XV

"Hey." Jed's smile was a little wan as he greeted her in the Bartlets' front yard; she guessed he and his dad had probably had some huge argument after she and Matt were gone.

"Hey." She sat down next to him, and laid her head against his shoulder. He smiled, and rubbed her hair.

"Listen, I really am sorry about last night," he said again. She sat up, and kissed him briefly.

"We really are gonna have to do something about this apologetic habit of yours," she chided, tapping him sternly on the nose.

He blinked innocently at her. "You don't find it endearing?"

"Not when you only do it when it's not your fault and you never ever do it when it is."

"Hmph." He pretended to be disgruntled.

"Hi, Abbey. Hey, Matt." Jonathan wandered out of the building to join them. Jed remembered they weren't the only people in the universe at that, and gave Matt a nod.

"Hey," her brother shrugged lazily. He paused to scrutinise Jed with an odd intensity. "You okay?"

Jed frowned as he stretched an arm around her shoulders. "Sure. Why wouldn't I be?"

Because there's no way in hell your dad didn't start shouting the moment we were halfway down the path last night? she thought, but didn't say. Matt pasted a smirk over any evidence of concern.

"Well, you know. Last day before Miss Bossy-Pants here gets on a train and leaves you to freedom. You won't know what to do with yourself when she's not around to tell you."

Johnny snorted, but Jed just turned and smiled at her. "She can boss me about long distance."

"You bet." She kissed him on the nose by way of a reward. Matt made a disgusted sound.

"Okay, are you two gonna be like this all day? Because I could always, you know, go hang myself."

Abbey smiled sweetly at him. "Be my guest."

"You want to go walking?" Jed asked her hopefully. Other boys might try to make their last day together some spectacular event with parties or movies or flash restaurants, but Jed just wanted to walk and talk in the sun holding hands. He seemed honestly quite baffled by the idea that it should matter what they did together, as long as they were together.

She had to admit, it was adorable as hell. "Sure."

She accepted the hand he offered to help her up, but was startled as Matt suddenly muscled into their personal space. "What did you do to your arm?" he demanded intensely, grabbing Jed by the elbow.

"Nothing," he said defensively, trying to tug his sleeve down over his hand. Abbey looked between the two of them in confusion.

"Yeah, right. It's always nothing, isn't it? Show me." He used one of those big-brother arm-locks he was always working on her to stop Jed escaping, and yanked back his sleeve. Abbey's breath came out in a started hiss as she saw the ring of bruises that circled his wrist.

Jed finally succeeded in pulling away from her brother, looking as closed off and defensive as he'd ever seen him. "It isn't anything, Matt. Really."

She glimpsed Jonathan hovering in the background, looking pale and almost frightened by the turn things had suddenly taken.

"Sure it is, you want to tell me how you did that by accident?" her brother demanded.

Abbey had already made the connection. You wouldn't get bruising like that unless somebody had grabbed you, really hard, and- Suddenly she felt sick.

"Just leave it, Matt, okay?" Jed demanded, backing away and scowling. He looked angry, but there was a different emotion beneath it, one kept tightly corralled and locked away.

Her brother was relentless, in Jed's face and verbally attacking with the force of a hot temper that was in no way trained on him. "Did your dad do this to you? Did you have a little talk last night? You want to show us any other bruises you've got because you're so... klutzy?"

Christ. Oh Christ, oh, Jesus. Bruises. Telltale bruises, after spring break, after Christmas...

He'd explained them away as clumsy falls and boyish stupidities, and she'd believed him - why wouldn't she have believed him? She remembered the vicious pattern of black and blue bruises that had covered the whole of his lower back when he'd returned from home in January.

Slipped on a pile of logs, he'd said... She could still see the sheepish, adorably embarrassed look on his face as he'd acted for all the world as if he'd been clumsy and stupid.

Oh, Jed. She wanted to reach for him, pull him into her arms and never let go, but he was still retreating.

"I said leave it, Matt!" he snapped, shoving away from him in a gesture that was instinctive fight-or-flight with no expertise behind it. He'd probably never been in a fight in his life... but, oh, he'd seen violence. Seen it for God only knew how long, found it waiting for him right here in his own home, and taken it in stolid silence. She saw that now, saw through all the things that had always seemed such a mystery of opposites in Josiah Bartlet, finally saw all the way through it to the whole of the man that lived beneath.

And he was beautiful. He thought his bruises made him ugly, something to be pitied, something to be shunned, but in her eyes, he was only beautiful.

She heard a muffled sound from Johnny, choked off too soon to identify the emotion behind it, and the front door slammed loud as he retreated, ran away from this laying open of family secrets long buried. The three of them were left frozen in a tableau, the weight of the truth lying heavy between them.

She stepped towards him. "Jed-"

He backed away from her extended hand, eyes wounded and full of angry misery. "Abbey, just- Just forget it, okay? Just leave it alone. It isn't- It doesn't- Just forget it."

He was backing away from her, and then suddenly he turned away, starting to jog away and then speeding up into a run. Matt moved as if to go after him, and she stopped him with an arm across the belly.

"Let him go, Matt."

Matt turned to her, hot temper fading now into an uneasy blend of pity, worry and guilt. "Abbey, I-"

"Yeah, I know," she cut him off softly. "I know."

He rested his arm around her shoulders, a rare and unanticipated gesture. "He'll be okay," he said quietly. "He's tough. You know he's got to be. He'll be okay."

"I know he will," Abbey agreed, solemnly but forcefully. She looked up at her brother. "But we have to let him have a moment. It's-" She didn't have any words to sum up the whole sorry, solid mess of it. "Let him have his moment."

He still recognised the pattern of her tread, even out here in the grass. He didn't look up from where he sat, arms tightly folded around his knees and head lowered, closed in on himself like a turtle retreating into its shell. He hadn't been crying, although his eyes burned with the wretched frustration of being laid open like this.

He hadn't wanted her to know. He'd just wanted one single, precious corner of his life that was free from the taint of this, where he could just be himself, untouched by his father's shadow

Abbey sat beside him, silent. She made no move to touch him or try to bring him out of himself, only waited for him to come to her in his own time.

Jed let out a slow, heavy breath, and finally raised his head. "Abbey, I-"

She laid a finger against his lips, and gave him a sorrowful smile. "You don't have to say anything," she promised in a whisper. "Don't say anything."

She leaned forward, and kissed him, a ghost of a touch that made him shiver and close his eyes. When he opened them, she was still knelt in front of him, looking at him with a gentle half smile. He studied her eyes, but he could see no pity there. She wasn't repulsed, or steeped in unwanted condolences, or quietly distressed by his weaknesses. All he could see in her eyes was the exact same thing he'd always seen, the exact same love that had been there for him before his secret shame was known.

He smiled sadly then, a fragile, tentative expression that could have been shattered with as little as a word, a look or a gesture.

Abbey smiled back, and laid her head against his shoulder. "I love you," she said, and that was all.

That was everything.

They were silent for a long time, lying side by side in the grass looking up at the sky. Finally Abbey struggled to sit upright, and looked down at him.

"Show me," she said softly, a world away from the angry way her brother had made the same demand. "Take your shirt off, and let me see."

Jed sat up too, and his face started to close off again, the quiet trust she'd earned from him beginning to peel away. "Abbey-" he said warningly.

"I love you," she said simply. "Let me see."

He hesitated, but after a moment quietly popped out each of the buttons one by one, and let the shirt fall from his shoulders.

The marks on his wrist were not the only ones. His stomach was bruised from what had surely been a violent blow to it, and his side above his hip as if he'd been knocked into something. There were the marks of faint and faded scars, some which her eyes and fingers had traced before, others she had never stopped to notice.

Abbey saw all of this, and none of it. The doctor in her ached for his injuries, wanted to take him in her arms and heal him, fix him, but to the woman in her, he was more than a catalogue of wounds. He was Jed, and she loved him.

He watched her as she looked at him, laid bare in more ways than one, and a little afraid. "What do you see?" he finally blurted, when she was silent for too long.

"You," she said simply.

She smiled, and slowly, wonderingly, he began to smile back.

"You're beautiful," she told him, and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close.