141well here it is folks. my deep dive au that i've been working on for literal months. will be posting as often as i can keep a chapter buffer, as i'm writing and editing five chapters ahead, likely once a week or more. chapter promo images, giving a hint as to what's coming, posted the day before the chapter is uploaded on tumblr, where i can be found at altschmerzes.
this fic is my baby, and i hope you like it. drop me a line, let me know what you think, and happy reading.
(for those of you playing along with the playlist at home, title is from sleeping at last's 'page 28').
Everything about the exterior of DXS is designed so as to be perfectly evocative of a think-tank. Jack's eyebrows climb steadily up as he rounds the winding side road towards the building. It looks more like a modern art exhibit than a building - tall struts of shiny metal add stability to banks of massive windows that seem like a structurally questionable decision for an architect to make regarding an office in earthquake-riddled Southern California. The grass is a bright, friendly green, studded with benches and carefully maintained sidewalks. There are no big signs announcing the name of the place, either the truth or a cover, though he can easily picture one, a tasteful block of sandstone near the road to the parking lot, carved with Smart Place Where Smart People Work. Okay, maybe not that, but some kind of lofty sounding name like The Something Or Other Institute or The Fancy Last-Name Group. Something high brow and think tank-y and not at all in his wheelhouse. It's enough to almost give a man second thoughts.
In all, he wasn't sure what he was expecting out of the home base of his new, super secret, probably super dangerous job, but this… wasn't it. Then again, Jack muses, pulling into a spot near the front doors, that's probably the point.
There's a handful of people milling about outside, coming in or heading home or on break, and it's so strikingly normal that he hopes he's in the right place and not about to fall prey to an elaborate prank from an old friend with an odd sense of humor.
When Matilda Webber had first told him about this, Jack had been sure she was messing with him. Department of External Services. DXS. It sounds so much like something out of a blockbuster Marvel movie that he couldn't believe it was a real place where real people worked. Where Matty wanted him to work.
The offer came out of the blue, at the end of the short-term consulting gig he'd been doing with the NCIS office in Los Angeles. He'd only been puttering about the promenades and beaches for less than a day, killing time in gorgeous coastal California before the next request for an assist on a particularly tricky or grueling mission came his way when the phone rang. It was Matty Webber, a friend from far back enough in the day that her number wasn't programmed into his newest phone, and he could only guess as to how she got ahold of the number. One thing led to another, and there he was, having pulled up at a public park, wondering if he got the address wrong or if Matty had finally cracked in the years since they last saw each other.
"Hey, I'm here," he said into the phone, squinting over rolling green lawn and tennis courts. "Where are you?" A moment after he asked it, Jack spotted a lone figure with long, dark hair sitting still at a picnic table, two coffee cups set out in front of her. "Never mind, I see you."
Matty looked up when he reached the table and gestured for him to take a seat on the bench opposite hers. Jack did so with a skeptical look around. Poor visibility of threat angles, a dozen escape routes going in all directions, the possibility of being overheard by a bunch of teenagers playing frisbee with a degree of delight and distraction indicating they were most if not all stoned out of their skulls… Overall, not an ideal meeting place to discuss the kind of business that Jack and Matty have had cause to discuss over the time they'd known one another.
"Is there a reason we're doing this here?" he asked eventually. Matty rolled her eyes and pushed the yet-untouched coffee cup towards him. Jack eyed the Starbucks logo, then picked it up and took a cautious sip. "I don't know if I should be flattered or worried that it's been how long since we worked together and you still remember exactly what I do to my coffee."
"You should be flattered, and we're doing this here because it's a nice day and the entire three weeks I've been at my new job I've been stuck inside at a desk untangling a genuinely impressive mountain of red tape and paperwork left behind by my predecessor's untimely departure." Matty's tone was exactly as sharp and acerbic as Jack remembered it being, and it was paradoxically calming to his nerves.
Since he returned from his stint as an EOD overwatch, and once he was finished with the time spent on the family land in Texas, helping his mother with all the projects around the house he always swore he'd get on but never did, Jack's life had been one temporary project after another. His reputation preceded him, but while the offers of consulting jobs weren't scarce, neither were they permanent, and the constant moving and changing was beginning to wear him down. To see Matty here today, and have her be exactly as he remembered her, it was a breath of fresh, familiar air.
And then there was the matter of why he was seeing her. The mysterious opportunity she'd called about, the one she'd referred to as 'the chance of a lifetime' and then absolutely refused to tell him anything more about until they were able to meet in person.
"So," Jack said, setting the coffee cup down and meeting her constantly evaluating, measuring gaze straight on. "What's going on, Matty? Why am I here?"
The primer on DXS and the news that there was yet another mysterious government-run body watchdogging the safety of the known world from an unobtrusive corner of Southern California is not the strangest part of the tale Matty spins for him. It's a tale that begins with the day she got a phone call from a man she knew back even before she and Jack had worked together. This man, an old work colleague she owed in a way that was too serious and deep to discuss with any degree of detail, had told her of an organization in crisis and asked for her help, calling in that old favor. James MacGyver, Director of the Department of External Services, had called Matty asking her to take the recently and traumatically vacated spot as Deputy Director, after the discovery that his agency had been breached by a double agent, infiltrated by a group known only as 'the Organization'.
"So when Director MacGyver discovered what had happened," Matty said, laying the whole unbelievable tale out with an air of near-boredom implying the novelty of the wild situation wears off once you spend enough time filling out forms in triplicate about it, "he went through DXS with a fine-toothed comb. Anybody whose story or credentials or conduct gave him even a hint of a reason to suspect they were involved with the breach, or knew about it, or could've known about it and missed it, was fired immediately. Some of them were brought up on charges, and that's still being sorted out. One of the people who was ousted as a result was his previous Deputy Director, Patricia Thornton." Catching sight of his bare-faced shock, Matty held up a hand before Jack could ask. "Yes, it's the Thornton you're thinking of, and no, I can't hardly believe it myself. But here I am, sitting at her desk, trying to figure out how to put this agency back together after the whole place got torn apart and turned inside out."
Swallowing past his surprise and putting aside the issue of the name 'Thornton' for another time, Jack focused on the more pressing point at hand.
"Why do I get the feeling you didn't just explain all of that because you have a fondness for storytelling."
"You're right," Matty admitted immediately. "That isn't why at all. I explained all of that because it's necessary background for what I'm going to say next. I have a job offer for you."
"Job offer," repeated Jack back to her, voice blank. He'd have listed any of a dozen assumptions about this meeting before he'd have gotten remotely in the vicinity of 'job offer'.
"Well, it's half job offer, half a favor. Really, it's me doing you a favor if you think about it. DXS lost good people after the Director…" Matty trailed off, eyes doing a circuit of the park's perimeter as she searched, most likely, for a delicate way to phrase things. "Cleaned house. As it stands, his top agent is currently without a partner." There was a pointed tone to the end of that sentence, and one of her eyebrows arched up, and Jack wished he was a little less good at putting two and two together.
"And you want me to come be this 'top agent's partner? What makes you think I'm the right fit? Or that I'd even want to?"
"Because you haven't had a steady position since you got discharged and you're only going to be able to stand living like this, anchorless and drifting around as the on-call handyman of the international security world, for so long. You need a purpose. A challenge. And I've got one. DXS, we need a guy like you, and you? You need a job like DXS. You don't have the stomach for anything less. Am I wrong?"
It seems rather too on the nose, hitting far too close to the mark for the time and distance that's separated what was once a firm friendship and what they are now. They'd worked well together back in the day, but it's been years, and the last assignment they'd been on as a team hadn't ended pretty. It hadn't destroyed their relationship, but it came close, and Jack still wasn't quite sure where they stood with each other. He didn't think it was on the kind of ground from which a person said things like that.
"You're not wrong," Jack said finally, because she wasn't. Matty wasn't wrong, she knew too much about him to believe he could live like he was living for long. He did need a purpose, a challenge, and it looked like she might be about to hand it to him. "Tell me about this top agent. The one who needs a partner."
Still sitting for the moment in his car outside the front doors of DXS, Jack glances at the passenger's seat of his car. Or, more accurately, at the unassuming manilla folder sitting in the passenger's seat. Matty had brought it with her that day to the park and pulled it out of her bag when he'd asked about the agent he was to be partnered with, like she'd known beforehand that he was going to agree. He reaches over and flicks the folder open, taking a look again at the brief profile that Matty had stuck in before a few after-action reports, to give him something of an idea of what he was getting into.
Angus MacGyver. That had been the first indication that something was up with this new partner he's signing up for. The top agent, the one Matty recruited him to work with, has the same last name as the Director of DXS.
"The nepotism kid?" Jack can still hear himself asking, incredulously, over the phone when he'd got home that night, had time to put two and two together. "Your amazing job offer, the one that's doing me a favor really, is babysitting the nepotism kid? I can't believe you got me involved in this just to get me assigned to the nepotism kid." Nepotism had begun to stop sounding like a real word, but Jack couldn't help but repeat himself, the idea was so ludicrous.
Matty had defended the agent, this 'Angus MacGyver', and her decision to get him involved, saying that Jack should reserve judgement until he actually met the young man in question. Apparently, there was a lot more to him than his last name, but Jack still finds himself doubtful, squinting at the building, banks of windows reflecting bright late morning light. It's so deceptively shiny, like the surface of a lake that goes deeper than anyone could possibly fathom. Every inch of his rationality, his critical thinking, is telling him there's more to this assignment, and this nepotism kid, than meets the eye, but not necessarily in the way Matty meant.
Figuring there's nothing else for it - and people are gonna start to think something's up if he sits here in his car and stares at the building for too much longer - Jack turns the car off and gets out, leaving the information folder there on the passenger's seat. After all, he's about to meet the real deal soon.
There's an assistant waiting for him when Jack enters the lobby. She gives him a bland smile, doesn't introduce herself, says, "Director MacGyver's waiting for you," and turns around to walk back down the hall before stopping to verify if he's following. Jack moves after her, jogging a little to keep up when his attention is pulled away from the new environment by the realization that his guide is leaving him behind.
As he follows the assistant down the hall, Jack notices people paying absolutely no attention to him in the most conspicuously deliberate way possible. Heads stay ramrod straight as he passes, no casual swing to the side to track the movements of the newcomer in an office that likely doesn't see many of those. At the same time, eyes flick to the side once then snap back to stare intently at conversational partners, conversations themselves dimming then rising again when he passes. It's way more of a spectacle, disguised though it may be, than a new recruit warrants, even here, so Jack figures it must be something to do with his partner. They all know he's here to babysit the nep- excuse him, DXS's top agent, and it makes him big news on campus, he figures.
Around the next corner, and there he is, the man himself. There's no mistaking James MacGyver, even without the placard in the wall next to his shoulder reading DIRECTOR. Every inch of his posture and dress radiates understated control, a man without a question of where he stands in the world. He stands leaning against a door jamb outside his office, glancing every few moments down at his watch, with a kind of banal impatience that Jack recognizes from bureaucrats everywhere. Surreptitiously, Jack glances down at his own watch, just to be sure he isn't late.
It's ten fifty-two in the morning. Jack's introductory meeting with the Director and his new partner was scheduled for eleven. He's early, which is industry on time, which means there shouldn't be a problem. Shaking his head as if to dispel any kind of nervousness over an infraction he hasn't actually committed, Jack holds his chin up, schools his expression, and walks right up to his new boss.
"Ah, you must be Webber's magic bullet," the man says. Calculating blue eyes sweep over Jack, evaluating him head to toe, and the back of Jack's neck prickles. Matty hates when people just call her 'Webber'. "Director MacGyver. Pleasure."
"Likewise," Jack says, drawl seeping into the word more strongly than it usually would. "Jack Dalton." He accepts Director MacGyver's offered hand and shakes it, barely managing to withhold a cringe at the strength of the Director's grip. It never made sense to him, what breaking a new aquaintence's hand was supposed to prove.
Whatever it was his new boss was looking for, he must have found it, because he nods once and lets go of Jack's hand.
"Now, this would be the part where I would introduce you to your partner," Director MacGyver sighs, looking around as if the man in question might be hiding somewhere in the nearly-deserted hallway. Even the assistant has quietly vanished in the way that assistants do, melting away to take care of some other vital task without which the organization would fail terribly, before anyone else even knew it needed doing. "Except that it would seem my son has misplaced his watch, or his calendar, or maybe his brain."
Unsure how to take that, Jack just smiles awkwardly, hoping he'll get ahold of the Director's sense of humor before not knowing how to take things gets him in trouble. Luckily, the Director moves on quickly.
"At any rate," he says, briskly moving on from the comment and the irritation at MacGyver the junior's tardiness, "we can get started without him. Lots going on around here, lots to see."
The tour of DXS starts with the Director making a sweeping gesture off down the hall, towards a number of doors marked with the same kind of placard decorating his.
"This is where the offices for upper management are, this one's mine, you've got Deputy Director Webber's across the hall," his hand passes through the air as if swiping a palm across the closed door indicated. "We've had some turnover lately, in all our departments, some heads have been replaced, I'm sure Deputy Director Webber filled you in on most of that. Things have started to settle down now, though, and with your instatement as Angus's partner things should be back in ship-shape in no time."
"About that turnover," Jack says, looking around the hall and trying to sound casual. He neglects to bring up that he isn't even sure if he's taking the position yet, some last reservations holding him back. "The mole problem. How worried do we still need to be about that?"
The Director dismisses the question with a wave of his hand, shaking his head along with it. "Not worried. The 'mole problem', as you put it, has been thoroughly addressed. Nothing you need to be concerned with. Your role here will be exclusively as Angus's partner, you know. His Overwatch, essentially, which according to Webber you have experience with, make sure he doesn't get himself killed or tank the mission because he doesn't notice some glaring threat. He's highly intelligent and very good at his job, but he needs watching, you know, like all exceptional agents, he gets tunnel vision. Misses the forest for the trees- No, misses the forest for the specific pine needle on the ground next to the tree. That's where you come in."
"Got it," Jack says shortly. That description doesn't exactly instill a lot of faith in him, but he's willing to reserve judgement until he actually meets the agent in question. Maybe his father is just being overprotective.
"Good. Now, down there's the head of exfil, you probably won't talk to him much, exfil shows up when you need 'em and disappears just as fast, and then our chief of medical, you'll probably see him more often..."
It goes on, with a handful of other leaders of departments Jack is pretty sure he'll have little if any contact with, if this job is one that ends up sticking.
It's that thought that dogs his steps as he follows Director MacGyver through the building, the question of this job sticking. It feels different than the consulting gigs he's been bouncing around since shipping home, the unmoored bouncing from Texas to New York to DC to California. If he takes this job, if this meeting goes well, and he commits, then he's in it. He's stuck in this building with this partner he has yet to meet, stuck in California, hundreds of miles away from his family in Texas. But there's something about just being in this building, following this man as he shows Jack past the elevator downstairs to the shooting range and the tactical gear storage, that makes his heart beat a little faster.
The Director gestures down a hall towards interrogation and interview rooms, just different enough to warrant different names, and Jack holds his head up a little higher. He points out a gym, containing two sparring agents, and Jack's stride grows a little longer. There's something about being here that feels right, and if it's that he was born for this kind of work or that he's too stuck in it by now to be able to adjust to a normal life, Jack doesn't know. Either way, here he is, and here he's going to stay. He needs this job and, according to Matty, this job needs him.
Just as he's about to hit the button for the elevator that will take them to another floor, Director MacGyver stops what he's doing, instead fishing his phone out of his jacket pocket. One glance at the screen and the man's face tightens somewhat, irritation but disguised, just barely carelessly enough that Jack caught it.
"It would seem that your new partner has deigned to join us, and will be to Conference F shortly, if you'd like to follow me that way."
