TITLE: “Dear Father”…No, Scratch That… “Dear Jackass”… AUTHOR: Kasey SUMMARY: The ice between Sam and his father grows even thinner. RATING: PG-13L, ESF(A) TIMELINE: Takes place either between SGTESGTJ and StackhouseFillibuster or after tSF…either one.  Spoilers for both of those. DISCLAIMERS: They aren’t mine. THANKS: Lieutenant Flip, who didn’t mind when I sorta took her title a little…and who also betaread it for that is what she does best! ::grins:: Other, of course, from write kickass stories and be the best friend a gal could ask for!  And, as well, to Dis, without whom we would be but people picking at badly butchered sentences…ah, “Mal/Laurie”…what would we do without you?  What would I do without either of you? ::grins:: It was very late when I got home, as usual.  And yet, for some reason, unlike normal when I would fall into bed and be asleep fairly soon as it was very late, I felt like I couldn’t sleep.  Not yet.  There was something I had to do first, something that had absolutely nothing to do with serving the president or the country, but something that had to do with the person I’d first served. My father. I’d looked up to him so much…he’d been my hero from the time I was a little boy.  I wanted to be a lawyer, just like him, marry a woman just like my mother, and have two children – a girl just like my sister and a boy just like me, who would then grow up to continue the cycle…it was that I thought he had it made, I guess.  He was a big-shot in the law scene in LA, a top litigator, and who I thought was the best man in the world. Which is, I think, why it hurt so much to find out it was all a lie. I’d talked to him on the phone twice since Mom had called me in tears, and both times I’d ended up calling him a few choice expletives and hanging up on him in a rage.  It just infuriated me to no end.  The idea that he pretended to be in love with Mom for so long just…I couldn’t deal with it.  I couldn’t deal with HIM. I walked to my closet in the living room of my apartment and found what I was looking for on the floor in the corner of it.  An ancient shoe box, the one from my first pair of “adult dress shoes”, held together only with about a roll of duct tape and several rubber bands.  I carefully extracted it from the neatly organized piles of crap and sat on the edge of the bed as I slowly opened the lid, pulling out a pile of old photographs.  They varied in age from the time I was born until present – I didn’t have the time or energy to put them all in albums, and it wasn’t like I had all that many.  My mother had an entire bookcase full of photo albums back home, but I had…well, I had the shoebox full.  That was all.  There were photos of my friends and me in our caps and gowns – at Crenshaw, Princeton, and Duke.  Pictures of my Dana’s wedding…and right behind those were, ironically enough, images of a play wedding we had when we were little.  All the kids in the neighbourhood were in it.  I was the minister, and Dana pretended to get married to Tommy from two houses down – she wore our mother’s favourite white tea dress that was a little too small for her so much too big for Dana, and I wore a black turtleneck and pants, with a white piece of paper taped to the turtleneck, then my white terrycloth bathrobe over it.  It was both amusing and adorable to look back at the pictures, at our faces unchanging and unaging throughout all time.  I continued to look through the pictures, smiling faintly with a sense of nostalgia at the memories captured on film.  Then I found it, the picture I was looking for.  From a trip I’d been trying to remember as clearly as I could, to be sure I was thinking along the right lines… I knew I’d remembered it right.  There was the proof – right there in my hands. When I was six years old, Dana and Dad and I all went on a trip up to Santa Monica. He had business up there, but he took us around sight-seeing and to a little carnival and other places which made it less boring for us.  It had been great to spend time with Dad – he always seemed to be going places and doing things for work.  At the carnival, we were joined by a pretty woman a little younger than our mother with sleek light brown hair pulled back into a bun and a warm smile and sparkling eyes.  Dad said she was the woman he was working with on the case, that her name was Erica, and that we were to treat her with respect, which we did anyway because we knew our manners.  That was all.  Nothing more.  Erica was incredibly nice.  She bought us cotton candy which Mom would NEVER do (it rotted our teeth) and rode with us on rides Dad wouldn’t ride and talked and laughed with us, whereas both our parents were a little more uptight.  And she smiled a lot…especially at Dad.  Dana looked away whenever she did, as though she thought it was something she shouldn’t watch.  But I didn’t mind – she was really nice to us.  And it made sense that she and Dad were friends – she was a good person who was a lot of fun, and if Dad was going to be having to work on cases in another city, it would be nice for him to have a friend to go places with, I thought. Just another example of a naïve young mind at work.  This mystery Santa Monica woman who I didn’t want to know anything about was someone I’d met and liked very much.  And because I was little at the time, I never imagined there was anything between her and Dad other than having someone to hang out with when he had to be in Santa Monica on business. And suddenly I resented my father a million times more. I seethed for about fifteen minutes, almost seeing red as I held the photograph in my shaking hands – though I couldn’t tell whether they were shaking from shock or from rage.  He hadn’t just lied to us about where he was going and what he was doing there, he’d lied to us about who she was, about what his relationship with her was…and while it wasn’t that much more of another lie, it somehow made it all a million times worse.  The fact that he’d lied to his wife and children countless times made worse by one more lie, 26 years ago. Finally I set the picture down on the bed and walked to my laptop on the kitchen table.  Opening it, I signed on and began a letter to my father, so full of rage I was almost seeing red. “Dear Father,” No, scratch that. “Dear Jackass,” There.  Much better.