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October 31, 2009
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.
Office of the First Lady
“Donna!” It would’ve been impolitic for her Chief of Staff to accuse the First Lady of squealing like a twelve-year-old. It also would’ve been completely accurate, and while Mrs. Santos was in the midst of her pumpkin-, chocolate-, and costume-fueled mania, possibly an excellent way for Donna to get herself fired. “Are you ready? This is going to be so great!”
Donna Moss had looked up as soon as her boss appeared in her doorway, a mirthless rictus of not-joy plastered across her face with the reflexive ease of long practice. It managed to fool Mrs Santos, deeply sunken into demented glee. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, voice so chipper she would’ve fooled herself if she hadn’t been grinding the enamel from her teeth and trying not to burst into tears (again) not five minutes ago. “The costume store has been closed to the public, and the smallest motorcade the Secret Service will let us get away with will be ready to leave in about fifteen minutes. I’m just finishing up a few things. I’ll be ready to join you in ten minutes or so.” If someone smiled too long and too hard without meaning it, did they get punished by losing their smile forever? Hadn’t there been a folktale about that somewhere?
Mrs. Santos’ Jack Skellington grin somehow grew even larger, and she bounced in place, which really should not have been possible in those heels. “Wonderful! Miranda is so happy about having her Aunt Donna along with us. I had to convince her she couldn’t be you for Halloween.”
Now Donna smiled for real, even if she had to fight back a wave of nausea. She actually loved being Miranda’s Cool Aunt Donna, so long as she didn’t have to do it more than a few hours a day. More than that started to hurt. “Well, no, that wouldn’t do at all. Who knows what Josh would do if he had to handle more than one of me.”
“Keel over with an impossibly smug, self-satisfied smile on his face, probably,” Mrs. Santos snarked, and Donna thrilled at the fond exasperation in her voice even as the idea of Josh keeling over made made her shudder. It was a far cry from the contemptuous frustration Mrs Santos sometimes vented at Josh after Donna’s fiancee had convinced Matt Santos to run for President. “Don’t dawdle, Donna. You work too hard,” she said, after a moment of shared laughter.
“Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Santos slipped out the door, heels beating a staccato rhythm as she all but skipped down the hallway in her black-trimmed red double-breasted power suit. Donna supposed one of the benefits of being First Lady was not getting called out when you looked a bit like a deranged lunatic, or a six-year-old getting to go to Disneyland for the first time. Weren’t those the same thing?
As soon as Donna couldn’t hear footsteps anymore, she groaned and rubbed her temples, the smile falling away from her face as the familiar sick, twisting feeling resettled in her gut.
How the hell did I get myself roped into this?
Everyone knew Donna Moss hated Halloween. Hated it with the sort of quiet, barely tolerant smoldering generally reserved for the DMV or the Drudge Report. Anyone who knew her well—and a few strangers with the bad luck of crossing her path in late October—would tell you so. And since you could set your clock by it, it was the one time of year no one, jokingly or otherwise, tried to blame her mood swings on Josh Lyman. So at least she had that going for her.
Most people politely did not try to drag her into the festivities. Except one. Almost three years into President Santos’ first term, First Lady Helen Santos somehow still didn’t know her Chief of Staff would rather cover herself in honey and roll through a giant anthill filled with giant ants than have anything to do with costumes or pumpkins or scary decorations or adorable, excited, happy little over-sugared children (Oh, God.)—even if they called her Aunt Donna.
So far, avoiding Mrs Santos' zeal had been easy. In 2006, Halloween fell a week before Election Day. Eleven-year-old Peter and five-year-old Miranda had been full of glee and sugar and safely hidden far away from the campaign (and Donna) with their grandparents. Their first two years in the White House hadn't really been that much more of a challenge. Even though the Office of the First Lady oversaw preparations for the White House's annual Halloween bash, Mrs Santos’ substantive policy goals took the Office’s priority, so Donna never got any strange looks when she farmed out Halloween prep to her Deputy Chief of Staff, who farmed it who knew where. Donna didn't really care as long as everyone was happy, no laws were broken, nobody got hurt, and most importantly no one got any pictures of adorable tiny children in cute little costumes beating the hell out of piñatas in the likenesses of Congressional Republicans or foreign heads of state that the Santos Administration didn't particularly like.
Not that any such piñatas now or had ever existed. She hoped.
Now, in 2009, Donna's luck had finally run out. As near as she could tell, Donna had acted a bit too disappointed that she couldn’t get away from work to help the kids pick out their costumes for the past two years. Helen’s guilt at depriving Donna of such fun times made her sneaky: she pulled a few interns into a conspiracy to clear Donna’s schedule just enough that she would have no excuse not to come enjoy herself. Mrs Santos was especially proud of how she had done an end-run around Donna’s fiancee, Josh Lyman, President Santos’ Chief of Staff, who for eleven years had always come up with something at the last minute to ensure Donna would get called safely away during any Halloween-related thing.
(Josh loved Halloween: the happy kids, the costumes, the candy, and the excuse to pull harmless pranks on people he would normally have to prank without any sort of excuse at all. But for eleven years, starting back during President Bartlet’s first campaign when Donna was just his college drop-out Senior Assistant, he had taken the initiative to pretend to be the biggest Halloween hating bastard on the East Coast to keep Donna insulated from something that obviously made her miserable. He never once asked her why. Even in the deepest stages of their mutual denial of their romantic attraction (before Donna nearly getting blown to hell in Gaza forced them to get their shit together) Donna knew she loved him a little bit more just for that.)
Donna groaned. Please God, let me not throw up on anyone. Worse, she was going with the First Lady and her kids and had to come back to work after, so she couldn’t even sneak an adult milkshake or something. And of course it was Santos Family Tradition to go pick out your costumes the morning of Halloween, and not say a week earlier or any other time Donna did not have to seriously struggle to even get out of bed at all. At least Peter was thirteen now, so this was probably his last Halloween before he was too old, er, cool and hip, for the whole thing. Unless Mrs Santos persuaded him to help with Miranda and the White House festivities. Even if Peter turned into one of those especially sullen, broody teenagers, he’d never figure out how to say no to Miranda. Great.
But here was the secret: Donna Moss didn’t hate Halloween at all. If she had, things would’ve been so much easier. Halloween just fell on the same day and made a convenient excuse.
Donna looked at her closed office door and turned her attention back to the wallet in her lap. Long, slender fingers dropped into a hidden pocket and came out with a worn, slightly faded photo—it was laminated now, but it had taken a couple years and a water spill to make that finally happen in 1995.
It was from her mother’s Polaroid, the kind Tony Stark’s StarkPhone had put off the streets for good. The camera printed a date at the bottom: October 31, 1993, 4:45 PM.
There was herself: drowning in a hospital gown and blankets; blonde sweat-matted hair pushed back from her face; exhausted blue eyes red-rimmed from crying; sunkissed-peach skin and high cheeks usually so good for dimples pinched with exhaustion; pale lips raised into a soft, trembly smile as she gazed into her lap.
Even at thirty-two, people still told Donna she looked practically ageless. But whenever she saw her sixteen-year-old self, she couldn’t help thinking just how young she looked.
But for all that Donna herself took up most of the picture, the swaddled blankets in her thin, pale arms and the tiny face peeking out of them drew her eyes. Donna remembered thinking, the moment the nurse laid the burbling, barely crying bundle in her arms, that her porcelain skin was too smooth, too perfect to be real, that if she touched it the wrong way her girl would shatter and blow away on the wind like dandelion seeds.
No one in Donna’s family had hair the color of the russet peach fuzz on her baby girl’s head. That was her father’s grandfather’s. No one else Donna had ever seen before or since had those two white patches of hair where her bangs would be one day, dolloped like a couple of drops of errant cake frosting. The epidural and other painkillers they had given Donna meant coherent complex thought hadn’t exactly been a big thing just then, and she was swear-on-a-Bible sure those spots were where the pair of angels who carried her girl down to Earth had kissed her once they saw how perfect and beautiful she was.
Donna wiped tears from her eyes and ran the edge of her fingernail carefully over the photo, tracing her girl’s scrunched up face. Donna had known better than to stay at the Homecoming party with Paul McIntyre when the upperclassmen had started passing out virgin margaritas from the machine one of them had in the back of his pickup, because the varsity kids lived to torment little nerds (she was young and naive and thinking laxatives or that stuff that made it blue when you went to the bathroom); had known better than to agree to have just one with Paul (who always wanted to believe the best of people) that had turned into just two and then just three before she got him to leave; had known she was woozy and giggly and not thinking straight (because she was just exhausted, she thought) and should have insisted Paul walk her home when he decided to stop because he was having too much trouble driving in a straight line; had known better than to agree to make out with him just then. Donna had insisted on a condom when they somehow decided the moment had finally come, but the one Paul carried with him had broken anyway.
(She had not known the drinks had been spiked with tasteless, odorless 100 proof vodka because the uperclassmen thought it would be fun to get the nerds as wasted as possible. And she and Paul had been ridiculously handsy when they were sober.)
The next day they realized what had happened, that something they were saving for marriage had been twisted and ruined and they could hardly remember it, and just like that they couldn’t talk to each other for weeks. Then Donna was late, and told Paul, because what else could she do? As terrified as they were, at sixteen and in such a tiny little town where everyone knew everyone else and their favorite brand of underwear (and how many pairs they had bought that week), there had been no choice but to tell their parents the truth.
The news had gone over like a lead balloon to say the very least, but their parents loved them very much, and were there every step of the way, no matter what the town gossips or the preachers and ministers or teachers or anyone else said. Even though she knew she didn’t love Paul enough to marry him, not yet, she also knew she could never give the baby up for adoption. It was hers. Her parents had come as close to yelling at her then as they ever did during the entire pregnancy, warning her in solemn, serious tones just how hard it would be and how much she would have to give up. And when she didn’t waver, they wrapped her in a four-armed hug and told her would make it work. Turned out they were no more eager to give up their first grandchild, even if they were not at all happy about how it was coming into the world.
When she held her beautiful little baby in her arms after eight hours of labor, just the two of them and her mom behind the camera and Paul passed out from exhaustion in a seat out-of-frame, she knew the most difficult nine months of her life had all been worth it. It was gonna be hard, but she’d do whatever it took to make it work. She had never loved anyone—never thought she could love anyone—the way she loved little Anna Marie the moment she first laid eyes on her.
She can still remember the night nurse taking Anna away to the nursery when Donna finally started to nod off, and how excited she was to take Anna home the next day.
She could live another hundred years and never ever forget waking up the next morning to her mother and father’s bloodshot, swollen eyes looking at her, or the way her father’s sob-roughened voice had shook when he told her Anna had died in the night. Never forget her little girl, so pale and still and quiet in the hospital morgue.
Part of Donna never left that miserable, cold little room. The rest of her, they dragged out screaming and pumped full of sedatives.
Part of Donna still wondered if naming her baby after Marie Antoinette, the last, beheaded Queen of France—she had been reading a book of French history the day she went into labor and thanks to the drugs all she could think was what a pretty name it was—hadn’t been some sort of death curse.
It was months before she felt like she was part of the world again, not just floating along letting things happen to her—a kite negligently thrown into a windstorm. Paul drifting away from her and her unquenchable grief barely registered. His funeral six months after Anna’s, she watched through a fog from the front pew. She did manage to summon enough of a spark of anger to hate all drunk drivers forever and swear never to drink again, but that was it.
After that, Donna’s parents had caved and sent her to therapy. She’s never felt whole again—nothing, not her parents, not Josh, not everyone she loved, could fill the hole in her heart where Anna should be—but she found her way back, and vowed to do something with her life that her little girl, could point down at from Heaven and be proud of. In 1998, that vow took her to the Bartlet for America campaign. When she tells Josh every day to do good, she’s telling herself, too.
So, no. Donna Moss did not hate Halloween. But every year she was supposed to have celebrated her Anna’s birthday on October 31, she now found herself wanting nothing more than to mourn quietly in private, shut away from all her friends and her boss and Josh and everyone else who didn’t know Anna had been the center of her world for the fifteen minutes before they took her to the nursery where she died alone, without her mother. Instead she’s surrounded by the one single holiday whose most important goal was to celebrate children—living, happy, healthy children playing in their own imaginations the way no adult remembered how to do—in the White House, where the President brought hundreds of children to enjoy the biggest Halloween party on the planet, like a chocolate-covered pied piper from her own personal hell.
And now the First Lady had trapped her into a costume shopping expedition with her kids. At least Miranda Santos had her mother’s blonde hair. No brunette sprites today, thank you.
Wiping again at her teary eyes, Donna forced her face to calm, her eyes to dry, as only a professional politician could. It was time to go, and Mrs Santos couldn’t see this. Couldn’t know about this. This was hers and untainted by all the craziness that was her life. Even Josh didn’t know about Anna. But they were engaged, and he wanted to talk about children.
She would have to tell him soon.
Donna brought the photo to her lips, pressing a soft kiss to a forever-tiny face. “I got busy today, so we won’t have our usual alone time together, but … Happy b-birthday, baby. I love you.”
Slipping the photo back in her wallet, she stood, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door.
November 1, 1993, 9:56 AM
Saint Mary’s Family Birth Center
Madison, Wisconsin
No one paid the tiny, stooped over grandmother walking out of one of the side doors with a small, swaddled bundle wrapped in her arms any extra attention. Not the orderly who opened the door for her, not the passing nurse who happened along just in time to help her into the sleek black sedan that was waiting in the parking lot.
The old woman politely thanked the young nurse before she shut the car door and rolled up the severely tinted windows, and only after the car pulled away and they were well on the road did she exhale a long breath, her wrinkled, weathered old body folding in on itself and shifting, twisting, and reshaping in smooth movements, a time lapse of a master sculptor remolding wet clay.
A second later, a blue skinned, red-haired young woman with glittering yellow eyes and purple lips stared down at the sleeping newborn in her arms, ran a curious finger over the spots of white fuzz at either side of her hairline, and grinned. “Well,” said Mystique, groaning softly and rubbing her temples, “all things considered, that was easier than I imagined, even if spending several hours pretending to be a dead baby gave me cramps. Do you have any painkillers, Irene? The little blonde flatscan wouldn’t stop wailing until they shot her full of something. Between Erik re-writing their computer storage and Mastermind working his magic on the grandparents and staff, I’m almost certain we’ve left no traces.”
Passing streetlights strobed in the lenses of Irene Adler’s dark sunglasses and sent gold highlights swimming through her brown hair as the car worked its way out of the city. She tapped her white cane anxiously against her knee as she rooted around in her purse for the aspirin bottle before handing it to Mystique. Her frown sharpened her pale features. “Of course the girl screamed and cried, Raven. As far as she knows, her baby’s dead. I’d be worried if she hadn’t. This child is too important to have sociopath in her blood.”
Mystique didn’t miss the guilty twist to Irene’s expression. “Don’t look like that. Taking the child was your plan, Destiny. It’s a little late for second thoughts.”
Irene’s expression hardened. “And I’m not having any. My dreams were clear. Anna is far too important to the future of mutant kind. Our very survival depends on her, even if I don’t know how, not yet. Leaving her in the care of a naive little farm girl who was too stupid to keep her legs closed would have been foolish enough. Leaving her with humans could have been disastrous.”
Mystique snorted. “Quite. Then what are you so upset about.”
Irene sighed; she had already lost this argument and they both knew it. “We don’t have to take her to an orphanage. It’s not too late to—“
“Irene,” Mystique said softly, letting real regret fill her voice. “We’ve discussed this. You can’t take care of a baby on your own, and my commitments to Erik would keep me away too often. And we can’t risk involving a nanny. Once she’s old enough for you to take care of, you can take her from the orphanage and we’ll be a family, like we want. Five or six years isn’t so long to wait for our dream.”
“…I know,” Irene growled, but after a moment she took a deep breath and smiled softly. “If that is how it must be, let me hold her? I want to get to know my new daughter before I have to send her away.”
Mystique grinned at her, momentarily thinking of another small bundle, with blue fur and bright yellow eyes and a tiny fanged smile. “Of course, my darling.” It’s going to be different this time, little one. I won’t make the same mistakes.