A/N: I would like to thank whatever motivated me today to get up off my figurative ass and finish this chapter. (Just kidding, I know what it is. I'm back at college and avoiding coursework, which means I'm about to become a lot more prolific as a result.) Thanks to everyone who's waited for Chapter Two!

CHAPTER TWO: PRESENT DAY

"With Charlotte, how did she tell you?" Habib asks, almost as if the question was inconsequential. It definitely seems it; Will has no idea where his therapist is going with this line of questioning, but then again this is the bastard who once waited fifty minutes to tell him his insomnia was being exacerbated by bacon and tricked him into actually staying for a session.

He swallows hard, eyes flickering to the bookshelf lining the wall at the back of the office. What he wouldn't give for these memories to be just happy.

"After the end of the show," he gets out, his throat as dry as paper. "She'd found out right before we went on the air and didn't want to ambush me with it."

The ride home, though, after he swept her into his arms and kissed her until they had to catch their breath.

"How did you feel?" Habib asks, and Will does his best to ignore his wan smile.

Instead, he leans forward in his chair, lacing his fingers together. "Happy."

They'd been so thoughtlessly happy. We're having a baby. They both knew, he think, how things could go wrong. But those things were intangible, and for a night, they both could pretend that they happened to other people. Despite all evidence to the contrary that bad things happened to the two of them, and at a higher incidence than normal people.

Habib nods. "How long did it take to stop feeling happy?"

Will exhales heavily, feeling the muscles in one cheek twitch. "A few days."

Will remembers thinking a day or two later, that first Saturday after they found out about Charlotte, lying in bed tangled up together and MacKenzie voiced her first worry. That Jerry's suit had been, in the end, so easily dismissed.

Wasn't it time again for something bad to happen to them?

But he'd wrapped his arms around her and shushed her, promised her that he'd take care of them both, like that was something he could promise. Mac had laughed, and called bullshit. But he hadn't even thought about how bad he could be at it, not until they'd started telling other people and he remembered that the baby's needs would rapidly encompass more than being fed and clothed and dry.

He'd prayed that Charlotte would be a girl. He still wonders if that makes him terrible.

But he'd been so certain—he's good with Maggie, Sloan, Tess, Tamara, Jenna, far closer with them than any of the guys in the office except perhaps Jim, because of Mac, or Don, when they weren't fighting—he'd be better with a girl. He all but raised Fiona, and he knows that it's different, with girls.

He notices Habib watching him.

"And this time?" he's asked.

"Until the ultrasound appointment. Well, no. I thought I could still handle it, until the—the—"

He cages his inability to finish his explanation with an irreverent flip of his hand.

"Flashbacks and panic attacks started," Habib continues smoothly, nodding.

"Yeah," he answers quietly. "I was relieved when the ultrasound technician told us that Charlie was going to be a girl. I could handle a girl. That's when it—when it started getting better."

"What are you worried about?"

It's not just like—it's not that he's afraid he'll be like his father. Even though Charlotte has turned out to be an alarmingly placid child, she's definitely had times where she's displayed his and Mac's more temperamental traits, and he's never felt the urge to—

He can't even finish the thought in his head.

Charlotte's four. She throws tantrums like all children do and he and Mac sit her in a corner, set the timer, and wait it out. She's sneaky and mischievous and prone to painting on surfaces that she shouldn't and stealing Mac's make-up and jewelry and heaven forfend any staffer think that candy is safe at their desks, but they make her explain why she knows what she did is wrong and sit her in a corner and set the timer.

(And Mac worries about Charlotte's manipulative streak, like Charlotte doesn't get it right from her.

Besides, he thinks it's adorable.)

But Charlie's a little kid. And his parents were kids themselves when they had him.

He finally winds up answering, "That I'll—it's not that I'm worried I'm going to be like him. I'm worried I'll be—distant. Or—just not good. That he'll know that I'm fucked up over this, and hate me for it."

God, that's incredibly self-absorbed, he thinks.

"Why do you think you'll be distant?" Habib asks. But that's another thing that Will can't quite, or rather, won't, put words to. He's already obsessive enough. Nodding curtly at the lack of response, Habib changes direction. "Okay, why do you think you're having flashbacks?"

Will sighs.

That's not the direction he wanted to go in.

"I don't know," he answers, feeling tension rise in his shoulders.

"I think you do," Habib answers in an irritatingly-calm tone voice.

"I don't know," Will enunciates clearly, realizing his voice is marked by exasperation. "If I knew I'd say so."

"Alright," Habib concedes, although Will is certain that the therapist will bring it up later anyway. "And your daughter? How did she take the news about the new addition?"

"Well," he answers quickly, the corners of his mouth turning up into a smile of their own volition. They'd tried to wait to tell her, but then morning sickness had knocked Mac out and it had just been easier to try to allay Charlotte's fears with the truth than anything else. And Charlotte had been so mature, in turn, running to and fro bringing Mac water and peppermints and ginger candies and cutting herself off mid-shriek, whispering an apology.

Which, of course—

Charlotte's been angling for a little brother or sister since Isabelle Hirsch was born, but he hadn't expected that if the day came he'd see his four-year-old curled up in bed with her mother, sucking her thumb and quietly watching the morning news without complaint while Mum battled nausea and a headache.

Charlie's a great kid.

He doesn't know if his luck will hold out for a second great kid. What if he loses his patience, or disengages, or just fucking sucks?

"She's excited," Will continues, more slowly. "I think Mac bought a dozen books or something about becoming a big sister with dumbed-down explanations of biology and — not that it matters, to Charlie. I mean, a ton of our friends have — she calls them her cousins. Elliot Hirsch—"

"He's the one at ten o'clock, right?" Habib scribbles something on the legal pad resting next to him.

He doesn't know what that has to do with anything, but, "Yeah. He and his wife have four kids."

"And?"

Seriously, what the hell?

Will shrugs. "I don't know, Charlie was excited. When we told her. And two of our other friends have a son who's eight months and two of our employees who she calls aunt and uncle are having a kid in January, and they're getting married soon and—Charlie's very excited. But the past two months—"

He was the one who picked up the phone when Susan called in the middle of the night, barely processing her saying Thank god, I was hoping she wouldn't have to hear this over the phone and Ted's had another heart attack before switching on the light on his nightstand and rubbing Mac's back until she woke up, all the while trying to figure out how to say His heart stopped for two minutes, but he's responding well on bypass in the cardiac ward at St. Thomas's, I'll call Scott and we'll get the first flight out.

Habib's voice pulls him out of that particular memory. "MacKenzie's father also died. I can't even begin to think about how rough that must have been on her."

What do we tell Charlotte? She's never asked about—no one close to us has died. Mac's voice had been so hollow, her eyes red and swollen, no tears left to cry. They'd sat on the edge of the bed in their room in her parents' Belgravia townhouse, Mac fisting and releasing the comforter, breathing slowly through pursed lips.

Ted died at eleven at night. Charlie would invariably bound into their room at half-past six. Will had no doubts that MacKenzie—regardless of the fact that she was fifteen weeks pregnant—would force herself to be done with her own emotional response before then, for Charlotte and Susan's sakes.

"Tell me about it," he breathes.

But that's not what Habib wants to hear. "And you. You've said that you and MacKenzie's father had become close as well."

Will elects to ignore that.

"I think we were both so afraid of her miscarrying that we forgot that there were other bad things to happen."

How do you explain death to a preschooler without freaking her out? Neither of them are particularly religious. Mac bought a book, like she does for most things they could easily explain to their audience but not to their daughter. And then they couldn't let Charlotte's days be ruled by funeral preparations and being smothered by relatives she'd never met, and Will's certain that Mac heard at least you have the baby to look forward to one iteration short of clawing a great-aunt's eyes out.

And then MacKenzie had started with the spells of lightheadedness that sent her onto bed rest the last few weeks she was pregnant with Charlie.

It wasn't until they got back into the States three weeks ago and finally made it to their rescheduled twenty week appointment and the technician told them it was a boy that he saw Mac smile again.

"What was it?"

He swallows hard, examining his knuckles. "A heart attack. He was seventy-eight. He lingered for a few days after the initial event, but he had heart problems for decades—"

"Your father died of a heart attack too."

"Ted had the history for it," he retorts, realizing that he's being strangely defensive.

"And your father was an alcoholic. That's not exactly the easiest on the cardiovascular system." Habib looks like he's considering pushing that further, but drops it. "MacKenzie got closure with her father."

"She didn't need it, they were close—"

"I'm trying to say that you didn't," the psychiatrist interrupts.

"I don't think I could have gotten it, anyway," he says, trying to shrug it off.

Will's imagined it before: what if he hadn't been too late? What if he had spoken to his father? Would he have gotten what he wanted?

That is, of course, a trick question. He hasn't a fucking clue what he would have wanted from John McAvoy.

"I don't fucking get it. I just don't, and I don't think there's any good explanation for it, and I don't think I'd want to hear him try to give me one." Standing, he drifts over towards the bookshelves, and begins to laugh, shortly and bitterly. "Except I do." He doesn't want to turn around to see Habib's face, just wants to get this out and get it over with. That's why he came here today. "I don't… I don't know why. You know, the night he died, MacKenzie was the one who convinced me to call him back? And then to leave him a voicemail—but my sister picked up, and that's when… but MacKenzie, she didn't even know back then, and it was the middle of the show, the worst possible moment. And I tried to explain in shorter terms, there was crew everywhere and mics were hot, so—"

"Will?"

He sighs, drifting a hand along one of the carefully dusted shelves. If he could only do this without rambling like a fucking lunatic, that'd be fantastic.

"Mac told me that I didn't have to feel the way he made me feel forever. That I could call him if that's what would make me feel better. That I didn't have to be afraid of what that meant," he says, withholding the innate urge to cringe.

"How long after that did you propose after that, again?" Habib quips.

"Shut up," Will shoots back, snorting. But it's a good excuse to not speak for a few minutes, and he's oddly appreciative. Eventually, his thoughts coalesce into something fairly cogent, and looking down at the minute hand on his wristwatch, he forces himself to voice them. "I'm fifty-three, I have a wife and a kid and a half, and I still want to know what's wrong with me. Why he did it. And I'm just worried, what if I prove him right? What if I'm a terrible father to my son? Because—because he reminds me of me, or something, and I resent him for it. What if I'm too hard on him, or try and make him someone he isn't, or—"

He doesn't know where to go from there, a mishmash of ill-formed syllables escaping his mouth before he just stops trying to chase that sentence to completion.

Because he can't imagine balling up a fist to his child, or screaming at him like his Dad would, systematically working any sense of confidence out from him. Will is uncertain of a lot of things, but he knows he's not capable of that.

But it's simple—he's terrified.

Of what, he needs his therapist to fucking hurry up and tell him. So he turns around, hands on his hips, forcing himself to face whatever expression Habib has on his face. There's a brief moment of silence before he caps his pen and clips it to his notepad, tossing them both away from him, looking Will straight in the eye.

"Okay, so—and just because I'm telling you this doesn't mean you get to not come back next week," he starts.

Even though he feels his lip curl, Will nods.

Habib licks his bottom lip, and then very calmly explains:

"You're a good anchor, no one has to say so. You're a good boss, and a good friend. No one has to say so. You're a good husband, no one has to say so. You're a good father, no one has to say so. You know you're a good dad, Will. But you also know you're going to look at your small, helpless, and vulnerable baby boy and love him, and start asking why your father was capable of doing what he did to you. But there's nothing wrong with you."

What he feels is something similar to the very uncomfortable pressure in his chest whenever someone, even MacKenzie, tells him that Charlotte is lucky to have him as a father.

"So this isn't about me?" he asks, scrubbing a hand over his eyes until he sees spots. "It's still about him."

Habib gives him one of his wry half-smiles.

"I'm afraid so."

Thanks for reading!