Hello! This is just a little post-ep for 3.18, Good Bones (with a small reference to 3.15, Break in Diplomacy). I thought both the episode and the poem were great and thought-provoking and so somehow this happened. It may not make much sense but I hope you enjoy it a bit. Let me know what you think! x
"You broke a lot of rules… and things got done. And now, to go back to bureaucracy and budget cuts while stuff like that happens..?"
"'You could make this place beautiful.'"
The Good People and the Bad
There's a glass of whiskey warming in her hand as she stands in her home office, staring at an unopened email from the FBI Director while she listens to the sound of her family cheerfully clearing up the kitchen as they prepare to go to bed for the night.
Elizabeth knows she should open the email.
But she doesn't. She knows what it's going to say and it's not something that she wants to read tonight.
Not after the seeing the truck in Kyrgyzstan filled with dead girls. Not after Lara Cramer, and the conversation she had with her staff in her office about why this thing has hit them all so hard. She's said it herself before: it's not her actions she regrets, it's her inactions. This is a situation she feels like she didn't properly show up for, and she knows exactly why her staff are feeling like they are.
She's feeling it, too.
She takes a sip of the whiskey, feeling its warmth all the way down her throat. It doesn't dislodge the hollow feeling of the sense that she has failed.
"Night, Mom." Jason passes through from the kitchen with a smile, his face still bright and happy with his sense of achievement over Thad Newton.
Pride fills her up at the sight of him and she steps forward to stop him on his way to the stairs. "Hey, Jace, about today," she starts, a little hesitantly. This isn't a side of the conversation she's used to being on with her sometimes wayward son.
Jason's face falls and hardens like he's expecting a telling off over the damaged car. "Yeah?" He folds his arms across his chest like he's defending himself against what's coming.
Elizabeth slides her hand around his forearm to get him to drop the defensive stance, a genuine smile crossing her face. "I'm really proud of you, you know," she tells him, looking him straight in the eye so he knows that she means it.
His eyebrows rise, surprised. "Really?"
She thinks about Matt telling her that when she started at the State Department she broke the rules and things got done. Thinks about Jason doing the same, in his own way, at Alison's school today. The contrast with the day that she has had. "Really."
"Even though I damaged Thad's car?"
She lifts one shoulder in a shrug and gives him a conspiratorial smile. "It's okay, I already got my budget passed by the Foreign Relations Committee. Otherwise I might be worried about his mom claiming the damage back in penalties before she let it go through."
Jason laughs at the joke and readily accepts Elizabeth's hug when she reaches out to pull him to her for a moment, turning her head to press a kiss to his hair. She has to stretch up slightly to do it; her youngest child is just about taller than her now. She wonders where the hell the time has gone as she lets him go and gives him a little shove towards the stairs. "You did good, standing up for your sister," she says.
Jason nods and it's obvious that he's proud of himself, that he feels good for doing the right thing and making a stand. For breaking the rules and getting stuff done. "Thanks," he tells her, and she thinks he's pleased that she's so obviously proud of him. "Night."
"Night, baby." She stands and watches him go and then drinks a little more of the whiskey because she wants to feel the warmth again.
Thirty minutes later and she's still looking at the unopened email from the Director of the FBI.
The scene in her office with her staff is still haunting her. The looks on their faces as they told her what was wrong. They were all too tactful to say it outright, but she knows that part of them must blame her for the failure over the kidnapped girls in Kyrgyzstan, even if just a little. She's ultimately responsible for the actions – and inactions – of the department; it stops with her. She admitted out loud that they didn't properly suit up for Lara Cramer and she came back to the office from Congress today celebrating departmental budget cuts as a win.
No wonder they said what they did, about budget cuts and bureaucracy and poems about you could make this place beautiful.
You could. Like they were asking: will you?
She knows it's about a lot of things, a general frustration with systems and processes and a particularly painful failure; it's not all directed at her.
But she feels like it is. The thing that scares her most: she's not entirely sure what it is that she should have done differently.
That's what she's thinking about, turning over and over in her mind, when quiet footsteps distract her and she looks up to see Alison coming in from the kitchen, switching off the light behind her. "Hey, Noodle." Elizabeth finds a smile for her daughter and holds her hand out to her, encouraging her to come over to say good night. "Has Dad already gone up?" She's surprised she didn't hear him clunking his way up the stairs with his boot and his crutches. Too lost in her thoughts to notice a ruckus.
"Yeah, he just went." Alison takes her hand and lets Elizabeth pull her the couple of steps to the desk, turning to lean back against it like she's settling there for a while. She peers down at her, concerned. "You okay, Mom?"
Elizabeth squeezes her daughter's hand and shakes her head to clear her face of whatever thoughtful expression had been residing there, trying to dispel her daughter's worry. "Hey now, I should be the one asking you that. Are you okay, after what happened with Thad?"
She knows from experience that bright smiles and victory celebrations and good-natured impressions of Dean Ward don't mean that Alison isn't still hurting about the whole thing.
Alison starts brightly, an instinctive reaction. "Yeah, I-" Then she stops abruptly and looks down, shuffling on the spot. It's a long moment before she looks back up at Elizabeth with a slightly watery yet defiant expression. And there is the honesty of what she's feeling. "Why the hell are some guys like that?" she asks abruptly, like she can't quite figure it out.
"That's a big question." And it's one she doesn't have a satisfactory answer to, the question of why some guys like Thad Newton think it's okay to try to drag her daughter into a room after the prom, or why other guys think it's okay to kidnap and sell girls like it's their right. Why they all think that women are a commodity to which they are entitled. Different situations, different contexts, but the basic question is the same.
"Why do they think they can get away with it?" Alison spits out before Elizabeth can think of anything to say that won't sound hollow and dissatisfying. She sounds so angry, and Elizabeth is so proud of her, filled with so much love for her daughter with the fierce expression on her face, her righteousness betrayed only by that look in her eyes that suggests she's also a child looking for answers from her mother.
At least Alison's second question is the easier one to answer. "Because, historically, they very often have," she says.
And that's the heart of it. That's the unwelcome truth that no one wants to admit to, but to which Elizabeth has had to admit while dealing with the traffickers in Central Asia. Some guys are like that because they're confident they'll get away with it – because they very often do.
She watches the play of emotions on Alison's face, the way her daughter nods reluctantly, like she already knew the answer to the question but she was perhaps hoping her mother might say something else. "How do you deal with it?" Alison asks, pulling her hand back from Elizabeth's so she can brace both hands on the desk and hop up onto the wood.
Elizabeth glances at the empty whiskey glass that sits by her laptop and thinks about the defeated expressions on the faces of her staff in her office earlier that day, about the hug that she's craving from Henry when she crawls into bed in a little while. "Well," she says, forcing optimism and brightness into her voice. "You don't give up. You –"
"No." Alison cuts her off. "I mean, how do you deal with it?"
Oh. She realises now. She has been so stuck on the bigger picture, so caught up in the problems of her job that cross borders and require congressional budget approval and secret missions involving famous actresses, that she has slightly lost sight of the immediate things in front of her. Alison isn't looking for some lofty academic answer from a professional diplomat, or at least not entirely. She wants to know how her mom deals with idiots like Thad Newton, the everyday jerks that every woman comes across. She's looking to hear something real.
Elizabeth figures she owes her daughter the truth, or at least a truth, because she has to admit that it isn't always the same. One obvious example springs to mind. "The last guy that tried something with me?" she says. "I broke his nose." Then she waits to see if Alison will put it together without having to tell her the complete story; she's still nursing an instinct to hide what horrors she can from her child even as she's admitting that they exist.
Alison looks at her for a long moment, a frown on her face as something obviously jogs in her memory. Then it falls into place and realisation dawns and she gapes in shock for a couple of seconds. "Oh my God," she says quietly, and then nothing else for quite a while. She looks away like she's deep in thought and when she looks back at Elizabeth she looks a little lost, her watery eyes threatening to spill over into tears.
Then Alison shakes her head and slides off the desk and onto her mother's lap instead, wrapping her arms around Elizabeth's neck and clutching tighter when Elizabeth's arms come up to cradle her daughter against her.
Elizabeth kisses Alison's forehead. "I deal with it by dealing with it," she says, aware that Ali was no doubt hoping for something more specific, but it's the best that she's got right now. "It's a rule of the world that awful things happen, and when they do, you just have to… suit up, for whatever it is. But don't be afraid to care about it, or feel sad or scared or unsure sometimes." She feels the push of tears welling in her eyes at the thought that she may recently have been so hamstrung and blindsided by bureaucracy that she missed a chance to avert an awful thing, to save something. Someone. There was something that she missed and she can't pinpoint exactly what it is, and it's driving her crazy. She pushes the tears down, tries to find some certainty that she can gift to her daughter. "And I keep good people around me," she says, knowing this at least is something she can be sure of. "At home and at work. That helps."
The good people make it that bit easier to take the fight to the bad. Make her feel like there's a fight that can be won.
Alison nods against her. "Yeah."
"And you just… make sure that guys like Thad Newton don't get away with it, or at least make it as hard as possible for them to get away with it, because that's the only way things are going to change."
Sometimes that means slaying the dragon, as Matt put it in her office earlier. Other times it means making evil duck and find another hole for a while. Those times are much harder to deal with, knowing it's still out there, waiting.
Elizabeth leans back in her chair so she can cup Alison's face in her hand, pulling her up to look her in the eye and stroking a rogue tear away with her thumb. "Never doubt that you can change things for the better," she says, and she hopes more than anything that Alison believes her.
Because that's the goal, to make the world better. It's why she goes to work every day, and it's why it hurts so much when she fails at something; because she signed up to effect change in the world to make it a better place for her children to live in, and she can't say that she's done that when other people's children are dying in trucks and she feels like she could have done more to stop it.
"I'm really sorry about those girls," Alison says, and it's clear that she gets it, gets that while on the surface they've been talking about Thad Newton, really they've been talking about everything else, too.
Elizabeth wonders exactly when it got to be that she can have this conversation with her children. "So am I."
Alison kisses her cheek and stands up from the chair, lingering for a minute at Elizabeth's side. "To answer your question," she says, a light blush staining her cheeks, "I am okay after what happened with Thad… I guess I have good people around me."
She disappears up the stairs then before Elizabeth can say anything else, leaving her alone with her thoughts and her empty glass and her unread email. She decides that can wait until tomorrow.
The terrible things in the world will still be there in the morning.
Time to suit up to try to fix them.