John's Quest

Title: John's Quest

By: Abra de Winter

Pairing: John Hoynes/Ellie Bartlet - Romance

Rating: PG

Beta By: dot- without her help the story would not be nearly as good as it is. Any mistakes left in the story - all mine!

Spoilers: season 5 episodes 15 – "Full Disclosure" and 16 – "E pur si muove"

Disclaimer: The characters are from the NBC, WB, Bravo, A John Wells Prod., TV show, 'The West Wing'. They are the creation of Aaron Sorkin.

Feedback: yes, please!


Chapter IV


JonnyQuest: Why do you want to go the Ambassadors' Dinner?
BlueOrchid: It's a good occasion to meet my parents in a nice place. Safe and public.
JonnyQuest: You need a bigger buffer zone.
BlueOrchid: You're watching the Seinfeld reruns, aren't you?
JonnyQuest: I'm trying to stay hip.
BlueOrchid: You're hip.
JonnyQuest: So, who are you bringing?
BlueOrchid: Why? Who are YOU bringing?
JonnyQuest: A colleague. You?
BlueOrchid: I'm thinking of going solo.
JonnyQuest: I admire your confidence.
BlueOrchid: Yeah. That's me all right. Confidence and beyond.

________________________________________

Ellie remembered the main reason she hated Washington parties when she attempted to pack. It wasn't that she hated parties, but her parents were never attending normal, fun, peaceful parties. She had a harder time pleasing them when she had to publicly project the right image.

She discarded one outfit after another until her she had reduced her selection to three. One for the road, one for the party and one for the informal dinner at the Residence. She sighed. Being one of the First Daughters was annoying most of the time, but this time it was even more inconvenient. She had been compelled to postpone an important meeting with faculty members in order to fit this ordeal into her schedule.

The atmosphere in the car was relaxed as they drove from Baltimore to DC. She had brought along the nicest guy she had ever dated and was happy to see him coping so well with her lifestyle. He got along great with the agent who drove them. He was right for her in every way. Well, he was a young Republican… but no one was perfect.

When they reached DC, Ellie was in a good mood, and quite prepared to face the evening. She was going to chat, dance and be charming. Maybe this time her parents would be too busy to find microscopic faults in her actions. She wasn't going to look for the least populated corners of the room in which to hide. She was definitely not going to talk only to people she found interesting. She was going to be a good Bartlet and endure the spotlight for one night.

Their eyes met briefly over the sea of people, with the slightest spark of recognition, then they both looked away. Their unspoken understanding to avoid each other did not exempt them from observing one another.
She felt like a child again, looking away every time he was looking back at her, as though she were back in fourth grade having her first thoughts of boys as more than just soccer teammates.

John wondered if he could get a reaction from across the room. He waited until she took her date to talk to her parents. When her gaze flickered in his direction he responded with a mocking expression, which clearly meant 'you brought this poor sucker?', and he was pleased to see her almost snort the champagne.
Jed patted his daughter on the back, but Hoynes wasn't looking any more. His colleague had engaged him in conversation and he did not want to expose his unnatural interest in Ellie's every move.

After a while, he slipped out of the room as unobtrusively as he could. Ellie was dancing with her father, but she still saw him go.

John made his way to a foyer without difficulty. He knew the building rather well, due to the numerous functions he had attended there. He knew the way to this room particularly well because he had used it to sneak out from other parties to be with Helen. He remembered the adrenaline rush from making out with her there, a few feet away from the press, the politicians and his own wife, more than a year earlier

He sat at the piano and played a simple tune to warm up his fingers. He hadn't played the piano since the last time he had visited that same room.

Thoughts of Helen made his private performance a lot more vibrant than usual.
Ellie made sure no one was watching her and took the longest possible route to the door through which Hoynes had disappeared. She looked around the deserted passageway, disappointed not to find him there. Before she started to snoop around she heard the piano.

Ellie followed the sound all the way to him. She remained hidden, watching him from an opening in the heavy curtains. When he stopped playing, she stepped into the light.

"You're a man of many talents," she said.

He stood up when he saw her.

"Thank you. I took lessons for a few years."

"I took lessons so they'd let me play soccer," Ellie commented. "My mother wanted me to take ballet instead of piano, but that didn't stand a chance with all the sprained ankles and scratched knees."

John sat down again and patted on the chair next to him.

"Come on over and show me."

"I'd rather not."

"All right then." He didn't insist and stood up, shutting the lid over the keyboard.

"Your colleague seems charming. Why didn't you bring Paula?"

"She's in Dallas all week."

"You didn't even ask her, did you?"

"It's not her scene."

"You mean she would've refused to stand by her man?" she teased him.

"Don't make it sound like a country song. It's nothing serious." He shrugged his shoulders.

"You're getting the hang of this dating thing, aren't you?"

"Speaking of dating," he started to walk a circle around her, like a wolf cornering its prey, "I noticed you didn't come alone." He stopped and looked her straight in the eye.

"Oh, well, you know…" she said, flustered.

"You couldn't dump the nerd, right?"

"He's not a nerd."

"He has an internet company."

"Software, but…"

"He took you to see The Wrath of Khan on your second date," he interrupted her.

"Star Trek – Generations," she corrected him, amused.

"He's a nerd."

"He has a Harley," she counterattacked.

"In storage somewhere I bet," he snorted.

"In his garage."

"Has he ever taken you for a ride?"

"He is not a nerd."

"Face it! He's a nerd. A geek. A dork."

"My parents like him." She hung her head and her hair fell on her face, muffling the whispered words.

"I beg your pardon?" he asked and brushed the hair from her face without thinking.

Ellie looked up, a little startled by this sudden intimate gesture.

"I said, my parents like him," she said, recovering from the shock.

"We should return to the party," he said, then, seeing Ellie's slightly panicked look, added, "I'll go first. Wait a few minutes before you come out."

He remembered a similar conversation he had had with Helen in that very room, but he didn't feel any guilt over it. Ellie, on the other hand, continued to fix him with a guilty look.

"It never came up," she tried to explain. "That we talk…"

"It's OK. I didn't tell anyone either." He didn't add that he had no one close enough with whom he could share something like that.

"I like talking to you. I don't have to justify it to anyone."

"You're right. A dance is out of the question then?" he said, smiling.

"Thanks for the offer, but I promised myself I wouldn't give my parents a heart attack."

"Yeah," he nodded. "Besides, who needs that kind of attention?"

Ellie hated to be the in the limelight, and dancing with John Hoynes was a sure way to make all eyes turn her way. Worse still, the flood of comments generated by one simple dance would be far from flattering. Her parents would not actually have heart attacks, of course, but she had premonitory a flash of the small signs of disappointment she had come to read so well. However, she didn't let him know how much it bothered her.

"I'm quite capable of dealing with attention, thank you very much! I opened the Governor's Ball with my father when I was fifteen, you know! Mom had surgery, Liz was in college, Zoey was too young."

"I'm sure you were great," he set her mind at ease.

She smiled at the memory and John was surprised to see the difference. Ten years seemed to have flown away. She looked fifteen. And she was charming.

"We'll talk later," he said, leaving.

Ellie waited for the door to close before she sat down in front of the piano. She played the first notes of her beloved Moonlight Sonata. The result was awful.

'It's a good thing I'm a scientist,' she thought, standing up again.

Ellie could not stop worrying over whether anyone had noticed her clandestine interlude with Hoynes. She watched him discreetly as he talked to Lord Marbury, the British ambassador, and decided he was relaxed, meaning he didn't think anyone had seen them.

"May I have this dance?" Leo McGarry asked.

Suddenly, her pulse was racing madly. Ellie had had an enduring secret crush on Leo since she was seventeen. When she reached twenty-three she had gone to extremes to outgrow it, but the experience had not liberated her. She had grown accustomed to thinking of Leo as her personal hero, always present in her heart and mind, but never physically close to her. On the rare occasions they met, Ellie's natural shyness was increased ten times.

He looked extremely tired and Ellie wanted to cradle him in her arms until she took away all his worries, but all she could do was take his hand and follow him to the dance floor.

Her head was spinning and she was more nervous than she had been when she opened the New Hampshire Governor's ball.

John Hoynes was pretending to pay attention to a conversation between his date and Oliver Babish, while inconspicuously watching Ellie dancing with Leo. Unobserved, he witnessed Leo taking her back to the dork she had brought. He grimaced as the dork looked at Ellie adoringly. No wonder the Bartlets liked the snotty punk. He was just like them.

'What's the matter with me?' he reprimanded himself for having such thoughts. He didn't care what the Bartlets thought about Ellie's dates. He didn't care who Ellie Bartlet was dating.

The last feeling he had about Ellie that evening was one of relief. Ever since he had found out that he would see her at the Dinner he kept wondering how she would look and how it would feel to see her in real life after the months of phone calls and online chatting. Now that the evening was almost over, he was relieved. She looked nice, but nothing out of the ordinary. They had talked and it hadn't been awkward.

________________________________________


A few weeks later…


JonnyQuest: I'm in Baltimore next week. Have lunch with me!
BlueOrchid: Sure.

Ellie chose a fairly remote location for their first lunch together. She was more than a little concerned about the meeting. She had very few friends, all hand-picked, most of whom she had known since kindergarten. Making new friends was not something Ellie took lightly. He was a friend and she wanted to see him. If the conversation became uncomfortable, they had at least one common interest. Sports. Ellie looked over the sports page one more time before she left to meet him, memorizing the latest baseball scores and information about various other sporting events.

'Maybe we can compare injuries,' Ellie sighed, looking at the permanent scar on her right knee.

________________________________________


The conversation ran unbelievably smoothly. They had managed to transpose their easy-going virtual relationship to a friendly real life one.

The more they talked, the more they discovered how intertwined their lives were. John was good friends with Oliver Babish. Her best friend from high school was Oliver's eldest daughter. Ellie realized he was the only person with whom she had talked in months that knew the same people she did. Her circle of Baltimore friends was quite small and completely composed of scientists like her. Talking about childhood friends and the White House staff felt liberating for the first time in her life.

Time passed swiftly, and John accompanied her back to the hospital.

"I have another meeting in the morning. Would you like to have dinner with me?"

"I'd like that," she accepted.

________________________________________


"You have a bad influence on me," John informed her after they finished talking about Josh and Donna. "I don't like to gossip."

"It's not gossip. We're just talking about people we know. There's nothing wrong with that. After Zoey's kidnapping, she moved in with me for a while. We don't have all that much in common, so we talked about everyone we knew," she admitted.

"That's the definition of gossip, isn't it?" he pointed out.

"We talked about you, as well. Nothing that I couldn't tell you now. So, you see, it's not gossip," she tried to prove her point, quite unsuccessfully.

"I bet it was boring," he said casually.

"I thought that was every man's fantasy. Two girls in skimpy pajamas talking about him all night long…"

"As long as it involved my rugged good looks, I'm flattered," he grinned.

Ellie took a long drink, and looked at him over the rainforest blooming from her glass. She had a mildly amused expression.

"What?" he asked, slightly alarmed by her reaction.

"Well, we did talk about your good looks, but not exactly the way you might think."

"Do tell!" he pretended to feel vexed.

"It usually came up something like 'he could have had any woman in DC, how could he be so stupid?'"

"Oh." Hoynes tried to keep up his end of the conversation despite the wave of embarrassment.

"What can I say? Zoey inherited Dad's character assessment skills. I'm not all that good at reading people. For instance, I used to rather like Helen Baldwin before the book incident."

An hour later they were talking about his divorce.

"I'm not proud of it. I wanted to save my marriage, but I think it was over for a long time already. I got the feeling that she was upset that the affair went public more than anything else. We only lasted this long because we both had the same goal - that I become President. If not for that, I might have noticed she stopped loving me long ago. "

He had never voiced this suspicion before. From their long conversations, Oliver might have guessed that by its end the Hoynes' marriage was almost a façade, but John had never told him.

"Don't say that!" Ellie said, sounding shocked and hurt. "You shouldn't think that!"

"That's the way it felt," he added a little less assertively.

"She may have hidden from you that she was hurt, that she felt betrayed, she may have said she was angry for sabotaging your political career, but don't you go thinking she was not jealous or frustrated or that she didn't feel worthless because you chose another woman in her place. Don't think she didn't love you!"

Hoynes looked at her in mild surprise. Her tone was a lot more vibrant than it had been the entire evening. Her flirtatious exuberance had transformed into a passionate plea. He touched her hand across the table, trying to show his gratitude without words.

From her own conversations with John, Ellie knew how isolated he felt. She wished he could remember the beginnings of his marriage, rather than its sad conclusion. Ellie had not known the Hoynes' twenty years earlier, but she knew it in her heart that they had married for love, not electoral Mathematics. She did not want him to dwell in the dark loneliness he was sinking in, lying to himself that if he had started to date meant that he had healed.

In the past year, Ellie had given a lot of thought to Hoynes, to his political destiny and his rather public private life. She had stopped seeing him as the lighthearted Jonny Quest who was able to cheer her up after a tiresome day, the words of comfort had come sout before she could over analyze them. He was her friend, and she wanted to make him feel better.

"I'm sorry. I got carried away," she said, blushing.

She removed her hand from his and took another sip of cocktail.

"I thought you weren't a big marriage supporter," he said, thinking about something she had said a few weeks earlier, "but you believe in the marriage vows…"

"Yeah, well, I think people should live up to their promises," she laughed nervously. "Silly thing to believe when you think I've lived among politicians my whole life."

"You were privileged to know some of the most outstanding politicians of our time. Not
many people have your father's moral compass."

She tried to read in his eyes what he was feeling at the moment. The clouds she could discern in his blue gaze were a pale expression of the storm inside him.

Ellie wished she could help him find his way out of the darkness.


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A/N
What do you think about the story so far? Are they still in character? Is the chemistry starting to show?