Work Text:
“Hey, boss, there’s a package on your desk for you,” Piper said when Mack came into work on Monday morning.
“A package?” he repeated. Mack was used to reports and debriefs and bills at work, not packages. Anything he purchased for himself went to the apartment he shared with Elena and Flint; anything ordered for S.H.I.E.L.D. went to its respective department, not to Mack directly.
“Don’t worry, we already checked it over. Definitely not a bomb.”
“I wasn’t worried about that, Piper.” Well, now he was worried about it.
Mack had other tasks he needed to get through before he opened the package, though. He had taken the whole day off on Sunday, which meant there was a backlog of signatures needed and reports to read and various other minutiae to take care of. It was well after noon before Mack even had time to think about the package again, let alone open it.
The box was small enough that it had sat on his desk without being cumbersome to work around, but large enough that it definitely could contain a bomb.
Mack sighed. The worst part about S.H.I.E.L.D. being semi-public again was the constant security threats. The fact the label on the box was printed, not handwritten, didn’t help matters much. Nevertheless Mack slid the knife out of his thigh holster and cut through the layers of packing tape holding the box closed.
He furrowed his brow when he lifted the contents of the package out. Who would be sending him a photo album? He closed the flaps of the box again to see if he could glean any insight, but there wasn’t any return information, just his name and the address of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters.
Carefully, Mack opened the first page.
The only thing on the page was a birth announcement pasted in the center. Welcome to the world, Isabelle, it read in a breezy cursive font. Mack’s heart skipped a beat as he studied the photo more closely. He couldn’t be quite sure, with the size of the photo and the age of the baby (they all looked the same up to a certain point), but he thought he recognized that nose and those dimples.
He flipped the page of the album, and couldn’t help but smile at the next spread of photos. The page was painted pastel pink and soft brown — the former matched the baby’s swaddle, and the latter the monkey plush she gripped onto in all of the pictures. Her wide blue eyes made her seem more perplexed than adoring of the monkey, but it was adorable nonetheless. Mack’s focus was on all of the pictures, so it took him a moment to realize there was a caption, too.
My Daddy bought me a monkey friend so my Uncle Fitz won’t have to.
Unexpected tears stung at the back of Mack’s eyes. He had only seen one photo of this baby, Bobbi and Hunter’s daughter, and he already loved her.
Slowly, Mack closed the photo album. It had been addressed to him, but just the first page made it clear they wanted everyone on the team to see it. A teleconference call wouldn’t do it justice, which meant he had to wait for Daisy to get back from space and Fitzsimmons to come over from Scotland. Mack sighed, tracing his thumb over the outer edge of the album. Maybe he’d call in a few favors to get them here sooner.
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“So, is the world ending?” Daisy asked as she took a seat on top of Mack’s desk. “Because this seems like the sort of council you would call if the world was ending.”
“If the world was ending I wouldn’t have let this take three weeks,” Mack said drily. As it was this had been three of the longest weeks of his life, having such a big secret but not being able to tell anyone about it. He hadn’t even told Elena — mostly because he didn’t know how to explain how much it meant to him. She knew Bobbi and Hunter had been his best friends for nearly a decade of his life, but she hadn’t gotten to see how devastated he had been when they were gone. She didn’t know how happy he was to have a piece of them back.
“So what is it then?” Fitz asked, crossing his arms over his chest. He never was happy to be called in from Perthshire, but Mack knew he’d be changing his tune soon.
Mack unlocked the top drawer of his desk and withdrew the photo album reverently. He’d cleared his desk for the occasion — hence why there was room for Daisy to be sitting on it — and the assembled watched as he set the album down.
“Is that alien?” Jemma asked. “Really, Mack, you should know better than to take 0-8-4s out of the lab, it’s —”
“It’s not alien, Simmons,” Mack said, stifling his amusement at being lectured about S.H.I.E.L.D. protocols when he’d been the one to sign off on the damn things. “It’s definitely from earth.”
With that he flipped open the first page of the album. Daisy leaned over from her perch on the desk. “Welcome to the world, Isabelle,” she read out. Then, more slowly — “That’s a baby.”
“It is a baby,” Mack agreed, waiting for the pieces to fall into place.
“A baby named Isabelle,” Jemma half-said, half-asked.
“C’mere, Turbo,” Mack said, gesturing Fitz forward. As predicted, he had softened somewhat at Daisy’s first declaration. Fitz approached the desk, and Mack flipped the page for him.
“My Daddy bought me a monkey friend…” Fitz trailed off when he reached the part of the caption that had his name in it.
“Bobbi and Hunter?” Daisy asked quietly.
“I think so. I haven’t looked at the rest of it,” Mack said. “I thought we all should be here.”
The rest of the team approached the desk with the same sort of guardedness as Fitz had, until they were huddled in a semi-circle around the book. Sousa and Kora had come with Daisy, but they hung back, obviously aware that something they didn’t understand was happening.
They began flipping through the pages. Isabelle outgrew her swaddle but kept her monkey stuffed animal. She learned to crawl, then walk, then run (and fall an awful lot if the scrapes on her knees were any indication). With each page turned Mack was struck with how much Izzy looked like her parents. He had seen a fair few baby pictures of both Bobbi and Hunter, and the resemblance was frankly uncanny.
The photo album was carefully devoid of personal information, but the scraps of Bobbi and Hunter’s life they did get to see through Izzy growing up spoke of safety and happiness. Izzy grinned at the camera with a gap-toothed smile in nearly every photo, though she positive beamed in a photo of her in an oversized Quake is My Hero shirt. That photo didn’t have a caption, but it didn’t need one. The picture of Izzy precariously balanced on one leg did need a caption explaining that she was trying to do tai chi, and May’s smile — a real smile, not one borrowed from someone around her — was soft as she traced a fingertip under the words. Izzy still dragged around her stuffed monkey wherever she went, and apparently had fun tormenting a cat named Steve (or “Steeb”, as one caption said). She stargazed and did science experiments and twirled decorative batons and got dirty from head to toe. She lived a life, and it was documented for all of them to see.
Mack’s favorite page came in the form of a birthday party. There was a whole spread of Izzy with a posse of stuffed animals scrunched around a tiny tea table with even tinier cupcakes in their hands. The banner in the background of the photos was blurry, but tucked between the pages of the photo album was a blue construction paper card with HAPE BURDA UNKL MAK written across the front. Inside the card was a message in familiar handwriting. Dear Uncle Mack, I hope your birthday this year is really super good. Maybe next year we can be together. Love, Izzy. P.S.: Mummy says you can get a pony for your birthday when you turn 100. Is that true?
He chuckled as he re-read the message, soaking in the familiar lines of Bobbi’s script and the unfamiliar ones of Izzy’s messy signature. One day he’d get to see Izzy on his birthday.
More than one of the photos had been carefully cropped to cut someone out of the image, and that was even more obvious on the birthday party page. They’d left in just a shadow of who was on the other side of the camera and somehow, that hurt more than them being entirely absent. It was a reminder that Mack could have a piece of them, but never all of them. Not anymore.
He didn’t want to turn the last page. Turning it would mean the photo album was over, and Bobbi and Hunter would be lost to him all over again.
It wasn’t his choice, though. Jemma reached forward to flip to the last page, and…
“I can’t wait to be a big sister,” she read, voice choked. Izzy sat criss-crossed in the middle of a sunny room, holding her raggedy monkey under one arm and a strip of ultrasound photos in the other hand.
“Maybe we’ll get another photo album when the second baby is born,” Fitz said hopefully.
“I don’t want to wait that long,” Daisy said immediately. “There has to be something we can do, right?”
Mack held back a sigh. What could they do that he hadn’t thought of already?
“Come on,” Daisy said, reaching out to touch his arm. “Put me on it. I’ll figure something out.”
Mack looked to Coulson, as he still tended to do sometimes when there was a directorial decision he didn’t know how to make. The older man inclined his head slightly, and Mack was absolved of any guilt he felt when he agreed to let Daisy do more looking into the matter.
The group dispersed not long after that, mostly lead by Daisy and her desire to get working on the problem. Once again Mack was left alone with the photo album, but this time he didn’t need to feel any guilt over inspecting it more closely.
Carefully, he ran his fingers across every surface of the album he could find. The front cover, then the back cover, then the spine, until —
His fingers caught on the tiniest of grooves and Mack pushed in. A small compartment hidden in the spine of the book opened, and a memory card fell out.
He checked to make sure the door was locked before sliding the memory card into the computer and opening folder full of photos on it.
The birthday party looked different without him cropped out. Izzy looked so small in the photo of her in his lap, even if she was practically glowing with happiness. He hadn’t been able to make it out on his actual birthday, but one day late was closest to the day of he’d ever been able to visit.
Mack scrolled to the next photo, one of Izzy shoving a tiny cupcake into his mouth. Next year for his birthday he was going to be able to show the pictures of them together on his desk instead of having to hide them in a secret memory card. Next year he would have them back — he’d made a promise.
He wasn’t going to miss his godchildren growing up.