Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I.

For a long time, Ellie hadn’t given it all too much thought, who she’d lose her virginity to.

Some boy, probably. In high school, if she was the kind of girl her parents didn’t want her to become. In college, to her first husband, if she was like Liz — somehow also not exactly what her parents wanted them to become.

She wasn’t sure what her parents had had in mind for her — there was a point where she’d tried to figure that out, where she’d tried to become it, but over time she’d stopped. Ellie was a dutiful daughter; she liked being a daughter her parents didn’t have to worry about, didn’t have to fret over as often as they did Zoey. She hadn’t gotten pregnant at nineteen to a husband no one in the family really liked, and she hadn’t been caught sneaking out of her window at thirteen. She was a good daughter.

She didn’t know how to make her parents happy — least of all her dad — and while sometimes she wished she did, she’d tried to make her peace with living her life in the unknown. They liked her, they loved her, she loved them back; she wasn’t perfect, but she was good.

Ellie might not have known how to make her parents happy, but she did know how not to.

Congresswoman Andrea Wyatt — Ellie’s Congresswoman, who she’d voted for no less than a few months ago, the same day her father had become the President of the United States — is slowly getting dressed in the dim light of her hotel room. She showered, and the towel’s wrapped only around her hips and legs, her breasts exposed as she’s looking around for a bra that Ellie had quite unceremoniously tossed aside the way she’d seen in movies her parents wouldn’t have wanted her to watch.

This — whether that means losing her virginity to a sitting Congresswoman, or to any woman, or to be sitting in bed staring at that woman’s naked breasts —  is not how to make her parents happy. She doesn’t tell Andy — Congresswoman Wyatt — because she’s afraid it makes her look childish, but she thinks part of what made her want to have sex with her is because she knows it would make her parents unhappy.

The President and the First Lady will never find out.

Ellie feels better about her life than she has in a long time.

II.

The first resemblance of a relationship she gets into after Toby is a failure.

She calls that her first, because she does not consider Eleanor Bartlet to be a relationship, not under any circumstances. Having slept with the President’s daughter is one thing; dating her is another calamity entirely, and not one Andy wishes to bring upon herself.

She’s never been stupid.

Maybe she has been; it feels pretty stupid to have gotten herself into a relationship with an Oriole, because he was chatty and charming and handsome and a little older than her —  when the idea of having sex with him filled her with dread.

She couldn’t make it make sense.

She likes sex with men, she always has. She’s occasionally joked, among friends, that the last few months of her marriage survived because of it.

Except that’s not entirely true, and the last months of her marriage were spent in celibacy more than anything.

It came to her, one night, when Derrick from the Orioles kissed her with a hand between her thighs and insisted he had a condom, that she was making a fuss over nothing.

Two things — that she needed to get the hell away from him, as if the driving with a few beers hadn’t been warning enough; and that a condom did nothing to reassure her.

Opening herself up to the mere possibility of an unplanned pregnancy that her immune system would kill before it ever had the chance to grow, is just unbearable.

She’s talked about it with her therapist, but for the moment she’s just accepted it’ll be a while before she can have sex with men again.

Derrick from the Orioles did not appreciate that. She understands she was naive to try.

Eleanor Bartlet —the first person Andy actually sleeps with after her divorce — is a different story.

There’s a relief when she kisses her — the second time they meet like this — there’s honest to God relief in the way Eleanor Bartlet grabs her arms with excitement and kisses her with the eagerness and remaining lack of practice that endeared her so the first time.

Eleanor Bartlet poses no threat to her body — only to her career and reputation, and that’s something entirely in Andy’s own control.

She feels guilty, when she has the girl in her bed, legs of the President’s daughter wrapped around her shoulders, nose and tongue buried between her thighs. Guilty, that Eleanor Bartlet’s appeal is how little of a threat she is, how ironically safe it feels to fuck her.

That guilt doesn’t stop her from letting Eleanor pull her back in, the second time, the third time — and, hopefully, a fourth time soon.

Chapter Text

III.

My father won ’t fire the Surgeon General. He would never do that.

Andy already enjoyed the current news cycle before Eleanor Bartlet got involved — likes it when the Bartlet administration’s put into these positions, thinks this country’s well due a conversation on weed. A particular fond memory of a night in college starts with the image of CJ Cregg with a joint between her fingers.

They might as well talk about it.

Seeing this quote splayed out on the pages of the newspaper, attributed to the Bartlets’ quietest and most well-behaved daughter by none other than Danny Concannon, means the administration can’t get out of dealing with the topic head on. Fire the Surgeon General, don’t fire the Surgeon General, it’s a family affair now.

She laughs, utterly delighted at Eleanor Bartlet’s nerve, as she gathers her files to head to the White House herself. No doubt Eleanor’s on her way, too.

Andy can hear the President’s yelling when she walks into the bullpen; she doesn’t have to ask but does so anyway to confirm that it’s his daughter he’s losing it on. The laughter dies in her throat.

She times her exit just so — catches Eleanor Bartlet on her way out the Oval Office like it’s pure coincidence, and provides a gentle hand on her arm and some cold water on her eyes before anyone might notice that her dad’s affected her. There’s nothing inappropriate about it; she’d do it for anyone.

A public divorce and many private losses mean Andy’s long learned the art of hiding one’s heartbreak in the district. Has long learned the importance of it, even if Eleanor’s still learning.

She offers danish — taken from Toby’s office after a particularly ineffective meeting — and tea at home after her last meeting; she says they can make it dinner. If anyone asks, no one’s going to doubt that Andy, of all members of Congress, was deeply invested in the middle Bartlet girl lashing out on policy.

It’s dangerous that Ellie accepts the offer as quickly as she does.

They talk about doctors and marijuana and the role of the government in all of it — Andy’s fascinated to hear how passionate Ellie gets when she gets the chance to really speak her mind. She’d like to hear much more of that. She offers to lend a helping hand, should Ellie ever want to put any of this into a speech or policy; she’d love to push the White House on this.

She’s flirting a little when she says it, but the offers is no less genuine for that.

Ellie’s flushed and excited and daring tonight — angry with her father and riled up over something important — and she kisses Andy before dinner’s finished.

The evening doesn’t stay appropriate for long. America’s First Daughter goes down on her in the living room before Ellie’s on her way back to the White House and Andy’s doing dishes with the water too hot to get her mind off how stupid that was.

The Surgeon General doesn’t get fired.

When her dad first ran for office, Ellie had been promised it’d be for one term only.

She’d liked that — she’d made her peace with that. It meant her dad would not be President anymore when Ellie was finished with med school. It meant she’d be able to do her residency without being the President’s daughter. It meant she and her mother didn’t have to worry about his health quite so much.

Congresswoman Wyatt — Ellie’s started to call her Andy in her head, all the time, and keeps trying to correct herself. She voted for her in the midterms, she’s not someone she should call Andy. Congresswoman Wyatt called her the night the MS has been revealed to the country; not to yell, not to accuse her of lying, just to ask if she was okay.

She hadn’t been. She’d appreciated the call.

Ellie’s still mad weeks later, and while she knows that most of that is worry masquerading as something else, she has no desire to unpack it yet. It’s easier to be mad than to acknowledge she’s scared her dad will die in office. Just that thought makes her choke up.

She’s sitting in the cafeteria at John Hopkins, poking at a salad she has no interested in finishing, when she looks up to see Andy — Congresswoman Wyatt, but with the lost look on her face Andy comes to mind — standing in the middle of the room. She’s looking for an empty table where there are none, then she’s looking at Ellie’s free seats like she’s not sure she has the right.

Ellie can’t remember seeing Andy look unsure. She waves her over without thinking.

“Thanks,” Andy tells her, placing down a plate with two slices of pie in front of herself. She offers Ellie one when it’s clear she got both for herself. She smiles the way Ellie’s patients do when they’re embarrassed to admit they’re scared for an exam.

Ellie doesn’t want to ask, knows it’s not her place, and feels pretty bad when it becomes clear her eyes ask everything she didn’t want to say out loud. Andy bites her lips, and she really looks tired. Her eyes are a little red — Ellie wishes she had something to help her hide the tears.

“They warn you about false positives with IVF,” Andy says, not giving much more context, clearly relying on Ellie knowing vaguely of a cycle works. She does. Her face falls. “It’s fine,” Andy insists. “Not the first, might not be the last.”

It’s a risk, Ellie knows, when testing too early; the hormones given during the transfer can affect a test. She’s never seen it happen. “I’m sorry,” she says honestly.

Ellie hesitantly asks her how many cycles she’s done, and Andy tells her this was the seventh. She doesn’t have to explain that that’s a high number. When Ellie did a rotation in a fertility clinic, her attending recommended women stopped trying after five.

“I know,” Andy adds, and Ellie apologizes for the surprise in her expression. “I keep fighting them on it. We combine it with different treatments — eventually…”

She shakes her head and looks nauseous when she takes a large bite of her blueberry pie.

“A friend from med school is doing her residency at CFA,” Ellie says quietly. “Just last week, she said, she did an exam on a woman in her third trimester after the ninth cycle. Professional recommendations aren’t everything.”

The smile Andy responds to that information with doesn’t quite feel genuine, but Ellie doesn’t blame her for it. She wonders if this is why Andy barely drinks; she wonders if this is why she’s divorced. She doesn’t ask any of her questions.

When Andy’s finished two slices of pie and a strong but bad cup of coffee that Ellie warned her about, they’ve talked through Ellie’s current rotation in oncology, how she feels about her father’s re-election campaign, and the bill on foreign aid that Andy’s about to co-sponsor and will likely upset the White House.

Ellie doesn’t completely understand the bill, Andy doesn’t completely understand oncology, but they’re smiling a little brighter. Ellie walks Andy back to her car just to be nice, and tells her, quietly, that if they’d be alone, she’d have liked to kiss her goodbye.

Andy tucks Ellie’s hair behind her ears and tells her she’d have liked that, and that’s that.

Ellie finds herself hoping for more of these moments.