Work Text:
New Year’s Eve.
The last time.
Claire runs her fingers along the walls, up the railing of the stairs, reminiscing. Seven years of New Year’s Eve spent here, seven New Year’s Day receptions where she’s opened the White House up and agreed to shake hands with as many people as she can throughout the day – a tradition she’d revived after over seventy years of disuse and one that she hopes her incumbent continues long after. It’s certainly caused a lot of hullabaloo, a lot of ruckus, a lot of security and caution and care, but she’s survived.
They all have.
Tonight, she and Eve will wait up until the ball drops to signal the first morning of a bright new year, and they will kiss to celebrate that changing the same as they always do – a kiss to end the year in sweetness, a kiss to begin the year just the same. Then they’ll drink the last of their champagne and try to get a scarce few hours of rest before the reception begins. It’s all habit at this point, all ritual, all practiced and exact and precise, and at the end of this next year, it will still be Claire and Eve, ending the year with a kiss and beginning another one just the same, only without the ritual of reception because after this, she’ll be gone.
Retired.
Somewhere else.
And the only thing she can take with her is the only thing she brought with her: her family.
Claire doesn’t know what these twilight years will bring, but she can only hope – that feathery goose that snaps anyone in its way – that they will be as good as the past ones have been. They haven’t been what she expected, but they have been good.
Claire runs her fingers along the house in which she has lived for nearly eight years, and she smiles, and she makes her way up to where Eve awaits her.