Author's Note: I posted this on A03 a few days ago, but thought I would share it with the Scandal fandom (and my fellow Olake shippers) on here as well. As always, I don't own SCANDAL, but I would appreciate hearing your thoughts either way.
Olivia Pope was a political genius, one of the most brilliant minds in Washington, D.C., and one of the most formidable women-one of the most formidable people- in the country. She did what was best without considering what was right, one of the less appealing qualities that she had inherited from her parents, and she always had a back-up plan, because it was just idiotic not to. That was how she had managed to get a man whose campaign was deemed hopeless in its early days elected to the highest office in the land twice. That was how she had managed to get Susan Ross elected to the Senate seat in Virginia and later into the vice presidency. That was how she was going to be the reason that Melody Grant, a freshman senator and a former First Lady, became the first female President of the United States to be directly elected by the people. She was going to make history by simply doing what she always did, and that was something that should be celebrated. And yet she returned to her cold, lonely apartment or her cold, empty hotel room every night, and she drank half a bottle of wine and ate an unhealthy amount of microwave popcorn, and she thought about the past and all the opportunities she had been given to make her future different than what her past had been and her present was, and she realized that Mellie was wrong. All of the power in the world didn't comfort you when you were all alone because of your own actions. All of the power that radiated from the Oval would not be able to make Olivia Pope happy. Not anymore.
She often wondered if love was a thing that actually existed, or if it had just been made up by romance authors and directors across the world. Her parents had never loved one another, and she was relatively certain that they had never loved her. What she felt for Fitz had been fierce and unwavering for nearly a decade, and it had felt like love, but she couldn't be sure. After all, the only serious relationship she had been in before Fitz was the one she had with Edison, and she wasn't altogether certain that she was allowed to claim that she had loved a man that she had allowed her father to bring physical harm to after she used him to prove a point. She wasn't sure that she knew what love was, but everyone else was unwavering in their belief that they felt it for her. Jake, Edison, Fitz… they had all claimed to love her, and yet they had all been the cause of her physical, mental, or emotional agony in some way, shape or form. Maybe that was the point that all the songs and the books and the poems were trying to make. Maybe love was pain.
She was leaning over the balcony of her hotel room in California as she pondered these realizations, her hair loose on her shoulders and her thin terrycloth robe providing little protection against the bite of the early morning air on the skin of her arms and legs. There were six days left before the election. They had been in the state that was expected to go red on Election Night for several days. Mellie had a campaign appearance later that day, and then it was back on the trail for everyone, which was sure to be fun (sarcasm intended). Vanessa was off doing her own thing in Chicago or Charlotte or some other city where they had already secured a majority of the Republican vote, but Vanessa was almost always off doing her own thing those days. The love story of Jake Ballard and Vanessa Moss had bit the dust privately months before, almost immediately after they said their vows in that church, and it was beginning to bite the dust publicly in the eyes of the American people, which was not a good thing when one member of the union was the Republican candidate for the vice presidency. Olivia had begun to send Vanessa off on her own campaign trail the moment those poll results came in. It was probably a good thing. It was most definitely a good thing, actually, because Jake no matter appeared ready to commit murder before breakfast because of his wife opening her mouth and speaking about something he would have loved to have a conversation about if literally anyone other than his wife had brought it up.
Olivia heard the door that led to her balcony open behind her. Mellie smiled at her slightly as she approached, her nude pumps clicking against the tiled floor and her purple wool dress brushing against her knees with every step. With the pearl choker at her throat and pearl-drop earrings in her ear, her appearance was reminiscent of that of an early-administration First Lady Kennedy. The former First Lady and freshman Senator was the epitome of elegance and power in that moment, and Olivia was thankful for it. It reminded her of the just reason for her misery.
The other woman's smile became slightly wider and much more genuine before she spoke. "The campaign appearance is in about an hour and a half. Jake was having trouble choosing a tie, so I volunteered Karen to help, since she wants to be a fashion designer. She's in a phase where she is completely convinced that that's what she wants to do with her life. I suppose if she does end up doing that, she has to start somewhere, right?" Mellie's laugh was light and fell flat the moment that Olivia didn't respond in kind. "Oh. I suppose you're out here all alone for a reason, then." Brushing a strand of hair away from her perfectly-rouged cheek, Mellie sighed. "Is it Fitz? Are you two on the outs again? I know that Naomi is not the least bit what you expected from him, but she's good for him, I promise," the woman reassured her, speaking of Dr. Naomi Scott, the former Navy nurse and close friend of the President whose presence on the campaign trail had become something of a constant thing since Fitz had become enamored with her.
"No, it's not Fitz. And Naomi is good for him. She seems nice. Quiet, but nice," Olivia replied distractedly, her eyes on the sunrise over the horizon just so that she would have an excuse not to look at Mellie. Against all odds, she had actually become friends with the woman over the past few months, which meant that Mellie was a lot better at reading her those days than she had been when their only interactions consisted of booze, vulgar and derogatory language, and suffocating levels of guilt. Also, Mellie had her suspicions about Olivia and Jake. Olivia guessed it was because a woman always knows when her husband's cheating, but a woman also always knows everything there is to be known about who she's being cheated on with. That wasn't a good thing, especially since Olivia had once been the First Mistress instead of the First Lady and had already been delivered a few very good tongue-lashings by Mellie Grant about the horrible consequences of infidelity before the former First Lady had begun to sleep with her husband's best friend and had fallen rather ungracefully from the pedestal that she had perched herself atop of when she learned of her husband's ongoing relationship with his former campaign fixer. Suffice it to say that Mellie would know what was happening the moment she saw Olivia in a room with Jake after this conversation ended. "I just needed a breath."
"You didn't need a breath, Olivia, you needed to not be in love with a married man." Mellie's voice is surprisingly gentle, and Olivia's eyes dart towards the other woman in disbelief. "The fact that you're not sleeping with one another does not change the fact that he has puppy dog eyes the moment that you walk into a room. I would think it was sweet if he wasn't somebody else's husband."
"It wasn't supposed to… we weren't supposed to… we didn't mean for it to happen the way that it did," Olivia informed Mellie, stumbling over her words. "He asked me to run away with him years ago and just stay gone, but then Harrison died, and my team was falling apart, and everything was just a disaster, and I couldn't just leave it all behind."
"You couldn't just leave Fitz behind, you mean. You didn't want to leave Fitz behind the way that I left Fitz behind." Mellie sighed, her elbows resting against the railing of the balcony. "It's a difficult thing to understand, much less deal with, you know. The fact that your son is dead at fifteen years old and the woman that your husband most wants there to comfort him isn't you." There was no hostility in Mellie's voice, no judgment hidden within her words. "When Gerry died, when I lost my son, my world stopped spinning. I'm not going to stand here and pretend that I was a good mother to him, Olivia, because I was not. I was cold and unfeeling towards him most of the time, and while a large part of that was because I was scared, it was also because my own mother was the same way towards me. And so when he died, I was trapped in this world of my own, and Fitz wasn't able to pull me out of it. That's the person I expected to be able to pull me out of the hole, Fitz. But the person that Fitz expected to pull him out of the hole was you. And that was unfair, Olivia. I don't think I ever told you how unfair I considered that to be. But our son was dead. Our worlds stopped spinning. And for a very long time, you were the only person who could possibly make Fitz see past that. You couldn't leave Fitz behind the way that I did. I think we both know that you love him more even now than I ever have. But loving Fitz, keeping Fitz from going insane, it shouldn't have cost you Jake. You shouldn't have had to lose Jake."
"I did anyway," Olivia replied, laughing without humor. "Even if I loved him, even if I wanted him, I lost Jake the moment I walked onto the Truman balcony and told Fitz that I wanted to try. I lost the Jake that I had always known, anyway."
"See, here's the thing. I don't believe that people stop being versions of themselves suddenly. Fitz is who he is, I am who I am, and that is who we've always been and who we'll always be. So the Jake that you knew, the Jake that you loved, the Jake that loved you, he's still in there." Mellie smiled at her. "Just tell him everything."
"I can't. He asked me to run away with him on the day of his wedding and I rejected him. He asked me again on the opening night of the RNC and I rejected him. For Jake and I… there's nothing left. You're hoping for something that is never going to happen if you're hoping for me to fix him, Mellie."
"Olivia, your loyalty is staggering." The comment came out of left field, but Olivia had known the other woman long enough to know that she would get to her point rather quickly. "You are a good campaign manager. You are a loyal campaign manager. But sometimes, you are loyal to a fault." Mellie sighed. "I am about as much of a bitch as any woman can be. I'm aware of that, Olivia, I revel in it. So I'm not used to loyal people. You and Jake, though, you are both intensely loyal, walk-through-fire-for-those-you-love loyal, live-and-die loyal. You're loyal to me and to this campaign, and like it or not, you are loyal to one another." Mellie waved a hand in the air. "He's married. Get over that. Move on."
"If I move on, are you going to call me a whore again?" Olivia asked quietly, hesitantly, no small amount of amusement in her tone.
"Ah, no, this one was yours first, which makes his wife the whore. Ooh! Do you want me to drink too much hooch and say that to her face?" Mellie's excitement was childlike and infectious, and Olivia laughed when she spoke. "The point is, Olivia, he's starting to look at you like you're a stranger. I speak from experience when I say that you never want the man you love to start looking at you like you're a stranger."
Mellie patted Olivia's shoulder and mustered up a smile before she left, unaware of the weight she had just caused to cover her campaign manager's chest.
Maybe it was too late. Maybe she was too late. She already had it on good authority that Jake didn't just look at her like she was a stranger anymore. He actually believed she had become unrecognizable. She was pretty sure that that was much, much worse.