VII
He knew as soon as Charlie showed CJ into the Oval Office. It was stamped all over her face with the bitter ink of pity and resignation.
He heaved a heavy sigh, and sat back to look at her. She shook her head, and held her forehead a moment, before saying softly "I'm sorry."
Jed nodded slowly, knowing it wasn't her place to be making apologies but unwilling to just brush it aside. If CJ was the voice of his position, then this was as close as he was going to get to an apology for all the things that his presidency put him through.
That he put himself through, ultimately. After all, it was only pride that had brought him this far.
Pride, and the old ghosts that were once more scratching at the doorposts.
Jed breathed, and banished the constriction in his chest back into the shadows with the boy to whom it belonged. "Maybe this will all just fade out unnoticed," he said softly, with a trace of a quiet smile.
He didn't believe it as he said it, and CJ only looked at him sadly. She hesitated, and then said "The others need to know."
He could have laughed at that. Nobody needed to know. It was past, dead, buried, gone; locked in a box of memory where it belonged. He didn't open that box anymore, and nobody else should ever need to, either.
Jed gave a short hand-gesture, signalling his reluctant acquiescence. CJ was doing her job, he couldn't fault her there, and he knew it was only respect for his emotional frailties that had kept people out of the loop far long than they should have been.
She was right, they were going to know, whatever happened, and maybe it was best that they heard it from her. Maybe then they'd have time to compose the careful masks that would hide all those feelings that he didn't want to see.
He didn't want their pity, or their sympathy, or their understanding. He didn't want to be recast in their eyes as the victim or the underdog triumphant. He just wanted it to be over. Gone, with no shadow left to linger over his life.
And apparently, that wasn't going to happen.
CJ hesitated in the doorway, and then turned back. "Mr. President?" she said, almost shyly. "If you ever need to-"
Jed smiled, his first genuine smile of the day for all that the offer was nothing he'd ever have accepted. "I'm fine, CJ," he told her softly. And he was. After all, it was nothing more than a spider's web of shadow and old memory. It could brush over him to send chills through him, but there was nothing left there that could hurt him. Not anymore.
His father was dead and buried, and there was no call to go disturbing the sanctity of his grave in search of a bogeyman. Whatever his faults, he was only a man, and he was still Jed's father, not some Victorian literary nightmare of a caricature.
He called CJ back. "They're going to tear him apart, CJ," he told her soberly. "And... I don't want that." He sighed quietly to himself. "I don't want that."
"Hey, honey, I'm home!" he called sarcastically.
"And not clean-shaven yet," Steve noted, appearing from the bedroom to run a playful hand over his boyfriend's rough cheek.
"I'm keeping the beard," Sam told him sternly, tapping him on the nose.
"Did you learn nothing from your day of mockery?"
He frowned. "How do you know I got mocked?"
Steve smiled wryly. "I took a wild guess."
"I'll have you know," Sam reminded him, "that these are some of the smartest, most professional, most high-level political operatives in the whole of the USA - hell, in the world - I work with."
"They mocked you," Steve repeatedly knowingly.
"Apart from the ones who didn't care," Sam admitted. "But I'll push on, regardless! Did they not mock Darwin when he proposed the theory of evolution?"
"Your beard is going to rock the scientific world on its foundations?"
"We never know until we try."
Steve laughed, and pulled him close for a tight hug. "Actually, I kinda like it," he admittedly, running his thumb along Sam's jawline, and then kissing him.
"Really? 'Cause I kind of grew it just to annoy you," Sam admitted.
"Didn't work." Steve kissed the base of his neck again.
"Well, that's a shame, 'cause-" He broke off at another feather-light kiss. "Although now I'm thinking that it's possible that it has other benefits."
Steve laughed, and pulled him into his arms.
Charlie dropped his keys on the countertop as he moved into the kitchen.
"You're early," Zoey called from the other room, as he shrugged out of his coat and poured himself a glass of juice.
"Your father had a few hours free at the end of the day." A few hours that had taken an act of unspoken coordination by the White House staff, as everybody pulled together to lighten the burden on a president suffering from worries unknown. But now was not the time to drop that kind of concern on Zoey.
He crossed over to the bedroom, and found her sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, lost in thought. He leaned his head against the doorframe until she looked up at him. "Did you go?" he asked softly.
She nodded. "Yeah."
"And, they said-?"
"Yeah. They said... yeah."
Charlie blinked for a few moments, and then crossed the room to flop onto the bed beside her. They were silent for a while, and then he glanced up at her. "Are you...?"
"I'm fine," she said quietly, still staring into the distance. He tugged on her arm, and she obligingly moved down to rest her head against his shoulder.
"So what do we do now?" he wondered, slipping his arms gently around her waist.
Zoey snuggled close against him, her eyes closed. "What people normally do, I suppose." She shrugged, and her hair tickled his chin.
"What's that?" he wondered only half-rhetorically, blowing strands of hair away from his mouth.
She laughed softly, and shrugged again. "We'll figure it out."
"Yeah."
He tilted her face up to look at him, and gave her a gentle kiss.
"We'll figure it out," he promised.
Ah, an early night - a precious gift, rarely heard of in the hectic day to day life of a president.
Wasted on him now, when sleep stubbornly refused to visit.
He'd been a restless sleeper all his childhood, often having to rise in the middle of the night and tug his sheets back into place to the accompaniment of his brother's snores. The habit had followed him to college, and had only finally been banished when he'd married Abbey and had her soothing presence beside him to tide him over into the dark.
It resurfaced when she was gone from his side, but normally exhaustion was enough to drag him down into unconsciousness before insomnia could put up more than a token resistance. Except for on these nights; the nights when the thoughts refused to stop churning.
He'd always had a problem with philosophy. Others might find their thoughts falling into circular patterns and abandon them, but his did the opposite - they just kept branching out and branching out until there were too many tracks for even his fast-moving brain to keep a grip on. His mind was built for finding answers, and where there were none it kept on stretching itself thinner and thinner in the quest for them until he felt almost transparent.
These were the questions that had forced him away from theology and into the safely repeatable formulae of economics.
These were the questions that visited him at three AM.
He thought of his father, and how he might feel to be embroiled in such a mess as was coming on the next tide of press questions. A futile pursuit, for when had his father's mind been anything but unknowable?
Disappointment, that was a given. He'd be disappointed in Jed for not preventing this, for allowing such things as his emotions and his private life to be aired in public, to creep in front of matters of work and duty. That wasn't how Bartlets did things. That wasn't how men did things.
And what would he say, if he knew Jed was seeing a psychiatrist? What's wrong with you, boy? that's what he'd say. And what would Jed be able to say, apart from "Nothing"?
In New Hampshire, you didn't see psychiatrists over 'nothing'. You didn't dig up the past just for the sake of getting it out, you didn't have to go rooting around for excuses when everyone in the world could see you were doing perfectly fine for yourself. He wasn't a victim! Life hadn't dealt him a bum hand. He had an amazing wife and three amazing children, he had the kind of friends nobody had the right to ask for, he had the job every all-American boy was raised to aspire to...
His father wasn't an ogre, he wasn't the bogeyman. He'd raised him harshly, but the forge of his early years had prepared him for a life that could be cold and cruel and dangerous, and he'd learned early that there was no such thing as satisfaction, no such thing as enough, no such thing as the point where you could stop and be content that you'd achieved all you needed to.
His father's hand had shaped him, where a softer touch might have let him collapse into formlessness, never learning the drive that had propelled him through all his life. He knew that, and through the filter of distance and time, he could value that. For better or worse, his past had brought him to where he was and who he was today, and for that, he could have no complaints.
And his past was also just that... past. They had no business digging it up, and raking over the coals of fires long burned-out.
No business at all.
Jed rolled over on his side, and tried to sleep.