FtF Commentary #4: Demons
Okay, here's the commentary for Further to Fly part four, Demons. Some of this I already had written, since I planned to get onto it fairly quickly when I finished the FtF 3 commentary back in *cough* August 2005. Moving on...
Demons
An obvious name, but also a song title to match the first three stories; it comes from a song by Easyworld (one of my favourite obscure bands), which I picked for the chorus lyric, "Give me all your demons; they don't scare me."
Demons is the first story where we leap ahead a chunk of time; the events of FtF 1-3 actually take place over just three weeks. (And you wonder why Leo was driven to alcohol...) This one is set a further three months down the line.
~ I ~
I opened with a meeting of the White House assistants so I could do a bit of "the story so far" exposition. They're quite useful characters to use because it's almost an outsider POV, but at the same time they're close enough to the action to see practically everything that goes on.
Leo's usual workaholic habits had taken a downturn. Margaret, despite the fact that she'd been agitating for this to happen for years, was deathly worried now it finally had. The others found it hard to tell if this was genuine cause for concern or standard Margaret procedure. They'd all been keeping a surreptitious eye on him, but what might be going on beneath the McGarry surface was a mystery to greater minds than even those that inhabited the White House.
The first nod to what's going on with Leo is fairly minor, because it's a big plot point that Leo is so trusted that no one does really suspect what's going on (which only contributes to how bad he feels about it).
Also, note the use of the word "surreptitious". You'll be seeing that a lot. When I was at junior school we were tortured with had 'creative writing' lessons where we were basically given a topic and a thesaurus and ordered to produce purple prose. (Seriously. Anyone who wrote 'the bubbles rose' would have it scratched out and be sent back to their seat until they came up with 'a myriad shimmering iridescent globules soared into the azure sky'. And no, I'm not exaggerating.) I owe a great debt to them as a writer; by the age of about eight I had both a massive stock of vocabulary words and a very strong aversion to using them in any situation where a shorter, simpler word would do. But nonetheless, a few got stuck in my head, and 'surreptitious' is one of them.
"How do I tell the daughter of the leader of the free world that her bridesmaids' dresses make me look like a walking soufflé?" she groaned. Apparently even the public wedding of the century wasn't immune to the universal curse of godawful bridesmaids' dresses.
"If it's any consolation, CJ hates hers too," Carol offered, as she flipped through a batch of faxes from the press office.
Donna gave her a look. "CJ could wear a black plastic sack and look good in it."
Bonnie nodded seriously, and raised a hand. "The committee declares a moment for its members to be screamingly jealousy of CJ."
They took a moment.
Egad, the dreaded bridesmaid plot! I couldn't believe I was writing it either. But, unfortunately, my alleged 'two-parter with maybe a short sequel to tie up loose ends' morphed into a series, and the plotlines had to progress. (Personally, I'd have been only too happy to skip from FtF 4 to 6 with a quick line of dialogue to cover "Yeah, so, Zoey and Charlie are married now," but I had a feeling some readers wouldn't like that solution as much as I did. So, there had to be a wedding. And FtF 5 became all about that, but "Demons" had to put in a little groundwork before that.)
"What about Sam?" Donna asked, and the two communications assistants giggled.
"It's so cute," Bonnie grinned.
"He and Steve are moving in together this week-" Ginger put in.
"-And they're getting all domestic-"
"-Talking about dinner plates and curtains and towels and bookshelves-"
The main reason I don't get on with the romance genre is that I have no patience for the "Will they, won't they? Does he, doesn't he? What if he doesn't feel the same? I am not worthy of his love! Oh no, now he's dating her! Angst! Jealousy! Kitchen sink! Wacky misunderstandings!" twists and turns. My version tends to involve people getting together in a very matter-of-fact, drama-free way, and then staying together quite happily unless there's a plot-driven reason otherwise.
...I would really suck as a romance writer.
So, yeah, Sam and Steve are moving fairly fast here. But I figured that hey, Sam has so little time for a social life that moving in together is probably their only chance of actually seeing any of each other.
I have no idea why the two of them started talking about Sam and his hypothetical heterosexual porn collection here. I needed Steve to be going through Sam's stuff for a later plot point, I pencilled in a "Sam leaves for work; Steve is packing" scene... this is what came out. Shrug.
Leo stood by the mirror for a long time, staring into eyes he wasn't sure he recognised anymore. He promised himself, as he had promised a half dozen other times these past few months, that this would be the last time.
He knew he was lying.
I like the little Leo scenelet at the end of this chapter. It's short and simple, but it outlines the cycle Leo's fallen back into as much as it needs to. Nice scene. I got a little impatient with the Leo angst moments (I don't have a very high tolerance for that, either) towards the end of this fic, but this one I quite like.
...Huh. These chapters seem really short to me now. (I shifted over to chapters of about 3000 words for my two latest epics.) I still seem to have much the same number of scenes per chapter in FtF as in Pegasus Connection, though; the FtF scenes have a much higher proportion of dialogue to internal thoughts/description, so they come in a lot shorter.
~ II ~
"Isn't this guy supposed to be, like, on our side?" Josh wanted to know.
"Apparently, he's decided to take our policies into account before deciding whether he agrees with us."
"Well, that's a very irresponsible attitude."
"So we need you to meet with Congresswoman Wyatt," CJ told Toby. He looked depressed. "And the British Ambassador." Toby looked considerably more depressed.
The first three instalments of FtF didn't have much international politics. Not so much an oversight as a complete lack of knowledge on my part, but I figured I'd have to go there eventually. I Googled a few keywords, and the foreign aid figures looked interesting enough to spin a storyline out of.
The story involves the UK not because I live here, but because it gave me an excuse to invite Lord Marbury to the party. I love that guy.
Ron gave another military nod. "Secret Service members are ready to accept any risk for their protectee, up to and including their own death."
"But you won't go up against the First Lady?"
He didn't crack a smile. "Up to and including their own death."
Ron Butterfield has such a good straight face that it's fun to give him lines like this where you can't tell if he's joking.
I figured that, given what we know about Jed Bartlet and his "not at all presidential" attitude to vegetables, the new health plan I introduced last story was going to start chafing pretty quickly. Jed's really only a occasional smoker in the series, but, hey, lure of the forbidden and all that.
~ III ~
"They're in that thing slung across your shoulder that you laughingly call a backpack."
Josh gave her a stern look. "You're mocking the backpack?"
"The backpack needs no mocking. The backpack is a collection of threads held together with buckles."
"This backpack, I'll have you know, has seen me through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
"Apparently, you used it as a shield."
I like this line.
Dennis raised a hand. "CJ... with this radical new legislation and the controversial Sex Education pilot scheme, is the administration at all concerned about President Bartlet's increasing reputation as 'the sex president'?"
CJ tried to bury her urge to snicker at that, and didn't quite succeed. "Dennis, I think I can honestly say that that's a conversation I don't anticipate having with... anybody, ever."
And this one. The fun thing about writing fanfiction is that you get to imagine the characters 'performing' it, so even as the writer you get a kind of "in the audience" quality sometimes. And picturing what Allison Janney would do with a line like that is what makes it art.
"I've heard some rumours from a publisher friend about a book on the president's childhood."
"The Rogers thing?" CJ shrugged it away. "Yeah, I've heard of about it. We get about fifteen unofficial biographies every year, it's not a thing."
Katie gave her a look. "Like I say, I've just heard some rumours, but... I think you should probably see about getting an advance copy of this one."
This story marks the start of the biography arc, which runs all the way to part seven. Having named this part Demons, I wanted to focus on more than just Leo's problems; I've been fascinated by Jed's daddy issues since "Two Cathedrals", so I thought I'd see what happened when they were dredged up in a very public manner.
~ IV ~
"Toby."
"Andy." He smiled awkwardly. "You look nice."
"And you look annoyed."
"I was cheerful. Now I am not."
She grinned. "It's good to see you too, Toby." She kissed his cheek briefly, and he reflected that an expression-hiding beard was sometimes a useful thing to have. Especially when you weren't entirely sure what expression it might actually be hiding.
There's so little consensus over the Andi/Andie/Andy spelling that the TWOP forums took to calling her And*. I got the Andy version, masculine overtones though it has, from the Official Companion. On the other hand, I believe Aaron Sorkin himself once typed it in a message board post as "Andi". (On the third hand, oddly endearingly, the evidence of said posts would suggest that not so much for Mr. Sorkin with the spelling, sometimes.) I was already using "Andy", so I stuck with what I had.
I love the Toby/Andy relationship. It's another one, like Jed and Abbey, where there's so much depth and complexity and history to it that it feels extremely real. Opinion is divided on whether Sorkin can write romance (mostly, it seems, divided into "WTF?" and "Seriously, WTF?") but his established relationships are awesome. And those are generally what I'm more interested in anyway.
When I brought Andy back here, I actually had intentions of recycling an old plot from a never-finished-fic where she would end up pregnant after a "for old times' sake" sort of night together. Apparently I built up to it too slowly, because Sorkin got there first, damn him. So I had to flip that plotline on its head and take it somewhere else. I still mourn the loss of CJ's line about "the pitter-patter of tiny Zieglers".
Marbury immediately leapt in to cut him off again. "In 1970, the US paid just three tenths of a percentage point of its GNP in foreign aid. In 1990, it was down to two tenths. Now, it's barely a tenth of one percent. There are twice as many countries classified by the UN as 'least developed' than there were thirty years ago; why, exactly, is the US under the impression that the need for its aid in other parts of the world is decreasing?"
"Nobody's under that impression," Toby grated into the hand he was resting his chin on. "Obviously we want to earmark as much money as possible to help developing nations-"
"Then why all the cuts?" Marbury demanded. Revealing the sharp diplomatic mind behind the drunken playboy exterior, he'd been casually reeling off figures for the best part of an hour without ever stopping to look at notes. "US foreign aid currently stands at eight billion dollars a year; if your country was paying the same proportion of its wealth as it did in 1965, that figure would be nearly fifty billion."
"This isn't 1965," Toby reminded him.
"Thank you for pointing that out, Toby," the ambassador said dryly, "that distinction had quite escaped me. However, the rest of the world is not living in 1965 either, and they continue to allocate much higher percentage of their Gross National Product to overseas aid than you do."
One of the things I love about Marbury is that he comes across so deliberately the drunken playboy, but he's obviously razor sharp beneath it. The figures quoted here are, I believe, fudged from a real-world source; the actual numbers are slightly changed, but the magnitudes are/were about right.
It's interesting to write something like this, actually, because it's putting our guys in the less than righteous position and having Toby try to defend that. Even if they don't win all their battles, having the administration occupy the moral high ground every time starts to look Mary Sue-ish after a while.
Andy smiled at Sam. "Toby's being Mr. Grumpy-Pants right now."
My mother used to call our old cat "Mr Grumpy-Trousers" when he stalked off in a huff. It works for both cats and Toby Ziegler because they share a certain air of affronted dignity.
~ V ~
Sam shrugged. "It was just... he likes to do his little mentoring thing sometimes." Remembering, he smiled to himself. "He told me I should run for president one day, I don't know what-"
"He told you that?"
He registered the sudden abrupt change in tone, and held up his hands. "Steve-"
He put the chess piece back down in its place. "You- seriously, you could've had a shot at being president?"
Oops. Possibly he'd just started a big deal out of something that really wasn't- "Steve, it was just-"
"You didn't tell me this," Steve said, jaw set warningly. "You said you didn't care if we got splashed all over the tabloids, you said it didn't matter, and you didn't tell me this."
Back at the end of FtF 2, Steve was a tad taken aback to find out exactly how high up the White House hierarchy Sam sat. He got over the surprise and rolled with it pretty quickly, but the idea that Sam casually tossed aside a potential shot at the presidency when he embarked on their relationship is a different kettle of fish.
I don't think FtF Sam could be happy hiding his orientation to be president, even if he was in a committed "death do us part" relationship with a woman. But to Steve, it seems that, well, it's not as if he couldn't have been happy living the wife and two-point-four children life. So no pressure on the relationship there, or anything.
"I? Do not want to be president. I never wanted to be president. I never thought about running for president. It... hell, it's so far away from being a thing it's, like, the anti-thing."
Steve pointed a warning finger. "Stop that with the Joshtalk, you're not confusing me out of having this argument."
I'm fairly sure the thing with "the thing" is a verbal contagion spread by Joshua Lyman. I once made a graph of the usage to support that argument when somebody claimed that Sorkin was a lazy writer because everyone on the show spoke with the same quirks. Because that's the kind of geek that I am, dammit.
Josh made an awkward sound of agreement. It was stupid to be suddenly shy around his old friend on gay rights issues - Sam was still Sam, only with a... slightly more boyfriend-having quality these days. But still... it was the way he felt debating any kind of religious issue with Toby, the feeling like he maybe didn't quite have the qualifications to take part. Except Toby would just quite casually take a jab at him if he thought Josh was getting too big for his holiday-Jewish theological boots, and it would be much harder to tell if he offended Sam.
I think you always get that slight feeling of not being quite qualified to discuss something when you're sitting next to somebody who's living the issue, no matter how well-informed and articulate you might be.
"I can do it tomorrow morning."
"Yeah, but this is time sensitive," he objected.
Donna looked at him for a long moment. "Josh... what time is it now?"
He looked at his watch. "Uh... something past ten?"
"And what will I get if I call anybody now?"
"Uh... an answerphone?"
"And when will they call me back?"
"Tomorrow morning?" he admitted in a small voice.
I think the West Wingers sometimes lose sight of the fact that not everybody in the world is as married to the job as they are.
~ VI ~
"Well, you could be talking to the walls," Josh noted, "'cause you're obviously delirious. Charlie, I, I'm not- I can't be your best man."
"Why not?" he asked mildly.
"Because I'm not-" He cut himself off. "What about Sam? You could ask Sam. Sam would be good."
Charlie grinned and shook his head. "Yeah, Sam would be good. I'm asking you."
"Charlie, I'm not..." He rubbed his forehead. "Seriously, I'm not best man material. You should ask somebody who, I don't know, who-"
"Josh." Charlie looked him in the eye. "I didn't pull your name out of the air, okay? I've thought about it. And I picked you. I want you to do it. Now, are you turning me down?"
"No," he said quietly.
"Good." Charlie straightened up and turned to go. He hesitated in the doorway. "You put me where I am, Josh. I haven't forgotten that."
Josh met his eyes, and heard the phantom howl of sirens. "Most people wouldn't expect you to thank me for that."
"And most people would be wrong."
We didn't get to see a lot of the Josh and Charlie friendship, which is a shame. They had a lovely understated little buddy thing going on there.
"You shouldn't be here, Leo. Go home, get some rest."
Leo gave a wry little smile that made Jed feel like there was some bitter little private joke he wasn't in on.
Leo's a workaholic as much as he's an alcoholic, and I think he uses one to shield himself from the other.
"Yeah." He sighed again, heavily, and Abbey gave him a playful squeeze.
"So..." she began tauntingly. "What's all this I hear about you being the president of sex?"
It produced the desired effect, and the edges of a grin began to unfold across his features. "Yeah, I heard about that. I've been wondering all day what my official duties are."
"I think it's mostly a ceremonial position," she said dryly.
I couldn't resist continuing this gag. Sue me.
~ VII ~
CJ smirked, and flipped quickly through a few black and white photos of the youthful president. A school picture and a baby photo that she'd seen before. A candid college-era shot of the president displaying a broad grin that she had to concede Carol's point on, and one that made her snicker of him looking like a James Dean impersonator complete with moody pose and cigarette. Not to mention- "Aww."
"Isn't that adorable?" Carol agreed.
"We should see if the First Lady wants a copy of that." Apparently, the future First Couple had been near-sickeningly sweet together even as teenagers. For a moment the picture made her sentimental about the days when dating had been as simple as waiting to see who would ask you to the prom.
Then reality caught up, and reminded her that she'd hated those days with a fiery passion.
It's kind of hard to hold the image of Badlands era Martin Sheen in your head together with President Jed.
I always got the impression that CJ would like to have a love life, but wasn't really invested enough in that wish to put up with the hassle of dating.
"Yes, but I'm..." He struggled for a moment. "...Approaching the latter section of my manly prime." She snickered. "Hey!"
Donna, he felt, failed to make a suitable expression of contrition for mocking his manly prime.
I suppose one of the reasons I steered Josh and Donna into solidly friendshippy waters in FtF is that it gives them a greater degree of equality in their relationship, which I think they were rather badly lacking in the canon of the time. I'm not anti the J/D ship (Donna the Vampire Slayer was actually very UST-y, since it was written during season two when the show appeared to be going there) but I'm not a particular fan either; I'm more or less totally neutral. So I moved them into a space where they were neither together nor messing each other up too horribly and left them parked to enjoy the novelty of a relatively healthy relationship.
[Also, it's kind of disconcerting to have moved on from the West Wing - where J/D is the main het ship and J/S its slash rival - to Stargate, where J/D is the main slash ship and J/S its het rival. I think it's officially time we declared a moratorium on characters being named "Sam" or anything beginning with J.]
~ VIII ~
The president continued to hover. "You don't want a more comfortable chair? 'Cause you know, the chair in my office is pretty-"
Charlie grinned. "I don't think I'm allowed to sit on that one, Mr. President."
"Well, can I have somebody get you something to drink? How about a-"
"Sir." He gave his boss a look. "This whole 'personal aide' thing doesn't really work if you spend the whole day clucking over me like a mother hen."
The president narrowed his eyes. "A mother hen?"
"Yes, Mr. President."
"I assume that was said with the appropriate amount of respect?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, okay then. I'll be in my office if you need anything." The president gestured over his shoulder, as if Charlie needed to be told where that was. He hesitated in leaving, and then planted a quick, affectionately paternal kiss on Charlie's cheek. "Don't push yourself too hard, son."
I love writing Jed and Charlie together. Their relationship is all kinds of adorable, and I enjoyed the excuse to make it even closer with Charlie's official adoption as part of the family.
Once, Andrea Wyatt had been very much in love with Toby Ziegler.
Immediately before and during their divorce, she had alternated between being very much in love with Toby Ziegler and being prepared to kill him, with occasional periods of both at the same time.
After their divorce, that love had not so much faded as mutated, becoming a mix of respect and wistful affection, and something that couldn't quite stretch itself from broken romance into friendship. She couldn't live with Toby anymore, but in many ways she still adored him.
None of that, however, precluded her from the more than occasional strong desire to brain him with something blunt and heavy.
This was written well before the season four developments in the Toby/Andy relationship, but I always did see their marriage as having imploded for reasons other than lack of love. It's clear there's a lot of depth of feeling there, even if not all of it's positive.
I really like all of their dialogue here, actually. Good scene.
CJ hesitated, and then asked. "Ma'am... did your husband do anything particularly embarrassing in his college years I should know about?"
"Well, he once lost a bet and had to do an Elvis impersonation in front of an audience."
"Elvis?" CJ was mostly unsuccessful at hiding her smirk; Charlie didn't even try.
"Oh, he was actually doing pretty well until he fell off the stage," Abbey noted.
I think this was slightly inspired by Bartlet's little outburst of song in The US Poet Laureate. "Another sky, another June, another something that rhymes with June..." Cracks me up every time.
Abbey's knowledge of Jed's relationship with his father here more or less ties with my backstory from As Long As There Are Stars; namely, that she became aware of it but didn't press him to open up about it when he clearly didn't want to.
~ IX ~
"Gays in the military," Sam said, with a bitter twist to his mouth. This had been a pet issue of his since long before it started hitting a little closer to home.
"Ah, yes, disgraceful business. Good to see your country is finally taking a few tottering steps towards civilisation."
"Thank you, your lordship," Josh said dryly.
He smiled. "Her Majesty's armed forces have been pursuing for the past few years what was referred to as 'a policy of complete indifference'."
"We prefer to reserve that for more important issues," Sam said dryly.
The ban on homosexuals serving openly in the British armed forces was ruled unlawful in January 2000. By all accounts the change in policy was a complete non-event and the prophesied chaos failed to occur.
Marbury's line is a direct quote from... somebody, but alas I can no longer locate whatever article I lifted it from via Google. I believe it was a military official of some sort, but don't hold me to that.
~ X ~
"There are lines, Toby!"
"He shouldn't hide!" Toby burst out. "He shouldn't-" He broke off, and began to pace the office. "He can't be allowed to run away from himself."
"Because he's the president?" she asked sharply.
He came to a halt. "Because he's who he is!"
CJ shook her head sadly at him. "You can't try to make him perfect," she reminded him.
"I can make him as good as he can be," Toby said fiercely.
"Why?"
"Because..." He waved his hands emphatically. "Because mediocrity abhors brilliance. And the only defence against mediocrity is to be brilliant, and to stay brilliant, and hiding is not escape, it's surrender! And you cannot surrender to mediocrity, you cannot ever surrender to mediocrity, because... Because that's where it ends. If you let mediocrity break you down, then... that's where it... ends."
He wound down slowly, like a clockwork soldier. There was a long silence.
CJ gave him a slow, gently sympathetic smile. "Toby... what happened to you when you were at school?"
They exchanged a long look. "I got tougher," he said very softly. He gave her a melancholy smile, and walked past her out of his own office. She could have followed.
But she didn't.
This CJ/Toby scene here is probably one of my favourites of the whole series. I don't actually have much to say about it, but... I love it. Something about Toby's little mediocrity speech just worked, and I'm fond of the clockwork soldier visual as well.
~ XI ~
Fortunately, she'd come prepared. She leaned in until they were at eye level. "Do I need to go and get the reserve pie?"
That, at least, stirred a response. "What?" He frowned at her.
"I brought one in case of emergency," she elaborated.
"You were going to placate me with pie?"
This is intentional symmetry here, since Andy also brought Toby pie in her very first episode, Mandatory Minimums.
When she looked up, her eyes were alight with more fury than CJ had ever seen in them, and that was no little thing. "That man-" The venom in the First Lady's voice actually made her flinch, and Abbey bit off the rest of whatever she'd been ready to say. "CJ... God help me, CJ, but I'd gladly see my husband's family history dissected in every tabloid piece of trash this country's ever known if it meant that man was exposed for what he truly was."
CJ didn't dare speak up, and the moment was only broken when Abbey sighed and shook her head. "Honest to God, CJ, there are some days I wonder how he even survived that family. The way his father used to treat them... playing one brother against another, and God knows Jonathan didn't come out of it any better, seeing his older brother taken down all the time and neither of them able to stop it."
She looked CJ in the eye. "Nothing he ever did was ever enough to please his father, CJ, and Lord knows if he was alive today, he'd still be standing over Jed's shoulder, cursing him for a fool with every step he takes. And somewhere back in Jed's head, I think he still is."
CJ had nothing to say. It was so... incomprehensible. The only frame of reference she had for a father was her own dearly beloved dad, a tower of strength through all her life and a dull, aching place in her soul now he was gone. To have come through that kind of emotional degradation... how did you get from that to Jed Bartlet? It just didn't seem possible.
I think that what interests me most about Jed's daddy issues is that he's not anybody's caricature of "how abused children turn out". The past has left its mark on him (in the form of Uncle Fluffy and other issues) but not in the 'typical' TV-movie symptoms of problems with emotional intimacy, low self-esteem, etc. It's actually quite rare to see a TV character who is portrayed as having been abused and yet not completely paralysed by it decades later.
In a way, that's what the whole biography arc is about; the fact that Jed has survived his past, moved on from it and dealt in his own way, and yet as soon as everyone hears about what he suffered they're trying to tear him down to get at the emo child they're sure must be under there somewhere. The dragging up of the past doesn't hurt him nearly as much as everyone else's new reactions to it and to him.
It kind of makes me think of baked_goldfish's emo Jed icon. There's a point when you've really got to stop defining somebody totally by their victimhood - and when they're President of the United States with a Nobel Prize and three decades of happy marriage under the belt, you're possibly just a smidge past that point.
On a more personal note, I guess the storyline is also about frustration with the one-size-fits-all school of therapy, both in real life and fanfic, that insists that it's equally beneficial for everybody to "get it all out". People process things in different ways, and no, it isn't always good for those who handle things internally to have all their mental walls smashed down so they can re-do the healing in a way that's visible to other people.
No, she was going to go out for the evening with Donna as planned, get well and truly hammered, and talk to the president tomorrow. Tomorrow was a Saturday, he might be in his jeans and Notre Dame sweatshirt, and somehow he'd be... less the president. A little more like Jed Bartlet, a little more a human being that she could have a desperately painful conversation with. She knew she couldn't do that tonight.
I play with the idea of the two Bartlets in a lot of different ways. The idea of the gap (and the lack of any gap) between man and office is fascinating to me.
~ XII ~
Donna raised her glass, proposing a toast. They'd started toasting fairly random things a few rounds of drinks ago. The glass stayed in the air for a while until one sprang to mind.
"Always the bridesmaids, never the bride," she finally declared, slurring the word 'bridesmaids'. Difficult word. Difficult job, dammit. But someone had to do it, and that was her, Donnatella Moss, bridesmaid extraordinaire. She'd done the deed for both her sisters and an old college roommate, now she was doing it for the daughter of the leader of the free world. She was going up in the world. Or possibly in some other direction. She was definitely going somewhere, because the room sure as hell wasn't staying still.
Drunk Donna is fun to write. She's rambly and free-associating enough at the best of times.
Also, I apologise for putting the image of Toby in a bridesmaid's dress in your head. (And if you didn't have it, you do now. Ha!)
"You've got the vision, Sam. You'd make a great president."
White knight takes black rook. "I've seen the toll it takes on President Bartlet."
Black knight takes white pawn. "So do you think he shouldn't have done it?"
White pawn takes black knight. "I'm not him."
He put Sam in check, and took one of his rooks when he was forced to move out of it. "You really are, Sam," he said sincerely. If Sam couldn't see how much he was like his mentor, he was being wilfully blind.
I'm not really a proponent of the Sam and Josh as a future Jed and Leo theory (having seen them nearly set fire to the White House, among other things) but I guess, with a couple of decades to add gravitas, Sam could be a good president in his own right. Josh, I think, would never be comfortable in the role of Chief of Staff; he wants to be "the guy the guy counts on", and he's happier with someone there above him so he doesn't have to reign himself in.
I think I got the chess moves in this sequence by setting my computer chess program to play against itself.
~ XIII ~
"It was your idea to get the blanket and make like we were camping."
Steve shrugged. "I'm gay; I have a licence to camp." Sam pointed an admonishing finger.
"Okay, that's it. I'm reporting you to the bureau of bad puns and stereotypes."
"You have one of those at the White House?"
"Some days I think I work in it."
I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry.
(Okay, so I'm not. It was too good a setup for Sam's line.)
There had been no alcohol the night before. That was good. That was very good. He could do this. He could find his control. He could pull himself out of this. He-
He was practically shaking with the desperate need to get drunk. Leo wasn't sure if the way his hands seemed to quake was for real or the stigmata of the weight of guilt that was slowly crushing him to death. Either way, he kept his muscles tensed as painfully tightly as he could whenever he was not alone, burying the evidence.
And nobody suspected. That was the worst of it, the knife in his gut; nobody, nobody suspected. Oh, he couldn't hide completely - not from Jed, or from Margaret, or from Josh - but though they all eyed him concernedly, not one of them had fingered the horrible truth. Because not one of them believed for a second that he could screw up this badly, that he could ever have sunk to this depth. They trusted him, and he was betraying them for every fraction of a second they continued to.
Everybody trusts Leo. Implicitly. He's the go-to guy when everybody else is breaking down. And so he's stuck in this kind of between position where he's too ashamed to tell them what's going on, feels like a traitor for hiding it, and no one else is going to help him out by levelling the accusation.
~ XIV ~
Alone in the room - Charlie, despite his protests, had been barred from coming to work any earlier than midday - he surreptitiously tugged at his waistband. If he was getting any thinner, it was taking a long time showing itself. Abbey insisted his diet had put him in better shape than he had been for years, but he suspected he was being humoured.
Surreptitiously! It's that word again.
Josh pulled a face. "You know, technically, I'm your superior."
"Toby's my superior."
"And I'm up there with Toby, so I'm still the boss of you. In fact, I think, I'm not entirely sure, but I might be the boss of Toby, too."
There was a brief pause.
"Good luck with that."
I'm never entirely sure how the West Wing hierarchy is supposed to work, but I'm fairly sure the practise doesn't match the org charts.
They exchanged puzzled looks. Yesterday and the day before, it had seemed that the ambassador had no other goal than to keep them locked up in a room together, tied up in every tiny little nuance of the debate. Now suddenly whatever they decided was okay with him.
Toby mentally regrouped. "Uh, the figures we're proposing-"
"Will be more than enough to satisfy my compatriots across the pond," Marbury waved it away. "Naturally, we're all aware of the realities of these issues; the fact that you were willing to commit to making improvements is the important factor. The PM will be more than happy to clarify his comments and retract any accusation against your county. In fact, he already has; I spoke to him last night." He smiled and bowed. "And now, I shall leave you two alone. Good day!"
I like Marbury as a schemer, working behind the scenes and having a little fun yanking everybody's chains in the meantime. There's a lot going on under the surface with him.
Toby rubbed his forehead slowly. "Remind me why we didn't finish the British off when we had the chance?"
Toby seems to like declaring war on people. Especially the countries that are least likely to see it coming...
"Come with me. Tonight."
She hesitated, plainly torn. "Toby-"
"Come with me."
For a speechwriter and impassioned ranter, Toby is excessively blunt and simple in his personal life. He tries to achieve everything by brute force of personality.
~ XV ~
"Is that live?" she demanded.
"No, we made a greatest hits tape," he said, amused.
Donna glared malevolently at the little image of CJ, cheerfully bantering with the press as if she'd got to bed bright and early the night before without a drop of alcohol in her system. "Okay, CJ's definitely signed a pact with some kind of dark, nefarious power."
CJ just seems like the kind of person who would be cool and collected through her hangover while everybody else is still holed up in a corner groaning. Also, they should totally release a CJ's Greatest Hits tape.
I was still allergic to the word 'gotten' at this stage in my fic writing. I've since got - heh - over my aversion to it, although I still have to proofread carefully for places I should have been using it. Little quirks like that are much harder to police your writing for than just using the right nouns.
"Ellie's afraid of me," he confessed.
"Don't be stupid, Jed."
"I frighten her. She's intimidated by me."
Abbey frowned at him. "Who told you that?"
"Millicent Griffith."
Jed's troubles with Ellie take on a fascinating new light seen through the lens of his relationship with his own father. He struggles to relate to her in the same way his father did with him, and he must wonder if he's making the same mistakes.
I also like the slightly uncomfortable thought that his insistence on having her meet his eyes is something he picked up from his dad. Ironically, the very short fuse that distinguishes him from his father (Bartlet Senior always struck me as a very cold man who held on to and nursed his resentments) is what makes it difficult for him to try and get to the root of his problems with Ellie without exploding.
~ XVI ~
"Hey."
"Hey."
Charlie smiled at his fiancée as she came to sit beside him. "You're sitting out," she noted a little concernedly, absently stroking his hair in a way he rather liked.
"I'm sorry, I'll get out my funky shoes and dance," he told her dryly. Zoey shoved him lightly, and then laid her head against his shoulder.
"Do your ribs hurt?" she asked softly.
"They're okay." There was still a band of dull pain across his chest that would sharpen into a twinge at unexpected moments, but compared to the white-hot agony when they were freshly broken, it barely seemed noticeable. The ribs were the last of his injuries to heal; his fractured wrist had finally recovered, although it would be a good long while before he dared try playing basketball with it.
It would probably be embarrassing to count up the number of scenes in this series that begin with some variant on the "Hey"/"Hi" exchange.
This story is set three months after "Sons and Daughters", so Charlie is no longer totally debilitated by the injuries from the beating he took, but I didn't want to just forget about them. As I recall, I had a bugger of a time trying to find a website that would give me a straight estimate on how long it took for broken ribs to heal.
Which meant he had to stay. At a dinner party full of mingling people, every one of them holding a drink, and nothing to distract him but vapid, inane conversation.
Really, is there any worse career for a recovering alcoholic than one that involves dinner parties full of politicians?
Marbury smiled, and sipped his champagne. "I'm sure the president has better things to do than, as you so melodramatically put it, 'kick my ass'." He didn't fake any approximation of an Americanised twang, and yet hearing his words parroted back in that flawlessly aristocratic accent made Leo feel incredibly vulgar and uncultured.
Leo considered himself a man of the world, educated well enough in what you might call art and literature and what made for a gourmet meal, but there was something about the sheer sense of... history... that the Brit wore like a cloak that felt as intimidating as his foppishness was annoying. Politics was a place you met plenty of people who had their own opinions on what constituted 'good breeding' - the main tenet of their philosophy generally being that they had it and other people didn't - but Marbury was irrefutably the genuine article. And something of the hardworking Catholic boy that remained at the core of Leo itched uncomfortably in the presence of a power that was bred instead of earned.
It's funny how you acclimatise to voices. I'm usually completely unconscious of accents when I'm watching an American show but as soon as you add an English voice to the mix, all the accents pop right out at me again. It's weird.
"You seem a little distracted, Leo," Marbury observed mildly.
The switch from "Gerald" here is deliberate, although Leo is, indeed, too distracted to notice it. Damn right Marbury knows what his name is.
I kind of love Marbury, in case you haven't noticed yet. I'm a little sad I never did get round to writing that fic where he and Abbey get taken hostage at a diplomatic function and proceed to rescue themselves with much ass-kicking and pretended drunkenness.
~ XVII ~
"Sir, shouldn't you be... mingling?" he finally wondered aloud.
The president shrugged sharply. "Ah, what's the point? They won't even let me eat any of the food."
"You're allowed to eat the salad," Charlie reminded him.
"Yes, but not any of the food."
I love this little Jed/Charlie scene at the start of this chapter. It's simple, but one of my favourites.
She watched them surreptitiously while her husband shook hands and schmoozed people he'd rather not be talking to.
Surreptitiously! (Drink!)
Lord Marbury appeared through the crowd and made his way to Josh's side. "Ah, Joshua! Might I have a moment of your time?"
"Lord Marbury," Josh nodded politely, the automatic smile he pasted on only slightly fixed.
"I'll get more drinks," Donna said brightly, and went off to snag a waiter.
When she returned with two flutes of champagne, Marbury was alone. "Where did Josh go?" she frowned.
I used Marbury to set Josh on Leo's tail because I felt it needed someone on the outside to make the final connection that those closer to Leo would be reluctant to let themselves make.
~ XVIII ~
"Sure," Steve shrugged. He pointed with his wineglass. "I'll go bug CJ for some more embarrassing stories."
"She doesn't know any," he said confidently.
"That's what you think, Spanky." Sam stared at him in alarm, and Steve grinned widely. "CJ is my new best friend," he said, and headed over to join her.
CJ's habit of assigning random nicknames never ceases to amuse me.
Sam came to a complete halt and stared at him in disbelief. "Sir, I..." He shook his head. "Maybe Congress, I suppose, but... you can't seriously think that I would run for office now?"
The president gave him a sharp look. "Well, what in the world would be stopping you?"
"Um, the fact that I won't win?" he pointed out.
"Well, that's a stupid reason," the president shrugged.
"I suppose."
"That was the reason I did run, and look what happened with that."
"True."
The president smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder. "Sam... as I'm sure you'll recall having advised me many times, the winning the battle is the very least of it. I didn't let Leo talk me into running for president because I ever believed I'd end up here. We didn't run for reelection because we expected to get back in. And I didn't propose the Hate Crimes Bill because it would be an easy sell." He looked Sam in the eye. "We don't do these things because we expect them to be easy, or even because we think we have a hope of getting them accomplished. We do these things because these are the right things, and because we believe that this is the time for people to do them."
I like this little conversation/mini-speech.
I've since stopped using shorthand dialogue tags like, '"X," he shrugged' as a substitution for '"X," he said with a shrug'. Personally I never minded them as an informal thing that can sometimes helps the flow or avoid an awkward sentence structure, but - like a few other not-quite-grammatical quirks - it's something that I just stopped doing because it's easier than having the copyeditors strike it out every time.
~ XIX ~
Ah, hangovers. Funny how it all came back to you. Still, this was only a small one in the scheme of things. One surreptitiously purchased bottle couldn't bring you all the fun of a night on the town and a raided mini-bar.
Surreptitiously! (Drink!)
...I really hope that's the last one. This is getting embarrassing. Hmm. A quick spot check of the FtF series reveals that the word is used 18 times across ten stories, so yeah, this is definitely an unusually heavy concentration. But still, eep!
He opened the door of his hotel room.
Josh was sitting on the floor outside it, waiting for him.
I set up the end of the last chapter to imply that Josh had given up and gone home. But I have a limited tolerance for drawing out angst, and the scattering of Leo POV scenes across this fic were already pushing it, so I went for the resolution instead of letting the plotline drag on.
(Also, at this point, I think I still foolishly believed that the end of the series was in sight two, maybe three stories away. Hah.)
Huh. This Jed/Charlie scene is total filler. And the Sam/Steve one isn't much better. Guess I was stretched for material towards the end.
Leo was drinking again.
That, in Josh's mind, was not the crux of the problem. Leo's own reaction to the fact that he was drinking again... that was the problem.
For someone who seems flail helplessly a lot of the time, Josh has an interesting knack for being able to discard irrelevancies and just cut down to the very heart of an issue. I guess it's part of what makes him so good in his role as Bartlet's attack dog; he knows how to go for the jugular. (His problem being that he tends to go for it as soon as he sees it instead of stopping to consider whether it's a smart move tactically.)
~ XX ~
"Forgotten your brain again?" she asked dryly.
"I thought you were supposed to keep hold of that?" he smiled back.
"I think it got lost in the shuffle somewhere."
"Explains a lot," he allowed.
In my house, it's traditional to always follow up, "What have I forgotten?" with "Your brain?" (Usually followed by, "Nope, don't need that.")
Josh came across to sit on the edge of his desk. He produced a small slip of paper from his inner pocket and fiddled with absently. "It took me a long time to find this," he said, almost to himself. "I'd almost forgotten I had it. It was a bit like... a bit like Dumbo. You remember Dumbo? They gave him the feather to make him believe he could fly, but he didn't really need it." He looked wryly across at Leo. "You probably didn't see Dumbo."
Leo's lack of cultural conversancy never amuses me.
Also, this whole section is shameless mush. But hey.
~ XXI ~
"The truth will set you free," he reminded him softly, and it was a mark of the power and presence of Jed Bartlet that the platitude rang neither unimaginative nor insincere.
Gravitas at work, people. I don't think Martin Sheen would be capable of sounding trite if he tried.
"Do I look like I'm smiling?" he demanded.
"Well, I don't know, 'cause it's a little hard to see you past that enormous pair of rose-tinted glasses you're wearing!"
I like this line. Despite the misplaced mental image of Bartlet in Elton John glasses it invokes.
I didn't trip over and hit my head, Jed, I went out, I bought the damn bottle, I took it home and I drank it!" he spat out.
"And I ran for this job even though I know I have MS," the president said quietly. He raised an eyebrow challengingly. "Guess they should crucify us both."
Leo shook his head. "It's not the same thing-"
"Oh, it's not the same thing, because you have a disease and I have a disease, and when it strikes then we can't do our jobs." He scowled. "So if you're not telling me that I can't do my job, then stop telling me that you can't do your job, because you can't have it both ways!"
I think this is an interesting parallel, and one that doesn't get brought up much: if you truly accept alcoholism as a disease, then Leo's situation is an exact match for Jed's; he has a pre-existing condition that potentially could flare up and interfere with his work, but there's no guarantee of it doing so. It's the same thing.
"Okay, Leo, note the position of the word 'sir' in that sentence, and ask yourself who here is the boss of us." Jed shook his head. "Leo, do you seriously think that a single person in this whole damn building is gonna walk away from you? Do you think we're gonna let you walk away from us? If you leave, we're coming after you. And if you try to quit, I'm just gonna sit on you until you change your mind."
"Well, that'd be a fate worse than death," he said sardonically.
"Hey! I'll have you know that I've lost a lot of weight these past few months."
Having set up Abbey's diet and exercise plan as a potential solution to Jed's health problems last story, I did try to put in a few hints that it's been helping. (Although further on in the series he then proceeds to take a downturn thanks to the depression induced by the biography arc. Damn, I beat up these characters a lot in this series.)
"Oh please, have you listened to yourself lately? Dye yourself green and you could be Yoda."
"You know Star Wars?"
"Shut up."
"You know Star Wars?"
"I have a daughter!"
"You're telling me you know Yoda, but you don't know Charlie Brown?"
"He's the one with the dog, right?"
And another little poke at Leo's Charlie Brown issues.
The end of this fic is totally cheesy, but ah, well. The occasional bit of cheese just adds to the flavour, right?
The end.
Huh. I'm not sure if that was all that insightful, but I had more to say than I thought I would after all this time. I'm working on a commentary for Pegasus Connection, but that could take a while. I may do one for Decade in between, as it's a short story.
Demons
An obvious name, but also a song title to match the first three stories; it comes from a song by Easyworld (one of my favourite obscure bands), which I picked for the chorus lyric, "Give me all your demons; they don't scare me."
Demons is the first story where we leap ahead a chunk of time; the events of FtF 1-3 actually take place over just three weeks. (And you wonder why Leo was driven to alcohol...) This one is set a further three months down the line.
~ I ~
I opened with a meeting of the White House assistants so I could do a bit of "the story so far" exposition. They're quite useful characters to use because it's almost an outsider POV, but at the same time they're close enough to the action to see practically everything that goes on.
Leo's usual workaholic habits had taken a downturn. Margaret, despite the fact that she'd been agitating for this to happen for years, was deathly worried now it finally had. The others found it hard to tell if this was genuine cause for concern or standard Margaret procedure. They'd all been keeping a surreptitious eye on him, but what might be going on beneath the McGarry surface was a mystery to greater minds than even those that inhabited the White House.
The first nod to what's going on with Leo is fairly minor, because it's a big plot point that Leo is so trusted that no one does really suspect what's going on (which only contributes to how bad he feels about it).
Also, note the use of the word "surreptitious". You'll be seeing that a lot. When I was at junior school we were tortured with had 'creative writing' lessons where we were basically given a topic and a thesaurus and ordered to produce purple prose. (Seriously. Anyone who wrote 'the bubbles rose' would have it scratched out and be sent back to their seat until they came up with 'a myriad shimmering iridescent globules soared into the azure sky'. And no, I'm not exaggerating.) I owe a great debt to them as a writer; by the age of about eight I had both a massive stock of vocabulary words and a very strong aversion to using them in any situation where a shorter, simpler word would do. But nonetheless, a few got stuck in my head, and 'surreptitious' is one of them.
"How do I tell the daughter of the leader of the free world that her bridesmaids' dresses make me look like a walking soufflé?" she groaned. Apparently even the public wedding of the century wasn't immune to the universal curse of godawful bridesmaids' dresses.
"If it's any consolation, CJ hates hers too," Carol offered, as she flipped through a batch of faxes from the press office.
Donna gave her a look. "CJ could wear a black plastic sack and look good in it."
Bonnie nodded seriously, and raised a hand. "The committee declares a moment for its members to be screamingly jealousy of CJ."
They took a moment.
Egad, the dreaded bridesmaid plot! I couldn't believe I was writing it either. But, unfortunately, my alleged 'two-parter with maybe a short sequel to tie up loose ends' morphed into a series, and the plotlines had to progress. (Personally, I'd have been only too happy to skip from FtF 4 to 6 with a quick line of dialogue to cover "Yeah, so, Zoey and Charlie are married now," but I had a feeling some readers wouldn't like that solution as much as I did. So, there had to be a wedding. And FtF 5 became all about that, but "Demons" had to put in a little groundwork before that.)
"What about Sam?" Donna asked, and the two communications assistants giggled.
"It's so cute," Bonnie grinned.
"He and Steve are moving in together this week-" Ginger put in.
"-And they're getting all domestic-"
"-Talking about dinner plates and curtains and towels and bookshelves-"
The main reason I don't get on with the romance genre is that I have no patience for the "Will they, won't they? Does he, doesn't he? What if he doesn't feel the same? I am not worthy of his love! Oh no, now he's dating her! Angst! Jealousy! Kitchen sink! Wacky misunderstandings!" twists and turns. My version tends to involve people getting together in a very matter-of-fact, drama-free way, and then staying together quite happily unless there's a plot-driven reason otherwise.
...I would really suck as a romance writer.
So, yeah, Sam and Steve are moving fairly fast here. But I figured that hey, Sam has so little time for a social life that moving in together is probably their only chance of actually seeing any of each other.
I have no idea why the two of them started talking about Sam and his hypothetical heterosexual porn collection here. I needed Steve to be going through Sam's stuff for a later plot point, I pencilled in a "Sam leaves for work; Steve is packing" scene... this is what came out. Shrug.
Leo stood by the mirror for a long time, staring into eyes he wasn't sure he recognised anymore. He promised himself, as he had promised a half dozen other times these past few months, that this would be the last time.
He knew he was lying.
I like the little Leo scenelet at the end of this chapter. It's short and simple, but it outlines the cycle Leo's fallen back into as much as it needs to. Nice scene. I got a little impatient with the Leo angst moments (I don't have a very high tolerance for that, either) towards the end of this fic, but this one I quite like.
...Huh. These chapters seem really short to me now. (I shifted over to chapters of about 3000 words for my two latest epics.) I still seem to have much the same number of scenes per chapter in FtF as in Pegasus Connection, though; the FtF scenes have a much higher proportion of dialogue to internal thoughts/description, so they come in a lot shorter.
~ II ~
"Isn't this guy supposed to be, like, on our side?" Josh wanted to know.
"Apparently, he's decided to take our policies into account before deciding whether he agrees with us."
"Well, that's a very irresponsible attitude."
"So we need you to meet with Congresswoman Wyatt," CJ told Toby. He looked depressed. "And the British Ambassador." Toby looked considerably more depressed.
The first three instalments of FtF didn't have much international politics. Not so much an oversight as a complete lack of knowledge on my part, but I figured I'd have to go there eventually. I Googled a few keywords, and the foreign aid figures looked interesting enough to spin a storyline out of.
The story involves the UK not because I live here, but because it gave me an excuse to invite Lord Marbury to the party. I love that guy.
Ron gave another military nod. "Secret Service members are ready to accept any risk for their protectee, up to and including their own death."
"But you won't go up against the First Lady?"
He didn't crack a smile. "Up to and including their own death."
Ron Butterfield has such a good straight face that it's fun to give him lines like this where you can't tell if he's joking.
I figured that, given what we know about Jed Bartlet and his "not at all presidential" attitude to vegetables, the new health plan I introduced last story was going to start chafing pretty quickly. Jed's really only a occasional smoker in the series, but, hey, lure of the forbidden and all that.
~ III ~
"They're in that thing slung across your shoulder that you laughingly call a backpack."
Josh gave her a stern look. "You're mocking the backpack?"
"The backpack needs no mocking. The backpack is a collection of threads held together with buckles."
"This backpack, I'll have you know, has seen me through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
"Apparently, you used it as a shield."
I like this line.
Dennis raised a hand. "CJ... with this radical new legislation and the controversial Sex Education pilot scheme, is the administration at all concerned about President Bartlet's increasing reputation as 'the sex president'?"
CJ tried to bury her urge to snicker at that, and didn't quite succeed. "Dennis, I think I can honestly say that that's a conversation I don't anticipate having with... anybody, ever."
And this one. The fun thing about writing fanfiction is that you get to imagine the characters 'performing' it, so even as the writer you get a kind of "in the audience" quality sometimes. And picturing what Allison Janney would do with a line like that is what makes it art.
"I've heard some rumours from a publisher friend about a book on the president's childhood."
"The Rogers thing?" CJ shrugged it away. "Yeah, I've heard of about it. We get about fifteen unofficial biographies every year, it's not a thing."
Katie gave her a look. "Like I say, I've just heard some rumours, but... I think you should probably see about getting an advance copy of this one."
This story marks the start of the biography arc, which runs all the way to part seven. Having named this part Demons, I wanted to focus on more than just Leo's problems; I've been fascinated by Jed's daddy issues since "Two Cathedrals", so I thought I'd see what happened when they were dredged up in a very public manner.
~ IV ~
"Toby."
"Andy." He smiled awkwardly. "You look nice."
"And you look annoyed."
"I was cheerful. Now I am not."
She grinned. "It's good to see you too, Toby." She kissed his cheek briefly, and he reflected that an expression-hiding beard was sometimes a useful thing to have. Especially when you weren't entirely sure what expression it might actually be hiding.
There's so little consensus over the Andi/Andie/Andy spelling that the TWOP forums took to calling her And*. I got the Andy version, masculine overtones though it has, from the Official Companion. On the other hand, I believe Aaron Sorkin himself once typed it in a message board post as "Andi". (On the third hand, oddly endearingly, the evidence of said posts would suggest that not so much for Mr. Sorkin with the spelling, sometimes.) I was already using "Andy", so I stuck with what I had.
I love the Toby/Andy relationship. It's another one, like Jed and Abbey, where there's so much depth and complexity and history to it that it feels extremely real. Opinion is divided on whether Sorkin can write romance (mostly, it seems, divided into "WTF?" and "Seriously, WTF?") but his established relationships are awesome. And those are generally what I'm more interested in anyway.
When I brought Andy back here, I actually had intentions of recycling an old plot from a never-finished-fic where she would end up pregnant after a "for old times' sake" sort of night together. Apparently I built up to it too slowly, because Sorkin got there first, damn him. So I had to flip that plotline on its head and take it somewhere else. I still mourn the loss of CJ's line about "the pitter-patter of tiny Zieglers".
Marbury immediately leapt in to cut him off again. "In 1970, the US paid just three tenths of a percentage point of its GNP in foreign aid. In 1990, it was down to two tenths. Now, it's barely a tenth of one percent. There are twice as many countries classified by the UN as 'least developed' than there were thirty years ago; why, exactly, is the US under the impression that the need for its aid in other parts of the world is decreasing?"
"Nobody's under that impression," Toby grated into the hand he was resting his chin on. "Obviously we want to earmark as much money as possible to help developing nations-"
"Then why all the cuts?" Marbury demanded. Revealing the sharp diplomatic mind behind the drunken playboy exterior, he'd been casually reeling off figures for the best part of an hour without ever stopping to look at notes. "US foreign aid currently stands at eight billion dollars a year; if your country was paying the same proportion of its wealth as it did in 1965, that figure would be nearly fifty billion."
"This isn't 1965," Toby reminded him.
"Thank you for pointing that out, Toby," the ambassador said dryly, "that distinction had quite escaped me. However, the rest of the world is not living in 1965 either, and they continue to allocate much higher percentage of their Gross National Product to overseas aid than you do."
One of the things I love about Marbury is that he comes across so deliberately the drunken playboy, but he's obviously razor sharp beneath it. The figures quoted here are, I believe, fudged from a real-world source; the actual numbers are slightly changed, but the magnitudes are/were about right.
It's interesting to write something like this, actually, because it's putting our guys in the less than righteous position and having Toby try to defend that. Even if they don't win all their battles, having the administration occupy the moral high ground every time starts to look Mary Sue-ish after a while.
Andy smiled at Sam. "Toby's being Mr. Grumpy-Pants right now."
My mother used to call our old cat "Mr Grumpy-Trousers" when he stalked off in a huff. It works for both cats and Toby Ziegler because they share a certain air of affronted dignity.
~ V ~
Sam shrugged. "It was just... he likes to do his little mentoring thing sometimes." Remembering, he smiled to himself. "He told me I should run for president one day, I don't know what-"
"He told you that?"
He registered the sudden abrupt change in tone, and held up his hands. "Steve-"
He put the chess piece back down in its place. "You- seriously, you could've had a shot at being president?"
Oops. Possibly he'd just started a big deal out of something that really wasn't- "Steve, it was just-"
"You didn't tell me this," Steve said, jaw set warningly. "You said you didn't care if we got splashed all over the tabloids, you said it didn't matter, and you didn't tell me this."
Back at the end of FtF 2, Steve was a tad taken aback to find out exactly how high up the White House hierarchy Sam sat. He got over the surprise and rolled with it pretty quickly, but the idea that Sam casually tossed aside a potential shot at the presidency when he embarked on their relationship is a different kettle of fish.
I don't think FtF Sam could be happy hiding his orientation to be president, even if he was in a committed "death do us part" relationship with a woman. But to Steve, it seems that, well, it's not as if he couldn't have been happy living the wife and two-point-four children life. So no pressure on the relationship there, or anything.
"I? Do not want to be president. I never wanted to be president. I never thought about running for president. It... hell, it's so far away from being a thing it's, like, the anti-thing."
Steve pointed a warning finger. "Stop that with the Joshtalk, you're not confusing me out of having this argument."
I'm fairly sure the thing with "the thing" is a verbal contagion spread by Joshua Lyman. I once made a graph of the usage to support that argument when somebody claimed that Sorkin was a lazy writer because everyone on the show spoke with the same quirks. Because that's the kind of geek that I am, dammit.
Josh made an awkward sound of agreement. It was stupid to be suddenly shy around his old friend on gay rights issues - Sam was still Sam, only with a... slightly more boyfriend-having quality these days. But still... it was the way he felt debating any kind of religious issue with Toby, the feeling like he maybe didn't quite have the qualifications to take part. Except Toby would just quite casually take a jab at him if he thought Josh was getting too big for his holiday-Jewish theological boots, and it would be much harder to tell if he offended Sam.
I think you always get that slight feeling of not being quite qualified to discuss something when you're sitting next to somebody who's living the issue, no matter how well-informed and articulate you might be.
"I can do it tomorrow morning."
"Yeah, but this is time sensitive," he objected.
Donna looked at him for a long moment. "Josh... what time is it now?"
He looked at his watch. "Uh... something past ten?"
"And what will I get if I call anybody now?"
"Uh... an answerphone?"
"And when will they call me back?"
"Tomorrow morning?" he admitted in a small voice.
I think the West Wingers sometimes lose sight of the fact that not everybody in the world is as married to the job as they are.
~ VI ~
"Well, you could be talking to the walls," Josh noted, "'cause you're obviously delirious. Charlie, I, I'm not- I can't be your best man."
"Why not?" he asked mildly.
"Because I'm not-" He cut himself off. "What about Sam? You could ask Sam. Sam would be good."
Charlie grinned and shook his head. "Yeah, Sam would be good. I'm asking you."
"Charlie, I'm not..." He rubbed his forehead. "Seriously, I'm not best man material. You should ask somebody who, I don't know, who-"
"Josh." Charlie looked him in the eye. "I didn't pull your name out of the air, okay? I've thought about it. And I picked you. I want you to do it. Now, are you turning me down?"
"No," he said quietly.
"Good." Charlie straightened up and turned to go. He hesitated in the doorway. "You put me where I am, Josh. I haven't forgotten that."
Josh met his eyes, and heard the phantom howl of sirens. "Most people wouldn't expect you to thank me for that."
"And most people would be wrong."
We didn't get to see a lot of the Josh and Charlie friendship, which is a shame. They had a lovely understated little buddy thing going on there.
"You shouldn't be here, Leo. Go home, get some rest."
Leo gave a wry little smile that made Jed feel like there was some bitter little private joke he wasn't in on.
Leo's a workaholic as much as he's an alcoholic, and I think he uses one to shield himself from the other.
"Yeah." He sighed again, heavily, and Abbey gave him a playful squeeze.
"So..." she began tauntingly. "What's all this I hear about you being the president of sex?"
It produced the desired effect, and the edges of a grin began to unfold across his features. "Yeah, I heard about that. I've been wondering all day what my official duties are."
"I think it's mostly a ceremonial position," she said dryly.
I couldn't resist continuing this gag. Sue me.
~ VII ~
CJ smirked, and flipped quickly through a few black and white photos of the youthful president. A school picture and a baby photo that she'd seen before. A candid college-era shot of the president displaying a broad grin that she had to concede Carol's point on, and one that made her snicker of him looking like a James Dean impersonator complete with moody pose and cigarette. Not to mention- "Aww."
"Isn't that adorable?" Carol agreed.
"We should see if the First Lady wants a copy of that." Apparently, the future First Couple had been near-sickeningly sweet together even as teenagers. For a moment the picture made her sentimental about the days when dating had been as simple as waiting to see who would ask you to the prom.
Then reality caught up, and reminded her that she'd hated those days with a fiery passion.
It's kind of hard to hold the image of Badlands era Martin Sheen in your head together with President Jed.
I always got the impression that CJ would like to have a love life, but wasn't really invested enough in that wish to put up with the hassle of dating.
"Yes, but I'm..." He struggled for a moment. "...Approaching the latter section of my manly prime." She snickered. "Hey!"
Donna, he felt, failed to make a suitable expression of contrition for mocking his manly prime.
I suppose one of the reasons I steered Josh and Donna into solidly friendshippy waters in FtF is that it gives them a greater degree of equality in their relationship, which I think they were rather badly lacking in the canon of the time. I'm not anti the J/D ship (Donna the Vampire Slayer was actually very UST-y, since it was written during season two when the show appeared to be going there) but I'm not a particular fan either; I'm more or less totally neutral. So I moved them into a space where they were neither together nor messing each other up too horribly and left them parked to enjoy the novelty of a relatively healthy relationship.
[Also, it's kind of disconcerting to have moved on from the West Wing - where J/D is the main het ship and J/S its slash rival - to Stargate, where J/D is the main slash ship and J/S its het rival. I think it's officially time we declared a moratorium on characters being named "Sam" or anything beginning with J.]
~ VIII ~
The president continued to hover. "You don't want a more comfortable chair? 'Cause you know, the chair in my office is pretty-"
Charlie grinned. "I don't think I'm allowed to sit on that one, Mr. President."
"Well, can I have somebody get you something to drink? How about a-"
"Sir." He gave his boss a look. "This whole 'personal aide' thing doesn't really work if you spend the whole day clucking over me like a mother hen."
The president narrowed his eyes. "A mother hen?"
"Yes, Mr. President."
"I assume that was said with the appropriate amount of respect?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, okay then. I'll be in my office if you need anything." The president gestured over his shoulder, as if Charlie needed to be told where that was. He hesitated in leaving, and then planted a quick, affectionately paternal kiss on Charlie's cheek. "Don't push yourself too hard, son."
I love writing Jed and Charlie together. Their relationship is all kinds of adorable, and I enjoyed the excuse to make it even closer with Charlie's official adoption as part of the family.
Once, Andrea Wyatt had been very much in love with Toby Ziegler.
Immediately before and during their divorce, she had alternated between being very much in love with Toby Ziegler and being prepared to kill him, with occasional periods of both at the same time.
After their divorce, that love had not so much faded as mutated, becoming a mix of respect and wistful affection, and something that couldn't quite stretch itself from broken romance into friendship. She couldn't live with Toby anymore, but in many ways she still adored him.
None of that, however, precluded her from the more than occasional strong desire to brain him with something blunt and heavy.
This was written well before the season four developments in the Toby/Andy relationship, but I always did see their marriage as having imploded for reasons other than lack of love. It's clear there's a lot of depth of feeling there, even if not all of it's positive.
I really like all of their dialogue here, actually. Good scene.
CJ hesitated, and then asked. "Ma'am... did your husband do anything particularly embarrassing in his college years I should know about?"
"Well, he once lost a bet and had to do an Elvis impersonation in front of an audience."
"Elvis?" CJ was mostly unsuccessful at hiding her smirk; Charlie didn't even try.
"Oh, he was actually doing pretty well until he fell off the stage," Abbey noted.
I think this was slightly inspired by Bartlet's little outburst of song in The US Poet Laureate. "Another sky, another June, another something that rhymes with June..." Cracks me up every time.
Abbey's knowledge of Jed's relationship with his father here more or less ties with my backstory from As Long As There Are Stars; namely, that she became aware of it but didn't press him to open up about it when he clearly didn't want to.
~ IX ~
"Gays in the military," Sam said, with a bitter twist to his mouth. This had been a pet issue of his since long before it started hitting a little closer to home.
"Ah, yes, disgraceful business. Good to see your country is finally taking a few tottering steps towards civilisation."
"Thank you, your lordship," Josh said dryly.
He smiled. "Her Majesty's armed forces have been pursuing for the past few years what was referred to as 'a policy of complete indifference'."
"We prefer to reserve that for more important issues," Sam said dryly.
The ban on homosexuals serving openly in the British armed forces was ruled unlawful in January 2000. By all accounts the change in policy was a complete non-event and the prophesied chaos failed to occur.
Marbury's line is a direct quote from... somebody, but alas I can no longer locate whatever article I lifted it from via Google. I believe it was a military official of some sort, but don't hold me to that.
~ X ~
"There are lines, Toby!"
"He shouldn't hide!" Toby burst out. "He shouldn't-" He broke off, and began to pace the office. "He can't be allowed to run away from himself."
"Because he's the president?" she asked sharply.
He came to a halt. "Because he's who he is!"
CJ shook her head sadly at him. "You can't try to make him perfect," she reminded him.
"I can make him as good as he can be," Toby said fiercely.
"Why?"
"Because..." He waved his hands emphatically. "Because mediocrity abhors brilliance. And the only defence against mediocrity is to be brilliant, and to stay brilliant, and hiding is not escape, it's surrender! And you cannot surrender to mediocrity, you cannot ever surrender to mediocrity, because... Because that's where it ends. If you let mediocrity break you down, then... that's where it... ends."
He wound down slowly, like a clockwork soldier. There was a long silence.
CJ gave him a slow, gently sympathetic smile. "Toby... what happened to you when you were at school?"
They exchanged a long look. "I got tougher," he said very softly. He gave her a melancholy smile, and walked past her out of his own office. She could have followed.
But she didn't.
This CJ/Toby scene here is probably one of my favourites of the whole series. I don't actually have much to say about it, but... I love it. Something about Toby's little mediocrity speech just worked, and I'm fond of the clockwork soldier visual as well.
~ XI ~
Fortunately, she'd come prepared. She leaned in until they were at eye level. "Do I need to go and get the reserve pie?"
That, at least, stirred a response. "What?" He frowned at her.
"I brought one in case of emergency," she elaborated.
"You were going to placate me with pie?"
This is intentional symmetry here, since Andy also brought Toby pie in her very first episode, Mandatory Minimums.
When she looked up, her eyes were alight with more fury than CJ had ever seen in them, and that was no little thing. "That man-" The venom in the First Lady's voice actually made her flinch, and Abbey bit off the rest of whatever she'd been ready to say. "CJ... God help me, CJ, but I'd gladly see my husband's family history dissected in every tabloid piece of trash this country's ever known if it meant that man was exposed for what he truly was."
CJ didn't dare speak up, and the moment was only broken when Abbey sighed and shook her head. "Honest to God, CJ, there are some days I wonder how he even survived that family. The way his father used to treat them... playing one brother against another, and God knows Jonathan didn't come out of it any better, seeing his older brother taken down all the time and neither of them able to stop it."
She looked CJ in the eye. "Nothing he ever did was ever enough to please his father, CJ, and Lord knows if he was alive today, he'd still be standing over Jed's shoulder, cursing him for a fool with every step he takes. And somewhere back in Jed's head, I think he still is."
CJ had nothing to say. It was so... incomprehensible. The only frame of reference she had for a father was her own dearly beloved dad, a tower of strength through all her life and a dull, aching place in her soul now he was gone. To have come through that kind of emotional degradation... how did you get from that to Jed Bartlet? It just didn't seem possible.
I think that what interests me most about Jed's daddy issues is that he's not anybody's caricature of "how abused children turn out". The past has left its mark on him (in the form of Uncle Fluffy and other issues) but not in the 'typical' TV-movie symptoms of problems with emotional intimacy, low self-esteem, etc. It's actually quite rare to see a TV character who is portrayed as having been abused and yet not completely paralysed by it decades later.
In a way, that's what the whole biography arc is about; the fact that Jed has survived his past, moved on from it and dealt in his own way, and yet as soon as everyone hears about what he suffered they're trying to tear him down to get at the emo child they're sure must be under there somewhere. The dragging up of the past doesn't hurt him nearly as much as everyone else's new reactions to it and to him.
It kind of makes me think of baked_goldfish's emo Jed icon. There's a point when you've really got to stop defining somebody totally by their victimhood - and when they're President of the United States with a Nobel Prize and three decades of happy marriage under the belt, you're possibly just a smidge past that point.
On a more personal note, I guess the storyline is also about frustration with the one-size-fits-all school of therapy, both in real life and fanfic, that insists that it's equally beneficial for everybody to "get it all out". People process things in different ways, and no, it isn't always good for those who handle things internally to have all their mental walls smashed down so they can re-do the healing in a way that's visible to other people.
No, she was going to go out for the evening with Donna as planned, get well and truly hammered, and talk to the president tomorrow. Tomorrow was a Saturday, he might be in his jeans and Notre Dame sweatshirt, and somehow he'd be... less the president. A little more like Jed Bartlet, a little more a human being that she could have a desperately painful conversation with. She knew she couldn't do that tonight.
I play with the idea of the two Bartlets in a lot of different ways. The idea of the gap (and the lack of any gap) between man and office is fascinating to me.
~ XII ~
Donna raised her glass, proposing a toast. They'd started toasting fairly random things a few rounds of drinks ago. The glass stayed in the air for a while until one sprang to mind.
"Always the bridesmaids, never the bride," she finally declared, slurring the word 'bridesmaids'. Difficult word. Difficult job, dammit. But someone had to do it, and that was her, Donnatella Moss, bridesmaid extraordinaire. She'd done the deed for both her sisters and an old college roommate, now she was doing it for the daughter of the leader of the free world. She was going up in the world. Or possibly in some other direction. She was definitely going somewhere, because the room sure as hell wasn't staying still.
Drunk Donna is fun to write. She's rambly and free-associating enough at the best of times.
Also, I apologise for putting the image of Toby in a bridesmaid's dress in your head. (And if you didn't have it, you do now. Ha!)
"You've got the vision, Sam. You'd make a great president."
White knight takes black rook. "I've seen the toll it takes on President Bartlet."
Black knight takes white pawn. "So do you think he shouldn't have done it?"
White pawn takes black knight. "I'm not him."
He put Sam in check, and took one of his rooks when he was forced to move out of it. "You really are, Sam," he said sincerely. If Sam couldn't see how much he was like his mentor, he was being wilfully blind.
I'm not really a proponent of the Sam and Josh as a future Jed and Leo theory (having seen them nearly set fire to the White House, among other things) but I guess, with a couple of decades to add gravitas, Sam could be a good president in his own right. Josh, I think, would never be comfortable in the role of Chief of Staff; he wants to be "the guy the guy counts on", and he's happier with someone there above him so he doesn't have to reign himself in.
I think I got the chess moves in this sequence by setting my computer chess program to play against itself.
~ XIII ~
"It was your idea to get the blanket and make like we were camping."
Steve shrugged. "I'm gay; I have a licence to camp." Sam pointed an admonishing finger.
"Okay, that's it. I'm reporting you to the bureau of bad puns and stereotypes."
"You have one of those at the White House?"
"Some days I think I work in it."
I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry.
(Okay, so I'm not. It was too good a setup for Sam's line.)
There had been no alcohol the night before. That was good. That was very good. He could do this. He could find his control. He could pull himself out of this. He-
He was practically shaking with the desperate need to get drunk. Leo wasn't sure if the way his hands seemed to quake was for real or the stigmata of the weight of guilt that was slowly crushing him to death. Either way, he kept his muscles tensed as painfully tightly as he could whenever he was not alone, burying the evidence.
And nobody suspected. That was the worst of it, the knife in his gut; nobody, nobody suspected. Oh, he couldn't hide completely - not from Jed, or from Margaret, or from Josh - but though they all eyed him concernedly, not one of them had fingered the horrible truth. Because not one of them believed for a second that he could screw up this badly, that he could ever have sunk to this depth. They trusted him, and he was betraying them for every fraction of a second they continued to.
Everybody trusts Leo. Implicitly. He's the go-to guy when everybody else is breaking down. And so he's stuck in this kind of between position where he's too ashamed to tell them what's going on, feels like a traitor for hiding it, and no one else is going to help him out by levelling the accusation.
~ XIV ~
Alone in the room - Charlie, despite his protests, had been barred from coming to work any earlier than midday - he surreptitiously tugged at his waistband. If he was getting any thinner, it was taking a long time showing itself. Abbey insisted his diet had put him in better shape than he had been for years, but he suspected he was being humoured.
Surreptitiously! It's that word again.
Josh pulled a face. "You know, technically, I'm your superior."
"Toby's my superior."
"And I'm up there with Toby, so I'm still the boss of you. In fact, I think, I'm not entirely sure, but I might be the boss of Toby, too."
There was a brief pause.
"Good luck with that."
I'm never entirely sure how the West Wing hierarchy is supposed to work, but I'm fairly sure the practise doesn't match the org charts.
They exchanged puzzled looks. Yesterday and the day before, it had seemed that the ambassador had no other goal than to keep them locked up in a room together, tied up in every tiny little nuance of the debate. Now suddenly whatever they decided was okay with him.
Toby mentally regrouped. "Uh, the figures we're proposing-"
"Will be more than enough to satisfy my compatriots across the pond," Marbury waved it away. "Naturally, we're all aware of the realities of these issues; the fact that you were willing to commit to making improvements is the important factor. The PM will be more than happy to clarify his comments and retract any accusation against your county. In fact, he already has; I spoke to him last night." He smiled and bowed. "And now, I shall leave you two alone. Good day!"
I like Marbury as a schemer, working behind the scenes and having a little fun yanking everybody's chains in the meantime. There's a lot going on under the surface with him.
Toby rubbed his forehead slowly. "Remind me why we didn't finish the British off when we had the chance?"
Toby seems to like declaring war on people. Especially the countries that are least likely to see it coming...
"Come with me. Tonight."
She hesitated, plainly torn. "Toby-"
"Come with me."
For a speechwriter and impassioned ranter, Toby is excessively blunt and simple in his personal life. He tries to achieve everything by brute force of personality.
~ XV ~
"Is that live?" she demanded.
"No, we made a greatest hits tape," he said, amused.
Donna glared malevolently at the little image of CJ, cheerfully bantering with the press as if she'd got to bed bright and early the night before without a drop of alcohol in her system. "Okay, CJ's definitely signed a pact with some kind of dark, nefarious power."
CJ just seems like the kind of person who would be cool and collected through her hangover while everybody else is still holed up in a corner groaning. Also, they should totally release a CJ's Greatest Hits tape.
I was still allergic to the word 'gotten' at this stage in my fic writing. I've since got - heh - over my aversion to it, although I still have to proofread carefully for places I should have been using it. Little quirks like that are much harder to police your writing for than just using the right nouns.
"Ellie's afraid of me," he confessed.
"Don't be stupid, Jed."
"I frighten her. She's intimidated by me."
Abbey frowned at him. "Who told you that?"
"Millicent Griffith."
Jed's troubles with Ellie take on a fascinating new light seen through the lens of his relationship with his own father. He struggles to relate to her in the same way his father did with him, and he must wonder if he's making the same mistakes.
I also like the slightly uncomfortable thought that his insistence on having her meet his eyes is something he picked up from his dad. Ironically, the very short fuse that distinguishes him from his father (Bartlet Senior always struck me as a very cold man who held on to and nursed his resentments) is what makes it difficult for him to try and get to the root of his problems with Ellie without exploding.
~ XVI ~
"Hey."
"Hey."
Charlie smiled at his fiancée as she came to sit beside him. "You're sitting out," she noted a little concernedly, absently stroking his hair in a way he rather liked.
"I'm sorry, I'll get out my funky shoes and dance," he told her dryly. Zoey shoved him lightly, and then laid her head against his shoulder.
"Do your ribs hurt?" she asked softly.
"They're okay." There was still a band of dull pain across his chest that would sharpen into a twinge at unexpected moments, but compared to the white-hot agony when they were freshly broken, it barely seemed noticeable. The ribs were the last of his injuries to heal; his fractured wrist had finally recovered, although it would be a good long while before he dared try playing basketball with it.
It would probably be embarrassing to count up the number of scenes in this series that begin with some variant on the "Hey"/"Hi" exchange.
This story is set three months after "Sons and Daughters", so Charlie is no longer totally debilitated by the injuries from the beating he took, but I didn't want to just forget about them. As I recall, I had a bugger of a time trying to find a website that would give me a straight estimate on how long it took for broken ribs to heal.
Which meant he had to stay. At a dinner party full of mingling people, every one of them holding a drink, and nothing to distract him but vapid, inane conversation.
Really, is there any worse career for a recovering alcoholic than one that involves dinner parties full of politicians?
Marbury smiled, and sipped his champagne. "I'm sure the president has better things to do than, as you so melodramatically put it, 'kick my ass'." He didn't fake any approximation of an Americanised twang, and yet hearing his words parroted back in that flawlessly aristocratic accent made Leo feel incredibly vulgar and uncultured.
Leo considered himself a man of the world, educated well enough in what you might call art and literature and what made for a gourmet meal, but there was something about the sheer sense of... history... that the Brit wore like a cloak that felt as intimidating as his foppishness was annoying. Politics was a place you met plenty of people who had their own opinions on what constituted 'good breeding' - the main tenet of their philosophy generally being that they had it and other people didn't - but Marbury was irrefutably the genuine article. And something of the hardworking Catholic boy that remained at the core of Leo itched uncomfortably in the presence of a power that was bred instead of earned.
It's funny how you acclimatise to voices. I'm usually completely unconscious of accents when I'm watching an American show but as soon as you add an English voice to the mix, all the accents pop right out at me again. It's weird.
"You seem a little distracted, Leo," Marbury observed mildly.
The switch from "Gerald" here is deliberate, although Leo is, indeed, too distracted to notice it. Damn right Marbury knows what his name is.
I kind of love Marbury, in case you haven't noticed yet. I'm a little sad I never did get round to writing that fic where he and Abbey get taken hostage at a diplomatic function and proceed to rescue themselves with much ass-kicking and pretended drunkenness.
~ XVII ~
"Sir, shouldn't you be... mingling?" he finally wondered aloud.
The president shrugged sharply. "Ah, what's the point? They won't even let me eat any of the food."
"You're allowed to eat the salad," Charlie reminded him.
"Yes, but not any of the food."
I love this little Jed/Charlie scene at the start of this chapter. It's simple, but one of my favourites.
She watched them surreptitiously while her husband shook hands and schmoozed people he'd rather not be talking to.
Surreptitiously! (Drink!)
Lord Marbury appeared through the crowd and made his way to Josh's side. "Ah, Joshua! Might I have a moment of your time?"
"Lord Marbury," Josh nodded politely, the automatic smile he pasted on only slightly fixed.
"I'll get more drinks," Donna said brightly, and went off to snag a waiter.
When she returned with two flutes of champagne, Marbury was alone. "Where did Josh go?" she frowned.
I used Marbury to set Josh on Leo's tail because I felt it needed someone on the outside to make the final connection that those closer to Leo would be reluctant to let themselves make.
~ XVIII ~
"Sure," Steve shrugged. He pointed with his wineglass. "I'll go bug CJ for some more embarrassing stories."
"She doesn't know any," he said confidently.
"That's what you think, Spanky." Sam stared at him in alarm, and Steve grinned widely. "CJ is my new best friend," he said, and headed over to join her.
CJ's habit of assigning random nicknames never ceases to amuse me.
Sam came to a complete halt and stared at him in disbelief. "Sir, I..." He shook his head. "Maybe Congress, I suppose, but... you can't seriously think that I would run for office now?"
The president gave him a sharp look. "Well, what in the world would be stopping you?"
"Um, the fact that I won't win?" he pointed out.
"Well, that's a stupid reason," the president shrugged.
"I suppose."
"That was the reason I did run, and look what happened with that."
"True."
The president smiled, and clapped him on the shoulder. "Sam... as I'm sure you'll recall having advised me many times, the winning the battle is the very least of it. I didn't let Leo talk me into running for president because I ever believed I'd end up here. We didn't run for reelection because we expected to get back in. And I didn't propose the Hate Crimes Bill because it would be an easy sell." He looked Sam in the eye. "We don't do these things because we expect them to be easy, or even because we think we have a hope of getting them accomplished. We do these things because these are the right things, and because we believe that this is the time for people to do them."
I like this little conversation/mini-speech.
I've since stopped using shorthand dialogue tags like, '"X," he shrugged' as a substitution for '"X," he said with a shrug'. Personally I never minded them as an informal thing that can sometimes helps the flow or avoid an awkward sentence structure, but - like a few other not-quite-grammatical quirks - it's something that I just stopped doing because it's easier than having the copyeditors strike it out every time.
~ XIX ~
Ah, hangovers. Funny how it all came back to you. Still, this was only a small one in the scheme of things. One surreptitiously purchased bottle couldn't bring you all the fun of a night on the town and a raided mini-bar.
Surreptitiously! (Drink!)
...I really hope that's the last one. This is getting embarrassing. Hmm. A quick spot check of the FtF series reveals that the word is used 18 times across ten stories, so yeah, this is definitely an unusually heavy concentration. But still, eep!
He opened the door of his hotel room.
Josh was sitting on the floor outside it, waiting for him.
I set up the end of the last chapter to imply that Josh had given up and gone home. But I have a limited tolerance for drawing out angst, and the scattering of Leo POV scenes across this fic were already pushing it, so I went for the resolution instead of letting the plotline drag on.
(Also, at this point, I think I still foolishly believed that the end of the series was in sight two, maybe three stories away. Hah.)
Huh. This Jed/Charlie scene is total filler. And the Sam/Steve one isn't much better. Guess I was stretched for material towards the end.
Leo was drinking again.
That, in Josh's mind, was not the crux of the problem. Leo's own reaction to the fact that he was drinking again... that was the problem.
For someone who seems flail helplessly a lot of the time, Josh has an interesting knack for being able to discard irrelevancies and just cut down to the very heart of an issue. I guess it's part of what makes him so good in his role as Bartlet's attack dog; he knows how to go for the jugular. (His problem being that he tends to go for it as soon as he sees it instead of stopping to consider whether it's a smart move tactically.)
~ XX ~
"Forgotten your brain again?" she asked dryly.
"I thought you were supposed to keep hold of that?" he smiled back.
"I think it got lost in the shuffle somewhere."
"Explains a lot," he allowed.
In my house, it's traditional to always follow up, "What have I forgotten?" with "Your brain?" (Usually followed by, "Nope, don't need that.")
Josh came across to sit on the edge of his desk. He produced a small slip of paper from his inner pocket and fiddled with absently. "It took me a long time to find this," he said, almost to himself. "I'd almost forgotten I had it. It was a bit like... a bit like Dumbo. You remember Dumbo? They gave him the feather to make him believe he could fly, but he didn't really need it." He looked wryly across at Leo. "You probably didn't see Dumbo."
Leo's lack of cultural conversancy never amuses me.
Also, this whole section is shameless mush. But hey.
~ XXI ~
"The truth will set you free," he reminded him softly, and it was a mark of the power and presence of Jed Bartlet that the platitude rang neither unimaginative nor insincere.
Gravitas at work, people. I don't think Martin Sheen would be capable of sounding trite if he tried.
"Do I look like I'm smiling?" he demanded.
"Well, I don't know, 'cause it's a little hard to see you past that enormous pair of rose-tinted glasses you're wearing!"
I like this line. Despite the misplaced mental image of Bartlet in Elton John glasses it invokes.
I didn't trip over and hit my head, Jed, I went out, I bought the damn bottle, I took it home and I drank it!" he spat out.
"And I ran for this job even though I know I have MS," the president said quietly. He raised an eyebrow challengingly. "Guess they should crucify us both."
Leo shook his head. "It's not the same thing-"
"Oh, it's not the same thing, because you have a disease and I have a disease, and when it strikes then we can't do our jobs." He scowled. "So if you're not telling me that I can't do my job, then stop telling me that you can't do your job, because you can't have it both ways!"
I think this is an interesting parallel, and one that doesn't get brought up much: if you truly accept alcoholism as a disease, then Leo's situation is an exact match for Jed's; he has a pre-existing condition that potentially could flare up and interfere with his work, but there's no guarantee of it doing so. It's the same thing.
"Okay, Leo, note the position of the word 'sir' in that sentence, and ask yourself who here is the boss of us." Jed shook his head. "Leo, do you seriously think that a single person in this whole damn building is gonna walk away from you? Do you think we're gonna let you walk away from us? If you leave, we're coming after you. And if you try to quit, I'm just gonna sit on you until you change your mind."
"Well, that'd be a fate worse than death," he said sardonically.
"Hey! I'll have you know that I've lost a lot of weight these past few months."
Having set up Abbey's diet and exercise plan as a potential solution to Jed's health problems last story, I did try to put in a few hints that it's been helping. (Although further on in the series he then proceeds to take a downturn thanks to the depression induced by the biography arc. Damn, I beat up these characters a lot in this series.)
"Oh please, have you listened to yourself lately? Dye yourself green and you could be Yoda."
"You know Star Wars?"
"Shut up."
"You know Star Wars?"
"I have a daughter!"
"You're telling me you know Yoda, but you don't know Charlie Brown?"
"He's the one with the dog, right?"
And another little poke at Leo's Charlie Brown issues.
The end of this fic is totally cheesy, but ah, well. The occasional bit of cheese just adds to the flavour, right?
The end.
Huh. I'm not sure if that was all that insightful, but I had more to say than I thought I would after all this time. I'm working on a commentary for Pegasus Connection, but that could take a while. I may do one for Decade in between, as it's a short story.