This Trophy Isn't Real Love

Chapter 11

Jack will never, for the rest of his life, be able to completely escape the image he's confronted with inside James MacGyver's house.

The decision to forego knocking in favor of a well-placed shoulder to the wood of the door is one easily made. Even on the front porch, the raised voices inside the building are clearly audible. Actually, no. Raised voice. Singular.

Out of whatever he'd been expecting, whatever Jack thought he'd find when he got the message - just a location ping from the GPS app on Mac's phone and three little dots indicating further typing that just went away after several long seconds - and raced to the place indicated, this was… This was nothing he'd have ever seen coming. Even with Delta instincts, CIA training, Phoenix experience, it takes a long fraction of a moment for Jack to process what he sees when the door flies open, banging loudly off the interior hallway wall.

James is there, in the living room, voice booming like bottled thunder and hand a vice around Mac's wrist. He has his son pinned to the wall with one hand, Mac's own clenched fist shoved back against his chest and trapping him there. James' other hand is pulled back, about to deliver what is, judging by the blood dripped from Mac's chin down the front of his shirt, not the first blow of this altercation. Mac's eyes are squeezed tight shut and he's shaking, hard enough that Jack can see it from across the room.

That split piece of a second is all it takes for Jack to gauge what's happening and shut off every part of himself shrieking with white-hot, incomprehensible panic, and move into action. There is, at the moment, room for only one objective.

Get James off Mac. Now.

If there is any satisfaction to be found in the nightmare Jack has walked into, it's in the feeling of the fistful of James' shirt he snatches up to pull him in one swift yank away from Mac, and in the feeling of the man's head snapping hard to the side with the force of the right hook Jack sends square into his jaw. James is down in a second, the momentum of the pull and the punch sending him several feet away. He's obviously dazed, falling heavily to the side upon his first attempt to get up.

Jack takes a step towards him, ready to finish what he'd started with that punch, already winding up to express exactly the kind of overwhelming, all encompassing rage and grief he feels at the sight of the blood on James' knuckles. Mac's blood. This man has Jack's kid's blood literally on his hands and by the time Jack is done with him, he'll-

"Jack."

There is only one thing in the world that could've stopped Jack just then, frozen him in place before he could even come within range of James, and that is it. Mac.

Mac's voice, barely audible yet slicing through the crashing rush in Jack's ears. Mac's voice, splintered and involuntary, throwing pause over what Jack was about to do, what he's so sure is the right course of action. He wavers, and Mac says it again, just his name, in that horrible tone of voice Jack will never be able to forget the sound of. It seems like such a simple thing - James hurt Jack's boy, James needs to pay. One plus one is two. Except…

The fact of the matter, bare and plain, is that what Jack has just walked in on is abuse. He's interrupted an outburst of violent abuse, wherein Mac's father had him pinned, bleeding, to a wall, clearly having hit him at least once already and just moments from doing it again. And the conclusion based upon this is that the last thing Mac probably needs right now is to see Jack, the next best thing he's had to a father for more than half a decade, engage in a violent outburst of his own.