A/N: And thus ends the fic. Um... I hope it's satisfactory. Up next is All Human Wisdom which is kind of a Mac companion piece and sequel. Which I'm hoping to get off the ground soonish, and will actually feature the birth of Teddy. So... yeah. Thanks to everyone who has left reviews or followed.
Also Sorkin has not given us Bartlet levels of Catholicism for Will, so I have attempted to make up the deficit here. Except not really. Eh.
CHAPTER SIX: PRESENT DAY
He uses the time it takes to sink back down into leather-upholstered armchair to try to formulate an answer. But he doesn't have one.
"I don't know." To be a better man than he is, he thinks.
With Charlotte it's uncomplicated. He doesn't understand the ribbons and bows and frills, or the braids and pigtails, or her sudden and immense interest in the cosmetics on Mac's vanity, but he can help with the workbooks and cartoons and games and dog-training and everything else that Charlotte doesn't need explicitly Mac for. But Mac doesn't know shit about football or how to even hold a baseball bat and it's not like he's the kind of guy who'll have a heart attack if his son plays with his sister at her dollhouse or takes ballet lessons, but it seems like everything steeped in what society has deemed to be masculine is colored by his own father's views on how to correctly be a man.
There were lines to not be stepped over, rules meant to box yourself in tightly, to learn to be so unbending and unyielding that you become brittle, and break.
Not for his son.
"Well, think on it," Habib says, and then looks at his watch. "Our fifty minutes are up. I'll see you Wednesday?"
Sighing, Will fights every impulse to say no.
"Yeah. I'll be here."
Setting down his notebook, Habib looks him over. "Do try to have a good time at the wedding today."
Screwing up his face into what he knows is definitely a scowl, Will waves a flippant goodbye and exits his therapist's office.
By the time he got home from his appointment Mac had already gotten Charlotte dressed, and their daughter was twirling in front of the full-length mirror in the entryway, admiring herself in her white tulle and taffeta flower girl dress. Maggie was sitting at the kitchen table, getting fussed over by a hair stylist, MacKenzie, and Sloan. Which he took as his cue to stay out of the way, reminding Charlotte not to scuff her shoes before they even leave for the church before heading upstairs to get dressed himself.
3 o'clock finds them piling into their Suburban to drive to the church, and after hundreds of pictures he had shooed off the photographer so that Maggie could try to breathe through a bout of not-so-morning sickness before heading down the aisle.
Ten minutes to four, they're standing in the back of the narthex as the procession music (he thanks god that Jim and Maggie had the taste to not choose Canon in D or anything Pachelbel) when Maggie takes his arm and very nervously says, "Ellen was your assistant when I was first hired as an intern. Karen was the one who quit before I forged a memo from you to HR, hiring myself because I was doing the job anyway. Karen wasn't very efficient."
He lifts an eyebrow at that. "You forged a memo to HR?"
"I'm very good at your signature. Second best to Mac, really," Maggie continues, smiling impishly. "Not that it's hard. It's kind of just a big W… scrawl, big D, big M, scrawl… Charlie's handwriting is neater than yours."
"But Charlie doesn't sign your performance reviews, I do… unless you're forging those and sending them up to HR too," he replies, keeping an eye on Charlotte as she embarks down the aisle into the sanctuary, carefully sprinkling handfuls of white rose petals onto the red runner. They had all impressed upon her the necessity of going slowly earlier. He's oddly pleased that she listened, her steps stiltedly measured and definitely far slower than normal.
She snorts. "Nah, I'm a great employee." Fussing with her veil, she bites her lip up at him. "So, any last-minute advice?"
"Never fight while you're frying bacon," he says, trying to shirk the innate feeling that he is the last person who should be giving anyone personal advice. But he supposes that from Maggie's point of view, he and Mac have it well-enough in hand.
"Will!"
He snorts. "I'm serious, I still have the burns. Hot grease is not a joke."
Rolling her eyes, she hugs his arm with both of hers. "And I'm serious. You and Mac are what I got to work with, here. Give me one of your off-the-prompter inspirational moments about how I'm not a colossal screw-up who won't be a miserable failure as a wife and mother."
Will's pretty certain those only work when the audience is the camera, but for Maggie he figures he can give it a whirl. "Trust me when I say that having a baseline of what not to do is often a helpful precedent. Not that it'll keep you from constantly second guessing yourself, but you know what you have to lose."
"We were thinking of naming the baby after Daniel. Maybe as a middle name," she answers quietly. "You know, I kept thinking that they'd show up. They didn't even RSVP."
"It's their loss."
The bridesmaids trickle out of the narthex one by one. Mac, in her deep purple matron of honor gown, looks over from where she's talking with Sloan and waggles her fingers at the two of them.
"It still kinda feels like it's my fault," Maggie mumbles.
Unthinkingly, he shakes his head. "You're standing in a church, in a very beautiful white dress, two minutes away from pledging your life to another. There is no excuse for missing that. Charlie could drop out of college and get addicted to crack and I'd still be there in a heartbeat to do this. And no, I'm not equating getting pregnant out of wedlock to getting addicted to crack," he clarifies, laughing dryly at himself. "I'm trying to say that-I'm just-they're your parents. It's on them. Not you. There are unspoken rules."
"Oh god, there are rules I have to learn, too?" she asks, entirely facetious in a way that hints at barely-concealed emotions.
Will sighs, watching Mac approach the doors leading to the sanctuary. "How did you win my wife away from Jim's side, again?"
She shrugs. "Jim is pretty predictable at rock, paper, scissors. Always goes for rock, first."
"Yup, you're definitely ready for marriage." Gently, he leads her towards where one of the church attendants have closed the doors in preparation for Maggie's entrance. Stops, takes her by the shoulders before neatening a tendril of hair, kissing her on the forehead, and fixing the veil over her face.
For half a moment, all he can remember are the last words his Dad said to him, at his last Christmas spent at home his third year of law school. He'd flown home from New York for Fiona, who had begged. You'll come back. You'll never make it out there. You'll come back, and I'll be waiting.
And that was when Will knew that he could never go home again.
Bouncing on her toes, Maggie looks excitedly up at him.
"When it comes down to it," he says quickly, listening out for the opening strains of the bridal march. "Your parents are the ones who are missing out. They could have grown up with you. They could have come today. Now here's the thing, and for the love of god don't take as long as I did to figure it out: your life goes on. They can wait forever for you to have some sort of revelation that you don't belong here. But trust me, Margaret. You do. And in a minute I'm going to walk you down the aisle and in seven months you're going to have a baby and your life will go on without them. Let it."
If only he had someone to tell him that at thirty, as Bush was leaving office and he once again had no idea where to go except anywhere but Nebraska. But if someone had told him that then, he never would have met MacKenzie. He's far too old to have those sorts of regrets.
Blinking back tears, Maggie straightens his tie. "I'm glad you're not as much of a jerk as you used to be."
"Just think, if I hadn't have been, I would have noticed your self-appointment as my gatekeeper," he retorts, folding her arm around his again.
The pianist starts again, and they're given their cue.
"I'm glad you hired yourself," he continues, more seriously. "And I am honored to be the one you asked to walk you down the aisle."
His last thought before the wedding starts is how in the mad aftermath of his and Mac's own hasty nuptials, that Maggie was the one who thought to run to the bakery three blocks over to buy them a cupcake. Smiling, he lets her lead him forward.
The ceremony passes in a blur. Jim cries, which is good because if he didn't, Will thinks he would have subtly kicked him in the shins until he did, which is exactly what Jim threatened to do to him five years ago.
(He didn't need any assistance in that either, as Charlotte was thrilled to learn when Uncle Neal, at her request, dredged up the iPhone video of their City Hall wedding from some hidden corner of the internet.)
The photographer has them take approximately a thousand and a half pictures afterwards, outside the little Long Island church that Maggie had found that would be willing to marry them on short notice. Small, non-denominational, quaint. Now a days (not really, probably since he was nineteen years old and first moved East) it seems like he's only ever in a church for a wedding or a funeral. Ted's funeral three months ago. Before that… he thinks maybe Midnight Mass one year with the staff, as Sloan and Don had gotten married at the Plaza, not a church. He used to take his siblings to mass every Sunday, made sure they woke up on time and were bathed and dressed nicely, before leading them across the farm to the tiny and relatively unadorned Cathedral in town.
Sunday was the only day of the week that Dad waited until the afternoon to start drinking.
Charlotte isn't even baptized.
Not that he's really worried that he's going to be solely responsible for sending his daughter to hell, but maybe they should consider it when the baby's born.
Charlotte, tugging on the sleeve of his suit jacket with one hand while trying to straighten the wreath of pink roses in her blonde curls with the other, peers up at him. "Daddy, I left my sweater."
"In the pew?"
She nods. "Sorry."
"Not a big deal. Tell Mummy I'll be right back." He probably should have remembered to grab it before they headed out with the recessional. Pointing Charlotte in the direction of where the bridal party has amassed, he turns back towards the church, quickly ascending the front steps and slipping back inside.
The ceremony ended almost forty-five minutes ago, so the sanctuary is long empty. He spots Charlotte's white cardigan in seconds where it lies in stark contrast to the red velveteen cushion in the front row. Forty years ago, he never would have let something like this happen. Any infraction, however small, was an unforgivable lapse of responsibility in his father's eyes. More than once he had caught a beating covering for his little brother or sisters.
They'd go from mass. Walk, if the weather was nice enough, because then it would take longer. During the winter they'd press in together in the '69 station wagon. And when they got home, John would strip off his jacket and tie and reach for the bottle and not stop drinking until he passed out around nine or ten.
Will still doesn't understand how a man could go from listening to a homily on god's love in the morning to breaking his wife's cheekbone by the middle of the afternoon. But his own faith hasn't survived it. The closest thing he has in faith in a benevolent god is his faith in MacKenzie.
He thinks he knows how to answer Habib's question.
What do you want to teach your son?
The specter of John McAvoy is fresh in his mind. Perhaps it's canny, candles for the dead flickering at an altar tucked into a back corner of the church. He can hear the wretched cadence of his father's whiskey-soaked voice in his ear.
"You wish you could hit hard enough, Billy."
The late afternoon suns glints hard on the golden cross hanging over the pulpit.
"To be gentle," he mutters, picking up his daughter's sweater, folding it over his arm, and leaving the church to rejoin his family.
Thanks for reading!