VIII

The slightly bemused reaction he'd got from his little brother gave way to the usual frosty reception once he returned home. He supposed it was too much to hope that his father would have cared about any change in his attitude, or approved of it if he did.

Home had never been the most comfortable of places to come to rest at, but spending time with Abbey and her family had only served to heighten his awareness of how truly lonely and miserable New Hampshire was for him now. He hadn't kept touch with any of his casual school friends well enough to renew acquaintances now, and of course Mrs. Landingham was gone. There was only Johnny, and he had his own life to live, no longer accustomed to having an older brother around. It didn't help that Jed had changed so much over the past block of months, his time with Abbey revealing and stretching aspects of himself he hadn't really been aware even existed.

Besides, there had always been an awkwardness between the brothers. When they were boys they could bridge it with childhood games and squabbles and the solidarity of being united against the adult world in general, but they weren't boys anymore. They were men, or on the cusp of being them, and very different men at that... and the subject of their father was a heavy, unyielding slab of silence hanging between them.

Nobody ever discussed Jed's relationship with his father. It just... was. He liked to believe that his father's resentment of him hadn't always been there, but since his mother had never spoken of it either, there was no way he could have asked. Certainly, by the time reachable childhood memory kicked in, he had already been old enough for it to be readily apparent that he was not quite the same as most of the other little boys.

It had taken him a long time for him to realise that it was his intelligence that set his father off. It was so much a fundamental part of his being... the insatiable hunger to learn, a childhood vocabulary several sizes too large, questions other children would never think to ask, everything in how he approached and how he analysed the world... that he'd never been able to understand anything more than that trying to speak up made his father angry.

He'd learned, gradually, from seeing the way his father's lips would tighten in the presence of his uncles, with their flash jobs and expensive clothes and the conversation that always seemed to be just one small step too quick for his father to be part of. He'd learned from the extra brutal beatings he'd received when he impressed them. He'd learned from watching Johnny, with his B and C grades and his preference for baseball and bikes over chess and calculus.

He'd learned, but it hadn't fixed anything, because... how could he stop himself from being smart? And how could he ever be prepared to give it up, even if he knew how to? It was all of him, it was everything he had. The more his father punished him for showing his intelligence, the tighter he clung to it. He stood up and took every beating it earned him, because it was that or stop standing up, and be utterly destroyed.

His father's enmity had taught him to be endlessly stubborn, remain defiant in the face of certain defeat, and treat arrogance as a necessary tool to keep his abilities alive. If everybody in the world said he couldn't do something, then everybody else was wrong and he was right. In his own singularly cruel and brutal way, his father had been the making of him.

The making of the crude foundations of him, anyway. He might never have made anything more of that core of fiery determination if Mrs. Landingham hadn't turned up to keep giving him pointed nudges every time he was tempted to slip back into complacency or frustration. She'd forced him to pick a direction and start moving. The fact that the priesthood hadn't been the right path didn't even matter - he'd started moving, and a body in motion remained in motion, while a body at rest stayed at rest. If she hadn't given him the good swift kick he'd been seriously needing, he might never have got out of New Hampshire, and found out who he was outside of the shadow of his father.

And then he'd met Abbey... and she'd taken the core of the Jed Bartlet that had been forming beneath the surface and yanked him, blinking, out into the sunlight. Which was simultaneously scary as hell, and the most incredible thing that had ever happened to him. It wasn't that being with her made him a new person, it made him himself, freely and fully, in a way that he'd never had the chance to be before.

He missed her so keenly it was a physical ache. Talking on the phone or reading her letters was as much a twist of the knife as blissful relief, like the cruelty of keeping a man dying of thirst alive with just one sip of water at a time.

Jed spent much of the time in between in a kind of low-grade depression, able to find nothing in New Hampshire to distract him from or alleviate his misery. Relations with his father, at least, were frosty rather than turbulent - no doubt a listless, miserable son was greatly preferable to one bubbling over with smart talk and smarter ideas. Johnny just shook his head, unable to comprehend how Jed could be so hung up on his absent girlfriend when there were tons of other pretty girls around to pass the time of day with.

He missed her terribly, and there was nothing at all he could do about it. So he just spent his time reading and re-reading letters, waiting for her calls, and willing the summer away, minute by minute.

"Hey, Abbey, c'mon!" he nudged his little sister out of whatever funk she'd drifted into.

"Oh, sorry." She shook herself awake and stood up. "What were we-?"

Matt rolled his eyes. "We were gonna drive over to Mike's?"

"Oh! Yeah. Yeah, just give me a minute to go upstairs and get ready?"

"Okay, but hurry up?" He shook his head as she scurried off, and wandered into the doorway of his father's study. "It's like living with a zombie," he grimaced.

He didn't have to explain what he was talking about. Dr. Barrington sat back from the chess board, and frowned. "Yes, she has been behaving rather like she's had a limb lopped off," he agreed. "It was bad enough over spring break, and they've only grown closer in the time in between. The two of them can't seem to survive more than a couple of days apart before coming down with a bad case of separation anxiety."

"I can't believe she's pining for the guy that much," Matt scowled. "She was never like this with Ron." It was weird to see his sister so completely wrapped up in a guy. She'd always been so independent.

That earned him an eloquent dry look. "One would suspect that's why Ron is out, and young Jed is in."

"Seriously, I think we're all going to go crazy if we have to live with this all summer. Can't even get near the phone, I think the mailman thinks she's got a crush on him or something... Sheesh, can't we club together and buy the two of them a rail trip? Or, failing that, some sedatives?"

His father frowned grimly. "It's... difficult. It's not a question of money, and I'd certainly be more than happy to have the boy here for a couple of days... His father doesn't approve."

"Of Abbey?" Matt growled, perfectly happy to employ double standards when it came to his sister's dating life. Just because he didn't think she should be seeing anybody didn't mean he was prepared to put up with anybody else disapproving of it.

"Of his own son, I think," said his father softly. "Jed won't speak about it, but there's obviously something wrong in the Bartlet homestead."

"You think his father beats him?" Matt asked quietly, remembering a particularly sobering conversation a few months ago when he'd indulged in some hot-headed speculation about Jed's acquisition of some highly suspicious bruising over the spring vacation.

"I'm sure of it," he said with cold seriousness. "He didn't really deny it, and it's obviously not a one-time occurrence."

"Why doesn't he just leave?" Matt demanded frustratedly. "He's not a little kid, why does he even go back there?"

"It's family, Matthew," his father told him with a quietly sad smile. "It's never that easy when it's family. But you're right, he's not a child... and much as we might want to, we can't just march in there and rescue him from his own life. All we can do is make him feel welcome in a proper home, and help give him the support he needs to work out how to rescue himself."

Matthew would have argued with that - the man was obviously an abusive SOB, why couldn't they just haul Jed out of there and let him know it was for his own good? - but at that point Abbey came galloping down the stairs. "Okay, okay, I'm ready!"

"Took your time," he jabbed reflexively.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, can you believe it took me, ooh, almost four minutes?"

"What takes four minutes in getting ready?" he wondered aloud. "You can knot your own shoelaces these days, right?"

She swiped him lightly with her bag. "Look, do you want to go out or not?"

"Yeah, yeah. But I'm driving," he warned. She stuck her tongue out at him. "Well, it's good to know that you've matured while I've been away."

Jesus, was his baby sister really dating and getting ready to go off to college?

She whirled to face their father. "Dad, if Jed calls-"

"I'll take a message," he agreed, with a long-suffering sigh.

There was no doubt about it. Something had to be done about those two, before they drove the whole family screaming insane.

"Hey, Jed?" His brother yelled in passing, winding his way back through the house from the front door. "You've got a visitor."

He knew it couldn't possibly be Abbey, but still his heart rose in his throat in desperate optimism. God, he really was a hopeless case, wasn't he? Most likely it was somebody from church, or an old school friend following a random whim to catch up. He went to answer the door.

"Well, hey there, Jed."

He gaped in surprised amazement.

"You might want to shut your mouth. That's really not an attractive look on you."

He shut it, and felt it curl up into a smile of genuine delight. "Mrs. Landingham! What are you doing here?"

She gave him a dry look. "Well, that secretary's job didn't work out, so I've taken to selling girl scout cookies door-to-door. Seeing as how you couldn't keep your hands out of the jar the whole time I had it on my desk, I figured I could put you down to cover my profit margins."

The familiar flavour of her sharp brand of sarcastic humour seemed to cut through the staleness of his time in New Hampshire like a knife. He stuck his hands in his pockets, unable to stop grinning.

"It really is incredibly good to see you," he said earnestly. "Um, you look nice," he added, not hesitant because the sentiment was in doubt but because it was something he would probably never have thought to come out with a few years ago.

However, she was more interested in running an analytical eye over him. "I see you're not as pale and skinny as you used to be; finally learned the benefits of getting out into the outside world once in a while?"

"There's more to life than books, Mrs. Landingham," he said with a smile.

She arched an eyebrow. "Well, that's a novelty coming from you." He just shrugged.

"I've changed."

"So I see. Well, how about we figure out what you've been doing with yourself these past few years, and we'll see whether you've learned any new bad habits you need shaking out of."

He took no offence, only smiled; Mrs. Landingham's constant needling of him and refusal to let him rest on his laurels was a whole different world from his father's blanket disapproval. "Wouldn't miss it for the world," he said.

And meant it.