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eloriekamBecause of that (and also because I haven't posted anything in so long), I'll probably be posting a real chapter soon.
Participation in what they believed in, working towards something better, had eased the strain on the older members of the Bartlet administration, but no one was unchanged in the years since they left the White House.
Sam was still almost frustratingly gorgeous, the laugh lines of an older man appearing by his eyes as silver crept in a little at the temples. Jed had warned him to enjoy the salt and pepper look while he could, for if he won the Presidency, the next few years would change that drastically. Sometimes the faint lines of stress and anger appeared by his mouth, but passerby frequently pegged him at fortyish, not halfway through his fifties as he was. He rarely noticed the changes in Mallory; the determined spark and gentle affection that had together attracted him were the same.
Leo was almost translucent, all his force bound up in his expressive eyes. For all that, he often laughed and tickled his grandchildren and told them stories like a man fifteen years younger. Some quality had kept part of him from aging any more.
The same quality nearly ruled Jed and Abbey's appearance, too. Abbey was all dignified silver, it seemed, as straight-backed and elegant as she had been on the day her husband first stepped into the West Wing. Jed's eyes glinted more mischievously each year, even as he failed physically more and more, moving from cane to braces and walker and wheelchair, fighting each step of the way with the determination that had made his disease so famous in the first place.
Donna always teased Josh lightly whenever he tried to brush back his hair as he had when they first met. He would roll his eyes as his hand encountered skin where he still expected it to run into curly brown hair. Josh sometimes threatened to pull out all of his gray hairs, but Donna reminded him, as she had over the years when he got frustrated with reality, that it was the look unchanged in his eyes that counted. Donna herself had molded over the years into a synthesis of the strong women she knew: CJ, Andrea, Amy, Abbey. There were few issues indeed she feared, except for her husband's health. Unusual muscle pains, unknown even to the rest of the circle, had contributed as much as anything to his departure from Jamieson's staff. And so she cajoled and bribed him into being careful now, aware of how important this work was to him, and to her.
It was so, so odd to her, as the youngest member of the original circle, for Charlie had only been brought in later, to watch the others change and grow and age and yet stay the same in some other ways. Sam, for instance: he sometimes wouldn't walk down the street, but other times he could open his mouth and rock everyone down to their socks. And Mallory, who had feared becoming a bitter political wife or her mother, standing always and relentlessly with her husband, speaking out. Toby's eyes were still complex, but a little less uncomfortable, even when he was asked about grandchildren by anyone misled by his silvery hair and beard and the presence of Huck and Claudia. Indeed, it was usually Andi who took exception, coming up to smile with elegant confidence, hair she'd managed to keep red all this time about her face, and casually talk about births and weddings and first meetings. The 2014 campaign had left her oddly energized and ever more aware of issues she'd never thought about before.
Carol, who had finally and in complete frustration decided to stay single except for a possible pet, watched everyone else's children grow up. She never felt that she'd missed anything, being there for so many big steps for all of them as she had been. From Huck and Claudia to little Danielle... unique and utterly precious and raised in a strange world where senators and representatives were significant, almost celebrities, but more known.
There were things that everyone else had to see about these children; that Noah liked puzzles and Claudia played the piano and Huck was as likely to bind up his words in a painting as to write them down. Would the public accept that Samantha loved to pull a string along for the cats to play with like any normal girl, or would they focus on her abnormal moments with animals, the vacation where she'd seen a wolf after it'd been caught in a trap and the way she'd cried when she saw pictures of a manatee hit by a motorboat? What would be front and center for Abigail: her time volunteering to help AIDS victims, or the time she'd joined a march protesting discrimination against women?
Who would the public see? Two extraordinarily intelligent girls raised by trusted friends when their mother died who would graduate high school at fifteen, or the legal daughters of some of the most prominent political faces in the country and the de facto granddaughters of a former President? And how would that perception affect the other children?
She wasn't worried about Josh and Donna's children, who resembled their parents astoundingly; they'd had the twins around since they were born, literally. Noah, with his light brown, curly hair and dimples and odd gray eyes; Joann, who dimpled on just one cheek and had hair just this side of blond to go with startling hazel eyes that would read anything in sight and hands that always needed to be on something, be it instrument or person or creature; and Josiah, with utterly charming green eyes and brown hair, who would rub his still chubby fingers along rock or bark but always resisted the walls in his mother's office.
Jocelyn and Zachary, both startlingly black-haired like their father at first glance, but with glimmering highlights if one took the time to look, and look they would. Joy's hazel eyes reflected an amazing boldness, leading to adventures in the past couple of years that drove her parents insane. Zach's blue eyes were quiet, reflective pools; anyone looking at him when he was thinking might dismiss him as being slow on the uptake, but he'd already dodged around enough stupid playground incidents to lay rest to that idea. Both of them, however, hated dressing up, and the PR expert in Carol groaned in frustration even as she sympathized. Sometimes formalwear was simply no fun at all, and they'd have to make it fun.
Charlie and Zoey's children wouldn't be involved directly in the short term, but hopefully they would be in the long term, as would their parents. Delicate and kind and creative and completely colorblind, those three... or at least Danielle would be once she was old enough. More than any of the others, they seemed to be a perfect synthesis of their parents... or so their grandfather kept insisting.
Husbands and wives and friends had all agreed on the difficulty; if even one child were to ever make it clear it was too rough, they would call off their hopes and dreams, for such was the nature of their peculiar idealism. If the path to the highest office in the land was too difficult for a child at the distance of two or three layers of relations and communications, perhaps something else was wrong.
There was still hope it would not be so, that Seaborn for America would reach for the stars and find them within their grasp. That there would be a first One Hundred Days like no other.
Carol knew they would all change, and hoped none of the changes would turn to bitterness down the road. That was not an acceptable price either.
'How arrogant are we? Or are we, really? We've been at this for almost 20 years, and some of us far longer. I saw the first 100 Days that CJ laid out for Sam so long ago, and I didn't think it was possible to make it more radical, but he is. Every single issue he could think of is on there. Energy, education, health care, women, more education, environment, free trade, foreign relations, crime, violent crime, guns, pollution, land use, science funding, AIDS, defense spending, minorities, gay rights, civil rights... it goes on and on.'
And with all of them, wherever they looked, stood CJ's daughters; two girls who had started greeting elected officials on the street when they were five, who had helped with a Senate campaign when girls their age were usually just discovering how to really flirt. Twins who seemed to their parents to be growing up too fast... and yet who both demonstrated levelheadedness and wit and good humor and everything else healthy time and again. Samantha and Abigail, whom they had thought to protect from politics, who could instead be protecting them by exercising skills that were as natural as reading to them. Two girls, who stood and prayed in a cemetery that spring that they were doing what they were supposed to be doing, what their mother would have approved of if she could, and who sometimes stood and shook inside at the idea of what they were trying to do.
