Physical Thoughts
The first time Steve stumbles upon a tiny metal sculpture, it's lying on the floor of his office beneath his couch, right up against one of the legs. He doesn't think much of it at first, the little doodad roughly in the shape of a hibiscus flower. He just picks it up and shoves it absentmindedly into his pocket before grabbing the object behind it which was his reason for looking under the couch in the first place: a half-finished report that blew off of his desk when Danny loudly and dramatically stormed out of the room about two minutes before.
Steve doesn't even remember that the metal flower is there until he's changing for bed that night and reaches into the wrong pocket to grab his phone. When he pulls out the tiny sculpture, he very nearly throws it away, but at the last second, he decides he likes it enough to keep it around. He leaves it on the counter in his bathroom while he showers, and eventually the little hibiscus moves to his dresser, then his nightstand, then back to the dresser again, until at some point it ends up wedged beneath the frame of his mirror in the upper left-hand corner, where he can see it every morning while he gets ready.
Despite seeing the small piece of art every day, Steve doesn't think much of it—it's not remotely dangerous or threatening in any way, so he doesn't need to give it a second thought. At least, not until he stumbles across another sculpture.
This one, Steve finds abandoned on the corner of the smart table. It's in the shape of a Five-0 badge, complete with the small rectangle in the center that carries the Five-0 designation. Steve spins it around between his finger and his thumb and comes to the realization that the little badge has been fashioned out of a paperclip. These things must take a great deal of concentration to create, well-made as they are.
As the door opens and Kono and Chin slip inside, arguing about a witness they've just returned from questioning, Steve slips the new trinket into his pocket. When he returns home that night, the little badge is deposited on his dresser and promptly forgotten about until the next paperclip shape appears.
The cycle keeps repeating over the following weeks: small sculptures of anything from a shrimp to a surfboard to a file folder appear all over the place, popping up wherever Steve goes. He finds a stethoscope on top of a file cabinet in Noelani's office, a pencil outside of one of the interrogation rooms, a tiny palm tree in the sane next to Five-0's usual table at Kamekona's shrimp truck. Steve pays little mind to the strange creations, merely scooping them up without a thought and discarding them on his dresser whenever he next returns home, sometimes adding two or three paperclips at a time to his rapidly growing collections. They seem to be harmless, perhaps a nervous habit of a Honolulu resident, and although they mostly appear to show up in areas that Steve frequents, he isn't too terribly concerned.
Then one day, he finds a small trident on the arm of one of the chairs in his backyard that overlook the small beach.
Steve twists the paperclip trident thoughtfully, wondering for the first time if these aren't a symbol of a killer or a stalker, much like the chess pieces left by Dr. Madison Grey for his team to find. No one else appears to have taken note of the tiny metal sculptures as of yet, but Steve promises himself that he'll bring them up the next time he's in a room with his entire team.
As it turns out, he never has to bother, because when Steve heads back indoors with the trident still resting in his palm, he encounters Jack Dalton in his kitchen, and the soldier takes one look at the paperclip before bursting into a massive grin.
"Looks like he likes you, Steve," Jack says, sounding genuinely happy about Steve's discovery of the little trident.
"What do you mean?" Steve asks, and Jack nods to the paperclip in his hand.
"Mac, man," Jack explains. "He's always making little pieces of paperclip art and stashing them all over the place. Where'd you find that one?"
"On one of the beach chairs in my backyard," Steve says, frowning. "You mean Mac's the one who's been leaving these things all over the place for the past month or so?"
"Yeah, Steve," Jack says with a laugh. "The kid's got a major fidgeting problem. Can't ever seem to keep his brain or his hands busy. His granddad got him into the habit of messing with paperclips when he was a kid, and he's been doing it ever since."
"Why do you think this one means that Mac likes me?" Steve asks next, his curiosity getting the best of him as he holds up the trident-shaped paperclip.
"It's a trident, Steve," Jack says. "A SEAL trident, or at least a more literal version of one." Steve's eyes widen when he makes the connection between the trident and the SEAL insignia. "Mac makes those little sculptures all the time," Jack continues, "and more often than not they reflect whatever he's thinking about. After his girlfriend turned out to be a traitor, he musta made about fifty broken hearts. I'm still running across some of them tucked away in his house."
"The first one I found was a hibiscus flower in my office at the Palace." Steve comments and Jack's grin widens.
"I'm guessing this was not long after Mac and I arrived on the island?" He asks and Steve nods, aligning the timeline of Mac's presence at certain locations with his own discovery of the paperclip trinkets. "That's the state flower of Hawaii, the hibiscus, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it is," Steve confirms, a small grin growing on his own face to match his friend's. "I'm guessing that had something to do with Mac adjusting to Hawaii." Jack nods, a proud expression on his face.
"Now you're getting it, brother." He says. "You know, I haven't been finding many of Mac's little artworks since we got here."
"That may be because I've been picking them up as I discovered them," Steve admits. "I've got a pile of maybe thirty on my dresser upstairs, all sorts of things. Some of them I get, like a palm tree and a shrimp and a surfboard, but others not so much. Why would Mac make a paperclip SIG?"
"Steve, don't even try to understand what's going through Mac's head at any given time." Jack shakes his head and barks out a laugh. "I found seven variations on a teddy bear in three days once, and I still haven't figured out the meaning behind them. Sometimes whatever Mac's hands make only makes sense to him, and sometimes he isn't even sure what he's doing. The paperclips are just a way for Mac to focus his thoughts, I think, and even if they don't end up revealing much of anything of use, they do help."
"They keep him focused on whatever's going on around him." Steve infers, and Jack nods.
"Back home at the Phoenix, we've got a big glass bowl sitting in the middle of the war room that's always filled to the brim with paperclips, just for Mac," Jack admits. "I'll admit it's a little weird, but it helps him think, and for as long as his thinking keeps saving lives I'll let him do whatever he needs to think better."
"Out of curiosity, where does he get all those paperclips?" Steve asks. "He must go through a hundred every month."
"Well, a lot are from the big bowl at Phoenix," Jack explains. "And he gets boxes of 'em from time to time, usually from coworkers. Everyone at Phoenix says Mac's the easiest person in the world to shop for, which is probably true." Steve laughs at this, recalling Mac's excitement at being given permission by Danny last week to take his old, broken toaster—which is now sitting on Steve's kitchen counter, fully functional and capable of toasting bread in half the usual amount of time.
"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me." Steve comments.
"The rest of the paperclips come from me." Jack continues, twisting the wolf ring on his finger in circles—a subconscious tick of his in the same way that Mac messes with paperclips, Steve figures. "I keep a stash of paperclips on me wherever I go and pass them on to Mac when he's too distracted to question where they're coming from. It's pretty useful when he's lost in his own head, and they've also come in handy on more than one occasion when he's needed a small, bendy piece of metal to create a taser or disarm a bomb."
"I have to say, Jack, I used to think you were one of the weirdest people I'd ever met," Steve says conversationally. "And then I met MacGyver."
"He's a weird one, Steve, I won't deny that." Jack agrees. "But he's also the best damn agent and the best damn person I've ever met." As he speaks, Jack digs around in his pocket, pulling out his wallet. He opens it and pulls out a paperclip sculpture that's been twisted into the logo of the Texas Longhorns. "Mac and I got off to a rough start in the Sandbox, believe it or not," Jack says, smiling warmly at the paperclip. "The day after I signed on for another tour to be Mac's overwatch, I found this on my pillow. I like to think it was Mac's way of forgiving me for being an asshole to him. I've kept it with me ever since."
"He's a good kid," Steve says, watching as Jack tucks the paperclip carefully back into his wallet.
"That he is." Jack agrees. Steve heads upstairs, pausing in front of his dresser and looking at the paperclip sculptures with new eyes. These little trinkets are pieces of Mac's mind, physical evidence of his thoughts. Steve knows that Jack must have a collection like this back in LA, and he decides that he's going to give most of these paperclips to his friend. Most of them.
When Steve returns to his room half an hour later after giving the majority of the paperclips to Jack, he looks at his mirror and smiles.
Wedged beneath the frame of the mirror are the trident, the Five-0 badge, and the little hibiscus flower.