West Wing FF: Stars that clear (have been dead for years) [gen, R]
Title: Stars that clear (have been dead for years)
Fandom: West Wing
Characters: Toby, Josh (Sam, Will, CJ, background CJ/Danny and past canon pairings)
Rating: R
Genre: Angst
Length: 5,700 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Warnings/Spoilers: Potential spoilers to end of S4. Character deaths and violence
Summary: This was the only way to win a war of attrition
AN: For the West Wing Dystopia Ficathon at futureisours with thanks to raedbard and blockycurvature for organising. This fic comes, under my own tenuous categorisation, under 2. [wo]man vs. man and 7. [wo]man vs. god/religion
He was shoved against the wall. Blood began to trickle lazily from the back of his head. Toby raised a hand to block Josh’s fist.
“You said you would fix it,” Josh shouted, screamed.
“I tried.”
“Not hard enough.”
Josh’s eyes were wet as he tried, again, to land the punch. Toby had wept only once since this all began - he had nothing left in him to give, not even now. He could not take any more sorrow, so he was glad that Josh had a little to spare. For himself, he willingly took the blood onto his hands; they were already drenched, and anyway he would not give this loss to anyone else to bear.
The newspaper was waved in his face like the evidence of his guilt, as if Toby was in need of such things.
“They’re leading with the part about him refusing a priest. Not that he was murdered, but that he was godless as well as a criminal. What kind of…” Josh slumped, finally, and fell bodily against Toby’s shoulder.
Toby took the newspaper. Sam was too bruised, and too thin, and Toby could not recognise the look on his face. Terrorist leader executed, the headline read. It was fear, he suspected, in the back of Sam’s eyes, blue and shocking still in cheap print.
“He wanted…” Toby tried to say.
“Don’t dare try and tell me this was what he wanted,” Josh answered harshly, breath hot against Toby’s neck. “He was scared.”
“Not too scared to do it,” Toby said, although Josh was right.
“He was scared of dying. I’m scared of fucking dying, Toby, but I would have risked it if you could have just…”
“There was no way, Josh. You think I didn’t try? You think I wasn’t standing outside the building trying to think of a way? Up until I heard them cheering, I was trying to think of a way. He told me not to risk our people to get him out.”
“You spoke to him?” Josh twisted back out of Toby’s grip.
“No. Before. We had… we had plans, Josh. You knew this was a possibility.”
“I didn’t know he knew.”
“Josh.”
Josh had stopped shaking. He took long slow breaths, his collar damp with sweat and tears. Toby caught him around the shoulders, as gently as he could manage; careful with one as penitence for losing the other. It was not Sam who had not known, and it was not Sam they kept the plans from. Before this had all happened, Toby had not thought it would be Sam who shifted the fastest to pragmatism. Their leader, younger and handsome, and all too recognisable when the patrols came looking. He was the one who came to Toby with lists in his curved-up handwriting, orders for what to do when something went wrong. The last rule, the one that Toby had only broken on his death, when all rules ceased to apply, was ‘don’t tell Josh’.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “We need to get back.”
“Now?”
“Where else do you want to go?”
Josh looked down the alleyway towards the prison.
“They’ll burn his body,” Toby said.
“It’s not right.”
“We couldn’t save him. Saving his corpse won’t help.”
“Toby.”
“No, Josh. We need to get back. If we get caught here…” He tucked Josh under his arm, though Josh was the taller of the two of them, and steered them back towards the station. Nobody met their eyes, and he didn’t know if it was because of their obvious distress or because these strangers knew what had caused it and didn’t want to risk involvement.
Their stop was the last, although it had not always been. Because of the ‘risk of insurgents’, public transport would not venture too close to the Mall. So they made their own way back to the pale ruins. It was only stone, Toby knew that, like the broken spire which used to cast a shadow over this building. This building which had, in its own way, dominated the city before all this.
He ducked under the broken gate and steered Josh through the wilderness of grass and roses. There were two entrances they had not blocked up, and a guard at each, though no one had ever come looking for them here. It was not that their location was a mystery - it was common knowledge that they were somewhere in the area. It was simply that it was not known exactly where, and the authorities did not care enough to look where no one but they would make a refuge, surrounded by a mass grave. The raids were on the meeting places, not where they slept and lived and ate. Some days Toby suspected it was a challenge. If only they were willing to live out the rest of their lives as feral relics of a dead world, days like today would never happen.
CJ met them at the door. Her face was red from crying, but already dry.
“Josh,” she said.
He gave Josh to her keeping, because he would be safer there than with Toby, who was only capable of loss.
Toby walked down the steps, down into the basements that he had not known so well before - back when there were still rooms upstairs, and not only rubble. The corridor was long, but he walked it without interruption. The little room had been for him and Sam; it was his alone now.
He stood in its centre with a balled fist over his eyes. He was a widower twice over. He had lost two children, a status which neither his two languages nor his former profession had given him words for. And he was this, whatever this might be. Grief piled on top of grief until there was nothing left but to be buried under it, here in the ruins.
Toby walked to the wall.
“There’s better pictures,” Josh said, startling him. “Pictures that aren’t like that.”
Toby stopped, frozen in the movement of pinning the article to the wall with the others. It would not be the only photograph of someone he had known and lost. Not even the only of someone he had loved and heard die. He pinned the picture carefully to the wall, in the middle of the others. “Pictures like this remind us why.”
* * * *
Morning dawned pink and clear, like an insult. Like a joke Josh wasn’t able to laugh at. His back creaked and popped when he stood up. The second thing he saw was the wall.
He didn’t know if Sam or Toby had started it. It seemed more like something Sam would do, but maybe that was the Sam of Josh’s memory. The first Sam of Josh’s memory. Josh scanned his eyes over the wall quickly, avoiding the captured images of a white smile, warm brown eyes, of a flash of blonde hair.
Toby looked at him from his desk. “Coffee on… On the other desk.”
“Yeah? Yeah. So that’s… We just… Yeah.”
Toby looked, for a moment, as if he was going to respond. When he finally spoke, it was only to say, “CJ’s turn to go out.”
“I’ll go.”
“Josh.”
“It’s fine, I’ll go.”
Someone needed to go and talk to their people, because they had not trusted the phones since this had happened. They knew, better than almost anyone else, that lines could be tapped and communications traced and more than that, it was meant to be an empty building. They stole electricity, enough to get by, so long as the lights could not be seen. There were a few living with them who wouldn’t register on the database, and who could work without being arrested. But most of them might as well be legally dead, for all the good their I.D would do them. Josh, at least, would not be arrested unless someone thought to look him up. He and Toby and CJ had remained, to this point, off the ‘arrest on sight’ list.
The walk did not take long enough, and so he waited in the entranceway to hold onto a minute of nothingness. There was a facsimile of old normality in these rooms, with the relentless clatter of the typewriters, and the hum of low voices punctuated by an occasional yell. He closed his eyes and leant by the doorway for a moment, breathing in ink and sweat.
“Josh,” Danny called.
Josh nodded back, the pretence over.
Danny put a hand on Josh’s arm. “Listen, man, I’m sorry.”
“We’re all sorry.”
“You wanna say anything?”
“You mean…?”
“I mean for when I report this in a way that doesn’t demean my profession.”
“You saw?”
“I saw. So if you want to say anything… Anonymous, of course.”
“Everything you print is anonymous.”
“Not true: I make sure Hartley gets credited for everything.”
“Normally preceded by: ‘self-styled President Hartley’.”
“True. So…?”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Josh.”
“It’s not… there aren’t words, Danny. Toby has…” He handed Danny the folder of pages that Toby had trusted to his care. “Some stuff he wanted to say, some stuff of Sam’s. Old speeches, that kind of thing. Whatever background you need. But I…”
Danny nodded, and took the paper from him. “You’re sure?”
“Just tell the truth.”
Half-smiling, Danny said, “You know that’ll get me arrested?”
“What won’t, these days? We’re all just trying to go out doing something.”
“He did, Josh,” Danny said. “You know that, right?”
Josh nodded silently. There was no room to believe anything else and still walk back to that office.
* * * *
Nowadays the conversations were marked by absences more than presence. The passing of time could be judged by the shrinking of the pauses while they waited for the dead to speak.
This loss was new - it was the first of the third wave - and so Josh expected long pauses. But there, in the middle of one such silence, a quiet voice spoke up.
“Who are you?” Josh asked.
Toby answered for the young man hiding behind his glasses, “This is Will.”
“Will?”
“Yes,” the stranger said. “Will Bailey.”
“Do I know you?”
“He was one of Sam’s,” Toby said. And that should have been all: that Sam had approved. But Sam was not here, and this man was, and the two facts tripped over themselves in Josh’s head, tied together. They were still reading notes in Sam’s handwriting in calendars, no one had yet broached the subject of who would take his meetings, but now someone else filled in his place in the conversation.
Josh loomed over Will until the other man looked up from his papers and met the hostile gaze. Josh kept the eye contact, but addressed his question to the rest of the room. “Somebody vetted him?”
“Sam did.”
“Can somebody prove that?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Toby glared. “Me. Anything else?”
“I’m not saying his name, his job, his hair colour, I’m saying can we trust him? Because right now-”
“Josh!”
“Because right now, we need to know who our friends are!”
Will Bailey stood up. “Mr Lyman. My name is Will Bailey, my father was General Thomas Bailey. I met Sam after I was arrested. We coordinated a defence which, while ultimately unsuccessful, lead to a dialogue which continued after I was released and until his-”
“Execution?”
“His murder.”
Josh looked at Will properly. “What were you arrested for?”
“I led a protest.”
“Of what?”
“Of the twenty-eighth amendment, the illegal actions of an illegal administration, and the false histories being taught in our schools.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Okay. On with the meeting.”
“I don’t understand.”
Josh glared. “I was saying I was satisfied with your explanation. You’re making me regret that.”
Will had raised himself off his seat with one hand, but at Josh’s words he settled down again. He exhaled heavily, and held the nib of his pen to his notebook, waiting.
CJ coughed, and smiled a little, and said, “So. Mike to go to New York then?”
* * * *
Toby slammed Josh’s skull against the floor. Will was faster to move, and dived to the ground under his own power.
Gunshots were fired into the ceiling and plaster fell like snow. There was a long still moment. Josh could feel Toby’s pulse where thumbs were pressed into his neck, holding him down, palms spread out to cover his head.
He risked the turn of his head to watch Will, who was flat on the ground, utterly still. When he looked the other way, he could see the knife lying between him and the table leg, close and out of focus. The coffeehouse was full of people, even in this purportedly criminal area of an already condemned neighbourhood, and nobody moved.
Boots moved into his vision - regulation riot gear. If he looked up he would see body armour, an unused baton, and the hovering end of a shotgun.
Toby was dragged to his feet. Above Josh’s head he heard mutterings about the list, and arrest policy. He slid his hand towards the knife.
He heard the dull wet noise as a punch was aimed at Toby’s stomach, and then a kick at his chest.
There was just enough room between the boot and the leg to plunge the blunt knife into. There was a yell, a shot, and a sickening cut-off scream. Josh was pulled under the table before it was knocked sideways. Will had a gun in his hand and the man who would have arrested Toby had a bullet lodged in his neck.
Toby’s fingers around Josh’s wrist were tight enough to make the bones crunch, dragging him from one fallen table to another, following Will to the kitchen door.
They made it out, barely, with shouts and footsteps fading into the distance behind them.
“Can I say something?” Will asked, when they were back in Toby’s office. There was an edge of laughter in his voice which was, frankly, a little disturbing. He continued, “This never happens to CJ.”
“You realise you’re mocking our close encounter with the bullet end of a shotgun?” Josh asked.
“It was that or rock back and forth in the corner and I did that last time. Anyway, my point.”
“There was a point?” Toby asked.
Will focussed. “It should be CJ.”
“Excuse me?”
“CJ could make this work.”
Will jumped back into a conversation they had been having and trying not to have for three weeks. Their plans had never included what to do with Sam gone. Even if they had (dark thought that had lain at the back of Toby’s heavy look on that day, I knew this would happen) it had never been CJ. Josh thought the reason they had not spoken about it was that Toby would say Josh, and he would say Toby. That they had not considered the third part of their small triumvirate shamed him, when she was so often the best of them. Toby took responsibility because he trusted no one else with it, Josh because Sam had needed to be lifted up. CJ simply did what they needed her to do, with one of the few smiles left in the building. They just hadn’t thought.
Will was looking at them, waiting for a response.
Toby nodded. “Ask her.”
“I think it would be better coming from…”
“In a minute,” Josh said. “Go feel her out for us.”
When Will left the office, Toby sat down heavily, holding his side. Josh stood, useless, by his chair. He uncurled and curled his fist, trying to steel himself to reach out.
CJ came through the door, bearing ice and with an expression that promised more violence.
Will trailed behind her. “I just said…” he began.
Josh nodded. It was no surprise.
She knelt down beside Toby, wincing at the red-purple bruising she exposed when she lifted his shirt. CJ held the icepack to his chest and ignored his protest. “This is why I can’t let you boys out of my sight,” she complained.
Toby lifted his chin and looked up at her. It was most of an expression that Josh recognised, an amused affection seldom bestowed on anyone but her. The other part was the expression before Sam, or after Andy; the precious things lost or losing.
CJ touched Toby’s elbow. “What is it?”
“We need to talk to you.”
* * * *
CJ was different. She made people laugh, in the middle of meetings about protests and national coordination. And they trusted her, in the way they would never do with Toby or Josh, who were respected and feared, but not simply liked on first meeting. CJ stood at the front, with Danny watching from the first row, and persuaded undecideds that their mission was winnable.
Josh knew all that. It was just that, well, Josh wasn’t so sure anymore. And he didn’t understand how Toby, who viewed each of CJ’s semi-public appearances with suspicion, could nod at her afterwards and say, “Good job.”
He would go into details afterwards, about how she should have mentioned one thing, or not have emphasised another, but the essential message was always the same. Good and we can do better.
“I just don’t think we should ignore…” Josh said, after one such post-game show.
“Josh,” Toby interrupted.
Josh talked over Toby’s next words, “don’t think we should ignore that we’re worse off than we were three months ago. We need to acknowledge that Sam-”. He cut himself off this time, forever missing the words to finish that sentence.
“Can we have a minute?” Toby asked, and the room cleared. CJ may have been leader, but Toby was boss. Toby was arbiter of disputes, and it was his view of what Sam Seaborn had or hadn’t been that would become official history. He had the language to make it so.
“Don’t make him what he wasn’t,” Toby said.
“Don’t make him less.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing, Josh? Because I won’t call him the blessed messiah?”
It was something a little like that. There were no atheists in foxholes and Josh had never been short of capacity to worship. Toby was a better Jew and Toby understood that messiahs didn’t emerge and disappear; there was only a two-person chain of those who had failed half-way through the mission. Josh, though, had watched over and over again, as those he loved gave up their lives instead of him. Sam was the sacrifice and Josh was the saved, the last in a long line. Josh would make it the last.
“He wasn’t a figure-head,” Josh said.
“No,” Toby agreed.
“He was…”
“Not to us. He wasn’t that to us, Josh.”
Sam hadn’t walked into the enemy’s midst and overthrown the tables. He hadn’t been angry at the destruction of their year-old kingdom, though he would rant and rage about the misspellings in their police files. He could direct emissaries across the country but needed hazard tape to stop him tripping down the steps into his office.
“If it wasn’t for him…”
“You would be here,” Toby answered, his quietness a blow. “You would be exactly where you are now and so would I. This is what we chose.”
“It’s what they chose.”
“That too.” Us more, lay unspoken at the end of Toby’s pseudo-agreement. There was life out there - not the life they would have chosen but life nonetheless. Love and marriage and children and work, and Josh could have had that. Toby had less, by then, that was worth keeping silent for. Josh was the adaptable one, the one who made things work. But he had not been satisfied with what they were left with, by their own more than any outside forces. So he had spoke out, stood up, and chose the life of ash and wreckage. For all that Sam had been, he wasn’t responsible for that.
“What do you want from me?”
“I need you with me. I need you behind CJ, and with me and Will.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Josh took Toby’s hand in a clumsy shake, more of a clasping; a brother’s bond rather than a gentleman’s agreement. This was what they had left, and they would make it enough.
* * * *
Sparks flew and they were running short on time. Josh leant over Toby's shoulder. Toby turned around and glared.
Josh just leant closer, and eventually poked a wire dubiously. "You're meant to be Communications and you can't figure this out?"
"Yes, because while leading seventeen unsuccessful campaigns, stealing cable came up all the time."
CJ laughter preceded her into the room. She sat on the sagging couch and planted her feet deliberately in Danny's lap. “Boys.” Her hair fell over the arm of the chair, escaping from its scarf, and she looked happy. Josh smiled at her.
Stolen merchandise made its way in, supported by Will. He managed to balance the bowl of chips on the broken filing cabinet serving as a table. “Does anyone else find this very strange?”
“Empires rise and fall but the Subway Series continues on?” Josh checked.
“Yeah.”
“Nope.” Josh’s rebuttal was echoed around the room.
Fictional stakes were high, with the Yankees dominance undiminished with the passage of years. The crowds (mostly white, and rich, and with an unblotted security record) assembled in Yankee Stadium, now isolated in the middle of a blasted skyline. The last game any of them attended in person was ten years ago, and it had been seven since any money had changed hands. Josh owed Toby seventeen thousand imaginary dollars, but CJ was well ahead with winnings approaching fifty thousand. Sam had kept the scores.
Toby tossed a ball of paper at Josh’s head. “Double or nothing. Yanks by six.”
Josh fumbled the black notebook from his jacket pocket. The columns were drawn up precisely, with clean strikes through the missing or dead. He wrote, as neatly as he could manage: NYM at NYY, Game 1/3.
Midway through extra innings, a distant bang shook the glass in the window. There was a brief and terrified flurry of activity, until CJ laughed, quick and golden. “It’s the Fourth of July. It’s the fucking Fourth of July, Josh, it’s fireworks.”
They went outside to marvel at the lightshow that for once should have held no fear. But red light above skyscrapers would always look like this now, like a world aflame.
CJ walked towards him, swaying. In the background, louder than the fireworks, he could hear the Mets lose again. CJ draped her arms around his waist and sang, “Dance with me,” into his ear.
There was no music, and so they stepped from foot to foot to the beat of the explosions. Josh closed his eyes, and through his eyelids could only see the colours: red and blue and gold.
* * * *
Three hours before, Josh had asked, “Where’s CJ?”
She had spent the day with Danny, but she should have been back. She wouldn’t spend the night out without telling them.
Toby had gone to the door, saying nothing to Josh. He had called Mike over from his post by the door. “Pass the word that we’re looking for CJ.”
Three hours later, with her absence caught between the two of them, a snag in an already unravelled universe, Josh stopped working. “CJ’s not back.”
“No.”
“I’m saying… I’m saying, she’s not back, Toby.”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“We need…”
“Yeah. Come with me.”
The walk was long and dark, with only the rare unbroken streetlamps casting puddles of light. It was quiet, but it was always quiet now. The grey crawl of foreboding had been a constant since the first day, when the beginning of the end had come without warning.
There was no-one there. Just silent typewriters and a still press. A blotted stain on the carpet that looked black and wet, spreading under the couch where CJ sat to watch Danny write.
Toby stopped, stock still.
There was a noise, right on the edge of hearing, and they were both running. Heedless of their black silhouettes under the lamps and the thud of leather soles on the sidewalk. Josh thought, in the red space left by lack of oxygen and a wound that never healed entirely, that maybe this time they would make it. This time they could run fast enough and far enough and jerk themselves awake.
The first time had been just the same: he had made the journey to the White House on foot, unbelieving until he had seen the smoke and heard the screaming. This time the White House was sanctuary, but it was a temple holding too few believers. Some day soon it would be him and Toby, back to back while the last of the oil burnt out.
It all came out later. Jason had been by the window and dived out, earning a fracture and scrapes and shame. How Danny had shielded CJ with his body, unknowingly sentencing her to share a punishment meant only for him, the rabble-rouser. The subsequent open fire had been scattered, leaving escapees to pass the message on.
The official news talked only of armed rebels killed in a police raid, mentioning sedition and a den of sexual perversion. If Danny was the agitator, CJ must have been the prostitute, and there was no photograph of either.
After three days, Josh found a photo in her abandoned office - the two of them on a couch on one of the days between the first and second wave. Mallory would have been the one who took it, her or Zoey. Josh pinned it up and didn’t look at Toby. ‘Why’ seemed farther and farther away when all it got them was more reasons pinned to an overcrowded wall.
* * * *
With message received loud and clear, they did nothing for weeks. It was something like being back at the beginning - they locked themselves in one room, lying close and almost silent, watched over by the dead.
Will did this some nights. He woke up with shallow knife-sharp breaths and said, “Sometimes I think I died there.”
Toby did not turn - he never did - though Josh could see that he was awake. His spine was held too rigidly for sleep, and his breathing too measured. Josh had known what Will would say even before he whispered it into the dark. Knowing did not provide him a response, but it hadn’t done so the first ten or fifteen times either. They did not talk about this in the daytime, so there was no way of knowing the right words to say, and anyway that was Toby’s domain.
Toby got up and walked to his desk. His pen scratched across the pages making a thousand wasted words he could have used to help Will. Josh, who stared at a point left of Will’s taut shoulder, similarly said nothing.
Eventually, Will’s eyes closed, though sleep was still some way off. It was only then, when Will turned over, facing where Toby wasn’t, that Josh touched him. He squeezed Will’s arm lightly and did not say that it would get better.
They were long past expectation and nearly as long past hope. Against his fingertips were only the remnants left when everything else was gone. Will could not be convinced that there was an innocent explanation for his release, when so many others had never made it out. He offered up accounts that ran from buried tracking devices to hypnotic suggestion, and nothing would persuade him that it was simply a lucky accident. That he had been arrested and sentenced in that small period between bad and worse, that his co-conspirators had mostly been students tearing pages from their textbooks, and that he was too low down the list to be worthy of a public execution. A few months later, when his life would have been more tangled with Sam’s, and the real witch-hunts had begun, Will Bailey would have been just another picture on their wall. And - the new guilt Will held in his heart - perhaps CJ Cregg would not have been made leader and would not have died that afternoon.
The country was populated with orphans and widows and brothers who had been suddenly rendered only children. Josh wondered if they all woke up with Will’s conviction that a world that left them so alone could only be purgatory. He did not believe in divine retribution on earth, but going to hell in a handbasket wandered into his mind every now and then. It was all just an effort to make sense of the nonsensical. Punishment may be cruel, but it was seldom arbitrary. In these days, they took the small comforts of an ordered world, even one that reeked of fire and brimstone.
* * * *
The telephone rang. Everyone froze.
Toby lifted the receiver. “Ziegler.”
The voice on the other end fractured and reassembled in the wrong order. The codes were old, and never used, drawn up after the second and before the third. They didn’t have time. “How long?” he asked.
“Two, maybe three-. We’ll try-. Out.”
Josh, standing by the door, said nothing. Will had found his way to the office, though no one had yet thought to send for him. Toby looked up and caught Josh’s eye for a brief second on the way to Dave’s. “Clear the building. Twos and threes, rear and side exits.”
“Toby,” Josh said, as Dave went running.
“Give me a minute.” Toby reached for a page, and began to write. Fifty states, fifty names, fifty codes. Lose the thirteen of those Josh and Will already knew. Codeword to translate the few hundred words into something indecipherable to any eyes but these. He folded the paper into thirds and pressed it into Josh’s hand. “Sagittarius.”
“Toby!”
“Take Will and get out of here.”
“No.” “No.”
The chorus surprised him. He ignored it. “Maryland. Get to Maryland and find Sarah. She’ll get you clear.”
Josh shoved him against the wall. Toby lifted his head and held his hands awkwardly by his sides. No challenge, but no movement either. Josh was proud, and afraid, and dressed the two in virtue. Toby understood that very well.
The story had never been his - it belonged to Josh, and Toby’s only duty was to ensure it continued to be told. Josh would never forgive him, but Toby had no need of pardon. Only this: his hand rising to Josh’s shoulder, pushing him towards the door, and the moment when Josh stopped struggling.
With no fight left, they stood watching each other.
Toby spoke. “You know I can’t leave.”
“Yeah.”
“They know me. That was why, in the coffeehouse. They don’t know you two.”
“Yes.”
“I need you and Will to get out.” The roles switched so quickly they blurred. Will is the disciple now - the one left to write the gospel history of blood and death, and turn it into meaning. But he is also the prophet who must take that message out into the world, until enough believe it that they have no more need of heralds.
Josh, though, must always be himself - he who stood in the middle of the carnage unscathed. There must always be someone to raise up the one who comes after, and help them into the fray. This last act was a bloodless one, but Toby would bear the guilt of it.
There would be no chance afterwards, so he asked before. “I’m sorry, Josh.”
“Yeah,” was not forgiveness, but he had not expected that to be granted. It mattered only that he asked, and that this stain, at least, was wiped from his muddied slate.
So he did not take it as absolution when Josh gripped tightly and tugged at his arms. His own hands pulled up around Josh’s shoulders and lay there, still. There was no show of back-patting or last minute instructions; it was simply the formal goodbye they had both thought better than to get.
He held out a hand to Will and received a quick, fierce embrace. “You could still…” Will said.
“No.”
On the way out of the door, it was Will who looked back, not Josh. Toby nodded again. He knew what certainty was: that he loved his children, that Jed Bartlet was a good man, that words could change the world. This was certainty. Will left, and Toby heard Josh’s steps falter, only for a second, on the path up the corridor and away from there.
Toby walked the empty corridors alone, making one last check, as befitted the captain of a sinking ship. Rooms had been abandoned in the middle of meals, sex, poker, and two separate chess matches. But the building was empty.
He caught his reflection in a blank television screen, and it took a moment to place the expression. So Sam had not been afraid after all. It was an unexpected boon.
The telephone rang. No calls in fifteen years, and then two in three hours.
“Ziegler,” he said, and his voice was steady.
“The grounds are surrounded. Get your people to come out with their hands up.”
“I’m sorry, but no. Sam says to tell you that we drank the Kool Aid.”
He could hear murmuring, as if the man had covered the receiver with his hand. Evoking the name of a ghost would have that effect on the ones who murdered him. The last reference was not one they would understand, but it made no difference. His last words would be misquoted anyway, and these people are not worth wasting better ones on.
The final timer clicked, and he imagined he could hear it. They would not be able to miss the sky catching fire - a self-immolation the Vikings would be proud of. It would do better than language for this purpose. The words would return later, he knew, and do what had been asked of them even after all those years in waiting. Josh would keep them safe, and bring them home when it was time.
FIN
AN2: Title from Bright Eyes song, "We Are Nowhere and it's now"
The full line is: You see stars that clear have been dead for years/But the idea just lives on
Feedback is always lovely.
Fandom: West Wing
Characters: Toby, Josh (Sam, Will, CJ, background CJ/Danny and past canon pairings)
Rating: R
Genre: Angst
Length: 5,700 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Warnings/Spoilers: Potential spoilers to end of S4. Character deaths and violence
Summary: This was the only way to win a war of attrition
AN: For the West Wing Dystopia Ficathon at futureisours with thanks to raedbard and blockycurvature for organising. This fic comes, under my own tenuous categorisation, under 2. [wo]man vs. man and 7. [wo]man vs. god/religion
He was shoved against the wall. Blood began to trickle lazily from the back of his head. Toby raised a hand to block Josh’s fist.
“You said you would fix it,” Josh shouted, screamed.
“I tried.”
“Not hard enough.”
Josh’s eyes were wet as he tried, again, to land the punch. Toby had wept only once since this all began - he had nothing left in him to give, not even now. He could not take any more sorrow, so he was glad that Josh had a little to spare. For himself, he willingly took the blood onto his hands; they were already drenched, and anyway he would not give this loss to anyone else to bear.
The newspaper was waved in his face like the evidence of his guilt, as if Toby was in need of such things.
“They’re leading with the part about him refusing a priest. Not that he was murdered, but that he was godless as well as a criminal. What kind of…” Josh slumped, finally, and fell bodily against Toby’s shoulder.
Toby took the newspaper. Sam was too bruised, and too thin, and Toby could not recognise the look on his face. Terrorist leader executed, the headline read. It was fear, he suspected, in the back of Sam’s eyes, blue and shocking still in cheap print.
“He wanted…” Toby tried to say.
“Don’t dare try and tell me this was what he wanted,” Josh answered harshly, breath hot against Toby’s neck. “He was scared.”
“Not too scared to do it,” Toby said, although Josh was right.
“He was scared of dying. I’m scared of fucking dying, Toby, but I would have risked it if you could have just…”
“There was no way, Josh. You think I didn’t try? You think I wasn’t standing outside the building trying to think of a way? Up until I heard them cheering, I was trying to think of a way. He told me not to risk our people to get him out.”
“You spoke to him?” Josh twisted back out of Toby’s grip.
“No. Before. We had… we had plans, Josh. You knew this was a possibility.”
“I didn’t know he knew.”
“Josh.”
Josh had stopped shaking. He took long slow breaths, his collar damp with sweat and tears. Toby caught him around the shoulders, as gently as he could manage; careful with one as penitence for losing the other. It was not Sam who had not known, and it was not Sam they kept the plans from. Before this had all happened, Toby had not thought it would be Sam who shifted the fastest to pragmatism. Their leader, younger and handsome, and all too recognisable when the patrols came looking. He was the one who came to Toby with lists in his curved-up handwriting, orders for what to do when something went wrong. The last rule, the one that Toby had only broken on his death, when all rules ceased to apply, was ‘don’t tell Josh’.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “We need to get back.”
“Now?”
“Where else do you want to go?”
Josh looked down the alleyway towards the prison.
“They’ll burn his body,” Toby said.
“It’s not right.”
“We couldn’t save him. Saving his corpse won’t help.”
“Toby.”
“No, Josh. We need to get back. If we get caught here…” He tucked Josh under his arm, though Josh was the taller of the two of them, and steered them back towards the station. Nobody met their eyes, and he didn’t know if it was because of their obvious distress or because these strangers knew what had caused it and didn’t want to risk involvement.
Their stop was the last, although it had not always been. Because of the ‘risk of insurgents’, public transport would not venture too close to the Mall. So they made their own way back to the pale ruins. It was only stone, Toby knew that, like the broken spire which used to cast a shadow over this building. This building which had, in its own way, dominated the city before all this.
He ducked under the broken gate and steered Josh through the wilderness of grass and roses. There were two entrances they had not blocked up, and a guard at each, though no one had ever come looking for them here. It was not that their location was a mystery - it was common knowledge that they were somewhere in the area. It was simply that it was not known exactly where, and the authorities did not care enough to look where no one but they would make a refuge, surrounded by a mass grave. The raids were on the meeting places, not where they slept and lived and ate. Some days Toby suspected it was a challenge. If only they were willing to live out the rest of their lives as feral relics of a dead world, days like today would never happen.
CJ met them at the door. Her face was red from crying, but already dry.
“Josh,” she said.
He gave Josh to her keeping, because he would be safer there than with Toby, who was only capable of loss.
Toby walked down the steps, down into the basements that he had not known so well before - back when there were still rooms upstairs, and not only rubble. The corridor was long, but he walked it without interruption. The little room had been for him and Sam; it was his alone now.
He stood in its centre with a balled fist over his eyes. He was a widower twice over. He had lost two children, a status which neither his two languages nor his former profession had given him words for. And he was this, whatever this might be. Grief piled on top of grief until there was nothing left but to be buried under it, here in the ruins.
Toby walked to the wall.
“There’s better pictures,” Josh said, startling him. “Pictures that aren’t like that.”
Toby stopped, frozen in the movement of pinning the article to the wall with the others. It would not be the only photograph of someone he had known and lost. Not even the only of someone he had loved and heard die. He pinned the picture carefully to the wall, in the middle of the others. “Pictures like this remind us why.”
* * * *
Morning dawned pink and clear, like an insult. Like a joke Josh wasn’t able to laugh at. His back creaked and popped when he stood up. The second thing he saw was the wall.
He didn’t know if Sam or Toby had started it. It seemed more like something Sam would do, but maybe that was the Sam of Josh’s memory. The first Sam of Josh’s memory. Josh scanned his eyes over the wall quickly, avoiding the captured images of a white smile, warm brown eyes, of a flash of blonde hair.
Toby looked at him from his desk. “Coffee on… On the other desk.”
“Yeah? Yeah. So that’s… We just… Yeah.”
Toby looked, for a moment, as if he was going to respond. When he finally spoke, it was only to say, “CJ’s turn to go out.”
“I’ll go.”
“Josh.”
“It’s fine, I’ll go.”
Someone needed to go and talk to their people, because they had not trusted the phones since this had happened. They knew, better than almost anyone else, that lines could be tapped and communications traced and more than that, it was meant to be an empty building. They stole electricity, enough to get by, so long as the lights could not be seen. There were a few living with them who wouldn’t register on the database, and who could work without being arrested. But most of them might as well be legally dead, for all the good their I.D would do them. Josh, at least, would not be arrested unless someone thought to look him up. He and Toby and CJ had remained, to this point, off the ‘arrest on sight’ list.
The walk did not take long enough, and so he waited in the entranceway to hold onto a minute of nothingness. There was a facsimile of old normality in these rooms, with the relentless clatter of the typewriters, and the hum of low voices punctuated by an occasional yell. He closed his eyes and leant by the doorway for a moment, breathing in ink and sweat.
“Josh,” Danny called.
Josh nodded back, the pretence over.
Danny put a hand on Josh’s arm. “Listen, man, I’m sorry.”
“We’re all sorry.”
“You wanna say anything?”
“You mean…?”
“I mean for when I report this in a way that doesn’t demean my profession.”
“You saw?”
“I saw. So if you want to say anything… Anonymous, of course.”
“Everything you print is anonymous.”
“Not true: I make sure Hartley gets credited for everything.”
“Normally preceded by: ‘self-styled President Hartley’.”
“True. So…?”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Josh.”
“It’s not… there aren’t words, Danny. Toby has…” He handed Danny the folder of pages that Toby had trusted to his care. “Some stuff he wanted to say, some stuff of Sam’s. Old speeches, that kind of thing. Whatever background you need. But I…”
Danny nodded, and took the paper from him. “You’re sure?”
“Just tell the truth.”
Half-smiling, Danny said, “You know that’ll get me arrested?”
“What won’t, these days? We’re all just trying to go out doing something.”
“He did, Josh,” Danny said. “You know that, right?”
Josh nodded silently. There was no room to believe anything else and still walk back to that office.
* * * *
Nowadays the conversations were marked by absences more than presence. The passing of time could be judged by the shrinking of the pauses while they waited for the dead to speak.
This loss was new - it was the first of the third wave - and so Josh expected long pauses. But there, in the middle of one such silence, a quiet voice spoke up.
“Who are you?” Josh asked.
Toby answered for the young man hiding behind his glasses, “This is Will.”
“Will?”
“Yes,” the stranger said. “Will Bailey.”
“Do I know you?”
“He was one of Sam’s,” Toby said. And that should have been all: that Sam had approved. But Sam was not here, and this man was, and the two facts tripped over themselves in Josh’s head, tied together. They were still reading notes in Sam’s handwriting in calendars, no one had yet broached the subject of who would take his meetings, but now someone else filled in his place in the conversation.
Josh loomed over Will until the other man looked up from his papers and met the hostile gaze. Josh kept the eye contact, but addressed his question to the rest of the room. “Somebody vetted him?”
“Sam did.”
“Can somebody prove that?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Toby glared. “Me. Anything else?”
“I’m not saying his name, his job, his hair colour, I’m saying can we trust him? Because right now-”
“Josh!”
“Because right now, we need to know who our friends are!”
Will Bailey stood up. “Mr Lyman. My name is Will Bailey, my father was General Thomas Bailey. I met Sam after I was arrested. We coordinated a defence which, while ultimately unsuccessful, lead to a dialogue which continued after I was released and until his-”
“Execution?”
“His murder.”
Josh looked at Will properly. “What were you arrested for?”
“I led a protest.”
“Of what?”
“Of the twenty-eighth amendment, the illegal actions of an illegal administration, and the false histories being taught in our schools.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Okay. On with the meeting.”
“I don’t understand.”
Josh glared. “I was saying I was satisfied with your explanation. You’re making me regret that.”
Will had raised himself off his seat with one hand, but at Josh’s words he settled down again. He exhaled heavily, and held the nib of his pen to his notebook, waiting.
CJ coughed, and smiled a little, and said, “So. Mike to go to New York then?”
* * * *
Toby slammed Josh’s skull against the floor. Will was faster to move, and dived to the ground under his own power.
Gunshots were fired into the ceiling and plaster fell like snow. There was a long still moment. Josh could feel Toby’s pulse where thumbs were pressed into his neck, holding him down, palms spread out to cover his head.
He risked the turn of his head to watch Will, who was flat on the ground, utterly still. When he looked the other way, he could see the knife lying between him and the table leg, close and out of focus. The coffeehouse was full of people, even in this purportedly criminal area of an already condemned neighbourhood, and nobody moved.
Boots moved into his vision - regulation riot gear. If he looked up he would see body armour, an unused baton, and the hovering end of a shotgun.
Toby was dragged to his feet. Above Josh’s head he heard mutterings about the list, and arrest policy. He slid his hand towards the knife.
He heard the dull wet noise as a punch was aimed at Toby’s stomach, and then a kick at his chest.
There was just enough room between the boot and the leg to plunge the blunt knife into. There was a yell, a shot, and a sickening cut-off scream. Josh was pulled under the table before it was knocked sideways. Will had a gun in his hand and the man who would have arrested Toby had a bullet lodged in his neck.
Toby’s fingers around Josh’s wrist were tight enough to make the bones crunch, dragging him from one fallen table to another, following Will to the kitchen door.
They made it out, barely, with shouts and footsteps fading into the distance behind them.
“Can I say something?” Will asked, when they were back in Toby’s office. There was an edge of laughter in his voice which was, frankly, a little disturbing. He continued, “This never happens to CJ.”
“You realise you’re mocking our close encounter with the bullet end of a shotgun?” Josh asked.
“It was that or rock back and forth in the corner and I did that last time. Anyway, my point.”
“There was a point?” Toby asked.
Will focussed. “It should be CJ.”
“Excuse me?”
“CJ could make this work.”
Will jumped back into a conversation they had been having and trying not to have for three weeks. Their plans had never included what to do with Sam gone. Even if they had (dark thought that had lain at the back of Toby’s heavy look on that day, I knew this would happen) it had never been CJ. Josh thought the reason they had not spoken about it was that Toby would say Josh, and he would say Toby. That they had not considered the third part of their small triumvirate shamed him, when she was so often the best of them. Toby took responsibility because he trusted no one else with it, Josh because Sam had needed to be lifted up. CJ simply did what they needed her to do, with one of the few smiles left in the building. They just hadn’t thought.
Will was looking at them, waiting for a response.
Toby nodded. “Ask her.”
“I think it would be better coming from…”
“In a minute,” Josh said. “Go feel her out for us.”
When Will left the office, Toby sat down heavily, holding his side. Josh stood, useless, by his chair. He uncurled and curled his fist, trying to steel himself to reach out.
CJ came through the door, bearing ice and with an expression that promised more violence.
Will trailed behind her. “I just said…” he began.
Josh nodded. It was no surprise.
She knelt down beside Toby, wincing at the red-purple bruising she exposed when she lifted his shirt. CJ held the icepack to his chest and ignored his protest. “This is why I can’t let you boys out of my sight,” she complained.
Toby lifted his chin and looked up at her. It was most of an expression that Josh recognised, an amused affection seldom bestowed on anyone but her. The other part was the expression before Sam, or after Andy; the precious things lost or losing.
CJ touched Toby’s elbow. “What is it?”
“We need to talk to you.”
* * * *
CJ was different. She made people laugh, in the middle of meetings about protests and national coordination. And they trusted her, in the way they would never do with Toby or Josh, who were respected and feared, but not simply liked on first meeting. CJ stood at the front, with Danny watching from the first row, and persuaded undecideds that their mission was winnable.
Josh knew all that. It was just that, well, Josh wasn’t so sure anymore. And he didn’t understand how Toby, who viewed each of CJ’s semi-public appearances with suspicion, could nod at her afterwards and say, “Good job.”
He would go into details afterwards, about how she should have mentioned one thing, or not have emphasised another, but the essential message was always the same. Good and we can do better.
“I just don’t think we should ignore…” Josh said, after one such post-game show.
“Josh,” Toby interrupted.
Josh talked over Toby’s next words, “don’t think we should ignore that we’re worse off than we were three months ago. We need to acknowledge that Sam-”. He cut himself off this time, forever missing the words to finish that sentence.
“Can we have a minute?” Toby asked, and the room cleared. CJ may have been leader, but Toby was boss. Toby was arbiter of disputes, and it was his view of what Sam Seaborn had or hadn’t been that would become official history. He had the language to make it so.
“Don’t make him what he wasn’t,” Toby said.
“Don’t make him less.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing, Josh? Because I won’t call him the blessed messiah?”
It was something a little like that. There were no atheists in foxholes and Josh had never been short of capacity to worship. Toby was a better Jew and Toby understood that messiahs didn’t emerge and disappear; there was only a two-person chain of those who had failed half-way through the mission. Josh, though, had watched over and over again, as those he loved gave up their lives instead of him. Sam was the sacrifice and Josh was the saved, the last in a long line. Josh would make it the last.
“He wasn’t a figure-head,” Josh said.
“No,” Toby agreed.
“He was…”
“Not to us. He wasn’t that to us, Josh.”
Sam hadn’t walked into the enemy’s midst and overthrown the tables. He hadn’t been angry at the destruction of their year-old kingdom, though he would rant and rage about the misspellings in their police files. He could direct emissaries across the country but needed hazard tape to stop him tripping down the steps into his office.
“If it wasn’t for him…”
“You would be here,” Toby answered, his quietness a blow. “You would be exactly where you are now and so would I. This is what we chose.”
“It’s what they chose.”
“That too.” Us more, lay unspoken at the end of Toby’s pseudo-agreement. There was life out there - not the life they would have chosen but life nonetheless. Love and marriage and children and work, and Josh could have had that. Toby had less, by then, that was worth keeping silent for. Josh was the adaptable one, the one who made things work. But he had not been satisfied with what they were left with, by their own more than any outside forces. So he had spoke out, stood up, and chose the life of ash and wreckage. For all that Sam had been, he wasn’t responsible for that.
“What do you want from me?”
“I need you with me. I need you behind CJ, and with me and Will.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Josh took Toby’s hand in a clumsy shake, more of a clasping; a brother’s bond rather than a gentleman’s agreement. This was what they had left, and they would make it enough.
* * * *
Sparks flew and they were running short on time. Josh leant over Toby's shoulder. Toby turned around and glared.
Josh just leant closer, and eventually poked a wire dubiously. "You're meant to be Communications and you can't figure this out?"
"Yes, because while leading seventeen unsuccessful campaigns, stealing cable came up all the time."
CJ laughter preceded her into the room. She sat on the sagging couch and planted her feet deliberately in Danny's lap. “Boys.” Her hair fell over the arm of the chair, escaping from its scarf, and she looked happy. Josh smiled at her.
Stolen merchandise made its way in, supported by Will. He managed to balance the bowl of chips on the broken filing cabinet serving as a table. “Does anyone else find this very strange?”
“Empires rise and fall but the Subway Series continues on?” Josh checked.
“Yeah.”
“Nope.” Josh’s rebuttal was echoed around the room.
Fictional stakes were high, with the Yankees dominance undiminished with the passage of years. The crowds (mostly white, and rich, and with an unblotted security record) assembled in Yankee Stadium, now isolated in the middle of a blasted skyline. The last game any of them attended in person was ten years ago, and it had been seven since any money had changed hands. Josh owed Toby seventeen thousand imaginary dollars, but CJ was well ahead with winnings approaching fifty thousand. Sam had kept the scores.
Toby tossed a ball of paper at Josh’s head. “Double or nothing. Yanks by six.”
Josh fumbled the black notebook from his jacket pocket. The columns were drawn up precisely, with clean strikes through the missing or dead. He wrote, as neatly as he could manage: NYM at NYY, Game 1/3.
Midway through extra innings, a distant bang shook the glass in the window. There was a brief and terrified flurry of activity, until CJ laughed, quick and golden. “It’s the Fourth of July. It’s the fucking Fourth of July, Josh, it’s fireworks.”
They went outside to marvel at the lightshow that for once should have held no fear. But red light above skyscrapers would always look like this now, like a world aflame.
CJ walked towards him, swaying. In the background, louder than the fireworks, he could hear the Mets lose again. CJ draped her arms around his waist and sang, “Dance with me,” into his ear.
There was no music, and so they stepped from foot to foot to the beat of the explosions. Josh closed his eyes, and through his eyelids could only see the colours: red and blue and gold.
* * * *
Three hours before, Josh had asked, “Where’s CJ?”
She had spent the day with Danny, but she should have been back. She wouldn’t spend the night out without telling them.
Toby had gone to the door, saying nothing to Josh. He had called Mike over from his post by the door. “Pass the word that we’re looking for CJ.”
Three hours later, with her absence caught between the two of them, a snag in an already unravelled universe, Josh stopped working. “CJ’s not back.”
“No.”
“I’m saying… I’m saying, she’s not back, Toby.”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“We need…”
“Yeah. Come with me.”
The walk was long and dark, with only the rare unbroken streetlamps casting puddles of light. It was quiet, but it was always quiet now. The grey crawl of foreboding had been a constant since the first day, when the beginning of the end had come without warning.
There was no-one there. Just silent typewriters and a still press. A blotted stain on the carpet that looked black and wet, spreading under the couch where CJ sat to watch Danny write.
Toby stopped, stock still.
There was a noise, right on the edge of hearing, and they were both running. Heedless of their black silhouettes under the lamps and the thud of leather soles on the sidewalk. Josh thought, in the red space left by lack of oxygen and a wound that never healed entirely, that maybe this time they would make it. This time they could run fast enough and far enough and jerk themselves awake.
The first time had been just the same: he had made the journey to the White House on foot, unbelieving until he had seen the smoke and heard the screaming. This time the White House was sanctuary, but it was a temple holding too few believers. Some day soon it would be him and Toby, back to back while the last of the oil burnt out.
It all came out later. Jason had been by the window and dived out, earning a fracture and scrapes and shame. How Danny had shielded CJ with his body, unknowingly sentencing her to share a punishment meant only for him, the rabble-rouser. The subsequent open fire had been scattered, leaving escapees to pass the message on.
The official news talked only of armed rebels killed in a police raid, mentioning sedition and a den of sexual perversion. If Danny was the agitator, CJ must have been the prostitute, and there was no photograph of either.
After three days, Josh found a photo in her abandoned office - the two of them on a couch on one of the days between the first and second wave. Mallory would have been the one who took it, her or Zoey. Josh pinned it up and didn’t look at Toby. ‘Why’ seemed farther and farther away when all it got them was more reasons pinned to an overcrowded wall.
* * * *
With message received loud and clear, they did nothing for weeks. It was something like being back at the beginning - they locked themselves in one room, lying close and almost silent, watched over by the dead.
Will did this some nights. He woke up with shallow knife-sharp breaths and said, “Sometimes I think I died there.”
Toby did not turn - he never did - though Josh could see that he was awake. His spine was held too rigidly for sleep, and his breathing too measured. Josh had known what Will would say even before he whispered it into the dark. Knowing did not provide him a response, but it hadn’t done so the first ten or fifteen times either. They did not talk about this in the daytime, so there was no way of knowing the right words to say, and anyway that was Toby’s domain.
Toby got up and walked to his desk. His pen scratched across the pages making a thousand wasted words he could have used to help Will. Josh, who stared at a point left of Will’s taut shoulder, similarly said nothing.
Eventually, Will’s eyes closed, though sleep was still some way off. It was only then, when Will turned over, facing where Toby wasn’t, that Josh touched him. He squeezed Will’s arm lightly and did not say that it would get better.
They were long past expectation and nearly as long past hope. Against his fingertips were only the remnants left when everything else was gone. Will could not be convinced that there was an innocent explanation for his release, when so many others had never made it out. He offered up accounts that ran from buried tracking devices to hypnotic suggestion, and nothing would persuade him that it was simply a lucky accident. That he had been arrested and sentenced in that small period between bad and worse, that his co-conspirators had mostly been students tearing pages from their textbooks, and that he was too low down the list to be worthy of a public execution. A few months later, when his life would have been more tangled with Sam’s, and the real witch-hunts had begun, Will Bailey would have been just another picture on their wall. And - the new guilt Will held in his heart - perhaps CJ Cregg would not have been made leader and would not have died that afternoon.
The country was populated with orphans and widows and brothers who had been suddenly rendered only children. Josh wondered if they all woke up with Will’s conviction that a world that left them so alone could only be purgatory. He did not believe in divine retribution on earth, but going to hell in a handbasket wandered into his mind every now and then. It was all just an effort to make sense of the nonsensical. Punishment may be cruel, but it was seldom arbitrary. In these days, they took the small comforts of an ordered world, even one that reeked of fire and brimstone.
* * * *
The telephone rang. Everyone froze.
Toby lifted the receiver. “Ziegler.”
The voice on the other end fractured and reassembled in the wrong order. The codes were old, and never used, drawn up after the second and before the third. They didn’t have time. “How long?” he asked.
“Two, maybe three-. We’ll try-. Out.”
Josh, standing by the door, said nothing. Will had found his way to the office, though no one had yet thought to send for him. Toby looked up and caught Josh’s eye for a brief second on the way to Dave’s. “Clear the building. Twos and threes, rear and side exits.”
“Toby,” Josh said, as Dave went running.
“Give me a minute.” Toby reached for a page, and began to write. Fifty states, fifty names, fifty codes. Lose the thirteen of those Josh and Will already knew. Codeword to translate the few hundred words into something indecipherable to any eyes but these. He folded the paper into thirds and pressed it into Josh’s hand. “Sagittarius.”
“Toby!”
“Take Will and get out of here.”
“No.” “No.”
The chorus surprised him. He ignored it. “Maryland. Get to Maryland and find Sarah. She’ll get you clear.”
Josh shoved him against the wall. Toby lifted his head and held his hands awkwardly by his sides. No challenge, but no movement either. Josh was proud, and afraid, and dressed the two in virtue. Toby understood that very well.
The story had never been his - it belonged to Josh, and Toby’s only duty was to ensure it continued to be told. Josh would never forgive him, but Toby had no need of pardon. Only this: his hand rising to Josh’s shoulder, pushing him towards the door, and the moment when Josh stopped struggling.
With no fight left, they stood watching each other.
Toby spoke. “You know I can’t leave.”
“Yeah.”
“They know me. That was why, in the coffeehouse. They don’t know you two.”
“Yes.”
“I need you and Will to get out.” The roles switched so quickly they blurred. Will is the disciple now - the one left to write the gospel history of blood and death, and turn it into meaning. But he is also the prophet who must take that message out into the world, until enough believe it that they have no more need of heralds.
Josh, though, must always be himself - he who stood in the middle of the carnage unscathed. There must always be someone to raise up the one who comes after, and help them into the fray. This last act was a bloodless one, but Toby would bear the guilt of it.
There would be no chance afterwards, so he asked before. “I’m sorry, Josh.”
“Yeah,” was not forgiveness, but he had not expected that to be granted. It mattered only that he asked, and that this stain, at least, was wiped from his muddied slate.
So he did not take it as absolution when Josh gripped tightly and tugged at his arms. His own hands pulled up around Josh’s shoulders and lay there, still. There was no show of back-patting or last minute instructions; it was simply the formal goodbye they had both thought better than to get.
He held out a hand to Will and received a quick, fierce embrace. “You could still…” Will said.
“No.”
On the way out of the door, it was Will who looked back, not Josh. Toby nodded again. He knew what certainty was: that he loved his children, that Jed Bartlet was a good man, that words could change the world. This was certainty. Will left, and Toby heard Josh’s steps falter, only for a second, on the path up the corridor and away from there.
Toby walked the empty corridors alone, making one last check, as befitted the captain of a sinking ship. Rooms had been abandoned in the middle of meals, sex, poker, and two separate chess matches. But the building was empty.
He caught his reflection in a blank television screen, and it took a moment to place the expression. So Sam had not been afraid after all. It was an unexpected boon.
The telephone rang. No calls in fifteen years, and then two in three hours.
“Ziegler,” he said, and his voice was steady.
“The grounds are surrounded. Get your people to come out with their hands up.”
“I’m sorry, but no. Sam says to tell you that we drank the Kool Aid.”
He could hear murmuring, as if the man had covered the receiver with his hand. Evoking the name of a ghost would have that effect on the ones who murdered him. The last reference was not one they would understand, but it made no difference. His last words would be misquoted anyway, and these people are not worth wasting better ones on.
The final timer clicked, and he imagined he could hear it. They would not be able to miss the sky catching fire - a self-immolation the Vikings would be proud of. It would do better than language for this purpose. The words would return later, he knew, and do what had been asked of them even after all those years in waiting. Josh would keep them safe, and bring them home when it was time.
FIN
AN2: Title from Bright Eyes song, "We Are Nowhere and it's now"
The full line is: You see stars that clear have been dead for years/But the idea just lives on
Feedback is always lovely.