Ainsley Hayes

Ainsley pinches at the bridge of her nose, trying to fight off the will to sleep. It's been so busy in the White House ever since the President had started to call meetings with a good deal of the legal staff, which meant they weren't available for the day-to-day and Ainsley's workload had dramatically increased. It meant that it was pushing ten at night and she's genuinely unsure if she should leave.

What she wants now, more than anything, is just a night off. The trouble is, if she's here, then she's tied to her phone and that means it's not really relaxing. What she needs is that hotel. Whatever strange logic governed it meant that no time had passed since she and Sam had accidentally wandered into it and right now, she loves the idea of a weekend away when all she does is sleep and relax and rest.

There are two problems in this.

The first being that she can't find a door that opens there and the second being that she doesn't want to go alone. She begins the long walk up from the Steampipe Trunk Distribution Venue towards Sam's office, not surprised to still find him at work. She raps her knuckles lightly on the glass separating his office from the bullpen and pokes her head in the door.

"Do you ever wonder what our lives would be like if we had normal 9 to 5 jobs?" she wonders, in place of an actual greeting. "I don't know what I'd do with myself, honestly."

CHARACTER NAME: Ainsley Hayes
CHARACTER CANON: The West Wing

Slow-tagging is a yes, canon-puncturing is a no, and currently, the only person who can godmod Ainsley is Sam Seaborn.

It was getting to be a routine that Ainsley could set her clock to. Every day she would have to run to the washroom and then think she was fine and then it would hit out of nowhere with this constant regularity, this present insistence of the little boy growing inside of her that apparently had his mother's appetite. "Okay! Okay," she said, glancing lower to glare at her ever-growing stomach. "Look, as much as you and I both want fudge-encrusted french fries right now, I'm trying to finish a book."

And she was going to try and set her inner circadian baby rhythms to right if she had to hear a symphony of stomach growls in the process.

Ainsley had exactly one student in some of her classes. It was true that she didn't exactly anticipate the doors being broken down in order to be taught by her, but she had thought that she would have better luck than this. Still, just because only one person was there didn't mean she was going to slack in the least. She had formulated a specialized lesson plan just for Lucy and had their mentoring sessions.

"Lucy?"

And she was trying to figure out just why Lucy seemed so distracted. Ainsley pressed a palm to her slowly-growing stomach and picked at her shirt to adjust it before she looked at the girl with worry in her eyes. "Is it me? Are my lessons boring?" she asked with genuine concern. "If there's something that's dreadful about the lectures, you can tell me and we can move on, I promise."

Ainsley knew that there was a lot of courage involved in what she was planning on discussing with Shadow and she had to be wary of this. It wasn't like they were established, wasn't like they had been together for so long that it would be mad otherwise. They'd been together for fourteen months and while that was nothing to frown at, it certainly wasn't the keys to that house at the end of the drive; the end of a path.

But Ainsley was about to turn thirty-six years old in a matter of days and she wanted things that might escape her if she didn't start trying for them. Of course, that meant discussion with Shadow. They had said March.

And now it was March.

She was folding some of the laundry in Shadow's hut, arranging things in the proper places that she had deemed for them. She hadn't made many changes; just enough to make herself feel at home. And she was waiting. Waiting and biding her courage forward, hoping she would have enough to say the words she wanted to speak.

Most mornings, if Ainsley had stayed over the night before, she had made sure to be up and back to the Compound at a relatively early hour of the morning; one she had grown accustomed to getting up at in her jobs in Washington. This was done mostly so no little girls stumbled their way into a precarious situation.

But this morning? Well, Ainsley had had a couple of glasses of wine the night before and had even brought sleeping garments in the form of a pink negligee and so, when the sun rose in the sky, rather than spill out of bed and change, she just burrowed deeper into the warmth of the covers and Shadow and ignored any potentialities the morning might bring.

She couldn't be blamed for one morning like this, could she?

Ainsley had resolved to do one thing right and she could do many, many things properly, she just wanted to make sure this didn't crash and horribly, horribly burn before she even had a chance with things. This all meant that she had to talk to Josh and pray this didn't turn into some kind of fight, seeing as it apparently only ever took a spark to ignite them into a fire of bickering and shouting.

Which meant talking to Josh calmly.

If such a thing were possible. She took a deep breath and lightly knocked on his doorframe. "Josh?"

Ainsley remembers statutes, laws, notes of importance, Latin translations, and just about everything else under the sun that has to do with righting the wrongs of society. She can recite them like she’s got them copied on the back of her hand and she knows them like the ingredients of a good rich cheesecake (which Gramma Hayes had taught to her when she turned twelve, gangly and awkward with beautiful blonde hair that made boys go after her, even if she was still flat as a board).

But nothing really compares to the moment that she steps into the White House and her high-heel-enclosed foot steps past the threshold. It’s then that she remembers to exhale and she swears, she could swear, that she’d heard it echo in this, that revered place that had been the setting of so many dreams and fantasies.

…when I grow up, Daddy, I wanna get married in the White House!

She’d looked to the majestic ceilings, to every painting with a story behind it. She watched the bustling civil servants who she envied down to her very depths and she wanted to know more. She wanted more than just a visitor’s pass, but not for this White House.

Ainsley still remembers the way bitter disappointment tastes of acrid charcoal on her tongue. She remembers the way she had felt, the way her heart had sank when she realized that it was a Democrat’s White House that wanted her, that somehow, through all her work, she had projected even the slightest notion that she was the sort of woman who did that sort of thing, the sort of crossing party loyalty lines.

But she remembers the way that disappointment had paled upon her arrival to the White House and for the briefest of flickering moments where she forgot who ran the nation and who was sat in his Staff and his Cabinet, just for a moment, she felt like she was holding her father’s hand and taking a tour of the White House for the first time, all over again. She wasn’t here today just for a tourist’s view. They wanted her for a job. The entire building looked different under that sheen and as much as Ainsley Hayes knew and remembers that she’s there to turn down the job, some small part of her had wanted to just stay there.

Stay there and never leave.

What she remembers most though, more than the laws, the recipes, the way her grandfather smiled when she perfected yet another precedent and could recite it inside and out, what she remembers is the way she had felt so significant and insignificant, all at once. How she could stand there and mean everything and nothing to the world. She had wondered if that was common in government and even though she had walked into the White House to refuse a job, to spit at Sam Seaborn in the face and tell him that she would rather dine with wolves than work with him, when she left, all she could remember was the President’s expression and his voice and the good cause he was serving.

Duty and honor.

What Ainsley remembers is that night, when she had walked out of the White House, even if she hadn’t known it consciously just yet, she knew one thing: she was coming back.

LONG OVERDUE FIC!

( It wasn’t planned, exactly, but Josh had spent the night with her, sleepless and without anything interesting. )