Title: Blue Eyed Devils
Characters: CJ Cregg, Blue-eyed Men
Rating: PG
Notes: Spans pre-series thru Season 5
Disclaimer: All credit goes to Sorkin, Wells, & NBC/Warner Bros.
Every time CJ had ever gone after a blue-eyed man, a catastrophe of epic proportions had come her way. The first time she'd remembered it happening was in fifth grade, though it was more than likely that the same curse had struck her down sometime earlier in her life –like in preschool or something –and she just couldn't remember it.
Tommy Chapman was her target, back when she was eleven and pushing five-four –an unheard of height at her age, but she'd always been an unheard of height for her age, which was stupid because after eleven years of the same thing somebody ought to have heard of it. They weren't in the same class, but that didn't stop her from finding ways to stare at his china-doll-blue eyes every chance she got. One day, when both she and he happened to be waiting beside each other while the four square balls got dolled out, she'd told him that she'd liked his eyes.
He'd run away, screaming that the Giant Girl was going to rip out his eyes to put in her stew.
Eleventh grade, sixteen and still unherd-of-ly tall –but tapering off this time, or so said the doctor that'd had to draw in a new growth curve for her –she had her sights set on Jim Mason. His eyes were as blue as the mustang her brother had been teaching her to drive, and he was on the basketball team which meant that, if all went according to plan and he took her to the junior prom, his head would probably come up to her nose when she was in heels.
When she sat next to him at lunch, he'd asked if she was on the girls' basketball team, then went ahead and spent the next forty-seven minutes dumping every NBA statistic known to man down her throat, stopping only to chew –with his mouth open; she swore she could see up into his sinus cavity –call her 'Cindy' –she'd learn later that this wasn't him screwing up her name, as she'd thought, but rather him forgetting he wasn't talking to his ex girlfriend, who actually was on the basketball team –and then, finally, to ask if he could stop by sometime to drive her brother's car.
She'd ended up at prom with Art Stevens, who was a good nine inches shorter than her and had brown eyes.
There were two blue-eyed men at Berkley. Both she met at parties, and both, ironically, threw up on her. One, though, at least had the decency to wait until after she'd slept with him.
From then she'd made a point of writing off blue eyes in favor of brown or grey or green –hell, even red or all-white or all-black would've probably been safer for her –but then she'd joined the Bartlett campaign and, for about half a second –that was really more like half a day –she'd considered jumping one Samuel Seaborn just for the sake of seeing if he'd be the one to break the curse. Toby had talked her down, then gotten her drunk just to make sure she wouldn't be able to follow through.
Then there was Danny Concannon, and she didn't want to talk about him, except to say that he'd come into her life long enough to give her a goldfish, goldfish food, and the best business dinner she'd had in a while, only to leave again having kissed her fewer than ten times and more than reaffirmed her believe in the blue eye curse.
Next was Simon Donovan, who she really, truly couldn't bear to talk about yet.
And then Danny was back, and he was kissing her again, and she really didn't know what to do because, for a second, she thought that this'd meant the curse was over –none of the other men had, or even could, come back, and since he had, that had to've meant something good, right?
Except, no, he'd come back to make her job a living hell with his freakish, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalistic skills. To be honest, she would've been all right with that had he been willing to spend more time kissing her, but she couldn't say that to him because he'd take it as an invitation, and then something much worse than a dead dictator's brother would've cropped up.
But then it happened anyway, in spite of the lack of kissing, and Zoey was gone, then the President was gone, and then, even after both of them had come back, Danny was gone, and she was miserable. And still cursed.
One of these days, she'd vowed as Toby passed her what she'd guessed had to be her sixth-or-eighth grasshopper of the evening, she was going to find Danny Concannon, wherever the hell he'd ended up, and she was going to jump him. Cause, as it stood, he was her best chance of breaking this ridiculous curse. And, also, if the kissing were any indication, then the subsequent jumping would be worth any potential fallout that might occur if she were wrong about the curse-breaking part of the scenario.