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“I want it put on the record that when I die, CJ’s not allowed to put her hands on my panel.”
Lorenzo has his arm loosely swung around CJ’s shoulders, making it all the more of a challenge to cut out the piece of fabric the way she’d envisioned. He’s claimed the singular couch in the sun-coated apartment all for himself.“Seriously, what’s that gonna be?”
“It’s a dolphin,” she says, tongue between her teeth. “The fabric frays the second I cut it.”
“The fabric frays,” Alex chimes in, nodding wisely. She kicks at CJ’s foot with a laugh. CJ rolls her eyes and smiles at her — it’s a good day if Alex has the energy to mock her.
Andy, with her head in CJ’s lap spitting out every tiny piece of grey fabric CJ drops on her, looks up at the dolphin with a critical eye. “I can see it,” she assures her.
“She just wants to get in your pants,” Lorenzo warns CJ.
Before CJ can turn red, Andy makes it worse by adding “I don’t need to lie to do that. Have you seen me lately?”
CJ groans, resting her head against Lorenzo’s arm. He’s gained two lesions since last week; she doesn’t say it, she knows damn well he knows. When I die gets closer and closer.
The sun that fills every corner of the apartment doesn’t do anything to warm her up — the heat is smothering; CJ feels cold to the touch.
Inadvertently, she breathes in Lorenzo’s sweat — tries to find a way to remember it, and decides it shouldn’t be that hard. He smells pretty bad these days; he wouldn’t be hurt if she told him that and no one blames him.
If Andy died, she thinks she’d throw herself off the Golden Gate Bridge. The fact that Lorenzo’s even alive, just two weeks after his partner’s funeral, is all she asks from him. She just wishes she could will herself to remember all of him.
He squeezes her shoulders like he knows exactly what she’s doing.
“I’m just saying. Anyone but CJ.”
Alex shrugs, throwing the letters she’s been cutting out onto the low table by the couch. “You never know, she might be the only one left when that time comes.”
CJ’s hands freeze. Andy laughs too loudly. Lorenzo scoffs. “Don’t tell me you’re already planning to be outlived.”
“You never know. Kevin got it in ‘82 and he’s still walking around like all he has is a permanent cold. Rachel and Theo got their tests at the same time, last March, remember? He’s taking a trip to Cabo next month; she’s dead.”
“Rachel got a some sort of UTI that made her septic—“
“You’re not that stupid.”
CJ and Andy share a look and stay quiet. CJ finds Andy’s hand without saying a word.
“So,” Alex continues. “You never know. I could die tomorrow; Andy’s test could still be— it can go fast. Might just be you and CJ in the end, man.”
“Now that’s depressing.”
“I’m pretty good company,” CJ butts in. Lorenzo and Andy lean in to kiss part of her at the same time. It doesn’t ease the cold chills down her back.
Andy squeezes her hand. “CJ,” she says gently. “Not gonna happen. I’m fine.”
Not true, objectively speaking. There are still streaks of make-up on Andy’s chin, remnants of the beard she’d drawn on and couldn’t manage to clean last night — too exhausted, in too much pain. She claims it was just the alcohol.
“I’m just sick,” Andy says, her voice not wavering in the slightest. She kisses CJ’s hip over her shirt so she doesn’t need to get up. “Not positive. It’s not gonna be positive. We’re just being careful getting a test.”
“Are you… positive about that?” Lorenzo dares.
CJ curses at him, but Andy’s laugh is infectious.
While CJ finishes up her dolphin, Alex gathers all the fabric cut-outs and measures the panel again.
Andy gets up, wiping pieces of thread and fabric from her clothes, and offers some food to the others. Lorenzo says he could get used to being waited on.
“I’m an excellent guest,” Andy informs him when she comes back into the room and he tells her she’s always welcome.
“I think you left your dick in my bathroom last night.”
Lorenzo has a way of saying things that makes him sound perpetually unimpressed. CJ spits out the water she’d been trying to drink.
Andy, to her credit, with half a painted beard on her chin and dark circles under her eyes, doesn’t miss a beat. “I figured, since you’re single now…”
“You don’t come to play, huh?”
Lorenzo’s laughing. His voice cracks, but he’s laughing through it, and when Andy hands him a snack he pulls her right into a hug.
CJ tries to burn that into her memory, too.
*
Every square inch of the national mall is covered in cloth panels in every color of the rainbow. Paths are cleared out to walk between them, the only part of the ground still visible.
CJ can barely get herself to come closer.
The President gives a beautiful speech that she doesn’t catch much of. Josh and Sam try to talk to her and they’re smiling and CJ is more bothered by that than she wanted to be.
She answers questions from reporters on autopilot. Comes up with a nonsense answer she’s truly embarrassed about when she’s asked if she ever realised how historically significant the years were that she’d studied at Berkeley.
The President takes her arm and walks her around the mall for a bit, and CJ only does her best not to read any names. She tries to prepare herself to recognise some, and when she doesn’t think she can prepare herself for that, she opts to stare at the grass instead and let him talk.
They take pictures. She spots Andy in the small crowd of people scheduled to speech and take a picture with the President. CJ can’t look at her without thinking back to a sun-coated, sweat-filled room in California. She looks away before she can linger on it.
CJ stays as long as she absolutely has to. She doesn’t respond when Toby — looking similarly perturbed — asks her if she’s okay.
It’s instinct and familiarity that has her seeking out Andy the very moment the official photographs are done.
Andy, who’s taken her obligatory photo-op with the President, who’s said a few words about notable Maryland citizens memorialised in the quilt, who has since wandered off by herself and now stands with her back to the crowd, several paths down from where Congressman Skinner is now talking.
She’s peering down with a hand on her stomach and a hand on her throat, but she turns around before CJ’s said anything and reaches for CJ’s arm without thinking.
They’re not together anymore. They haven’t been in a long time — broke up just a year and half after a panel made in Lorenzo’s apartment; roughly seven months after they made Alex’s with Lorenzo’s explicit guidance.
In the past few years, they’ve barely talked, really. CJ can’t explain why — she’d like to, every day again, but can’t get herself to reach out.
They’re not together anymore. Still, Andy takes her arm, and CJ lets herself be pulled into a hug warmer than she’s had in years.
Andy holds her closer, buries her head in CJ’s shoulder and CJ swears she can hear her sniffle. She smells her perfume — can’t tell if it’s the same one from Berkeley or something entirely different, but it’s Andy. Through and through.
If a picture’s taken, there’ll be some commentary on their dramatics. Women’s emotions; a political game on Andy’s part. A person or two might draw a connection to their shared years in San Francisco — not many. CJ wraps her arms around Andy Wyatt a little tighter.
Andy’s test had come back negative a week after they’d made the panel. Lorenzo had told her it was for the best, because he couldn’t wait to see a former drag king be sworn into the fucking House of Representatives. Andy had made him promise to live long enough to see it.
He had. Barely — clinging to life by the skin of his teeth, but he had. CJ knows how much it had meant to both of them.
They’re not together. Not anymore. But CJ is sad to let Andy go, anxious to keep holding her in some way when they’re slowly walking down the various paths trying to find something, someone, in a crowd of panels much too large to be right.
“Next time they want to do this, there won’t be enough space on the mall,” CJ says, like she’s trying to make casual conversation. Andy’s holding her arm firmly in her hands.
Andy nods. She says “yeah,” and nothing else.
They stop eventually — not at the panel of anyone they recognise. “I have no idea where he’d be,” Andy says softly. “Lorenzo. Or Alex. Or your stupid dolphin.”
CJ brings out half a sob before she can stop herself. Andy squeezes her arm and gives her a quiet apology. “It was a fine dolphin.”
“I’m just glad I didn’t die,” Andy shrugs. “Couldn’t have trusted you.”
The silence is unbearable. The thought of breaking it even more so.
CJ wraps an arm around Andy’s waist. She stares down at a cloth panel for a five year old boy who died in 1996, placed beside a bright yellow panel for a man proudly introduced as grandfather. She stares at a shared panel with cut-outs of two women holding hands and names CJ’s brandishing in her memory like she did Lorenzo’s everything.
She’s glad they didn’t die.
“Me too,” CJ manages. She doesn’t even care if it looks a certain way that she’s still holding Andy.
She’s glad they didn’t die. She wishes she’d spent less of the time they weren’t dead being so damn afraid.
“Look at where we are,” Andy says wistfully, her head on CJ’s shoulder.
CJ has the clarity of mind to look around and see just how far they’ve wandered from the staff and from the cameras before she can’t help but turn her head and kiss the top of Andy’s hair.
“Look at us,” she echoes.
She doesn’t say there’s more she wants to do with it. She doesn’t say she wonders, even now, what she’s done to deserve to live when Lorenzo was buried the second month of Andy’s first term in office. She doesn’t even say that she wishes every day she’d just pick up the phone and call Andy again.
“Look at us,” Andy repeats.
The national mall bathes in a bright sunlight. Colors in every shade, fabrics with a thousand names and hand-made figures, turn the city in one the more magnificent memorials CJ’s seen.
The President has just finished giving a fine speech — she works for the first President to have visited the quilt. She hears Jed Bartlet talking to someone, his voice ringing across the mall, and sees flashes of Lorenzo’s lesions and the half-removed make-up on Andy’s chin.
If she closes her eyes, she can hear her friends’ laughter in President Bartlet’s voice.
She squeezes Andy’s waist gently. Andy asks if she’s okay, and CJ’s whispered “yeah,” is more than enough.
Here they are.