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The last suitcase thuds into the trunk with a note of finality.
Alexander scuffs the toe of his shoes on the ground idly, biting his bottom lip - a nervous habit long ago formed - his eyes still pointed resolutely at the concrete. A little ways back, still lingering behind, his father watches.
“Alex,” Laurens cuts through Alexander’s trance softly, “go say goodbye to him, you’ll regret it if you leave on bad terms.”
Alex looks up at the Secret Service agent, still somewhat resentful at his presence to begin with. His and Lafayette’s, who is gathering the last of their things from inside. As much as he likes the two agents, he doesn’t want them intruding on his college experience, he’s grown up a senator’s son, the president’s son, he doesn’t need that following him to university.
“I don’t want to,” he pouts. “He could always come say goodbye to me if he wanted to say goodbye so badly.”
“I know you’re upset-”
“He didn’t even listen when I told him all the things I’d be willing to do besides having you two as shadows all the time .” How is he supposed to have any fun when he’s constantly being watched by two bodyguards?
“Alexander, your father loves you and that is all this is about. Do you understand what could happen if anything happened to you?” Laurens tone is uncharacteristically stern.
“I know, I know, national security and all that shit, target on my back, I’ve heard it all my life, John-”
“ No, what happens is your father, who loves you as his whole world, loses his son. Go say goodbye.”
Alex glances up. “He’s the president, I’m not his whole world.”
Lafayette comes down the stairs, the last of their things slung in a duffel bag. Alexander looks back at his father, remembers the angry words spat at each other just last night. There will be a time for apologies, later, that time is not right now.
He waves his hand once, expression apologetic, but he doesn’t go up.
He gets into the car, stares out the window until they drive away, deaf and blind to Lafayette and Laurens’ prodding. But he stares, at the side of the house, and then through the back window, watching his father slowly disappear.
Something aches in his chest but he squashes it down. There will be time later for warm hugs and whispered apologies and the safety of home.
President Washington watches the car carrying his son until he no longer can, swallowing the bitter taste of regret and fighting the sting of tears before he too turns away and goes back into his office.
Washington spends the hours, the days pacing his room. He rarely leaves, rarely eats, rarely sleeps. Only the most important briefings are brought to him. Everything else is handed off to now-President Davies. The hastily signed document from two weeks ago seems like a blur now, but Washington doesn’t regret the decision. Alexander is more important. The only person that truly matters to him.
He can’t stand to turn on the television anymore. The coverage is constant, on every station.
The President’s son vanished at a party.
Eighteen years old. Likely targeted.
Two Secret Service agents were injured trying to prevent the abduction; one in a medically induced coma with severe internal bleeding after being shot in the abdomen, the other left with a severe concussion.
No witnesses.
Not a trace.
Last night he was able to watch three minutes of a candlelight vigil outside the White House, but after those short minutes Washington felt his heart break all over again, and he had to turn it off.
The news delivered in person to him, an update every hour or two, is more and more grim. There’s been no word from the kidnappers, nothing. Airports were shut down as far away as New York, cars searched in and out of D.C., and nothing.
Not a trace of his son.
And Washington is unable to plead for the safe return of his child as any parent would naturally want to. The President, even if he’s not for now, cannot show weakness that the country’s enemies might take advantage of. A desperate parent might be willing to give up sensitive information.
So, he’s all alone in this crushing expanse of his private rooms and office. Washington keeps ending up in Alexander’s room, staring at the edge of the bed. He carries Alex’s panic button in his hand, a constant in these last two weeks.
The last thing Alexander touched, surely, but not quickly enough for it to go off.
Does he know that his papa would do anything to get him back? That if his kidnappers made demands Washington would not be able to say no, that he would have to be forced from complying. That he’s the most important thing in Washington’s life, presidency or no?
Is he even still alive?
No, no Washington cannot think like that. His Alexander is alive, they’ll find him.
But he can’t deny that he is losing hope, they all are. With no ransom this very well could have been a ploy with the sole purpose of hurting the president, which means there would be no reason to keep his son alive-
No.
The last words he’d ever said to his son hadn’t been I love you or be good or stay safe like any other parent seeing their child off to university, they’d been angrily shouted arguments and then stony silence. What if that’s the last thing he ever says to his baby?
Given the time alone, Washington spirals further and further into his distraught, despondent cycle, as he has every night over the last two weeks.
But then comes a knock at the door. Washington is back in his quarters. It’s suppertime, and he’s expecting a tray of food to be brought in, which he’ll mostly ignore, as has become the custom.
Instead of a steward with the tray of food, it’s his Vice President- no, President Davies, and Agent Lafayette.
“We wanted to check in on you,” Davies says, concern evident on his face. He had tried at first to keep Washington from signing the document relinquishing power to him.
Lafayette’s bruise has faded into yellow and browns, but the gash through its centre is still stark red and dressed with butterfly bandages, running at the edge of his hairline from where Alexander’s attackers forced it into the corner of a brick wall.
Washington acknowledges them with a glance and a small tip of his chin. “How is Agent Laurens?” He asks softly, looking more at Gilbert than Samuel.
The man’s steps falter for only a moment, his eyes reflecting abject grief. “He’s… this morning his heart stopped for a few minutes, they brought him back but… it doesn’t look good, Sir. The doctors recommend we call any family he has.”
That’s another blow to Washington’s heart. He chose these two specifically, young and eager Secret Service agents, to see to Alexander. And now… now, “I’m so sorry, I-” his gaze shifts from Lafayette to Davies, “Could you find me the number to contact his parents? I feel I should say…”
Say what? He’s already crushed. What comfort could he be to someone else right now?
“No need, George. I’ll take care of it.”
Next to them Lafayette wobbles on his feet and Davies springs to instant action, steadying him by the shoulders. “S’ry,” Gilbert slurs, blinking a few times. His eyes look awful. Glazed, pupils too large. That blow to the head turned concussion still lingers.
Some of Washington’s other agents have relayed that Lafayette at least is lucky; the blow could have easily killed him.
“Here,” Davies leads Lafayette to a nearby comfortable chair, helps him lower into it. “You ought to be resting. Did the Director approve your return to work?”
Lafayette looks up at him, and something in Washington’s gut twists. He has to remind himself that Gilbert, despite how young he looks, is ultimately a professional. He wanted this career. He wanted to protect Alexander.
“Light duty,” Lafayette says, the words slurring slightly as he shifts, and then immediately sinks back against the cushion. “Two hours a day, giving you a report and looking at evidence… sir.”
“Indeed,” Davies says sympathetically. “Tell President Washington what you told me.”
He recounts, slowly, like he’s struggling to find each word. Washington knows the story though, and the slight variations surely caused by the severity of his injury. His explanations don’t always come in order. One moment he’s talking about Alex’s face, another Laurens collapsing after being shot. He remembers the sound of footsteps and a glint of something as it was picked up from the ground. But by then he was on the ground too. He couldn’t tell what it was.
Lafayette’s report changes day to day, two or three variations of the story and no clarity on which one is reality, the poor boy’s memory of the night is unclear at best thanks to the concussion.
Washington nods and looks away, staring out the window, so he hears the crash before he snaps around and sees the young agent collapsed, taking a small end table to the ground with him.
His hand slams against his call button immediately, a lance of panic sharp in his gut as he watches the boy begin to jerk and spasm on the floor as Davies frantically tries to push away everything that might injure Lafayette further.
“What’s happening?!” The president crosses the room in only a few strides, falling to his knees beside the pair. “I thought the doctors said-”
“They were wrong,” Davies cuts over easily, a former doctor himself. “Should have seen it,” he hisses, a self-reprimand, “what we thought was a concussion could have been a slow brain bleed, or both, but whatever it is, it just hit a critical level.”
More agents burst into the room, some doctors, all met with a shout from Washington to help the boy.
Lafayette’s spasms stop, he goes limp, but he doesn’t wake.
As they take him away Washington can’t help but think that that’s three sons killed by this attack.
He hasn’t known them for long, but both remind him of Alexander so much.
“I want updates on his condition every fifteen minutes,” Davies says to the agent remaining to take his statement. “Everything that happens.”
The agent nods and radios it on. Washington stares at the chair Gilbert had been sitting in.
“All right?”
He’s lost everything. He wants the agents to be all right. He wants his baby back. Give him his son and he’ll never ask for anything again. He’ll-
“George?”
“I… want to go to the hospital with him,” Washington clears his throat carefully before he finally speaks.
Davies frowns and glances at the agent once more. “I don’t think that would be wise, Mister President. With everything going on as is, we’d be stretching the Secret Service to ensure your proper protection at a hospital.”
Of course… were Washington anywhere near his right mind he would understand why that makes sense, why he’d be spending the resources that are currently utilized in trying to find Alexander.
“I’ll let you know the moment I hear any news.” Davies grasps his shoulder in a friendly manner, and then Washington is left alone again, nerves more frayed than ever.
Washington wakes in pitch darkness to the phone on the nightstand ringing loudly. Though he doesn’t remember falling asleep, or even laying down, sleep still clings to him as he fumbles to pick up the phone.
His heart pounds in his throat, fearing the worst. Either Laurens or Lafayette has passed. Alexander has been found abandoned, dead. Every worst nightmare come true.
He almost doesn’t want to pick up the receiver.
“Yes?”
He listens to the voice on the other side, the blood draining from his face, and then he’s up, dressing faster than he’s ever remembered getting ready in his life.
Your son has been located, he’s being transported to St.Elizabeth’s Hospital now.
A hospital, a hospital, he’s alive.
Mr.President at this time it’s not recommended that you-
“I don’t care, I’m going!” Washington’s voice thunders through the phone, its strength returned with the news that his whole world hasn’t collapsed. No force in Heaven or Hell is keeping him away from his baby now. “Make it safe, do what you have to, I’m going to that hospital.”
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, perhaps by Fate, St.Elizabeth’s is the same hospital that Laurens and Lafayette were taken to.
He hangs up before any more can be said, and ten minutes later he’s in a car, speeding towards the hospital with Secret Service vehicles in front and behind him and police cruisers boxing them the rest of the way in.
He’s told the details in the car, his stomach flipping and his heart breaking the more they tell him.
Alexander was found by a late night dog walker, bound and gagged and thrown into the bushes at a park barely a mile from the White House, unconscious. While he’s stable, there’s no doubt that he was hurt during his captivity, every sign indicative of torture in multiple forms.
Beaten, cut, drowned, who knows what else…
For Christ’s sake, he’s eighteen years old, who would- who could do something like that to a boy hardly more than a child ? Innocent of everything save whose son he is.
His poor baby.
No man alive can hold Washington back once they reach the hallway of Alexander's private room. He hears the machines beeping steadily and without thought he races ahead of his own agents.
Alexander is on the bed, hooked up to a heart monitor and an IV, half awake. There’s a splotch on his cheek, a bruise, and another at his temple, his jaw, a split lip.
He reacts slowly, turns his head. That cloudy gaze fixes on Washington and the boy’s lips twitch. It could be a smile, more likely relief. He’s been drugged too, something about that foggy look in his eyes is familiar.
“Hi, Dad.”
Washington lets out a sob and makes it to the bed in less than two steps, carefully pulling Alexander into his arms. His son clings to him, pressing his head into Washington’s chest. He feels the boy whimper and let out a soft cry against his chest, some cut or bruise or pulled muscle causing some pain. With a quick heartfelt apology Washington lowers him back to the bed.
Alexander whimpers again, hand grasping at nothing like when he was a child asking to be held. Washington takes his hand, drawing soothing circles over the back of it with his thumb. The fear in his son’s eyes isn’t natural, it shouldn’t be there. He can only imagine what it would be like if Alexander didn’t have drugs in his system.
“I love you,” Washington says in a rush, with every ounce of love and relief and broken joy in his heart. “I love you, I love you so much Alex, I’m so glad you’re home. I’m here now, I’m here, you’re here, I love you.”
They sit that way for hours, Washington saying the same things over and over as Alexander drifts in and out of sleep.
It’s over.
You’re safe.
No one will ever, ever hurt you again.
He knows what he has to do to make that last statement true. And for his baby, it won’t be difficult.
Two days later Alexander is permitted to go on short walks. He’s slow and stiff, like an old man, he complains to his father. The first time he says it they both laugh. It’s the first either of them have in weeks. Alexander’s doctors keep him on the IV too, for both the severe dehydration and antibiotics to keep the worst of his injuries from becoming infected.
Agents Laurens and Lafayette have both improved, to the point at least that the immediate danger has passed. Both are still sedated, but their rooms, right across from each other, have glass windows.
Hesitant as he was to be assigned agents at first, Alex is desperate to see them. The wing is otherwise clear of patients and guests.
Alex leans his forehead against the window to Laurens’ room. “I saw them shoot him,” he says, voice still worn, exhausted. He shudders at what must be a flash of memory, something that will never go away.
“I know,” Washington whispers. They haven’t talked about this, not yet, but he’s heard Alex scream for John in his nightmares. He’s heard Alex scream for him, too.
“He told me once, it was his job to… to step in front of a bullet for me,” Alexander shakes his head and unwelcome tears appear in his eyes. “But it wasn’t meant for me. Th-they had me, and they shot him anyway.”
Washington has to close his eyes a moment, but he steps close, takes his boy in his arms again. Alexander sniffles and turns to face him.
“I dropped my necklace.”
“What?”
“The chain with- with mom’s school ring on it. It came off and I lost it. M’sorry.”
Of all things, Alexander is apologizing for losing a trinket in the midst of a kidnapping. The agents later at the scene didn’t find it, surely they would have given that to Washington with the panic button.
Alexander cries, sobs really. It’s loud and gut wrenching and Washington just stands there, holds him.
“It doesn’t matter son, it’s okay, it was just a ring,” Washington soothes after a moment, rubbing circles on Alexander’s back.
“ Mom’s ring-”
“It was just a ring nevertheless, she left me something far more valuable and something I care about far more than that, hm?” He tilts his son’s chin, wiping away a tear. “Cry for it if you want, but know that the only thing I need is right here.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Washington looks up, still holding tight to Alexander, and there’s Davies. “I heard Alexander was recovering, and some good news for our agents as well?”
Washington smiles over the top of Alexander’s head. He’s actually been hoping Davies would stop by to pay a visit.
“Alexander’s been given the okay to go home tomorrow.”
Davies smiles- he’s shared the same concern. He is, after all, Alexander’s godfather.
“Agent Lafayette is recovering well, expected to be released in another few days. Seems the original doctor that saw to him mixed up a prescription after the concussion. Poor man was taking blood thinners without even realizing. Agent Laurens, a little longer. It sounds like the bullet lacerated his spleen, a kidney, damage to the spinal cord. They don’t know if there will be any permanent loss of function yet.”
Alexander grips a little tighter.
“They are still worlds’ better than a few days ago,” Davies replies soothingly, “I’m glad to hear it.”
He squeezes Alex’s shoulder, and with a sharp gasp the boy’s gaze snaps to him, holding for an extended minute before tucking back into his father’s chest. Washington smiles apologetically at his friend, rubbing Alexander’s back still.
They’d spoken briefly of the no doubt difficult road ahead in regards to Alexander’s recovery. Davies still has connections in the medical field. He'll recommend the best therapists once they're home and settled.
“You’re a very brave boy, Alexander,” Davies goes on. Alex freezes, all muscles tensing, and he turns to stare again, this time completely silent. His brow furrows and he studies the man for a long moment, before lowering his head again and pressing into Washington.
“I think it’s time we go back to your room,” Washington suggests gently. “You look about ready for a nap.”
Alexander nods, and Davies trails after them as Washington helps Alex back to his room. It’s so different from before, Washington can’t help but mourn that bright and bubbly and often too bold son of his, replaced by this afraid and timid boy that he loves no less.
Alexander’s medications make him sleepy, especially since he’s been taking a dose of diazepam every few hours to help with the anxiety, though it doesn’t completely get rid of it, nothing can.
The boy is tucked in with a heated blanket and asleep within the next fifteen minutes, drifting off with the feeling of his father gently playing with his hair calming him down.
Washington lets out a long breath and wearily looks to Davies.
“You look tired, George,” his friend whispers, taking a seat at the almost-plastic couch in the corner.
“I am,” he admits, “but it’s worth it, for him. I don’t want to think about how it would have been if I lost him.”
Davies tips his head and hums, watching the teenager sleep. “Things are going well back at the White House, you’ve nothing to worry about; take as much time as you and Alexander need.”
At this, Washington pulls a chair to face opposite Davies, sitting in it with an air of anticipation.
“About that, Samuel…” he takes a deep breath, “I have no intention of returning to serve the rest of my term.”
Davies’ eyes widen in surprise, his mouth falling open in shock. “George- you- you still could. No one blames you for this leave, you could come back and still be welcomed-”
“I don’t want to, though,” Washington cuts over him easily, glancing back at his son. “He needs me, and I almost lost him. I don’t want to juggle his needs and the needs of the country, it’s unfair for everyone. I’m going to go home, I’m going to care for my son; that’s all I want now.”
A blanket of silence falls then, Samuel processing the decision no doubt, as monumental as it is. Finally, he speaks. “If that’s what you want… then who am I to tell you no? I know Alexander is your world, I can understand wanting to care for him. No parent alive would ever question you, I’m sure.”
Washington grins, relieved, free.
“Thank you, Samuel. You’ve always been such a great friend and support for us. The country will be in good hands. We can have the lawyers draw up the official paperwork over the next week.”
Davies smiles. “Anything for you and Alexander, George. It’s been an honour.”
The sun has set already by the time Samuel returns home from the hospital. He and Washington decided together the announcement can wait until Monday, though the murmurs are already stirring among the press. Word is out that Washington is taking the boy home.
Davies turns on the television as he sets to cleaning up his space, throwing away a few small boxes, empty bottles. He's generally an impeccable housekeeper. The television drones on quietly in the background.
President Washington’s son continues to improve. Doctors pronounced him this afternoon in good condition, reports Standing President Davies, and expect he'll be cleared for release tomorrow.
He stops in the bathroom and puts the bottle of blood thinners back in the medicine cabinet.
President Davies meanwhile remains in the White House and has pledged an investigation into the abduction and assault on the two Secret Service agents.
He keeps a box of trinkets in the top drawer of his desk. Davies is not a sentimental man, but these are momentos, trophies. He draws the box out and removes the lid. There are a few pictures inside, a couple of medals.
Davies reaches into his pocket and removes the thin chain with a woman's ring attached.
Even critics offer praise to President Davies for his compassionate leadership throughout this crisis.
None of them have any idea.
Davies smiles, places the necklace in the box and replaces the lid. His newest trophy safe and secured he closes the drawer and goes to begin packing.
He has so much work to do.