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menzosarres · 7 years ago

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Title: Changing of the Guard

Fandom: House of Cards

Pairing: Claire Underwood / Jane Davis

Rating: M

Length: 6500 words currently, probably 10-12k by the end.

Summary: When it comes to the presidency, Claire doesn't want to repeat any of her husband's mistakes. When it comes to forming attachments, she doesn't want to repeat any of her own. But a West Wing crowded with strangers and a Residence crowded with silence isn't easy on anyone's sanity, and Claire never asked to be left alone at the top.

Chapter 1 below the cut, or just skip straight to AO3.

A Chapter Without Jane

Francis calls every day that week. Once a day, at 9:45 PM, like clockwork.

Every time Claire declines the call, the White House seems a little smaller, the distance between her world and his growing, cavernous and silent, full of everything else he may have been hiding from her while they shared this roof and everything he’s doing now, out there, somewhere she can’t see.

On the second week, he doesn’t call until Friday. She considers it, only for a moment. It’s been a week from hell, full of familiar faces she knows she can’t trust and new faces she doesn’t know at all and a war on top of everything, and really, she doesn’t mind being alone, but she’s never alone, and if she can’t be alone, she’d rather be watched with someone who understands beside her.

She knows Francis wouldn’t make it difficult. If she picked up the phone, it would be a calm conversation—no pleasantries, but an exchange of that easy understanding that has existed between them for twenty-eight years wrapped up in the next steps he would be sure they’d have to take to come out of this on top.

But everything is different now. Now, Claire knows Francis’s greatest flaw. They’ve discussed it before, the importance of their particular honesty, their willingness to admit to each other the darkest depths of their ambition and pride, to recognize the people around them they can share that candor with, with whom they can put aside games. They watch too many people with smaller ambitions try to pretend their darkest drives don’t exist, and watch them fail because of it. There is value in truth—selective honesty, with most, but with each other, complete.

If they don’t say it aloud to someone, it eats holes in them until everyone around them can see it, dark as night and clear as day.

And Francis lied. Not about the little things, his little coup, but about all they’d worked for together. He never admitted it, not to her, not to anyone, but his every move this past year had chewed through his tired skin and gnawed the seams of his best suits until even she had to admit what so many around her had said for years: Francis believes, on top, there is only room for one.

That is the kind of secret that ends a marriage.

So she stepped up, and watched him fall.

But now, as the phone vibrates on top of that Resolute oak that grew in a time when Apple was still just fruit and children’s rhymes, Claire doesn’t want to make the same mistake. Standing alone at the top is a balancing act no mere man—woman—can maintain forever. With things as they are, it would take no great skill and very little luck to be the person who drags her down. Francis threw enough of the allies who’d been at their backs for decades to the wolves waiting for his throat, that soon there was no one left to lift so much as a finger to steady him as he stumbled, no one to catch him as he plummeted towards the hungry mouths below, unsated by the meager, spineless sheep he threw to them before.

The screen light dims, and the room falls silent again.

Claire sighs, staring at the papers in front of her she knows are waiting for her signature, but which she’s already forgotten the subject of. She flips her phone face-down, not wanting to see the taunting white text.

Francis Underwood Missed Call

It’s all for the best. Francis isn’t a steadying hand any longer, but she doesn’t intend to stand alone here forever. She needs new balance.

But in an empty office at the end of a very full day, Claire feels absence gnawing at her, the first warning of encroaching wolves. Francis is gone. Doug is gone. LeAnn, Seth, Cathy—gone. All people she understood, some more easily than others, and all people who understood her, some to a greater extent than others, and all… gone, some more permanently than others. And so she is watched, alone, tempted to talk to herself more often than she’d care to admit. Francis had grown to like it too much, preaching to eyes and ears and gaping mouths that couldn’t talk back. She feels… untethered, without an understanding ear to serve as her mirror, her confessional. To return what those who watch merely take.

And Tom is gone, but Tom was never that person. Tom was always… difficult. She looked for something in him she was never going to find, the latest in a string of these men—artistic, needy, still clinging to a fleeting sense of their own youth—everything Francis wasn’t. But she never wanted any of that, and what she did want, what she stole from them… It wasn’t Tom she wanted it from. With Francis, she always knew her necessity. He never stopped needing her, no matter how large and distant he grew. He needed her, yes, but did he want her? As the years passed, she believed it less and less. With Tom, Adam… Oh, they wanted her. Perhaps they even needed her. But they didn’t understand her. And being watched as she talked and slept with someone who never quite listened when she tried to make him understand… Over time, he became just another pair of eyes, wanting, weighing.

Claire has always been ambivalent about attention. And she could only convince herself she wanted him back for so long.

She picks up her pen, beginning to sign with an intention she doesn’t feel, too tangled in her own thoughts to reread the permissions and grants and addendums waiting for her name.

Because then, of course, there’s Jane. Waiting on the tale end of every thought about her presidency. Had she known, when she set her part in motion, that Jane wouldn’t be beside her…

Well, it doesn’t do to dwell on might have beens.

Jane is in Dubai, doing what she does, a week’s worth of her particular brand of astonishing sanity filtered through one brief phone call and an equally brief update from Usher, who she still doesn’t quite trust and still doesn’t think of by his first name, despite everything she has made him do for her. Since Francis stepped down, Jane’s sheer competence seems to have doubled, tripled, no longer hampered by their shared agenda Claire was never willing to openly discuss. Which makes Claire wonder, more often than she might like, just how far Jane Davis’s successes under the last president had been slowed by, as Jane had insisted with such sincerity, Claire’s distracting presence, and how much had simply been Jane, carefully preparing for what Claire had wanted but always denied aloud, refusing to pull her impossible strings until he was out of the way, and she was in power.

Claire flips her phone up again, swiping the missed call off the screen before she unlocks it.

She wonders what it says about her—about this week, this day—that Jane’s name in her contacts feels even more tempting than Francis’s call. She hovers over it, contemplating reason, both her stunning lack of it, in the broadest sense, and whether she can come up with one compelling enough to excuse the unforgivable sin of wanting to talk to someone who makes her feel…

The phone rings. She drops it. It clatters off the edge of the desk and onto the floor, its buzz now muffled and low. Claire takes a moment to gather herself, to push back her chair and close her eyes, breathing out a quick sigh.

It really is too quiet in this place.

She looks down, expecting Francis, but no, he hasn’t called twice since the day of the press conference.

Instead, she feels something squeeze in her chest as she reaches down with an unexpected, haunted smile.

��Jane,” she says, putting the phone to her ear. “How is Dubai.”