Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nadine dislikes the new secretary from the moment she lays eyes on her. Elizabeth McCord has far too much excitement in her eyes, far too much energy in her step (God, she has nice legs), and far too much laughter peppered in her distinctive voice. Washington will ruin her within a month. 

The jittery young man beside her—secretary? personal assistant? future homewrecker?—must be well over six feet tall, but Elizabeth is tall enough in heels to not be dwarfed by him. Having already introduced the secretary to Matt and Daisy, he keeps going around the circle and gestures to Jay. "Jay Whitman, your policy advisor." 

"It's great to meet you," Elizabeth says brightly, shaking his hand. Jay echoes her statement, tacking on ma'am at the end. Despite all the time she's spent with him, Nadine can't quite gauge whether his smile is real. 

"And your chief of staff, Nadine Tolliver." 

"Nice to meet you, ma'am." She's suddenly conscious of how much shorter she is than the secretary, probably five inches even if Elizabeth took off her shoes, and right now it's probably seven or eight. She shakes Elizabeth's hand, sees her new boss's brow furrow for a split second, wonders if it's mutual distaste or just surprise at how cold her fingers always are. 

"That's a lovely name," Elizabeth says as Nadine drops her hand, and her heart plummets into her stomach. Somehow, she forces out her thanks for the remark, but not without briefly thinking that she's about to throw up on the shoes of the woman who's soon to be fourth in line for the presidency. 

~ 

"That's a lovely name." 

"Thank you, Senator." 

She doesn't even remember what state Vincent Marsh represents, only that she's seen him once or twice in various offices of the bosses of the bosses of her boss. He's young for Washington, and she's seen him on television passionately pushing for a bill that she'd campaigned for under the radar. Still, she's too far down the totem pole for him to be standing here. 

"I don't mean to say it's exotic," he clarifies. "I just hadn't heard it before." 

"That's alright.”

The awkwardness of it all makes her heartbeat pound in her ears. She glances back down at her desk and the folder containing her thesis. She's just about to search for a citation from one of her paragraphs in hopes that the article she's thinking of will help their argument against the latest aid bill. "What—what brings you here?"

"This, actually." He gestures to the folder's label. "You." 

"I'm sorry?" 

The senator grins. "Can we speak somewhere alone?" 

Come Monday, she has a job and a pit in her stomach instead of joy. She'd have done well to listen to it. 

Chapter Text

"She's not my boss. She's our boss." 

Blake's pushback against her remark might make her proud if she wasn't so exasperated with everything involving Elizabeth right now. Her off-the-rails daughter, her doubling back on Vesuvian, her seemingly innate urge to challenge every single remotely straightforward solution, the flight risk involved with any scripted remarks…

Elizabeth would be enough of a challenge without her relentlessly protective assistant fighting her battles all the time.

She doesn’t truly despise her—in fact, she keeps catching herself warming to her new boss in spite of all of the chaos. That’s the problem. The woman's ex-CIA, for God's sake. If Nadine gets too trusting and then slips up, Elizabeth will have her entire life history laid out on a silver platter within the hour. Starting, of course, with Vincent.

If the secretary knows, she's done a damn good job of hiding it. (Probably the CIA part coming in handy again.) Nadine doesn't have much of a choice but to keep her at arm's length. When…if she jumps off this sinking ship, she can't afford for any of her secrets to be used against her.

She walks the line between responsiveness and resistance perfectly—right up until the peace treaty with China and Japan gets shot to hell.

When control slips out of her grasp, it slips fast. Matt's far too flippant about Vincent's speech, and their treaty signing dissolves into disaster, and finally, standing in the conference room in the middle of the asylum debacle, she snaps. The last of her composure shatters on the floor while she lashes out at Matt again, and when she looks the secretary dead in the eye and refuses to push the speech, she knows she's just sealed her fate.

She shuts herself in her stupid fishbowl of an office, trembling all over, and awaits the inevitable. If Elizabeth had any doubts about her and Vincent before now, she won't anymore. 

When Elizabeth asks her to call Arabelle and apologize, she has half a mind to quit right then and there. Of all of the ways to trap her in her lies, this is the lowest of the low.

"I can't," she says, turning to look for malice in Elizabeth's expression. She finds none. "You must've heard talk," she chokes out through the lump in her throat. 

The secretary stares blankly at her, and Nadine knows instantly that she's made a huge mistake.

For a split second, she wonders if she can walk it back and cover her tracks. But she is so tired of keeping secrets and so tired of keeping Elizabeth as far away as possible, and the words start tumbling out in a rush, and the gears in Elizabeth's head start visibly turning, and soon enough she's sobbing with her head in her hands while the Secretary of State watches on, and she's sure she won't be able to show her face here ever again. 

Elizabeth doesn't come any closer, let alone try to touch her. That one ounce of preserved dignity makes all of the difference in the world. She lets herself weep for what feels like only a minute but is probably more, and then she rests her head against her clasped hands and prepares herself to look up at her boss.

She feels so much lighter with the crushing weight of secrecy off of her shoulders. It will be replaced by guilt soon enough once a whole host of evidence comes to light, then paranoia, then hatred for the man she thought she knew and thought she loved. For now, though, she feels free for the first time since she found out about the crash.

Taking a deep, shaky breath, she tries to salvage her makeup with a tissue under her eyes. "Ma'am, I—"

"Take as much time as you need," Elizabeth says softly from the doorway, and closes the blinds on her way out. 

~

"Take as much time as you need." 

Nadine allows herself exactly twenty seconds. Any more than that and she'd be liable to turn the car around and bail on this entire plan.

"I'm ready," she says finally, opening the door, and goes to the trunk to wrestle her suitcases out. 

It had all happened so fast. The recital in Boston, the introduction to a pair of Frenchmen from a premier European dance company, the phone calls, the contracts, the plane tickets. In the back of her mind, she wonders if she'll come to regret prioritizing the stage instead of getting her foot in the door at some sort of high-paying office job.

In the front of her mind, though, she's more excited than she's ever been in her life. 

Once they're in the airport, she manages to smother her nerves until she catches sight of her gate. She swears she can feel the color drain from her own face as she sits down in the waiting area. "Am I insane for doing this?"

"Dina, don't be ridiculous. If you'd turned this down for some desk job, we'd all be hearing about it for all eternity." Her sister sits down next to her and pulls a textbook from her bag. "I do expect some nice French gift when I graduate, though." 

"I'll bring you back a few extra-large rats from the streets. White or brown?" 

She earns a well-deserved elbow to her ribs before they settle into comfortable silence. This is how it's always been, and Nadine hopes it's how it always will be. The two of them hunkered down in some room, each buried in their own lives and goals, too busy to talk but comforted by the other's presence. 

There'll be none of that in France. 

Much too soon, the first boarding announcement starts up. Her sister takes it as a challenge to see how many words she can say over it. "Eat. Please. No keeling over backwards onstage. Call me whenever you can. And be careful. I don't trust all of those European men."

They both know she's not kidding, but she says it like it's a joke and Nadine responds in kind. "And you know this because you've met a lot of European men?" Gathering her jacket and purse, she laughs so she won't cry. "Do I get a turn to lecture you now? Try getting drunk once in a while. You're legal now. No excuses. Or get a B on an exam or something. It's…freeing." 

"Not a chance in hell." 

"It was worth a shot." Laughing isn't quite working anymore, not now that the airline is starting to call people to their seats. She swallows hard. "I love you, Lilith." 

All wild hair and huge brown eyes and warmth that hasn't frozen solid just yet, she squeezes Nadine's hand. "I love you too."

Chapter Text

"Are you okay? You're really pale." 

Blake is clearly very caffeinated, very anxious, and very tired (they all are, considering how late their flight landed last night and the drastic time difference in Turkey), but he's still very observant.

Nadine stares straight out the car window and prays that he'll interpret it as annoyance rather than an attempt to stop her stomach from climbing into her throat. "I'm fine."

She's not. Upon arrival, as Elizabeth goes to greet the two men waiting in the doorway, her vision fades into static. She presses one hand underneath her nose and tries to steady her breathing.

“Nadine?” It sounds like he's underwater through the rushing in her ears. 

“I’m going to be sick.” Thank God the bushes are on this side of the motorcade, only a few feet away, and that the cars shield her from the eyes of the officials standing with Elizabeth. She stumbles, feels Blake’s arm around her as she retches for the first, third, tenth time into the leaves. 

"I'm right here," Blake says, concern pitching his voice higher. "Close your eyes. Deep breaths. There's water here if you think you can stomach it."

To Elizabeth's detail, he says something about the two of them going back to the hotel. That's just about all Nadine hears before her stomach turns inside out again. 

The next few hours fade in and out. She just barely manages the ride with her head between her knees, then collapses in the suite bathroom while Blake looks on in horror.

His presence, comforting just a half hour ago, now makes her heart race even faster. "Leave," she chokes out. "Please."

His compromise is to go in the other room of the suite ("I'm not going back to a treaty signing and leaving you to pass out in the bathroom") with a promise to check in every half hour whether she likes it or not.

She manages to move from the bathroom floor to the bed during his fourth check-in, only to end up heaving over the wastebasket five minutes later. While she's gasping for air, someone knocks on the door, and Elizabeth's unmistakable voice calls her name.

Nadine scrambles to straighten up as she weakly tells her boss to come in, but the motion drives a wedge into her skull and her stomach. She fumbles for the wastebasket with one hand, the other over her mouth, and thinks that she might rather die than be in this situation. 

She hears the sound of the door shutting, and then—"Oh my God, Nadine." 

Almost immediately, Elizabeth’s beside her, slipping her hair into a band and rubbing her back as the nausea slams into her like a brick all over again. "I'm—I'm so sorry, ma'am."

"Shh." Elizabeth keeps one hand on her back. "There's nothing to be sorry about." 

The crushing wave of nausea eases after a small eternity. Exhausted and limp, Nadine folds over herself, breathing slowly, desperate to steady her body enough to sit up.  "I'm sorry," she slurs again.

She can only imagine how bad she must look. Her hair, plastered to her neck and her forehead, makes her skin crawl, and her shirt is suddenly freezing against her back—probably drenched in sweat.

Elizabeth’s cool hand on her forehead makes her flinch. “What a nasty bug. You’re burning up." 

Nadine can’t speak through the shame and the millionth lurch of her stomach. Swallowing, she closes her eyes tightly an instant before her spine rolls under Elizabeth’s touch and she loses yet another weak battle against her stomach.

When she's finished, Elizabeth gently brushes the damp curls out of her eyes. “You poor thing.”

~

“You poor thing.”

Nadine sits back on her heels, wiping her mouth as Catherine offers her water. The show starts in two hours, and despite her best efforts, she’s pretty sure that the gods have conspired to make any sudden motion, let alone spinning around for three hours, cause her to throw up everything in her body. 

“How long have you been sick?”

“A week, on and off.” She takes a sip from the paper cup, swallows wrong, and coughs, choking on it. It takes all of her effort to stifle the gagging that rises in her throat.

“Nadine, how have you even managed to rehearse?”

“It usually goes away by the afternoon. I assumed it would today—" She heaves over the toilet again. At least whatever this is will help her shed the last few pounds that the director wants off of her hips.

“Oh my God.”

“What?” The edge in Catherine’s words spooks her. 

“Listen to yourself. Nauseous in the morning for over a week?”

She’s staring insistently at Nadine, who searches her brain for the reason why. Then it hits. A night a little over a month ago, with shame burning her cheeks after getting chewed out by their choreographer for a repeated error during rehearsal. A night that had started on Pierre’s couch as she held back tears and ended with them both frantically bolting out of bed after sleeping through their alarm for rehearsal. 

Except now she knows in her heart, before she’s even done or said anything else, that that night won’t end for another eight months. That if she weren’t the youngest, lithest, and most prodigal dancer here, her career would be over—and still, who knows how she’s going to land any job a year from now, out of practice and with her name far from any company’s mind. 

She’s silent until Catherine slips out of the bathroom with a sympathetic look, then dissolves into floods of tears. 

That night, she covers dark circles with makeup, dresses in a skirt that still fits her perfectly, and dances flawlessly, passionately, furiously, just in case it’s her last time ever on a stage. 

A few years later, writhing in the darkness as the crowd hushes and the crew cuts the spotlight from her broken body, she wishes it had been.

Chapter Text

"Nadine, you have to eat." 

Blake looks so disheveled and distraught that Nadine can't bring herself to snap at him. She presses the heels of her palms against her eyelids, willing the dizziness away. "I'm fine." 

God, she can barely think through the exhaustion. The others have managed a few winks of sleep here and there since news of the coup broke, but she's been too scared of the dreams that await her if she lies down on her couch.

That, and this entire floor is looking to her for guidance. What will they say when they realize this is all her fault?

"When was the last time you sat down? Had water? Slept?" 

"Blake—" It comes out breathless. Her chest feels unbearably tight.

Taking a slow breath in through her nose, she reminds herself that Blake has the most personal reason to be falling apart right now out of any of them. He's the only one who really knows Elizabeth, who's supported her from the beginning while Nadine and everyone else on the seventh floor doubted their new boss. She should be the one worrying about him. She should be the one apologizing for every stupid, selfish decision she's made since she met Vincent.

She clears her throat. “We don't have time for that right now." 

Maggie passes her yet another stack of files and Post-It notes; Blake waits by her shoulder until Maggie leaves and then resumes his badgering. "I'm not blind, okay?" 

All of the possible meanings of that sentence make her freeze. "What?" 

"Anyone with half a brain knows you don't eat when you're stressed." He takes the files from her and sets them down on his desk. "You look like you're about to pass out. Sit down." 

She obeys.

"You're no use to anyone if you run yourself into the ground." He doesn't let her argue. "Go lie down. I'll wake you up in ninety minutes." 

Nadine thinks she might cry if she looks at him, so she stares at her shoes while he leads her to her office. "Forty-five," she says, even though she knows he won't agree. Then, before she can stop the words—"I'm sorry, Blake."

He interprets it all right and all wrong at the same time. "She's not dead."

She can't be dead. If she's dead, Nadine will have lost a second Secretary of State. She'll have lost someone who she maybe, just maybe, could have called a friend in another lifetime. And she'll have to live with the guilt when Elizabeth returns in a body bag. 

If. 

But instead, she's the one who gets the call from Russell a few hours later, after she's managed an hour of sleep and half of an apple and a couple of aspirin. If she didn't know better, she'd think he'd been crying before he called, and if she didn't know better, she'd let herself cry too when she hangs up the phone. Instead, she runs for the conference room so the tears won't have time to come.

They see it in her face before she says a word, and their reactions choke her with emotion so quickly that she's barely able to speak. It's Blake who looks like he might faint now, dropping his hands to the table and gasping for air, face frozen between a smile and shock. 

"She's coming home," Jay says, clapping Blake on the back, and immediately pulls Nadine into a hug. She swallows a sob and takes her first full breath in a small eternity. 

Elizabeth is coming home.

~

"Nadine, you have to eat." 

Startled by Jay's sudden presence, she flinches and lashes out without thinking. "You could try knocking." 

"You've been here all night and you're running on empty." Jay shuts her office door behind him. 

"We've all been here all night, Jay." She stands up slowly, trying not to betray how weak her legs feel. "That tends to happen when the Secretary of State dies."

Bitterness is the only way to preserve her facade, but even so, her voice cracks at the end of the sentence. She looks away. 

He sighs. "Is there anything that you'll eat if I bring it to you?"

"No."

She'll throw up if she tries. Years of a few hundred calories per day and kneeling over toilets in the back of dance studios had trained her body far too well, and the physical instinct returns whenever she’s under stress. He's right to worry—she's going on 36 hours of nothing more than tea—but she can't help it. Not when Vincent is dead. 

Jay gives up, squeezing her shoulder gently and leaving the room without another word. 

The day is long and awful and full of people coming in and out of the elevator. Information, questions, briefings, updates on the crash—it all pours in like a tidal wave, and Nadine hasn't had one second to come up for air.

It's getting harder and harder to stay in crisis mode and handle it all on autopilot, but she manages to go through the motions anyway. If she stops for one second, the weight of what she's just lost will hit her all over again. 

It's Maggie who says something next. She enters the conference room as everyone else is leaving from their third update briefing of the day and immediately puts a hand on Nadine's shoulder. "Are you alright, Miss Tolliver?"

"Just…a little lightheaded." She presses one hand to her forehead as static clouds the edges of her vision. 

Maggie immediately grabs ahold of Nadine's arm. "When did you last have anything to eat?"

She tries to speak, but nothing comes out. The static blinds her completely. She stumbles, knees buckling, and hears Maggie shouting. "Jay—Jay—Oh my God!" Then nothing.

She awakes on the couch in her office to the sound of Jay's voice. "Oh, thank goodness." 

Disoriented, Nadine tries to scramble to her feet, but her vision swims again as she makes eye contact with him. She settles for sitting on the edge of the couch while the memories all come rushing back. Vincent, the plane crash, the chaos, and whatever had just happened in the conference room.

"Did I—what time—how long—"

"You fainted while you were talking to Maggie. You've only been out for a couple of minutes. I sent her to get some juice." Her stomach rolls at the thought of it. "You need food." He's begging now. "You haven't eaten since Tuesday night, have you?" 

He's right, but the grief and guilt and anxiety have already seized her stomach and her throat again, making the idea of eating feel impossible. "Please stop talking about food," she pleads, bracing her elbows on her thighs and dropping her head to her hands. 

"This is dangerous. You're going to make yourself ill." Then his expression softens. He sits down beside her on the couch, pointedly giving her space. "Nadine…you knew him longer than any of us. No one will judge you for hurting."

The mention of Vincent breaks her. "How is he gone?" she whispers, choking on a sob. "How is this real?" 

Tears blur her vision when she looks up at Jay. Still, she swears there's a flicker of recognition in his expression, like he might be putting two and two together.

The sick-to-her-stomach feeling rises again, then passes when Jay puts a hand on her shoulder without saying a word. She doesn't want to be held, but she can't breathe or think or stop shaking, and so she leans into the touch and sobs.

If only she could tell him why. If only she could've told Vincent what he meant to her, just to hear him say it back one last time. But it doesn't matter anymore. 

He's never coming home. 

Chapter Text

It'll take her a long time to forget the sound of Blake's voice as he screams her name, and even longer to forget the look in Elizabeth's eyes as she curls up on the floor.

Nadine freezes in the middle of the room, trying to decipher Blake's hysterical stream of words over Elizabeth's labored breathing. "I called 911—they're on their way—she thinks she's having a heart attack—I—I—what—what do we do?"

"Breathe, Blake." He sounds so young. "Get everyone away from the route to the elevator. Find Jay and tell him to keep Chen busy, and then wait for the paramedics to get here." She's not entirely sure it's a logical list of instructions, but she knows Blake well enough by now to understand that he really just needs something—anything—to help with. "She's going to be alright."

He nods and flees the room, leaving her alone with Elizabeth.

She kneels down beside her, leaning back on her heels. Elizabeth's knuckles are white from gripping her knees, the muscles in her neck taut and distorted as she gasps for air. All of the color is gone from her face, and her eyes—

She knows that look. This isn't a heart attack. 

"Ma'am, it's Nadine." She reaches for Elizabeth's hand and winces at how tightly Elizabeth grabs her wrist. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

Her whole body's shaking. "I can't…breathe." She pushes hard against her chest with her free hand, like she's trying to push the air out. "My chest…"

"Hurts?"

Elizabeth nods. Squeezing her eyes shut, she pulls her knees to her chest. Her breathing sounds even more shallow already. "Am I dying?"

"You're not dying." She tries her best to make it sound soft instead of sharp. "Look at me if you can." As an afterthought, she adds, "Lift your arm up over your head." Elizabeth obeys her request, reaching one hand up into the air while she stares at Nadine with haunted, empty eyes."Now put it down." 

She's crying now, but the next gasp for air seems ever so slightly less desperate. "Lift your arm again." 

The distraction buys her a few minutes before the next surge of hyperventilating. Elizabeth curls into a ball again, pressing her chin to her knees, and when Nadine starts to shift her weight so the floor won't keep digging into her knees, Elizabeth's grasp on her arm tightens. "Don't leave—please—"

Nadine's heart breaks for her. "I'm not going anywhere."

When Elizabeth and her detail and the paramedics finally leave the building and there's nothing more Nadine can do, she sinks into the nearest chair and fights against her own racing heart. When it rains, it pours is always true on the seventh floor, but it's been especially true for the last few weeks. 

She wonders if her efforts with Elizabeth have actually helped at all. Despite her experience with the matter, she's never been the onlooker before. 

Blake's eyes are still bugging out of his head when he finds her. "Thank you," he says softly. She can hear the shame behind the words. "I—I didn't know what to do."

"It's okay." In some twisted way, she's relieved that this seems to have restored the natural order between them. Blake's been protective of her since that day in Turkey. (He tries to make it subtle. It's not.) Maggie's hands-off approach is one thing; Blake's Elizabeth-specific method of managing people is another entirely. 

He nods, opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. "Is she going to…" His voice wavers. 

"Oh, Blake…no. No." She gets to her feet. "She's going to be fine."

"But—"

"It wasn't a heart attack." His eyebrows furrow, but she doesn't feel right offering further clarification. "I want her to be able to talk to you herself when she's ready, but I promise you, she's going to be alright."

"How do you kn—" He stops mid-sentence, swallows, and says, "She's really lucky to have you."

"She’s lucky to have you too, Blake." 

Once she's back out in the bullpen running damage control, she wonders exactly how much he's guessed. She wonders if he knows that watching Elizabeth disintegrate felt like looking in a mirror, except Nadine doesn't know how it feels to be held together while she falls apart. She wishes she did. 

~

The doctors had put her together again like a jigsaw puzzle five weeks ago and instructed her to not even think about dancing for six months. She'd sobbed for the better part of three days in the hospital, overwhelmed by the news and the worst physical pain she'd ever felt in her life.

By the time Lilith had picked her up, driven her home, and declared that she'd stay to help with Roman until her first year of medical school classes started in September, she'd been too numb for tears. 

She hasn't cried since. 

Lilith is endlessly patient in her matter-of-fact, unflappable way. She takes the verbal beatings without flinching whenever Nadine lashes out, coaxes her to swallow the painkillers through her paranoia about addiction, helps her find applications for law schools and job options in the meantime. She's an awful cook—her attempt at lasagna on Nadine's second night home had resembled a brick in both looks and taste—but everyone has to be bad at something.

(Nadine watches Lilith’s constant thrum of intensity melt away whenever she kneels on the floor to entertain Roman and thinks that Lilith would be a wonderful mother. When she says so one night, Lilith makes some noise between a scoff and a laugh and says nothing.)

She refuses to entertain the possibility of the break from dancing being permanent, but moving on for now is her only choice. She's raising a child alone and if she doesn't do something with her degree soon, she'll doom them both to a lifetime in this tiny apartment.

So she sends in piles of forms and tests her weight on her leg every day, as though the benefit of using the muscles will outweigh the danger of pushing the bones too quickly, and convinces herself that this is only temporary. It's the only way she'll manage.

It works until the day Lilith leaves, and then everything hits her at once. She gets a few phone calls from companies asking her to come in for interviews and sets the dates and times over the sound of Roman screaming. (He's decided lately that running around the kitchen table in circles and yelling at the top of his lungs is a top-tier activity, and she's not nearly quick enough on her feet at the moment to get him to stop without raising her voice.)

The pain, usually a dull ache by this point, is stronger than usual, and the fear of wasting her life away is so much harder to silence now that she's alone again. Nothing specific sets her off, but she feels her chest tightening and her heart rate picking up all through the evening, and by the time she finally gets Roman to fall asleep, her throat won't seem to let her take a full breath.

Obsession takes over. She checks the locks on the door once, twice, then the knob on the stove, then the locks again, then Roman, then the stove—

Maybe it's the fact that Lilith's flight isn't due to land for another hour, or that Nadine hasn't been alone in weeks, or that she has no idea how she's going to handle her raging toddler son come morning with one working leg, but she's suddenly sure that someone's going to die and it's going to be her fault. 

She knows it doesn't make any sense at all, but that doesn't make a difference. The panic is quick and lethal. She takes shelter on the couch and curls into herself, her chest burning and her bad leg screaming in pain. How did one mistake turn into all of this? How has she ended up in this deep of a hole? How is she ever supposed to get out? 

She hyperventilates until she's too exhausted to move, dreams of burning planes and dark alleys and bones sticking through skin, and wakes up in tears. Alone.

She doesn't know how it feels to be held together while she falls apart. She wishes she did. 

Chapter Text

Something fundamental changes after Iran. Nadine supposes it’s inevitable, but it’s strange all the same. Their stilted working relationship had been rushed forward so quickly that in the days that followed, there was no longer any time to be awkward.

She might have been more concerned if nothing had changed, because knowing what it was like to think Elizabeth McCord was dead was too powerful a feeling to ignore for even one second. Friends seemed like an odd word, but they’d become confidants of sorts, though sharing anything about the rest of her life set Nadine too on edge to function, so maybe that term didn’t fit either. 

Regardless of labels, Nadine’s become accustomed to the company on trips, the always-waiting ear to hear her deeply sarcastic jokes, the moments where one of them would slip away to breathe for one damn minute and the other would turn up when they were really needed. (Elizabeth had asked for that about a month ago, pleading for Nadine to show her a couple of hiding spots that even Blake couldn’t know about.)

She’s become accustomed to companionship, and if she hadn’t learned her lesson by now, she'd be happy about it.

~

Something fundamental changes a few months after she starts working under Senator Marsh. She sees the way he looks at her when she’s shaking hands with a rep from Wisconsin, as if she’s the only person in the room. She hears the smirk in his voice when she’s reaching up to put her papers away in her office—she has an actual office now—and he tells her that her dress is beautiful on her. She feels his hand lingering on her shoulder, always, when he introduces her to whichever hotshot politician they bump into on a given day. 

And on a Tuesday, she smells unfamiliar perfume in his office when she walks in to present candidates for a press position. “Arabelle’s flying out to see family in California,” he says. “She won’t be back till Saturday—she just left from saying goodbye.”

She nods—it’s a simple statement, but with an unfamiliar tone that leaves her confused as she sets down the résumés on his desk. “I’ll handle landing Lahey’s vote on the bill,” she says after one too many seconds of silence. “Let me know if you need anything, Senator." 

"Nadine, don't you think we're past that?" 

"Past what?"

"The titles, for heaven's sake."

He steps around his desk, glancing at the doors as if to make sure they’re shut, and she blinks and he’s kissing her and for some reason she’s not pulling away, and she knows that she's probably making a horrible mistake, and that she’s going to pay for not stopping this before it goes any further, and that she’s just become the other woman to a US Senator.

But it feels wonderful right now.

Much further on, when he tells her about the Secretary of State offer and asks her to come with him as Chief of Staff, it starts to feel different. She stumbles over the words for a moment, processing the news and his offer sluggishly. “Chief of Staff? I barely have any experience—are you sure?”

“Very.”

Excitement gives way to a sinking feeling in her gut. "Don't—don't you think people will catch on? There's a hundred people you should be choosing before me—they'll start to guess why—"

"Nadine." He reaches for her, tipping her chin up with one finger. "Don't you worry about that."

But she does worry. She steps foot on the seventh floor for the first time and flushes at the realization that she's gotten here by sleeping with her boss. If she ever accomplishes anything professionally, she’ll never get to know if it’s because she's qualified or because of the secret she's built her life around. 

She's standing in the State Department, for heaven's sake, but she feels more powerless than ever. 

So she pours herself into her work, making a name for herself bit by bit, crafting a mask that no one will ever see through. Memorizes hundreds of names and thousands of details and writes them all down for safekeeping. Makes a friend and an enemy out of the White House Chief of Staff within the first five minutes of meeting him. Takes the meetings that the other women on the seventh floor turn down. Gets a taste of making a difference, and gets hooked on it. 

She will become a force to be reckoned with in this town even if it kills her.

Chapter Text

Blake reeks of alcohol and smoke and other smells she'd rather not think too hard about. The cold is making her bones ache, one side more than the other, and she's tired and ticked off and can't shake the feeling that she's the only person left on this whole team with the secretary's best interests in mind.

In short, she really would like to slap him.

Blake, of all people. She's used to holding this department up on her shoulders, but she's also used to having him behind her. Matt's been snarkier than usual lately, whining in practically every meeting about her micromanaging or being a stick in the mud, and Jay's frazzled enough as it is with Abby and Chloe, and Daisy's pushback on decisions because of appearances and optics keeps adding work to Nadine's list.

Blake is supposed to be easy. Blake is supposed to manage their border collie of a boss, get her to all of the right places at all of the right times, and force her to take breaks from herding sheep before she starts to spiral. 

Blake is not supposed to be the one getting hammered overseas and pissing on public streets. 

Nadine (briefly) battens down the hatches of her temper, reconsiders, and decides to let him have it (also briefly). She fully expects Elizabeth to chew him out as well when she delivers him back to her. When he starts rattling off information instead of apologizing, her initial confusion turns to irrational, red-hot anger.

"Ma'am," she says, dropping her hand away from her face only once she's managed to erase most of the rage, "these tradecraft episodes would work even better if you would fill us all in." Annoyance bleeds through to her tone. She doesn't give a damn. 

"Well, that's actually the opposite of how they work." Elizabeth barely even looks at her before turning her attention to Blake.

Jay meets Nadine's eyes from behind Elizabeth. He's ironed his own expression out pretty darn well, but his eyebrows are giving away his displeasure. It helps to know she's not insane, or at least not alone. 

She expects the frustration to ease once the trip is over. It doesn't. Blake apologizes profusely on the flight home, explaining he was sworn to secrecy. It only makes her feel worse. If she can only blame Blake for the pissing part of the secret, then she has to blame Elizabeth for the rest.

Elizabeth, who trusted Blake with this plan and seems completely unfazed by the fact that he'd completely lost control last night. Elizabeth, who'd kept Nadine on as Chief of Staff for no good reason, had her investigated, and clearly still doesn't trust her enough to let her do her job. 

It nags at her to the point that she almost—almost—wishes the fact-finding part of Blake's night had been a failure. She's mortified when she realizes why.

It's unfair to hold that horrible day after Iran over either of their heads, but she can't help it. Blake had all but shut down within in a minute, and Nadine had been left to make sure Elizabeth didn't think she was dying alone. After the fact, she’d assumed that sitting with her boss through one of the darkest moments of her life would be enough to earn her trust.

Apparently, she'd been wrong. 

~

She'd assumed that sleeping with her boss for the better part of six years—and successfully hiding it from an entire country and also his wife—would be enough to earn her trust. 

Apparently, she'd been wrong. 

Vincent's being cagey. It starts small, a few of her casual questions deflected with oddly-timed jokes, a few more forged entries on his schedule than usual. The alarm bells start ringing in her ears, first in the middle of the night as she lies in bed wide awake and then at the office too, and when she first asks if he's keeping something from her, he shouts at her for the first time in months. She cowers instinctively and hates herself for it. 

He apologizes and makes up for it later that evening, but she can't look him in the eye for days.

In her office one Wednesday, Nadine catches herself wondering if he's found another woman. When the irony of that thought sinks in, she recoils in her chair and squeezes her eyes shut, as though the bright spots will burn reality from the back of her brain. 

What they have, what they do, has never felt dirty before. It probably should, but Vincent is the one warm presence in a life she's weathering on her own. The occasional waves of guilt barely make a dent in the joy. But now, when he brushes her off like a nuisance when she lingers after group meetings, cancels plans over and over with a laundry list of excuses, touches her roughly both in his office and…elsewhere, raises his voice at her when she pushes him to tell her anything important at all, she feels tainted.

Guilt crashes in her stomach every time she tries to sleep. Some part of her that she doesn’t want to acknowledge thinks it might be fear. 

A month or so later, when his temper fades as abruptly as it came, she locks the office door and throws herself into his adoration as soon as he offers it. Anything to feel whole. Anything to stop the doubt from consuming her. Anything to be his again. 

"I'm sorry I've been so short with you," he says, and starts talking in vague terms about the White House's decisions and the stress of classified Sit Room meetings. "I shouldn't have taken it out on you." 

"You really can't tell me any of it?" she says, doe-eyed, tilting her head to look at him. Of course he can't, but she’ll put up with sounding stupid just to keep him looking at her.

"You know as well as I do that it comes with the job, Nadine." He gives her one of his wonderful soft smiles. "I'm sorry."

She swallows. Looks at him. Leans in to kiss him. Lets her gut scream all it wants, because she loves him too much to care. "It's alright."

And it is, until he winds up in pieces in the Atlantic and she learns that he was preparing to feed her to the sharks. 

Chapter Text

She loves Roman so much it hurts. So she begs. She swallows her pride and her anger and pleads with him to let her into his life. When he grunts out some version of agreement, the crack in her heart shrinks by a millimeter.

He walks away after that. It's nothing new. Still, she's so starved for hope that she can't stop smiling when explaining their interaction to Elizabeth afterwards.

Nadine shouldn't be able to miss something she never had, but there's a constant ache in her chest when she thinks about all of the ways their relationship could've, should've, been. If she'd stopped dancing before everything went so, so wrong, if she'd been less overbearing in his youth, if Pierre had put in any effort at all instead of leaving her to manage the finances and a child alone—

If she'd only been older and wiser. She knows better now. 

When she finds Blake having an existential crisis on the floor and takes him out drinking, it's as much about distracting her as him. (And maybe it's also about the feeling of someone needing her. Someone she's come to view as a sort of son.)

Something in her soul splinters when he starts singing James Taylor. When she gets home, the space feels larger and emptier than ever. 

The next day, she gets to the Truman Building early and moves her acoustic guitar back into a corner of her office—the one that she so often played on late evenings when everyone else had gone home and she was waiting for Vincent to be free. She'd taken it home right after he died, assuming she'd be out of a job soon and should start clearing out her space.

Alone on the empty seventh floor—now that's nothing new—come evening, she lays down on her office couch with her eyes closed and the guitar in her lap. Muscle memory picks its way through the strings, leaving her mind to wander. She thinks about what she'd said to Elizabeth before the Myanmar trip about wanting to keep her private life private. How strangely disappointed she'd been when Elizabeth said she'd done a superb job and walked away without pushing any further. How much she'd tell her if she asked again. 

The next night, Elizabeth does. She finds Nadine in the same position playing "Copperline" and knocks lightly on the doorframe. "Do you have a minute?"

"Of course," Nadine says, propping the guitar against the couch as she sits up. 

Elizabeth pulls up the chair across from Nadine's desk. "I wasn't trying to push you to share anything personal the other day." She runs her hands through her hair,  rumpling the side part. "But I wanted to make sure you knew that if you ever do want to talk about anything at all, I'll always listen."

"Thank you, ma'am. I appreciate that." Nadine's cheeks burn, but she'll be damned if she blocks Elizabeth out again. Yes, she wants to talk. Desperately. If she can just get the first words out, maybe the rest of them will follow. 

"I didn't know you played guitar," Elizabeth says after a long silence. It's an offer of a starting point and they both know it. 

Nadine clears her throat. "I learned in France. I was dancing eight hours a day and performing all the time and I didn't have the time for any hobbies involving seeing people, so guitar was a good choice." She pushes past the weight of hesitation. "Roman was unplanned, obviously. I went back to dancing as soon as I could after he was born. It was a logistical nightmare, but I'd put him in the corner of the studio and he'd somehow sleep through all the noise." 

Elizabeth smiles but doesn't say anything. Nadine ventures further, knowing she'll regret it in the morning. "I…when he was about two, I broke my ankle onstage, badly." Why is she saying any of this? "Multiple fractures, torn tendons, ligament damage in my hip—after the operations I kept thinking I would be back onstage within a year, but the doctors told me that with the way it healed, I'd be begging for a repeat injury, and I couldn't risk that as Roman got older because his father wasn’t around." It's only the breathless sound of her own voice that reminds her to pause for air. "So I went to the first law school that accepted me, came to D.C. when I graduated, met…Vincent, and that was that." 

She waits for the shame of oversharing to hit her, but it doesn't take the bait. Elizabeth looks at her with that same soft, lovely expression from the night that she'd learned about Vincent. "Nadine, I'm so sorry." 

Nadine looks down, scrambling to regain control. "Don't be. I would've have regretted all of the dancing anyway if I'd turned thirty and had no professional qualifications for any other job. I certainly wouldn't have ended up here." 

Would that have been such a bad thing? 

She picks up the guitar. Not to play, just to hold in her lap. It's a small comfort that she's turned to a hundred times over the years. "Roman said something to me the other day—we were arguing about Juilliard. He'd dropped out and I'd cut him off financially and he said that his father was supportive of his choice and I wasn't, and when I said that I was the one paying for it, he made a comment about everything coming back to money with me." Her sentences are so much longer than they should be. She manages another breath. "I don't know why it bothered me." 

"You raised a child alone while going through personal hell," Elizabeth says, "and based your whole life around making his better while his father got to carry on with business as usual. I think that's enough of a reason for it to bother you." 

Nadine examines the calluses on the tips of her fingers. 

~

Nadine examines the calluses on the tips of her fingers. "He's never going to speak to me again." She shifts the guitar in her lap.

"He'll come around—hold on." Distantly, she hears, "Frederick, don't you dare." 

"Was it a mistake to cut him off?" she asks, fearing the answer, and examines the strings. She plays fingerstyle, never with a pick and never loudly, but the hours have added up, fraying the bronze in certain spots. 

"I have no idea, Dina. I'm not any better at raising a son than you, and you've been at it for longer than me."

(She'd watched bits and pieces of the process as Lilith completed a hundred different degrees, fell in love, got married—Nadine had always thought Lilith could do better—and had a child. The jealousy of watching her sister check off milestones in the proper order, at the proper age, had nearly consumed her. 

The last thing she'd expected was for Lilith to run away with another man, a lunatic, under the assumption that her life would be intact when she returned.

Maybe they were both genetically predisposed to make horrible decisions when it came to men.

"Why aren't you furious at me?" Lilith had asked when she'd told Nadine the reason for the divorce. 

"You made a mistake," Nadine had said, figuring she had no right to judge anyone who'd fucked up a marriage. "You'll make it better.")

She's still jealous now. Lilith is bringing up a child on her own, sure, but she has a brilliant professional career already, and Frederick loves her, and his father is a better dad than he was a husband, and they've made amends to the point that Lilith sounds excited whenever she talks about going to Seattle to visit. Her former in-laws are fresh out of a circus, she says, but even they seem to be coming around.

Nadine is bringing up a child alone, except he's no longer a child and he no longer wants anything to do with her. She's been so rattled by this morning's Juilliard-themed screaming match that Vincent had called her out on being distracted at work. "I don't want him to end up like me." She wouldn't wish the heartbreak of losing the ability to dance on anyone, let alone her own son. 

Lilith doesn't need clarification. "But you were happy in Europe. Wasn't that worth something?" 

Maybe, but it wasn't worth the regret that's followed her around every day since. "So you do think I shouldn't have cut him off." 

"No." She hears the sound of a whisk against a bowl and wonders what inedible meal Lilith is making tonight. "I think you were right to draw the line. I just think you have to let him do what he wants on his side of it." 

Later that night, Nadine sits on the floor with her guitar and breaks the high E string for the first time ever in the middle of "Diamonds and Rust." 

Chapter Text

The FBI visits every five minutes set her on edge, the panicked stampede as Blake, Daisy, and Jay come running out of Elizabeth's office makes her jaw drop, and the split-second live feed shot between the explosion and complete signal loss confirms what she thinks is the worst-case scenario.

But the news that the bomb was dirty nearly sends her to her knees.

Everything happens so, so fast after that. First it's Elizabeth being dragged away and then it's her kids being MIA and then it's Henry at ground zero and then it's Nadine slipping away to make herself sick in the bathroom because she can't think straight and it's the only way to stop her stomach from turning nonstop for the rest of the day.

And then it's her taking a seat at the head of the table in the conference room two minutes later and trying to keep everyone else from floundering.

It's what she does, after all.

Blake, ever the loyal servant, is the one who ends up having to find everyone at St. Anne's and accompany Elizabeth to the isolation ward where Henry's being kept. Just the the thought of stepping foot in a hospital after a dirty bomb makes her dizzy with relief that she's not the one tasked with that mission. It's not the radiation. It's the lights and the sheets and the beeping and the bad news—she hasn't handled hospitals well since that night.

It's an illogical reason to be unnerved, but it sticks with her through the day and all of its horrible updates, and when she passes by Matt's office, she sees the same sort of fear in his eyes before he even opens his mouth.

She offers him a place for the night even after he suggests that she's a cat lady. It's far from the worst thing she's been called, and besides, she could use the distraction. It's not lost on her that she'd dragged Blake out to a bar for the same reason not long ago.

She really should stop doing that.

Matt is clearly dumbstruck when he enters her apartment. After briefly fixating on her photo with Nelson Mandela, he gravitates toward her favorite shelf of photos and mementos while she's on the phone. She watches him examine a posed stage photo and braces herself for the inevitable comments.

"I didn't know you were into theater," he says when she hands him his scotch.

She instinctively redirects to Boris Yeltsin before remembering how nice it had felt to talk to Elizabeth after the Myanmar trip. She's in her own home, and this is Matt, not her boss. It can't hurt. So she offers up a single sentence about dancing, and it doesn't tug at her chest quite as hard as usual.

She takes note of that.

"Good night, Matt," she says later, filling a glass of water to take to her room.

He draws in a slow breath, his jaw tense. "Good night."

Nadine fights an internal war in the span of five seconds, steps around the table, and hugs him as best she knows how. "Everything's going to be okay."

She walks away before he can say anything else, and when she wakes up after sleeping through the night for the first time in a month, she knows it really will be.

He nearly sets her kitchen on fire half an hour later. The laughter rises from deep in her stomach and resists her efforts to silence it for nearly a full minute.

It feels wonderful.

~

The piano picks up pace. She moves with it, falling into place with the notes, letting muscle memory take over so she can focus on her cues—but for the first time in years, familiarity doesn't kick in. Fortunately, conscious thought about the choreography hasn't slipped her mind yet, so she digs it forward, pleading her body to obey.

Everything's gone wrong this week. Her dancing schedule, her shoestring budget, the constant lack of sleep associated with parenting for the first time—she's clinging on by a thread, and it's catching up to her. She's used to every muscle in her body aching dimly from her rehearsal schedule, but today it's a radiating, dull throbbing in both shoulders and her calves.

Even the adrenaline of performing in front of an audience isn't enough to overcome the exhaustion. Every movement feels like she's trying to run through water. She gets a beat behind, then two, and though she'd usually be able to improvise, her head is too cloudy for her to think on her feet.

Her feet, which are one step behind her mind and the rest of her body, which end up too close to her partner when he moves forward on the correct sequence and she moves backwards on the wrong one. She doesn't notice until she's in the air for a leap and her foot clips his side, and the contact is just enough to change the angle of her momentum.

Her momentum, which sends her back down to earth on the outside of her foot.

Her foot, which rolls until all of her weight lands on her ankle.

Her ankle, which makes the most horrific noise she's ever heard and then gives out completely, sending her plummeting sideways until she lands clean on her hip.

Her hip, which slams against the dance floor as she crumples, pain scorching the entirety of her leg, another noise splitting her head open before she realizes it's her own screaming.

Her screaming, which gives way to shallow gasps as silence settles over the last of the music, the last of her music, and she feels people touching her, her hair, her ribs, her hands, whispering, "Hold on. Just stay still. Everything's going to be okay."

She curls in on herself, unable to tell whether the darkness is the curtain closing or the world closing in on her. Something brushes against her leg. She jerks it back on instinct and the pain doubles in a heartbeat. She pushes herself up on one elbow and starts retching from the agony. Nothing comes up. Her vision is fading into sparks.

"Everything's going to be okay," repeats the voice—one of the girls.

What a lie.

Chapter Text

"Matt, get me a draft as soon as possible. Jay, you'll have to take the meeting with Adam while I take this call in my office." Elizabeth turns to Nadine. "Nadine—track down Senator Larson on the Hill and call me once he's on board. Make it clear it's not an option."

"Yes, ma'am." She doesn't flinch—she's spent her whole life erasing all traces of physical reactions from her instincts.

Of course it's Blake who still sees right through the cracks. Looking hard at her, he clears his throat and tells Elizabeth he'll be along in a minute. Clearly distracted, she doesn't question it.

"What's the matter?" he asks once they're alone.

" Blake,” she warns, sipping her tea as a stalling tactic. "Nothing."

He's silent, and for a moment she thinks that'll be enough to shake him. He starts wringing his hands, though, the way he always does when he's about to say something he thinks he shouldn't, and Nadine braces herself before he even takes a breath. "I'm going with you."

"You're babysitting the wrong woman, Blake." There's no way he'll miss the way the cup shakes in her hand, though.

"Nadine, I'm not kidding." His tone stays light, but anger flashes in his eyes—or whatever the scaled-down Blake Moran equivalent of anger is. She knows it’s not directed at her. "You can make me ask you directly, or I can tell the secretary to not let you go alone, or I can just come with you and we don't have to talk about it."

For the sake of appearances, she counts to three in her head before giving in.

Blake sits rigid and white-knuckled beside her as the senator snarls about loyalty and incentives and a hundred other things she can barely process. Her brain makes the smell of his breath and his cigarettes stronger than it should be from this distance. She swears she can feel his fingernails digging into her shoulders again and the wall against her back.

(If she ever gets the chance, she'll track down and hire the intern who'd knocked on the door not a moment too soon.)

After an excruciating fifteen minutes, she emerges on top thanks to good old-fashioned blackmail. She doesn't feel at all guilty about it, but the undisguised hatred in Larson's eyes as she stands up to leave makes the room feel very hot and very small.

Blake shuts the door behind them and immediately places a hand on Nadine's back. "Let's get you some air, okay? And maybe lunch?”

Too grateful for words, she nods and—just for a moment—lets her head fall against his shoulder.

The Chinese food they order goes down easily. It surprises her that she's hungry now of all times, but she takes advantage of the ability to eat without forcing every bite down.

Blake looks relieved.

They make it through a few minutes of light conversation and another minute of silence before Blake says her name. He sounds almost choked up when he starts talking. "Please tell me all of the one-on-one meetings that you agree to do aren't with people like…that."

"It's not really a choice, Blake." No longer hungry, she sets down her chopsticks.

He blanches. "It always is."

~

The counts for their bill are tight, and she doesn't trust half of their yes-men as far as she can throw them. Vincent agrees when she says so over a staff breakfast and sends her to go wrangle the senior senator from Massachusetts.

This is not the first time she's stood in a room with a large, angry man and fought for the future of her country. She prides herself at being damn good at it. She knows when to provoke the bear, when to seduce it, and when to play dead—years of dancing across Europe will do that to a person. And after a few months of this routine, she's used to delivering the legislative spoils of her efforts back to Vincent in exchange for his arms around her and his hands in her hair.

Senator Forrest is harder than most of her other opponents. She's used to looks of indifference and incredulity, but he turns on her with genuine malice in his eyes.

No matter how hard she tries to convince herself otherwise, wearing Vincent's target on her back is terrifying. She barely cracks a hundred and ten pounds even when she's not stressed (or really, when she's not in the throes of what her doctor would call a relapse), and Forrest is easily six-foot four and furious and—a man.

A man who's apparently been collecting dirt on his 99 Senate counterparts for years and, after she pushes him a little too hard, announces that he's going to obliterate their narrow majority with PR landmines against five different senators. (She counts their lucky stars that Vincent isn’t one of the five. This time.)

As the dominos start falling, all she can think is that it was only a matter of time. She and Vincent had both walked right into his trap, and there's not much she can do now other than hang in the net.

Forrest grins, tossing the damning file onto his desk. "You can tell Senator Marsh to shove that bill up his ass."

Nadine draws herself up straight for a last-ditch effort. "If you do this, Senator, there will be co—"

Intimidation makes her voice weak, and he knows it. "No. There will not."

"Sir—"

He looks her in the eye and hits her clean across the face.

When she gets back to Vincent's office, he's in the middle of a staff meeting that she's supposed to be in. "Update?" he says expectantly, and when she tells him all of it except for the part where she'd been physically assaulted, he stands up and shoves his chair back so hard it nearly falls over.

She recoils. He doesn't notice, or if he does, he doesn't care. "What the hell were you thinking?"

She loves him, wants to spend her life with him, but she hates him more than anything right now. The room is packed and he's shouting at the top of his lungs—"I sent you to win one vote and you lost us six?"—and her lip stings from when she instinctively bit down hard enough to break skin. But she's already buckled once today. She'll be damned if she does so again.

Nadine takes the verbal blows in silence, still trying to quell the shaking from the physical one, and avoids the gazes of the few sympathetic people in the room. Their pity tastes like blood. Internally, she vows to throw it back in their faces as soon as she gets the chance.

She will never let herself get this rattled again. Regularly fearing for her life is a small price to pay for ambition.

It's far from the worst that she'll experience in years to come, but she'll always go wherever he tells her to. It's not a choice.

It never is.

Chapter Text

"Nadine, is there anything else I need to know?"

"No," Nadine says. She thinks her heart might fall out of her chest right here, right now. Arabelle knows. She must. And Nadine still can't bring herself to say the truth out loud. "There isn't."

She's been so happy lately. The weight of the world on her shoulders feels a little lighter (with the glaring exception of watching a man get hanged) and she's gotten to do some very good things with a group of very good people. Looking forward to waking up in the morning is a gift she doesn't take for granted.

But just a few minutes with Arabelle, who surely knows what her husband did with Nadine for six years but won't give Nadine the closure of confirmation, is enough to send her into a tailspin.

The phrase poetic justice comes to mind as she tosses in bed all through the night, and again when she catches sight of herself in the mirror come morning and decides that she simply won't eat today, and again when she stands in Elizabeth's office and hears Vincent's voice calling her useless. (And then the light of his life.)

All of her ghosts all around her all at once.

She fights for control, careful to not let the sleep deprivation creep into her tone as she runs point on the entire department's worth of projects. It doesn't, but it clearly reaches her face. On the second day after Arabelle's visit, Daisy asks if Nadine's doing alright. They both know exactly what she's referring to.

"I'm fine," she says by default before amending the statement. She's too tired to regret having talked to Daisy about Arabelle. "Just a little rattled by…all of this."

Daisy moves as though she's going to put a hand on Nadine's shoulder, then changes her mind. Nadine finds herself wishing she hadn't.

On the third day, Elizabeth looks at her upon stepping out of the elevator and does a double-take. "You look tired," she says softly, in that distinctly maternal way that always catches Nadine off guard. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Long week, ma'am." What an understatement. Getting drunk with Elizabeth and ranting about the roller-coaster of seeing Arabelle again sounds like a fantastic, albeit unprofessional, idea at the moment. It's too bad she can't convince herself to propose anything like that—she suspects Elizabeth would say yes if she did.

On the fourth day, she feels off-kilter and achy all over, and on the fifth day, she wakes up with a splitting sinus headache and the beginnings of a sore throat. She knows instantly why she'd slept for five full hours last night. The realization makes her heart race and her hands shake uncontrollably as she gets dressed—being sick has prompted the same disproportionate panic response for as long as she can remember.

Blake watches her like a hawk after she sneezes three times in a row in the morning meeting, but he doesn't say anything. (Perhaps he thinks he's crossed enough lines lately, especially after the Larson meeting last month.) Talking rakes at her throat. Despite her efforts to keep her voice steady, Jay's brow furrows as soon as he hears her speak. She dreads the concerned questions that will surely come from at least one of them later.

Sometime past noon, while she's fighting the urge to cough and wondering how everything already hurts so much more than this morning, Maggie knocks on her door. "The files you asked for."

"Thank you." She winces, both out of pain and embarrassment from sounding so obviously ill.

"I had soup delivered too." Masterful as ever at juggling piles of items in her arms, Maggie sets down a mug of tea and a paper bag. She looks slightly timid. "I didn't mean to intrude. I just—I thought you could use something warm."

Nadine wonders how on earth she got so lucky with Maggie. "Thank you," she says again, forcing herself to make eye contact. Maggie deserves it.

Maggie studies her a moment more, probably trying to gauge exactly how bad she's feeling. "Please tell me if you need anything."

She manages to wait until Maggie leaves before doubling over to cough. It comes from deep in her chest and feels like it's trying to bring up half a lung with it. When it finally relents, she leans back in her chair and closes her eyes, trying to steady her breathing.

She really doesn't feel well.

~

She really doesn't feel well.

This is where the haunting begins, though it'll feel so familiar years from now that she'll wonder if she ever knew anything else. Before Elizabeth, before Vincent, before the accident, before Roman. Just her, young and alone in a tiny, drafty apartment in France, understanding for the first time that she'll only ever achieve anything by sacrificing her heart and mind and health for it.

Try as she might, she won't ever forget that lesson.

She's unraveling and she knows it. Worn to the ground by five to eight hours of intense exercise every day and wilting under the pressure of starvation, her body is crumbling. Her head spins constantly. She can't ever get warm. She hasn't had a period in nine months.

But she's dancing better than ever, if the newspapers and the audiences and the job offers are anything to go by, and that's all she's ever wanted. Ambition doesn't silence the hunger, but it makes it well worth the pain.

After a two-show day, she absentmindedly complains of the lightheadedness over the phone with Lilith, forgetting that Lilith has suspected what she's doing since before she left for Europe. Sure enough, Lilith catches on immediately. "You're not eating enough, are you?"

"I'm fine,” Nadine says, bracing herself against the wall with one hand and pressing the other under her nose. "I'm probably just coming down with something."

Lilith ignores her. "Your bones are going to fall apart if you don't stop this."

She tries to. She really does. But she's in so deep, and by the evenings, when she's mentally prepared to force down just enough food to keep her conscious for the next 24 hours, the dizziness usually makes her too nauseous to try.

Most days, she feeds off of the pride, but tonight she's so exhausted that she starts crying as soon as she hangs up the phone.

When winter comes a few weeks later, it nearly destroys her. The weather and the rehearsal schedule and the lack of food and sleep reduce her immune system to dust. First it's a cold, then a persistent low-grade fever for weeks, then another cold that settles in her chest until she starts coughing too hard to breathe in the middle of rehearsal. Fiona, one of the other Americans, presses a hand to her forehead and insists that Nadine come with her to see a doctor.

It's a horrid chest infection, not a cold, and she's sent home with pills and strict orders to eat before she takes them. After taking the first dose with only water when she gets home, she finds out the hard way that she shouldn't have blown off the instructions.

Desperate to get back to the studio before she’s demoted or even replaced, she manages half of an orange before taking the next pills. They stay down.

Nadine takes a grand total of two days off, loses another five pounds without trying after returning to rehearsals, and doesn't stop coughing for a month. And she learns to fear pills and love oranges.

Chapter Text

Talking through briefs with Elizabeth on Wednesday afternoon, Nadine wonders how obvious it is that she can barely breathe. 

She honestly doesn't know how she's managed to function for the last few days. Whatever this is seems to reach deeper into her lungs and push harder against her chest every night. The election is closing in, though, and half of Europe is having a pissing contest in the meantime. No one can afford to be distracted, and they certainly can't afford to cover for her.

Russell barrels through the doors without warning, unsurprisingly furious about something election-related. Breath catching in her throat, she turns away and coughs violently for nearly half a minute before finally managing to control it. It hurts. Badly.

Tactful as ever, Russell looks over at her and says, "Jesus, you sound like shit."

She gives him as much of a dirty look as she can muster. "You're so kind."

He turns back to Elizabeth, winding up to yell again. She expects that to be the end of it, because Russell has the attention span of a goldfish for anything not related to his political wrath. After a few sentences, though, he pauses and glances back at her. "Really, Nadine. Have you had that checked out?" 

Elizabeth's also staring at her now. Curling up in a dark hole has never sounded so appealing. "I'm fine." She'll start reciting that in her sleep soon.

Maybe it's just that Russell's in particularly fine argumentative form today, or that he's so worked up that the passion is carrying over—or maybe he's just genuinely concerned about her, though she doubts that—but he scoffs at her response. "Yeah, right."

She escapes further scrutiny under the (true) excuse of a meeting, but the next fit of coughing bends her double almost as soon as she steps outside of Elizabeth's office. When it passes, Maggie appears by her side, eyes huge with worry. 

"Can you…" The room is much too hot and her chest is on fire. She doesn't know what she's trying to ask. "I…"

"I've cleared your schedule for an hour and a half," Maggie says softly, already reaching an arm across Nadine's back. "I think you should lie down." 

She does, curling up on her office couch under the quilt she always keeps there, and wakes up in a cold sweat to the sound of Jay's voice. "It's just me," he says as she scrambles to get her bearings. "Nadine, slow down." 

Still disoriented, she fights for a full breath and ends up coughing instead. Jay sits down beside her and offers her a bottle of water when it stops. "Maggie talked to me. She's worried about you but she thought you'd be mad at her for coming to me." 

"I'm not." She's just overwhelmingly hot and cold at the same time and can't stop shaking, and she's terrified by how little air seems to be reaching her lungs.

"This isn't a cold anymore, Nadine. It's been more than a week and you can't breathe." It's impossible to argue with that. "This sounds like pneumonia. You need to see a doctor." 

Panic pricking at her spine, she shakes her head. "I can't…they'll…I'll…" When the coughing starts up again, it's so deep and painful that it brings tears to her eyes. 

Besides her breakdown in front of Elizabeth—that feels like an eternity ago now—Jay's the only one of them who's ever seen her cry. Partially because she's known him the longest and partially just because he's Jay, she trusts him in a different way than the others. Enough so to finally buckle under the weight of sheer exhaustion. 

"I don't feel well," she whispers, as though that's not the most obvious thing in the world, and when Jay hugs her gently from the side, she falls to pieces in his arms. 

Jay's right. The doctor (a woman, which she suspects is related to Jay speaking quietly to the nurse who saw them first) tells her that it's bacterial pneumonia, probably picked up while her body was preoccupied with the original virus. That she's running a high fever and is dangerously dehydrated. That if she'd stopped sooner instead of running herself into the ground, she wouldn't be in nearly so bad of a state. 

She says the last bit kindly, but it doesn't make a difference. Nadine's heard that same statement her whole life. If she hasn't learned by now, she probably never will. 

The suggestion that she stay through the night on IV fluids and supplemental oxygen shuts her down completely. Jay spends fifteen minutes talking her off a mental ledge, promising her that he'll figure the logistics out. In the end, she gives in.  

She's just so, so tired. 

~

The first day Jay finds her at rock bottom is also the first day that Vincent hits her. 

The two of them are in his office at the crack of dawn and he's pointedly not referencing Arabelle by name as they discuss the upcoming schedule. She has a splitting headache and a nasty cough and when he blows off her opinion about negotiations with China, her temper boils over. He looks at her with his lip curled like she's some sort of animal. 

(Later, she'll realize that this is the first time she’s ever openly disagreed with him.) 

His voice steadily creeps up in volume, drilling into her skull. Despite the many times he's snarled at her before, the dark glint in his eye is unfamiliar and unnerving as he moves closer to her. "If I wanted a second opinion on this, I'd be getting it from someone who knows what they're talking about."   

All she wants to do is fight. She shouts back, voice raw. "Would you like a list of all of the times I've saved your ass?"

He hits her like it's an afterthought. Like she's not even worth his anger, only his indifference. "You would be nowhere if it wasn't for me." 

Nadine stares dumbstruck at him, her whole body trembling with rage—she hates that he'll assume it's from fear—and leaves the room without saying another word. 

By some miracle, she avoids him until the rest of the senior staff arrive. In the middle of their morning conference room discussion about China, she's seized by coughing while he's talking and he turns on her again. "For God's sake, Nadine." 

It's the last straw. "Excuse me," she says, and takes the opportunity to flee to her office before she can say something she'll regret in front of a room full of people. 

She knows from those bitter winters in France that this is bronchitis. It always is—she's rarely ill, but when she is, it always seems to be something that ravages her lungs until she simply can't function. Sitting down on her couch, bent over with her head in her hands in an attempt to stop the pounding, she replays their earlier conversation on a loop. 

That's how Jay finds her after a few minutes. Clearly tentative as he lets himself into her office, he says, "Go home, Nadine. Take tomorrow off and then you'll have the weekend to rest." 

Furiously wiping her eyes, she tries not to let the tears fall. "The secretary’s already furious with me." Jay doesn't know the half of it.

"I'll talk to him." He retrieves her coat from the back of her chair where she left it earlier and holds it out for her to put on. Then, bitterly, "He was being a dick in there. You know that, right?" 

Nadine tears up again at that and hates herself for it. She never used to cry with anyone watching.

When he holds her while she sobs after Vincent dies, she'll accept him into the very small circle of people that she trusts unconditionally. When they all find out about Vincent’s involvement in the coup, she'll wonder how long it's been since Jay fully trusted his former boss. When she comes clean about the affair right before Elizabeth's trip to Iran, she'll suspect that he's not all that surprised by the extent of their relationship. And when she's so ill that she can barely stand from that same couch a few years later, she'll wish she turned to him sooner. 

But when she returns on Monday, it'll be as though nothing ever happened in Vincent’s office today. And she'll return to him as soon as he wants her, because she still believes he's all she has.

If she hasn't learned by now, she probably never will.  

Chapter Text

Jay is waiting when she wakes up. 

Curled on her side, Nadine sees him in the chair beside her before she can process anything else. The panic sets in as soon as she realizes where she is, but her whole body feels too heavy to outwardly react to the danger. She shifts her weight, fighting the flight response.

Bits and pieces. That's all she remembers.

(Maggie looking absolutely petrified as she retrieves Nadine's phone and purse and always-ready overnight bag from the corner of her office, whispering something to Jay that makes him glance back at Nadine and shake his head.)

(Her brain completely paralyzing her with fear in the hospital, replaying one of the worst weeks of her life on a loop, sending her into a silent, lethal panic attack that leaves her shaking and rooted to the spot while Jay acts as messenger.)

(Jay squeezing her right hand while a nurse fishes for a vein in her left hand, telling her to look at him just before she briefly blacks out from sheer terror the moment the needle makes contact.)

(Panicking all over again about the way the oxygen cannula makes her feel trapped, coughing harder, and starting to hyperventilate until her body simply can't take any more.)

(Falling asleep sometime after that.) 

"Hey," Jay says softly. "Good morning." 

Rubbing her eyes, she shudders as her hand brushes the tubing under her nose. Coherent thoughts still won't come. "How long have I…" Her voice can barely reach above a whisper. 

Jay glances at his watch. "You slept on and off for almost fourteen hours." Her shock must be written all over her face, because he laughs. "It's almost ten o'clock."  

Nadine stares at him until she figures out what's nagging at her brain. "Have you been here all night?" 

"Of course, Nadine." She starts to apologize and he shakes his head, the last of his smile fading into concern again. "I could never…" 

What's left unsaid as he trails off—that he could never leave her to face all her demons alone in the place she hates most in the world—nearly moves her to tears too. She pushes herself into a semi-upright position on the slanted bed and takes a breath, testing her lungs. The muscles in her chest ache, but for the first time in days, getting air isn't a constant battle. 

The next wave of panic hits without warning. "Are—are they going to make me stay longer?" She doesn't think she'll be able to bear it if they do. 

"No," Jay says quickly. "I talked to a nurse earlier. Someone will come by to stop the IV and the oxygen soon. They were more worried about getting fluids in you than your oxygen levels." Weak with relief, she tips her head back and sighs. "You'll just have to be on antibiotics for a couple of weeks—liquid. I checked." 

Sometimes she wonders exactly how much he's guessed about her over the last few years. 

"The secretary also threatened me with severe consequences if I didn't pass on the message that, and I quote, "I will file a restraining order if she tries to come back to work without taking at least a week to rest."' 

Nadine sits bolt upright. "A week?" 

Jay chuckles again. "You should thank me. She was aiming for two weeks before I negotiated…" Mood shifting rapidly again, he sighs.

"What is it?" 

"I really think I should stay at your place for a night or two." Nadine starts shaking her head before he's even finished the sentence. "It's your choice, and I'll drop it if you tell me not to, but I'd feel a lot better knowing that you're not alone if the meds don't kick in right away or the cough gets worse at night. Just until you're past the worst of it—" 

"I'm fine, Jay." 

"For the love of God, Nadine, you're not fine!" Jay's voice cracks with emotion. "This could've been so much worse—you could have died—"

“That’s absurd.” She turns his own words on him. "I'm telling you to drop it."

"Nadine." There are tears in his eyes now. "You weren't the one watching last night. You have no idea how many times I've been afraid for your life—I'm begging you. You keep this entire department going all the time. You're there for all of us. Always. Please trust us enough to let us return the favor."

Something inside her splits clean down the middle. She doesn't know what to say or do or think, but she knows she won't forget this moment for as long as she lives. 

Numb except for her heart thudding rapidly in her throat, she stares at the bleak white wall and wonders how the hell she's ended up here.

And eventually, she nods. 

~

Lilith is waiting when she wakes up. 

She fades in and out of consciousness for longer than she should, and somewhere in the in-between, she makes some slurred, barely comprehensible comment about being interrupted while counting the comb marks in Lilith's hair. 

Lilith tells her that a few months later. Only once it's funny. 

Nadine learns a great many things she never wanted to know within the first 24 hours after surgery. The first is that the pain accompanying an ankle patched together with metal is quite simply unimaginable. The second is that even lying in a hospital with her ribs practically jutting out of her chest and her leg in pieces isn't enough to silence the voice in her head. The third is that she will never, ever be able to handle needles without passing out or take pills again without wanting to vomit. 

If nothing else, she's grateful to be in an American hospital, to have shattered her body like glass on a stage in New York City instead of Paris. Europe has only ever meant dancing to her. It'll be a long time before it gets to mean that again.

If it ever does. 

"This is my fault, isn't it?" she whispers on the second morning, curled up against Lilith's chest with her bad leg carefully positioned. "You were right—I know you kept telling me to stop—" Starving herself. Why can't she say it out loud?

"Hush." Lilith strokes her hair, cradling her with a gentleness that Nadine doubts she deserves. "It'll be alright." 

It'll never be alright. She's reduced her body to bones and her bones to dust and she'll be paying the price for the rest of her life. "I couldn't—I couldn't—" She bursts into tears. "I can't stop. How do I stop?" 

For the first and probably the last time ever, Lilith says, "I don't know." 

(She’ll go on to become a psychiatrist. Nadine suspects that's not an entirely random decision.) 

Dancing has been everything to her for as long as she can remember. First a hobby, then an outlet, then a passion, then an all-consuming dream that she would do anything to make reality. 

And now it's all gone. 

When the tears finally run dry, Lilith says, "We can find you help if you need it."

Something inside her splits clean down the middle. She doesn't know what to say or do or think, but she knows she won't forget this moment for as long as she lives. 

Numb except for her heart thudding rapidly in her throat, she stares at the bleak white wall and wonders how the hell she's ended up here.

And eventually, she nods.  

Chapter Text

For the first time in a long time, Nadine recognizes hope for what it is. 

When she and Jay get back to her apartment on Thursday afternoon, she freezes in her living room and blurts out that she can't sit down without changing her clothes. Unfazed, he tells her to let him know if she needs help getting anything. 

He's filling a glass with water at the sink when she returns in a sweater and loose pants. "Where do you keep your pens and paper?"

"What?" 

"You're going to keep track of how much water you're drinking so you don't end up in the hospital again." 

He says it like it's a Nobel Prize-winning idea. Nadine finds it absurdly funny and laughs until it turns into a cough, then keeps laughing. 

"I'm serious," Jay says, but he starts laughing too, and she ends up retrieving both from her office rather than attempt to explain the layout of her desk to him. 

Once she's settled on the couch with a blanket and a full pitcher of water, Jay asks if she's comfortable with him going back to the State Department for the rest of the afternoon. She says yes a little too quickly and firmly, desperate for a taste of freedom. 

Freedom, of course, means little more than drifting in and out of sleep and drinking four glasses of water in order to tease Jay with her tally when he returns. But the kind messages from Elizabeth and Blake and Matt and Daisy over the next few hours make her think that everything might just turn out alright after all.

On the second day, she wakes up just past eight to a delightful, warm smell from the kitchen. 

Jay's stirring a massive quantity of soup at the stove. He must have picked up ingredients on the way back from work last night, and she must have been too tired to notice the extra bags. That's hardly surprising.

After being too nauseous from the antibiotics yesterday to stomach anything more than buttered toast and tea, she welcomes the feeling of hunger. Still—"A metric ton of soup for breakfast?" 

"You dare to doubt my soup-making powers, Nadine?" He tests the doneness of a particularly large chunk of potato with a fork. "We can freeze the rest of the metric ton so you'll have leftovers."

He leaves for the State Department once he finishes cooking. She leaves him a thank-you text message after deciding that the soup is maybe the best she's ever had in her life. 

On the third day, she starts feeling better. Really, truly better. 

She is also bored out of her mind. She begs Jay to send her files or emails or something to work on over the weekend—she's not above whining once in a while. He doesn't budge, but after Nadine rolls her eyes for the fifth time, he concedes that he'll ask Elizabeth about letting her work from home on Monday. 

He returns in the evening to confirm that she'll be okay on her own tonight, and to drop off a bag of oranges. 

On the fourth day, she walks into a silent kitchen and struggles to shake the loneliness. Maybe it's just the emptiness of her schedule—she can't remember the last time she did nothing on a Sunday. Still, her heart leaps at the mid-morning knock on her door. 

It's Blake, not Jay, and he's standing in the doorway with her guitar case and a tote bag. "The secretary had to go to an event at Jason's school and she's not pleased I came without her, but I figured you might be going a little stir-crazy." 

Laughing, she says, "I'm going out of my mind." 

He hugs her for a long time—carefully, as if he's afraid she'll break—and stares at her once they break apart. "I'm really glad you're okay." 

"You have to wait at least half an hour before getting sappy, Blake." 

She can't imagine how many things on his to-do list he's pushed aside to come visit her. Still, seeing him still makes her smile so hard it hurts. He listens while she plays some of her favorite songs on guitar and makes her promise to sing them for him once she's fully recovered, and while she heats up some of Jay's leftover soup on the stove, he deals out cards at the counter and tells her about a particularly loud argument between Elizabeth and Russell on Friday. 

"What?" she says when he starts looking oddly at her during their third game of cribbage. 

"You look alive again." Blake smacks his forehead with his hand. "Wow, that sounded bad. That's not—I didn't—you know what I mean." 

She does. Leave it to Blake to voice the feeling that she couldn't quite put her finger on. It makes her choke up yet again—at this rate, she's probably doomed to cry at the drop of a hat forever. She's strangely okay with it. "It's alright, Blake." 

For good measure, she kicks his ass at cribbage yet again after that.

~

For the first time in a long time, Nadine recognizes hope for what it is. 

It is a series of puzzle pieces collected over a long, long stretch of time. (She won't solve that puzzle for even longer still.)

It is taking her first steps with no crutches, braces, or limping and allowing herself to think about dancing again. One foot in front of the other, entertaining a dream deferred. (Hope, it turns out, is beautiful even when it ultimately amounts to nothing. Even when it hurts like hell.)

It is digging up years of trauma disguised as discipline with the help of a therapist, slowly approaching a point where three meals a day is doable five days a week. (The progress isn't perfect or permanent, but it pulls her back from the brink and keeps her heart from failing at age 26. She will always be grateful for that.)

It is watching Roman grow while she juggles law school and work, internally promising herself and him that all of this will be worth it in the end. That she will do a damned good job of raising him when his father never wanted to. (That he will grow up surrounded by music and theater and, if he eventually loves it as much as she does, will be able to make a life out of it.)

It is getting her law degree and taking Roman to Boston for a weekend to celebrate and tell Lilith the news. (Lilith is more tightly wound than ever and yet has selected a dark, crowded bar as her location of choice. Nadine is utterly baffled by the contradiction until she traces the love light in Lilith's eyes all the way across the room. Then she's utterly thrilled.) 

It is marveling at the warmth of summer and the way that her bones don't feel brittle with cold anymore. Twirling around in a meadow à la The Sound of Music the next time she's in the countryside, simply because she can. (Winter won't ever stop hurting, but summer gives her something to fight for.)

It is packing her things and moving her entire life to DC, because everyone says they want to change the world but she won't stop until she does. (Because in government, a good day at the office means altering the course of thousands of lives for the better.)

It is deciding that the pursuit of joy is like catching fireflies in a jar. (If she doesn't keep the light locked up tight, it always seems to vanish in the darkness.)

It is staring in the mirror and realizing that she looks alive again.

Chapter Text

It seems sometimes that the story of her life is a perfect circle. Build a dream, watch her efforts fall to pieces, spot the light at the end of the tunnel, and reach for it just a heartbeat too late. Over and over, again and again. 

She is not in the habit of questioning this pattern, but she's starting to understand that the circle is shrinking. Each time that she runs from her ghosts, they hunt her down more quickly than ever before. 

One day, there won't be any light to look for at all. 

Perhaps that realization is why Nadine freezes in the middle of peeling an orange on the sixth day. She's been working all morning—Jay finally caved yesterday and allowed everyone to forward her a few emails and projects—and has managed to stay out of her own head, but now she frantically rinses her hands off and picks up her phone. 

At some point, she writes, I'd like to talk. 

Her hands shake as she types and she flushes red as soon as she sends the message, but she hopes Elizabeth will remember her promise. She doesn't think she'll ever work up the courage to say something like this again. 

Then she finishes peeling her orange. 

The radio silence from Elizabeth isn't surprising (the woman's helping run a country, for heaven's sake), but it still makes Nadine worry that she's done something wrong. She works anxiously for hours, praying she hasn't overstepped—

And at about six in the evening, Elizabeth writes I'm on my way. 

(It is distinctly odd for her to declare this without asking first for Nadine's approval. Elizabeth, too, must be afraid that Nadine will back out if she waits any longer.)

Elizabeth holds back from hugging Nadine when she arrives, much like she did all that time ago when Nadine first opened up to her about Vincent. Eyes raking over Nadine's face and body, she closes the door to give them privacy from the agents stationed out front. "How are you feeling?" 

"Much better, ma'am." Awkward is the wrong word for this. It's not uncomfortable—talking with Elizabeth rarely is. Still, Nadine's already questioning why she decided to text her boss of all people. Jay knows half of the truth already; she wouldn't have to tell him nearly as much. Maybe it's because Elizabeth is a woman, or that she's come to consider her a very good friend, or she's just tired of running from Elizabeth's offers to help. 

Or maybe she just knows deep down that if she's going to voice any of this, she has to voice all of it.

"Russell nearly had my head on Wednesday after seeing you in that meeting," Elizabeth says, chuckling as she takes off her coat. "When he found out you'd been in the hospital, he just barely remembered to ask how you were doing before saying "I told you so."'

"He's a gem," Nadine says dryly. 

"He was right."

She can't argue against that, so she simply gestures to the couch. "A glass of wine?" 

"Yes, thank you." Nadine sees the patience in Elizabeth's eyes, the caution in her words as she waits to see what, if anything, Nadine will decide to share. Like she's a stray cat debating whether or not to eat out of Elizabeth's hand. She can't decide whether it bothers her or not. 

Stalling for time, Nadine pours two glasses as slowly as possible while Elizabeth sits down. As she hands Elizabeth hers and sits down on the other side of the couch, hesitation gives way to impatience. She rips the band-aid off. "Vincent Marsh used to hit me."

Thank you dies on Elizabeth's tongue. She freezes, one hand still holding her glass in midair, and stares dumbstruck at Nadine. 

"Only a few times," she says. She can't look anywhere but the floor. "Never when he was a senator. He was rough when we…you know, but never like that. Other Congressmen would get physical when I went to negotiate bills, but never him. But once he became Secretary—we were in his office alone and it was early in the morning, and I was sick and exhausted and I snapped at him about something. And he struck me and I stood there shaking, furious, and he…he said something about me only getting to where I was by sleeping with him." Surprised by the sudden waver in her voice, she sets down her glass and takes a deep breath. "He'd hit me once in a while after that, and that sentence was all I could ever think of whenever it happened." 

Elizabeth tilts her head, still silent. 

"I was such a fool that I didn't go looking for answers whenever he'd turn on me like that. It was night and day—he'd keep me late just to scream at me and then tell me I was the light of his life the next day." She clears her throat. "Even once he dragged me into doing his dirty work, I still convinced myself it was love."

"Nadine." Elizabeth shifts her weight so that she's sitting on her feet, facing Nadine. "He used you. He abused you. You were manipulated." 

"I was stupid." She at last manages to meet Elizabeth's eyes. "I was the fall man. I should be in jail." Why is it that whenever she starts talking to Elizabeth, she can't stop? "I don't remember half of what happened after he died. I was in charge of everything, all of the communication with the White House and the emergency meetings and keeping the State Department from falling apart. I don't think I went home for four nights. At some point, I was talking to Maggie and…" 

She freezes up. It's one thing to talk about Vincent. It hurts. It always will. But it's easy to blame it all on the man she thought she loved, and Elizabeth has known the most damning parts—the affair, the lies, and the secrets—for a long time. Nadine doubts that she's surprised to hear about Vincent's use of physical force. To talk about this, though, is to bare her soul to Elizabeth, because Nadine has no one to blame but herself. 

"Hey." Elizabeth reaches out and gently touches her hand to Nadine's knee. "It's alright."

Nadine recoils on instinct. Drawing her legs to her chest, she fumbles for the right words. They stick in her throat like a scratched record. "I—I—I started starving myself when I was eighteen." Silence. She doesn't dare look at Elizabeth again. "I'd decided before I started college that I wanted to work as a dancer, but I wanted to have a degree in my pocket because dancing doesn't exactly pay the bills. At least not at first. I took all of the advanced dance classes I could fit into my schedule around school, performed whenever I could, and got scouted out for a dance troupe at a ballet in Boston. I took off for France as soon as I graduated and—"

She is eighteen again, going 24 hours without eating for the first time just to see if she can, curled in a chair as her stomach rolls. She is twenty-two, waving off Lilith's concern about her health on the drive to the airport. She is twenty-three, realizing how limp her hair's become as pride fades into fear. She is here, now, still struggling decades later to verbalize the destruction she'd brought upon her body. 

"I was always thin, but it…I was all alone in France and it gave me something to control." It was, and still is, some sort of addictive high. "I was sought out more as a dancer once the weight started coming off, so I kept at it. I found out I was pregnant a year or so in—I was violently ill for a week before I realized, and I was throwing up so often throughout the pregnancy that I hardly put on any weight at all. I danced as long as I possibly could, and once he was born, I went right back onstage and lost all of the baby weight and then some within a couple of months."

Feeling slightly sick to her stomach, she shifts her feet to the floor and bends over, breathing slowly. "I started losing muscle too and people started asking questions. The accident I told you about…the doctors told me that I'd ruined my bone density and that if I'd been eating properly, I could've been back onstage in a couple of months because the damage wouldn't have been nearly so bad."

Hearing the truth in her own voice stabs her somewhere deep, deep down in her heart. "It was my fault. I've never loved anything in the world as much as dancing," she says, blinking against the prick of tears, "and it's my fault that I—that's it's gone."

Nadine presses a hand under her nose and stifles a sob as the first tears overflow. How different everything could've been if she hadn't ruined it. How far she could've gone if she hadn't gone to extremes. 

What if won't ever stop hurting. 

Elizabeth closes the gap between them, stopping just short of actually touching her. "Of course you would have stopped if you could. It was a disease and you needed help."

Her vision swims through the tears. Barely hearing Elizabeth's words, she pushes on. "I've never been able to eat under stress since then. It makes me want to throw up. I went days without eating after he died and fainted in front of Maggie. Then people started dying in connection to the coup and I thought I was next, and then you went missing in Iran, and the dirty bomb…" Her throat aches from talking. "Every time I think I'm past it, it comes back." 

"I never knew," Elizabeth says softly. "I wish I could've helped you sooner." 

Nadine reaches for a tissue from the box on the table to blow her nose. "I can't handle hospitals," she says thickly, because she can't bear to think about anorexia anymore but she doubts she’ll be able to say anything more if she stops now. "After surgery, I passed out when they had to start a new IV for morphine and I haven't been able to stay conscious around needles ever since. The pain meds were so strong that they made me nauseous and I was so scared of becoming dependent on them that I stopped taking them as soon as I got home."

"So when Jay took you last week…" 

"He would remember more than me," she says, sniffling again. "I think I shut down as soon as we got there and blacked out when they placed an IV. I always know that getting seen at a hospital will help, but I just…I can't ever convince myself to go."

Elizabeth's brow furrows. "Always?"

Suddenly ashamed, Nadine struggles to respond. "Since I was in Europe, I've ended up with some sort of chest infection almost every time I catch something." No wonder she panics whenever she feels a cold coming on. "It doesn't happen often at all, but—" 

Beside her, Elizabeth inhales as though she's going to say something. Nadine scrambles to move on before she can. "My sister got me through all of it," she says, well aware of how sudden the shift in topic sounds. "She was there at the hospital after the accident, stayed at my apartment to take care of Roman, found an eating disorder specialist who I could talk to…she's one of the smartest people I've ever met. I think you'd like her." 

"She sounds wonderful." Elizabeth smiles. "What's her name?" 

"Lilith," Nadine says through a fresh wave of tears. She catches a fleeting glimpse of something unidentifiable in Elizabeth's eyes at the mention of the name. It's gone as soon as it came, though, and Nadine's not sure that she hasn't just imagined it. "When she left for med school and I was alone again, I started having panic attacks almost every night."

Elizabeth takes her hand before she's even finished the sentence. "Oh, Nadine…" 

"They've come and gone since then, but after Iran, I knew what was happening to you and I couldn't stop it and I just wanted you to feel less scared than I did." This time, she can't stop a sob from escaping. "I know it's not the same. I brought it on myself, and you’d almost been blown up trying to undo the mess I made."

She's weeping now, the tears falling faster than she can brush them away. Pulling another tissue from the box, she says, "Arabelle Marsh showed up during the Venezuela crisis. She said she wanted information on a woman I'd known from my trips to Caracas with Vincent, but at the very end she suggested that she knew about our relationship." She draws her knees back up to her chest. "I wanted so badly to come clean and I couldn't. I couldn't eat or sleep after she left and I started feeling so ill a few days after that and it all happened so fast—"

Wordlessly, Elizabeth pulls Nadine into a hug. It's all she needs to break apart. "I didn't know where to go," she whispers, curling into Elizabeth's tight embrace. 

And then she sobs.

She hasn't cried like this since Lilith held her in her arms and promised to help her stop digging her own grave. Clinging to the loose fabric of Elizabeth's shirt while Elizabeth strokes her hair, she allows herself to weep for everything and everyone she's lost. Her innocence. Her health. Her ability to move without pain. Her chance to make amends. Her honor. Her son. Her faith. Her dancing. 

Everything. 

"I'm always here, Nadine." Dimly, she thinks Elizabeth sounds congested, like she's on the verge of tears too. "We all are."

She couldn't stop and apologize even if she wanted to. Her heart simply cannot hold its own weight for one more second. Closing her eyes, she lets time bend around her as she cries. 

When she's completely wrung out, she shifts away from Elizabeth and bends over herself again. Panic seizes her immediately. Head in her hands, she takes huge, gasping breaths and waits for the feeling to pass. 

"Thank you," she says finally, staring at the two untouched wine glasses. Smoothing out her clothes, she stands up.  

Clearly sensing that Nadine can't handle any more emotions tonight, Elizabeth stands up too. "You've done the same for all of us." 

She aches all over and she's utterly exhausted and her eyes and sinuses are throbbing from all of the crying, but she feels whole again as Elizabeth hugs her tight once more. 

The moment, or at least the part of the moment that Nadine will remember for the rest of her life, fades after that. Desperate for a return to business as usual, she sighs and says, "I'm coming back to work tomorrow."

Elizabeth laughs. "Not before nine o'clock."

"Deal," Nadine says, wiping her eyes again. 

She sleeps like a rock.

Trust is a lovely thing. 

~

Trust is a lovely thing. Or so she's been told.

She walks through life alone and hopes that one day, she’ll experience it for herself. 

Chapter Text

"Good morning, ma'am." 

Elizabeth looks up from the papers on her desk, grinning. "Goodness, Nadine—when I said not before nine, I didn't mean you had to be here at nine on the dot." 

Nadine allows herself to smile back. "Are you really surprised?" 

"Not in the slightest." 

As she'd covered the lingering evidence of illness and tears with makeup this morning, adding color to her still-ashen cheeks and concealing the swollen dark circles under her eyes, regret over their conversation had seized her. Telling Elizabeth more about Roman after their Myanmar trip was one thing. What had happened last night was another entirely. 

She can't stop thinking back to the night that she'd told Elizabeth about the affair. The stakes had been much higher then—the fear of imminent arrest or even death, the chance of being fired on the spot, the likelihood that her new boss would never look at her kindly again—but she can't move past the shame of letting her broken heart bleed out in Elizabeth's arms last night. "I'm so sorry, ma'am." 

Elizabeth takes the words right out of Nadine's mouth. "Don't say a word about being unprofessional." She steps around the desk, moving closer. "You are…" Her voice breaks ever so slightly. "You're a very dear friend to me, Nadine. I just want you to be happy." 

This time, Nadine is the first to move in for a hug.

~

Her heart heals so quietly that she barely notices. 

She knows damn well that Elizabeth and Jay and Blake will look at her differently for a long time. After everything that's happened, how could they not? 

Running away is all she's ever done. The instinct to turn tail and flee from this friendship is overwhelming. But it's been years—decades—since she's felt as safe as she did in Elizabeth's arms, and it's been such a long, hard few months, and she's sure she'd still be crumpled at the bottom of that hole if they hadn't pulled her out. 

So she lets them in.

~

Her heart heals so quietly that she barely notices. 

Inch by inch, day by day, dusk gives way to dawn. The medication runs its course until the last of the pressure in her lungs fades, oranges at noon become oatmeal at nine more often than not, laughter in the office sounds like music to her ears again, and the nightmares leave her to sleep in peace. 

Blake brings her tea and a scone the day before the election and asks how she's doing. When she smiles and says she's doing well, she means it. 

(How ironic that she's looking forward to this life again just in time for it to be ripped away tomorrow if Dalton loses.)

Daisy turns to her for comfort in the elevator come morning, and that discussion turns into the whole team drinking far too much at the Brickmore come evening. Pleasantly warm from the alcohol, she leans against a railing and poises herself to disagree with everything that Mike says.

She succeeds in doing so right up until he suggests that she stay the night. (Boy, he's really something in bed.)

For a man she's been determined to hate since the beginning, he sure is fun to play cat and mouse with. After Gordon stares pointedly at her dress in Elizabeth's office, Mike stays behind to ask her to dinner. She serves him her specialty—a well-done no with a heaping side of vagueness—and savors the spring in her step on her way out. 

She expects this light to fade, of course. It always does. But she'll hold it close while it lasts. 

~

Her heart heals so quietly that she barely notices. 

Jay taps her shoulder at a low-stakes dinner—one of those celebratory nights for an agreement that required almost no negotiations to pull together. "Care to dance?" 

"Yes," she says, nearly tripping over her chair in her haste to join him. 

By some miracle, the decades-long residual pain in her bad hip and ankle is nearly nonexistent tonight. She positions her hands to start a waltz and lets the music take over. Lets herself pretend just for now that she's back in college, young and strong and hoping that her path will always be paved with music. 

For a Plan B, though, dancing in an exquisite red gown while helping run the most powerful country in the world isn't too shabby at all. 

She dances with Jay until she can't feel her feet—she's pretty sure he hit that point half an hour ago and was simply too polite to quit and ruin her fun—and then makes her escape with him back to their hotel rooms. As he steps into her room to help her unzip the back of her dress, tears of pure joy well up in her eyes. "That was so much fun, Jay." 

Her words come out like a giddy schoolgirl, but he doesn't seem to mind. "It was." 

Pleasantly warm all over from just the right amount of alcohol, she embraces him before he leaves. 

God, she's been doing a ridiculous amount of hugging lately. 

~

Her heart heals so quietly that she barely notices. 

Shortly before Dalton's second inauguration, she invites Blake to her house for dinner. She considers it for a full week and writes a grocery list before even bringing it up, but Blake seems to believe that it's a spontaneous offer on her part. He arrives bearing nice scotch and rambles on nervously until Nadine swats him with a dishtowel. "Goodness, Blake. I'm not going to shove you in my oven at the end of the night."

"Understood."

Blake spends most of the evening telling ridiculous stories about his childhood and his rich, insane family. Nadine spends most of it laughing. Owing to Roman's civil, almost friendly phone conversation with her yesterday, she's able to savor Blake's company without an undercurrent of guilt. Perhaps one day, she'll have meals and laugh like this with Roman—with her own son, not just with one of the young men that she's taken under her wing. Reconciliation feels much less impossible than it used to, though. 

For now, that is enough.

"Nadine?" Blake says as they tag-team the washing of the dishes at the sink."Just…thank you for everything."

"My pleasure." 

It's a relief to not be the one choking up for once. 

~ 

Her heart heals so quietly that she barely notices. 

Resistance is futile when it comes to Mike. He worms his way into her life without warning, and suddenly she's taking an overnight bag to his house after an exceptionally lovely dinner together. What happens once they get in bed is equally exceptional. "Get that grin off your face," she says as she changes into work clothes, "or this is never happening again."

What an enigma Mike is. He's so funny (but she's known that all along), and he's incredibly gentle when he's not trying to be loud and brash at the office. He stares at her like she's the centerpiece of an art exhibit

Nadine's idea of rushing through a relationship is well within the realm of what most people would call taking it slow. On a relative scale, though, they're moving quickly. She knows and she can't quite bring herself to care. He is all sorts of charming. Nadine is all sorts of desperate to love and be loved again. So be it.

The first time she balks at breakfast after staying at his house overnight, Mike foregoes any sort of lecture in favor of digging into his own waffles.  Undoubtedly informed by Blake or Jay about her fruit preferences, he points to the fresh oranges in the fruit bowl as an alternative. She peels one just to have an excuse to sit with him. 

Within five minutes, she adds a waffle to her plate. Mike looks victorious.

The first time he sees her ill, she stumbles out of his bed at the crack of dawn, half blinded by a skull-splitting migraine and on the verge of vomiting from the pain. Mike sits with her in the bathroom and softly talks her out of going into work. Once he retrieves a cold cloth and water and turns out all the lights, he sits with her until she falls asleep. 

To her utter shock, she's right as rain by the time he returns from work. She can't remember the last time the pain passed so quickly—but then again, she can't remember the last time she stayed home instead of trying to solve international crises through the agony. 

The first time she cries in front of him, it's after a long, fruitless day of treaty negotiations that shouldn't bother her as much as it does. He comes over to make dinner at her apartment as planned, takes one look at her face, and asks her what's going on. 

Nadine chops vegetables with far too much force and explains the latest diplomatic disaster, and he listens silently until she arrives at a conclusion that she hadn't quite realized until now. This one hurts because they were so, so close to getting it done. There's no sobbing, no spiraling out of control. But when she wipes a few stray tears before chopping the parsley, she doesn't turn away to hide it. 

Maybe that means something.

Her mood improves after that. She presses close to him when she joins him on the couch and marvels at how natural it seems. It feels so familiar to sit here like this. So natural to curl into his arms.

It feels like something that could someday be love.

~

Her heart heals so quietly that she barely notices.

Until the black-and-white footage of a truck of dead girls unravels everything in an instant.

~

Happiness, she realizes somewhere along the line, is never meant to last. 

Chapter Text

Nadine fumbles for the edge of the table with one hand, the other seizing the arm of her chair as the world closes in on her. Nobody speaks. Nobody can. They can only stare at the black screen that had displayed the bodies of forty girls just a moment ago. 

She closes her eyes. The black and white image of their defeat greets her. 

Elizabeth vanishes instantly, leaving the rest of them motionless around the table. Nadine doesn’t notice Matt or Jay or Daisy leaving, though she’s vaguely aware of Blake’s hand on her shoulder before he exits as well. And now she’s alone, her heart beating too high up in her chest, her throat constricting against guilt and grief until she can barely breathe. 

How has this happened? 

Walking back to her office in a daze after all is said and done, she's shocked to see how late it is. Damn the glass walls in this place, a fishbowl during the day and foreboding at night. She should pack up and go home and burn all of this from her mind with scotch and sleep, but all she wants to do is cry. 

Nadine draws the blinds, sinks to the couch, and crumbles under the weight of all of those beautiful souls left for dead. Her breath comes in shallow, harsh gasps. Rationality slips away all at once. The floor seems so much safer. She drops to the ground and pulls her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth. 

If only she could disappear. 

It takes her half an hour to pry herself off of the floor and another five minutes to even begin to think about what to do next. The thought of driving home feels much too daunting, and the idea of facing tomorrow feels absolutely impossible.

How will they ever move past this? 

She calls upon the one source of comfort who isn't already as broken up about this as she is. He picks up on the first ring and hears the panicked edge to her breathing before she even opens her mouth. "Nadine, are you okay?" 

"Can…can you come pick me up from the State Department?" She sniffles. "Something happened…I can't…"

"Of course." In the background, a door slams shut. "Stay right there. I'm on my way." 

Her legs are going weak again. "I'm sorry." 

"No. No. It's okay, sweetheart." The sound of his car starting. "Do you want me to stay on the phone?" 

Sweetheart. She shakes her head. 

"Nadine?" 

She sinks to the floor again. "No." 

Mike drives one-handed, rubbing her knuckles with his other thumb. Words escape her for the entire drive. When he asks if she's alright staying at his house tonight, she can only nod in agreement before dissolving into floods of silent tears. 

As they walk through the door, she finds her voice. "Forty girls suffocated to death in a truck today," she says numbly. "The traffickers got away." 

"Oh, God." He reaches out. She leans into him with all of her weight. "I'm so sorry."

She washes her face, sets an alarm for five o'clock, and cries herself to sleep in Mike's arms.

How have they failed so completely? 

Somehow, she manages to finish the budget memo first thing in the morning. After all, faking it has been in her job description for decades. She could teach a masterclass on compartmentalizing.

But that truck and those girls completely rob her of those defenses as soon as Mike drops her off at the Truman building. 

Elizabeth, though subdued, peppers awkward, encouraging remarks into their group discussion in the conference room. Jay voices all of the pent-up anger and sadness that no one else will acknowledge. Nadine loves him for it, but she can't even lift her head to look him in the eye. 

Calling Diane Cramer shatters her. It's all Nadine can do to not sob right alongside her. Once she hangs up, she merely stares off into space and blots under her eyes as tears threaten to ruin her makeup. 

Elizabeth finds her, of course—Elizabeth and her overwhelming efforts to change the subject and focus on the budget. Nadine understands logically that the show must always go on, lest the entire country grind to a halt. Usually, that fact is a welcome distraction, but it feels like such a fucking heartless approach today.

She bottles up the urge to shout as Elizabeth hovers in her doorway, and as she gathers the staff, and as she stands in the office and stammers through an apology for her distracted behavior, and as Jay breaks her heart all over again by reading part of a poem. (It is lovely and uplifting and it makes her feel sick. "Good Bones." How ironic.)

But later, she passes up Mike's invitation to spend the night in favor of screaming herself hoarse under her pillow. All this time spent building a better future for the next generation, and they've fallen just short of letting those girls experience that future. So fucking close, but so, so far.

Nadine has sacrificed her heart and soul and a hundred different versions of her own future for this work. She's met wonderful, brilliant people willing to go into battle alongside her. She's watched the ripple effect of her actions give so many others a fighting chance at a better life. 

She's made this place beautiful already, and she wants to keep making it beautiful. She really does.

But how on earth can she keep clinging to hope when this job constantly tears it out of her grasp?

Chapter Text

"You want breakfast?" 

Adjusting her scarf, Nadine pastes a smile on her face and breezes past the question. "I have to go to work."

Mike tries again. "Dinner?"

"I have to stay at work." 

"Does Bess ever let you eat?" He's so sweet and so clueless. "Do I need to have a conversation with her?" 

No. But Nadine needs to have a conversation with him. If this little experiment of theirs is going to go any further, she simply has to tell him the truth. Not about everything—certainly not about Vincent, at least not yet—but at least about the dancing and the eating and the pain and the heartbreak. 

She likes him. She really likes him. And she thinks that maybe she's learned her lesson about trying to fight these battles alone. But she's also going to be late for work if she doesn't leave now.

Nadine rides the high of last night on her way out, blindly missing the door handle three times for good measure, and doesn't particularly care when Daisy starts fishing for information in the elevator. Mike might only be a distraction, but he's a damn good one. Being with him at night is the difference between sleeping well and crying alone in the dark for those girls all over again. Solitude now brings an ache in her chest instead of a familiar comfort. 

The paranoid part of her brain reminds her that she'll regret this one day. In time, this fragile web of support that she's started relying on will snap. The team will give up on her, and she will be alone and broken again, and it will hurt so much more now that she understands the alternative.

Still, though, she is enchanted and desperately in need of someone to live for—so Mike gets to stay. 

For now.

She is in charge of talking to Audrey Stewart, of course. She is the seventh floor's human shield, taking the bullets for her boss during the most brutal conversations.

(Long ago, she tolerated this task out of ambition. Under Vincent, she embraced it out of love. Lately, she accepts it out of duty and duty alone.)

It eats at her throughout the morning meeting, erasing all thoughts of Mike, and the weight certainly doesn't ease once she's in her office with a dead soldier's grieving mother. 

"It's a year I've been at this," Audrey Stewart says flatly. 

Nadine blinks. That's the problem, isn't it? The people in charge take their sweet time making decisions, slowly weaving through the existing red tape while adding more of their own, looking only at the numbers instead of the lives lost along the way. The people who give everything to this country are left with nothing at all. And Nadine is left to explain why. 

There's no good reason. There never will be. A mother wants her dead son's body back home, and the United States government won't even give her that. 

She exhales. "I'm sorry." 

She is so sick of only being able to offer apologies. This woman and all of the others that have flooded her office over the years deserve so much more.

The conversation is still ringing loud in her mind when she next ends up in the elevator with Daisy. An orange in one hand, she drowns the buzzing out by admitting to whatever the hell is happening between her and Mike.

Daisy lights up, delighted, and soon enough they're shooting the breeze at a table outside—and it's all fun and games until Daisy's expression changes abruptly. 

Nadine tries her hardest to give Mike the benefit of the doubt in front of Daisy. Back in her office afterward, though, she viciously slams the untouched orange down on her desk and gets to work searching for dirt on this woman.

She immediately wishes she hadn't. The thought of Mike betraying her on a personal level, while disappointing, is hardly a surprise. That's how it always goes with men. His apparent willingness to betray Elizabeth, though, floors Nadine. God, what a perfect fool she's been.

Relief floods her when she finds out that Mike ran from the EIL as soon as it started trying to dismantle democracy. Maybe there's a prayer of moving past this, of picking up where they left off—

That hope is shattered as soon as she sits down next to him in Elizabeth's office. A pit grows in her stomach as he snarks at her about discretion, and she literally has to chase him down the hall afterwards to catch him before he vanishes. "What's going on?" 

His expression catches somewhere between awe and contempt, as though he can't fathom how stupid she must be to not understand his anger. "I know it was you." 

"Of course it was me." She stares at him, dumbfounded. Of course it was her. Of course she went to Elizabeth. Of course she couldn't do anything else. Elizabeth had protected her when she was an inch from arrest, had held her while she wept for all of the lives that she was complicit in ending, and had chosen to trust her anyway. 

Nadine hadn't even thought twice. 

"All you had to do was ask," he says, eyes blazing. "That's all you had to do." 

She struggles for words. "My first obligation is to this job."

There's no longer any thrill of pride in that statement. Just duty, propping her up like a puppet, leaving her with just enough heart to fight for her country but never enough to fight for herself.

When he leaves without a second glance to "do some dirty work," the pit in her stomach becomes a lump in her throat. She knew she'd regret this one day, but she hadn't thought she'd regret it quite so soon. 

~

Nadine is slipping again. 

The perfect circle has resumed its course. The light at the end of the tunnel is fading once more. She feels it in the loose clothes and the constant restlessness and the instinct to snap at the team whenever they toss their responsibilities in her lap. It's familiar, of course, but it feels different when it originates from a man, and that hasn't happened since Vincent first lifted his hand at her. 

She's cried herself to sleep every night for weeks. When it's not about the girls, it's about Roman, and when it's not about Roman, it's about pain, and when it's not about pain, it's about Mike. She misses him more than she'll ever be willing to say.

Perhaps this is her punishment for a lifetime of lies crammed into six years with Vincent. Perhaps she'll have to atone for that sin for the rest of her life.

She takes her lunch break just to sit at her desk while her heart turns to stone in her chest. This is her default setting: detach herself from the hurt, redirect her mind to her responsibilities, and move on. No tears, no emotions, no dwelling on it.

(She learned that lesson after a full year of trying to return to professional dancing on a leg that would never be able to withstand such force again.) 

Being numb stops the pain, and she’d do just about anything for that. 

Jay finds her. He always does. Holding a stack of files and several items wrapped in foil, he knocks on her door and lets himself in. “I brought you a wrap.”

“I’m not hungry,” she mumbles, rubbing her nose.  

“Yeah, right.” He holds it out to her; she half-heartedly glares at him before accepting it. Now that he’s mentioned it, she’s actually starving. 

Sitting down across from her, he opens his own wrap. When Nadine reaches for the files, he pulls them away with a chuckle. "Oh, come on. Take a minute and eat." 

He finishes his in the time it takes her to eat two-thirds of a half. "That's quite good," she admits as he balls up the foil. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome," Jay says. Then, "Nadine, are you okay?" 

Setting down the wrap, she looks up at him. "Jay, I promise I'd tell you if I were running a hundred and three degree fever again."

"That's not—" He runs a hand over his face. "You've just been quieter lately." 

"It's been a long couple of months," she says honestly, even though it's ridiculous to tell that to someone who's recently been kidnapped. "That's all." 

Jay leans forward. "But you'll tell someone if—if you start having a hard time again?" 

The blows feel constant and endless lately. The girls, the truck, Jay being captured in Nice, the bomb threats, their narrow escape from that would-be deadly biological attack, her lost chance with Mike…but she'll get through it. She always does. 

"I'm okay, Jay. Really." She swallows hard. "I just don't know how much more of this I can take." 

His sigh radiates pain. “I know.” 

~

A year to the day since the accident, she tucks her dance shoes away in a box under her bed. 

For better or for worse, it’s time to go.

Chapter Text

Elizabeth pours a hearty amount of scotch into two tumblers. "Hell of a week." 

Nadine follows her to the couch. "No kidding." 

It's been much too long since she and Elizabeth have stayed at the office to talk over drinks. Nadine's almost sure that the empty stretch began with Andrada's assault on Elizabeth—or rather, Nadine's suggestion in the wake of it. 

(Nadine had sent Blake and everyone else away from Elizabeth on the excruciatingly long plane ride home. Fighting decades worth of her own memories, she'd masked her own rage while Elizabeth trembled all over with adrenaline. When Nadine had asked if she'd wanted privacy, Elizabeth had seized her hand and grasped it hard enough to hurt. 

Even then, Nadine had wondered if she was overstepping, and she'd certainly done so afterwards in D.C. with her proposition of coming forward. It had taken almost an hour of self-convincing for her to open her mouth in Elizabeth's office, and she'd been dismissed immediately. Nadine had exited with her tail between her legs, head spinning with all of the times that she'd kept quiet to protect a political agenda.

That, and to minimize the chance that any of the men who had laid a hand on her would end up actually killing her one day.)

Since then, she hasn't been able to think about their evening conversations without thinking about all of the times that she's overstepped their professional relationship. She trusts Elizabeth, of course—deeply and completely—but she's supposed to be here to make Elizabeth's life easier. Not to require therapy sessions from the Secretary of State. 

But tonight, Elizabeth had declared that surviving murder accusations was a perfectly good reason for a good drink, and so here they are. 

"I keep thinking this is the part where I'm going to wake up from this insanity," Elizabeth says wryly. "God, if you hadn't taken on Russell when you did, I might actually have killed a man." 

Nadine doesn't feel nearly as ashamed as she thought she would. Shouting like that at Russell had been exhilarating. She'd felt like her old self, the version of her that would go toe to toe with anyone under the sun and fight tooth and nail until she won. "I really am sorry about that, ma'am." 

"Somehow, I doubt that," Elizabeth says, laughing. Then—"Nadine, I'm sorry about Mike B." 

Nadine freezes. "Ma'am?" 

"Come on. Gordon practically stuck his head up your dress." Elizabeth sets her drink down on the table. "Plus, Mike spilled the beans, but that's beside the point." 

Creating an international emergency just to get out of this conversation sounds like a very good idea. Nadine compromises by taking a very large sip of scotch. "It was never serious," she says. "He walked away after I went to you about his work with the European Independence League, and that was that." She clears her throat. "He said I shouldn't have taken anything to you without talking to him first, and…"

"You couldn't," Elizabeth says softly, reading her like a book. "Not after Vincent Marsh." 

"I was thinking about telling him." She falters. "Maybe not about Vincent, but the rest of what I told you." But she hadn't, and now she regularly replays that choice in her head, wondering how different things could be if she'd trusted Mike a little sooner and a little more. 

Elizabeth shrugs. "You still can." 

The very idea of it makes her laugh bitterly. "He won't even look at me whenever he's here." 

"Because he doesn't know, Nadine." The force in Elizabeth's words startles her. "Of course he was offended that you wouldn't trust him when he doesn't have any idea why." 

The flight instinct is kicking in again. She's well accustomed to the fact that truth hurts, but right now it's making her skin crawl too. "Maybe we should call it a night."

"I'm not blaming you." Elizabeth kicks off her shoes and shifts her position to sit back on her heels. "And I'm not saying you have to chase after him. But if you like him—and I think you do—then you should think about letting him in." 

Examining her nails so she won't have to look up, Nadine bites her lip hard to distract from the stinging behind her eyes. Having said her piece, Elizabeth moves on in spectacular fashion. "Jason accidentally karate-chopped a wine glass off the kitchen counter last week." 

Nadine shoves aside all thoughts of Mike in favor of this new mental image. "Oh, dear." 

Elizabeth smirks. "His exact words were "oh, fuck," but that works too." 

An hour later (with no further mentions of Mike), they do finally call it a night. 

An hour after that, once she's driven home and has mustered all of her courage, she texts Mike and asks if they can talk. 

Boy, Elizabeth had better be right about this.

Mike writes back almost instantly. I'm free tonight. Nadine's heart leaps before she can stop it. If she weren't in the habit of being so cynical, she might consider this a very good sign. 

She agrees to meet at a bar in town, which provides enough of a guarantee that this won't be anything like the night that she explained everything to Elizabeth. She won't break down. Not in public. She'll just say her two cents and probably regret it in the morning. 

Of course, being in public doesn't stop nerves from tying her stomach into knots as she sits down to wait for Mike. By the time he arrives, she's succeeded in shredding an entire napkin to bits. He glances at her, then the torn napkin, then her again, and raises an eyebrow. "Hello, Nadine." 

"Mike—" As he sits down, she reaches for another napkin. "I need to explain some things to you," she says in a rush, "and I need you to just hear me out until the end. Please." 

The end will be the story of how she nearly danced herself to death, and how she was proud to watch her body fade away in the meantime, and how she paid dearly on the day the music died, and how nothing was ever the same after she woke up in a sterile white room, and how she lost the son that she'd tried so hard to raise well, and how Lilith saved her life a hundred times over, and how her job description came to include regular physical and verbal assault, and how she won't ever forget any of that. 

But the beginning will be the story of how she fell for a man who promised her the world but was ready to let her suffocate under the weight of it. How she convinced herself that secret bank accounts and fake passports and yelling and violence and years of being his mistress were all born from some sort of love. How she patched her life back together and decided that she couldn't trust anyone ever again.

Vincent Marsh has destroyed so, so much of her life already. She'll be damned if he takes what's left of it. 

Chapter Text

A wreck of this magnitude can't be cleaned up overnight. She's known that from the start. So when she picks up her glass of ice water after dissecting decades of deeply private struggles, it's not too surprising that Mike looks like he might faint. 

"Nadine…" Mike stares at the sizable pile of shredded napkins in front of her. "Nadine, I—" He looks at the ceiling, exhaling through pursed lips. "I need to process all of this, okay?"

"Okay." Her voice wavers for the first time. His silence swells into an unbearable ringing in her ears. "I'm really sorry," she whispers. "I should have trusted you sooner." 

He raises his eyebrows. "Oh, you think?" She flinches and he reverses course. "Shit, I'm sorry. This is just a lot to learn at once." 

"Okay," Nadine says again, and closes her eyes against a wave of nausea as she stands up. Mike, in addition to pissing her off for years, is now apparently capable of making her so scared of losing him that she might vomit. "Okay." 

"Hey." Mike stands up urgently, stepping around the table to put a hand on her shoulder. "Breathe." 

All she wants is to be hugged by him, but she's probably ruined any chance of that happening ever again. She lifts her head a fraction of an inch and leans into his touch until the room stops spinning.

"I have to get home," she says weakly. "Thank you for coming." (For carving joy into a heart that had had so little to work with, for the banter and the laughter and the brief belief that everything would be alright in the end. For always holding her together even when it was her own fault that she was in pieces to begin with.)

"Nadine?" He sounds softer now. "I'm glad you're here." 

Nadine turns to leave before he can see her cry.

~

The next night finds her back where she started—in Elizabeth's office, holding a glass with only half as much scotch as yesterday but drowning in just as many emotions.

Elizabeth gets straight to the point. "Mike B is pretty pissed—at me, not you," she adds as Nadine looks up in horror. "He was here this morning while you were in one of your meetings. Said I should have told him about you and Vincent years ago so that he could protect me from the consequences." 

Nadine bites down hard enough on the inside of her cheek to taste blood. 

Early on, she'd had been almost certain that Elizabeth had ratted her out as soon as she'd learned about the affair. Sure that her boss would ask someone for legal advice about the information she'd just learned, she'd been unable to sleep for days after her confession, and when Elizabeth had confronted her about her fake name and the bank accounts…

She'd started retching in the bathroom as soon as she'd walked out of Elizabeth's office. And on the plane to Venezuela. And when she returned to her apartment after the trip. 

Stepping foot on the empty seventh floor the next morning, the terror had hit hard and fast all over again. Dry heaving over the toilet yet again as sheer panic strangled her, she'd decided that she simply had to trust Elizabeth. She simply had to assume that this woman would stay in her corner instead of throwing her behind bars. 

Otherwise, she wouldn't have had anything left to fight for. 

She knows now that trusting Elizabeth is one of the best choices she's ever made, but she doubts Elizabeth would say the same about her—not when she'd had to accept a laundry list of possible consequences to protect Nadine. 

"I've dragged you into all of this." Surely if Elizabeth had known even a quarter of the baggage associated with keeping her on as Chief of Staff, she never would have done so. "I'm sorry." 

Elizabeth ignores the apology. "I did consider telling him, you know. But I couldn't do that to you." 

"Why?" She's wanted to ask that for years. Elizabeth had had every reason to pull her from the senior staff in those early months, even before learning about Nadine's connection to Vincent. Nadine hadn't tried to hide her lack of faith in the perky academic that the president had plucked from a horse farm, nor her scorn at Elizabeth's unorthodox methods. "Pardon my French, but I was a bitch to you for months." 

Elizabeth chuckles. "But you didn't walk away." She leans forward, clasping her hands in her lap. "You steered the entire ship until I learned how to do right by this job. I would've gone overboard in a couple of weeks if you'd left. I needed you and I trusted you." 

Trust, of all things. "Why?" she says again. "I kept his secrets. I—I—I stood by him even when people were going to die. You almost died." All of this destruction is, in one way or another, her own damn fault. She will carry that weight for as long as she lives.

"I've gotten more second chances than most people get in a lifetime. You deserved at least one." Her eyes are bright. "Plus, it doesn't hurt that that turned out to the best decision I've ever made in this seat." 

Nadine can't quite find the words to respond to that. Savoring the warmth spreading through her chest, she reaches for her drink. 

"I think you were right to tell him the truth," Elizabeth says abruptly. "I know that must've been hard." 

"Just a bit…No hysterical crying, though. Only you got the full experience." 

It's deeply amusing to watch Elizabeth try to fight off a smirk. Already starting to laugh, she says, "I hope it's been long enough that I'm allowed to find that funny." 

Nadine fights against her own laughter. "Yes, ma'am." How she got so lucky as to consider this woman a friend, she'll never know.

Brushing her fingers against Nadine's arm, Elizabeth becomes suddenly serious again. "I really do hope it works out for you two, Nadine." 

She smiles again—both in spite of everything and because of it. "I think it might." 

She's surprised to realize she believes it. 

~

Elizabeth leans against the elevator wall. "In the most diplomatic language possible, it was very enjoyable to watch you kick Russell's ass again." 

Nadine rolls her eyes, smirking. She suspects that Elizabeth only brought her along this morning for the entertainment factor of watching the two of them go at each other like a pair of terriers again. 

…Jack Russell terriers, perhaps. 

That man's name is one hell of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stopping briefly to intercept a message from Maggie, she heads for her office. And stops dead. "Mike?" 

He's leaning against the wall, but he stands up straight as she approaches. "You left a sweater at my place last time you were there." She notes a conspicuous lack of anything, let alone a sweater, in his hands. "What do you say we go pick it up after dinner tonight?" 

~

"A lot of my patients," Lilith says over lunch, "just need to learn how to recognize a good thing when it's staring them right in the face."

Chapter Text

The end is near. 

It's not a breaking point—that happened a long time ago. It's just that her heart hurts a little more every day in the elevator and it's a little harder to wake up every morning and every failure feels a little bigger than the last. 

It's not all bad, either. But she's starting to like the idea of starting the rest of her life. 

Especially if there's a chance that Mike will be a part of it. Their reconciliation dinner had gone better than she'd dared to hope.

"I want you in my life," he'd said, stunning her with his directness. "I can't do that if you shut me out." 

This is not the first time that she's put all of her eggs in one basket. She's done it with dancing, with Vincent, with Elizabeth, with this job, and now with Mike—but he's worth it. Having someone to talk to makes all of the difference. Mike seems to instinctively know when to push her to talk and when to let her mull things over in silence, and she doesn't even mind that he favors the former approach. 

She doesn't quite know what to call this thing that they have, but it feels a lot like a second chance—and a lifeline enabling her to do her job as long as she's needed. As long as she has him. 

But even that isn't always enough.

Nadine leaves for the Libya trip on top of the world and returns in pieces after a girl almost dies because of them. She’d stepped up to handle the absolute mayhem in the hospital out of necessity, but the overwhelming fear had eaten her up inside, leaving her dizzy and restless and unable to sleep even on the long flight home.  

Weary beyond belief, she staggers into Mike's kitchen and lets the buzz of adrenaline dissolve into tears.

Mike freezes at the sight of her. "Oh God, did the girl take a turn—" 

She shakes her head. "She's going to be alright." 

Just staying upright is almost too much to bear. "You're shaking," he says as she presses herself into his chest. "Nadine…" 

She swipes furiously at her eyes. "I don't even know why I'm crying." 

Mike grasps her shoulders and pulls back to look at her. "Because you're exhausted." It's almost a shout. "You look like you haven't slept in days." 

Confronted by the truth, she twists away. Mike follows her as she flees for the living room. "Dammit, Nadine, can't you see that you're running yourself right into the fucking ground?" 

"Comes with the fucking job," she retorts. It has for years. 

"That job is going to kill you." Collapsing on his couch, she watches him pace the room. "You're working yourself to death."

"Mike—"

"I love you, okay?" The words mean so much more than she ever imagined they would. Tears blur her vision all over again. "I want you here for a long time. And I think you need a break from fighting this hard all the time." 

This time, when he sits down next to her and lifts an arm around her shoulder, she lets him. "I know." 

~

When Roman and Shindy tell her that she's going to be a grandmother, the sheer depth of emotion renders her speechless. On several occasions, she's seen her life flash before her eyes, but the images have never included the future until now. 

Hugging her this morning before she walked out the door, Mike had said that she'd know when the time was right. This warmth—this overwhelming, all-consuming hope—feels a lot like knowing.

Still, she gives herself an out. She'll just ask Elizabeth for a bit of time and see how the words feel on her tongue. That's all.

Elizabeth lights up when she hears the news. All bright eyes and joy, she nods along as Nadine proposes taking leave and says that they'll work with whatever she needs.

Nadine falters at that, and Elizabeth understands what it means before Nadine does. "That is, if you—if you want to make it work." 

It turns out that knowing feels like the beginning of the rest of her life. 

And her best friend in the whole world hugs her tight and sets her free to live it. 

Chapter Text

so give me hope in the darkness

that i will see the light

’cause oh, they gave me such a fright

but i will hold on with all of my might

just promise me we’ll be alright 

She will drive home to Mike's house when it's all said and done, and she'll burst into tears as soon as she sees him. Tears of joy, because there isn't one ounce of regret in her heart, and tears of remorse, because she has no idea how he’ll fit into the beginning of the rest of her life if she leaves for California. "One day at a time," he'll say, rocking back and forth gently with her as they hug in the kitchen. 

She will cry again—purely out of joy this time—when she tells Roman and Shindy that she's done with the State Department. On a gut instinct, though, she'll stop short of mentioning her original thought of moving across the country to be with them. They're family, but how can she live without the family she has here? 

She will fall more in love with Mike every day in the meantime, and he will be sitting beside her when she gets a call from Roman two weeks later. "Hey, Mom," he'll say, his smile audible. "We have a little change of plans." And Nadine's jaw will drop, because Roman taking a different offer in New York is the difference between a 5-hour flight and a 4-hour train ride. Because having her family and her closest friends on the same coast is what she prayed the beginning of the rest of her life would look like. Because sometimes, things that seem too good to be true are actually exactly as they're meant to be. 

She will marry him in a completely private ceremony exactly a year after she steps down as Chief of Staff, and they'll only tell Elizabeth, Blake, Jay, Lilith, Roman, and Shindy. It'll take a lot of coaxing—Vincent was the first person to promise her forever, after all, and she likes to leave an escape route at all times—but she will stop letting good things slip away, and Mike will be one of the best.

She will take up a formal position at Georgetown and an informal position advising Elizabeth, because quitting cold turkey will prove to be unbearable. Soon enough, she’ll vow to see Elizabeth all the way to the White House, and indeed she does—first by joining the team sporadically on campaign stops, and then by becoming a part-time advisor to the nation's first female president. (She'll teach dance classes with what's left of her spare time.) By Elizabeth’s second term, there will be a stampede of grandchildren running amok in the White House, and Nadine and Elizabeth will both love every second of it.  

She will pick up most of the pieces that she's lost along the way, and when her heart heals this time, she'll know from the start that it's healing for good. She will be well, and she will be happy, and she will be more sure than ever that there is so much to live for. 

But for now, this is it. 

The elevator doors start to close. Nadine blinks back her tears and stares out at the crowded seventh floor, praying that she won't ever forget this moment. 

What a life she gets to live. 

~

Her heart is beating out of her chest and sweat pours down her back as the last notes of their first performance on this tour ring out.  

Nadine has never been so happy in her life. 

The applause is overwhelming, and she can barely stop herself from hugging everyone around her when they join her onstage for bows. God, she'll be happy as long as she gets to do this. As long as she gets to dance.

This, she thinks, is the beginning of the rest of her life—and indeed it is. Just not in the way that she expects. 

Because she will pour her heart into a few more years of performing, and then she will shatter into pieces onstage after starving herself for years and lose her only passion to blinding, never-ending pain. She will raise a child alone, a child who will want nothing to do with her for decades. She will get her foot in the door in DC and meet a man who will give her the chance to prove herself, and she will make her worst mistake by falling in love with him. She will lose him, mourn him, and then hate him for making her his puppet. She will learn to trust his replacement with her life, and she will weep when she nearly loses her too. She will make amends for all she's been complicit in. She will find family in the seventh floor of the Truman Building, and together, they will really, truly change the world. She will fall in love again, for real this time. And eventually, she will walk away from the job that's broken her down each night while giving her a reason to stand up each morning, and she will understand the beauty of new beginnings. Even when they don't involve many endings at all.

But for now, this is it.

The curtains start to close. Nadine blinks back her tears and stares out at the audience, praying that she won't ever forget this moment.

What a life she gets to live.

and the ghosts that we knew

will flicker from view

and we’ll live a long life