This Trophy Isn't Real Love

Chapter 16

While he did come here for a reason, though, Jack will be the first to admit he's an imperfect person, and he can't resist making some things very, very clear to James first.

"The only, and I mean only reason you're still in one piece right now is that it would make him feel worse if things went down the way I want them to." He fixes James with the coldest stare he can manage, allowing the deep reservoirs of glacial hatred he feels to show, steady and even on his face, matching the tone of his voice. "And, not that you'd know anything about this, what will help him is all that I care about here. Otherwise, you're a dead man."

"You can't- You can't talk to me like that," James sputters indignantly.

"You abused someone I love, I'll talk to you however I damn well please."

The use of that word, the ugly name of the ugly thing that festered in hiding for the last several months, it causes James' face to twist, his mouth curling up into a sneer and his eyes narrowing.

"Oh come on it wasn't- You of all people know what he's like. Kid's impossible to control. Give him an inch of rope and he'll take a mile and then hang himself with it. He needs course correction and to be taught discipline. You can't honestly tell me he follows orders with you any better than he did with me. You know exactly what I'm talking about, Dalton. You know how he is."

The positioning of the two of them as having anything in common, especially when it came to Mac, along with the justification of what James had done leads Jack to the conclusion that he'd been wrong. It is absolutely possible for him to get angrier.

"You can't possibly actually believe that," he says, voice quiet and hard.

"What, he some kind of angel when you're around?" James asks sardonically, and Jack is shaking his head before the question is hardly over.

"No. He isn't. Do you think he's listened to me a day in his life, done one thing I told him to when he thought he knew better? No. Hell no, of course not, but I'm sure as shit not about to start beating on him for it." Just saying the words leaves an acid taste in Jack's throat. His hands burn at even the act of refuting that he would ever look at Mac, at the strong-willed convictions and selfless acts of reckless bravery that were so central to who he is, and decide he needed to be hurt until he learned obedience.

Jack knows how it feels to hit Mac. He knows, and he will regret that caustic first meeting in the sandbox for the rest of his life, though he hadn't known the kid from Adam at the time. Now, with time and blood and family between them, the idea of striking Mac out of anger or a desire to punish him, it's enough to have Jack gritting his teeth against sharp, sick nausea.

"Don't be dramatic, Dalton, I never beat him," James scoffs, and Jack feels like his lungs have frozen solid. "So I smacked him a couple of times, knocked a bit of sense into him, big deal. I was trying to keep him in line. It was for his own good. Besides, Angus is an adult. He didn't need to stand there and take it. If I'd really been hurting him, he'd have fought back, it's not as if he isn't trained well enough. I didn't hit him anywhere hard enough or often enough for it to be abuse, that's just dramatic."

"If you had never hit him once, what you did to him would still be abuse," Jack fires back at him. He can hear his own heartbeat in his ears, and it's decades of experience with various high-stress high-danger jobs that keeps him calm and continuing to speak coherently. His anger is sitting cold and hard in a line across his shoulders, ice and iron and very, very still. "The shit you put in his head, the way you made him feel? The way you made him see himself? You didn't have to hit him to hurt him, though you certainly didn't let that stop you."