West Wing FF: Writ large and more clear (Toby&Molly, PG)
Title: Writ large and more clear
Fandom: The West Wing
Characters: Toby&Molly
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Fluffy drama
Length: 500 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells. Molly belongs to Toby, because she is a Daddy's girl.
Spoilers: S1-7
Summary/AN: Molly is worrying them both a little.
For raedbard, because as long as she writes Huck I can write Molly. Just written, and no wait after the read-through, so lord knows what I've written.
Molly is worrying them both a little. Andy is worried about Huck as well, but Toby recognises his son’s silence from his own youth, and for the moment is not alarmed. Later, perhaps, if it becomes something he cannot explain away with genetics and himself as a male role-model. Molly’s anxiety is something different, and he holds himself liable even before her mother’s unspoken accusation.
Toby is the one to make Huck speak, asking him questions to draw him out into hesitant conversation. Molly, conversely, cannot seem to cope with silence, and he does not know why, or how to answer her four-year-old chatter at her level. Her glare when he crosses this line he can’t see is worthy of her mother. Toby worries, thoughts he knows it to be nonsensical, that she has picked up on their family dynamic. It was the silences about the important things that killed him and Andy.
When he acts on this, brushes a kiss over her hair and whispers his love, she calls it back happily and wraps her arms around him. But her lip is still marked where tiny white teeth niggle at it.
For the longest time he does not connect her sudden fear of the dark to everything else. It is such a normal thing for a child, seeming separate from her grown-up fear of the silences that lurk in their homes. Yet it happens more at his apartment than Andy’s house, which makes him guilty and then puzzled. There are fewer rooms in his apartment, and there are nightlights and lamps everywhere. Still she finds herself in his bedroom, in the living-room late at night, and - for thirty heart-stopping seconds of shrieking - closed in the closet.
She breaks the silences with screaming, and he is opening the door to find his baby-girl calling for him desperately, arms outstretched for him to sweep her up. He understands, with a deep and painful ache in his chest, that she is not crying because she is afraid of the dark. She is crying because she is afraid that in the silence he has left her, and will not come to her rescue. He does not know what she hears in the whispers in the quiet places, whether it is the recriminations that he and Andy hide there, or the voices he knows only too well from his own nightmares. Each time her cries are muted, not by the light when the door opens, but in the second before that, when the handle creaks down and he calls her name. He makes her happy just by proving to her that he is still there; it is the least anyone he loves has ever required.
“Daddy, daddy, daddy,” she chants against his ribs, as if by incantation she can push the words through his skin and onto his heart. As if they are not there already, writ large and more clear than any others.
Andrea can be the one who tells her to be brave and teaches her how to rescue herself. That isn’t a lesson for her Daddy to give, he is too careful of her tender heart to risk it, even when she will need to discover hurt. Instead he holds her close, singing half-remembered lullabies and reassuring her quiet form that her father will always save her from the monsters.
FIN. *hugs Molly*
Fandom: The West Wing
Characters: Toby&Molly
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Fluffy drama
Length: 500 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells. Molly belongs to Toby, because she is a Daddy's girl.
Spoilers: S1-7
Summary/AN: Molly is worrying them both a little.
For raedbard, because as long as she writes Huck I can write Molly. Just written, and no wait after the read-through, so lord knows what I've written.
Molly is worrying them both a little. Andy is worried about Huck as well, but Toby recognises his son’s silence from his own youth, and for the moment is not alarmed. Later, perhaps, if it becomes something he cannot explain away with genetics and himself as a male role-model. Molly’s anxiety is something different, and he holds himself liable even before her mother’s unspoken accusation.
Toby is the one to make Huck speak, asking him questions to draw him out into hesitant conversation. Molly, conversely, cannot seem to cope with silence, and he does not know why, or how to answer her four-year-old chatter at her level. Her glare when he crosses this line he can’t see is worthy of her mother. Toby worries, thoughts he knows it to be nonsensical, that she has picked up on their family dynamic. It was the silences about the important things that killed him and Andy.
When he acts on this, brushes a kiss over her hair and whispers his love, she calls it back happily and wraps her arms around him. But her lip is still marked where tiny white teeth niggle at it.
For the longest time he does not connect her sudden fear of the dark to everything else. It is such a normal thing for a child, seeming separate from her grown-up fear of the silences that lurk in their homes. Yet it happens more at his apartment than Andy’s house, which makes him guilty and then puzzled. There are fewer rooms in his apartment, and there are nightlights and lamps everywhere. Still she finds herself in his bedroom, in the living-room late at night, and - for thirty heart-stopping seconds of shrieking - closed in the closet.
She breaks the silences with screaming, and he is opening the door to find his baby-girl calling for him desperately, arms outstretched for him to sweep her up. He understands, with a deep and painful ache in his chest, that she is not crying because she is afraid of the dark. She is crying because she is afraid that in the silence he has left her, and will not come to her rescue. He does not know what she hears in the whispers in the quiet places, whether it is the recriminations that he and Andy hide there, or the voices he knows only too well from his own nightmares. Each time her cries are muted, not by the light when the door opens, but in the second before that, when the handle creaks down and he calls her name. He makes her happy just by proving to her that he is still there; it is the least anyone he loves has ever required.
“Daddy, daddy, daddy,” she chants against his ribs, as if by incantation she can push the words through his skin and onto his heart. As if they are not there already, writ large and more clear than any others.
Andrea can be the one who tells her to be brave and teaches her how to rescue herself. That isn’t a lesson for her Daddy to give, he is too careful of her tender heart to risk it, even when she will need to discover hurt. Instead he holds her close, singing half-remembered lullabies and reassuring her quiet form that her father will always save her from the monsters.
FIN. *hugs Molly*