There's one of the security guards Jack is more familiar with, watching the door of the room Matty directed him to when he approaches. Her hand twitches towards her radio, and there's a slight crease that appears in her forehead. Jack is smart enough - and savvy enough when it comes to reading people - to know what this means, what she's evaluating him for, what kind of threat she's decided he poses. He walks right up to the door itself, the woman's hand settling solidly on the body of her radio as he does.
"I need to be allowed in there," he says, voice granting no room for negotiation.
"Dalton…" she hesitates anyway. He gets it, he really does, but he doesn't have time for this.
"You know who that is?" Jack asks, and she nods. "And you know why he's here?"
"Not exactly, but I can guess." Her voice is grim, and Jack knows they walked past her in the lobby, the day Mac showed up with that black eye. It's not hard to put together, now that she's been instructed to guard Mac's father in a holding cell.
"Right. Then you know why I need a word with him." He holds up a hand to forestall what she's about to say, the objection he's sure she's going to lodge. "I just want to talk. Trust me, I know what's at stake if I give the guy the beatdown everybody seems to think I'm gonna. I won't. I just have some things I need to say to him. I won't walk outta there leaving him with one more mark than he had when I walked in, but I've gotta go in there. Okay?"
The security guard gives in maybe easier than Jack would deem wise, were he approaching the scenario as an uninvolved, objective observer. She doesn't seem to be too deeply invested in absolutely guaranteeing James' safety. She's done her due diligence and won't go a step further, and that makes Jack inclined to believe she's guessed if not exactly what happened, then at least pretty close to it.
"You can't keep me here," is the first thing James says when Jack walks into the interrogation room. He's sitting back in his chair with an arrogant arch to his chin, the chain of the handcuffs securing him to the table pulled just taut enough to visually display his annoyance with their presence. Not hard enough to hurt, though, Jack observes. Not that James had held the same concern for his son's wrists. The ghostly imprint of his hands around them had been visible in dark bloom on Mac's skin as he turned the steering wheel in the car that morning.
This thought doesn't help Jack's words come out civil, though civility is not a priority he holds in high regard when it comes to James. Not any more. It had been, in the beginning, but the right to that courtesy disappeared the first time James raised his hand against Mac, used his words to cut Mac down, to manipulate or intimidate him.
"The hell we can't," he snaps, coming to a standstill across the table. He finds he doesn't have it in him to take a seat, to sit in a chair across from the man responsible for the insecurity he's seen in Mac since the day they met, responsible for the acute pain the kid's in now. James is a smart man, he couldn't have missed the weight Mac carried around with him. He'd seen the damage, and then re-broke Mac's heart again along the fault lines, and Jack can't sit across from him like he's an equal. So instead he stands, arms folded, and studies James.
Normally, he would find some amount of satisfaction in the bruise on the man's jaw, the evidence of the right hook Jack had delivered yesterday. Normally, though, he wouldn't have the memory of how that punch had been delivered in the process of interrupting the man while he'd been hurting Jack's partner, wouldn't have the mental image of a bruise inked in the same place on Mac's face, superimposed over James' whenever Jack blinks. Satisfaction is not something he is going to find in this room today, but that isn't what he came for.
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."
"I didn't do anything I didn't have a right to do," James mutters.
"You terrorized him."
"I took a strict hand with him, when you've been too damn soft to do so. You're clearly a pushover when it comes to him, the way he acts like he can get away with doing whatever he wants, talking to me however he wants. Hell, maybe if you'd been a little harder on him, I wouldn't've had so much work to do." James pauses, shakes his head, then speaks again. His voice lowers and he speaks more slowly. "I had no idea he was going to be so sensitive about it. If I'd known it'd affect him like this, I would've done things a little differently."
It looks like James is about to continue, mouth halfway open and shoulders rising with words about to form, an infuriating kind of genuine regret on his face but Jack cuts him off before he can say a single one. This has gone far enough. He's heard enough. He's ready to get out of here and never see James MacGyver's arrogant face and empty eyes again. And Jack certainly doesn't think he can stand to listen to James explain that if he'd known it would affect him, he'd have gone about trying to change Mac into a different person without hitting him. To listen to him continue to blame Mac for his completely understandable, completely human reaction to this kind of trauma.
"I didn't come here to listen to you defend yourself to me or anyone else," he says. "What you did is inexcusable, and you're gonna spend a hell of a long time paying for it. I came here to tell you that on the off chance you ever get out from under whatever it is your people decide to pin you with, you do not go anywhere near Mac."
"If I choose to contact my son, that's nobody's business but-"
"You don't get to call him that any more. You lost the right to call him yours when he gave you a second chance and you took it and used it to hurt him again." If you asked Jack, James lost the right a long time before that, but that's a different argument than the one they've been having.
"Whose is he then?" James' eyebrows raise mockingly. "Yours?" Jack's face remains unchanged, and James rolls his eyes. "Whatever. You know what, take him. He's yours. You want to waste your time pseudo-parenting someone else's second-hand son, you be my fucking guest, Dalton."
The restraint it takes not to rise to the bait, to give James the fight he wants, is enormous. There are a thousand things Jack could say, a thousand refutations or defenses he could offer, but it isn't worth it. James isn't worth it. So instead, he focuses on the message he came here to deliver in the first place.
"If you get out, you don't call him, you don't text him, you don't send a carrier pigeon. I don't want you so much as in the same state, and if I find out you've tried to contact him..."
"You'll what? Kill me?" James' voice is raising in volume now, clearly moving from the blase annoyance of before to burgeoning panic and amplifying anger.
Jack laughs, and the sound is ice cold.
"I won't have to," he says. "Matty Webber will get to you first."
The door shuts behind him before James has the chance to respond.
After leaving the room where James was being held, Jack keeps walking. He walks past the woman from security, still guarding the door, down the hall, and out of the building. Once he's started walking, he just doesn't stop. He ends up in a taxi eventually, catching one far enough from the building that regulations on how close one can catch a ride with a taxi or ride-share service on Foundation grounds no longer apply. Jack doesn't plan on going where he ends up, but once he's there, it's hardly a surprise.
"Bastard said it wasn't abuse," Jack says, voice low and hollow, sitting across from his father's headstone. "That… man put his hands on Mac, split his lip and blacked his eye, grabbed him and shook him so hard he's got bruises for bracelets, and that's not even touching what he's done psychologically. On top of it, he's got Mac convinced he can't talk to me about any of it because he's scared I'm not gonna want him anymore. And James had the damn nerve to tell me to my face what he did wasn't abuse."
Jack's head drifts side to side, eyes wandering out over the cemetery. It's a calm, peaceful day, with only a few mourners or visitors scattered around the peaceful, solemn plots of stone. Nobody is within earshot, but Jack finds himself speaking quietly anyway.
"I can't get it out of my head," he tells the carved shape of his late parent's name. "I dreamed about it last night, y'know? That's… He's my boy, pop. He's my kid, and and I don't know how to stop seeing it every time I blink, seeing my kid bleeding in that man's hands. I wonder how I let it get that far. How I didn't see it. How I let this happen."
With a soft, humorless huff of a chuckle, Jack knots his fingers through the grass at his side, pulling at it gently. His chest feels tight and his face hot. The hand not pulling the grass rises to press against his sternum, feeling the hitching of his own breath as he tries not to collapse into sobs here at the cemetery. The weight of what's happened, of what was done to Mac, what he witnessed… Jack feels like his heart's been shredded chamber from chamber, left in pieces to desperately try to continue to function amidst the impossible to comprehend.
"I know what you'd say. I know he hid it real well, nothing I could'a done about something I didn't know about. But… Can't help thinking I should've known, y'know, dad? It's my job to know, to keep him safe, even if he thinks he can't come to me and tell me he's in danger. Hard to look at him like that and not feel like I'm responsible. He stopped…" Jack's voice splinters and he swallows hard, gaining control of his voice before he continues. "When James came back, he stopped laughing. I should've known."
Moments of silence slip by, a sense of quiet stillness settling over Jack in a way that's eluded him recently, since James appeared and Mac's laughter went away.
"You'd have loved him, pop," Jack tells his father after a time, a small smile gracing his face. The light breeze chills the damp lines down his cheeks, and he scrapes his wrist over his face, clearing the tear tracks. He can't afford to fall apart. Not when his boy still needs him. "You'd have loved him almost as much as I do."
The relative peace that visiting his father always brings Jack is shattered the instant he walks back into the Foundation and sees Matty's face.
"What," he says, stopping dead in his tracks. "Where is he? What happened?"
"They have what James did to Mac on video," she says without preamble or deflection. "James kept surveillance, and the Agency has it now. I don't know how much or how far back, but Deputy Director Hill interrogated him like he was a suspect and then ended the interview when he was told about the video."
"Where is he? Mac, where is Mac?" Jack wastes no time asking unnecessary questions, just peers around Matty's shoulder, stepping to the side and raking his eyes around the room looking for his partner. Video. There's video.
"He left. I've been caught on the phone with the director of the Agency talking about this video - which you will notbe watching, by the way, because seeing any of that will devastate you and it certainly won't help Mac - and he's gone. Home, according to Riley, she texted when he got there." It's a thorough brief of a deceptively simple situation, and Jack is nodding by the time Matty's finished talking.
The video they can talk about later. Right now, he has to go.
"I'm gonna… I have to…"
"Go," Matty tells him, opening the conference room door and ushering him out. "Take care of him. It was brutal, and he needs you. I'll call you when I know anything more."
Jack nods distractedly, waving a hand at her as he goes. He's barely been in the building two minutes and he's already leaving, pushing back out the door he's just walked through without a word to anyone aside from Matty. He's gotta get to Mac's house, as fast as possible. A problem arises with this almost immediately, however - when Mac left, he took the car Jack arrived in with him. This leaves Jack standing outside the Foundation looking around in a daze, cycling rapidly through his options to get home as quickly as possible.
"Jack Dalton," a voice says, drawing his attention to a woman standing several feet away. She looks vaguely familiar, and he squints, trying to place her. Before he can, she introduces herself. "Agent Grace Soloman."
"I have nothing to say to you," he snaps, turning away. He knows that name, why she came here. What she was a part of.
"I just came to offer you a lift home," she tells him, the sound of her low heels indicating she's walking closer. "I know you drove in with Agent MacGyver today and you've gotta get back without him now. I've finished my business here and it won't be a problem."
"If you think I'm gonna tell you where he lives, you've got another think coming, lady," Jack says, still not looking at her.
"Agent Dalton," Soloman says with a patient, placid look on her face, voice completely neutral, "with all due respect - and for what it's worth, I really believe you're due quite a bit of it - if you think we don't already know where Angus MacGyver lives, you're awfully naive."
She's got a fair point, but Jack doesn't feel like listening to fair points right now. He's got somewhere he has to be, yesterday. He's maybe five feet farther down the sidewalk when he hears Soloman's voice sound again.
"I've never liked Deputy Director MacGyver," she says, stopping him in his tracks. Jack turns to look at her, frowning. Her face is completely open, no hint she's hiding anything. It's the most human he's ever seen her look, and it's enough to get him to pause, to wait for her to continue. "Frankly, the man is an arrogant narcissist who hates being wrong almost as much as he hates other people being right. I don't care much for Deputy Director Hill either. When I was recruited to the Agency, I believed I was serving the greater good. Now… Now I'm not so sure."
Too little too late, Jack thinks.
"What happened to your partner is…" Soloman shakes her head, eyes flicking away for a moment and then back to him. "It's terrible, and there's no excuse for it. And what we just did to him, Deputy Director Hill and I? That wasn't much better."
"Then why the hell'd you do it?" Jack is unable to keep from asking, anger flashing in his chest again.
"I can't give you any answer to that question that's gonna make you feel any better," she says honestly, "or that you'll likely understand. But what I can do is give you a ride home. If you think you can stomach the thought of sitting in a car with me for fifteen minutes, please let me at least do that much."
Jack gets in the car. Against his better judgement, spending time around this Agency operative weighed against getting to Mac as fast as possible comes to a decision that has him in the passenger's seat of the most stereotypical unmarked black SUV he's ever seen in his life.
"Thank you," Soloman says when she pulls up outside of Mac and Bozer's house. She sounds like she means it, like she really is grateful for the chance to do something, anything to make up for what she and Hill and her entire organization have done.
It isn't enough. Not enough for Jack to forgive her, and not enough for him to not be angry at her for not only her role in what happened to Mac that day but also for the way she's talking about it now. Like she knew it was wrong, but only cared enough to apologize afterwards, not enough to stop it from happening.
Jack is wordless as he gets out of the car, shutting the door behind him. Soloman pulls away from the curb and away down the street, and Jack pays her no mind. He's got more important things to worry about, waiting for him inside that house.