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Jill Morgan is born on a farm as the youngest of six and the only girl. Her early childhood is happy, almost idyllic, protected by parents who want Jill to enjoy her childhood for as long as she can, and five brothers who form an invisible barrier against every woe her home town could possibly throw at her.
It’s only when she becomes a teenager that Jill begins to realise that there are drawbacks to her position. The first time Jill brings a boy home, her brothers start drawing straws to determine which of them is allowed to drive her to school for the rest of the year. She’d like to point out that it wasn’t actually a date, but a classmate wanting help with a maths problem, but it’s not like her brothers care about the particulars. The resulting confrontation leaves Jill frustrated and the poor boy traumatised. He doesn’t talk to her again until their first high school reunion.
Sometimes she feels like a side character in someone else's story, crushed under the overwhelming intensity of her brother's protectiveness.
No boy even dares to approach her when she starts arriving to school with an overprotective brother at her side, which is probably why it takes her until senior year and the arrival of a new French substitute teacher to realise she isn’t actually attracted to boys at all.
Jill is terrible at languages, but that year she manages to raise her French grade for the first time in years. Mademoiselle Arnaud’s smiles are enough of a reward.
When she’s sixteen, Jill applies to a job for the first, and unknowingly to her, also the last time. It’s not really a job interview so much as the local librarian staring at her for five minutes before asking her what hours she can work. The pay is shit, but it gets her away from the overwhelming presence of her brothers for a few hours a week, and she’ll take what she can get.
Her three oldest brothers join the military because money is always tight, and education is expensive. Jill and her youngest brother obtain scholarships. The day she leaves for college is frightening because the farthest she’s gone so far was a school trip to their state’s capital, but it feels like an escape as well.
Jill loves her family, but the first time she enters her dorm room, Jill feels like she can finally breathe.
…
Her first year at college is entirely covered by her scholarship, but after that Jill has to find a job for the additional costs. Before she can even apply for anything, she’s headhunted by several companies looking for science majors with top marks. Jill finishes college in record time and is still pondering two separate job offers from equally prestigious tech firms, when her dorm room is invaded by a woman she does not yet know is going to be her future boss. Their first meeting is less than auspicious:
“Ms Morgan. My name is Matilda Webber and I’m here with a job offer.”
Jill stares at her, incredulous. “Should I call the police?”
Needless to say, she doesn’t take the job.
That doesn’t mean it’s the last she sees of the woman because, as Jill will soon come to know, Matilda Webber is nothing if not persistent.
“Ms Morgan,” a voice says from Jill’s left just as she’s about to take another bite of the atrocity her current employer’s canteen calls meatloaf. Matilda Webber sits down across from her and eyes Jill’s lunch choice with suspicion before placing a folder on the table between them.
Jill would like it to be known that her lunch choices do not in any way reflect on her ability to be a responsible adult, thank you very much.
She narrows her eyes. “How did you get in here?”
The company she works for does sensitive research and even Jill has a hard time getting through the door in the mornings and she’s an employee.
“I have my ways,” Ms Webber answers, sounding way more mysterious than Jill is prepared to deal with.
“No,” Jill says, putting her fork down with a bit too much enthusiasm. It hits the side of her plate noisily before falling to the ground.
She’d like that ground to swallow her whole now, please.
“Ms Morgan,” the other woman begins, pausing as if to wait just in case Jill wants to pick up her fork again. Jill doesn’t oblige her. The pause turns awkward quickly.
Jill clears her throat. “Look, Ms Webber, I’m very flattered that you want to recruit me for your think tank, but that’s really not a place I can see myself working at for the foreseeable future.” She shudders inwardly. The thought of being shut in a lab in some obscure building with a name few people have ever heard of for the rest of her life…
Jill hates think tanks.
Ms Webber’s eyes suddenly turn sharp, well, sharp-er, as the woman probably never had a moment being dull in her life…
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. But it’s not a conversation we can have here in the open.”
Before Jill can ask what she means by that, her pager (it says a lot about the state of the firm employing her that they still have pagers) starts ringing in alarm, and Jill has to leave quickly in order to prevent her lab assistant from burning down the building.
She’s glad for the interruption, really. There’s no way she’s ever going to work for a think tank. Jill wants a job that’s actually interesting.
…
That evening, Matilda Webber invades her dorm room again while her roommate is out. They only talk for ten minutes. Jill starts working for the Phoenix Foundation two weeks after graduating college.
…
In her first week working for the Phoenix Foundation the building is invaded by an assassin. Jill spends most of the time hiding somewhere where other people told her to be. Except for the last few minutes. Those she spends with a gun pressed to her head, terrified she’s never going to see her overbearing family ever again.
Her new boss saves her.
Jill might be a little bit in love with her afterwards. But that’s okay because she has the vague suspicion that a lot of analysts and lab workers at the Phoenix Foundation are a little bit in love with Matilda Webber, because the woman is competence personified and people like Jill are easily attracted to that kind of thing.
Jill would probably also be a little bit in love with the Phoenix’s top field agent if she were attracted to men in any way, she knows most of the field agents are, but instead Angus call-me-Mac MacGyver quickly turns into her favourite new lab buddy. Not only does he knows and understand the science that Jill has lived by for almost her entire life, but he’s a field agent and actually knows how to turn lab results into field applications which is incredibly useful.
And sometimes explosive.
“What happened here?” Jack Dalton, who has yet to address her by her actual name instead of Jane, Josie, or some kind of variation of names beginning with J says while sauntering into Jill’s second favourite and currently only a little bit on fire lab.
Mac looks at his partner with raised eyebrows while still holding the fire extinguisher.
“What does it look like, Jack?”
The rest of their experiment crashes to the ground while still smoking. The sound is almost deafening in the awkward silence.
“Well,” Dalton says, letting his eyes wander over the disaster zone. “I gotta say, Mac. You outdid yourself this time. Don’t think Matty’s gonna let you back into the labs anytime soon.”
Jill is fully ready to admit that she doesn’t really understand Jack Dalton. The man is the proverbial riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. He’s brash, often times inappropriate at work, and protects his partner with the fierce territorial instinct of a wounded lion.
Mac, she would describe as an almost-but-not-quite friend. They’re lab buddies who occasionally have lunch together. But Jack Dalton…
Jack Dalton drags her into personal vendettas, constantly gets her name wrong, and glares at her whenever she sits too close to Mac.
She really doesn’t understand him.
…
Things at the Phoenix Foundation change when Mac finds out that his boss is also his father. He leaves, without his partner, which shakes Jill’s worldview to the core. It’s during these few months that she finally comes to understand Jack, at least as much as someone can ever come to understand a man as enigmatic as Jack Dalton. He mopes, of course he does. Jill thinks he must feel Mac’s absence like a missing limb, but he also begins spending more time with her, occasionally dragging her to the canteen to eat lunch together. It takes her an embarrassingly long amount of time to realise that he’s doing that to take care of her in Mac’s absence, like he’s classified her as one of Mac’s people, and since Mac’s people are also Jack’s people, it falls to him to make sure she eats while his partner is away.
It’s…surprisingly nice. Jack has an incredibly weird sense of humour which works well with Jill whose sense of humour was nurtured in an adolescence populated by five brothers. She comes to care about Jack, too. By the time Mac has been gone for three months, she would classify Jack as an almost-but-not-quite friend, as well.
Jill gets promoted and takes charge of the team hunting for Murdoc. It’s exhilarating.
Then she dies.
…
Jill wakes up in a lot of pain. There are people in white who give her painkillers. She’s incredibly thankful to them but doesn’t manage to voice the thought out loud before she falls asleep again.
The next time she wakes up, there’s an exhausted Mac leaning back in the chair next to her bed, too long hair falling into his eyes. Jill knows he prefers it shorter.
At least he finally got rid of the awful beard he’d been sporting in the satellite pictures. Jack hadn’t shut up about that looks for days.
“Mac,” she manages to say before the dryness of her throat forces her to stop. Mac jerks up and smiles when he sees her awake. He feeds her an ice chip. Jill thinks this must be what heaven tastes like.
“We were really worried, but your injuries are a lot less severe than we initially thought,” Mac says, voice low and raspy, like he hasn’t spoken in days. Jill wants to know who “we” is when the door opens, admitting Jack to the hospital room.
He grins at her. “Glad to see you’re awake, Janie-girl.” He steps closer, and Jill expects to feel the slight sting she always does when he pretends not to know her name, but it doesn’t come. Right now, it almost feels comforting, this routine of theirs.
“It’s Jill, Jack,” Mac says, exasperated. Jack winks at her, and Jill has never quite managed to figure out how to tell him to stop, that she doesn’t find it nearly as funny as Jack seems to, but right now, she’s got other things on her mind, so she lets it pass.
“What…what happened?” Jill asks, desperately, because the last thing she remembers is Murdoc, in her car, and…oh god…
They tell her.
Jill is dead, officially. Murdoc didn’t quite manage to kill her, so the Phoenix apparently did the rest. Worse, she has to stay dead, at least until Jack and Mac manage to identify the mole who leaked her personal information to Murdoc. Because there has to be someone. No matter how good Murdoc is, there’s no way he could have gotten to her otherwise, not with the safeguards they put in place. So Jill has to stay dead until they find out who sold her out.
She wants to go home.
Mac and Jack stay with her through her recovery. Murdoc shot her, but it wasn’t fatal, and they will never find out why he didn’t kill her, but Jill doesn’t know that yet. She gets better surprisingly quickly, and Jack jokes more than once that her stubborn determination won’t let her accept anything else.
They spend the last few days before Jill is supposed to go into hiding in a surprisingly lavish hotel suite big enough for the three of them. On the last day, hours before they have to leave, Jack sits her down at the table, and it’s here that she meets the other Jack Dalton for the first time, the one who is intense, driven, and focused on his target. Usually that target is keeping his partner alive, but now she’s the centre of his attention and she feels like an insect caught in a spider’s web.
She doesn’t know how Mac can stand to be Jack’s focus for so long, but then again, Mac is usually just as fixated on his partner as well. They are both very intense people. Jill feels exhausted just thinking about it.
She looks at Jack.
This is the Jack Dalton Jill’s only ever heard stories about. The soldier and spy with an ice-cold reputation and impeccable aim. While Mac sets about cleaning the room of every trace proving she was ever there, Jack talks her through the next few weeks—tells her how to hide, and evade, and divert attention from her movements. His eyes are trained on her the entire time, the usual warm gaze turned into polished steel.
“You finished?” Mac asks, her bag in hand. Jack looks at his partner, eyes softening. Jill doesn’t know what happened to them, doesn’t know how they came to be separated for so long, but she’s glad they still seem to be drawn to each other like magnets. It gives her hope for the future.
…
Thankfully, Jill’s exile doesn’t last nearly as long as she thought it would, and she’s back at the Phoenix after only a few months.
She gets hugs from both Mac and Jack, and realises only then how much she’s actually missed them. If her eyes are red afterwards, her co-workers either don’t seem to notice or are polite enough not to mention it.
The mood at work is subdued, full of tension. She’s welcomed back happily but it feels as if the entire building is waiting for something to happen, something terrible, and Jill doesn’t know what to do with that.
Something does happen, something she would have never expected. Jack Dalton is going to leave, and he’s going to leave quickly. The unbreakable team is going to be broken up, and it looks like Jack is the one doing the breaking.
The Jill Morgan from two years ago would never have involved herself in a situation like this, but that Jill hadn’t yet been taken hostage by an assassin hell bent on destroying them, hadn’t yet been dragged into Jack Dalton’s personal crusade to help his partner find his dad, hadn’t yet died because of an assassin obsessed with Angus MacGyver.
She feels she’s owed at least some kind of explanation.
Since asking Mac about things involving his emotions is like pulling teeth, she goes to Jack for answers.
…
Jack’s explanation is…concerning.
“I gotta catch this guy, Jenny, he’s really bad news. I thought I got him last time, but I guess I was wrong,” Jack says, eyes fixed on something over her shoulder. He looks a lot older than he did yesterday, like an invisible weight has been added. Jill doesn’t like it.
“Why are you leaving Mac behind again?” Jill asks, because, while she can understand that Jack wants to leave to find this guy, she knows he doesn’t actually want to leave Mac. The idea of them separate, one without the other, is anathema to her worldview. There’s no Mac without Jack anymore, for her. It’s Mac and Jack, always and without question.
Jack flinches. “I…I can’t have him anywhere near this guy.” He looks surprised by the admission, as if he hadn’t quite realised that himself until now.
“They wouldn’t let me bring him anyway, and I told Mac that, I told him-,” Jack closes his eyes. “It’s a lie. I could get him on the taskforce so easily…” his last words turn into a whisper, anguish cutting off his ability to speak. Jill would bet Mac already knows that, knows that Jack is trying to protect him by leaving him behind and nothing else, but hasn’t told Jack out of kindness—the desire not to add to his partner’s already considerable burden.
She looks at Jack’s phone, clutched tightly in his hands, knuckles white with tension. If she squints, she can just about make out the figure of Kovacs in the grainy surveillance picture on the display.
“Wait-,” Jill says as a sudden idea strikes her. “Why would they send you this after all these years? I mean…how long ago did you say this was again? Twelve years? He’s been alive for a while.” She shrugs, suddenly unsure. “It just seems…awfully convenient.”
Jack turns to her and she takes an instinctive step back. The expression on his face is the kind of intense she’s only ever seen once before, the night he told what to do in order to stay dead.
It’s frightening, and if she were into guys at all, it might have also been a bit arousing. She’s beginning to understand what Mac sees in his partner.
“You’re-,” Jack begins before taking a deep breath. He rubs a hand over his face, expression thoughtful.
“Jack-,”
He stills, eyes fixed on something in the distance. “I am possibly the biggest idiot this side of Texas and if you tell Mac I said this, I’ll deny it.” He grins suddenly, grabs her shoulders and presses a kiss to her forehead. She squeaks.
“Sorry, sorry,” Jack says, raising his hand as if to scrub away the invisible evidence of his exuberance before thinking better of it. “’M not usually this inappropriate.”
Jill begs to differ, because until now, she wasn’t even sure the word appropriate existed in Jack’s vocabulary. She doesn’t voice the thought though, because his sudden cheerfulness is infectious.
He takes a step back and motions towards the door.
“I gotta...talk to Matty. See you later, Jill.”
Her heart skips a beat, feeling impossibly light. It’s the first time she’s ever heard him use her actual name.
Jill is not quite sure what just happened, but she’s got a feeling things just changed for the better.
Jack will never again pretend not to know her name.
…
Jack doesn’t leave. Mac stops moping. The two things are connected which Jill knows because she knows Mac and Jack who are her friends.
Jill no longer feels like the side character in someone else's story. She writes her own narrative now.
She never does find out what exactly happened but she manages to piece together enough snippets of information floating among the halls of the Phoenix Foundation to understand that Jack asked Matty a few particular questions inspired by the question Jill had previously asked him, and Matty in turn had taken these questions to D.C. which tied up the formation of that task force Jack was supposed to lead long enough, someone finally noticed the glaring holes in the reports about Kovacs’ continued survival.
Turns out Tiberius Kovacs never actually existed, and there was a big, very obvious mole in the investigation which also happened to be the current investigation’s lead agent.
Go figure.
Jack stays. A few months later he brings in the woman originally drafted to replace him anyway, because he's tired of being the team’s only member carrying a gun. Desiree Nguyen and Mac get on like a house on fire and Jack gains a lot of additional grey hairs.
Jill gets a trip to medical after walking into a support beam the first time she sees Desi smile.
But that’s a story for another day.