Work Text:
the youngest was the most loved / the youngest was the cherub / the luck was all before him / with a lovely wife beside him
*
Sam is sitting turned around in his chair with his back to the door. His jacket has been thrown over the side of the desk and his sleeves are rolled up. The yoke of his shirt is strained against his back because he is leaning forward, with his hands on his knees, looking out of the window. The light is low; it is evening in the West Wing. In the half-light everything seems cavernous -- Toby entertains fantasies of the lost corridors that might open up beyond the door that ought to lead to the Chief of Staff's office; the secret bunker whose opening mechanism is hidden behind the portrait of Washington, just under the bridge of the nose. He smiles, briefly, then clears his throat. It echoes, and all at once Toby remembers that he has, now that it could hardly matter less, become frightened of this room and the memory of things that happened inside it. But then Sam turns, and smiles at him, and the mouth of the cavern coughs up a little light from where they had hidden it.
President Samuel Seaborn (forty-nine years old, married to Mary, with two children, a daughter of seven named Amanda and a new little boy, not much more than a baby, named Tom), suits life as the head of the executive branch, or so it seems to Toby. Sam looks older, finally grown-up now that he is half-way through middle-age, but still vital, and boyish around the eyes. He looks exactly the way Toby always imagined President Seaborn and his forcefield of matinee idol good looks and surprisingly unsaccharine charm. He looks more or less the way he always does in Toby's memory.
He gets up from behind the Resolute desk, grinning. He's holding out both his arms and advancing on Toby, who is shifting from foot to foot, wishing there was a trapdoor that could be triggered by applying pressure to the beak of the eagle sewn into the carpet.
"Toby! Hey. Thanks for coming."
It's strange: to be embraced by the President, but stranger because it's Sam, and Toby still remembers, the memory sharper for being so out of context, the scent of his neck and the softness of his hair.
Toby clears his throat again when Sam lets go and forces his eyes to look straight-ahead. "It's good to see you, Mister President."
"Kinda weird being here, huh?"
Toby tries to smile; it is harder than it should be. "Yes, sir."
"Have you been back, you know, since?"
"No, sir. I think, ah, I think they have me on a list of some kind. Sirens, flashing lights. That kind of thing."
If Sam feels anything of the same discomfort that has begun to rise, fog-like, in Toby's belly, he doesn't show it. "Yeah, well. That was a long time ago, Toby."
"Yes, sir."
Sam catches the eye of his body man over Toby's shoulder and the mute kid who was guarding the door shuts it as Toby turns around, having followed Sam's eye. The snick of the door is strange -- unsettling -- to Toby's ear.
"Take a seat," Sam says, waving his hand toward the same pair of couches Toby remembers from before. He sits, and fidgets; Sam sits and crosses his legs, closes his eyes and then breathes out slowly. Toby watches him, helpless to look away, until Sam opens his eyes and Toby turns his own away.
"So, I have to ask," he says, after a time, "Is this weird for you?"
Toby gives himself a moment. "Mister President?"
"That for one thing."
Toby lets his hands fly into a shrug. He looks up at his President, at Sam, at the shadows that have gathered in the corners of this room when he wasn't looking. "This is the Oval Office," he says. He tries to smile, instead of appending the 'sir' that jumps into his mouth to the end of his last sentence. Sam returns the smile.
"Yeah. I would have had you up to the Residence, but Tommy's teething and ... well, you know."
A nod. Then, "Yes, sir." An attempt to hold inside himself all the disparate forces now acting on the integrity of his body; pulling his heart up through his mouth, and down into his boots.
"How're the twins, by the way?"
"They're ... they're fine, sir, thank you. Molly's, uh, in love with London. And Huck's in love with this new boy he's seeing."
"Yeah?"
"I was fine up until the time I was informed that this kid is a beret-wearing latter-day pseudo-Beat poet. And a Stanford drop out. So I'm currently sceptical."
Sam smiles. "Yeah. Wouldn't want to be around that Thanksgiving table."
"Mister President -- "
"I'm getting to it, Toby, I promise. I'm just getting hold of the words."
"Okay."
"I mean, I'm talking to you, you know?"
"Actually, no, sir."
Sam smiles again, sadly, it seems to Toby. "Underneath this confident and personable Presidential exterior, I'm still a little in awe, I think. Or admiration. Something. I read your book."
"That's kind of you to say, sir."
"I loved it, Toby. It was ... masterful."
Toby shifts his eyes away again, down to the table-top between them "Thank you."
"Are you going to write any more?"
"It's hard to really reach your potential in Politics textbooks, sir."
Sam laughs. "I would think. Anyway, I really loved it. It'd be great if you'd sign my copy sometime."
"Yes, sir."
"And, you calling me 'sir' all the time is frankly just freaking the crap out of me."
Toby nods, doesn't smile. "Yeah."
"But this is the Oval. And I didn't ask you here to reminisce."
"Yes, sir."
"So, I'll tell you about the thing."
++
He did not marry again. After Andrea found a guy she seemed to like at least as much as she had liked him he considered the idea of other women, played with it on rainy evenings as though it was a golden ring lazing on his finger. But time passed, Andrea married her nice guy, and Toby took the ring off for the last time, and locked it away in a box in his memory and didn't look at it anymore.
He had found that his mind turned backwards less than he thought it would. At first he put all his effort into the University and routines that were based around propriety and invisibility; whatever thoughts were left he bent towards his kids in letters and emails and phonecalls and the weekends and vacations. In return they would unfold for him snatches of time when he was reminded that he had still had business with the world outside his head: the times when Huck would jump on a Greyhound without asking Andrea's permission and knock on Toby's office door at Columbia and smile at him like the world was ending, and the times when Molly would lie on his couch in the evenings in summer with her feet in his lap and tell him the substance of her dreams. Later, once the new routine had bedded in and, despite his skill at disappearing, the University had given him new disciples to sit at his feet, he found that he could go for long stretches of time without thinking about any of them; perhaps least of all Sam Seaborn, who after all had been the first one to be lost.
But something changed, somewhere. Something slipped. A lock inside him was undone and behind the door something woke up; something he had nearly forgotten so completely that it might never have happened at all.
The Seaborn for America campaign was not a loud one at first, and that was the first echo. Though Sam had charm, good looks and a certain bankability about him, he was not considered a particularly serious candidate even among the customary chaos of Democratic Party nominees, and particularly not against the foregone conclusion of the Republican ticket. Nothing special happened, nobody called, but one day Toby turned on the television and there he was -- speaking on a beach with the wind in his hair and his hands turned out towards the sea, his tan darkly becoming, and suddenly Toby knew what would happen next.
There was a speech in Iowa, and another one in New Hampshire. And after that the other nominees melted away and the news had nothing to report but the massive successes of the Seaborn campaign. Even the Republicans started to look a little spooked. But as far as Toby could see -- as much as he could tell anything from pictures on the television and the hi-res photos attached to excited emails from his son -- Sam looked to be the only one who was still praying for the miracle; the only one who still had doubts. What the nature of those doubts were or what psychological pitfalls brought them into being, Toby could not be sure; but he thought he could guess.
No-one called. The campaign, and the election cycle, wore on.
He chose someone who reminded Toby of Jed Bartlet to share the ticket with him, and that was the only obvious mistake Toby saw him make. Seaborn and Bartlet were too alike; he needed contrast to show his own light to best effect -- someone a little grim and a little opaque, someone with experience to spare and enough old war stories to coax the last penny out of the contributors. Toby would have picked him someone more like Leo McGarry, but he isn't sure they make them like that anymore.
The news blared the popularity contest at him every day: Seaborn is a winner with women of all ages, with men between eighteen and thirty-five, with African-Americans, with the whitebread elite and with the urban poor. Toby played with the idea of calling the Post, Gallup, and CNN to tell them just how popular Senator Seaborn is with left-wing Commie elitists and the writers of obscure science-fiction novels, not to mention the voters of the popular Planet Xanadu Refugees Association, but in the end just used the line on his classes and got a decent laugh. One of the girls in the class put up her hand one day and asked him, diffidently, if this was the same Sam Seaborn who he had worked with in the White House, as if she couldn't have found out that information with Wikipedia and thirty free seconds. Toby knew she just wanted to see his face while he talked about Sam. But he didn't mind; no-one else was asking.
Samuel Norman Seaborn was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on 20th January 2018. Toby watched the ceremony in his office at the University while burning it to disc for his classes. He watched it once, finished the burn and then slipped the disc back into the DVD player and watched it all over again. He only paused it once, at the moment that Sam's hand first rested on the Bible and his wide-open eyes touched the white expanse of the Washington sky. Toby pressed pause and sat with his chin in his hands, just staring. He understood then, understood all of it.
++
The air in the Oval Office has become red with worries. Little tendrils, like mysterious smoke, are curling into Toby's mouth, choking him.
"This is what you asked me here to talk about?"
"Troops, Toby. Young men and women who likely won't come home, or, if they do may be injured, suffering the kinds of trauma I can't even imagine -- "
"Sam," he says, faintly. One rounded syllable that sits in his mouth like a cube of sugar, dissolving. He says it forgetting, or making himself forget; that is what he's here for after all. "You can't ... torture yourself."
"Oh no?"
"No."
"You wanna tell me why not?"
"This is the first time you've considered giving an order of this kind, and ... Certainly, sir, it's a difficult decision and a troubling time, but you can't count out every body you send to war, Mister President, and hold the number of every young man and woman who doesn't come home whole and victorious in your heart, sir. You can't do that."
"Yeah, because that doesn't sound like the kind of thing I would do."
"Sir -- "
"Toby, please. Can't we just, you know, talk? Two guys talking?"
"No," Toby says. The word sounds harder in the silence than he meant it to. Then, softer, "You're the President all the time, sir."
"And this is the Oval Office."
"Yes, sir."
Sam sighs. "Anyway, I was thinking ... I was thinking about all of the variables, and all of the decisions I could eventually decide were what I would go with. And ... I wanted to talk to someone who would know what to say."
"Someone who knows how to tell a President what he thinks he should do?" Toby says, smiling briefly, though he does not feel much like smiling.
"Something like that," Sam answers.
"Sir, I really shouldn't be the person advising you on this."
"You're a taxpayer. A voter. You were a public servant at the highest level, as well as one of the three geniuses I have been privileged to know in my life. Why shouldn't you share your opinion?"
"Mister President -- "
"Toby, I swear to God."
"I'm not that guy. Not anymore."
"Oh no? So which guy are you now?"
"I'm ... just a guy. A civilian."
"Which is exactly my point, Toby."
"Sir -- "
"How about just my friend? I'm a guy in a tough spot. Caught between machetes and Bradley tanks. And I need a friend."
"You don't have, you know, a staff? Seems to me I remember that you had a staff."
"It's weird, you know, I feel like every single one of them is fifteen years old. I don't feel old until they pile in here every day and tell me things I should know."
Toby snorts softly. "Well, then they must be all prodigies and therefore worth listening to."
"Maybe. But I'm playing it safe on this one. I would prefer wiser heads to prevail."
"And so you asked a Professor of Politics at a university thousands of miles away from the problem that you're trying to solve, who was so good at every other job he's ever had that he got fired at the business end of each and every one of them, who hasn't had his finger on this pulse, or any other, for a very long time. What is it that you want, sir?"
"My friend."
"He went away. A long time ago."
The red air is gathering, around in the table in columns of fumes, bars or rails. They lock in the words that Toby would have said. The air crowds into his mouth; he can only breathe it out in puffs, little exhalations of red hurt. The President doesn't notice, Toby thinks, and his face is only unwittingly sad.
"Yeah? Where'd he get to? Where'd he go, Toby?"
"I don't know, Mister President."
"I didn't mean to lose him." Sam chuckles, just to himself; a hollow sound that draws in the shadows outside the window. Somewhere without, in the West Wing, a door slams, and Toby almost jumps. "I really didn't mean to do that."
Toby sighs. He reaches into his shirt pocket for his pen (red) and takes it out, then twists the cap off, then clicks it back on again. He only says, "Yeah."
"I'm sorry I never called, Toby."
Toby nods, just once. "You were a little busy running for President."
"I should have called you."
"Also, I'm a very nearly ex-felon. And that doesn't play too well on the polls."
"You have a Presidential pardon, Toby. You saved lives. You did what you thought was right. They -- we -- should be proud of men like you."
"I sold my President down the river. I did something I knew would get me sent to jail when I had two kids under six. Greg Brock wasn't even this lucky."
"It was an impossible decision, Toby."
"Yeah. Maybe."
"Anyway, I should have called."
"Well, sir, you have now."
++
There are times now, though they are not frequent, when Toby finds himself watching him on the television, or, rather, watching for him. C-SPAN on mute, CNN, even Fox, sitting with papers on his knees and his line of sight through to the TV set slightly below the line of his glasses so that everything is blurred and uncertain; waiting. Usually he isn't even looking at the screen, not paying attention, but he will look up at the TV, and when his glasses fall back up his nose as he raises his head, will find him there: smiling more than most Presidents, and ageing better; the silver at his temples suits him. He doesn't look different, or perhaps it is that Toby's memories fill in the gaps, and make up for the small erosions and petty losses.
It shocks him the first time he realises what he is really seeing when he watches the President on TV; the subtext of his newfound devotion to his Commander in Chief. His mind has buoyed up memories that were better left sunken: of walking in on Sam in the men's locker room in the West Wing, half out of his shirt and his belt undone and flayed open at his waist, the flush climbing up Sam's throat so rapidly that Toby could have marked its passage with his fingers. Of several nights when they seemed never to leave Toby's old office, and the one time he found Sam sleeping in there and stood at looked at him, shuffling from foot to foot and fiddling with the handle of the door, before he could bear to wake him up. Of the last night before Toby flew back to D.C., after the campaign for the California 47th fell in on itself, after the rocks had been thrown, sitting on a motel bed with him and wanting to turn and kiss him, his mouth overflowing with the sourness of the whiskey and of regret, and nothing but silence left between them then, nothing left to say except goodbye. He doesn't remember the flight home that morning but he remembers the phonecall he got from Sam the next day, the one he'd expected, that made the subtext text: I'm not coming back.
At first remembering makes him angry and his knuckles and the surfaces in his kitchen and the kids in his classes suffer the effects, then it only makes him sad -- a large, roiling sadness, like an unnamed sea. He hears its roar in his ears at night, and keeps him awake.
++
"So about these troops," he says, trying and failing to sound nonchalant. Toby, sitting on the opposite couch with his hands looped between his knees, trying to block out the thousand different echoes that are making noise in his head, looks up at him. "What do you think?" he says.
"I think you've made the call already. And you called me to ask for permission to go ahead and do what you're going to do anyway."
"Pat me on the head? Tell me I'm a good President."
He is smiling but it isn't going to his eyes. Over the table between them Toby's fingers dance little pirouettes of nervousness. As he looks up he sees that Sam is watching them, following the twirls with his eyes.
"You are, sir."
"You're going to say you think I should quit asking for validation."
"I think you shouldn't need it."
"I should be more like you?"
Toby lets his eyes slip away into the shadows at the corner of the room, then bows his head. "I wouldn't necessarily go that far."
++
In the dark it is easier to build (or re-build): brick upon brick of feeling, the supports of this house dry and unsafe, the keys of all the locks rusty from disuse, the furniture strangely dated and covered in dust. He finds that keeps on remembering things, small events which had no significance to him when they occurred, but which are now keystones in the wall he is erecting. He doesn't know where the boundaries lie yet, or what should be outside, and what inside, the enclosure.
In the dark, in his bed, he lies and makes thought experiments. He labels the shapes and flavours and textures of a body he has never experienced. In his little house inside his head, Toby knows that Sam's ankles are pale and that the sharpness of the bone seems to have been eroded, as if by long pressure of a thumb pad over the place. He knows the constellations of moles and scars across the dome of Sam's back and has joined them up with his own fingers and his own tongue. He knows the warmth of the insides of Sam's thighs, and the weight of Sam's cock in his mouth. He gets dizzy from looking and doing and needs to close his eyes, whereupon the pictures duplicate themselves again as he falls into dreamless sleep.
In the mornings, over coffee and dry toast that he can barely force down, he dodges the eyes of the President of the United States. They are too blue, and Toby feels the weight of their gaze from a long way away.
++
The President's fingers are light, but not tentative, when they cover Toby's own. Up to the first joint he grasps them, just to still the dancing, Toby thinks. He looks up and tries to make his face equally still, blank of everything, every clue. But he is aware that he is crumbling, as if to dust. Sam tilts his head to the side; just a few degrees of pity to Toby's left, and a small smile that is two parts apology. Toby bows his head again and feels his fingers being let go.
There is a pause that seems to last a year to Toby, filed with nothing but the way their breathing aligns in the air, before dissipating.
President Seaborn clears his throat. "You're right, of course."
Toby looks up and forces himself to smile. "Yes, sir, I always am."
Sam laughs, though it catches in his throat. "Thank you, for coming by."
He is standing now, holding out his hand. Toby shakes it but feels nothing of the contact. His nerves are somewhere long past.
"I serve at the pleasure of the President," he says, only a little darkly.
Sam nods. "Take care, Toby."
Toby feels Sam's gaze -- watchful, and kind in a way that hurts Toby across his shoulders -- follow him to the door of the Oval Office. As he puts his fingers around the door handle he turns,
"Thank you, Mister President," he says, and then walks out.
*
there is no such thing in life as normal