Aftermath
Mac doesn't remember how it happened, but he knows it was his fault.
The first time he speaks a word after he wakes up in the hospital, it all comes out in a landslide, his scattered memories spilling out for Jack to make sense of. Mac tells Jack about the flames, about the innate feeling that he's the one who caused them. Mac tells Jack about the smoke that forced its way down his throat, burning his esophagus and his lungs and leaving him unable to properly breathe. Mac tells Jack about slumping against a wall, about the image he saw of a man in a fireman's uniform approaching him, only to disappear into the haze of the smoke and the blur of Mac's eyes as they slipped closed—he doesn't remember that that man was Jack, not a fireman, and Jack doesn't tell him. Because Mac also doesn't remember how he ended up trapped in a building that he burned to the ground.
Mac doesn't remember the molotov cocktail that was thrown into his hands, doesn't remember Jack screaming for him to get rid of it as quickly and as safely as possible. Mac doesn't remember the bullet that tore through his shoulder as he ran through the door, forcing his hand open. He doesn't remember the horror on his own face as glass and fire spread across the room, doesn't remember getting cut off from Jack, doesn't remember turning around when he heard the cry of a little boy.
Jack is the only one who remembers, and he doesn't tell Mac.
In the days after Mac wakes up in the hospital, everyone but Jack walks on eggshells around him, refusing to explain why it is that they're suddenly treating him like he's made of glass. Jack knows they all wonder if Mac trapped himself in that building on purpose, set that fire with the intention of drowning in ash and flame. Jack wants Mac to tell them that there are much more straightforward, less painful ways of ending your own life, ways that don't result in extensive property damage that someone else has to deal with. Jack wants Mac to tell them that he'd never even think about killing himself because if he did, Jack would pull him out of the afterlife by the seat of his pants and kill him again for doing it. Mac tells Jack that. Jack doesn't tell anyone else.
Matty and Riley and Bozer tell Mac what happened, little by little, not the origins of the fire—Jack was the only one there for that, and he's not telling anyone what happened—but the aftermath. The gutted building, the smoke still rising into the sky three days later, the too-small bodies in too-small coffins. It was a preschool they were protecting, the three-year-old son of a senator and all of his classmates, when that cocktail was thrown and that bullet was fired. Mac went back to save the lives of thirteen toddlers. He rescued nine before he passed out inside the building.
Jack watches hopelessly as Mac's guilt grows, as he blames himself for a situation that was out of his control, a situation that would have been much worse had he not been there. But Mac doesn't remember what happened and Matty, Riley, and Bozer never knew, and Jack can't tell them, can't explain that Mac is innocent, that nothing that happened was his fault.
After five days, Mac asks about the fireman, and Matty tells him the only part of the truth that she knows, and Mac blames himself even more. Jack wants to scream that it isn't his fault, wants to yell that the burns on Mac's arms and the ghosts that crowd his mind aren't the result of any action of his, that they're just as much his fault as the bullet fired into his shoulder.
But he can't tell them, can't say a word at all because his throat has been torn and burned and any attempt at speech makes him sound like a bullfrog with a cold, his words unintelligible, and every time he so much as swallows everything inside of him burns. Jack went after Mac that day and had to make a choice between his life and Mac's, and he made the easiest decision of his life—he'll always choose Mac's life over his own. When the ceiling caved in, Mac was lying unconscious on the street, and Jack was the one trapped inside. By the time they got him out, the damage had been done.
And now Mac is the one getting all the blame because Jack can't vouch for him.
Jack can't vouch for him, can't speak for him, but he can be there for him, and that's always what he's been best at, anyway. Jack Dalton is really good at talking but he's even better at listening and so listening is precisely what he does, every day in that hospital room while Mac rambles on and on about his guilt until he can't take it anymore, and then Jack does another thing he's really good at and he pulls Mac into a hug.
It's a relaxed hug because Mac's arms were burned so severely by the fire that he can't move his hands, but it's the proximity that matters and it never takes long for Mac to relax into Jack's arms.
And as Mac's arms heal, he starts to hug back.
And as Jack's throat heals, he starts to talk back.
And Jack tells Mac what really happened that day, and when Matty and Riley and Bozer come to visit he tells them, too, talking until his scratchy voice goes out and then talking some more just for good measure. He doesn't stop talking until he knows there's not a doubt in anyone's mind that this wasn't Mac's fault, that it couldn't have been.
And if he works his throat so hard that he can't swallow for another week without it feeling like the fires of Hell are alive in his belly, so be it.
He'll always choose Mac's life over his own.