Sláinte (1/1)

Spoilers: Everything through "The Ticket."
Summary: They say that the truth has a certain power...

Disclaimer: The West Wing and all characters therein is property of Wells, etc. I own nuttin' and this is just for entertainment.

A/N: This is part of "Stress," an ongoing series of vignettes.

A HUGE thank you to mdrgrl1 who smacked this into shape. I could NOT have written it without her incomparable guidance!

She'd been told they were destined. Two souls whom, for all their stops and starts, traumas and crises, would eventually become one. It was a truth universally accepted and tacitly understood. Contingency plans in place and press releases already drafted.

Because they were supposed to be together forever. Best friends and more, like those stories you tell your girlfriends in between lunch and gym class in seventh grade. Break-apart hearts worn on ten dollar chains and a varsity jacket on permanent loan.

And maybe they were. Maybe in some alternate dimension, where a shot in the chest and C-4 and shrapnel ripping through your body were enough to make you realize the hard truths, things were different. Maybe there they were married, working the Santos campaign together, with a little Moss-Lyman already putting bullet points on color coded index cards in the womb.

But that place isn't here. Her hollow one bedroom walk-up isn't the modest-but-expensive condo in Georgetown with the real, if tiny, backyard. The resumes neatly stacked near her briefcase are in high demand, but not by those who care about anniversaries and red lights. Her stomach is flat and empty except for the burn of cheap whiskey. And the ring near her finger is just the circle the glass leaves behind when she raises it to her mouth, not platinum and promises.

The ice cubes clink as she sips the bitter amber liquid, and she can't help her lips from twitching. He, with his delicate system, could never have handled what and how much she's drinking tonight.

She takes another sip to stop from making comparisons.

The burn in her throat is just from whiskey now, tears long since spent. She wonders how it's possible to grieve for something that never was.

When the absence of something is all you have to hold on to, you don't even realize you're falling until you hit the ground.

As she tips the glass to her mouth once more, the snort she makes fans frost along the rim. It's amazing how storybook expectations getting foiled can make you realize your own childish clichés.

Now she realizes that she'd been a fool to think that going off on her own, leaving him…yes, leaving him, not the job like she'd told herself she'd done…meant a damn. For as much as she'd grown in her in position during the campaign, she knows now that her progress was undermined by the very reason she'd made the change in the first place.

Him.

Because at the root of all this desire for growth and self-help mumbo jumbo was the blazing need to prove herself. Not to constituents who saw mile long legs and blonde hair. Not to uber feminists from the WLC who, for all their talk about female power and equality, couldn't see past her lack of a college degree. And not even to press secretaries who feared that they were seeing a regression in women's lib play out in the halls of the West Wing.

No, she'd done this all for one reason. Him. To show him she could compete with the caustic brunettes who had captured his attention and warmed his bed. To "ensorcell" him of her own accord. And for a brief shining moment when she'd walked into his office, prepared to accept the job, she'd felt the heady thrill of victory.

Then, with a few out of context quotes and carefully placed reminders of their relative positions, she was back to the condo-girl from Wisconsin with the freeloading ex-boyfriend.

Now she sees it's all been for naught. Logically she knows that not all of it has been, that the things she's learned during her time away from him will take her wherever she wants to go professionally. Even so, that doesn't explain away the fact that tonight the universe has distilled to a half empty glass, a stack of paper, and the leaded ball of truth that lies low in her belly.

It makes her feel tired. Old. Used. Raw. And maybe, just maybe, for the first time in over eight years, she feels a little bit free.

Raising the glass once again to her lips, she makes a silent toast to a future where her time, her decisions, and even her heart are solely her own.

And if the whiskey seems to burn her throat a bit more than usual, she forces herself to ignore the sting.

"sláinte" means "to your health" in Irish and is used like "cheers" in English.