Chapter Text
Jack McCoy's decades-long career in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office—culminating in his tenure as the Interim District Attorney, then elected in his own right—heavily contributed to his office-wide persona as everyone's “Law Dad”. He had been there so long that there came a point where all the ADAs and clerks simply could not imagine a time when he would not be there. It was the general consensus that surely Jack was going to live forever, and he would continue to be in the DA's office until the sun burned out.
Everyone understood he was the boss, to be sure—but unlike many bosses, he always treated his subordinates with kindness and respect, and was unafraid to offer his guidance and advice to anyone who needed it. In a turbulent world, he was a constant. He was a lighthouse, a North Star. No one was unmoored when Jack McCoy led the way.
He had not always been the kindly Law Dad; in fact, the first three decades of his time in the DA's office garnered him a reputation as a hothead and a womanizer to boot; he was a whip-smart, dashing lawyer who could argue a boulder to smithereens, and before you knew it, he'd be taking you out to dinner, and you'd be almost happy you lost your case to him. He had affairs with four of his subordinate ADAs in the span of a few years, marrying (and divorcing) one, Ellen, with whom he reared his first and only child. When Ellen told him she was pregnant, he was delighted and terrified at the same time.
He never imagined himself to be a father, but when the time came he was overjoyed to have a little girl. Just one. Small and perfect, who grew into a thoughtful, kind, intelligent, and bold young woman.
Rebecca. When she was born, he echoed her name over and over, as if to make her concrete and real in his arms, to stop her from vanishing. To say her name was to ground her, to keep her safe. Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca.
He joked that it was a miracle he only had a girl, because if he had had a boy, he couldn't be sure he wouldn't smack him around like his own father had done to him. Blessed with a daughter, on the other hand, all he ever wanted was to be gentle with her, to play, to listen, to protect her from the often repulsive world he worked in. He didn’t always live up to that promise, and he’d be the first to admit it—but by God, he tried.
Still, something always nagged at him, a stone unturned. He imagined what kind of father he would be like if he had a son. He’d be lying to himself if he said he never felt the longing to teach a boy to shave, how to catch a baseball, and how to pick his battles. He wanted to be better than his own father had been, to give his son a backbone without breaking him to pieces.
He never realized until he became a father how broken he really was.
Until then, he had valued himself by his work—indeed, it was this drive to succeed in the law that seemed to be the only thing that could elicit that golden smile of his father's—and he could not fathom defining himself beyond the degree on his wall and the win record in his office file. He drew the outer lines of his being with his sense of justice, an unyielding hunt for the truth, and a duty to the victims of society, and yet the idea that this very being would be tied to another that he had helped create was awe-inspiring and almost frightening. Suddenly he felt more deeply ashamed of his flaws and failings than he ever had, and feared that he was already too soiled to be good enough for the body and soul that grew in his wife's womb. What did a good father look like? He didn't know.
All he knew was the one he had had was a shattered man, unable to confront his own demons and who instead attempted to exorcise them by regurgitating them in fits of violence that made everyone around him collateral damage. Where Jack McCoy's power was in his words, his father's power had been in his heavy, callused fists.
Those fists made Jack want to please his father and rebel against him at the same time. I can make him stop, he thought, if I can make him happy.
Or if I hit back first.
On his seventeenth birthday, he had come home to his father threatening his mother with a broken beer bottle. Jack threw down the LPs he had just bought and barreled toward his father with every ounce of strength he had, and knocked him to the ground. He shouted for his mother to leave, but she wouldn't leave without her son. Jack's father writhed underneath the weight of the son who was not so small anymore, until he gave up and fell unconscious, overcome by exhaustion and alcohol poisoning. After that day, he never hit his wife or his son again, at least not in front of Jack.
Until that day, Jack had always assumed his competitive streak had come from his father, seeing how the man insisted on playing darts into the dawn with the other barflies until he could claim the most victories of the night. But after Jack fought back, he saw his father shrink, drained of the brute force he once lorded over his household. It had been revealed that the source of his father's strength was rooted simply in Jack's and his mother's fear, and when the illusion of power was shattered, so was the man.
This was what Jack McCoy loved about the law—the law was the axe by which those who would terrorize the weak were cut down. The law returned the power to those who had been robbed of it, returned dignity to those who could not take it for themselves.
"Becoming a prosecutor was the most rebellious thing I ever did," Jack would say, "and I'm a sixty year old man who still rides a Yamaha."
Perhaps part of him always knew that Michael Cutter would be a senior prosecutor someday, if not outright succeeding him. Mike's reputation had preceded him before he had even set foot in the DA's office—it was rare for someone to have scored so exceptionally well on the bar exam who immediately wished to become a civil servant; the cream of the New York law schools' crop that year mostly dispersed into various firms with egregious hourly rates, and an annual salary of about $36,000 was not nearly enough to even start making a dent in the return on investment that most of the graduates hoped to make. But Mike Cutter was a full scholarship student, and, much to the chagrin of his year's graduating class, the golden boy of Hudson Law’s Class of 1990.
The day after he was admitted to the New York Bar, Michael Cutter's job application was on the desk of then-EADA Ben Stone. There was an opening in narcotics, and Adam Schiff had been saying the office needed more hardliners. He couldn't appear soft on drug crime by the time the election rolled around, and Mike Cutter was eager to be a soldier in that war. He got the job.
This, however, bothered Jack McCoy. Jack was a bleeding heart liberal through and through, and here was this young man with the same drive he had, having his talent weaponized to uphold the rhetoric of the Reagan-Bush era.
When Mike finally got the chance to prosecute a high-profile heroin kingpin and won, Jack was surprised to find him later that day at the counter of a bar, nursing a whiskey—neat—alone. In spite of his major victory, Mike looked wounded.
"Big day, huh?" Jack asked, raising his bushy eyebrows with a congratulatory grin.
"Long day, more like," Mike coughed, not expecting Jack McCoy to sit next to him in a dive bar.
"I heard what you pulled off in there these past few weeks. Nice work."
"Thank you, Mr. McCoy."
Jack snickered at being spoken to so formally. Surely the kid knew he wasn't one of the old guard. But here he had the chance to pick the brains of the golden boy, the only hire at the DA's office to cause so much fanfare since—well—since he had been hired.
"It doesn't bother you, prosecuting drug cases?"
"Why would it?"
"You know this whole 'War on Drugs' thing is just to make it easy to lock up everybody who doesn't look like you and me."
"I know things were different in—" he stopped himself, but couldn't think of another way to say it: "—your generation, but drugs aren't all peace-and-love anymore. I've seen kids get hit by stray bullets, babies born addicted to crack cocaine, and the people who got their parents hooked get away with it." He sighed. "I'm not here to go after the people who got taken advantage of. I'm here for what I did today. To put the people who make money off of human life and put them where they belong. In prison."
"What'll you do next, now that this guy's locked up?"
"I'll keep going."
Jack recognized that drive, that flicker of fire in this young man's eyes, even when his body seemed to sputter.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Society's worst criminals sometimes began as its most marginalized, and their defense attorneys often made the argument that their clients were forced to commit a crime because their circumstances—even survival—necessitated it. But Jack believed that we are all given choices. We choose to kill, or not to; we face the consequences. And looking at Mike's worn face (too worn for a twenty-something, he thought), Jack knew that Mike understood this too.
In that moment Jack saw a reflection of himself, and felt a spark of kinship, like seeing a brother come to shore who had long been at sea, or a prodigal son returning home. He was compelled to put his arm on Mike's back and give him a hearty shake.
"Refill this guy's glass,” he called out to the bartender, “and get me one, too. This round's on me."
Jack remembered that evening when he was appointed interim district attorney, a decision that made not a single one of the powers that be happy, which suggested it had been a good one. “You don’t work in the DA’s office for thirty years without making some enemies—not if you’re doing your job right,” he’d say.
After he called Rebecca to tell her the news, suddenly his mind started to race as it jumped to the next big question: who would replace him as EADA? A district attorney needs a senior prosecutor he can trust, someone who will strive for justice and truth over all, just as he had. And while there were many fine prosecutors in the DA’s office, he knew he couldn’t give the job to just anyone. This would be the first big decision he would make as district attorney, and if he bungled it, he’d start his term having handicapped his already limited political clout.
He considered Connie Rubirosa, who had become his go-to second-chair since they first worked together, but, while she was very capable, she was relatively green as a Manhattan ADA, and though he could see her rising to the position in the future, she was not ready for it just yet. She’d have plenty of time to sharpen her chops some more (she was one of the ADAs he worked closely with that made him thank his lucky stars that she didn’t work for the defense).
If Jamie Ross hadn’t already been appointed to the bench, she would have been a fierce contender. Though they often disagreed on how to prosecute—indeed, it was with her he worked on a case which nearly led the disciplinary committee to revoke his law license—but he could think of no one with better scruples and sharper legal acumen. Still, he was happy that she was given the opportunity to weigh her even hand as a judge. That felt right to him.
Going simply by win-loss record, Michael Cutter was the clear choice, at least in Jack’s mind. As a prosecutor in narcotics, and later as felony assistant, Cutter had a 83% conviction rate—nearly unheard of with the national average hovering around 45%—and was known for miraculously eeking out pleas even when his best evidence had been thrown out, something that Jack liked now that he would be DA and would have to worry about the political fallout of cases he feared to leave to a jury’s discretion. He wasn’t sure how Mike did it, but he got results, and that prowess was undeniable.
Then came the intangibles. Mike Cutter was a tireless force of nature who swung the sword of justice with aplomb. It became an office joke that Mike was so aptly named “Cutter” because, indeed, he sliced many a defendant to pieces—but he also often accidentally cut himself while swinging around that sword of his. Rumor had it that he bent the rules a little bit further than most to get a conviction, and though he had no run-ins yet with the disciplinary committee, he had his fair share of contempt citations—something the younger Jack McCoy had been slapped on the wrist with more times than he could count—it was thought that Mike’s superpower of outsmarting his defendants and zeroing in on their weaknesses was sure to make him enemies.
Jack knew Mike Cutter as a senior prosecutor would make a lot of people unhappy. But then, hadn’t that been the case for his appointment as DA, too? He saw Michael Cutter as a man that most people were perpetually unhappy with, and in that sense, he saw a kindred spirit.
Still, it was more than that. More than his gravelly exterior, more than his crusade for justice—he would never admit it, but Jack McCoy had a paternal soft spot for Mike Cutter. He saw through Mike’s hard shell to the tender, wounded boy underneath. In the courtroom, Mike was a pitbull in a business suit. But Jack caught the man in glimpses when he walked past Mike’s office, and in those interstitial moments when Michael Cutter thought no one was looking, Jack saw Mike’s tired eyes, longing for someone to ask about his day, to keep him company, to welcome him home. Jack had his fair share of nights at home alone, both longing for and dreading his father’s return home; he knew quite well the impossible wish to be loved without having to work so hard for it.
So too did he know the fear of someone finding out that secret, that you wanted to be loved, and to give it—surely it would leave him weak and vulnerable. Jack was an old man now, and knew well that there was no starting over. His mistakes were lost to the past, and so were the wrongs he could beg futilely to be righted: the father that hit, the father that terrorized, the father that wounded. The father from whom, even in his death, Jack pleaded for love. He could take conditions. It just had to be real.
But even those who are afraid of their darkest selves being paraded naked before a raving crowd slip sometimes; the need for someone to see the love that sits in your chest can become so overwhelming that it simply leaks through the shell, even if just a few drops.
He remembered Mike’s hard exterior cracking once—it was after the trial of an auxiliary police officer who shot a civilian at a rally for immigration reform in Central Park. The trial had been long and messy, with the press frothing at the mouth over the infighting at the DA’s office between him and special prosecutor Josh Lethem. After he fired Lethem for dragging his feet on the case, Jack was eventually dragged into the trial as a witness to refute the accusation that his “liberal streak” had tainted the prosecution. Suddenly the trial had become about his own career, forcing him to defend his determination to see justice done by whatever means necessary under oath. Mike and Connie still succeeded in getting their conviction, but it still knocked the wind out of Jack.
As the prosecutors began to head home for the night, Mike slipped a small pin with specks of a gray patina.
“What’s this?” Jack asked as he put on his coat.
Mike snapped around, like a frightened bird, clutching a printed copy of the tome Jack had written for the special report on the protest incident.
“It’s one of the tie pins from Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in ’68,” Mike said.
For one brief moment—if Jack had blinked, he might’ve missed it—he saw on Mike’s face the same boy that he once had been, bright yet timid, unable to hide this small expression of admiration and reverence. It was an offering to a being he believed was greater than he, the same kind of offering Jack made to his father to please him—college, law school, becoming an attorney. This one was smaller, and with no expectation of receiving anything in return. Like a cat with a bird in his mouth.
But just as soon as he saw it, it vanished.
“I found it on eBay,” Mike said quickly, undercutting himself and disappearing into the hallway.
If only he had known what it meant to the old man behind the desk. After all, a crack of light is all one needs to see in the dark.