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The moment she hears the phrase “Sanctity of Marriage Act”, it is everything CJ can do to not throw up the breakfast her nine-year-old and partner served her in bed that morning.
Sanctity .
The state or quality of being holy or sacred .
She’s had a sickening feeling since she walked into a Senior Staff meeting with said partner right across the desk from her, the speculations about her life she’d just read burned into the backs of her eyelids, and Wilkinson’s name on the list for the budget conference committee.
When Toby and Josh walk right into the tail end of a meeting with Annabeth she’s tried to keep almost aggressively flippant, her stomach plummets to the soles of her feet. She envies them, really, for being able to solely focus on the political repercussions of such a rider, with no knowledge of the way her world is crumbling around her.
Her raised voice calling for Margaret, to them, is nothing more than frustration over the potential of political gridlock.
To them, it is not about the ring that has sat in the back of a drawer for ten years, the box wrapped inside one of Kate’s old utility tees that CJ stole a lifetime ago. It is not about the way she found out her partner had been retired from the Navy and CIA. It is not about the time Josie needed the hospital as a toddler and she had had to wait until Kate arrived from an NSC meeting for the doctors to be willing to take her back.
To them, it is not about the fact that she signed her parental rights for Tenny over to Kate moments after she had delivered their first child, in spite and because of the fact that Kate was serving a tour in Afghanistan and the news of Kabul being seized was breaking.
Sanctity.
Holiness. Value. Inviolability.
She is unnaturally quiet in their meeting in the Residence. It brings her back to the dynamics of their first days in office, some part of her kept out of the room at all times.
As Chief of Staff she forces herself to forget her heart and remember the promise she made to the President. She forces herself to recognize that the budget in congressional gridlock would be a recipe for political disaster. She forces herself to swallow the bile that rises in her throat as she recommends that they allow the workings of constitutional law to neutralize the amendment, rather than taking a stand.
It kills her to say to the President that they may have to let it through.
It kills her to know that there isn’t a situation she can fathom in which he would veto the budget if the amendment stayed.
It kills her to shuttle between meetings so endlessly throughout the day that she doesn’t even know if Kate has found out about this amendment in a gentler way than she has.
Sanctity.
Kate’s golden hair in the light of the setting sun.
Sanctity.
Tenny’s laugh the day she landed her first double axel, skating straight to CJ and asking her to do one with her.
Sanctity.
Josie’s squeal of joy when Kate had come back for good after months on assignment and tossed her in the air.
When Toby accuses her of being too afraid of internet rumors to do anything but rely on judicial restraint, she’s nearly at the end of her quickly-fraying rope. He attempts to put Josh’s impending resignation on one side of the scales she’s already struggling to balance. He pokes, he prods, he tries to handle her by picking a fight and getting her up in arms like he has for the decades they’ve known each other.
He accuses her, again, for caring too much about internet gossip and her reputation.
She nearly blurts out every word she has been filtering out of her conversations with him for as long as they’ve known each other.
She could kill Josh, she thinks, for running Donna out the door.
Walking into the press offices feels like flipping the script on them. It feels like the only brave thing she can do without showing her hand until the very moment she is asked, point blank, about her sexuality.
Sanctity.
The state of being worth protecting.
She folds the paper in her hands, rather than folding against the pressure of the rumors yoking her neck. She rips it in half as she walks out, her eyes remarkably dry.
There is nothing more sacred than the family her love has created against all odds, she knows. She has always known.
More than that she knows she owes no one else her truth, especially if they will use it to crucify her on the Hill.
She walks straight from the press offices to her office, where she knows Margaret penciled in a late meeting with Kate at her bequest. She shuts the door behind her, the blonde already in her seat from that morning’s meeting, her head inclined towards the door.
In fewer steps than seconds she is at Kate’s side, her hand on Kate’s jaw as she pours her devotion into their second kiss of the day. She feels Kate whimper, her lips parting as her breath stutters. Her teeth scrape at Kate’s bottom lip. A moan builds at the back of her throat.
They part, foreheads resting against each other briefly before CJ straightens.
They live a convoluted life. Their commitments are contradictory in many ways. Few people would understand as Kate did why CJ could make the calls and choices that she did as long as she was responsible for running the President’s staff. Perhaps she would wake up one day to find that her own children did not understand, and had no legal obligation to remain tethered to her out of shame.
Even so, her partner’s slender fingers linger on her hip as she stands in front of her. The closest she has ever felt to the divine are the sermons from the mouths of their babies and the feeling of being held in Kate’s arms.
At least for now, they are hers and she is theirs and they are whole and together in spite of a country that would tear them apart. That, in itself, was sacred.