TITLE:  Natural Irony AUTHOR: Kasey SUMMARY:  A late-night visit. RATING: PG, ESF It was a dark and stormy night. He’d always found it amusing when something large happened on such a night, being a child who was raised on bedtime stories of not only dragons and princesses, but also of betrayal and suspense.  And being the writer he was, it made him smile at the sort of natural irony that the atmosphere created.  It always made him smirk just the smallest bit, give a very light laugh for half a second, and go about his way. Which, that night, had no direction. He wasn’t yet familiar with his surroundings, the area around his new “home” that wasn’t yet “homey”, but he knew where a few things were. The White House. The Capitol. Josh’s apartment. He knew where each of those were, and how to get to them from his place, and what else mattered? He jammed his hands further down in his pockets and shivered as he walked down the street.  The air was just warm enough for there to be a giant storm, but not warm at all.  He was shivering, but that wasn’t necessarily because of the cold. Josh would be home, he could guarantee it.  It wasn’t like Josh had a girlfriend, not anymore – he and Mandy had broken up seven months earlier, and other than that…well, Josh flirted with his assistant, but that was about it.  His assistant was a good girl – the perfect mix of sweetness and come backs to make working with Josh a bearable job.  Josh was at his own apartment and had just ordered a pizza – he’d be eating pieces of it for the next week, probably, whenever he got back from the White House at night.  He flopped on his couch and started flipping through channels, and when there was a knock on his door twenty minutes later, he opened it with a ten-dollar bill already in his hand. But the pizza guy wasn’t at his door. Sam stood in the hallway, hands still jammed in the pockets of his trench coat, dark hair plastered to his forehead, a look of childlike innocence and betrayal all rolled into one and playing in his eyes.  Josh always had looked better wet than Sam had.  When he was rain-soaked, he would just grin and shrug it off, and the worst he’d heard people say was his face looked plastic, like a perfectly formed dimpled doll. But Sam looked like death warmed over, like hell, like a million things he could think of. But he didn’t say them.  Instead he said, “Come in, sit down, I’ll get you a towel and some coffee.” It was the sort of maternal instinct he’d been brought back to when he’d gone back home the night of the Illinois Primary.  He’d walked in, looking like something the cat dragged in after battering it around and breaking the whatever’s neck, and his mother, though tears soaked the defined lines on her face, had immediately taken him up to the bedroom and put him to bed as if he was a little child. Sometimes, in the face of a terrible ending, people had to be treated like they had in the beginning, when they were children.  Maybe because the naivete of their youth came back in those times.  Maybe because they needed the feeling of closeness that had become unacceptable sometime around their tenth birthday.  Josh walked to the bathroom and grabbed a towel from the cabinet under the sink and brought it out to Sam, then headed to the kitchen to make some coffee…something warm, at least.  It was damn cold out – he remembered that from walking once he got off the Metro – and Sam’s apartment wasn’t too close to his own.  The way Sam was just staring blankly, maybe he was sick already, or hypothermic or something. How ironic would that be? To lose his sister to heat and his almost-brother to cold? The pizza arrived while the coffee was perking, and Josh brought it in and set it on the coffee table in front of Sam.  "I dunno if you’ve eaten yet, but go ‘head if you’re hungry.” Sam shook his head, barely perceptibly, and slumped further into the couch. Josh brought out a cup of coffee and set it on the endtable for Sam, then sat down beside him.  “What happened?” he asked quietly, for the first time since Sam had arrived.  Somehow it seemed right that he should make sure Sam would be physically all right first, then make him talk about what had happened.  No answer. “Is it your Mom?” It wouldn’t surprise Josh if it was…She’d been sick recently, with bronchitis, and Sam had even said she wasn’t doing well, which, coming from the ever-optimist… “No, she’s…she’s doing better,” Sam murmured.  It surprised both of them how much his voice shook. “And your Dad’s not…” “He’s doing same as always – never at home, always working…healthy as a horse…” “Lisa?”  The look of grief that crossed Sam’s face told Josh he’d struck the nerve.  “What happened?” “She left,” he said quietly.  “She just-…I got home and her stuff was gone and there was a note on my side of the bed…She moved out while I was at work…” “She say why?” “The job.” Sam’s lips twisted into a wry grimace.  “I haven’t been home any night this week before eleven, and she’s sick of it.” And at that moment, Josh felt a deeper loathing for Lisa than he had ever felt for anyone or anything in his life, save maybe his terrified hatred of fire.  A woman who could abandon such a sweet and intelligent man for no other reason than getting home late – of which, if she was suspicious about his whereabouts, all she’d have to do is call anyone at the White House and they would verify – was absolutely pathetic.  She’d never broken it off while they’d been on the campaign trail and not gotten back to New York for long whiles, the two of them had called each other every night and professed their love and how much they missed each other…Not once on the campaign trail did Sam not call her.  Even when they wouldn’t get in ‘til late, or even when it was a long and hectic day and all they wanted to do was sleep, Sam would not sleep until he had called to be sure Lisa was okay.  Josh could remember countless times that Sam had looked genuinely weepy after hanging up, and Sam would turn to his best friend and say “I don’t know why I’m still out here – it’s driving me crazy to not see her.” Now he looked more crazed than ever, Josh noted.  Like he was this close to snapping.  And he wanted to go after Lisa and hurt her so badly she would wish she’d never broken the heart of Sam Seaborn. But he knew Sam wouldn’t let him.  Because Sam still loved her, and that’s why he was so upset that she’d abandoned him. Ironic indeed.