Chapter Text
Amelia Gardner is raised with the name of a father she’s never met, but her mom says she’s got his eyes, and when she’s old enough for it, his wit, his career.
Amy doesn’t trace her genealogy like that. Her eyes may look different from her mother’s, but they crinkle the same way when she smiles, and she blames Abbey for her sharp tongue, and she went to law school like her dad the lawyer, but she sees her career more as the extension of Lillian’s activism than her dead father’s work.
The name Gardner doesn’t bother her, and she carries it with pride because it’s hers as much as it ever was his, but she doesn’t want to see herself as the daughter of a man who died because he was stupid enough to drive drunk even while his wife was pregnant.
It’s just that Amelia Gardner is also raised with the name of a string of women who have fought for the right thing, fought for rights, and she finds more connection in the names Amelia and Amy and those who have worn them before her than she ever will in Gardner.
*
Amy goes to church every Sunday and sits in a long pew and watches the priest go on and on. The wood is cold and lacquered and she shifts on it endlessly until her mother swats at her stockinged legs. Amy listens to the words and traces her finger across lines in the Bible and can’t find any more meaning than she can in her last name, but she does start to learn about rhetoric early on, about how to put on a show, about people who are able to command the attention of a whole room, people who exert that kind of authority, people who lead and shape opinion.
The first thing she ever wants to do when she grows up is to be a priest, and she cries when she learns that’s not an option.
She thinks it’s because of her, at first, and she cries, and then her mom says that it’s because she’s a girl and Amy’s sorrow is replaced by rage. It’s funny, in that way that a small child being indignant is, but Amy holds onto that anger. Her mother understands the anger, but is more embarrassed by it than anything, and Lillian—the kids at Sunday school don’t understand why she has a Lillian, but that’s okay, it just means she’s smarter than them—holds her hand and says that’s why she never did go to church, and Abbey smiles at her sympathetically with something like knowing in her eyes.
“So, even though Emmett doesn’t even go to church, he could be a priest and I couldn’t just because he’s a boy?” she asks, petulant. Emmett frowns at the question and Lillian ruffles his hair.
“Amy, sweetheart, there’s a lot of things the world is gonna tell you are like that, but you don’t have to listen,” Lillian says, and Amy doesn’t really understand, not then, not fully.
Abbey nods, looking both wise and tired beyond her years, and Amy doesn’t understand that fully either until years later, thinking about what it must have been like to be a woman studying to be a surgeon instead of a nurse then. Behind them, Liz starts crying in Jed’s arms, and Abbey turns around to check on them. Joyce runs a hand through Amy’s hair, accidentally pulling out a clip she’d put in earlier.
“I’m sorry, honey. There are other amazing jobs, you know.”
Amy nods, because she knows her mother is right. It’s probably for the best, really, because she’d have made a terrible priest.
She’s never been good at advocating for things she doesn’t believe in, and she’d never been able to see the God her mom did.
*
Amy learns what politics means sitting after school with Emmett and helping Lillian paint signs or sort brochures when she’s at their house because her mom is working. Lillian’s always been one of those people who always stands by the phone and is usually on it, but in 1972, the only time Amy sees her without a phone to her ear is in the car. Amy asks questions that Emmett tries to answer, because to her young eyes, he should have the answers, but he’s still a child, too, and he trips over explanations on why the war is bad and she shouldn’t like Nixon even though her teachers say we should all respect the president.
Emmett isn’t eloquent, but he cares, and Amy catches enough of Lillian’s phone calls to know that the two of them are probably right, and besides, Amy’s mom seems to agree, and Abbey does, too, so that’s enough of a consensus for her to make up her mind on that.
Amy’s almost a model student, getting A’s and turning in all her work, but she’s got an argumentative streak that gets her into trouble, even, she realizes with resentment, when she wins, when she’s right. She doesn’t learn to give in, she learns to keep at it, debating with the teachers who tell her off for getting into fights about this issue or that, pointing out freedom of speech which they haven’t even been taught yet, and she asks why they haven’t been taught that when it’s more important to know your rights than your fractions, anyway.
Her mother scolds her when she gets a call from the principal, says she lets her spend too much time with Lillian, that that was never really the point, that they’d just wanted Emmett and her to grow up together like her father wanted. Amy doesn’t much care what he wanted, she likes spending time with Emmett and Lillian. Her mom works too much to watch Amy after school most days, anyway. She starts to send her to Abbey’s house when Abbey isn’t working.
Her plan backfires a little bit, because Abbey is a doctor, not an activist, but she’s got politics and banter and debate in her blood, and so, Amy learns, does Jed, but they’ve both got a way of charming someone before fighting them that Amy hasn’t yet been able to learn, and without meaning to they teach her how politics really works.
People like her mom can quietly agree with you, people like Lillian can energize and mobilize the people who agree with you, but people like Abbey and Jed can make people agree with you, or at least make people give you something you want regardless of their stance on the issue.
*
Liz Bartlet inherits her parents’ charm tenfold, and Amy is not immune to it but infinitely glad that it’s more often used for her than on her.
Emmett’s gone to college and Amy feels lonely without him, because making friends was never her strongest suit. He’d told her, once, that she was too angry and had a bad temper and she’d told him to fuck off but learned that people don’t like people who fight with anger but with knowledge and a professional distance, and Amy’s never been terribly good at expressing emotions anyways, so she—somewhat bitterly—takes to aloof intelligence like a fish to water, even if she still does like to fight too much for her own good. She quickly realizes that aloof intelligence doesn’t do much to earn her new friends either, but it does earn her some begrudging respect.
But she’s got just enough years on Liz for her to be both her friend and for Liz to think Amy is cool simply for the fact that she’s older but not yet an adult. Liz smiles and easily convinces one of the history teachers at school who Amy had argued with incessantly to help Amy create a debate club for kids too young to join the debate team, and it invigorates Amy, helps her channel her argumentative tendencies, helps her see the flaws in her debates and sharpen her rhetoric into a lethal weapon.
She’s captain of the debate team by her junior year in high school, but she wins more competitions than the captain did her first two years anyways, and Amy takes the certificates she wins with a polite but smug smirk. Her name is written on stacks of ribbons and papers and trophies in her room, and Amy knows, as she’s always thought, that she’s good at this.
*
Amy’s a busy teenager, and she tells herself it’s good preparation for her future career as a busy adult. She likes it, anyway, thinks she works best under pressure. She juggles endless hours of schoolwork, debate practice and competitions, volunteering for local campaigns, marching with Lillian, and helping Liz look after Ellie.
She’s halfway through a paper on the electoral college when the phone rings, and she’s too distracted by its shrill tone and her mother’s footsteps approaching it to focus on her writing, but she stares at the paper nonetheless. She hears an exchange of pleasantries, and then her mom calls out, “Amy, it’s your brother.”
Amy immediately hops up because she doesn’t hear from Emmett enough and takes the phone from her mother’s outstretched hand. She twists the long cord around her finger absentmindedly and presses the phone to her ear. And they exchange small talk, too, and she talks about her last competition and about upcoming elections for aldermen and listens to him talk about his classes, mostly biology. It’s a joke they all share that their mothers had gotten them mixed up, because Amy’s combative, ambitious personality and political aspirations are more in line with Lillian and Emmett’s mediating and interest in biology take far more after Amy’s own mother.
“Listen, Amy, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he says, his voice tight, and she’s worried instantly by his tone. Her grip tightens around the phone cord and she wraps it around her fingers.
“Okay,” she prompts.
“I, uh, I’m gay,” he says.
Amy’s met a few openly gay people—activists—in what she thinks of as her nascent political career even now, but it’s still something of a surprise to her, so it takes a second for her to remember to answer. She’s not upset with him, just surprised. She thinks of those activists, of brochures and slogans. “Okay,” she says again. “Cool. I love you, you know?”
“Yeah,” he breathes out, relieved. “Yeah, I know, kid.”
“Don’t call me that,” she says, wrinkling her nose.
“Whatever.”
“I gotta go finish my paper.”
“Yeah, I should go study.”
A year later, Amy’s at some event that’s calling itself a party but is probably too lowkey to be considered one because Liz had dragged her along, the girl’s soccer team all there, and she feels like she’s probably the least athletic person there, leaning against a wall in a blazer. One of the girls, Natalie, who Amy’s pretty sure plays defense and who she definitely stares at too long during chemistry asks her to come outside with her to look for her bag or something. Amy follows without really thinking about it, thinking more about how pretty her hair looks down since she’s only ever seen it up, and how she told a joke a few minutes ago that Amy’s still sort of laughing at, and how she’d come to a few of the events Lillian had helped organize over the years.
“What?” Natalie asks, grinning a little, when Amy keeps staring at her instead of helping her look.
“Nothing,” she says. “You just... you look really pretty, that’s all.”
Her grin widens. “Thanks, Amy. You do, too, for the record,” she says, and Amy blushes, and realizes with startling clarity that she likes girls. Or at least this girl. She bites her lip and starts looking around, trying to help Natalie with her search. They find the bag in a corner of the deck they’re searching, and Amy hurriedly goes back inside.
At home, later, she looks through one of Lillian’s endless brochures and thinks about the word bisexual.
*
She gets into Brown, because between volunteering and clubs and her grades at a private school, she’s an impressive candidate for any college, and Amy can write a hell of an essay, besides.
It’s an hour and a half drive from her house to her dorm, and she memorizes the drive in Emmett’s old car with the Stones playing too loudly.
She learns at least as much about astrology as she does about politics in her first semester because her roommate asks her sign before her major and Amy vaguely remembers that she’s an Aries, but Chelsea pulls out a book and figures out Amy’s whole birth chart. Amy doesn’t really know what any of it means, but it’s explained to her and from time to time, Chelsea will say something like, “Wow, you’re such an Aries,” or, “You’re Aquarius rising is showing,” or once, drunk, “You should really date a Libra, I love opposites attract.”
One of Chelsea’s friends reads her tarot while they’re all in the library studying for finals and she insists it’ll help them predict their grades and what they need to work on, but Amy mostly just wants the distraction. The girl frowns at the cards and tells Amy she’s self destructive and Amy laughs loud enough that a few people at adjacent tables glare at them a little bit.
It’s at college that Amy realizes she’s funny. She’s always been smart, clever even, witty at a stretch, but she’s more blunt and sarcastic than funny. At college, though, she finds people who take to her dry humor, her alternation between childish and bleak, her way of teasing with the closest thing she knows to affection.
She’s still smart more than funny, she thinks, still not particularly friendly, still as quick to anger as to laughter, but she thinks she’s learned how to use it all better, how to have friends and make connections and articulate herself in a way that’ll make people agree.
Which all helps her at least as much as any of her classes.
*
In the three years it takes Amy to graduate, Jed Barlet gets both a Nobel Prize and elected to Congress, and Liz gets engaged, and Emmett gets sick.
Amy shakes hands with and charms as many people as Jed and Abbey introduce her to, hoping to form connections that will help her career after law school. A few mention internships, and Amy takes one with a woman running for Senate in New Hampshire. She loses, but it’s good experience, and it reminds her how hard this job can be for women, how much change still has to be made.
Liz gets married over the summer. Amy barely knows Doug, but Liz is crazy about him and Jed and Abbey definitely aren’t. Zoey makes an adorable flower girl, though, and everyone is smiling throughout the reception, and Liz is happier than Amy’s probably ever seen her.
Emmett spends a lot of time in the hospital between needing treatment himself and visiting friends. He bitterly keeps count of how many he’s lost and Amy holds his hand and leans on his shoulder as he cries, and helps Lillian and Emmett organize protests.
She’s always joked that she likes politics because she likes competition, and that she’ll be good at politics because she likes winning. But that’s never been the only reason she’s felt she needs to go into politics. It’s watching injustice after injustice get ignored or perpetrated by those who are supposed to help balance the scales. It’s watching her brother suffer needlessly, watching people die, watching those who say that people have rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness shamelessly deny those rights.
Amy’s angry and cold and likes to win, but she never forgets the human side. She never forgets why.
*
She meets Josh Lyman her first year at law school. They run into each other at the library more times than she can count and eventually they end up studying together sometimes, because Josh is always studying and it makes Amy work harder with him as a standard to hold herself against. He’s half boyish charm and half pretentiousness, but she likes him anyway because he’s smart and he can keep up with her and he’s fun, and, she thinks, he likes a good fight almost as much as she does, likes to win as much as she does. That probably gets them into more trouble than anything, but it feels like good practice to argue with Josh endlessly, like if she can just get him to smile a little and throw up his hands in defeat and tell her she’s right, she can probably do anything.
She doesn’t date him, she dates his friend Chris, who’s tall and funny and has mostly the right opinions. But they have almost nothing in common, at the end of the day, and their conversations alternate between tense and awkward and boring as time goes on.
When they break up, Chelsea says it’s because Chris is a Pisces, and Josh hits on her from time to time until he graduates. Not that his way of hitting on her is much different than their debates always had been.
She kisses his cheek as he packs to move and says, “Good luck finding a politician to hire you,” with a teasing grin.
He laughs. “Yeah, you too.”
She scoffs. “I’m not the one trying to be the man behind the man. Or the woman.”
“Well, if you ever need someone to run your campaign,” he teases.
She laughs this time. “Because everything about me screams, ‘electable.’”
He shrugs. “I like a challenge.”
She rolls her eyes. “See you in DC, J.” It’s a challenge and a promise and he pulls her in for a hug.
“See you in the White House,” he rebuts.
*
Amy works on a few campaigns for women running for this and that after law school. It’s exhausting and fast paced and important, and after she keeps jumping on sinking ships that don’t affect real change beyond making a splash, she realizes that she kind of hates campaigns.
Plus, she kind of hates that she’s always supposed to be backing someone else’s call. Amy doesn’t like to fall in line, she likes to fight for what she believes in, regardless of what her boss thinks.
Amy gets a job in DC working for NOW and it feels right, like she’s working for something bigger than herself but for herself, not for anyone else but to help so many other people. She doesn’t start in a very high profile or high paying position, but Amy has connections and she makes even more and she really is very good at her job. She’s passionate and hard working and smart and everything you want from someone lobbying for real changes, and she’s able to work her way up at a pace that seems slow to her and fast to everyone around her.
Within a few years, Amy’s not pushing the agenda but shaping it. By the time Josh is the Democratic Legislative Director for the House, she’s Issues Director for NOW, and suddenly his goodbye of, “See you in the White House,” feels a lot more real.
She drafts resolutions and coordinates grassroots efforts and meets with senators and whoever she hopes can get things done and scopes out new candidates and decides on endorsements and does a million other things, too. And she loves her job and thinks it's important and fulfilling, she really does.
It’s just that she’s getting a little tired of lobbying men to do the right thing for women, of deciding between two men about who should get their money and their endorsements, tired of going to fundraisers and most of the women there being the wives instead of the politicians. She’s working to change it, along with the dozens of other things she and NOW are pushing for, but it’s exhausting.
She knows that not everything would be fixed, instantly, with a few more women getting elected, with more focus on getting women elected in the first place instead of asking men to care about them, but she does think things would probably be better.
For maybe half a second once, when her coworker suggests it, Amy considers running for something. She immediately rejects the idea, though. She’s really not electable, and she knows that being an elected politician is confining and you can’t take risks or do anything too far from moderate if you want one than one term, if you want to be able to do anything with that term, and that’s not something she can see herself doing.
*
Emily’s List is a couple decades newer than NOW, and it shows in the energy. There wasn’t anything slow-paced or boring about NOW, but there’s a little more chaos and excitement at Emily’s List and Amy jumps into her role as political director easily.
It’s a lot of the same work, just more focused on campaigns, and thankfully, the campaigns of women. It feels good to see women getting elected with her help, like she’s making the changes she’s always wanted to be.
It’s something of a disappointment, of course, when there’s really no viable female candidates for president, in 1998, but there are plenty of other competitive races in the Senate and the House and in state and local elections, and of course, Jed Bartlet is running for president.
She doesn’t work for the campaign, and she doesn’t, in her job with Emily’s List, do much for them, but she donates and personally endorses and advises them, not just because Jed Bartlet may be the closest thing she’s ever had to a father, but because he’s smart and capable and he’s a democrat and she agrees with him more than she ever did with Hoynes.
She’s always known the world of national politics is like a small town, but it’s still funny and a little strange to her that Josh Lyman and CJ Cregg—who she’s worked with through Emily’s List—are both working for Jed Bartlet’s campaign, that Andy Wyatt—whose campaigns she’s helped with—is married to another top staffer at the Bartlet campaign. It’s almost funny that she isn’t directly, at this point.
Abbey asks her to, once, and Amy can’t really tell if she’s serious but says, “Find me a woman who has a chance in a presidential election and I’ll work on that campaign, but otherwise, I like my job.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be your job?” Abbey jokes, and Amy rolls her eyes.
“I’ll help where I can, but I’m not quitting my job working with dozens of campaigns for women to help with one man’s campaign, even this man.”
Abbey respects that decision, and Amy watches Jed Bartlet slowly gain in the polls with pride and excitement. She wishes she could give the candidates she works with half his momentum, half his natural gravitas. He wins, and so do some of the women in competitive races, and Amy celebrates.