XV
"Hey, Charlie."
"Hey, Leo." The younger man beamed at him in such naked delight that it was impossible not to grin back.
The obligatory wave of nostalgia did indeed wave over him, but the images that surfaced were from other people's weddings, not his own. He hadn't been able to give himself over so easily to happiness, even then. Not with the nicks and bruises of his harsh childhood, and the darker shadows of Vietnam hanging over him.
I was never really a kid. Maybe that's why I suck so hard at being a parent. He'd been somewhat avoiding Mallory since the ceremony, on the admittedly shaky foundation of logic that she probably wanted him to do it. She'd wriggled around any suggestion she come and see him since Jed had called her with the news of his relapse, and what was that about? Because she didn't want to see him at the White House - where, everybody face it, he would inevitably be - or simply because she didn't want to see him?
Drunk again, dad? Her disgusted bitterness rang all the harsher for the fact that he only witnessed it in his own mind. Another little slice of his daughter's faith and innocence he'd carved away - how many more times could he do it before she just stopped caring?
The sight of his best friend's daughter and brand new son-in-law ached his heart too, with the melancholy pang of knowing that he'd once had what their bright future promised, and he'd kept throwing it away until it had finally stopped coming back.
But he turned his own regrets into a smile for others' better fortunes; well-deserved, and a long time coming. "Congratulations, Charlie. Congratulations, kid." He ruffled Zoey's hair, although not strongly enough to mess up the... whatever the hell it was that women seemed to be able to do to each other's hair to make it defy gravity like that.
Jeez, little Zoey Bartlet married? That made him... depressingly old.
"Hey, that's my wife you're talking to," Charlie said, the pretence at indignance eclipsed by his expression of wonder at the truth of his own words.
Leo smiled and stepped away to let the other well-wishers crowd in. Moments later, the flood of people had moved on, leaving him behind on his own. There was probably some elaborate metaphor to be constructed there - if he'd been Jed, he'd already have brought in oceans, sub-tropical rainfall, and be off on a tangent about the mating habits of blue whales by now - but he couldn't muster the effort.
He glanced uneasily around, feeling self-conscious at being just about the only one in the room who wasn't part of a couple or some happily giggling group. It wasn't even so much that he wanted the company as he dreaded the pity his solitude would inevitably bring.
By chance, or perhaps because she was watching him, his eyes briefly connected with those of his ex-wife. The instinct to look away and the disgust at his own cowardice struck in almost the same instant of time. He turned and headed back into the crowd, feeling a bitter taste well up in his throat that he had no alcohol to wash away.
There he was, as always, surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers - almost as many as his youngest daughter and her husband. It was neither the presidency nor his new father-in-law status that contributed to the swarm around him; Jed Bartlet had always been able to hold court in any room. In everything but physical height he was a giant; loud and bold and quick and vibrant.
So magnetic, so intense, so overpowering... so difficult to approach, if you were anything but breathtakingly confident in yourself. Her heart bled a little more for Ellie, as it always did. Her father loved her, but he would never understand why she acted they way she did. How could he possibly comprehend what it was like to be shy, to be lonely, to be insecure? How could he ever know how difficult it was for her?
And yet Abbey had said...
Millie crossed the room to join him. The smile he turned on her was perhaps a little dimmer than the megawatt bulb he'd been flashing around the room, but she supposed she couldn't entirely blame him. Her words last time they'd spoken face to face had been harsher, perhaps, than they truly needed to be - but somebody had to talk to the president that way. He always ran away from any attempt to reconcile him with his middle daughter, and if no one was prepared to take him to task over it, he was always going to.
"Mr. President," she nodded.
"Millie." His voice was as polite as ever, but as she joined him he encouraged her to fall into step beside him, guiding them both away from the thick of the crowd. Expecting, no doubt, that words not for public consumption might well be uttered.
"Zoey looks radiant," she observed.
"They all do," he agreed. "But then, they always did."
She'd never quite figured out how he managed that trick of saying something ridiculously trite with such conviction.
Millie hesitated before she spoke again, picking her phrasing carefully. "I seem to recall that, last time we spoke... words were exchanged."
"Oh, yes. Whole sentences, even," he noted dryly.
"I just wanted to say, I wasn't-"
He stopped her walking with a hand to her arm, and turned to face her. "I understand what you were saying Millie. And you were right." He lowered his head, and let out a small sigh. "I don't... I don't know why I can't seem to get through to her. I can't talk to her..." He looked up, and all the festivity of the occasion had bled away into a mask of misery. "She's scared of me, Millie. My own daughter. She's scared of me."
She froze. Oh my God. What she suddenly saw in his eyes startled her. Abbey had been right.
He believed me. God in heaven, I said those things to him, and he believed me.
"Okay, okay, let's... Let's have this conversation again, shall we?" she suggested shakily. "And this time I'll write the subtext up on cuecards for you, how about that?" She rubbed her forehead. "Jed-" Oops, dammit, slipped again - "Ellie isn't scared of you. She just... She just doesn't know how to approach you, and you don't make it any-"
He shook his head stubbornly. "You told me-"
"Jed, I was trying to make a point," she said, frustrated.
"Well, you made it," he said coolly. "My middle daughter doesn't trust me; she doesn't feel safe with me, and she doesn't want me in her life." His voice wavered. "I don't... that's not the way I'd like it to be. But it's what she wants, and if I can't do anything else right for her... well, I can do that."
"That's not what she wants," Millie said, shaking her head in dismay.
"Well, it would be nice to believe that," he said softly. "But in everything I've done and in everything I've said, she has never, ever given me any reason to believe she wants anything else."
And before she could attempt to argue him out of his insanity, he was being pulled back into the swirling crowd, sliding easily back into the smile that she'd never realised could cover such a complexity of conflicting emotions.
She sought out Ellie across the room, and spotted her hanging back, out of the limelight with that sullen young man who might or might not actually be her boyfriend. The sight always saddened her; but it was only now, with her new and startling insight into the insecurities of Jed Bartlet, that she truly began to realise what a double-edged tragedy it was.
"Mallory! Hi." Sam hurried towards her. He'd spotted her at Leo's side during the ceremony, and glimpsed her in passing a few times during the reception, but every time he'd tried to make his way over to her side she'd vanished by the time he'd arrived.
"Sam." The coldness of her tone alerted him that this perhaps hadn't been quite such a random motion as he assumed.
"Nice wedding."
Wow, that was a chart-topping conversation starter right there. Go Seaborn, go.
Mallory looked at him incredulously. "Am I talking to you?"
He attempted to process what that might mean. "Well, we have been exchanging words, albeit a few of them, and so- I'm sensing by that glare that you're levelling at me there that isn't what you meant, so... Or is this the kindergarten thing? In which case I'll be forced to fall back on the tried and tested defence that, by saying you're not talking to me, you were actually forced to talk to me, so you know, in conclusion, nyer. Or-"
Mallory folded her arms and narrowed her eyes, clearly in no mood for further attempts at translating her cryptic remarks. However, her voice when she spoke sounded disconcertingly depressed rather than angry.
"Do I even know you?" she wondered, apparently seriously. She shook her head. "I mean, did I even- I thought I knew who you were."
Sam frowned. "You did know who I was. I mean, um- Mallory, what's-?"
"I thought you were exactly what you seemed," she said quietly. "I thought you were a nice, uncomplicated guy. And then every time I turn around, you've got another secret."
He winced. "Mallory, I, uh-"
I don't have secrets. I just stumble into these things exactly as blindly as you'd think I can't possibly be dumb enough to.
He was trying to find a slightly more articulate way to frame that thought, but before he could, her face tightened at something over his shoulder, and she abruptly turned away. "I gotta go talk to my dad," she said shortly.
"Mallory-" But she didn't turn back.
Steve came up beside him, and Sam absently accepted the glass that was pressed into his hand.
"Was that Leo's daughter?"
"Yeah." He frowned after her pensively.
"She seemed in an awful hurry to not meet me," Steve noted mildly, taking a sip from his beer. He shot his boyfriend a curious sideways glance. "You guys used have a thing?" he asked shrewdly.
Sam vacillated. "We... kind of had a thing. Well, we didn't. We nearly had a thing. It was an almost-thing."
"Well, that's cleared that up," he noted dryly.
"Well, you know how it is," he shrugged. "We met, we argued, we went on a date that wasn't, she randomly grabbed me and kissed me one time, and then there was this whole thing involving call-girls."
"She wasn't too thrilled to find out that you accidentally slept with a prostitute?" Steve assumed.
"Call-girl." Even now, the correction was still automatic. "Oh, she knew about Laurie. She just got upset that there was a photo. Um, not of that," he added hastily, as Steve raised an eloquent eyebrow. "When I got my picture in the papers. She didn't know we were still talking, I guess."
"Did you patch things up?"
He could only shrug. "Um... maybe?"
"So you two had an almost-thing, and then she found out from the morning news that you were still friends with a call-girl, and then you kind of made up but possibly not, and then she found out from another newspaper that you had a boyfriend all of a sudden?"
Sam digested that. "You know, in retrospect, I'm thinking there was probably a point in there where I should have called."
Steve shrugged easily. "Women. Can't live with 'em... probably lucky I'm gay, really." Sam had to smirk, and squeezed his arm in gratitude. Steve responded by slipping his free arm around his waist and giving him a smile. "You know, my life was somewhat lacking in call-girls, presidents and invitations to cultural events of the decade before I met you."
"You've led a sheltered life," Sam said, resting his head briefly against Steve's shoulder. The blond man ruffled his hair.
"You okay there, buddy?"
"Yeah." He pulled back. "I just..." He shook his head, eyes on the direction Mallory had disappeared in. Boy, he'd really screwed that one up. "I can be a real idiot sometimes, you know?" he sighed.
"I do know, but I've learned to live with you."
"Shut up," he retorted, smiling.
"Make me," Steve challenged.
"Okay." The crowd and the cameras be damned, he leaned forward and gave his boyfriend a chaste but lingering kiss.
Yeah, he'd messed things up with Mallory by not keeping the channels of communication open, not taking the time to chase after things and just letting them slide by him. He'd bruised her with the loss of things that might have been, but maybe that was better in the long run. He'd found a kind of spark with Steve that just hadn't clicked in any of the other relationships he'd attempted - so maybe it was better that they hadn't tried, than tried and felt the disappointment of a chance at love that fizzled out.
Things worked themselves out in the long run, he'd always thought so. And here, surrounded by celebrating friends and with the soft pressure of Steve's arm around his waist, he could let himself believe it.