Work Text:
i am so very tired of doing the right thing / dear god please help me
*
Sam is walking through Washington D.C. The line he makes in his wanderings is a thin red one, leading backwards. It looks like a drunken spider made it to mark off miserable peregrinations that ended in a little knot of silk in which not one item of prey had been caught. Sam feels it burning in the heels of his shoes and picks up his feet so as not to feel it so hard, but it doesn't work.
He is walking away from something; from someone. At least, that is his promise to himself -- the words that come when his self-delusion is strong and his moon is waxing with denial. The fact is that Sam could walk down any one of the streets in this city of marble and find him there. He is what Sam found in this place one year ago, sitting small and darkly at the centre of the fantasy that had been taking place in the version of this city that exists in his mind since he was a little boy, and which came true last January. An entire year has passed since then, and nothing has changed but the saturation of the shadows in Sam's chest: they get richer with each pressing month, colouring arteries, veins, and capillaries with wash upon wash of black as the blood flows out from the well of ink and loneliness that he is pleased to call his heart. And as exercise will, the walk is only speeding the flow of this blood around his body, and now he can feel his eyes getting darker with it (unless it is just the dusk) and his lungs start to strain against it (unless it is the gradient of this hill).
He went out to clear his head, and to remove himself from the two rooms in which he has spent the greater part of his waking hours (as well as some of the ones he had marked out for sleeping) over the last month; rooms that have become saturated with a heady cocktail of late work, inspiration, perspiration, telepathy, and the warm hazy spices of Toby's cologne. Those two dark offices which stand side by side have become places of temptation for Sam. Tonight: watching his boss pace the floor with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his hair in tangles and his beard just black smudges over his cheeks; imagining a mouth soured with black coffee and the imprecision of the English language; closing his eyes for a second on the idea of opening up that mouth, holding in his hands the forearms exposed by those rolled-up sleeves, inhaling the taste of that frustration; Sam had almost kissed him.
He is not stupid enough to think that his boss hasn't noticed this descent into infatuation. He hoped, for a while, but it was futile. Toby knows. It might puzzle him, amuse him, horrify him, or make no impression at all. Although he considers himself an expert in Ziegler body language these days, Sam still can't tell; emotions become, unless the emotion in question is anger, opaque and coded things in Toby's face; the subtlety of his boss's heart sees to that. But he does know.
The work is its own excuse for intimacy. The nights they spent working on the State of the Union, guessing each other's thoughts and taking into themselves so deeply that they have become instinct the other one's syntax and semantics, were a kind of consummation for Sam. Writing naked and frightened and proud, doing it all together; this strange, intoxicating symbiosis that came out of such an unlikely pairing as the two of them but which ultimately delivered what has already been called one of the greatest speeches of the century. And Sam would use all that as an excuse: I couldn't help myself, Officer -- he's practically a genius, and anyway, he seduced me with his command of the English language! but it would be a lie. It all happened a long time ago (it seems a long time ago), right at the start, before a single word was written. Toby did it with the sound of his voice vibrating against Sam's throat, warm as a scarf, and the patterns his hands made in the freezing New Hampshire air. Sam doesn't think Toby guessed what he'd done right away, not back then. But it didn't take long, Sam thinks. There is only so much you can hide in your eyes, and he's never been very good at that kind of thing.
So now he is walking. Away. It is February 1st, and a quarter of eleven at night. It has just started to snow again -- a fresh layer over the grey slush that was there already. Sam stamps his feet against the sidewalk where he halted, a few minutes ago, without realising it. He can't really feel his toes anymore. He looks up, squints through the snow trying to work out where his inner compass (set to due Ziegler) has brought him. This is Delaware, and the small brick building twenty metres away on the other side of the street, now being gradually obscured by the thickening snow fall, is Toby's temple.
Sam smiles at himself: at his foolishness; at the way some coincidences always feel like designs, even to an atheist; at the fact that the temple is the nearest place where heat and light and a functioning roof is on offer. So he stamps his feet one more time, then crosses the street, and makes for a place where he can get warm before Fate starts laughing at him some more.
*
Sam has been sitting a little while. At this point he can almost believe in his feet as something other than an abstract concept. His fingers are no longer the disquieting shade of blue-white they were when he came in, but the insistent tingling feeling that has replaced the numbness doesn't seem like much of a trade. He's just staring now, looking at the scenes which he feels he should know but cannot place that adorn the walls of the synagogue. He likes it in here: calming, quiet.
"You do know," says a voice that is swept up and exulted by the acoustics of the building despite the softness with which the words were delivered, "That conversion is a long and tiresome process, right?"
Sam turns, though he doesn't need to. "Hey, Toby," he says. He'd raise a fist to shake at Fate, but he doubts he could make one right now.
"Also, how did you even get in?" Toby continues, coming down the centre aisle towards Sam with a kind of forceful lope that ought be frightening, but isn't because it's Toby. "We're exclusive, you know, the door doesn't just get left open in the hope of attracting the vague and indecisive."
"I'm pretty sure C.J. wouldn't like to hear you saying any of that."
"But since her offended Catholic alarm can only be activated by my thoughts and deeds when I'm within a twenty yard radius of her office in the West Wing, I will choose not to care about that."
Sam shrugs. Toby has rounded the row in which Sam is sitting and is now standing at the end of it, stepping lightly from foot to foot, smacking his hands together, and breathing like a man who has just come in from a blizzard. Given the state of his overcoat, Sam imagines that is exactly what he has done. He shrugs again.
"I think it was your Rabbi let me in."
"Yeah, he's soft on waifs and strays. I've tried to make his wrongness clear to him on that count." He shakes his head just a fraction to each side, then makes his way down to where Sam is sitting and takes his seat beside him. "But he won't listen." Toby brushes the snow from his shoulders and chest; much of it falls in Sam's lap where it melts forlornly.
"What are you doing here, Toby?"
"Well, to begin with, this is my temple."
"It's Wednesday night, Toby."
"Actually it's almost Thursday morning."
"Toby -- "
"I was looking for you. I threw the Spaldeen against the window for half an hour before I figured out you weren't actually in the building. Which piqued my curiosity."
"You couldn't just assume I'd gone home?"
Toby thinks about this, or seems to, for a minute and then says, "No."
"O-kay."
"I followed you," he says.
"Huh?"
"I followed you."
"How?"
"Well, by putting one foot after the other and noticing where you had previously done the same. Footprints. Since I figured you weren't flying."
"Toby, it's slush out there. There aren't any footprints to follow and in any case, I doubt that you've memorised the tread of my shoes and about a hundred people must have walked over the same paths that I've walked on in the last hour even if you had, I --"
"Okay," he says, holding up open palms. "Okay. I followed you. You know, I hid behind buildings, used a pair of binoculars. Got myself a funny hat. I tailed you, Sherlock. Or should I say 'Nancy'? As in 'Drew'."
"Yes, thank you, I get the reference. Insult. Whatever. Are you stooping to pop culture now?"
"Well, just this once."
"You followed me? Again, I need to ask, how?"
"I didn't throw the ball at the window for half an hour. I followed you from the front door of the White House. So you make a failing grade in stealthy manoeuvres."
Sam sighs. "Why?"
"Because you suck."
"No, why did you follow me?"
"You're just going to run through all of these, right?"
"Toby, please -- "
"I was concerned."
Sam raises his eyebrows, but not unkindly. "Really?"
"It's five below with wind chill. And you didn't take your scarf."
"Since when do you care if I don't wrap up warm, Toby?"
"Since I decided I would palm the educational initiatives speech off on my obliging deputy. I noticed the briefing books, by the way. Are you testing the compression strength of hundred year old teak?"
Sam can't help smiling. "Science fair project," he says. "You know how it is."
"Anyway, I brought the scarf," Toby says, unravelling a long length of black cashmere from his coat pocket as he sits beside Sam. The side of his hand brushes against Sam's shoulder as he draws the scarf up above his head the better to pull it from its hiding place. "I figured I didn't care about bruising the ... whatever the hell it's made from. So I shoved it in there."
"Plus you were on a tight schedule. What with the footprints and everything," Sam says, managing to keep the smile going, on prayer and chicanery.
"Exactly."
"Thank you," Sam says, quietly.
Toby nods, and makes a noise at the back of his throat that could be a sign that he's starting to get a cold, or the precursor to words that Sam is pretty sure he doesn't want to hear. But it turns out that it isn't either: instead it is a warning that the next thing to happen tonight will be Toby putting the scarf which is warm from his pocket and his hands around Sam's neck, gently, patting it into place with his nerve-buffeted fingers; that he will then stroke, or allow to brush, his fingertips over Sam's throat, where Sam's tie has come loose and his shirt button is on vacation from its rightful function; and that there Toby's fingers will find bare flesh that is rapidly warming under the friction of embarrassment, and the simpler friction of warm skin over cold; and that the alchemical effect of this closeness will be presided over by an unexpected stillness in the habitually restless gaze of Toby Ziegler.
He is still, sitting there, and his blink is slow and apparently loaded with meaning that it takes Sam a minute to understand. Sam opens his mouth to say something, but Toby closes it with his own.
His lips are warm too, and because Sam's entire face is on the edge of numbness, the effect is one of great distance being slowly crossed. The tip of Sam's tongue is fascinated by the heat of Toby's mouth and the shape of his lower lip, which seems to Sam like some impossibly ripe, impossibly out-of-season fruit, ready to burst. He lets himself taste it, for a while, and then pulls away.
"You're freezing, Sam," is what Toby says first, after a moment. His fingers have only just left off touching Sam's mouth, dabbing at the corners with their very tips. Sam feels like someone (and who would do it better than Toby?) has just put him into a hypnotic trance.
"Yeah," he says.
"I'm serious. I'm talking about hypothermia here. To be remedied by hot baths and warm blankets and so on."
Sam is staring at the place, just off-centre on Toby's bottom lip, where he would like to suck a blush into being sometimes soon. "Is that an offer?" he says, moving his gaze, by a massive force of will, up to Toby's eyes. Sam grins.
"Yes, I'm anxious that you should shiver and drip all over my bathroom tile, Sam." He says this while brushing the hair out of Sam's eyes, despite the fact that Sam's bangs aren't really long enough to get into his eyes in the first place. He is doing this tenderly, although there is nothing openly tender in his face beyond the hint of brown that Sam can see in the depths of his eyes. "I was thinking more hot chocolate and a warm bed."
"Okay," Sam says, still grinning.
"I was thinking more that I would abandon you at your door and, if you were really lucky, not drive away until you'd closed it. So don't get more stupid ideas that either of can cope with."
"You kissed me."
Toby's eyes roll sideways, as if ducking the invisible of blow of the blindingly obvious. "It appears so, yes," he says.
"And it didn't feel like a pity kiss."
Toby sighs deeply, from the diaphragm. "No."
"I have really good hot chocolate at my place, Toby. The cocoa solids are ... well, they're high. It was thirty dollars a jar."
"I really do worry that you are entirely the most freakish person I have ever met."
"I like chocolate, okay! The endorphin rush is very pleasant."
"And soon we can try you on grown-up food," Toby says, not quite under his breath.
"Are you coming or not?"
"I guess I have the length of the drive to decide that this is all a nightmare."
"Exactly. You can throw me out at the homeless shelter."
Toby snorts. "Yeah. A little light mugging to go with your case of exposure."
"Toby."
"We have to go back to the office."
"Why?"
"Because that's where I parked this morning, having neglected to plan for needing to pick up my hypothermic date from my temple in the snow."
Sam, who felt something nip anxiously at his stomach when the word 'date' emerged to hang heavily in the air, nods, smiling, just a little bit crazily. "Okay."
"You're okay to walk?"
"Yeah. The gangrene hasn't got me yet, Toby."
"I can always amputate anyway. Just to be safe."
"Walk me home."
Toby smiles. A quiet smile, but it warms Sam. "All right."
*
It is still snowing when they get outside the temple. The drifts are rising against the brick. Toby is fumbling with his gloves, black as coal under the streetlights. Since it is just this side of a blizzard, and since both their coats are big, billowing numbers that add ten pounds of dark weight to each of them, Sam figures that no-one will see him reaching for Toby's hand as they walk. It's risky: one kiss doesn't mean all that much, even coming from someone with the staggeringly narrow visible emotion spectrum of Toby Ziegler, but Sam figures he can't lose every time. And this is already his lucky night. He fumbles the pass, because his fingers are numb and Toby's are again encased in the stiff new leather of his gloves, but when he finds a configuration that feels right, with his fingers interlocking with Toby's, he holds on, squeezes. Toby shoots him a look that is three parts exasperation, and one part something else; something Sam cannot parse yet, some code to which he has not yet figured the key. Toby does not squeeze back, but his grip on Sam's hand is strong enough to hold.
The snow gets thicker. They walk home.
*
i am walking through rome / and there is no room to move / but the heart feels free / the heart feels free