needed to hear it.~It was the light above the sink that woke Riley. Jack had made himself a pallet on the floor so she wouldn’t be alone as she took the couch, facing the right angle for the light to hit her closed eyelids and wake her. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw Mac reaching for a glass of water. He was in his wheelchair, right leg immobilized as it should be with the cast—she smiled, glad that he took the time to position his leg correctly before coming out.There was no way he was going to reach those glasses stuck in the wheelchair like that, so she slid off and up and approached. She tried to be quiet so as to not wake Jack, and she succeeded, but she deliberately made a bit of noise with her approaching footsteps so she wouldn’t startle Mac.She didn’t.He stilled and sat quietly as she neared, reached above him to grab the glass, and filled it before handing it to him, all without a word.He guzzled the whole thing.“Thank you,” He turned to her and said.That’s when Riley got a good look at his face. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined. He had a pretty intense black eye, a bandage over the bridge of his nose, busted cheekbone with stitches that were red and swollen tracking to his similarly red ear—and then she noticed the partially shaved head—about a 2”x2” patch behind his ear, containing stitches that looked like they were still actively bleeding.She reacted before she thought otherwise, reaching toward him, toward that side of his head, but careful to not touch him at all, “Oh my god, Mac!”He just closed his eyes and turned so that she could see it better in the light, “I know I’m supposed to keep the bandage on it, but I hate it—it makes my head ache more than it already does.” He sighed.She looked at him, really looked at him, past the superficial wounds. He was sleepy, just woke up, tired emotionally—after being blindsided by the three guys in that house, he’d dealt with a concussion and its symptoms along with injuries befitting a real hardcore beating and Jack’s worry and drugs and multiple doctors and Matty—he’s not even trying to play it off like he wasn’t feeling crappy. That’s what she expected, the typical macho manly I’m hurt real bad but I’m not going to show it cause I’m a man and men don’t feel pain.Now that she thought about it, he never really does that. He always has genuine reactions and genuine emotions and he’s honest about his injuries and how they feel.“How are you, really?”He looked up at her, a bit of confusion on his face. He hesitated.She elaborated, “I heard it all, on the comms—“ she gestured up to her ear, where the earpieces go, “—but nobody’s told—I mean—I haven’t heard—“She wasn’t sure exactly what she was trying to explain, the words weren’t coming to her, but he understood.“I feel like I got hit by a truck—a garbage truck—that didn’t stop before reversing to see what it was, not seeing anything, and then driving off again.” He chuckled and she laughed to go along with it. Translation? He felt like crap and wanted to go escape the world again.But he went on, “Doc said the break—“ he gestured to his femur, encased in thick white plaster, “—was clean. Maybe it’ll take four weeks to heal? I’m supposed to dose up when I wake so I’m not blinded by the pain, but I’ll do that in the morning, so I don’t wake Jack.” Jack, who when she glanced over at him on the floor, was snoring away like a lawnmower. Had he slept at all when—“I don’t think he got any sleep on the plane, or in the hospital, so he needs the rest more than I needs painkillers.”She was about to open her mouth and ask him if he was in pain, but he answered for her.“I’m okay right now, haven’t been awake that long. Shoulder’s throbbing, though,” and he reached up with his unbandaged left hand to rub his right shoulder.If it hurt, but he didn’t have a sling, was it dislocated—was he supposed to have it in a sling?“Why’s it hurt?”“Nasty bruise, Kravitz hit me good, tackled me to the ground right on it.”That must’ve been the first and loudest of the thuds she’d heard. Two bodies hitting the ground, hard apparently.They stood in silence for a moment, Mac handed her the glass, probably trying to put it on the counter, but she refilled it, handed it back.“Take it with you. Get thirsty again, you won’t haft pull yourself out of bed to get to it.”“Heh,” he laughed and glanced at his lap, the typical look at the ground thing before you say something embarrassing or flattering or something, “I can’t exactly wheel myself back to bed if I’m carrying this.”Oh, he needed a third arm. Obviously. Way to go, Riley, you dumbass.But, he could have just asked her to help him. She was already up and awake and literally standing right there.She just looked at him dumbfounded.“…What?” He actually asked.She rolled her eyes, “I’m literally standing right here. Just ask me to help.” She smiled so he’d know she wasn’t being facetious.“You need to go back to bed, too, and—“…was he serious?“Dude, it’ll take like a minute, not an hour. Come on,” she took the initiative and grabbed the glass from him, carefully so she wouldn’t spill it on him, and started walking back to his room.She didn’t look back, but she knew he was smiling that Mac smile that was full of love and gratitude.She set the glass by his bed and turned to him, “Do you need help getting back in bed?”“Nah,” he shook his head, “I’m pretty good on the upper body strength. Thanks, Riley.”“You’re welcome, Mac,” she didn’t break eye contact, “I’m glad you’re okay.”He didn’t move. Honestly, she kinda wanted to see him get out of that wheelchair and into bed without using his leg, but he probably didn’t want an audience, so she just left, closing his door behind her.He’d be okay.She wasn’t worried anymore.