A/N: Sorry for a bit of a delay, midterms definitely got me down. But they're over now, so... thanks to everyone for waiting patiently and for reviewing the last chapter! Also if you go over to my AO3 account (under the same penname) I've uploaded a few other fics not archived here, mostly drabbles and porn. The porn I can't post here due to ratings concerns and the drabbles I always feel weird posting on here. But if you're interested, they are there.

CHAPTER FOUR: PRESENT DAY

It was, of course, going to come back to his father. Anything else, Will figures, would be too easy.

"Then what am I—?"

Supposed to do, he finishes in his head, even after cutting himself off. He's slower to anger now, he thinks. After five years of marriage, four years of fatherhood, Will McAvoy has mellowed. That's what the critics say, anyway. But he spent decades channeling his anger at his careers, at pushing people away, at building himself into someone who owed nothing to anyone. But he's not that man anymore. He's said vows, has children.

And it's been easier. It has been. And it's been good.

Four Emmys, two Scripp-Howards, three National Press Awards, a Peabody, the most popular cable news show, MacKenzie, a house, a dog, and two children. He has an amazing life, and ninety-nine percent of the time he is perfectly and incandescently happy with his amazing life.

He keeps reminding himself of that.

"He's dead," he says. "My dad is dead."

So is this it? he wonders. He can't fix it? His dad dies, and it gets to fuck him over for the rest of his life?

"Maggie's parents aren't," Habib comments.

"What does that matter?" Will asks, exasperated.

Her parents disengaged the moment they heard about the antidepressants and the therapy and cut her off entirely when her social life was dragged out in Jerry's complaint. And so he and Mac stepped up. The rest of their cobbled-together family stepped up.

In his chair across the room, Habib is completely still.

"I'm saying that whether or not he's alive does not matter," he explains, his intonation as calm and unmoving as his posture. "Children are fragile. Like glass. Glass absorbs the prints of its handlers, no matter how careful they are. Some parents smudge, some crack, and a few shatter childhoods completely, beyond repair."

In a moment, he sees a boy born, grow up, and start running. He doesn't want that life for his son. That's the American Dream, right? To give better to your children than you were given yourself?

(He's had this conversation with MacKenzie. Multiple times, in fact, and she's always quick to reassure him that Charlotte is happy, that they're going a good job. She makes no attempts to think that she can fully understand the scope of—and he, in return, makes no attempts to fully understand what happened to her and Jim in the Middle East, cannot be jealous of what happened to cleave them together—what happened in his childhood, and how can she? Mac grew up surrounded by the wanton and cutthroat upper classes.

All he knows is that misery is comfortable, is where he feels most authentic, and he hasn't felt the pull towards it in years. But it's returned, and he's struggling, and so here he is. And Mac will welcome him home with a kiss and a smile and he won't have to feel defensive about needing a psychiatrist.

Not that he has, in years. And never with MacKenzie.)

It has to be… he has to be enough.

"So you're saying I'm beyond repair?" he asks, almost laughing, definitely bitter.

"Your childhood is," is Habib's calm reply.

Will balks. "You said there was nothing wrong with me."

"As a person," he clarifies. "You're a good person, worthy of love and the rest of it. Your psyche is still quite—"

Fucked up. Although Habib probably would couch it in nicer terms.

"Yeah. Great," he says shortly.

Habib leans forward in his chair, leaning his elbows on his knees and folding his hands together in the space between his legs.

"What would you have wanted to hear from your father?" he asks, making eye contact and refusing to break it.

"I don't—"

Will's first instinct is to bolt. Not out of the appointment, or the building, not like he did to Abe eleven years ago when the man kept pressing him to listen to one of Mac's voicemails, read one of her emails, let him feel anything except a blind, stifling rage.

You're not ten years old, Abe had said then. You've stunted yourself to the moment you broke the bottle of Jack across your father's face.

But immediately he begins calculating the mental acrobatics to escape the junior Habib's (Jack, he reminds himself—Jacob, but Jack) line of questioning, but after a moment the calculus stops. He's not that man anymore, and he cannot afford to be.

"Bullshit, Will," Jack protests calmly. "You do know."

"I don't fucking know." And he doesn't. Not that they were to scale, but he hadn't known what he wanted to hear from Mac, either. It took him six years to realize that he didn't know the first thing about forgiveness, or letting go, and it wasn't until he almost cut MacKenzie out of his life again. "I—I—whatever it is, I'm never going to get it, am I? Even before he died… I haven't spoken to my father since I buried my mother." He stops, and tries to force his thoughts forwards, towards anything. "I don't even... "

"An apology?" Jack suggests.

Will feels himself snap. "Yes! I want a fucking apology!"

Jack nods once.

"Would an apology have fixed anything?"

Will pauses, breathing harder than he would like to admit. "No."

Jack nods again, and then looks down at his hands for a moment, clearly formulating another question. "Would his approval have fixed anything?"

"Have you seen my ratings in Nebraska? I'm surprised parts of the state aren't burning effigies of me. My dad never approved of me to the day he died. So that's not a—a mystery." His answer comes quicker than expected, but he thought about it enough before his dad died. Over a million and a half viewers a night back then, and none of them, he knows, were John McAvoy. "Mac, Charlie. My staff. My daughter. I need their approval. Because they… because they…"

"Don't use their love as a threat," Jack finishes. "Abuse is about power, every aspect of it. Especially love, or the illusion of it. The absence of it."

Yes, Will thinks, and even the voice in his head is sarcastic. I know what it is. But today isn't the day for snarking at his psychiatrist. Not with twenty minutes left to the session.

"I don't understand him. I don't want to," he says. If he understands where his dad found his talent for cruelty, then he doesn't deserve Mac, or Charlotte, or any of it. "I don't think I ever could."

"Why?"

"Because what he did is unforgivable! And—and—I can't understand him. Not won't, but can't. I would hang myself from the shower rod if I saw fear in Charlotte's eyes when she looked at me! And he did it on purpose. Someone who does that to any child that's—that's unforgivable. As a father, I can't forgive him."

"What about as his son?" Jack asks gently, but Will feels anger rising anyway. "Not as someone who needs to protect himself from a monster, or protect his little brother and sisters, or his mother. As his son, as his able-bodied, financially independent son. Can you forgive him for what he did to you?"

It all goes quiet inside his head.

Nearly fifty years says that no, he can't. Or perhaps won't. Will doesn't know if there's a difference between those two at this point, though. He's unlearned a lot of things in the past five years, but he learned to fear his father before he learned to walk.

Swallowing hard, he drops his gaze to the floor.

"Charlotte's started doing this thing," he begins, trying to decide what to say. Out loud, because the clock is ticking down and he's been doing this in his head for decades now, trying to parse it out and maybe if he says it out loud he'll get somewhere. "Pretty much every night now, but it started when Ted died. She's been waking up in the middle of the night or at some ridiculous hour in the morning, and instead of putting herself back to sleep she's seeing monsters in her closet and under the bed. I mean, before she'd have to get up and walk across the hall but since she's moved to the bedroom above ours all she has to do is start crying and we can hear her over the intercom."

They could just turn off the intercom, but that's not an actual option. And he's not like Mac, who can convince Charlotte that the monsters are something that can be dealt with, and aren't real, and get her to settle back into bed. The monsters are real. He knows the monsters are real—he grew up with one, he's put them in jail, he reports on them every night on the show.

And the second she climbs out from under the covers and into his lap, whimpering and burrowing her face in his shirt, he's done for.

"Mac thinks we should just show her nothing's there and get her to go back to bed, but I know that's what we're supposed to do—I mean, it's all in her head, but Ted was the first person in her life who's died and she's four. How can a four-year-old process that?" Mac had tried, hard, to be logical and calm and to just explain things in plain terms. Charlotte slept in their bed that night too, in between them in the four-poster bed in the guest room that Susan has always designated as theirs, right next to the pink and white room with the canopy bed that has always been Charlotte's.

"The whole idea of death has to be terrifying to her. At one point she was on the floor screaming and hugging her dog because she realized he was going to die. I'm waiting for her to realize how fucking old I am," he exclaims, gesturing, standing. If he makes it to the age his father did, Charlotte will be a whopping twenty when he drops dead. His son will be just sixteen. "And she's just been evicted from her bedroom across from ours and she keeps asking questions to make sure that everything isn't changing too fast, that we won't forget about her, won't stop caring once the baby comes. It drives Mac up a wall, but I just take her into bed with us."

MacKenzie, whose back is killing her and who is developing sciatica with this pregnancy and needs far more sleep than she's willing to admit and he doesn't blame her, because Charlotte tosses and turns just like he does and maybe he and Charlotte should just start sleeping on the couch in the library, but Mac is half the reason why she wants to spend the night in their bed. It's a no-win situation, and there's a reason why he's usually the one already up and awake when Charlotte starts crying about monsters.

He lets himself look at Jack, who is sitting up straight, alert, his hands poised on the arms of his chair. And fuck, Will's chest feels tight.

But that's not new. It's been that way for weeks now, starting with anytime he entered his son's nursery and slowly encroaching on everywhere else.

"I mean, I know in a few months I won't be able to do that because there'll be a bassinet next to the bed and she can't get woken up every time the baby cries, but for a few months she can at least feel safe, right?"

His voice is unacceptably desperate to his own ears.

"Will?" Jack asks.

But he needs to finish getting all of it out. "I never had that. I never got to feel safe. Ever." And that's it. "I can't forgive him."

Jack is silent, and the few seconds that he doesn't say anything stretch into long, anxious heartbeats.

"Okay," he says with a sense of finality.

Will whirls around from where he's mindlessly paced back to the psychiatrist's bookshelf. "Really? I say all of that and all I get is—"

"I have lollipops in my desk drawer for the children of my other patients who wait quietly and play nicely in the waiting room during their parents' appointments. Do you want a lolly?" he offers cheerlessly and pointedly.

There's no reward, Abe told him during one of his first sessions, after Mac had asked around, found someone suitable and credible and discreet. You probably won't feel any better once you figure it out. It might just hurt more. But you'll be able to make the choices to make yourself happy, easier. But everything here, it's gonna hurt. So that life out there might hurt a little bit less in the future.

"Funny," he replies dryly, and then sighs lopsidedly, running a hand through his hair. "So if I can't—even if he was alive, you said—"

"You'd have to let it go," Jack confirms, irritatingly sure.

"And how in the fuck am I supposed to do that?" Will asks, voice growing louder. "I'm fifty-three. I've been trying to let it go for decades."

"How did you forgive MacKenzie?"

"This is nothing like with MacKenzie, don't even—"

"I agree, the transgressions your father committed against you far outweigh the mistakes MacKenzie made," Jack concedes quickly and easily, and then tilts his head for a moment, considering something else. "Forgiveness and letting go aren't always the same thing. You have every right to never forgive your father. But you can let it go, even if you can't get closure. You're past the point in your life where holding onto that anger is helpful. You know that. Otherwise you wouldn't be here on a Saturday morning. How did you forgive Mac?"

That's simple. Will's agonized over this for years, the what if I let her leave, what if I didn't tell her I kept the ring, what if I didn't talk to Charlie. There'd be no rings, no house, no daughter, no dog. There wouldn't even be a show.

He doesn't even know if he'd still be alive, or if he'd have accidentally overdosed with no one to find his corpse until he didn't show up to work on Monday morning.

"I realized if I didn't I was going to spend my life alone, wishing I had done a thousand things differently, and it would be entirely my fault," he answers by rote. "And I could be happy. If I wanted to. I want to…"

"What do you want to teach your son?" Jack asks, cutting him off.

"What?" Will recoils, solidifying himself on his perch far on the opposite side of the room from Jack in his chair.

He smiles in a small way, watching him, and then asks, "Conversely, what did your father want to teach you?"

"I—"

What the fuck?

"He taught me how to hit people hard enough that they stop coming back," he responds flippantly.

"Not what he actually taught you. What he wanted you to be."

Will snorts. "I really don't think he had that much thought put into the raising of me and my brother and sisters."

"Abusers have pathologies and agendas. All of them." Jack's voice is increasingly unyielding. "You were the oldest son."

"So what?" he tries to deflect, again, his resolve crumbling.

Habib purses his lips together, narrows his eyes, carefully selecting his words before opening the features of his face again. "Most men of your father's era have expectations for their oldest sons that remain to be different from their other children. You're the oldest son. The golden boy. The leader. The—"

"He wanted me to be terrified to know anything more than what he could give us." The words tumble out, unheeded, nearly mindless. Will barely realizes their implications as he says them, doesn't want to acknowledge them. "He wanted me to be obedient and god-fearing and—he wanted me to be a mirror of himself. Except he hated himself, and his life, all of it. So he hated me."

Unlike last time, the quiet is gone, his head filled with noisy klaxons and alarm bells and he stumbles into the bookshelves.

"Goddammit."

When Will can look away from the creased leather spines of medical texts, Jack indicates his hand back to the chair Will abdicated, gesturing him to sit again.

"So, what do you want to teach your son?"

Thanks for reading!