West Wing FF: Secret Messages in the Carved-Out Spaces (Sam/Toby, PG-13)
Title: Secret Messages in the Carved-Out Spaces
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Sam/Toby
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 2,000 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Spoilers: Very few. I suppose Season 1 and any backstory is fair-game.
Summary/AN: Written for tww_minis for raedbard who wanted:
Character you'd like paired with Sam: Toby, in a UST or outright slashy way, whichever the writer feels more comfortable with.
2 or 3 elements you'd like included in the story: the State of the Union, possesion, apples
2 elements you *don't* want in the story: people from outside the West Wing/White House
Rating Preference: anything that fits the story, although hints of smut are gratefully received in this pairing.
This is set during the writing of the first SotU, which is causing me canon problems. SotU in S2 is the third, as in the episode title, but as these things are in January that puts the first just after the Inauguration - is that right? Curse my Northern-Irishness! Anything time-line that's off probably comes from that. Also, unbetaed, for the only person who might have done so is Em, for whom it is for. Twas ever thus. I hope it fits what you wanted, at least in part!
Sam’s face glowed in the dim lamp-light. He squinted at the page as if the words had twisted into something else since he had written them.
Toby watched him from the doorway. Sam was standing hunched over the desk with his coat half-on. But he had found the time to put his glasses on and crumple up yet more paper since his last purge. Although that had been forty-five minutes ago, and accompanied by a wave and a ‘Night, Toby’.
“Sam,” he said quietly.
Sam looked up from the page. “Toby? I thought you had left already.”
“Really? So your Bob Cratchitt look is for whose benefit?”
“Toby...”
“I think the White House can afford to pay its electricity bills.” He flicked the light on and off a few times.
Sam winced and shielded his eyes.
“What... what are you still doing here, Sam?”
He gestured vaguely through the glass at the board, still covered in Toby’s frustrated ‘We’re nowhere’. In fairness to Sam, Toby acknowledged that these workaholic tendencies were just the latest symptoms of a suffering they had shared the last few weeks. Though Toby’s suffering tended to be louder and inflicted on all of the unfortunates in the communications department. And Josh, when he was foolish enough to get in the way. A televised national address and a messy almost-divorce were not conducive to making nice.
“Sam,” he tried again. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at this.”
“The board?”
“It started with the board, Toby, and then it kind of progressed.” Sam nodded down at his desk, and in the detritus of papers, books and vitamins, Toby saw the green.
“The apple is what distracted you from going home and getting the sleep you so clearly require? Seriously, Sam, you sound drunk.”
“I was looking at the apple, Toby, and honestly, I forgot what it was for.”
“The apple.”
“Yes.”
“You forgot what it was for.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not drunk.”
“No. Toby, I was looking at it, and all I could think about was apple-imagery.”
“Apple-imagery?” He was curious in spite of himself. “Garden of Eden imagery, or keeps the doctor away imagery?” The second was perhaps a little kitsch, though the President might get away with it. The other seemed rather apocalyptic for their first State of the Union.
“Eden,” Sam answered and Toby wondered if the White House was the garden or what was left afterwards. Something about the State of the Union made him tend towards the latter. All their optimism was in the speech already - for each other they had only frenzied yelling and dark sarcasm. And those shining moments, too rare and never mentioned, when one would reach for a word and find the other had it waiting. He glossed over those, more fate-tempting evidence that together they were going to be good at this. Sam lifted the notes on the desk and waved them at Toby. “Just... well knowledge essentially, I think it was connected to the education section, but of course it’s all sacrilege so it’s not actually usable.”
Toby reached over to take the page, usable or not, but Sam clutched them to his chest. It was strange enough that Toby had to fight the urge not to grab for them, to see what Sam was hiding. Sam’s habit, now that they had been working together long enough for him to have one, was to fill in the spaces in between Toby’s words. Sometimes, of course, he filled the space with a phrase perfect and singing and completely the opposite of the language they had agreed on. And they would argue with each other, and then the President and Josh and Leo, and then the House Democrats. And eventually, sometimes, Sam would win, and they would rewrite policy under the cover of speechwriting and feel a little like co-conspirators for getting away with it. But sometimes Toby would have to be the one that slapped Sam down because his leftist edges hadn’t been eroded even by the campaign. For this, their first State of the Union address, Toby must have rejected thousands of Sam’s suggested words already. So he was curious, and a little reluctantly hurt, that Sam would keep these words for himself.
But then Sam bestowed on him another slow, tired-drunk blink. Toby wondered at Josh not finding Sam first, not sending him home when he was obviously flagging. But then he had banned Josh from the bullpen when he looked through his window to see Sam bombarding Josh with balled up paper. He had been taking Sam’s side even before it was explained that Josh had joked about writers’ block. If it had been Toby, worse than paper would have been thrown. There were things that you just didn’t say in the middle of speechwriting. They could throw barbs at each other, about Sam’s imagery - of which apples had not been the first - or Toby’s repetition - because Sam had more faith in their viewers’ intelligence than he did. Josh wasn’t one of them and he should have known better than to try and get involved. His own genius did not rest in such a fragile balance of sparkling poetry and the hidden rules behind it. Sam’s frame of mind had taken a knock at Josh’s words and did not seem to have recovered.
Toby placed a hand on Sam’s shoulder, catching him as he shied away again. “Home,” he instructed gruffly. “I’ll drive you.”
As Toby steered him out of the room Sam turned his head in question. Toby smoothed a hand over Sam’s shoulder and patted it awkwardly. Sam leant into the touch and submitted to being led to Toby’s car.
* * * *
This was their first big speech since the Inaugural, and back then they had all still been crashing in hotels and each other’s apartments. He had never had to drive Sam home before, snatching the keys from him because it was one a.m. and it was too damn cold to wait for Sam’s fumbling fingers to find the right ones.
Sam had just smiled blearily at him, still not really awake, and Toby followed him into the apartment to make sure he made it to the bed. On the way to the bedroom Sam turned and whispered something against his neck. He pulled back a little to let Sam repeat it. Sam had discarded his coat and jacket as soon as he got in, and there was just the thin layer of bright white shirt between Toby’s hand and the warmth of Sam’s back. He traced the jut of the bone lightly, and waited for Sam to say whatever had caused him to smile his moment of brilliance.
Sam glared, and Toby knew the missing words were probably important.
“Sam?”
“The moment has passed, Toby,” he answered.
Toby wasn’t a writer for nothing and ‘moment’ was not a word you used about speechwriting. He gestured an impatient hand at Sam, who covered up the pocket he had stuffed the paper in before. “Sam! Don’t make me drag it out of you. While you take a White House pay-check I own every word in your head.”
Sam looked as though he might dispute that, but Toby knew it was true. Or it should be true, and if he brushed past these things, sometimes he could make Sam believe them. He didn’t need to fear depending on Sam as long as he knew that Sam’s words were all his.
“Thanks, was what I was going to say. For driving me home.”
You’re lying was what Toby was going to say, but Sam listed into him again, and for all that Sam seemed drunk, in reality he wasn’t. And his legendary clumsiness wasn’t an excuse for the soft whisper in Toby’s ear. Toby read between the lines.
Then it was Toby who allowed himself to be led, winding, into Sam’s bedroom. He stopped talking, and Sam was only talking to himself now. It was selfishness, but he wanted these words too. Sam rambled nonsense phrases, laughing or smiling or some mixture of the two, warm and loving against Toby’s shoulder. Long fingers (ink stained clichés) tapped an impassioned rhythm on Toby’s right hip, the other hand stroking counterpoint against his stomach. Toby’s own hands were grasping onto Sam’s waist, pulling Sam into him in a rhythm all of his own.
Afterwards, when Sam leant his head on Toby’s shoulder to sleep, he whispered something else. Toby turned his head to make Sam speak up, and Sam inched closer to repeat it against Toby’s mouth - fierce and intent and Toby could not make out a word. And he knew knew that these were important, because all of Sam’s words were precious and consequential and he savoured their taste but he needed to hear them.
Sam nodded his forehead to Toby’s as if they had agreed on something, though Toby had not spoken and Sam had not been understood.
And then Sam did speak, audible finally, “Night, Toby.” And it was like ‘Thanks for bringing me home’ and apples and all of Sam’s other codes because Toby owned all of Sam’s words but the ones between the two of them.
* * * *
These were yet more words that Sam couldn’t say, but this time Toby knew exactly what they were. Knew that they couldn’t do this again, that it would end their careers, and that neither of them would swap the White House for anything. And he supposed, acknowledging that, that it really was no wonder that his wife had left him and Sam’s fiancée had broken up with him over the phone. The words they gave the President could change the world; there was no room in between that for words to give anyone else, even each other.
They couldn’t do this. But the next morning Sam turned up in Toby’s office and walked up to the board. With great ceremony, he wiped it clean again, and handed Toby the marker. He smiled, boyish and white-toothed, and Toby had been meeting that smile with own - helpless, under his beard and hand - since the first week of their partnership.
“Sam?”
Sam reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He passed them to Toby who took them silently. Toby flicked through them, all in Sam’s curled script. The word knowledge jumped out at him, in the middle of a paragraph stating sharply that it was not an evil. He thought of apples. For Sam it was not forbidden fruit but knowledge. He had been right when he said it would be called sacrilege.
Ten pages, front and back. Roughly two thousand words which had belonged to Sam and now belonged to both of them. These ones could perhaps inspire the ones they still owed the president, but for now they were just for him and Sam. The President wouldn’t be able to use the ones implying the fall from Eden was a good thing anyway. Toby folded them up again and placed them into his own pocket.
The knowledge of Sam’s mouth breathing words into his own. Against the fact that they had risked scandal, that they could not do this again. That he was barely out of a marriage, not yet formally divorced. The knowledge that Sam’s words did not all belong to Toby but Sam would give them to him anyway. That, though last night was a one-time thing, he could see them doing this until the impossible happened and they both ran out of words.
He drew the lines on the board again, dividing it into a grid and copying down the headings. Sam had sprawled on the couch, pen held in his hand expectantly. Just waiting for Toby to hand him a topic. Then he would fill more pages, and so would Toby, and they would swap, and rewrite, and cross out each others’ favourite phrases, and cobble it together. And that was another word that would only ever be used in their own heads because he could feel finally that this speech was going to be good. That the President would read it, and Toby’s words would be Sam’s and Sam’s Toby’s, because no one could tell them apart but each other. For the moment though, there was just Sam, waiting for Toby to give him the word.
FIN :-)
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Sam/Toby
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 2,000 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Spoilers: Very few. I suppose Season 1 and any backstory is fair-game.
Summary/AN: Written for tww_minis for raedbard who wanted:
Character you'd like paired with Sam: Toby, in a UST or outright slashy way, whichever the writer feels more comfortable with.
2 or 3 elements you'd like included in the story: the State of the Union, possesion, apples
2 elements you *don't* want in the story: people from outside the West Wing/White House
Rating Preference: anything that fits the story, although hints of smut are gratefully received in this pairing.
This is set during the writing of the first SotU, which is causing me canon problems. SotU in S2 is the third, as in the episode title, but as these things are in January that puts the first just after the Inauguration - is that right? Curse my Northern-Irishness! Anything time-line that's off probably comes from that. Also, unbetaed, for the only person who might have done so is Em, for whom it is for. Twas ever thus. I hope it fits what you wanted, at least in part!
Sam’s face glowed in the dim lamp-light. He squinted at the page as if the words had twisted into something else since he had written them.
Toby watched him from the doorway. Sam was standing hunched over the desk with his coat half-on. But he had found the time to put his glasses on and crumple up yet more paper since his last purge. Although that had been forty-five minutes ago, and accompanied by a wave and a ‘Night, Toby’.
“Sam,” he said quietly.
Sam looked up from the page. “Toby? I thought you had left already.”
“Really? So your Bob Cratchitt look is for whose benefit?”
“Toby...”
“I think the White House can afford to pay its electricity bills.” He flicked the light on and off a few times.
Sam winced and shielded his eyes.
“What... what are you still doing here, Sam?”
He gestured vaguely through the glass at the board, still covered in Toby’s frustrated ‘We’re nowhere’. In fairness to Sam, Toby acknowledged that these workaholic tendencies were just the latest symptoms of a suffering they had shared the last few weeks. Though Toby’s suffering tended to be louder and inflicted on all of the unfortunates in the communications department. And Josh, when he was foolish enough to get in the way. A televised national address and a messy almost-divorce were not conducive to making nice.
“Sam,” he tried again. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at this.”
“The board?”
“It started with the board, Toby, and then it kind of progressed.” Sam nodded down at his desk, and in the detritus of papers, books and vitamins, Toby saw the green.
“The apple is what distracted you from going home and getting the sleep you so clearly require? Seriously, Sam, you sound drunk.”
“I was looking at the apple, Toby, and honestly, I forgot what it was for.”
“The apple.”
“Yes.”
“You forgot what it was for.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not drunk.”
“No. Toby, I was looking at it, and all I could think about was apple-imagery.”
“Apple-imagery?” He was curious in spite of himself. “Garden of Eden imagery, or keeps the doctor away imagery?” The second was perhaps a little kitsch, though the President might get away with it. The other seemed rather apocalyptic for their first State of the Union.
“Eden,” Sam answered and Toby wondered if the White House was the garden or what was left afterwards. Something about the State of the Union made him tend towards the latter. All their optimism was in the speech already - for each other they had only frenzied yelling and dark sarcasm. And those shining moments, too rare and never mentioned, when one would reach for a word and find the other had it waiting. He glossed over those, more fate-tempting evidence that together they were going to be good at this. Sam lifted the notes on the desk and waved them at Toby. “Just... well knowledge essentially, I think it was connected to the education section, but of course it’s all sacrilege so it’s not actually usable.”
Toby reached over to take the page, usable or not, but Sam clutched them to his chest. It was strange enough that Toby had to fight the urge not to grab for them, to see what Sam was hiding. Sam’s habit, now that they had been working together long enough for him to have one, was to fill in the spaces in between Toby’s words. Sometimes, of course, he filled the space with a phrase perfect and singing and completely the opposite of the language they had agreed on. And they would argue with each other, and then the President and Josh and Leo, and then the House Democrats. And eventually, sometimes, Sam would win, and they would rewrite policy under the cover of speechwriting and feel a little like co-conspirators for getting away with it. But sometimes Toby would have to be the one that slapped Sam down because his leftist edges hadn’t been eroded even by the campaign. For this, their first State of the Union address, Toby must have rejected thousands of Sam’s suggested words already. So he was curious, and a little reluctantly hurt, that Sam would keep these words for himself.
But then Sam bestowed on him another slow, tired-drunk blink. Toby wondered at Josh not finding Sam first, not sending him home when he was obviously flagging. But then he had banned Josh from the bullpen when he looked through his window to see Sam bombarding Josh with balled up paper. He had been taking Sam’s side even before it was explained that Josh had joked about writers’ block. If it had been Toby, worse than paper would have been thrown. There were things that you just didn’t say in the middle of speechwriting. They could throw barbs at each other, about Sam’s imagery - of which apples had not been the first - or Toby’s repetition - because Sam had more faith in their viewers’ intelligence than he did. Josh wasn’t one of them and he should have known better than to try and get involved. His own genius did not rest in such a fragile balance of sparkling poetry and the hidden rules behind it. Sam’s frame of mind had taken a knock at Josh’s words and did not seem to have recovered.
Toby placed a hand on Sam’s shoulder, catching him as he shied away again. “Home,” he instructed gruffly. “I’ll drive you.”
As Toby steered him out of the room Sam turned his head in question. Toby smoothed a hand over Sam’s shoulder and patted it awkwardly. Sam leant into the touch and submitted to being led to Toby’s car.
* * * *
This was their first big speech since the Inaugural, and back then they had all still been crashing in hotels and each other’s apartments. He had never had to drive Sam home before, snatching the keys from him because it was one a.m. and it was too damn cold to wait for Sam’s fumbling fingers to find the right ones.
Sam had just smiled blearily at him, still not really awake, and Toby followed him into the apartment to make sure he made it to the bed. On the way to the bedroom Sam turned and whispered something against his neck. He pulled back a little to let Sam repeat it. Sam had discarded his coat and jacket as soon as he got in, and there was just the thin layer of bright white shirt between Toby’s hand and the warmth of Sam’s back. He traced the jut of the bone lightly, and waited for Sam to say whatever had caused him to smile his moment of brilliance.
Sam glared, and Toby knew the missing words were probably important.
“Sam?”
“The moment has passed, Toby,” he answered.
Toby wasn’t a writer for nothing and ‘moment’ was not a word you used about speechwriting. He gestured an impatient hand at Sam, who covered up the pocket he had stuffed the paper in before. “Sam! Don’t make me drag it out of you. While you take a White House pay-check I own every word in your head.”
Sam looked as though he might dispute that, but Toby knew it was true. Or it should be true, and if he brushed past these things, sometimes he could make Sam believe them. He didn’t need to fear depending on Sam as long as he knew that Sam’s words were all his.
“Thanks, was what I was going to say. For driving me home.”
You’re lying was what Toby was going to say, but Sam listed into him again, and for all that Sam seemed drunk, in reality he wasn’t. And his legendary clumsiness wasn’t an excuse for the soft whisper in Toby’s ear. Toby read between the lines.
Then it was Toby who allowed himself to be led, winding, into Sam’s bedroom. He stopped talking, and Sam was only talking to himself now. It was selfishness, but he wanted these words too. Sam rambled nonsense phrases, laughing or smiling or some mixture of the two, warm and loving against Toby’s shoulder. Long fingers (ink stained clichés) tapped an impassioned rhythm on Toby’s right hip, the other hand stroking counterpoint against his stomach. Toby’s own hands were grasping onto Sam’s waist, pulling Sam into him in a rhythm all of his own.
Afterwards, when Sam leant his head on Toby’s shoulder to sleep, he whispered something else. Toby turned his head to make Sam speak up, and Sam inched closer to repeat it against Toby’s mouth - fierce and intent and Toby could not make out a word. And he knew knew that these were important, because all of Sam’s words were precious and consequential and he savoured their taste but he needed to hear them.
Sam nodded his forehead to Toby’s as if they had agreed on something, though Toby had not spoken and Sam had not been understood.
And then Sam did speak, audible finally, “Night, Toby.” And it was like ‘Thanks for bringing me home’ and apples and all of Sam’s other codes because Toby owned all of Sam’s words but the ones between the two of them.
* * * *
These were yet more words that Sam couldn’t say, but this time Toby knew exactly what they were. Knew that they couldn’t do this again, that it would end their careers, and that neither of them would swap the White House for anything. And he supposed, acknowledging that, that it really was no wonder that his wife had left him and Sam’s fiancée had broken up with him over the phone. The words they gave the President could change the world; there was no room in between that for words to give anyone else, even each other.
They couldn’t do this. But the next morning Sam turned up in Toby’s office and walked up to the board. With great ceremony, he wiped it clean again, and handed Toby the marker. He smiled, boyish and white-toothed, and Toby had been meeting that smile with own - helpless, under his beard and hand - since the first week of their partnership.
“Sam?”
Sam reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. He passed them to Toby who took them silently. Toby flicked through them, all in Sam’s curled script. The word knowledge jumped out at him, in the middle of a paragraph stating sharply that it was not an evil. He thought of apples. For Sam it was not forbidden fruit but knowledge. He had been right when he said it would be called sacrilege.
Ten pages, front and back. Roughly two thousand words which had belonged to Sam and now belonged to both of them. These ones could perhaps inspire the ones they still owed the president, but for now they were just for him and Sam. The President wouldn’t be able to use the ones implying the fall from Eden was a good thing anyway. Toby folded them up again and placed them into his own pocket.
The knowledge of Sam’s mouth breathing words into his own. Against the fact that they had risked scandal, that they could not do this again. That he was barely out of a marriage, not yet formally divorced. The knowledge that Sam’s words did not all belong to Toby but Sam would give them to him anyway. That, though last night was a one-time thing, he could see them doing this until the impossible happened and they both ran out of words.
He drew the lines on the board again, dividing it into a grid and copying down the headings. Sam had sprawled on the couch, pen held in his hand expectantly. Just waiting for Toby to hand him a topic. Then he would fill more pages, and so would Toby, and they would swap, and rewrite, and cross out each others’ favourite phrases, and cobble it together. And that was another word that would only ever be used in their own heads because he could feel finally that this speech was going to be good. That the President would read it, and Toby’s words would be Sam’s and Sam’s Toby’s, because no one could tell them apart but each other. For the moment though, there was just Sam, waiting for Toby to give him the word.
FIN :-)