day three of Cairo Day 2026! @macgyvercairo
For the April 15th prompt: emergency contact
Just a tumblr post today (which means it's complete and not a WIP! For once!!) not on AO3 yet because I'm playing around with integrating the scene/concept into a different one of my fics at some point.
Mac figured that grief was the opposite of finding a needle in a haystack. It was wading through a lifetime of hay, and hitting a needle whenever you least expected it.
A day off, a routine medical checkup, and updating all those stupid forms Mac usually only skimmed.
Until Emergency Contact, and Jack Dalton, and a number that was no longer in use.
There was a touch-screen pen tethered to the tablet. Mac took it apart and put it together again over and over again until it stopped working.
He needed to fix it. In his line of work they ran into emergencies plenty often for it to be relevant.
Once he hit adulthood, he made his emergency contact Bozer. It was a no-brainer at the time, but then he’d enlisted. He’d started thinking about Bozer getting a call that Mac had blown himself up, and that he needed to get his ass to the other side of the world to deal with the fallout. He didn’t like the idea of that, it just didn’t seem fair. When he’d gotten paired up with Jack, even while the guy had still hated his guts, he’d thought ‘well, this asshole will have to deal with all the paperwork if I blow myself up under his watch anyways, so he might as well deal with the other stuff too’ and updated his emergency contact info. When Jack re-upped it saved Mac the trouble of changing it all over again.
Then they were working for DXS, so the info stayed the same. Bozer couldn’t be called if Mac got shot, cut open, or blown up in various countries around the world on ‘Think Tank business.’
Then Mac really never thought about it again. Why would he? It was just a no-brainer.
Mac drummed the pen on the plastic chair arm. He’d spent way too long staring at the form, the receptionist was shooting him odd looks.
Now that Bozer was involved in the spy business, Mac could just add his info back onto the form. Hell, he could throw Riley on it too while he was at it.
Mac stopped drumming the pen and started taking it apart again. The receptionist was definitely sending him looks now.
It just didn’t feel fair, that was what was bugging him. From now until the end of time all of Jack’s paperwork — from the dentist, to clinics, to anywhere — would be Emergency Contact: Angus MacGyver, and a number that would be in use until it wasn’t. Sure, it would never be used again, but it would be there.
You go kaboom, I go kaboom.
Mac reassembled the pen, it still didn’t work. He fixed the form. He turned it back in blank.
