| TITLE: Things you Wouldn’t Do AUTHOR: Kasey RATING: Gen, PG SUMMARY: There were things you just wouldn’t do. Not ever. NOTES: I don’t know who the “you’ is in this, it’s just…I think it’s more like a generally-speaking thing. If I was writing it in French, I’d just use “on”, which is like “One”…”One would not…” etc. But this is in English, so again, who is the “you”? I don’t know. It’s not really from first person, either, so if you’re going “But wait…all of the normal people were talked about in third person, so who’s left to be telling it?” there is no one. Or, if you prefer, you can just think of it as being some miscellaneous aide. However you wanna read it. FEEDBACK: Yes, please! ARCHIVE: Sure, just let me know where. DISCLAIMERS: They aren’t mine. THANKS: To Lieutenant Erin, who fearlessly serves the Admiral. I’ve gotta get you some medals, girl, you earn ‘em. There were things you wouldn’t do. You wouldn’t yell at Sam, because he would just get all quiet and unresponsive to the point where Josh would start worrying at him, and it’d just do more bad than good. You would argue with San, sure, and he’d argue back. But you wouldn’t just shout at him. You wouldn’t yell at the President, either, especially not in the Oval Office, and not unless you were mentally ill. You would never tell Josh he was mentally ill, because then he got combative and offended and pissed off, and you wouldn’t want someone with mental problems to be angry. You would never actually admit Josh WAS mentally ill, because it wasn’t like he’d hear voices, he’d randomly explode because he couldn’t stop the flashbacks. But surely that wasn’t something to hold against him. You wouldn’t mention drinking in front of Leo. You wouldn’t mention that you wouldn’t mention drinking in front of Leo. You wouldn’t disobey Donna’s rules, especially not when it had to do with how much work Josh could do, because if you did she’d make it so you couldn’t see Josh whatsoever. You wouldn’t call CJ an amateur – well, not unless you were Leo or Danny – because she had a harder job than a **lot** of people and you yourself wouldn’t want to have to deal with the press as much as she dealt with them. And even if you were **were** Leo or Danny, you would only call her that when she **really** screwed up. Which wasn’t often. You wouldn’t talk to the President’s family if you were a reporter because you would find yourself on a plane to Yemen. You wouldn’t complain about the long hours except to the people who worked just as long as you. To anyone else, you would just smile and shrug and say “it’s part of the job.” You wouldn’t think about why you would always just say “it’s part of the job” whenever you’d want to complain and hurt someone for something you had to go do. You wouldn’t do things without consulting at least three other people, because chances were good things would go wrong if you didn’t consult first. You wouldn’t ever talk about the end. About the “after the Administration”. About “Eight years from now.” About “What happens if he doesn’t get re-elected?” About “Where are we gonna go?” About “We’re all gonna be thrown to all sides of the country.” You wouldn’t talk about certain things in front of certain people. Like wars in front of Leo or the President, because both of them were old enough to have seen a war – one from the front lines, one from the homefront. Like divorce in front of Toby or Leo. Like being discriminated against in front of CJ or Charlie, like being out of the loop in front of Sam. Like feeling left-out in front of Ainsley. Like guns in front of Josh. And if you **would**, for some reason, be stupid enough to bring it up, you would suffer the consequences. Probably in the form of either further suffering or a monologue, or sometimes Puccinini. You would do a lot of things, you would have a lot of conversations, you would say a lot of things both that you meant and didn’t mean, but you would not do those things. There were things you just wouldn’t do. Not ever. |