His body acts before his mind can properly plan it out.
The gun fires once, twice, three times, and then he is on top of her, covering her body as gently as he can manage. He barely hears Will shout "Get down!"; "Get down!" he repeats softly, holding a hand to the side of her head as Will does the same, helping to shield her. She falls rather heavily on his other arm; he doesn't notice, not with the broken glass still singing in his ears, not with her, trembling like a bird, breathing, in his arms.
Thank god.
"Somebody's shooting!" she exclaims, a note of hysteria turning her voice shrill. She stirs, attempting to sit up and brush their hands away from her. They resist her efforts, Toby's hand almost stroking her neck as he pushes her back down. "Stay down!" "Stay still…" he chimes in, his breath in her ear barely above a whisper.
They both hold her tightly, the three of them gasping for breath in that darkened room as Secret Service agents burst through the door, announcing their arrival with the clattering sound of a breaking lock. "Is everybody all right in here?" About damn time…
"We're all right," he mutters in reply, attempting to catch his breath and failing utterly. He tries to ignore his slight shaking and hopes she cannot feel it, even as his body is pressed so tightly against hers.
He realizes this is the closest his flesh has been to hers in what feels like years.
"Ms. Cregg?" the agent asks her directly, voice authoritative yet strained, attempting to assess the situation.
"We're all right," she murmurs, her body still tense, but wonderfully, blessedly alive, unbroken, whole…
He thinks of how he'd found Josh during that nightmare at Rosslyn, hand pressed to his bloodied torso as if he was trying to stop his guts from spilling out. That empty, haunted look in his eyes, his gray face, as if he had seen his own death fast approaching and had just about given up the struggle.
He doesn't want to think of her that way; he never will think of her that way.
"Are you sure?"
Will lifts his head and points towards the window, voice more steady than he surely must be feeling at this moment. "Three shots, one hit, straight from the sidewalk, straight shot…"
Toby remembers his duty; disregards the feel of her hair beneath his fingers. "Is the President in the Oval Office?" His mind is a blur, the arm sandwiched between her and the floor only now regaining feeling.
"You need to wait outside." The agent helps pull each of them up in turn; they scramble out of the press room, leaving the playing cards behind, and all Toby can think is my god, thank god, she's safe. She's safe.
He would have taken that shot for her, he realizes; he would have allowed his face to be the one that was grey with approaching oblivion.
He can still smell her scent.
They're in Leo's office again, standing at the poker table, with her blathering on in her faux-authoritative way about standing the egg on its tip during the vernal equinox. Toby attempts to look dismissive, but dismissiveness and sucking on a lollipop have never gone well together. Her confidence, misplaced though it may be, is charming, as usual; he can't stop his appreciation for her from showing. He is sure he is smiling with his eyes; he is aware she notices.
"Are we playing again?" Donna stands at the doorway, eyes wide and inquisitive.
"I'll get Ed and Larry," replies Will, edging past her out of the room.
Leo, from the shadows: "Donna, would you tell Josh we're back on?" Right, the Russian president...
"Yes sir," she answers; the two of them leave in tandem through separate doors.
They are alone in the room, and it is then that Toby's lips curl, almost cartoonishly, into a smile. He sucks on the lollipop, this close to laughing, as he tilts his head to the side, a challenge.
It's not often someone sees him like this, though CJ, as it turns out, is privy to this impishness of his more often than anyone else.
CJ makes her way around to her seat at the poker table, refusing to back down, eyes meeting his. "Did you know a day on the moon and a year on the moon are the same thing?" This again. Today must be CJ's Trivial Factoids Day.
Not that I'm complaining.
"I did," he responds, his tone light and endlessly amused.
CJ sits at the table and fiddles around with the egg, gaze appraising him for a moment before dropping her gaze to the egg.
"You know," she begins, still studying the egg, "I thought my reflexes before, in the press room-" and here she glances up at him, a wry intelligence gleaming in her eyes, "-were catlike."
He nearly swallows the lollipop; he cannot stop himself from laughing.
"You know," Ed or Larry begins (he doesn't give a fuck which of them is which at this point) as they are seated around the poker table, "you are particularly upbeat for someone who's been shot at twice in four years."
"Am I?" CJ cocks her head and looks at him.
"Yes," comes the blunt reply.
"That's 'cause I've got faith there, mi compadre," CJ responds, voice light and capricious.
Ed or Larry, whichever one it is, takes the straw out of his mouth. "Faith?"
Toby's eyes flit over to her, large, dark, watchful.
He notes that he feels remarkably calm towards her, despite having only minutes ago cradled her, shielded her in his arms, held her close to him, despite having seen her, in his mind's eye, wounded and limp, mouth burned red with her own blood.
"The substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." CJ places her straw in her mouth.
He reaches over and drops a few chips into the pot. "Yeah, but what I think he's asking-bump ten-I think what he's asking is, why on most other nights do you think the world's going to hell in a hula hoop, but tonight…?"
Well, he always thinks the world's going to hell, faith or no faith. He's long accepted this tendency as part of his "inner darkness", or whatever that blasted book two years ago had said about him.
"...we dip twice and eat gefilte fish?" CJ meets his gaze, a smile quirking at her lips.
Such a goy, her. He cannot stop himself from mirroring that smile. "Suzy Creamcheese, do not attempt the Haggadah." He very nearly raises an eyebrow towards her cheekiness; it is as if they are the only ones in the room.
So many of their conversations over the years have felt precisely that way.
CJ's eyes sparkle as she wags a finger at him, and he is loath to resist looking at her. "I know how to bless the soup, too. I'll raise your raise."
He loves when she is like this. When she is free, loquacious, feeling loved.
The others fold, leaving just him and CJ to battle it out.
"It's just the two of us," CJ notes.
He leans back in his chair, something needling at his mind. "Faith in what?" His voice comes out more softly, more tenderly than he means it to.
"Faith in us," CJ replies, looking directly into his eyes.
Suddenly on edge-no, no, she cannot mean what I think she does-he adjusts his position in the chair. "The people in this room?" he clarifies.
"And many, many, many others," declares she, her eyes saying more than perhaps she means them to.
A glance passes between them, flinty and intimate, that no one else in the room could ever properly understand.
Debbie has just walked out, waving her stack of bills, and once again, they are alone in Leo's office.
CJ walks from her position by the window over to the table as he puts on his coat, not wanting to rub it in that her "vernal equinox" theory is utter crap. She already looks downtrodden enough from this simple thing.
Faith. He wants desperately to say something to her, to take her in his arms again, to press the burr of his beard against her neck, but he dares not to. "You headed home?"
"In just a minute," she responds, her back to him as she piles up her winnings. She turns her head towards him. "I'm gonna let them know outside that they lifted the crash."
He wants nothing more, in this moment, than to take her hand, to press his mouth to hers, to guide her up out of her seat, to throw her into Leo's plush leather chair and make her moan unholy things, to slide his hands down the slides of her thighs as he kisses her collarbone, to feel the satisfying weight of her, trembling in his arms out of need, not fear.
To be the hero, the conquering savior-after all, he practically saved her life back there- to smile wickedly and claim his prize. "I think you owe me," he would say, before sliding his hand between her legs and hearing her hitched breath, her giggle of pleasure.
To have her look into his eyes with true warmth, warmth he does not deserve, close and intimate like they were before, before the whiskey-soaked night that led to Andi falling into his arms again, the night that led to the twins. Before he saw CJ's eyes grow moist and teary for that instant, that instant he told the lot of them, before he saw her try to hide it, to color her attitude with altruistic joy.
He supposes he ought to have told her first.
He supposes she would cry after the deed was done, once the acute want had subsided, cry for him and for Andi and for herself. He supposes, lump in his throat, that she never wanted to be this kind of person, even though he and Andi are divorced, even though Andi has thus far refused to remarry him. CJ never would want to be this kind of person, he thinks to himself.
And it's selfish, nothing but selfish greed, of him to put her in that position, to let his desires and-yes-love for her, twisted and fraught though they may be, to make her the other woman, the orbiting second choice whom he can pull into his world with a kiss, who can satisfy needs he cannot articulate, scratch itches only she knows he has.
It is in that moment he thinks that he must try to win Andi back, to put this dangerous muddled obsession with CJ to bed once and for all.
It's the only way any of them will survive.
He sees himself, gone gray and cold, the bullets he would have taken for her riddling his body. Because that is how it could have happened in the press room, and he knows that there's no one he'd jump in front of a bullet for faster.
Better me than her.
He tucks his chin into his chest for a moment, palms aching as he approaches her. "See you in the morning," he says quietly, letting the resignation he feels creep into his voice, before departing the White House for the slap of the cold night air and his empty apartment.