Work Text:
Huck is bouncing on his feet at the altar.
A box with two golden wedding rings is tightly clasped between both his fists, like he’s prepared for anyone in the room to snatch it right out of his hands. CJ’s tried to convince him there’s no need, but he’s much too afraid of losing the rings to trust anything but his own judgement.
Molly is holding her hand. She’s in a dress grandma Wyatt helped her pick out — the only person in the room who knows what both brides’ dresses look like, who’s promised them she made sure Molly’s dressed to match.
“Are you nervous?” Molly whispers to CJ — fails to whisper, because she can see President Bartlet in the front row muffle a laugh behind his hand. Molly doesn’t notice.
CJ nods. She leans down to make sure she’s more successful at her own whispered response. “Very. How about you?”
“Nuh-uh,” Molly shakes her head determinedly. “That’s Huck.”
She says it like CJ’s stupid for confusing the two of them; CJ chuckles and offers her sincere apologies. She shares a look with the President.
Huck’s pretty nervous, after all.
Initially, Molly was going to be the flower girl and Huck was going to bring the rings down the aisle. Huck had decided earlier this morning that he wasn’t going to do it after all, too nervous to walk down the aisle with everyone staring at him, too convinced he was going to trip and break the rings or break his nose or get lost between the doors and the altar.
So he’s standing at the altar, came in through a door at the side of the room while guests were still finding their own seats, and he hasn’t left CJ’s side yet since she and Molly joined him.
If her brother wasn’t doing his job, Molly sure as hell wasn’t going to do hers. She’d walked alongside CJ, holding her hand in her pretty dress while Jed Bartlet held CJ’s arm in his and guided her up the altar, kissing both her and Molly before taking his seat at the front.
It’s not perfect, but it really is. CJ would know.
She’s never been one to envision a dream wedding. She never quite got the appeal of the white dress and the expensive cake and kissing a man in front of her whole family and the friends she imagined herself to have at age thirteen.
Most her life, she told her boyfriends she didn’t see the point in marriage and she didn’t entertain the idea of marriage with the women she dated because — unlike Andy, she must say — it’d never seemed like something worth considering. CJ never liked to waste her time dreaming about something she couldn’t do.
It feels quite silly, in retrospect, that it should have taken her so long to realise the correlation between her lack of belief that marrying a woman was on the table, and her disinterest in the prospect of marriage altogether.
Her kids bouncing on their feet (as much as they try to be still and not too loud, these are Andy Wyatt’s children, and they lost that fight some years ago), an elegant white dress swaying around her ankles, a sea of friendly faces about to watch her express her love for a woman she met some thirty years ago. She can’t believe she ever thought she was above the romance of it all.
“You can’t cry already,” Molly tells her firmly. CJ can hear President Bartlet chuckle. “I think Huck has to pee. If he does, can I do the rings?”
Abbey Bartlet’s most definitely chuckling now, too. Molly remains unaware; Huck remains clinging to the wedding rings like someone might come to rip them out of his hands any moment. His sister, most likely.
“Huck’s fine. You’re not doing the rings honey,” CJ reminds Molly, who does a few half-twirls on her feet.
Just as CJ is starting to wonder what the hold-up is, eyes flicking to the cane waiting at the altar right by Huck’s side and wondering if Andy realised she needs it for the walk here after all and is just too proud to let someone come get it, the music finally starts. Two kids gasp excitedly at exactly the same time.
Here comes the bride starts playing and Molly tugs at CJ’s hand and reminds her not to cry yet. CJ says she can’t promise that.
Tears brim in the corners of her eyes when she catches the first glimpse of the woman who’s about to be her wife. Molly squeezes her hand.
Andy looks radiant.
Pale, sure. While she’s having a good day — CJ confirmed this morning and thirty minutes ago — it would have been naive to think the stress of a wedding would leave her without any pain. She’s not using her cane, leaning on Toby the way President Bartlet had stubbornly been leaning on CJ the entire way down the aisle.
It stands waiting next to Huck, Molly reminds her in a loud whisper. She doesn’t have to look away from Andy Wyatt to know Jed Bartlet’s smiling at that, too.
Andy’s simply radiant.
Her smile makes CJ want to cry — the way Andy’s eyes dart from CJ to each twin and finally end up resting on CJ and Molly standing and waiting for her at the end of the aisle makes it impossible to keep it dry.
She wipes her eyes, and Molly shakes her head like she’s been a terrible disappointment but still hands CJ the handkerchief she’s been given for exactly this moment.
It’s followed by the loudly whispered words “mom’s very beautiful,” that CJ can only wholeheartedly agree with.
“Yes she is,” CJ says proudly. She won’t comment on the tears on Molly’s own cheeks.
Andy’s red hair is streaked with a few silvery gold strands, laugh lines and crows feet etched deeply into her face as she laughs at CJ so brightly she might as well be the only person in the universe right now.
She’s wearing a beautiful lace dress that could not have looked better on anyone else, could not have been as perfect for anybody but Andy herself. It hugs her figure, shows off her décolletage just brilliantly, shows off better than anything else all the weight she’s tried her hardest to show the twins is so perfectly alright to have gained.
CJ laughs through her tears when she hears Molly’s not-so-quiet permission “okay you can cry now. She’s like a princess.”
Leaning on Toby’s arm more than she should have on a good day, Andy walks down the aisle with a bouquet of lilies and roses in her hand, a veil draped down her back that makes her look ethereal.
When they reach the altar, Toby adjusts her veil, adjusts the flowers, whispers something in Andy’s ear that CJ can’t catch.
CJ has her hand in front of her mouth and cries as quietly as she can while Toby kisses both of Andy’s cheeks, kisses the corner of her mouth, and kisses her hand one time. He takes his seat; Andy takes her place across from CJ at the altar.
She ruffles Huck’s hair when he dutifully hands his mom her cane back; she wipes CJ’s cheeks dry and doesn’t even bother to do her own when Andy, too, is crying.
CJ’s glad vows are meant to be written down — if she had to come up with something on the spot, she wouldn’t think of anything beyond an earnestly heartfelt I love you, how could I not?
Andy speaks first — going into terrifying detail on a kiss in the back of a lesbian bar in San Francisco thirty years ago, insisting she knew she would marry her one day the first time she heard CJ laugh louder than anyone else in a crowd.
She makes a joke about having been through their fair share of in sickness and in health with each other already, gives the room an incomplete rundown of various crises CJ’s held her hand through.
There’s laughter, then there’s tears when she ends it with the tearful statement that this was never what they thought their relationship would look like, back at nineteen, but Andy would take the nights spent on a bathroom floor with CJ over anything else she might have had.
CJ needs a moment, when Andy’s finished speaking, just to cry and breathe and gather herself back up so that she might do justice to the words she’d tried so hard to perfect over the past few weeks.
She’d be unrecognisable as a former White House Press Secretary, the way she pauses every other sentence just to take a breath and swallow down her tears.
She recalls Andy’s wedding to Toby — tells her that sitting in that Temple and watching them get married had been as painful as it had been beautiful. Tells her that she’d hoped, she’d really hoped, just for Andy and Toby, that that would have been the end for them. She adds how selfishly glad she is today that it wasn’t.
Her eyes find Toby’s for a moment, sitting next to Andy’s mother. He’s smiling.
In the end, she’s assured Andy that there’s no one she’d rather be waiting in a hundred different doctor’s offices with, and CJ ends up standing with a ten year old on either side of her. She can’t read her cards anymore, arms full with a pair of twins she loves as much as she loves their mother.
“You told me once,” CJ says with a stronger voice, one arm around each twin, “when we were nineteen, lying in a dorm room bed while my roommate was out. You told me you’d marry me someday; you told me you wanted kids and when we got married you’d have them with me.
“And I didn’t believe you. I thought it was some pipe-dream, one of those things you believed in that could not possibly be true, and while I’ve learned over the years that to underestimate you is to come out looking like a fool… it was hard to find that faith.
“I was never even convinced that I’d get married. I didn’t think I would, I didn’t think it was for me. If not you, who’d I marry? And I couldn’t marry you, so— why bother? And I never knew for sure if motherhood would be that, either. I always thought it’d happen eventually if it was meant to, and as time passed I thought— well, guess that was that.
“And still every now and then I’d think back to being in that dorm room with you, nineteen years old in San Francisco, when everything felt so hopeless and so full of life at the same exact time. And every now and then I’d catch myself thinking.. maybe. Maybe one day.
“Even when I thought it couldn’t possibly be true…” CJ takes a deep breath. She looks up at the ceiling for a moment, blinking tears out of her eyes. Huck finds her hand and squeezes it tightly. “I’ve found it impossible, these last thirty years, to stop believing in you, Andrea Wyatt. You’re frustratingly hard to lose one’s faith in. I’ll forever be grateful that you never let me do it.”
She can’t look at the guests, can’t look at the priest standing between them, can only find herself staring at Andy with burning eyes and two perfect children at her side. CJ barely even hears the priest starting on his own part.
Huck does an excellent job providing them with the rings.
More beautiful words have never been spoken than “then I do hereby declare you married for life. You may now kiss the bride.”
CJ’s heart soars higher than it ever has when she gets to do just that.