Angry Young Men

by: Delightfully Eccentric

Character(s): Jed, OMC
Category(s): AU/General
Rating: YTEEN
Disclaimer: The West Wing characters and histories aren't mine, and are used here for love, not money.
Summary: It isn't the presidency with Joe. The boy didn't like him long before.
Author's Note:Part of the '5 Things That Never Happened to Jed Bartlet' Series

They move around the bedroom, shedding clothes and donning nightwear, quietly absorbing the kind of casual intimacy denied them too often by their schedules. He misses the simple pleasure of getting ready for sleep next to his wife.

He climbs beneath the covers and waits for her, enjoying the prickle of cold soon to be dispelled by her body. He picks at the loose stitching on the pyjamas a very small Zoey (a different Zoey) gave him twelve, fifteen years ago.

Abbey watches him from the doorway of the bathroom, grinning around the toothbrush in her mouth.

He closes his eyes and listens to the running water as she rinses, absently mussing his hair with one hand. He has found excessive neatness is not conducive of a sleepy state of mind.

He feels the motion on her approach, then the sinking and the creak as she joins him and finally her skin and the silk of her nightgown sliding against him. He smells her soap.

Darkness covers them when she flicks the switch, and for a moment there's nothing but a husband and a wife and the conspicuous absence of distractions.

She rolls into her pillow, her leg kicked back and entwining with his. He grins into the night as her toes wiggle against the hairs on his calf. When she's sleeping elsewhere, it's like missing the bedclothes.

Her breathing settles and slows and becomes– not noisier, but more audible. It's a sound that irritates him slightly when he's lying awake and she's been asleep for hours, and worries him terribly when he's lying awake and she's in another time zone.

He reaches to run his hand down her back, and winces at a forgotten pain.

"What?"

She turns, searching out his hand with her own.

"What's wrong?"

Her fingers brush over the swollen knuckles. She's in the dark, she isn't blind.

"You hurt your hand."

"It's nothing."

"Jed?"

He sighs and tries to trace patterns in the darkness.

"Joe stopped by today."

"I didn't see him."

"I know. He said- He wasn't in a good mood. He didn't want to upset you."

She clucks her tongue. "You taught him to treat me like that, you know."

"Yeah, I did, 'cause it's good."

Her body isn't so soft against him now. Tension is so very tiring.

"Is he okay?" she asks, concern lowering her tone.

"He's fine. Why wouldn't- He was in a bad mood. Why wouldn't he be fine?"

He won't be surprised if there's something vital he doesn't know. He never seems to know, with the boy. With the girls he knows things, even if he doesn't know what to do about them.

"You hurt your hand."

"Jesus Christ!"

He throws the covers aside and gets to his feet, too quickly. Abbey grabs at him when he stumbles, but the floor is his destiny.

Breathing heavily, he rests there, the wounded hand clenched near his mouth. He shuts his eyes and refuses to join dots.

"You think I'd raise my hand to one of our children."

"He's a grown man. He's four inches taller than you. I wasn't suggesting-"

"You think that's how I go about handling our problems? Might as well lamp Ellie and be done with it."

"In twenty years I've never seen you handle any of your problems with Joe."

It's too harsh to reply to and too true to resent her for.

There are other things, like the way the boy touches her arm when they share a joke; like the way her birthday cards say more than 'love from Joe'; like how when she chews him out, the boy only rolls his eyes instead of turning white and spitting with rage.

Those are things he can resent her for, or can try to.

"I didn't- I'm not my father."

"I know."

He believes her, which is fortunate. One of them has to sound convincing.

"I didn't hit him."

"I know."

He'd have expected his eyes to have got used to the dark by now. He can make out only Abbey's outline rising up from the bed.

"You hurt your hand."

He closes his eyes.

"I punched the wall. He was- The way he spoke to me. I don't understand that boy, Abbey."

"He's not a boy," and her wistfulness is catching. "He's angry you haven't noticed he's a man."

"I'm angry he hasn't noticed I'm one. He appears to think I'm a beast."

He feels her hand on his cheek and knows she's trying to look him in the eyes. He doesn't want to let her.

She says, "You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was."

Jed reaches for the light switch. The subject is in sore need of illumination. Has been since Jed was half the boy's age.

He casts his wife a curious look.

"Pardon me?"

"Leo told me that the other day. We were talking about this, about you and your... stuff. It's an old Irish proverb or something. It's his way of saying Joe's turning out fine."

He smiles, almost.

"He's three inches taller than me."

"It's four."

"Three and a half."

"If it means you'll come back to bed."

He takes her hand in his good one and lets her haul him to his feet.

"You'll talk to him, right? Tell him I didn't mean... anything bad."

"I'll call him and convince him to come over and you'll tell him what you meant, 'cause I don't even know."

"Abbey. I don't think that would help matters any."

It hurts that after all these years, this is the thing they're still an ocean apart on.

"He doesn't believe me when I talk to him about you, just like you don't believe me when I talk to you about him. I don't know what your thing is, but this is one boys club that can stay that way."

Sometimes he wonders if it's a punishment, because he doesn't talk to her about foreign policy.

She rolls over; heat radiates from her back.

"Talk to your kid, Jed."

For the rest of the night, it is no longer absence that renders the distractions conspicuous.

*

He has his feet up on the desk. It just might be misuse of government property but he figures he has a stronger entitlement than most.

He's considered thumping his head off it. It didn't prove helpful the last time he tried it.

He taps his pen against the untouched pile of papers Debbie gave him to sign.

"Charlie!" Intercoms are overrated.

At the door with a demure, "Sir?"

Charlie always knows when not to be funny. It's irritating.

"Were you being sarcastic?"

Charlie blinks expressionlessly, for which Jed reads smugly.

"I'm sorry?"

"That 'sir' sounded sarcastic to me."

"No, sir."

"You just did it again."

"Did what?"

"Called me sir with sarcasm."

"I always call you sir. You're the President."

He puts his glasses down on the papers he isn't reading. He isn't sure if he's having fun.

"That was a little dig at my memory, wasn't it?"

"Mr. President, you can list the books of the Old and New Testaments, US Presidents and member states of the United Nations in alphabetical order. I really don't think there's much call for mockery."

Charlie's eyes change just a touch. He always knows when.

"Hang on. There's actually quite a bit of call for-"

"Yeah, okay. That's enough. You're not funny today."

"Okay, sir."

And that's definitely got the colour of sarcasm in it, but there's nowhere to take it so he lets it go.

It's quiet. A clock ticks, only in his head.

Charlie's halfway out the door. Too easy. Charlie knows. He can talk to Charlie.

"Wait. What do you think of Citizens for DC Statehood?"

"I live in DC. I'm from DC. I'm registered to vote in DC, and you're asking me what I think?"

"You just named three reasons you might reasonably be supposed to have an opinion on the matter so, yeah, I'm asking what you think."

"I think it's a funny kind of democracy when a percentage of the population are denied representation based on their geographical location. It's particularly ironic when that location is the seat of government."

"Yeah."

He picks his glasses up again and fiddles with the leg.

"You're going to break those, sir."

"That's stupid."

"The hinge is about to-"

"I meant your opinion on statehood."

"What precisely makes you think it's stupid, sir?"

"Because it's what Joe thinks."

Charlie's expressionlessness becomes subtly more animated.

"Is that why you were, ah, raising your voices when he stopped by yesterday?"

"He was raising his voice. That was my normal voice. My normal, authoritative, Nobel Prize winning, world leader voice. And yes, it was because he was being impossible."

"I meant was it because you decide opinions are stupid based on the fact that they're his."

His fingers clench around the glasses. A vein somewhere is going to pop. When it comes to the boy, the world is against him.

"I was kidding, Charlie. I was being facetious."

"Does Joe know that?"

"I didn't say it to Joe!"

"I'm surmising that you may have said something similar."

"I did not say- But if I did, I was kidding!"

"And I'm saying, did Joe know you were kidding? Because I thought you were, but I wasn't sure. If you don't mind me saying, sir, you can be tricky. And I see you every day."

"He's my son, for crying out loud. I can't make a joke with my son?"

"He doesn't see you every day."

"He wouldn't see me every year if it was up to him."

It's not a presidential sound, his tone, too petulant where he expected bitterness.

He tosses the glasses across the desk. Charlie's eyes follow, taking note of their resting place for whenever they are again required for use as something other than a stress toy.

Jed looks at him intently. Charlie doesn't seem to resent his absent father a fraction as much as Joe resents him. He's noticed before. It's one of the things he doesn't feel he can ask about. He doesn't know Charlie as well as Charlie knows him. He flatters himself that it's because of the presidency, as with Ellie.

It isn't the presidency with Joe. The boy didn't like him long before.

Charlie purses his mouth in sympathy.

"Perhaps if you tried to make it a little more obvious when you're kidding."

Jed turns a grin into a snarl and shoos him.

Charlie knows when to joke with him, when to be real.

He's become spoilt, through these years of doing this, and too used to having people anticipate and accommodate his moods. Half an hour's failed attempt to mimic them with the boy wears him beyond the bone. He can't imagine where they find the energy to do it day after day.

Spoilt too in that it's been years since he's had to deal with anything without advice from many times as many sources as could conceivably be useful.

He twists his wrist to his face, struggling to make out the figures on his watch. He double checks it with a clock, a real one, the ticking of which doesn't get louder when he compares himself to history.

He lifts the phone and puts it down, more than once. He's on his own on this one.

*

Joe keeps him waiting. Jed blows off the Secretary of State in order to avoid tit for tat.

It opens with accusation, passive-aggressive, nervous and mild:

"Why did you decide to tell Mom what happened?"

"She noticed my hand."

"What's wrong with your hand?"

Maintenance have already fixed the damage to the room. Too easy.

"I- After you left. I..."

Some things, the boy understands. Why does it have to be things like this?

"Oh. Okay. I just... didn't want to worry her. Is all. Was all. Um." They're tapping their fingers on opposite sides of the desk. A harmony is needed. When the boy notices, he lets his hands hang.

Jed tries to reassure: "She's okay."

"I know," defensive, as if their problem is Freudian. If only. If only he could believe it's all about Abbey. He might understand then.

The boy's hands tap the sides of his pants before finding their ways to his belt loops.

"You and I on the other hand, we need-"

"I don't know why you made Mom call me."

Sometimes the boy understands enough to contradict statements that haven't yet been made.

He still hasn't grown into wearing a good suit. The attempt never looks right (unless it looks right all the times Jed doesn't see him), particularly when slouched with his hands in his pockets.

He's too far away. Jed wants to walk around to the other side of the desk - the boy would only step back.

"I didn't make your mother do anything."

"Oh, whatever." Anything but.

The boy slaps a hand against the desk (there's a crack, Jed hears shattering), flinches and tries to hide it, kicks an imaginary bump in the carpet, and fails to reign himself in.

"You know what, you need to get that most people don't choose their words as carefully as you do."

"What does that mean?"

"Means I know Mom wouldn't let you make her do anything."

Figures. Abbey the Good Parent. Abbey the disciplinarian. Abbey, who understands. Abbey: never the bully and never the victim.

"I meant, you're digging at something. You don't choose your words as carefully as I do. Okay. Okay. What are you digging at?"

The boy wrenches the opening wide.

"Everything's a performance with you. Opening an envelope. Telling one of your stories. Fighting with Mom. Telling us you love us."

Jed's arms fly wide.

"This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Anyone would think I'm some kind of monster. When I tell you I love you I mean it."

The expression on his son's face, trying so hard to be a sneer, rends the deepest wound his heart has known.

"I don't know why you hate me, Joe. It breaks my heart that I don't understand you. But when I tell you I love you I mean it. You have no idea."

"I don't hate you!"

He tilts his head and raises a hand to his ear. It doesn't dislodge the ringing echoes.

"What?"

Confusion nudges its way to the forefront of the boy's look. He shuffles sideways in a graceless shrug of his whole body. His chest thumps with angry breath and he's left a sweaty palm print on the desk.

Jed used to be better at stiffening the nerves before audiences with his father.

"What did you say just then?"

The boy twitches in frustration. His feet grind the carpet, as if laying down roots is the only thing that can keep him from fleeing.

"The way you talk, it sounds like I'm some fucked up adolescent who hates his parents. I've never told you I hate you. I've never done anything to suggest I hate you."

"Well, you certainly haven't shaken off that teenage awkwardness yet."

Jed looks at his hands. He doesn't usually make these observations aloud, because who knows what might offend the boy? (He knows the answer: Abbey. Abbey always knows.)

The silence draws his gaze up, too late to read the dampness of the eye suggesting that his son is surprised, pleasantly, that he noticed.

"I don't hate you."

Jed sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters, "That's what I said."

"What?"

The boy runs a hand through his hair, it springs up behind. Jed tries to shake the impression that Toby Ziegler is watching him through the eyes of his father's photograph on the desk.

"I always tell people I didn't hate my father. Grandpa Bartlet. You never really got to know him, you were so young when he..."

He waves a hand as in dismissal. His eyes glaze and the hand trails back to the desk. The boy shifts uncomfortably.

"Your mother, Leo, this doctor I talk to sometimes – I tell them I didn't hate my father. I tell them it's important to have respect."

"Dad, I-"

The boy's levels of unease must be becoming drastic if he's throwing that word out there.

"Let me say this, son."

He sees the boy inhale and stretch his neck and look at him, and it's nice that something in his father's eyes can still make the boy sink back down into his shoes and sigh.

"Okay. Okay," as if to reassure himself. He needs it.

"Can we sit down?" asks Jed. He's coming down with stage fright.

"Okay. Okay."

The boy is closest but he doesn't sit until Jed reaches the sofa. Even then what he does can be better termed hovering.

"We had a difficult relationship, I suppose you knew that."

"I don't need a potted history of the grand and mighty family Bartlet, no."

And it isn't right that the boy has sat through all the stories about the Declaration of Independence and founding New Hampshire but knows nothing of the tightness of the atmosphere every time his grandfather and father were in the same room.

"I didn't hate him. I don't think I did. I didn't– He wasn't- Joe, I don't think I can explain to you how I felt about him. I certainly can't do it in a potted history. But I can promise you that I've spent the past two decades doing my utmost to prevent you from ever feeling that way about me."

"Dad."

The boy oozes exasperation and moves to rise. Jed finds his hand flying to grip his son's arm. The boy stiffens and shrinks into place.

"I'm not kidding, Joe. Charlie seems to think I need to make it clearer when I'm being facetious and when I'm not. When I tell you I love you I'm not just saying words. When I tell you I love you I'm not talking about the feelings I have about a nice juicy steak. I'm not talking about the affection I have for the staff. I'm not talking about the way I felt about my father. I don't know if I'm a good father to you or not but, God knows, the problems we have, it's not because... When I tell you I love you, I mean it."

The boy draws himself up and away. He pinches his nose and sniffs. His hands grope for their natural habitat, deep in the fingernail-torn lining of his pockets.

"I wasn't kidding either."

It occurs to Jed that they shouldn't have these conversations in his office.

"I'm not your headmaster," wasn't intended to be voiced aloud.

The boy looks at him, at least at his lips while they move. Perhaps he makes the connection, perhaps he's more interested in finishing his thought. At any rate he disregards the interruption.

"I think that sometimes you think I'm playing a game with you. You seem to think I think it's funny to make you crazy."

Jed wants to issue a denial – if only he could run it through communications, and possibly the counsel's office, before opening his mouth – but growing up was his first power game, wasn't it, after all?

"I haven't laughed with you in, God, I don't even know how many years."

The boy's voice goes high in the middle of the sentence, which serves as a reminder of how deep it is most of the time. That must have happened years ago but it still isn't the voice Jed hears when he thinks of the boy talking.

"I wasn't kidding, Dad. I don't hate you."

He sighs, becoming repetitive.

They've kicked around words before. This is progress, yes, but next could be two steps back and he still wouldn't know.

He doesn't know where to take this conversation and he'd like it to be the one conversation he's had these power and glory years he doesn't lead.

He has to. He has to crawl to the boy, who would just as soon not go anywhere other than out the door.

"About the statehood thing. It's not that I don't- You have good points."

The boy's hand covers his eyes, in weariness rather than pretension, and suddenly maybe the family resemblance isn't just something people write about in the lifestyle section.

"We've done this to death."

"I think I gave you the wrong impression. It's not that I don't agree with much of what you said, or that I don't like that you're interested in issues..."

The boy will probably never open a newspaper again.

"You pretty much came out and said the movement is stupid."

"Well, I think the matter's too static for a movement. And it's not stupid-"

"I know it's not stupid."

"Okay then, I don't think it's stupid. I do think it's largely irrelevant. I do think it's never-"

"How can you say that?"

The boy leaping with emphasis, hands in his hair.

I was once like you, his father thinks. Except my conversations with my father never got this far. It wasn't worth pushing with him. This is different.

He isn't sure what or whom he's like now.

"It's never going to be an issue on a national scale."

"It's a local issue! But, wait, there's no one to deal with it because-"

"Joe... We had these people at Big Block of Cheese Day."

"I know."

The anguish in the boy is overblown and real, and Jed begins to think that some of Andrew Jackson's ideas weren't the best.

He tries to speak, he falters. This is Toby's nightmare and a joke too far.

"I can't fix this because you want me to. Ellie's tried that already."

Shiny eyes fixed on the carpet, not saying, yeah, and you would up fixing her thing.

Yeah. This, not so much steps backwards as a slow sticky slide.

"Joe, I-"

"Right, there's nothing you can do."

The boy rolls his eyes like an adolescent caricature. Jed squirms in his seat.

"Are you going to refer me to your superior, Dad?"

Sometimes, perhaps, the boy is blessed with inspiration. He'll learn to recognise it later.

"Let me guess," the boy continues. If he wants a career, he'll have to stop his cheeks heating every time he's passionate. "Children's children are the crown of old men; and the glory of children are their fathers. Pro-"

"Proverbs 17:6. I know."

Jed, thoughtful in a good way, suddenly. He didn't know. He didn't know Joe read his Bible so closely. He's beginning to finally comprehend the edges of the things he doesn't know about the boy.

"Okay. Let's do this." He's interested, now. "Same chapter, a few verses down. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom, seeing he hath-"

"No heart to it."

"Joe."

He tries to convey so much. He can only hope.

"I have a heart to it."

Something makes the boy look up. His eyes dazzle. Jed stands up and takes his hand, tense under the touch, for a slow, tender shake.

"That the soul be without knowledge, it is not good. You didn't know your grandfather, but I'm not him. I love you and I mean it. I want to know you."

The boy nods. Jed isn't the only one having trouble with making words mean things.

"I didn't expect you to jump in and make a new state, you know. I just thought, maybe, some discussion..."

"I should listen."

"Yeah. Well. I guess."

They stand for a moment, looking. It's odd and better.

"Aw, get on with you. You have to have better things to do than hang around here with your old man."

The boy looks relieved, as at the end of a painful death.

"We can both tell your mother not to worry. Then she'll get really freaked."

It's awkward but it's a chuckle, and a start.

"See you. Um. Soon, probably."

"See you soon, son."

"See you. Um. Th-thanks, Dad."

The boy trips on the threshold.

Jed settles at the desk and flips the first sheet of paper off the pile, thinking about something other than smiling or crying.

He can't see the ink.

He gropes for his glasses, shuffling papers and getting impatient because that's one of the effects the boy has on him too. He lifts a framed photograph (Abbey and the baby boy because that's as straightforward as the relationship ever got) which has been knocked over and discovers underneath another casualty of the dynamic.

Charlie was right about the glasses, wrong about the source of the destruction.

He sees Joe's hand going down, sees the papers shift and the frames shake and hears the crack that wasn't just impact after all.

The smiles starts to waver at his lips. It solidifies – the way he feels is a tremendous relief, a weight heavier than any decision he's made in this office lifted.

Abbey will be pleased it wasn't a wall, and that he wasn't the one hitting things this time.

The glass is shattered and the frame is mangled. Beyond repair.

He'll have to start anew.

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