West Wing FF: Five things that never happened in the back of a movie theatre (Sam/Toby, PG-13/R)
Title: Five things that never happened in the back of a movie theatre
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Toby/Sam
Rating: PG-13, maybe R for language and implication
Genre: Drama
Length: 1,700 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Spoilers: Legitimate spoilers only to S2. But set from pre-S1 to post S7
Summary: One thing that might have happened, two that happened in different universes entirely, and two that could have happened, but neither man would talk about it if it had.
AN: Em's talked this up now, so I'm nervous. Because it was pretty much the result of a late night thought of - would Sam and Toby make out in the President's cinema? As it turned out, perhaps not, but other things happen...
1.
“Did you know I have a cinema now?” the President had asked.
Sam hadn’t, and neither had Toby, but CJ had. Which was why she was the only one allowed to talk to the Press - although God only knew why they needed to ask these things. You would think they could have asked the last guy sometime in the eight years he’d been in office. Thankfully though, unlike Donna and Josh, Sam was in fact certain that there were no nuclear missiles under their offices. So he was winning on that count. And also now extremely paranoid about his office. If nothing had happened to him yet, all it meant was that the former Deputy Director of Communications was sneaky.
“So anyway, I do,” the President had went on, “We’re going to educate Josh about classic Hollywood - you guys in?”
“Classic Hollywood, sir?” Toby asked dubiously.
“Would you believe that he hasn’t seen Casablanca?”
“No, sir, I wouldn’t. I, however, have, so I don’t think...”
“Come on, Toby,” Sam said, “It’ll be fun.”
Toby looked at Sam, betrayed.
The President grinned. “For future reference, I can make these things orders. Isn’t staff bonding wonderful?”
“Yes, sir,” Toby answered, imbuing it with as much sarcasm as he dared.
In the end though, he seemed to enjoy the evening okay. If only because CJ got tipsy and spent the whole evening saying “Play it again, Sam.”
Sam tried to explain, futilely, that the line was not in the movie, but she waited impatiently nonetheless. Toby just smirked and patted him on the arm. He had brought it on himself.
* * * *
2.
Sam bounces the rubber ball idly on his briefing book. Given to him, by Toby, as some kind of approval for slapping down Morgan Ross. It had been lying in his pocket for a while, waiting for its owner to show up so Sam could return it. Not that it mattered: Toby had a bunch of them, and they found their way into Sam’s office pretty often. Sometimes, admittedly, because he stole them. Toby just stole them back.
But Toby had seen Andy today, and he had done a good job too, so Sam was kind of waiting to hand it back to him. He rolls the ball around in his hand restlessly.
“Hey,” Toby says, dropping into the seat beside him, way up at the back of the theatre.
“Hey.”
“Did the President fire the Surgeon General yet?”
“He changed his mind.”
“It’ll look like...”
“Josh told him. He doesn’t seem to care.”
“Yeah.”
Sam lifts his hand and shows Toby the toy. He puts it carefully into Toby’s open palm, transferring the warmth from his hand to Toby’s.
Toby looks at it for a moment, the flashes of the film going off in front of him, lighting him up.
He hands it back, curling Sam’s fingers around it. “Hang onto it.”
Toby pats Sam’s leg, awkwardly affectionate. Sam leans his knee against Toby’s, trapping the resting hand between them. The screen goes dark; it’s coming to the good bit. Onscreen, the woman screams, and all Sam hears is Toby’s deep breathing. Neither of them move, and neither of them look down, but neither do they pull away.
When the lights come up, Toby is gone, but the print of his hand still burns.
* * * *
3.
The network guys clapped politely; the lower-downs were more openly enthused, getting to their feet to applaud the show runners at the back of the room. The point of contact - Sandra - said something to the one holding the purse-strings, and then came to find Sam and Toby.
“We have a go.”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, a wide smile crossing his face.
“Thirteen episodes?” Toby checked.
“Thirteen episodes, on your projected budget.”
Sam’s smile went wider. “They approved it?”
“Congratulations, boys - you’re the tent pole of the fall line-up.”
Toby slumped, finally, against the back of the chair in the screening room. He let Sam make the necessary pleasantries as the people he doesn’t care about leave. Some part of him registered Sam making apologies, explaining that his partner is ill and on drugs that make him drowsy. It isn’t the first time they’ve used this line, and he would not be surprised if people start thinking he has a problem. Right now though, they’ve won, after everything. And nothing else seems to matter very much.
“We’re making a television show,” Sam laughed, sitting down beside him. The network guys had all left.
“Yeah,” Toby agreed.
“Let’s watch it again.”
“What?”
“The pilot.”
“Not what do you want to watch? Just - what?” he asked incredulously.
Sam rubbed Toby’s arm, coaxing. “Let’s watch it again.”
“We have... we have, thanks to procrastinating network idiots, and the fact that you just have to have green screen for historical verisimilitude even though no one but you cares that Vancouver doesn’t look like Plymouth... we have two weeks to write three scripts.”
“I know.”
“And yet...”
“Let’s watch it again.”
“Sam.”
“You said that the day we got a green-light would be our day of jubilee. You don’t look very jubilant.”
There came a point when arguing with Sam was just pointless. It was less painful to shrug and give in. Toby got up and turned the projector on again.
“You know we’re the worst kept secret in Hollywood?” Sam asked, looking at Toby to see if he cared.
“The fact that one day you’re going to be the end of me?”
Sighing, Sam leant his head on Toby’s shoulder. It didn’t matter. They had a TV show. The two of them together. Everyone thought it was Sam’s - that Toby was just coming along because they were partners. The actors knew different, them and the crew, the guys that mattered. Sam was the one who did most of the directing, true - he called action, sweet-talked the actors - talked about his plans with such passion that everyone was swept along with him. But Toby was the one who was allowed to call cut, who finally wrapped the scene. This was a collaborative effort, blood and sweat and tears and about seven thousand legal pads. Salvation was too dramatic a word to use for television, and Toby would never let him get away with it out loud. But when he thought of what they had been through to get here...
The title graphic faded into a Vancouver forest. Sam whispered the pitch the way he had whispered it into Toby’s ear, beside him in their bed nine months ago, “By day, they churn butter and worship according to their own beliefs and by night, they
solve crimes...”
* * * *
4.
It was early on Monday afternoon in New York, and there was only one other person in the student movie theatre.
Toby watched the other audience-member quietly. It was always the same kid, maybe ten years younger than Toby - twenty one or twenty-two. Toby had thought he was a film student - he always brought a notebook, and a pen that he chewed on thoughtfully. But he never seemed to be making notes on what happened onscreen.
Most of the time the only way Toby could tell there was anyone else there was the glimpse of dark hair as he looked down the theatre, and the occasional soft laugh. So he had waited a few times, after the credits stopped, to watch the boy leave. There was an odd sort of beauty about him - if Toby were to look at twenty-something film majors like that - most obvious when he walked, and when he smiled. But now he was slumped in the chair, frowning at the notebook, and still Toby walked up to the end of the aisle.
The boy turned, smiling around the pen in his mouth. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Sam,” he offered without being prompted.
“Professor Ziegler... Toby.”
“Toby,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Want to sit down?”
“Yeah.”
* * * *
5.
“No one’s going to come in.”
“The First Lady...”
“I told the secret service no one else,” Sam said, garbled, as he worked at Toby’s fly.
“You really think they’re going to stop the First Lady?”
“She won’t come in.”
Toby put his hands on top of Sam’s, making him look up. “Sam, tell me you didn’t...”
“I didn’t,” he answered.
“She didn’t ask.”
“No.”
“And you didn’t tell.”
Sam got up onto his knees, looking Toby in the eyes with an amused smile. “Yes, Toby, it’s exactly like that. You’re my secret shame.”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Toby.”
“It’s true, Sam, don’t laugh.”
“I’m not ashamed of you, Toby,” Sam whispered, bright and certain in Toby’s ear. As if this was a normal conversation, an everyday coupling, and not something sordid in the back of the Presidential screening room.
“You should be.”
“Because I’m married or because I’m the President?”
“Because you’re you.”
Sam froze at that, Toby suspected that his mind had gone somewhere else. Santa Monica, or Orange County, two people who had their lives ruined by one man. He hadn’t meant it that way, not exactly. Though something in him never quite believed that Sam was capable of betraying his marriage vows. The ones he had seen Sam make, had stood beside him to watch. Toby had heard him say 'forsaking all others'. There was no immunity in that for blowing your former boss in the back seat of a dark theatre.
“I love you,” Sam said, considered and too clear to be a desperate whisper. Arms loose around Toby’s waist, staring him in the eye. Matter-of-fact.
“Sam.”
Sam sat back, pulling his arms to himself. “Go, it’s fine.” Presidential dismissal hidden in the softness of the words.
Toby thought about saying it; thought of wounding. 'Thank you, Mr President' lay heavy on his tongue. But this was not Sam’s fault. The kisses, the words that could not be taken back - they were all Sam’s. But it was not Sam’s fault that Toby had fallen in love with him years ago and couldn’t stop. That burden was his to bear, his and Sam’s beautiful wife who, he realised now, must know. This was not Jane Austen, the men did not retire to talk of masculine things; they retired to fuck, hidden away from the wife they were betraying.
Only Abbey had ever called President Bartlet Jed, so Toby had no right to assume this word belonged to him. But it did, so he whispered Sam’s name in the darkness.
* * * *
Fin.
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Toby/Sam
Rating: PG-13, maybe R for language and implication
Genre: Drama
Length: 1,700 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Spoilers: Legitimate spoilers only to S2. But set from pre-S1 to post S7
Summary: One thing that might have happened, two that happened in different universes entirely, and two that could have happened, but neither man would talk about it if it had.
AN: Em's talked this up now, so I'm nervous. Because it was pretty much the result of a late night thought of - would Sam and Toby make out in the President's cinema? As it turned out, perhaps not, but other things happen...
1.
“Did you know I have a cinema now?” the President had asked.
Sam hadn’t, and neither had Toby, but CJ had. Which was why she was the only one allowed to talk to the Press - although God only knew why they needed to ask these things. You would think they could have asked the last guy sometime in the eight years he’d been in office. Thankfully though, unlike Donna and Josh, Sam was in fact certain that there were no nuclear missiles under their offices. So he was winning on that count. And also now extremely paranoid about his office. If nothing had happened to him yet, all it meant was that the former Deputy Director of Communications was sneaky.
“So anyway, I do,” the President had went on, “We’re going to educate Josh about classic Hollywood - you guys in?”
“Classic Hollywood, sir?” Toby asked dubiously.
“Would you believe that he hasn’t seen Casablanca?”
“No, sir, I wouldn’t. I, however, have, so I don’t think...”
“Come on, Toby,” Sam said, “It’ll be fun.”
Toby looked at Sam, betrayed.
The President grinned. “For future reference, I can make these things orders. Isn’t staff bonding wonderful?”
“Yes, sir,” Toby answered, imbuing it with as much sarcasm as he dared.
In the end though, he seemed to enjoy the evening okay. If only because CJ got tipsy and spent the whole evening saying “Play it again, Sam.”
Sam tried to explain, futilely, that the line was not in the movie, but she waited impatiently nonetheless. Toby just smirked and patted him on the arm. He had brought it on himself.
* * * *
2.
Sam bounces the rubber ball idly on his briefing book. Given to him, by Toby, as some kind of approval for slapping down Morgan Ross. It had been lying in his pocket for a while, waiting for its owner to show up so Sam could return it. Not that it mattered: Toby had a bunch of them, and they found their way into Sam’s office pretty often. Sometimes, admittedly, because he stole them. Toby just stole them back.
But Toby had seen Andy today, and he had done a good job too, so Sam was kind of waiting to hand it back to him. He rolls the ball around in his hand restlessly.
“Hey,” Toby says, dropping into the seat beside him, way up at the back of the theatre.
“Hey.”
“Did the President fire the Surgeon General yet?”
“He changed his mind.”
“It’ll look like...”
“Josh told him. He doesn’t seem to care.”
“Yeah.”
Sam lifts his hand and shows Toby the toy. He puts it carefully into Toby’s open palm, transferring the warmth from his hand to Toby’s.
Toby looks at it for a moment, the flashes of the film going off in front of him, lighting him up.
He hands it back, curling Sam’s fingers around it. “Hang onto it.”
Toby pats Sam’s leg, awkwardly affectionate. Sam leans his knee against Toby’s, trapping the resting hand between them. The screen goes dark; it’s coming to the good bit. Onscreen, the woman screams, and all Sam hears is Toby’s deep breathing. Neither of them move, and neither of them look down, but neither do they pull away.
When the lights come up, Toby is gone, but the print of his hand still burns.
* * * *
3.
The network guys clapped politely; the lower-downs were more openly enthused, getting to their feet to applaud the show runners at the back of the room. The point of contact - Sandra - said something to the one holding the purse-strings, and then came to find Sam and Toby.
“We have a go.”
“Yeah?” Sam asked, a wide smile crossing his face.
“Thirteen episodes?” Toby checked.
“Thirteen episodes, on your projected budget.”
Sam’s smile went wider. “They approved it?”
“Congratulations, boys - you’re the tent pole of the fall line-up.”
Toby slumped, finally, against the back of the chair in the screening room. He let Sam make the necessary pleasantries as the people he doesn’t care about leave. Some part of him registered Sam making apologies, explaining that his partner is ill and on drugs that make him drowsy. It isn’t the first time they’ve used this line, and he would not be surprised if people start thinking he has a problem. Right now though, they’ve won, after everything. And nothing else seems to matter very much.
“We’re making a television show,” Sam laughed, sitting down beside him. The network guys had all left.
“Yeah,” Toby agreed.
“Let’s watch it again.”
“What?”
“The pilot.”
“Not what do you want to watch? Just - what?” he asked incredulously.
Sam rubbed Toby’s arm, coaxing. “Let’s watch it again.”
“We have... we have, thanks to procrastinating network idiots, and the fact that you just have to have green screen for historical verisimilitude even though no one but you cares that Vancouver doesn’t look like Plymouth... we have two weeks to write three scripts.”
“I know.”
“And yet...”
“Let’s watch it again.”
“Sam.”
“You said that the day we got a green-light would be our day of jubilee. You don’t look very jubilant.”
There came a point when arguing with Sam was just pointless. It was less painful to shrug and give in. Toby got up and turned the projector on again.
“You know we’re the worst kept secret in Hollywood?” Sam asked, looking at Toby to see if he cared.
“The fact that one day you’re going to be the end of me?”
Sighing, Sam leant his head on Toby’s shoulder. It didn’t matter. They had a TV show. The two of them together. Everyone thought it was Sam’s - that Toby was just coming along because they were partners. The actors knew different, them and the crew, the guys that mattered. Sam was the one who did most of the directing, true - he called action, sweet-talked the actors - talked about his plans with such passion that everyone was swept along with him. But Toby was the one who was allowed to call cut, who finally wrapped the scene. This was a collaborative effort, blood and sweat and tears and about seven thousand legal pads. Salvation was too dramatic a word to use for television, and Toby would never let him get away with it out loud. But when he thought of what they had been through to get here...
The title graphic faded into a Vancouver forest. Sam whispered the pitch the way he had whispered it into Toby’s ear, beside him in their bed nine months ago, “By day, they churn butter and worship according to their own beliefs and by night, they
solve crimes...”
* * * *
4.
It was early on Monday afternoon in New York, and there was only one other person in the student movie theatre.
Toby watched the other audience-member quietly. It was always the same kid, maybe ten years younger than Toby - twenty one or twenty-two. Toby had thought he was a film student - he always brought a notebook, and a pen that he chewed on thoughtfully. But he never seemed to be making notes on what happened onscreen.
Most of the time the only way Toby could tell there was anyone else there was the glimpse of dark hair as he looked down the theatre, and the occasional soft laugh. So he had waited a few times, after the credits stopped, to watch the boy leave. There was an odd sort of beauty about him - if Toby were to look at twenty-something film majors like that - most obvious when he walked, and when he smiled. But now he was slumped in the chair, frowning at the notebook, and still Toby walked up to the end of the aisle.
The boy turned, smiling around the pen in his mouth. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Sam,” he offered without being prompted.
“Professor Ziegler... Toby.”
“Toby,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Want to sit down?”
“Yeah.”
* * * *
5.
“No one’s going to come in.”
“The First Lady...”
“I told the secret service no one else,” Sam said, garbled, as he worked at Toby’s fly.
“You really think they’re going to stop the First Lady?”
“She won’t come in.”
Toby put his hands on top of Sam’s, making him look up. “Sam, tell me you didn’t...”
“I didn’t,” he answered.
“She didn’t ask.”
“No.”
“And you didn’t tell.”
Sam got up onto his knees, looking Toby in the eyes with an amused smile. “Yes, Toby, it’s exactly like that. You’re my secret shame.”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Toby.”
“It’s true, Sam, don’t laugh.”
“I’m not ashamed of you, Toby,” Sam whispered, bright and certain in Toby’s ear. As if this was a normal conversation, an everyday coupling, and not something sordid in the back of the Presidential screening room.
“You should be.”
“Because I’m married or because I’m the President?”
“Because you’re you.”
Sam froze at that, Toby suspected that his mind had gone somewhere else. Santa Monica, or Orange County, two people who had their lives ruined by one man. He hadn’t meant it that way, not exactly. Though something in him never quite believed that Sam was capable of betraying his marriage vows. The ones he had seen Sam make, had stood beside him to watch. Toby had heard him say 'forsaking all others'. There was no immunity in that for blowing your former boss in the back seat of a dark theatre.
“I love you,” Sam said, considered and too clear to be a desperate whisper. Arms loose around Toby’s waist, staring him in the eye. Matter-of-fact.
“Sam.”
Sam sat back, pulling his arms to himself. “Go, it’s fine.” Presidential dismissal hidden in the softness of the words.
Toby thought about saying it; thought of wounding. 'Thank you, Mr President' lay heavy on his tongue. But this was not Sam’s fault. The kisses, the words that could not be taken back - they were all Sam’s. But it was not Sam’s fault that Toby had fallen in love with him years ago and couldn’t stop. That burden was his to bear, his and Sam’s beautiful wife who, he realised now, must know. This was not Jane Austen, the men did not retire to talk of masculine things; they retired to fuck, hidden away from the wife they were betraying.
Only Abbey had ever called President Bartlet Jed, so Toby had no right to assume this word belonged to him. But it did, so he whispered Sam’s name in the darkness.
* * * *
Fin.