Hey guys, so this is my first fanfic and I know it's not perfect but I'm quite pleased with what I wrote. I hope you enjoy it
He hates her. It's been a month since he found out. A month since the funeral, since he killed someone, but he doesn´t think about that part much, he's too focused on the betrayal, the lies, the fraud to think about anything else. He hasn't seen her since the funeral and he won't, ever again. He doesn't want to see her anyway, he hates her.
The first time they have a crisis in the White House he refuses to call her, it's a minor crisis anyway, nothing they can't handle on their own and the only people who would suggest calling her are Cyrus or Mellie and he knows they won't bring her up cause it's not convenient for them. So he pretends he doesn't even think about calling her. In the end he's right and they solve it on their own.
The second and third and fourth time they have problems in the White House where they would normally call her in as a consultant they manage without her too, with a lot more struggle than they normally would with her there but they get through it anyway.
The fifth time though, after six months of avoiding her at all cost, the crisis is a little bit more complicated. He's trying to get a law passed and it's a pretty important one, one that he's been working on since he became president. He knew the voting would be pretty close but the polls assured him it'd get passed, but at the last minute one of the senators goes into labor and so it's Sally's job to vote and he knows he's screwed. They have two days until the voting and he knows he'll lose. He can almost convince himself it doesn't matter, the law can get passed next year or the year after that but he knows that's not true. This law is too important for him and the country, too many people would be helped by it. He can't just ignore all those people just to keep avoiding her, it's too selfish, so he sends Cyrus. I mean it's the logical thing to do, he's the president and has more important things to worry about, he doesn't have time to go all the way to her office or to call her over the phone. Besides, he hates her and he definitely doesn't want to see her or hear her voice, so he sends Cyrus. Everything works out just fine after that, she does her job, handles the problem, crisis averted.
After that Cyrus starts bringing her up, every time they have a crisis or a problem that needs fixing Cyrus suggests calling her. He considers hiring someone else, he heard Leo Bergen is pretty good but he knows she's the best, even if he hates her, he knows, so he comes up with a system. If he needs her, he sends Cyrus, he never goes himself, never calls her on the phone, nothing. He sends Cyrus. She's still off the White House list so it's not like she can come see him even if she wanted to. It's the perfect plan, she doesn't get invited to the White House galas, he doesn't go to an event if he knows she'll be there, he avoids her like the plague, he can't believe it works for so long considering they have way too many people in common but it does. Until it doesn't.
He find out Cyrus is planning on adopting a baby four months after the funeral, he finds out Cyrus has actually adopted a baby and that he is the godfather of said baby three months after that which he gracefully accepts of course because he loves kids, he finds out Olivia is the godmother of that baby a month later when James invites him to a celebratory party on their home after the adoption is finalized. He has to go, he's the godfather, and she has to go too, and the party is in two weeks. Fuck. He can't avoid her anymore. He can't not go, he can't run from it and he supposes it was inevitable anyway. They were going to run into each other at some point, he knows this and at least now he has two weeks to prepare himself for it, for her. So he makes a list. Of all the reasons he hates her. She committed fraud, she lied about it, she sided with Cyrus and Hollis and Verna and Mellie and not him, she made a fool of him and his administration, she betrayed his trust, she broke his heart… and yet.
He takes one look at her and everything crumbles, all the lies he told himself over the past few months, all the anger, all the hate, all of it just disappears. He doesn't hate her. He doesn't hate her at all. He loves her, he loves her so much, and he realizes in that exact moment that he always will, because she did the worst thing she could have done, she took his dream and his trust and his love and she crushed it in front of him and yet he still loves her, more than he loves anyone in the world besides his kids. And suddenly he realizes this is why, why he avoided her all this time, why he didn't see her or call her or caught her in the corner of the TV behind whoever's life she was fixing that week, why he sent Cyrus whenever they needed help. Because he took one look at her and his stupid heart went into over drive and the stupid butterflies in his stomach that had been quiet for so long decided to throw a party of their own.
He runs. He tells everyone he's not feeling well two hours after she arrives, after he talks to literally every single person there except her, all 53 people invited and he can't come up with anything to do to avoid her. He says his goodbyes and he basically drags Mellie out of there knowing he's being very rude and the she's in the middle of a conversation with someone he vaguely remembers as a congressman's wife. Mellie doesn't say anything all ride home and neither does he. He's pretty sure she figured out why he was so eager to flee the party but she doesn't bring it up, instead she orders a soup from the kitchen, checks his forehead for a fever he doesn't have and the next morning asks him if he's feeling better. He isn't, he feels awful, because he saw her and she looked gorgeous and exhausted and all he wanted to do was kiss her and hug her and forgive her and love her. But he won't, he can't, because she hurt him and broke his heart and toyed with his feelings.
A month later it's Ella's baptism and he sees her again and he's so close their hands touch and he has nowhere to look but right at her and time stops, he doesn't hear what the priest says, he doesn't feel the holy water, he doesn't notice any of it. Just her, her hand touching his, her eyes looking into his the way she always looks at him; and then it's over. The moment has passed, their hands untangle, they both look away and then moments after that they go their separate ways to the party Mellie is throwing at the White House.
He spends the whole way from the church to the party thinking about it or actually not thinking about it. He pretends it didn't happen, he pretends he didn't saw what he did when she looked at him, he pretends he didn't feel her hand shaking under his, he pretends he didn't noticed the circles under her eyes or the fact that she looks way too thin for it to be healthy. He convinces himself nothing happened, nothing will ever happen again, no more moments or looks or stolen kisses or laughs or any of it. It's over and he's okay with that. Really.
She's the one who runs this time. Which makes sense because this is his house and it wouldn't really be believable if he left a party in his own house. She runs one hour into the party and he lets her. He wants to follow her but he doesn't. He just lets her go. For real this time.
She stops taking them as a client after that. Doesn't take Cyrus' or Mellie's calls, doesn't meet Cyrus for coffee dates anymore, doesn't let Cyrus passed the door of OPA when he goes to see her in person. Nothing. She completely cuts ties with the White House. He hates her, he's never going to forgive her, she knows this already, she's known this for months, so why did it hurt so much? Why does she feel like someone pulled her heart out of her chest? Why does it feel like there's no air, like she can't breathe? Because she had hope, because even though she woke up every single morning and reminded herself that he hated her and wanted nothing to do with her, there was a tiny part of her that had hope that he'd reconsider, that he'd let her explain herself, that he'd give her a second chance the way he had with Cyrus and Mellie.
When she saw him for the first time in almost nine months at Ella's adoption party she stopped breathing for a second, because he looked so handsome and she hadn't seen him in so long other than on TV, but he didn't look at her all night. She made conversation with a few people she knew but she kept an eye on him in case he ever looked at her. He didn't. He amazingly managed to ignore her for two hours, which she didn't thing was possible in a relatively small party, but he did and then he left with some excuse about feeling ill.
She cries herself to sleep that night. Because she thought that if and when they inevitably found each other in the same room again, he'd have no choice but to hear her out and she thought that maybe, maybe he'd forgive her. Or at the very least she thought that she'd get to see him dressed in one of his fancy suits and he'd look at her in that way that makes her want to kiss him senseless, with those beautiful blue eyes of his and then she'd feel better, or she'd feel some type of way that was better than what she felt every day since that goddamn funeral, so she went out and she bought a breath taking dress that she chose specifically for him even though she had never, ever, not even when she was a teenager, dressed for anyone but herself. Instead he avoided her, he didn't even look at her all night and then he left.
The second time she saw him, a month later, she was ready; ready for him to ignore her, ready for the way that was going to make her feel, ready for him to talk to everyone but her, ready for all of it. What she wasn't ready for, was for them to be so close for such a long period of time, which was ridiculous because they were the godparents and obviously that meant being close while the baby was getting baptized and yet she somehow had forgotten that minor detail, she wasn't ready for their hands to touch and she most definitely wasn't ready for their eyes to connect in one of those special moments she had only ever had with him. So after an excruciatingly long hour she left the party and she cut ties with the White House.
Two months after the baptism, after successfully avoiding Cyrus for that long, which honestly is an accomplishment on its own, she gets an email. She wouldn't have opened it had she known it was from the White House but they used an address she didn't recognize, so she opened it and it was a project, to help at risk children. He's working on a project to help at risk children and he wants her imput, or at least Cyrus does, and so she has to help. She starts talking to Cyrus again, taking his calls, going on coffee meetings across from the White House, she gets rolled back into it, and she loves it.
The project is important and it needs a lot of work, it's not even close to ready yet so they work on it for months and she almost feels like she's part of the team again, part of the inter circle, almost. Except she doesn't see him at all, even though it's his project, even though she works on it from her office every chance she gets for months, she doesn't see him, not once. He emails her sometimes, she thinks, she sends all her ideas to the email address she first got the project from, which turns out to be Lauren's address. His secretary's address. She emails all her ideas and notes to that account, even if it would be easier to email it to Cyrus or the White House's address than to his secretary, but she sends her responses to Lauren because she assumes that way he gets them first and she thinks that he's the one replying to her sometimes, maybe, or maybe she just misses him too much and is imagining things.
After working on the project for six months, they get stucked. There's a problem and she doesn't know how to fix it. She can't come up with any viable solution and it's frustrating. She's examined the problem a hundred times, put the pictures on the wall, brought her gladiators in, and she's still stuck. It's like the wall is mocking her now, taunting her, daring her to come up with a solution that she can't come up with.
A week into this slump of hers, Cyrus comes in, first he thinks maybe they can look at the problem together, but every solution he comes up with she's already considered and discarded, then he gives her some tough love, saying that she is the best fixer in town and that she has to solve this and that so many people are counting on her and bla bla bla. But the thing is, she knows this, and she wants to help, it's just the answer won't come out. It's on the tip of her tongue but she just can't think of it quite yet.
Two weeks into the slump, after having read every single document they have, after knowing every picture and note in the wall and in the table and in her office and in her computer by heart, she gives up, she doesn't really see any other way, she clearly can't help, can't solve the problem, so she calls Cyrus, tells him to hire someone else and that she's out and then she hangs up. After that she expected a lot of things to happen, she expected the millions of calls and voicemails from Cyrus, she expected is when both Cyrus and Mellie showed up at OPA trying to convince her to reconsider, she even expected the secret service agents at her door step the next morning asking her to go with them to the White House, which she declines by the way. What she didn't expect was for Fitz to be there when she got to OPA.