Chapter Text
SWITZERLAND
Mac knew he hadn’t died the moment he woke up. There was too much pain for that.
But he was cold, his face was numb and constant, wearying, shivers raced through his body. He was laying on his back, enshrouded in damp layers, and there was a piercing pain through his right leg, side, and arm, that even the freezing numbness couldn’t dull, and a more diffuse pain throughout his back and neck. Nothing good.
Well, actually, one thing was good. Warm hands cupped his neck, just about the only spot of warmth across his entire body. Two fingers rested firmly on one of his pulse points, and the hard but not uncomfortable press of her nails gave her away. A normal person might feel ill at ease having a vampire’s fingers on one’s throat, Mac only relaxed.
Mac pried open his eyes and tilted his head up slightly. Riley’s face emerged from the sea of grey sky, enshrined in a large, plush, hood. Her mouth started moving when they made eye contact, forehead furrowed with concern, but it took a few seconds for sounds to start to make any sort of sense.
“…Mac?” Riley’s thumb rubbed back and forth on his neck slowly. “Just hang in there.”
Mac wet his lips. The urge to move seized him, but instead he lied very very still.
He should ask about his condition, but realistically Riley probably didn’t know. He also didn’t know if he even wanted to know. He could feel it was bad, but he knew there was nothing that could be done about it on the side of a mountain.
So instead he asked the other obvious question. “Where’s Jack?”
“He continued on.”
Mac didn’t ask a follow-up question, he just raised a single disbelieving eyebrow.
“He had to get far enough to transmit the codes and call for help.” Riley elaborated quickly. “He should be back soon.”
“Ok.” That was a given. Mac closed his eyes.
“You fell pretty far.” Riley spoke with an ominous hush, like it was some sort of looming secret.
“Feels like it.” Mac rasped.
“Mac.” Riley’s thumb didn’t stop its constant back and forth swipe. “You…” She trailed off, not finishing her sentence.
Mac made an effort to open his eyes again. Riley looked worried. She was still worse than Mac and Jack at hiding that type of fear on missions. It was a skill that only developed with bitter time and experience.
“When night falls it’s going to get even colder. Dangerously so.” Mac said eventually. “Should hike out by then.”
“I would agree, but you’re in no state to move.”
“I meant you.” Mac said firmly. “You and Jack.”
There was a long silence, and for a second Mac hoped it meant Riley was considering it. Then she spoke again.
“I would slap you if you weren’t already injured.” Her tone is somewhere between hurt and pissed.
Mac blew out a sigh. “I’d follow you when… when I could.”
“After you die, you mean.” Riley sounded like she was still considering the slapping thing.
“Fine.” Mac felt frustrated, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the pain, the cold, or the bitter fear churning in his gut that was causing it. “That’s exactly what I meant. I’m just trying to be realistic here.”
“You’re not being realistic. You’re being loopy and self-sacrificial. I’ll do you a favor and forget you ever said any of this.”
“I’m fucking dying already.” It breaks out of Mac far more cruelly than Riley deserved. “What’s the point in hanging around to watch it happen? Just get yourself to safety.”
“Fuck. You.” Riley emphasized each word. Her hand flattened on his forehead, nails dragging lightly on his scalp as she combs his hair back out of his face. “If you come up with any other bright ideas besides leaving you to die you let me know, but until then just… just shut up.”
“You guys never do my plans.”
His purposefully facetious, whiny, change in tone earned himself a snort from Riley, and the tension in her face eased just a little. “We always do your plans, and thats how we end up in messes like this.”
There was a bit of silence after that. Mac tried to ignore the way his shivering was slowly decreasing alongside the pain. It was not a good sign, he knows that, but it was a relief regardless.
“What…?” Riley started to ask a question before cutting herself off.
“I’m listening.” Mac joked weakly.
“It was a morbid question. Sorry.”
“Ask. I need a distraction.”
Riley twirled a strand of Mac’s hair. “What is it like to come back to life?”
Mac gave himself a little bit to think about it. It was hard to get his thoughts in order.
“The resurrection itself isn’t too bad. Just… weird and disorienting. It’s like waking up from a dream after you kicked the blankets off and are freezing to death. Just… a thousandfold. It’s the dying part that sucks.”
“Both of those things sound like they suck.” Riley tried to make her voice sound lighthearted and failed miserably.
To get her mind off the idea of him dying, Mac deflected. “How about you?”
“What?”
“You die to become a vampire, right?”
Riley paused. Her hands stilled in his hair. “Something like that, I guess.”
Mac took the cue to not pry, it had been a terrible change in topic anyways, and they lapsed into silence. It was only when he began to drift off that she started speaking again. He was pretty sure she’d noticed his sluggishness and was trying to keep him awake.
“It’s passed down, you know, we can only successfully turn others of the same bloodline.” Riley’s hands cupped the sides of his face. As a vampire she ran far cooler than him, which meant she was struggling to keep him warm, but she was at least able to protect his face from the bite of the wind. “My mom is still a human, never wanted to turn and never wanted me to turn either. I went to my grandmother to turn me after I’d gotten in trouble with The Collective I… I just felt backed into a corner. I knew it wasn’t the life my mom wanted for me, and it wasn’t really the life I wanted either, but I felt I had no choice. I needed a way I could fight back, to protect myself.”
“I’m sorry you were forced into it.” Mac could still remember Jack’s face when they’d gotten Riley out of the supermax and he’d found out she’d become a vampire. Now Mac just felt even worse for Riley for it, that she’d had to see her former step-father’s dismay over a choice that she’d never really had any choice in. “How… how do you feel about it now?”
Riley let out a soft, pained, laugh. “I mean, right now, while you’re freezing, I’m wishing I at least had the warmth back.”
Mac lolled his head back a little more, carefully, to look up at her properly. “It’s ok. You’re helping, I promise.”
Riley swallowed. Her eyes looked a little damp, and Mac tried not to let that get to him.
“I… I didn’t want to ask.” Riley’s eyes darted up and away from him, blinking hard. “But… if you— if you die is there anything I can do? Do I— like, do I do CPR or just wait for you to come back or—“
“Just be here, if you can.” Mac decided to not mention the fact that he didn’t know if he would come back, not for sure. He didn’t know any timeline he could give her for how long to wait, for when to expect him back, for when to give up.
“Ok.” Riley forced a tight smile. “I mean, I’m not going to let that happen, it’s just—”
“—I know.” Mac closed his eyes. The bright, white-ish, sky was wearing his eyes out. “It’s ok. Jack will be back soon.”
“Yup.” Riley shifted her hands, probably trying to jostle him just enough to open his eyes. “With an exfil copter right behind him.”
Mac didn’t know where she’d expect a helicopter to land on the sheer side of a cliff, but he just gave her a small, acknowledging smile for her attempt at reassurance.
***
“Hey buddy.” Rougher, burningly hot hands were patting his face now. “You’re stayin’ with us, right, hoss?” The words were purposefully casual, but there was a distinct intense edge to them.
“Yup.” Mac forced his mouth to obey him, managing to strain out the single word.
“Good man.” Mac could hear the relieved smile in Jack’s voice. “Riles, help me with his gloves, will you?”
Mac almost flinched away when his gloves were shucked off and new, looser but uncomfortably hot gloves were yanked on. Then the uncomfortable heat got worse as he was carefully shifted out of Riley’s arms and into what felt like a furnace.
“Hey.” Jack’s arms tightened around him, bare hands forming fistfuls of cloth over his chest as Mac tried to squirm away. “Fuck you’re cold. God, don’t tell me you already died.” Jack’s voice strained at the last part of his sentence, emotion threatening to break through his businesslike demeanor.
“Not yet.” Mac managed. His body still ached too much for that. Dying took that away, took everything away.
“Not ever.” Riley refuted, maybe a little naively, but with a sort of conviction that made Mac want to believe her. She was hovering by his side, and it took Mac a few seconds to realize she was trying to block him from the direction of the wind.
“We gotta hike with you out of here.” Jack informed Mac, with a tone to his voice like he and Riley had already discussed it when he’d first come back while Mad had been out. “It’s gonna jostle you, and I’d wanted to avoid that, but there’s no one out there who could get here in time. If we don’t move, we’re all gonna freeze.”
Mac wet his lips, though it felt like they froze the moment after. The heat from Jack’s body was still suffocatingly unbearable but he forced himself to ignore it. He was starting to shiver again, which he could begrudgingly acknowledge as a good thing. “How f-far?”
“To get out of these damn mountains? Too far.” Jack said plainly. “But there’s a place where the mountain plateaus, just a few miles from here, enough for a helicopter to land. I made contact with Phoenix and they’ll meet us there. Just gotta make it that far, alright?”
“I hope y-you’ve kept up on cardio.” For the first time, a tiny kernel of hope that he’d survive this one burgeoned in Mac’s chest.
“You I could carry anywhere I need to.” Jack asserted, then — because he had to ruin the moment — he added. “Ya featherweight.”
Mac couldn’t quite get his freezing fingers into the right positions, but he tried. Jack must’ve been able to sense his intentions because he let out an amused huff.
“That’s the spirit.” Jack shifted, hefting Mac to sit more upright. Mac let out a sharp, shaky, breath at the reawakening of the previously numbed pain. “Up we go, now.”
Riley took the cue to move in, ducking under Mac’s arm and helping Jack haul him up to standing. It took just about everything in Mac to lock his legs, he still wavered, most of his weight held up by Jack and Riley.
“Yeah.” Mac managed, his mouth felt like it was filled with cotton, and he figured he was probably slurring. “‘M not gonna be able to walk.”
“Didn’t expect ya to, hoss.” Jack returned wryly. “Just don’t pass out for a sec, alright? Gonna get you up on my back and that ain’t gonna be pretty.”
Mac groaned quietly as he got manhandled into position, draping his arms over Jack’s shoulders and letting his face drop to rest against the back of Jack’s neck. His hands ineffectually tried to make fists in the front of Jack’s jacket to help anchor himself.
“I wish I could fly.” He mumbled after a few seconds, for something to focus on besides the pain.
“How come?” Jack prodded, seemingly amused.
“A Phoenix is a bird typically depicted with the…” Mac cut off with a stifled swear as Jack hitched him up slightly higher up on his back. “…ability to fly, at least in art.”
“Wouldn’t think you’d want to fly, given your thing about heights.” Riley huddled in close by Jack’s side as they started moving.
“Yeah, well.” Mac tucked his head down, resting his cheek against Jack’s shoulder. “If I could fly I wouldn’t have any logical reason to fear heights. I mean, it’s not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end.”
“Nah, you’d be way too much trouble if you could fly.” Jack huffed. “I can barely keep up with you as is.”
“You could always start running.” Mac suggested. He tried to acclimate himself to the jolting sway of Jack’s pace.
“As a hobby? Hell no, I hafta do it enough on the job.”
“Your loss.” Mac’s eyes slipped closed. The movement was slowly beginning to be less abrupt and more soothing. “It’s a great…”
Jack waited a long few seconds before speaking up. “A great what, hoss?”
Jack swore sharply in the silent seconds after his question went unanswered, but Mac didn’t hear it.
***
Jack might have been exaggerating just a smidge with the “a few miles from here” promise he’d made to Mac. In his defense, ‘a few’ was a wildly variable descriptor, and the poorly masked relief on Mac’s face had felt worth it at the time. Now they were a couple miles in, battling a slippery and mostly uphill climb, and with Mac on his back he was forced to go far slower than he’d been able to move on his own. That was partly because when he was on his own he’d been able to run in wolf form, and partly because Mac was too tall to be nearly as light as Jack had wanted to pretend.
But he couldn’t walk out of these godforsaken mountains without his kids again, it just wasn’t happening.
Jack sunk into the familiar monotony, riding through each stab and jolt of pain, and letting his mind dissociate as much as he felt he could afford in the situation. As long as Riley was stumbling ahead of him, and Mac’s soft breaths were ghosting across his neck, he just had to keep moving.
Then Riley paused, a few feet up and above him, turning to stare out from the mountains. She looked striking, rising up from the rocks with blurry snowflakes flittering around her. Jack figured it was the type of thing Bozer would’ve snapped a picture of if he’d been there with them.
Jack halted too, begrudgingly, since he knew the hardest thing was to start moving again once momentum was halted. “Riles?”
Riley turned to look back at him with a brief, grim, helpless expression before her head swung back to the horizon. Jack followed her gaze, and his stomach dropped.
The horizon brewed grey, dark and ominous. An approaching storm.
“How far out do you think it is?” Riley asked, voice far steadier than Jack had expected it to be.
“Doesn’t matter.” Mac would’ve been able to tell them, and Jack probably could’ve taken a crack at it, but he didn’t see the point. “All we can do is keep moving. We can’t afford to hunker down and wait it out, we need to beat it.” Rather, Mac couldn’t afford to wait it out, but Riley and him both understood that it meant all of them. Neither of them were going to let Mac die, it wasn’t exactly something that needed discussing.
Riley wavered, staring at the horizon as if locked in place in some sort of staring contest. Stare into the abyss, and the abyss stares back. “Could a helicopter fly through that?” She finally asked, voice small.
That depended on the helicopter, the visibility and the amount of snow that could get into the engines. Jack’s gut said no, Mac probably would’ve been spouting percentage chances, but either way it didn’t matter. This was their only way out of here with all three of them alive, they had to keep working towards it however slim the odds got.
So Jack didn’t bother to answer her question. “Move, Riley.”
Riley obeyed his order, eyes tearing away from the horizon and back to the ragged hint of a trail they were following. Jack followed her. Mac kept breathing slowly.
***
Mac dreamt he was flying, or rather just skyrocketing upwards. The snowy environment shrunk below him until it was just a fuzz of grey, and he hit the clouds back-first.
It was cold, damp and shockingly so. Of course it was, higher up the air was thinning, molecules spreading apart, less collisions, less average kinetic energy, bleeding off heat like a wound you just can’t staunch.
I don’t think we can afford to stop here, Jack. The clouds whispered around him, unnervingly close. We need to—
—we need to warm him up. Growls thunder. We don’t have a choice, or he’s not going to make it.
How? We’ve already covered him head to toe…
All that does is hold onto his own body heat, if he’s not generating enough of it, it’s not gonna be doing jack shit.
Why isn’t he generating enough?
“Because it’s cold up here.” Mac replies, tongue sticking to his teeth, but unable to leave a question unanswered. “The earth is our closest heat source, refracting the sun, the further we get from it…”
“Hey.” A low voice looms close enough to his face that warmth pierces through the damp cold. “Mac? You with us?”
The clouds solidify, pressure squashing in from every direction. He’s crushed into the… not the sun, too far, and far too fatal. It was the earth, then, but it felt just as feverishly hot as he’d imagine any star would be.
“He was mumbling, some science mumbo I think, I swear to god I’m not hallucinating Riles—“
“Jack…?” Mac felt earthquake rattles through him and grimaced, curling closer to the heat source. He felt like he could never be warm again, like the clouds had diffused into his bones, like the cold, thin, distant atmospheric air had chased him all the way back down.
“He’s shiverin’.” Jack’s voice bled something close to pure joy. “Riles, he’s shivering again.”
“Thank god.” Riley’s voice cracked with relief.
“Where… are we?” Mac managed between jerky, shuddering, shivers. He ducked his head down against Jack’s chest, and a warm, bare hand carefully cupped the back of his neck, protecting it from the heat-thieving cold air. His slowly rebooting brain parsed together that Jack had shed his plush jacket — or at least wrapped it around the both of them — enclosing Mac in his body heat, the only source of warmth available to them aside from the distant, costly sun.
“We’re close, hoss.” Jack shifted slightly, curling over him and hugging him just a little closer. “Just a little further, I promise ya this time.”
“C-can we make it?” Numbers and distances and time had all blurred in Mac’s head, he had to just trust Jack on this one.
“That, or if we freeze, we freeze together.”
“N-not what I want t-to hear.” Except it was, almost. There was a sort of relief in the constancy of things he couldn’t change, like his friends’ stubborn presence.
“We’ll make it.” Jack amends, wryly apologetic. “I can go ahead and promise ya that, too, if it makes you feel any better.”
“It d-doesn’t.” Mac lies, his small smile betraying it the moment it was out of his mouth. “At all. ’s not exactly b-based on logic.”
Jack let out a scoffing laugh, twisting his head to presumably look over at Riley. “Think that’s a sign he’s good enough to move?”
Riley’s answer was wry and fond. “I don’t think we could get a better one.”
***
When the helicopter was waiting for them on the plateau, its sleek, metallic, man-made angles a welcome relief from jagged rocks and dampening snow, Jack argued that it was logic. Mac rebutted that it was luck. They argued until enough electric blankets and warm drinks had eased the stutter in Mac’s voice, and the shake in his hands, and then they slept on each other’s shoulders the rest of the way. Riley took photos for proof. Mac wasn’t sure later what the proof had been for. Maybe it was proof that Jack snored, mouth slightly ajar, or that Mac hugged something to his chest when he slept, ranging from a pillow to Jack’s arm. More likely, Mac thought it was Riley’s proof that he’d survived: from the IV bag hanging from the ceiling of the helicopter and the lack of a gold glow, to the long subsequent visit to a hospital the moment they landed.
Mac printed out one of the photos when he was finally off of bedrest. He didn’t have a frame handy, or a thumbtack, so he just used the bent end of a paperclip to lodge it into the wall of his room. It dangled there, off-kilter, until Bozer properly framed it a few days later.
This dumbass lived, it proudly proved, so maybe that’s something that still matters.