West Wing FF: Speech after long silence (Will/Sam/Toby, PG-13)
Title: Speech after long silence
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Toby/Sam/Will. (Though its pretty close to gen)
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 2,500 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Spoilers: Set post-series, so all spoilers thereof
Summary: He has just likened the State of the Union to a live sporting event, and it really is no wonder that his students find him a little peculiar. These are the only two people in the world who could possibly understand him right now.
AN: For vegawriters, in tww_minis who requested: A meeting of the best speechwriting minds in the land with Commentary about a state of the union speech, smoke from burning notebook pages, conversation about their muses/inspiration. And did not want: PWP. I'm not sure how well this fits, though there is certainly no porn, and I hope you're okay with post-series. I didn't know how else to get them in the same room at that time!
Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
- William Butler Yeats, After Long Silence
*
“Toby.” Sam’s voice was a song, opening the door wide.
Toby ducked in through the door, wrapped up in a black coat and scarf against DC in January. Not quite used to being able to visit with impunity, though Sam and Will had never been the ones to turn him away.
Will walked in through the door at the back of the apartment. “Hey, Toby.”
Toby could not help but smile at the two of them beside each other, two dark-haired men, still too young, with tans faded pale by careers spent mostly indoors. He had missed them both.
“We’ve ordered pizza,” Sam said.
“And I have scorecards,” Will added.
“People are trying to change the face of government here,” Sam protested. “Do you really think this is...”
Will threw popcorn at his head.
“Fine, fine,” Sam threw up his hands. “Anyone want a beer?”
At their assents, Sam went back into the kitchen.
Will pointed Toby towards the couch, and sat beside him. After the long pause, Will spoke. “He’s okay.”
“I know that.”
“I’m just saying that if you were concerned about him - he’s fine.”
Toby did not answer that, because Sam has been left and has done the leaving, and he is not fine. But he has been working for the DNC since last April; content if not happy, he is filling his days. And he is here in DC, with Will, when Will is not in Oregon. So it is no longer Toby’s place to question.
Toby is here because he has been invited; because for the three of them the State of the Union holds enough great and awful memories to last a lifetime, and that didn’t go away just because they weren’t writing this one. They are drawn to it, like a wound he cannot help but prod. They are paintings of the past made in oil - too vivid to look at without these men beside him.
Sam returned with three beers, and the pizza arrived minutes later. With the television on to watch the build-up, Toby was reminded a little of watching the Superbowl or the World Series, back when it was him and Sam and Josh. He has just likened the State of the Union to a live sporting event, and it really is no wonder that his students find him a little peculiar. He tries to teach them the language, between teaching them about budget negotiations and cabinet appointments, but it was trying to explain sunrise to someone who had only seen night skies. These are the only two people in the world who could possibly understand him right now. Who had stood beside him, and each other (though never at the same time) and watched their words be written in fire in front of the nation.
Sam sat down on the armchair, sinking down low into it, squirming in a way which made Toby shift unconsciously.
The President was announced with all due solemnity, and all three men thought of the sound of that door closing from the other side, the culmination of what they laughingly called six-weeks work. Knowing the speech by heart and hearing every half-falter and every pause that ran too long or too short. Hearing too every note which rang perfect, as it had rang when it was still a dream of a speech, trapped in the wordless void. The chorus of cheers afterwards, and the press of a man’s hand against their backs’ in thanks.
The first five minutes were spent mostly in silence. At the beginning of the sixth, Will started heckling.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“He just went off-book.”
“Why can no one just read the speech the way it’s written?” Toby asked rhetorically.
Sam answered anyway, “Because they want to make it their own?”
“Okay, but I guarantee there’s a speechwriter back there wanting to put a fork in his eye. He can’t improv, and someone should have told him that by now.”
“Just like you told President Bartlet?” Will asked.
Sam laughed, poking Toby with his pen. He turned to Will. “He actually did.”
They had all, in their own way, held the writing above the speaker. And then, in the same breath, understood that the President turned their words into deeds by virtue of his speaking them. That their value, as politicians, as men, was in the gift of their words to inspire, not as wordsmiths alone. To each other, though, the words meant more. Each understood for the other two what anyone else could not - that their heart’s blood had been poured onto the page with each word; they could write well because their life was in the writing. Every wrong note rang like sickness, each flat moment which should have lifted the audience from their seats was death.
Sam waved a hand in the air, pointing out to Will how the building crescendo had peaked in the wrong place. Will raised his hand to follow the path Sam’s had traced. In the absence of speech, Toby watched them both conjure their words in the air in front of them; he heard them without needing the sound.
* * * *
It was midnight now, and the on-air dissection did not look like it would be stopping soon. Will stretched out his legs on the table, brushing Toby’s ankle with a sock-clad foot. Sam curled around on his chair, turning from the television to face Toby with a smile sweet and tired, lopsidedly aimed. “You miss it?” he asked.
“Miss what?”
The television blared on, counting the number of claps, the number of agreeing murmurs, the number of disagreeing mutters. The measure of a speech, of a Presidency. Of a leader and of a man.
“That? No,” Toby said.
“Will?”
“Seeing dawn from the wrong side six days running, balling up seventeen pages of work because you’ll never raise it to the standard you need, and then, then when it’s finally there, being told that you’ve gone too far...? No, not so much as you might think.”
“I miss this,” Sam said, not looking towards the television. Looking instead at the half-drunk coffees and half-eaten pizza; the papers lying all over the floor; the sprawl of Will’s arm hanging over the edge of the chair; and the curve of Toby’s back as he hunched forward to listen. “Being one of us.”
Toby’s sigh was familiar and loving, falling soft as a kiss. “Sam.”
“Not that it isn’t... or that it wasn’t...”
“No one else gets it like you guys,” Will filled in, moving up the couch to make a tighter circle.
“Yes,” Sam admitted. “They’re sitting watching this, and they know that someone else wrote the speech, but they don’t really understand what that means.”
“Most writers don’t understand what it means, Sam - the State of the Union is something else,” Toby said.
“I know that.”
“And so do I, and so does Will,” Toby said, tapping Sam’s elbow lightly for emphasis.
Will closed his eyes, conjuring the images Sam made with no words at all. “There’s a certain kind of madness that’s difficult to replicate elsewhere. I suppose the question is whether you would ever want to.” Walking the corridors of power with Toby at his elbow, Sam’s voice down the phone line. The best and worst job he would ever have, the furthest he had ever had to stretch and find himself, and not the task, wanting. It had only been later, when that equation was reversed, that he had even realised there was a question.
It was Sam who sighed this time, birdsong lost under the television’s noise, but Toby bent close and picked it out of the air. He ran his hand from Sam’s elbow to rest on the taut shoulder; his boy who had never been a maudlin drunk before.
Will laughed, breaking the tension, “So were you always a pyromaniac, Toby, or was it the State of the Union that drove you to it?”
“It was the symbolism,” Toby explained. The twist and fade of words as they were lost in the smoke; unable to be spoken, they disappeared into the air another way. Destruction as an act of poetry, if creation was impossible, if the creations were always flawed.
“We used to walk,” Sam said. In Air Force One, in the Rose Garden, around the farm in Manchester. “I always wrote best that way.” The easy pace Toby kept, how the rhythm of his steps and his breathing made the cadence underneath their shared words. The way, now, he was speaking as he had almost forgotten how; lulled by other men’s breathing and the spaces they left for him to fill.
“I call my sister,” Will said.
“Elsie?”
“That’s her name, yes.”
“I just mean...”
Will grinned, because he did know what Sam meant - Elsie was not one of them. But she was one of him; she knew him. “She makes me laugh,” he said. Because she could see writing as something other than life and death, the battle for souls. Elsie was not afraid to give her big brother the occasional verbal slap (as well as the odd physical one) when he had worked himself into hysterics. She had laughed herself when she heard he had broken Toby’s window - the only one not surprised that Will had managed it. When he could not reach her now, or when even her jokes could not bring his words back, that was what he pictured. The moment just as the glass shattered, before he had brought himself to apologise, as the glass started falling apart and his words started coming together; the courage to speak the truth to the President.
Sam nodded agreeably. “I liked her.”
The two of them, Toby thought, talking about muses as if love was never dark. As if writing was something they pulled only from their light places, not from the shadows, in the echo of a man’s voice always disappointed now. Toby had not written a speech since he had left the Oval Office for the last time, though he had gifted Sam or Will with a paragraph or two over the years. Jed Bartlet’s was the voice he wrote for, and the voice always telling him that he had fallen short.
“Who do you hear when you write?” Toby asked before he had decided to do so.
Sam started, letting his hand fall heavily to his knee. “I don’t know, Toby. You, sometimes. Or Will. Even... even Leo, once.” After the debate, sitting beside his fiancée on their couch, he had been so proud to have known the candidate. His notebook, though read by no one else, was always tucked safe in his pocket; the next entry he wrote had been in Leo’s voice.
“That’s not what I’m asking, Sam.”
“Yeah, Toby, I hear him. All the time.”
“Yeah.”
“The President?” Will checked, though no one else had ever earned that tone.
“Yes,” Sam answered, “I know it wasn’t like that for you, not by then. And no one blames you for going.” Will looked at the side of Toby’s face and saw the muscles twitch. “But before that,” Sam went on, “it was better...”
“I get it, Sam, I do. Or I did once anyway.”
“The State of the Union,” Toby stated. “Foreign policy.”
“Yeah,” Will said, and did not jump when Toby patted his shoulder, arm now resting on the back of the sofa. “I don’t miss that, either,” he said.
“What?”
“Approval ratings,” Will said, hand tapping the air in front of the television.
“Will.”
He didn’t know whether Toby meant to console or correct, but Will did not allow him to do either. “It isn’t about that.”
“Yeah, it is,” Toby said, “Or we’d be the three most overqualified writers ever to have an audience of three at the New York Liberal Society.”
Sam frowned, the way he always did when Toby stamped down hard on the romance of their careers. “One, I’m not sure that exists. Two, if it does, it has more than three members, and you shouldn’t have picked New York for your example. Three, I don’t think we’d be over qualified for that job.”
“Sam. You’ve written for kings, governors and congressmen, not to mention two Presidents. You’re a writer, and you need an audience.”
“Toby,” Will said, interrupting and not caring, “you ran six unsuccessful campaigns before President Bartlet’s, and it was, to be frank, a miracle that one came off as well as it did. I ran a campaign for a dead man which this man,” he pointed to Sam, “then tried to win. One thing no one can accuse any of us of is looking for an easy ride.”
Which was not what Toby had meant, and he didn’t know why Will and Sam could not understand it.
“We don’t write what people want to hear,” Sam said. “Good writing’s truthful. If we... if we’ve done our jobs we say something they’ve thought but never put into words. Something they don’t even know they think. And when they hear it... when they hear what we’ve written... The win isn’t if they like it, Toby. It’s not when they agree with us. It’s when we make them think, when we draw the best of their natures out of them, when they come out of it thinking they’ve heard...”
“That they’ve heard, Sam.” Toby said. Again, always, they used different words to mean the same thing; this was only a pretence at disagreement. “We don’t write for ourselves, we write for the thirty-six percent of the country that think this, or the forty-nine percent who think that.”
“No. We write for the eighty-six percent of people who disagree with us, because we hope we can change their minds,” Will said.
Sam nodded, and Toby sighed his agreement. “Yeah.”
“But there is something in art for art’s sake,” Sam said, persisting stubbornly.
“Art? Sure. Speechwriting needs an audience.” Sam and Will deserved audiences. His regret, the one thing that would pull him out of his self-imposed exile, was that they deserved better than this. Sam would be ready, some day, for his run at the Presidency with Will alongside him; Sam’s Inaugural address would be the last speech Toby would write.
For now, though, neither them seemed to be thinking so far ahead. Sam’s head drooped back against the chair, Will’s against Toby’s shoulder. They fell asleep to the sound of the talking heads doing a final recap of the State of the Union. That, though, was not what Toby was hearing. Jed Bartlet was not the only voice in Toby’s head when he composed speeches, not always. This room was still filled with echoes of Sam’s elusive truth, of Will’s desire to change the minds of their detractors. Beneath it all, the hum of his own muse, the knowledge that the world’s turning lay in the words he did and did not say. He could not afford to be silent, could not afford to let them be silent, though speech always had a cost. Their audience waited. Toby took out his pen and notebook and began to write.
***
FIN
Fandom: The West Wing
Pairing: Toby/Sam/Will. (Though its pretty close to gen)
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Drama
Length: 2,500 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to Sorkin and Wells.
Spoilers: Set post-series, so all spoilers thereof
Summary: He has just likened the State of the Union to a live sporting event, and it really is no wonder that his students find him a little peculiar. These are the only two people in the world who could possibly understand him right now.
AN: For vegawriters, in tww_minis who requested: A meeting of the best speechwriting minds in the land with Commentary about a state of the union speech, smoke from burning notebook pages, conversation about their muses/inspiration. And did not want: PWP. I'm not sure how well this fits, though there is certainly no porn, and I hope you're okay with post-series. I didn't know how else to get them in the same room at that time!
Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
- William Butler Yeats, After Long Silence
*
“Toby.” Sam’s voice was a song, opening the door wide.
Toby ducked in through the door, wrapped up in a black coat and scarf against DC in January. Not quite used to being able to visit with impunity, though Sam and Will had never been the ones to turn him away.
Will walked in through the door at the back of the apartment. “Hey, Toby.”
Toby could not help but smile at the two of them beside each other, two dark-haired men, still too young, with tans faded pale by careers spent mostly indoors. He had missed them both.
“We’ve ordered pizza,” Sam said.
“And I have scorecards,” Will added.
“People are trying to change the face of government here,” Sam protested. “Do you really think this is...”
Will threw popcorn at his head.
“Fine, fine,” Sam threw up his hands. “Anyone want a beer?”
At their assents, Sam went back into the kitchen.
Will pointed Toby towards the couch, and sat beside him. After the long pause, Will spoke. “He’s okay.”
“I know that.”
“I’m just saying that if you were concerned about him - he’s fine.”
Toby did not answer that, because Sam has been left and has done the leaving, and he is not fine. But he has been working for the DNC since last April; content if not happy, he is filling his days. And he is here in DC, with Will, when Will is not in Oregon. So it is no longer Toby’s place to question.
Toby is here because he has been invited; because for the three of them the State of the Union holds enough great and awful memories to last a lifetime, and that didn’t go away just because they weren’t writing this one. They are drawn to it, like a wound he cannot help but prod. They are paintings of the past made in oil - too vivid to look at without these men beside him.
Sam returned with three beers, and the pizza arrived minutes later. With the television on to watch the build-up, Toby was reminded a little of watching the Superbowl or the World Series, back when it was him and Sam and Josh. He has just likened the State of the Union to a live sporting event, and it really is no wonder that his students find him a little peculiar. He tries to teach them the language, between teaching them about budget negotiations and cabinet appointments, but it was trying to explain sunrise to someone who had only seen night skies. These are the only two people in the world who could possibly understand him right now. Who had stood beside him, and each other (though never at the same time) and watched their words be written in fire in front of the nation.
Sam sat down on the armchair, sinking down low into it, squirming in a way which made Toby shift unconsciously.
The President was announced with all due solemnity, and all three men thought of the sound of that door closing from the other side, the culmination of what they laughingly called six-weeks work. Knowing the speech by heart and hearing every half-falter and every pause that ran too long or too short. Hearing too every note which rang perfect, as it had rang when it was still a dream of a speech, trapped in the wordless void. The chorus of cheers afterwards, and the press of a man’s hand against their backs’ in thanks.
The first five minutes were spent mostly in silence. At the beginning of the sixth, Will started heckling.
“Did you see that?”
“See what?”
“He just went off-book.”
“Why can no one just read the speech the way it’s written?” Toby asked rhetorically.
Sam answered anyway, “Because they want to make it their own?”
“Okay, but I guarantee there’s a speechwriter back there wanting to put a fork in his eye. He can’t improv, and someone should have told him that by now.”
“Just like you told President Bartlet?” Will asked.
Sam laughed, poking Toby with his pen. He turned to Will. “He actually did.”
They had all, in their own way, held the writing above the speaker. And then, in the same breath, understood that the President turned their words into deeds by virtue of his speaking them. That their value, as politicians, as men, was in the gift of their words to inspire, not as wordsmiths alone. To each other, though, the words meant more. Each understood for the other two what anyone else could not - that their heart’s blood had been poured onto the page with each word; they could write well because their life was in the writing. Every wrong note rang like sickness, each flat moment which should have lifted the audience from their seats was death.
Sam waved a hand in the air, pointing out to Will how the building crescendo had peaked in the wrong place. Will raised his hand to follow the path Sam’s had traced. In the absence of speech, Toby watched them both conjure their words in the air in front of them; he heard them without needing the sound.
* * * *
It was midnight now, and the on-air dissection did not look like it would be stopping soon. Will stretched out his legs on the table, brushing Toby’s ankle with a sock-clad foot. Sam curled around on his chair, turning from the television to face Toby with a smile sweet and tired, lopsidedly aimed. “You miss it?” he asked.
“Miss what?”
The television blared on, counting the number of claps, the number of agreeing murmurs, the number of disagreeing mutters. The measure of a speech, of a Presidency. Of a leader and of a man.
“That? No,” Toby said.
“Will?”
“Seeing dawn from the wrong side six days running, balling up seventeen pages of work because you’ll never raise it to the standard you need, and then, then when it’s finally there, being told that you’ve gone too far...? No, not so much as you might think.”
“I miss this,” Sam said, not looking towards the television. Looking instead at the half-drunk coffees and half-eaten pizza; the papers lying all over the floor; the sprawl of Will’s arm hanging over the edge of the chair; and the curve of Toby’s back as he hunched forward to listen. “Being one of us.”
Toby’s sigh was familiar and loving, falling soft as a kiss. “Sam.”
“Not that it isn’t... or that it wasn’t...”
“No one else gets it like you guys,” Will filled in, moving up the couch to make a tighter circle.
“Yes,” Sam admitted. “They’re sitting watching this, and they know that someone else wrote the speech, but they don’t really understand what that means.”
“Most writers don’t understand what it means, Sam - the State of the Union is something else,” Toby said.
“I know that.”
“And so do I, and so does Will,” Toby said, tapping Sam’s elbow lightly for emphasis.
Will closed his eyes, conjuring the images Sam made with no words at all. “There’s a certain kind of madness that’s difficult to replicate elsewhere. I suppose the question is whether you would ever want to.” Walking the corridors of power with Toby at his elbow, Sam’s voice down the phone line. The best and worst job he would ever have, the furthest he had ever had to stretch and find himself, and not the task, wanting. It had only been later, when that equation was reversed, that he had even realised there was a question.
It was Sam who sighed this time, birdsong lost under the television’s noise, but Toby bent close and picked it out of the air. He ran his hand from Sam’s elbow to rest on the taut shoulder; his boy who had never been a maudlin drunk before.
Will laughed, breaking the tension, “So were you always a pyromaniac, Toby, or was it the State of the Union that drove you to it?”
“It was the symbolism,” Toby explained. The twist and fade of words as they were lost in the smoke; unable to be spoken, they disappeared into the air another way. Destruction as an act of poetry, if creation was impossible, if the creations were always flawed.
“We used to walk,” Sam said. In Air Force One, in the Rose Garden, around the farm in Manchester. “I always wrote best that way.” The easy pace Toby kept, how the rhythm of his steps and his breathing made the cadence underneath their shared words. The way, now, he was speaking as he had almost forgotten how; lulled by other men’s breathing and the spaces they left for him to fill.
“I call my sister,” Will said.
“Elsie?”
“That’s her name, yes.”
“I just mean...”
Will grinned, because he did know what Sam meant - Elsie was not one of them. But she was one of him; she knew him. “She makes me laugh,” he said. Because she could see writing as something other than life and death, the battle for souls. Elsie was not afraid to give her big brother the occasional verbal slap (as well as the odd physical one) when he had worked himself into hysterics. She had laughed herself when she heard he had broken Toby’s window - the only one not surprised that Will had managed it. When he could not reach her now, or when even her jokes could not bring his words back, that was what he pictured. The moment just as the glass shattered, before he had brought himself to apologise, as the glass started falling apart and his words started coming together; the courage to speak the truth to the President.
Sam nodded agreeably. “I liked her.”
The two of them, Toby thought, talking about muses as if love was never dark. As if writing was something they pulled only from their light places, not from the shadows, in the echo of a man’s voice always disappointed now. Toby had not written a speech since he had left the Oval Office for the last time, though he had gifted Sam or Will with a paragraph or two over the years. Jed Bartlet’s was the voice he wrote for, and the voice always telling him that he had fallen short.
“Who do you hear when you write?” Toby asked before he had decided to do so.
Sam started, letting his hand fall heavily to his knee. “I don’t know, Toby. You, sometimes. Or Will. Even... even Leo, once.” After the debate, sitting beside his fiancée on their couch, he had been so proud to have known the candidate. His notebook, though read by no one else, was always tucked safe in his pocket; the next entry he wrote had been in Leo’s voice.
“That’s not what I’m asking, Sam.”
“Yeah, Toby, I hear him. All the time.”
“Yeah.”
“The President?” Will checked, though no one else had ever earned that tone.
“Yes,” Sam answered, “I know it wasn’t like that for you, not by then. And no one blames you for going.” Will looked at the side of Toby’s face and saw the muscles twitch. “But before that,” Sam went on, “it was better...”
“I get it, Sam, I do. Or I did once anyway.”
“The State of the Union,” Toby stated. “Foreign policy.”
“Yeah,” Will said, and did not jump when Toby patted his shoulder, arm now resting on the back of the sofa. “I don’t miss that, either,” he said.
“What?”
“Approval ratings,” Will said, hand tapping the air in front of the television.
“Will.”
He didn’t know whether Toby meant to console or correct, but Will did not allow him to do either. “It isn’t about that.”
“Yeah, it is,” Toby said, “Or we’d be the three most overqualified writers ever to have an audience of three at the New York Liberal Society.”
Sam frowned, the way he always did when Toby stamped down hard on the romance of their careers. “One, I’m not sure that exists. Two, if it does, it has more than three members, and you shouldn’t have picked New York for your example. Three, I don’t think we’d be over qualified for that job.”
“Sam. You’ve written for kings, governors and congressmen, not to mention two Presidents. You’re a writer, and you need an audience.”
“Toby,” Will said, interrupting and not caring, “you ran six unsuccessful campaigns before President Bartlet’s, and it was, to be frank, a miracle that one came off as well as it did. I ran a campaign for a dead man which this man,” he pointed to Sam, “then tried to win. One thing no one can accuse any of us of is looking for an easy ride.”
Which was not what Toby had meant, and he didn’t know why Will and Sam could not understand it.
“We don’t write what people want to hear,” Sam said. “Good writing’s truthful. If we... if we’ve done our jobs we say something they’ve thought but never put into words. Something they don’t even know they think. And when they hear it... when they hear what we’ve written... The win isn’t if they like it, Toby. It’s not when they agree with us. It’s when we make them think, when we draw the best of their natures out of them, when they come out of it thinking they’ve heard...”
“That they’ve heard, Sam.” Toby said. Again, always, they used different words to mean the same thing; this was only a pretence at disagreement. “We don’t write for ourselves, we write for the thirty-six percent of the country that think this, or the forty-nine percent who think that.”
“No. We write for the eighty-six percent of people who disagree with us, because we hope we can change their minds,” Will said.
Sam nodded, and Toby sighed his agreement. “Yeah.”
“But there is something in art for art’s sake,” Sam said, persisting stubbornly.
“Art? Sure. Speechwriting needs an audience.” Sam and Will deserved audiences. His regret, the one thing that would pull him out of his self-imposed exile, was that they deserved better than this. Sam would be ready, some day, for his run at the Presidency with Will alongside him; Sam’s Inaugural address would be the last speech Toby would write.
For now, though, neither them seemed to be thinking so far ahead. Sam’s head drooped back against the chair, Will’s against Toby’s shoulder. They fell asleep to the sound of the talking heads doing a final recap of the State of the Union. That, though, was not what Toby was hearing. Jed Bartlet was not the only voice in Toby’s head when he composed speeches, not always. This room was still filled with echoes of Sam’s elusive truth, of Will’s desire to change the minds of their detractors. Beneath it all, the hum of his own muse, the knowledge that the world’s turning lay in the words he did and did not say. He could not afford to be silent, could not afford to let them be silent, though speech always had a cost. Their audience waited. Toby took out his pen and notebook and began to write.
***
FIN