West Wing FF: Twice into the River (Sam/Josh implied, PG-13)
Title: Twice into the River
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Sam/Josh, at least it's about their relationship, it's probably more readable as gen. Also, there are mentions of the boys with other people, but it's background noise
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 3,700 words
Disclaimer: I don't own Sam. One of the saddest things in my life. Oh, and the others belong to Sorkin too.
Summary: It was more than just nostalgic symmetry. The story of Sam Seaborn and Josh Lyman, as seen through the filter of childhood memories, two office-window knocks, and their first meeting.
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers for S1-7. Also, I've made up a lot of the childhood stuff. They go a bit emo... I think the timetable is pretty much right, but my counting skills aren't what they used to be. ;-)
AN: So, Sam/Josh. Bound to happen someday, no idea how it happened with this. Unbetaed, and I haven't slept for quite a while, so the typos may be nutty. Just tell me gently. Also, these all connect perfectly *in my head*. But that's definitely more a vacation spot than anywhere you want to live, so tell me if it makes any sense at all please.
1997
Josh never bothered to call Sam before showing up. He wasn’t exactly sure why not, because even today, when he interrupted what was probably an important meeting, Sam didn’t refuse him. Today Josh had desperately tried to convince his best friend that writing for the presumptive Democratic nominee would be better for him than creating admittedly flawless liability shields. Sam had looked as though he might be regretting that open-door policy. Perhaps you lost the right to criticise your friend’s life when you only showed up once every three months. Less sometimes. But Sam never complained, and it didn’t seem to matter very much in the end. Sam had invaded Josh’s life in a bar in North Carolina and their relationship hadn’t changed much since then. Josh wouldn’t call for three months, and Sam would smile at him when he reappeared, and mock him soundly for never remembering the firm’s name.
Sam had looked tired today. Fondly exasperated with Josh, but that was nothing new. The tiredness was. He had already been there to convince Sam to come with him, but the need was more pressing with Sam standing in front of him being cynical. Sam shouldn’t be cynical.
Hoynes maybe wasn’t the real thing, and you could bet your ass he still didn’t have a position on social security, but he wasn’t an oil company. Hoynes promised they could make good on their promises just as soon as they could get him in through the door. Sam and Josh could work with that. Sam was, as Josh’s father had always said about his son, ‘meant for great things’.
* * * *
Every childhood memory Josh has is separated into pre and post Joanie’s death. Not a single one - not a song, or a movie or a game of Little League - that he cannot associate with his big sister’s absence or presence. That day always hangs between the two - smelling of smoke and the guilt he even now does not know what to do with.
So it’s not rocket science to work out when he decided to be a lawyer. Before Joanie died he was going to be lead-off hitter for the Mets. Afterwards, when he was suddenly the eldest, only child, Josh had decided to be grown up. He would be a lawyer, like his Dad, and they would be proud of him. It wouldn’t be as good as conductor for the New York Philharmonic, but he would make his parents proud.
Much, much, later, Josh would feel the need to tell two therapists that this was not his parents’ doing. They did not make him feel inadequate or unwanted, and no one so much as wondered in passing what would have been had the fire taken the other child. But loss leaves a very particular scar, and part of Josh’s guilt, even after his father’s death, was that his parents had always been a little sadder than they might have been.
He finds it difficult to hang onto friends afterwards. He makes them mad, unintentionally, with his sharp tongue. His first therapist, when he was too small for his feet to reach the floor from the high couch, told him that this was normal. That it was perfectly usual to feel apart from kids who had no idea what loss felt like. To push them away because they didn’t understand. Josh tries to explain, with words he cannot organise, that it is just that he worries they will leave him too.
* * *
1997
Of course, none of that worry mattered now. Hoynes was out of the picture. Bartlet was it, he was their real thing, and Josh would keep his promise to Sam by getting on the next train to Washington to tell him that.
He could do this. He could chase that desperation out of Sam’s eyes. When he got to the office window he realised he didn’t know what to say. In the end he just looked, letting his face tell the story. Sam, who always got him better than anyone else, just left his world behind and followed Josh.
* * * *
Josh was a freshman in high school before he changed his mind about following in his father’s footsteps. Or, to be more accurate, he had his mind changed for him by an old friend of his father’s. Leo McGarry - high in the party and climbing - stopped in Connecticut on a flying visit. He was headed to DC with a rookie Congressman he was hoping would get a second term. Mr McGarry, who insisted on being called Leo, looked haggard enough that Josh would have believed he was creating that second term all on his own. Certainly he looked far older than Josh’s lively father, though they were pretty much the same age. But then Leo started to talk and Josh stopped looking at the slightly old-fashioned suit and the dark-lined eyes to listen to Leo talk about leadership, and changing the face of democracy.
Josh had listened intently to the argument, friendly though it was, between Leo and his father. Forgetting that they were in their late thirties, and he was only sixteen, Josh argued back. Leo’s words stuttered and stopped. He turned to Josh, grinning, and said the magic words - “Thinking about a career in politics, kid?”
* * * *
He is the first to realise (though would be the last to acknowledge) that his law degree has not actually taught him how to practice law. But it has let him join the Young Democrats, the Harvard and Yale Debate Teams, and internships for some of the future leading lights of the Democratic Party. He learnt how to be the man behind the man, or the woman as the case may be and increasingly was. He learnt his way up and down Mandy Hampton’s body, and still couldn’t learn how to stop her throwing her handbag at his head when he said the wrong thing.
He still couldn’t unlearn the taste of survivor’s guilt, or how to need without the fear of loss.
* * * *
1990
Josh has been doing this for a little less than two years but he knows already that it will kill him when he screws it up. He is too young, really, for the job he’s doing today - organising the team of interns only two and three years younger than himself. They are in chaos - not the interns, the campaign staff - and short a writer. He looks around, thinks he might recognise a face, and acts. He is reorganising the teams in his head even as he asks the question. If the guy is not who he thought, or if he says no, the whole thought will be derailed. The boy turns and focuses clear blue eyes on him.
“Hey, it’s Sam, right? You were here last year too,” Josh asks.
“Yeah,” he answers, surprised.
“Hi. Josh. Deputy something or other. Kind of.”
He grins. “I know.”
“You’re a writer, yeah?”
Now he’s definitely surprised. “Yeah. I mean, I just spent three years in law school, so I guess I’m a lawyer, but last year I did some writing, yes.”
“You finished law school?”
“Yes!”
“Just checking.” Josh smiles, and Sam smiles back without offence. “So, you want to do some writing?”
“Sure, but I thought we were all....”
“The Congressman needs some brains to pick regarding changes to his stump speech for the latest pass at re-election. It turns out that’s you and me.”
“Shouldn’t that maybe be his communications director?”
“His communications director is, for reasons I really don’t have time to get into, stuck in Vermont. I remember you being pretty good. Want to help me out here?”
“Sure. Yes. Of course.”
“Cool. Come on then.” As he walks Sam into the Congressman’s office he swears he hears Sam whispering to himself. Something about into the breach. He looks at Sam, who it’s now clear is at least three years younger, and watches as he vibrates. He wants to say something calming or reassuring, but if he was any good at words he would not need Sam beside him. Though he suspects, as he puts his hand on the bouncing shoulders, that he might have brought him along anyway. Sam reacts to the hand by turning to face Josh with a sunny, grateful smile. Josh wonders what this moment will cost him later.
* * *
Sam has never been able to tell when women are looking at him, but he feels Josh’s eyes burn into the back of his head from across the bar. Smart, funny, wildly talented Josh Lyman who had grinned and led him into the inner sanctum. Who had acted as if his remembrance of a twenty-three year old intern from last year was a matter of course. He does not turn quickly, or try to check unobtrusively if he has read the situation right for once. Instead Sam turns slowly and precisely to face Josh, sitting at the other end of the bar.
Josh is nursing a beer, not his first of the night. Sam notes this, and mentally replays his mother’s warning about people who drink alone. He thinks, briefly, as he slides down a few stools, that perhaps he is heeding it - taking pity on Josh by joining him and freeing him from these portents. But he knows it isn’t true. Certainly he is moving because Josh, frozen in the headlights, wants Sam to move. But it has nothing to do with pity and everything to do with need.
It’s twice now that Josh has picked Sam out of a crowd. Sam needs to know why Josh thinks he’s so special.
Josh is a little drunk, and Sam grins at the stuff coming out of his mouth. Then Josh says, “And another thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Our guy’s good, but there should be better candidates out there. Someone who’s... I don’t know... born to do this kind of thing.”
“I thought that’s what campaign managers were for. King-makers? We live in a Republic, doesn’t that mean we should believe kings are made, not born?” Sam is just arguing back because he can, but Josh seems to take him seriously for a moment.
Then: “That’s a load of crap and you know it. Sam, we’ve been working together for what...”
“Coming on twelve hours now,” he answers dryly.
“And already you’re lying to me! There is a candidate out there for guys like us. One who is actually supposed to be in office, not one who thinks someone ought to do it and it might as well be him! Someone who can lead, Sam. Someone that has leadership as an actual talent, not part of the image we try to give to them. Who can... guide us through deserts, part the red sea, ya know?”
“And now you’re looking for a biblical leader...”
“Metaphorically! Broker deals with conflicting parties by threatening to cut babies in half, that kind of thing.”
“You’ve moved from Moses to Solomon,” Sam notes.
“Metaphorically!” Josh repeats, banging the bar for emphasis. Sam discreetly moves the glasses from around his hands. Josh continues, “When was the last time you looked at a politician and really thought - that’s the guy I want commanding the army?”
“The army of North Carolina?”
“Sam. This isn’t just about Congressman Markos. It’s about changing the face of democracy. The right place in the right time shouldn’t be enough to be a leader. A leader makes it the right time. Makes it the right place. Moves mountains, kisses babies, averts nuclear holocausts. All the king-makers should do is point them in the right direction and let them do their jobs.”
“The real thing.”
Josh blinks, wide and astonished that Sam is agreeing with him, or perhaps just that he followed the convoluted train of thought. “Yes!” he agrees loudly.
“When I find him, I’ll let you know,” Sam assures him.
“Me too.”
“You promise?”
Josh leans in, and his breath is warm and sweet on Sam’s cheek. He grips the hand still lying on the bar, gentle now that he is not threatening to break glass. “You and me, buddy. We’ll make kings. I promise.”
* * * *
Sam was nine years old when he competed in the regional Spelling Bee. He won, of course, but his father was on a business trip in New York and missed him.
His mother was there, and she hugged him tight to her, promising him ice cream. He remembers laughing guiltily when she told him that she would buy them enough to rot their teeth clean away.
His Dad makes it home - a delayed flight he explained that evening - bearing a heavy dictionary as a joke present. The next ‘thing’ Sam had was a basketball game, and his father was cheering in the stands. Sam knows now that his father was feeling guilty for the first absence, or perhaps it was simply a delayed flight before, but what he remembers is that his Dad didn’t see him spell orchestra but made it for his free throw. In the State-wide competition he panics, misses guacamole. His Dad saw that one.
He stops entering the contests, stops offering his opinions in class all the time. On paper though, on the notebooks he fills in careful rounded script, he writes stories. He can’t help but do well in school, he tries to be quiet but sometimes there are words he has to say. There are words he has to write too, and when he writes them in his homework the teacher looks at him strangely and phones his parents. He finds himself fast-tracked up a grade and now he is too small to play in the basketball team. He tries harder to stay quiet for a while and eventually gives up. He lets the words do what they want and ignores the stares and name-calling. There are words in his head that need to get out, don’t they realise he already knows he’s a freak?
* * * *
2007
Sam was mostly unsurprised when Josh turned up at his office door. It wasn’t as if he normally called first anyway. He sat in front of Josh and laughed when he was reminded of the style points, but he had been waiting for something. If only a call to tell him that Josh’s nervous breakdown had finally hit epic proportions and he should turn up to the hospital. Toby gave him regular updates, because Josh could not be trusted to do it himself.
He had followed the campaign, couldn’t not, but was still unsure about Santos. Toby claimed that he didn’t like him, claimed that he wouldn’t be elected, but Sam knew that Toby had been on the phone to Josh every other day in the lead up to the election. It was possible, although by no means certain, that Toby had changed his mind after Santos had won. Sam didn’t know. It was an amazing thing Josh had done, and Sam liked to think it had not been done for the undeserving, but Josh was so tired. He couldn’t remember Josh, or even Leo, looking like this after their first election. Of course they had been tired and stressed, and Sam remembered only too well his and Toby’s little moments of hysteria in the transition weeks. But this fractured weariness in Josh’s eyes scared him a little.
* * * *
When Sam was fourteen, three months into his sophomore year of high school, his Dad finally followed up on his threats and took away the clarinet. It wasn’t that Sam was good at it exactly. He wasn’t a band-geek, not that his reputation had any further to sink. Even if he did start playing in the marching band, Bobby Zane probably didn’t have any time in his busy day to schedule another beating-up for scrawny little Sam Seaborn
But still, between the punching and the fact he was a year younger than the rest of the kids and that unbelievably mattered even more now, he seemed to have less time for clarinet practice. Didn’t mean he didn’t care, but his dad had noticed. And Dad had turned it into a lesson on perseverance and commitment.
Had Sam known then what he knew later, he would have told his father that he didn’t want to learn the perseverance required to love someone else but not divorce your wife because you swore an oath. That perseverance, the real kind, the only kind worth having, was the perseverance to do the right thing even when it was hard and stupid and barely worth the effort. Like getting the divorce before the affair because if oaths couldn’t be kept they should be openly severed, not betrayed. Loving was difficult and painful and not as simple as a honeymoon every other weekend. And he would still have learnt that if he had kept his clarinet.
* * * *
In the summer between High School and college Sam finally grew out of what his mother persisted in referring to as ‘that awkward phase.’ It was too late to salvage Orange County, but in Princeton he smiled at the girl across the hall (awkwardly, under glasses and behind his hair) and she smiled back, blushing.
The smart girls kind of crept up on him, deciding - correctly - that he was not going to make the first move, and so they should make it themselves. The girl across the hall was called Sophie, and she majored in US history with minors in French and Psychology. The Sam-and-Sophie tag debate team was the subject of much affectionate mockery, but he had liked to believe they made it work. The break-up was amicable enough - on her terms, not his - and he would remember to send her Christmas cards even in the White House. She was the first girl he had sex with, and his memory of it, aside from the relief he was doing it right, was the wicked grin she had when she finally got him into the bed.
The first boy he slept with was called Jack, and it was a one-night stand that turned into a three-month summer romance. Sam sailed, and Jack liked to watch him walk about the yacht bare-chested pulling the ropes. There was more to it than that, but nothing that either of them could put into words. Nothing to hang onto when summer ended and Sam left to go back to college and Jack to med school. Sam does not know where to send cards to for Jack, and even if he did he would not know what to say. What he remembers, when he has the call to remember that time, is that he had not known that Jack was looking either, that there was no secret male code that he could decipher. And that having your heart broken, even amicably, even when no words had been spoken to point at and cry betrayal, still stung. His surprise surprised him.
* * * *
2007
It turned out that exhaustion was not the worst of it. Sam wondered whether he had just forgotten that Josh got like this at election time. But the election was over, and Josh really had never been this bad before. Yelling at Otto, Sam wasn’t sure that all of Josh was even there. Josh was always a little on edge but this was beyond that. Sam was pretty sure that there had been some phenomenal highs to counteract the disproportionate rage, but as an indicator of how he would cope in office the signs weren’t good.
Except that it wasn’t rage, it was blind panic, and how could no-one else at the campaign see it? This campaign had been a miracle from start to finish, but it had claimed Leo, and now the only other person Josh might have gone to for counsel was gone. Donna, (and he was sure of this, even when she was in the wrong office) would be doing all she could, but it was not everything. Josh needed someone in the West Wing to take him aside and tell him when he had crossed the line, when he needed to cross one, and when to stop second-guessing himself and just work. Santos couldn’t be that person, he was too much the rookie himself. He had been close to firing Josh by all accounts, and who the hell had convinced him that was a good idea? Josh had managed to forget - or perhaps did nothing but remember - that he wasn’t Leo. There was no shame in that, not if Santos wasn’t Bartlet. And Sam wasn’t Josh - Josh had all the comparisons wrong. What he should have said, probably what he had meant anyway, was that he needed Sam to follow him into the breach again. Needed Sam to shoulder some of the weight, though no one but Josh had ever considered him a heavy lifter. But Josh wouldn’t say that, he would just ask as if it should barely even be a question.
The first time Josh had done this, Sam did not agree just for Josh’s sake. He had refused to come and work for Hoynes even if Josh wanted him there. But Josh came back, talking of Bartlet, and with a lack of poker face that showed he had found the real thing in a half-empty event in Nashua, New Hampshire of all places. The real thing was their ill-defined holy grail, and Bartlet got to preside over Camelot for eight years. But now Josh was running the country without a King Arthur (and was it a mixed metaphor for Bartlet to be both grail and king?) and asked Sam to fight this again anyway. Last time had been for both of them, Sam even more than Josh, and for the fulfilment of a drunken promise made a decade back. This was for Josh, and there were no ties of obligation bar the ones Sam had made for himself.
Josh needed him. Nine years ago, he had needed Josh, and Josh had come to get him. Now Josh needed him. It was barely even a question.
FIN *sighs* Done. At least it's out of my head now, even if it is incoherent. Comments are ever wonderful
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Sam/Josh, at least it's about their relationship, it's probably more readable as gen. Also, there are mentions of the boys with other people, but it's background noise
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 3,700 words
Disclaimer: I don't own Sam. One of the saddest things in my life. Oh, and the others belong to Sorkin too.
Summary: It was more than just nostalgic symmetry. The story of Sam Seaborn and Josh Lyman, as seen through the filter of childhood memories, two office-window knocks, and their first meeting.
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers for S1-7. Also, I've made up a lot of the childhood stuff. They go a bit emo... I think the timetable is pretty much right, but my counting skills aren't what they used to be. ;-)
AN: So, Sam/Josh. Bound to happen someday, no idea how it happened with this. Unbetaed, and I haven't slept for quite a while, so the typos may be nutty. Just tell me gently. Also, these all connect perfectly *in my head*. But that's definitely more a vacation spot than anywhere you want to live, so tell me if it makes any sense at all please.
1997
Josh never bothered to call Sam before showing up. He wasn’t exactly sure why not, because even today, when he interrupted what was probably an important meeting, Sam didn’t refuse him. Today Josh had desperately tried to convince his best friend that writing for the presumptive Democratic nominee would be better for him than creating admittedly flawless liability shields. Sam had looked as though he might be regretting that open-door policy. Perhaps you lost the right to criticise your friend’s life when you only showed up once every three months. Less sometimes. But Sam never complained, and it didn’t seem to matter very much in the end. Sam had invaded Josh’s life in a bar in North Carolina and their relationship hadn’t changed much since then. Josh wouldn’t call for three months, and Sam would smile at him when he reappeared, and mock him soundly for never remembering the firm’s name.
Sam had looked tired today. Fondly exasperated with Josh, but that was nothing new. The tiredness was. He had already been there to convince Sam to come with him, but the need was more pressing with Sam standing in front of him being cynical. Sam shouldn’t be cynical.
Hoynes maybe wasn’t the real thing, and you could bet your ass he still didn’t have a position on social security, but he wasn’t an oil company. Hoynes promised they could make good on their promises just as soon as they could get him in through the door. Sam and Josh could work with that. Sam was, as Josh’s father had always said about his son, ‘meant for great things’.
* * * *
Every childhood memory Josh has is separated into pre and post Joanie’s death. Not a single one - not a song, or a movie or a game of Little League - that he cannot associate with his big sister’s absence or presence. That day always hangs between the two - smelling of smoke and the guilt he even now does not know what to do with.
So it’s not rocket science to work out when he decided to be a lawyer. Before Joanie died he was going to be lead-off hitter for the Mets. Afterwards, when he was suddenly the eldest, only child, Josh had decided to be grown up. He would be a lawyer, like his Dad, and they would be proud of him. It wouldn’t be as good as conductor for the New York Philharmonic, but he would make his parents proud.
Much, much, later, Josh would feel the need to tell two therapists that this was not his parents’ doing. They did not make him feel inadequate or unwanted, and no one so much as wondered in passing what would have been had the fire taken the other child. But loss leaves a very particular scar, and part of Josh’s guilt, even after his father’s death, was that his parents had always been a little sadder than they might have been.
He finds it difficult to hang onto friends afterwards. He makes them mad, unintentionally, with his sharp tongue. His first therapist, when he was too small for his feet to reach the floor from the high couch, told him that this was normal. That it was perfectly usual to feel apart from kids who had no idea what loss felt like. To push them away because they didn’t understand. Josh tries to explain, with words he cannot organise, that it is just that he worries they will leave him too.
* * *
1997
Of course, none of that worry mattered now. Hoynes was out of the picture. Bartlet was it, he was their real thing, and Josh would keep his promise to Sam by getting on the next train to Washington to tell him that.
He could do this. He could chase that desperation out of Sam’s eyes. When he got to the office window he realised he didn’t know what to say. In the end he just looked, letting his face tell the story. Sam, who always got him better than anyone else, just left his world behind and followed Josh.
* * * *
Josh was a freshman in high school before he changed his mind about following in his father’s footsteps. Or, to be more accurate, he had his mind changed for him by an old friend of his father’s. Leo McGarry - high in the party and climbing - stopped in Connecticut on a flying visit. He was headed to DC with a rookie Congressman he was hoping would get a second term. Mr McGarry, who insisted on being called Leo, looked haggard enough that Josh would have believed he was creating that second term all on his own. Certainly he looked far older than Josh’s lively father, though they were pretty much the same age. But then Leo started to talk and Josh stopped looking at the slightly old-fashioned suit and the dark-lined eyes to listen to Leo talk about leadership, and changing the face of democracy.
Josh had listened intently to the argument, friendly though it was, between Leo and his father. Forgetting that they were in their late thirties, and he was only sixteen, Josh argued back. Leo’s words stuttered and stopped. He turned to Josh, grinning, and said the magic words - “Thinking about a career in politics, kid?”
* * * *
He is the first to realise (though would be the last to acknowledge) that his law degree has not actually taught him how to practice law. But it has let him join the Young Democrats, the Harvard and Yale Debate Teams, and internships for some of the future leading lights of the Democratic Party. He learnt how to be the man behind the man, or the woman as the case may be and increasingly was. He learnt his way up and down Mandy Hampton’s body, and still couldn’t learn how to stop her throwing her handbag at his head when he said the wrong thing.
He still couldn’t unlearn the taste of survivor’s guilt, or how to need without the fear of loss.
* * * *
1990
Josh has been doing this for a little less than two years but he knows already that it will kill him when he screws it up. He is too young, really, for the job he’s doing today - organising the team of interns only two and three years younger than himself. They are in chaos - not the interns, the campaign staff - and short a writer. He looks around, thinks he might recognise a face, and acts. He is reorganising the teams in his head even as he asks the question. If the guy is not who he thought, or if he says no, the whole thought will be derailed. The boy turns and focuses clear blue eyes on him.
“Hey, it’s Sam, right? You were here last year too,” Josh asks.
“Yeah,” he answers, surprised.
“Hi. Josh. Deputy something or other. Kind of.”
He grins. “I know.”
“You’re a writer, yeah?”
Now he’s definitely surprised. “Yeah. I mean, I just spent three years in law school, so I guess I’m a lawyer, but last year I did some writing, yes.”
“You finished law school?”
“Yes!”
“Just checking.” Josh smiles, and Sam smiles back without offence. “So, you want to do some writing?”
“Sure, but I thought we were all....”
“The Congressman needs some brains to pick regarding changes to his stump speech for the latest pass at re-election. It turns out that’s you and me.”
“Shouldn’t that maybe be his communications director?”
“His communications director is, for reasons I really don’t have time to get into, stuck in Vermont. I remember you being pretty good. Want to help me out here?”
“Sure. Yes. Of course.”
“Cool. Come on then.” As he walks Sam into the Congressman’s office he swears he hears Sam whispering to himself. Something about into the breach. He looks at Sam, who it’s now clear is at least three years younger, and watches as he vibrates. He wants to say something calming or reassuring, but if he was any good at words he would not need Sam beside him. Though he suspects, as he puts his hand on the bouncing shoulders, that he might have brought him along anyway. Sam reacts to the hand by turning to face Josh with a sunny, grateful smile. Josh wonders what this moment will cost him later.
* * *
Sam has never been able to tell when women are looking at him, but he feels Josh’s eyes burn into the back of his head from across the bar. Smart, funny, wildly talented Josh Lyman who had grinned and led him into the inner sanctum. Who had acted as if his remembrance of a twenty-three year old intern from last year was a matter of course. He does not turn quickly, or try to check unobtrusively if he has read the situation right for once. Instead Sam turns slowly and precisely to face Josh, sitting at the other end of the bar.
Josh is nursing a beer, not his first of the night. Sam notes this, and mentally replays his mother’s warning about people who drink alone. He thinks, briefly, as he slides down a few stools, that perhaps he is heeding it - taking pity on Josh by joining him and freeing him from these portents. But he knows it isn’t true. Certainly he is moving because Josh, frozen in the headlights, wants Sam to move. But it has nothing to do with pity and everything to do with need.
It’s twice now that Josh has picked Sam out of a crowd. Sam needs to know why Josh thinks he’s so special.
Josh is a little drunk, and Sam grins at the stuff coming out of his mouth. Then Josh says, “And another thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Our guy’s good, but there should be better candidates out there. Someone who’s... I don’t know... born to do this kind of thing.”
“I thought that’s what campaign managers were for. King-makers? We live in a Republic, doesn’t that mean we should believe kings are made, not born?” Sam is just arguing back because he can, but Josh seems to take him seriously for a moment.
Then: “That’s a load of crap and you know it. Sam, we’ve been working together for what...”
“Coming on twelve hours now,” he answers dryly.
“And already you’re lying to me! There is a candidate out there for guys like us. One who is actually supposed to be in office, not one who thinks someone ought to do it and it might as well be him! Someone who can lead, Sam. Someone that has leadership as an actual talent, not part of the image we try to give to them. Who can... guide us through deserts, part the red sea, ya know?”
“And now you’re looking for a biblical leader...”
“Metaphorically! Broker deals with conflicting parties by threatening to cut babies in half, that kind of thing.”
“You’ve moved from Moses to Solomon,” Sam notes.
“Metaphorically!” Josh repeats, banging the bar for emphasis. Sam discreetly moves the glasses from around his hands. Josh continues, “When was the last time you looked at a politician and really thought - that’s the guy I want commanding the army?”
“The army of North Carolina?”
“Sam. This isn’t just about Congressman Markos. It’s about changing the face of democracy. The right place in the right time shouldn’t be enough to be a leader. A leader makes it the right time. Makes it the right place. Moves mountains, kisses babies, averts nuclear holocausts. All the king-makers should do is point them in the right direction and let them do their jobs.”
“The real thing.”
Josh blinks, wide and astonished that Sam is agreeing with him, or perhaps just that he followed the convoluted train of thought. “Yes!” he agrees loudly.
“When I find him, I’ll let you know,” Sam assures him.
“Me too.”
“You promise?”
Josh leans in, and his breath is warm and sweet on Sam’s cheek. He grips the hand still lying on the bar, gentle now that he is not threatening to break glass. “You and me, buddy. We’ll make kings. I promise.”
* * * *
Sam was nine years old when he competed in the regional Spelling Bee. He won, of course, but his father was on a business trip in New York and missed him.
His mother was there, and she hugged him tight to her, promising him ice cream. He remembers laughing guiltily when she told him that she would buy them enough to rot their teeth clean away.
His Dad makes it home - a delayed flight he explained that evening - bearing a heavy dictionary as a joke present. The next ‘thing’ Sam had was a basketball game, and his father was cheering in the stands. Sam knows now that his father was feeling guilty for the first absence, or perhaps it was simply a delayed flight before, but what he remembers is that his Dad didn’t see him spell orchestra but made it for his free throw. In the State-wide competition he panics, misses guacamole. His Dad saw that one.
He stops entering the contests, stops offering his opinions in class all the time. On paper though, on the notebooks he fills in careful rounded script, he writes stories. He can’t help but do well in school, he tries to be quiet but sometimes there are words he has to say. There are words he has to write too, and when he writes them in his homework the teacher looks at him strangely and phones his parents. He finds himself fast-tracked up a grade and now he is too small to play in the basketball team. He tries harder to stay quiet for a while and eventually gives up. He lets the words do what they want and ignores the stares and name-calling. There are words in his head that need to get out, don’t they realise he already knows he’s a freak?
* * * *
2007
Sam was mostly unsurprised when Josh turned up at his office door. It wasn’t as if he normally called first anyway. He sat in front of Josh and laughed when he was reminded of the style points, but he had been waiting for something. If only a call to tell him that Josh’s nervous breakdown had finally hit epic proportions and he should turn up to the hospital. Toby gave him regular updates, because Josh could not be trusted to do it himself.
He had followed the campaign, couldn’t not, but was still unsure about Santos. Toby claimed that he didn’t like him, claimed that he wouldn’t be elected, but Sam knew that Toby had been on the phone to Josh every other day in the lead up to the election. It was possible, although by no means certain, that Toby had changed his mind after Santos had won. Sam didn’t know. It was an amazing thing Josh had done, and Sam liked to think it had not been done for the undeserving, but Josh was so tired. He couldn’t remember Josh, or even Leo, looking like this after their first election. Of course they had been tired and stressed, and Sam remembered only too well his and Toby’s little moments of hysteria in the transition weeks. But this fractured weariness in Josh’s eyes scared him a little.
* * * *
When Sam was fourteen, three months into his sophomore year of high school, his Dad finally followed up on his threats and took away the clarinet. It wasn’t that Sam was good at it exactly. He wasn’t a band-geek, not that his reputation had any further to sink. Even if he did start playing in the marching band, Bobby Zane probably didn’t have any time in his busy day to schedule another beating-up for scrawny little Sam Seaborn
But still, between the punching and the fact he was a year younger than the rest of the kids and that unbelievably mattered even more now, he seemed to have less time for clarinet practice. Didn’t mean he didn’t care, but his dad had noticed. And Dad had turned it into a lesson on perseverance and commitment.
Had Sam known then what he knew later, he would have told his father that he didn’t want to learn the perseverance required to love someone else but not divorce your wife because you swore an oath. That perseverance, the real kind, the only kind worth having, was the perseverance to do the right thing even when it was hard and stupid and barely worth the effort. Like getting the divorce before the affair because if oaths couldn’t be kept they should be openly severed, not betrayed. Loving was difficult and painful and not as simple as a honeymoon every other weekend. And he would still have learnt that if he had kept his clarinet.
* * * *
In the summer between High School and college Sam finally grew out of what his mother persisted in referring to as ‘that awkward phase.’ It was too late to salvage Orange County, but in Princeton he smiled at the girl across the hall (awkwardly, under glasses and behind his hair) and she smiled back, blushing.
The smart girls kind of crept up on him, deciding - correctly - that he was not going to make the first move, and so they should make it themselves. The girl across the hall was called Sophie, and she majored in US history with minors in French and Psychology. The Sam-and-Sophie tag debate team was the subject of much affectionate mockery, but he had liked to believe they made it work. The break-up was amicable enough - on her terms, not his - and he would remember to send her Christmas cards even in the White House. She was the first girl he had sex with, and his memory of it, aside from the relief he was doing it right, was the wicked grin she had when she finally got him into the bed.
The first boy he slept with was called Jack, and it was a one-night stand that turned into a three-month summer romance. Sam sailed, and Jack liked to watch him walk about the yacht bare-chested pulling the ropes. There was more to it than that, but nothing that either of them could put into words. Nothing to hang onto when summer ended and Sam left to go back to college and Jack to med school. Sam does not know where to send cards to for Jack, and even if he did he would not know what to say. What he remembers, when he has the call to remember that time, is that he had not known that Jack was looking either, that there was no secret male code that he could decipher. And that having your heart broken, even amicably, even when no words had been spoken to point at and cry betrayal, still stung. His surprise surprised him.
* * * *
2007
It turned out that exhaustion was not the worst of it. Sam wondered whether he had just forgotten that Josh got like this at election time. But the election was over, and Josh really had never been this bad before. Yelling at Otto, Sam wasn’t sure that all of Josh was even there. Josh was always a little on edge but this was beyond that. Sam was pretty sure that there had been some phenomenal highs to counteract the disproportionate rage, but as an indicator of how he would cope in office the signs weren’t good.
Except that it wasn’t rage, it was blind panic, and how could no-one else at the campaign see it? This campaign had been a miracle from start to finish, but it had claimed Leo, and now the only other person Josh might have gone to for counsel was gone. Donna, (and he was sure of this, even when she was in the wrong office) would be doing all she could, but it was not everything. Josh needed someone in the West Wing to take him aside and tell him when he had crossed the line, when he needed to cross one, and when to stop second-guessing himself and just work. Santos couldn’t be that person, he was too much the rookie himself. He had been close to firing Josh by all accounts, and who the hell had convinced him that was a good idea? Josh had managed to forget - or perhaps did nothing but remember - that he wasn’t Leo. There was no shame in that, not if Santos wasn’t Bartlet. And Sam wasn’t Josh - Josh had all the comparisons wrong. What he should have said, probably what he had meant anyway, was that he needed Sam to follow him into the breach again. Needed Sam to shoulder some of the weight, though no one but Josh had ever considered him a heavy lifter. But Josh wouldn’t say that, he would just ask as if it should barely even be a question.
The first time Josh had done this, Sam did not agree just for Josh’s sake. He had refused to come and work for Hoynes even if Josh wanted him there. But Josh came back, talking of Bartlet, and with a lack of poker face that showed he had found the real thing in a half-empty event in Nashua, New Hampshire of all places. The real thing was their ill-defined holy grail, and Bartlet got to preside over Camelot for eight years. But now Josh was running the country without a King Arthur (and was it a mixed metaphor for Bartlet to be both grail and king?) and asked Sam to fight this again anyway. Last time had been for both of them, Sam even more than Josh, and for the fulfilment of a drunken promise made a decade back. This was for Josh, and there were no ties of obligation bar the ones Sam had made for himself.
Josh needed him. Nine years ago, he had needed Josh, and Josh had come to get him. Now Josh needed him. It was barely even a question.
FIN *sighs* Done. At least it's out of my head now, even if it is incoherent. Comments are ever wonderful