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Jack wakes up aching. Every joint, every muscle, every hair on his head. Even his teeth. Ache. In fact, ache is too weak a word. There should be something stronger.
… mega-ache.
Jack mega-aches.
There. That's better.
But Jack is a professional soldier. He might hurt, but he can't let it sideline him. He's been trained to assess the whole situation before acting. And as much as he aches - mega- aches - the threat beyond his skin may be worse.
So Jack listens.
Dripping water. Buzzing fluorescents. Ragged breathing.
Actually…
Jack holds his breath and listens again.
Ragged breathing. A groan.
So he's not alone.
Jack tries to remember what happened. His brain feels like someone threw it in the microwave and set it for “baked potato.” But even baked potatoes have ideas from time to time. He rubs his spuddy brain cells together, and they supply him with a memory.
“-and finally, ending our first night with a show.” Jack patted Mac’s arm. “A show of your choosing.”
“What? I get a choice?” Mac was abnormally chipper, but Jack supposed that was the Manniversary talking. It did bring out the best in both of them.
“Yeah! As long as it’s the Legends of Metal tribute or the Blue Man Group. Which, I mean really, there is no choice there. It’s Legends of Metal the whole way, right?”
Mac snorted. “No argument there.”
Jack smiled. He had no doubt.
“Does this itinerary involve any pool time? Maybe day two? I’d like to do some actual relaxing on this trip.”
“Mac, we’re from SoCal! We can relax, soaking up rays by the pool anytime. This is Las Vegas, baby! We gotta turn it up!”
“Except we never do that because every time we try to relax-”
BAM!
Glass shattered. The car jerked to the side, and Jack smacked his head on the window. Everything was spinning, spinning, spinning-
And then nothing.
Yeah. That happened. But the ground under Jack’s hands is cold. Far too cold for Nevada pavement in mid-July. And now that Jack is thinking about his hands, he starts to think about his face. About how it’s a little difficult to breathe. How something is digging into the sides of his face and the back of his head.
Jack feels his heart rate skyrocket, but he tries to finish his assessment before he opens his eyes. His foot feels… heavy. Something is weighing it down. Cutting into his skin. And…
And his boots are gone. The car crash knocked his only nice dress shoes off his damn feet. Jack is going to kill the driver that smashed into them.
Wait, them?
… Mac.
To hell with it. Jack opens his eyes, finding a very blurry, mostly-obscured room around him. He knocks the mask off of his face ( an old-timey gas mask, he notes) and sits up instantly, earning himself a severe case of head rush. But behind dizzying stars, Jack spots his partner, sprawled out nearby with a similar mask on. Jack does a quick assessment of his surroundings ( a cell, one foot chained, just him and Mac) before scooching over to knock the mask off Mac’s face and pat him on the cheek.
“Hey. Mac. Wake up.”
It takes Mac a solid ten seconds to open his eyes, during which Jack’s already racing heart won the triple crown.
“Jack?” Mac groans. He starts to sit up, and Jack helps him the rest of the way. “You okay?”
Jack is pretty sure it doesn’t matter how he feels. “I dunno. I think so. D’you know where we are?” Because he sure as hell doesn’t.
Mac shakes his head but stops abruptly, winces, and rubs his shoulder. “Dunno. Do you?”
“Some sorta prison?”
Mac’s eyes turn steely, jaw clenching. “Or worse.”
Because he’s a cheerful, optimistic guy who always sees the best in every situation.
“Yeah,” Jack agrees. Because he, while normally the optimist, is feeling pretty damn pissed about the whole thing. “Like, what the hell were those freaky-looking gas masks for?”
Mac flips his own gas mask upside-down and taps on it. Powder floats from the filter, drifting to the floor.
Jack frowns, eyeing his own mask warily. “What is that?”
“Not sure. But going off the grogginess and the bad taste in my mouth? I’d bet ketamine.”
“So they drugged us?”
Mac chucks the gas mask at the wall.
“That makes sense,” Jack muses. “That’s how they knocked us out for transport.” He shakes his head. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this one, buddy. Somebody really planned this out.”
“Yeah.” Mac quiets down, slumping against the wall. He hugs his stomach, eyes glassy. It scares Jack how few thoughts appear to be going through Mac’s head.
“I think… I think I can break us out,” Jack decides. He takes a minute to stand, the world spinning around him, before he pulls at his chain. It’s anchored to the floor and doesn’t budge an inch. But Jack keeps trying because he won’t stay here. He won’t.
As for Mac, he watches Jack numbly.
So Jack pulls and pulls, vertigo intensifying with every tug. He falls more than once, making Mac jump every time. But every time, Jack stands up with an, “I’m good. I’m good.”
(He’s not good.)
“Jack?”
Jack lets the chain fall slack in his hands and tries to catch his breath. “Yeah, Mac?”
“I don’t… I don’t think that’s gonna work.”
He’s right, but Jack pulls one more time for good measure. The force drags him to the ground again.
“Are you okay?”
Jack sighs. Mops his face with his sleeve. “Yeah. I mean, everything hurts. But yeah. I’m fine. You?”
Mac doesn’t reply right away, and Jack doesn’t miss the way he braces his side as he sits up. “Fine.”
(He’s not fine.)
“Sorry, man,” Jack laments. “These chains are a lot stronger than they look.” And that’s saying something. The chains already look strong as hell.
“Jack.”
He looks up. Mac is holding up a little red knife. The little red knife. Mac’s second greatest weapon.
“They took our belts, they took our socks, they took our shoes; why would they leave you that?”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Whoever did this, if they wanted us dead, could’ve shot us. If they wanted intel, they could’ve chained us to a chair and interrogated us, not have us shackled in whatever the hell this place is.”
“You know what this reminds me of? That movie. Saw. Remember that one? At any time, I feel like that creepy clown’s gonna come riding in here on a tricycle and ask us if we wanna play a game.”
Mac entertains his rambling, shrugging. “Probably not, but I say we get out of here before we find out.”
Jack moves to the door but, unsurprisingly, is stopped inches from it. He lifts his shackled foot, trying to give himself as much distance as possible, but he’s still too far away. “Mac, wanna try?”
Mac pales. Jack, an expert at MacGyver Facial Expressions at this point, instantly knows what he’s thinking:
No, Jack. I really don’t want to try, because I’m hiding something from you.
“What?” Jack walks back to Mac, crouching beside him. “What’s your deal? You’re hurt, right? Whoever hit us, they came from the passenger side… I think. You got full impact.”
Mac watches him, now very obviously trying to sit still. “I’ll be okay.”
“Pft. Mac, bud, we’ve been over this. Seven and a half years of this. And for the first six months, I wanted to kill you for it. Now tell me what’s wrong or so help me, I’ll steal all the beers from your fridge for a month.”
“You already do that.”
“Then I won’t do it for a month. C’mon, man. We’re probably gonna be stuck here for a while. Just tell me now, or I’ll bug you about it the whole time we’re locked in here.”
Mac sighs. “I’m… I don’t know. Maybe I bruised a rib or something. It’s not a big deal.”
“You got a C-minus in biology,” Jack argues. “I never got a C-minus in biology-”
“Because you never took it-”
“-because I didn’t need it. Clearly, I already knew everything, and you only knew a C-minus-worth, so therefore, I have more knowledge and am more qualified to assign severity to medical concerns.”
“You know nothing about medicine.”
“More than you. Come on. Let me see.”
Another heavy sigh. Mac gingerly lifts the bottom of his shirt, and-
“Yeah, Mr. C-Minus. That’s definitely a big deal.”
Jack tracks the bruising along Mac’s ribs and across his stomach. It looks bad. Really bad.
“What if you have a collapsed lung or whatever?” Jack worries. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Pocket knife. Incision anterior to the mid-axillary line, fourth intercostal space. That’ll release intrapleural pressure on the lung.”
Jack blinks. Blinks again. “... I’m not doing that.”
“What are you supposed to do then, Jack?”
“I don’t know! And I do not appreciate the sass right now! We are locked in a Saw trap, and you’ve probably got internal bleeding, and my head is pounding, and I don’t need your attitude!”
Mac, in a surprising turn of events, shrinks back. Nods ever so slightly.
“Thank you,” Jack huffs. He still doesn’t know what to do, because in the army, they never taught Jack how to stop bleeding if it was internal. That’s something the medics did. Probably.
And suddenly Jack is on the ground, and Mac is looking down on him, brow furrowed.
“Jack?”
“‘m here.”
“You passed out. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Ah, how the tables have turned.”
“Jack.” Mac’s clearly not in the mood.
Slowly, Jack pushes himself up, falling hard into a cross-legged position. “Head’s kinda wonky.”
“Concussion?”
“Yup.”
“Bad?”
“Um… TBD.”
“Right. Well. Can’t do much in here.” The more mobile of the two for the moment, Mac levers himself up, one hand on the wall for support. “I’m gonna see what else we have to work with.”
“Sure. Be there in a minute.” Because Jack really does need a minute. The world is still swaying dangerously. He closes his eyes, allows himself three full breaths, and then looks up.
And what he sees floods his chest with ice.
“Mac,” Jack calls. “Mac! Get over here!”
Slowly, painfully, Mac wanders over. “Jack, what’s-?”
Jack shushes him. “Check the vent behind me,” he whispers.
Mac frowns but looks up. His expression is unmoved, even as he spots the telltale red light of a security camera. “Huh.”
“‘Huh?’ That’s all you got?” Jack whisper-shouts. “There’s some sick freak watching us right now , and that’s your solution? ‘Huh?’”
“I just got t-boned by a full-sized SUV,” Mac argues back. “Gimme a break.”
Jack sighs. If Mac can’t fix this, then Jack will. He climbs to his feet and turns to the vent. “Hey!” he shouts at it. “Whosever’s watching, ha, ha, we get it! Very funny! Joke’s on us! I tell you what? Come in here, and we’ll have a little chat, okay? We can work this out like adults. This is ridiculous!”
“So glad we discussed this plan first,” Mac remarks.
“We did discuss the plan, man! You said ‘huh,’ and I had no choice!”
“You had so many choices before screaming at our kidnapper.”
Jack throws his hands in the air. “I can’t win today. Wasn’t it worth a try?”
“No.”
Rather than argue, Jack mopes around the room, kicking dirty boxes and abandoned backpacks as he goes. But then he kicks something, and the contents spill on the floor. Jack jumps back.
“Oh, gross! Why would someone keep that in an open container??”
Mac shuffles over and plucks one of the spilled items from the floor. “Sago worms?”
“Dude, I can’t believe you’re even touching that.”
“These are a delicacy in Indonesia,” Mac notes. “So we’re in Indonesia?”
“No.” Jack looks around, trying to place the room around them. “I think this is a fallout bunker.”
“So we’re still in the US.” Mac glances at the room too, and seemingly agreeing, frowns at the sago worm. “Why bother with the worms then? You can’t just buy these at Walmart.”
But then the light flicks on in Mac’s brain. “Wait,” he says. “You don’t think this is about Jakarta, do you?”
Ah. Jakarta. Mac’s first DXS mission. It went great… until it didn’t.
“You know?” Mac muses. “We never caught Samrozi.”
“So you think ol’ Sammy’s tryna get back revenge? Seven years later?”
And then Mac backs off the idea. “I mean, worms aren’t exactly incriminating evidence…”
But Jack thinks this theory has potential. “Hey!” he shouts at the camera. “Samrozi? This is enough. Come out from behind the camera and face us. Be a man. Don’t be a coward. This is stupid.”
“Hey.” Mac is muttering in his ear again.
“I got this,” Jack insists, turning to Mac. But the kid’s got this look in his eyes. That look that he gets when he has an idea.
“I know,” Mac whispers conspiratorially. “Just… do it closer to the lens.”
He definitely has a plan.
“Got it,” Jack agrees. Then he continues to yell at the camera, getting as close and being as annoying as humanly possible. He rants for ages, not even listening to himself half the time. He doesn’t stop talking until Mac calls him over.
“What’re you cooking there, Mac?”
Mac puts both of their chains over an open can. “Homebrew thermite.”
“And it’ll burn through chains. Let’s do it!”
“And maybe our feet,” Mac adds, while adding the final components to his mixture.
“Our feet?” Suddenly Jack thinks Mac may not have planned this one out too well. Internal bleeding can make you loopy, can’t it? “How’re we gonna run outta here without our feet?”
It’s too late. A small explosion blows out of the can, and the chainlinks over it turn bright red. Mac and Jack quickly tear the chains apart while they’re still hot.
Free at last.
And then all the lights go out. Jack can’t see for the life of him, but he can hear a door creaking and… Is that hissing?
“That does not sound good.”
Suddenly, Jack’s eyes and nose begin to sting. His chest tightens, and he coughs hard as the air is sucked from his lungs. He can hear Mac coughing too and-
Uh oh. That sounds like puking. So this is probably tear gas they’re inhaling.
Even with his senses overwhelmed, Jack can still hear Samrozi coming. He moves to sock the jerk in his stupid face, but then his every muscle seizes as fiery pain arcs through his body. Something thwacks him on his already pounding head, and he goes down like a sandbag.
As consciousness escapes him, Jack hears four words, repeated over and over:
“One lives, one dies.”
---
“-ack. Jack. Jack.”
Jack blinks awake, cringing against the searing lights above him. “Ugh. What the hell-”
“Thank god.” Mac blows out a breath, one arm still guarding his stomach.
“What happened?” Jack sits up slowly, waiting for the stars to clear from his vision. “Was that-?”
“Tear gas,” Mac confirms. “And a taser. I think.”
There’s a metal box sitting in the middle of the room. Jack frowns and points at it. “That new?”
“He threw it in while he was gassing us.”
“Well, what is it?” Jack reaches over to answer his own question. He pops the lid, and his heart skips a beat.
One gun. One bullet.
“‘One lives, one dies,’” Jack repeats. “What, he expects one of us to shoot the other?”
Mac fiddles with the hem of his sleeve, refusing to look at Jack.
“That’s ridiculous,” Jack insists. “Why the hell would we do that?”
There’s a sharp breath. Mac looks up, eyes piercing. “How long d’you think we’ve been in here?”
“Um, I dunno.” He feels his stubble, trying to assess the time exactly. “Thirty… thirty-six hours?”
“And we haven’t had food or water. You just got a thirty-second nap, but I haven’t slept since we got here. Think there’s a reason it’s so hot and bright down here?”
“To keep us awake. I went through this in SERE training.”
“And if we go long enough without water or food or sleep, we’ll start hallucinating.”
Jack’s stomach drops. “And he thinks if we go crazy, one of us will kill the other.”
“The odds aren’t terrible.”
Jack growls and whips the metal can at the vent. “Never gonna happen, Sammy!”
“I…” Mac grits his teeth. Winces. “I don’t think Samrozi is behind this.”
“But what about the worms? Jakarta?”
“No, I agree. This is about Jakarta.” He looks around the room. “All of… this. This is straight out of the CIA enhanced interrogation playbook. Do you remember after the cafe?”
“When we found Waller wailing on our perp.” Jack nods, though he’s not sure he gets the line of reasoning.
“Our after-action report was what kicked off the inquiry that got Waller booted from the CIA.”
But it feels… off. “I agree that Waller became… unhinged on that op. But if this is revenge, why now? Why this? I don’t get it.” His head is pounding, and all these crazy, confusing bad-guy plotlines are only further scrambling his brain.
“Not…” Mac grunts, pushing himself up off the ground and hobbling over to the door. “Not sure.” He stares at the ceiling, then the walls, then the door again. “Hey, maybe we could… maybe we could use the electrical… elec-”
And then he collapses on the spot.
“Mac!” Jack gets up as quickly as his head will allow him. (It’s so much slower than he wants to be. He wants to move now.) “Mac, wake up!” He falls on the floor beside Mac and jars his shoulder.
With all the speed of a bloated sloth, Mac nudges his eyes half-open. “... Jack?”
“What’re you doing, hoss?” Jack tries to keep positive, but he can feel his hope fading. “Why’re you on the floor?” He doubts he’ll like the answer, but he needs to ask anyway.
“Prob… probably internal… bleeding.”
Yeah. Jack definitely doesn’t like that.
“Okay. Okay, that’s okay. I can get us out of here. I can-” As he tries to stand, his head starts spinning, and he falls on his knees. His world is on a tilt-a-whirl, thoughts getting muddier with every passing minute. He closes his eyes, thinking that will calm the mother of all migraines in his skull. It does not.
“One lives, one dies!” The voice is new. Mechanical and warped. And maybe a bit staticky, like it’s coming from an old stereo. “That’s the only way to open the door.”
Screw that. Jack shakes Mac again. “Stay awake, buddy,” he urges. “C’mon, we can’t kick Waller’s butt if we don’t get through the door.”
Mac looks Jack dead in the eye, voice slurred and weak but with a gaze sharp enough to cut glass. “One lives, one dies.”
“Oh, no. Uh, uh. Not happening.”
“Jack, we-” Mac grimaces. “We’re both gonna die if we don’t.”
“What’s with that quitter talk?” But Jack’s vision is getting blurry, and even keeping his eyes open is making him nauseous. “We’re not doing that.”
“Jack, ’m dying. Right now.”
“Like hell you are.”
“I don’t… I don’t think you get a… a say.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
With every ounce of nerve that Jack has, he turns back at the camera. “Waller! Or whoever the hell you are! Come out, or I swear, I’ll make you wear your colon like a necklace! I’ll… I’ll skin your feet and make you walk through acid! Don’t try me, man!”
“Jack…”
He looks down so quickly that he’s swallowing back bile. “I’m here, Mac. I’m here.”
“Waller wasn’ in on th’... on the joke.”
And it takes Jack a long second to figure out what he’s saying. “You mean he didn’t know about the worms? But he did. He was on comms.”
“He didn’t think it was funny.”
“Yeah, neither did I. What’s your-?”
And then he sees it.
“Oh,” Jack breathes. “He told us to shut up when we were talking about it. I doubt he was even listening. He probably wouldn’t think to set out worms… would he?”
“Griggs and Hadley thought it… it was hysterical.” Mac’s shifting uncomfortably now, curling in on himself.
“Griggs and Hadley are dead, Mac.”
Mac coughs hard into his fist. Jack tries to ignore the bright red on Mac’s hand.
“Presumed dead,” Mac corrects. “By Waller.”
Waller clearly wasn’t the most reliable source. But Jack wouldn’t think he’d ever lie about something like that.
“Okay, maybe you’re hallucinating,” Jack reasons. “You’re telling me a couple dead guys kidnapped us.”
“Maybe.” He’s getting tired. Jack can see it in the way his eyelids droop. In how his fingers have stopped twitching.
“Mac, I don’t… I don’t know what to do. I’m not going to shoot you.”
“You… You could.”
“I-”
“Listen.”
And Jack listens. He listens and he plots and he tries his best to sort out exactly what kind of crazy plan Mac is rambling on about. He tries his best to follow through with the plan. Does every step down to the detail and tries to ignore how Mac keeps retching and coughing and fading.
Until Jack can’t ignore it anymore.
“Mac, please. Wake up.”
But Mac is falling out of reach. Jack isn’t sure if Mac can even hear him.
“Mac. Mac! Mac!” He does a sternal rub and shakes Mac’s shoulders and begs him - screams at him - to open his damn eyes.
But it’s too late. Jack is frozen, staring at the hopelessly pale face of his partner, lips covered in blood and eyes closed for the last time. He isn’t sure how long he watches, heart slamming against his ribs.
“You win,” Jack finally croaks. “One lives, one dies. Mac is dead. So would you… Would you open the damn door?”
But the door doesn’t creak open. Instead, the voice speaks from the ceiling.
“Shoot him.”
Jack shakes his head. “Wh-? What? He’s dead! Just let me go!”
“I don’t believe you.”
Jack closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. God. He’s really going to have to do this, isn’t he?
“Okay,” he concedes. “Fine.” With hands too steady for someone on hour forty without food, Jack picks up the gun. He doesn’t stand up - his head might explode if he even tries - and shoots without another thought. Blood instantly blooms from his shirt.
“There,” he says, voice cracking. “I did the damn thing. Now let me out.”
For one long minute, nothing happens. Jack sits on the floor. Mac bleeds. Jack grips Mac’s hand. Mac doesn’t grip back. “I’m so sorry, brother. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The door groans. Jack jumps, and it makes his vision extra blurry.
“Well, Dalton. I never thought it’d be you.”
Jack has to wait a moment to see who it is. And then Jack realizes that Mac was right.
“Griggs. You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Dead?” Griggs scowls, gun aimed threateningly at Jack. “Is that what you told yourself so you could sleep at night? That me and Hadley died in the explosion?”
“Waller told us-”
“You left us,” Griggs hisses, crouching so he’s at eye-level with Jack. “We were wounded and captured by Samrozi’s men. They kept us in a cell. Starved us. Kept us awake for days on end. We were tortured for intel on the agency for years.”
Jack should feel guilty. But all he feels is rage.
“And then, six years after we were captured, Samrozi gave us an out.”
“‘One lives, one dies.’”
Griggs looks at Jack like he’s a dead rat. “I thought I’d never do it. But I broke. I killed my best friend. Just to live.” He stands, glaring down at Jack. “And if MacGyver was playing dead - which I’m sure he was - you just killed your best friend too.”
“So what now?”
“Now? Now, I kill you.”
POW!
Griggs stumbles, hands grabbing his side. Blood coats his fingers, and he collapses in a heap.
Jack takes the gun from Griggs’s hand and sighs, relief flooding him. “Cutting it a little close there, Mac. For a second, I thought you might have actually died.”
“Still might,” Mac mumbles, laying back down and tossing the homemade zip gun to the side.
“I know,” Jack grumbles, digging through Griggs’s pockets for a phone. “Don’t worry, bud. Your big brain got us through that, so I can get us out of this.”
Mac hums. “Usin’... Usin’ the empty shell as a… blank was your… your idea.”
“Yeah, but you were the one who made that blood bag.” Jack recoils at the thought, knowing far too much about the blood staining Mac’s shirt. “I know you couldn’t spare any blood, but I could’ve bled into the bag for you. We didn’t have to use vomit blood.”
“You could… have hepatitis.”
Jack ignores him for a moment, interrupted by a voice over the phone. “Who is this?” Matty growls.
“Jack Dalton. Code A43-8. I need a medevac to… um… the location of this cell. Can Riley get that?”
“Stay on the line.”
Jack covers the receiver. “Hepatitis?” he whispers. “Seriously?”
Mac does not look apologetic.
“Okay,” Matty says. “We’ve got you. Medevac will be there in ten. And then, I want to hear just what the hell happened on this ‘manniversary’ trip that ended in an emergency exfil.”
“Can’t wait.”
(He can wait.)