Author's Note: This is a little AU for two reasons. Firstly, I've only seen S1-3 so far and secondly, I changed minor details when it suited me (weather, arrangement of a desk etc)
The quotation came from a list of prompts that Raebard put together for another ficathon.
Disclaimer: Aaron owns them - I just play with them a little.
Our story isn't a file of photographs / Faces laughing under green leaves/ Or snowlit doorways on the verge of driving away / Our story is not about women victoriously perched / on the one sunny day of the conference / Nor lovers displaying love.
-- For An Album, Adrienne Rich
They'll tell our story one day. They'll tell it in Pol. Sci. classes and in chattering groups of interns around overheating copiers.
Donna checks her desk with an experienced eye even as she gropes for the scarf that has somehow got itself tangled around an atlas and an old Bartlet for America poster. Blue folders, green folders and pink ones for when she really needs to wake Josh up. Four kinds of post-its, her mouse mat with its gel support that Josh bought her in a silent peace offering, red, blue, black and green pens, four freshly sharpened BB pencils and a teetering tower of paperclips swaying on their magnetic base. Centre and square are three memos she'll start the next day with if, of course, a new crisis hasn't blown up.
As she turns to go, her eye is caught by a photo she has pinned up. It's a sunny day and dappled shade falls on their laughing faces. CJ has picked up some of the leaves and is threatening Toby with them. Josh and Sam are shouting encouragement from their comfortable rug against the tree's broad trunk. They've just split a doughnut and almost identical smears of chocolate adorn their faces. Leo and the President have the chairs, of course, and although the thick sheaf of papers on Leo's lap tells the story of why they are there, he's not paying them any attention for now. He seems to have leant over to listen to something President Bartlet has said and they're both laughing. Almost at their feet, Donna and Margaret share a rug with three laptops and a small mountain of cell phones. Donna thinks she looks so young and wonders if she still has that dress. The photo has been there so long she forgets to look at it but tonight she sees it with fresh eyes.
They were all so young then and innocent. They were so sure they could win, not just an election but the battles. They were going to do so much. They would change the world America's children were growing up in. They would be the start of something. They still believed their election promises. The MS cover-up, Roslyn, PTSD, grand daughters of traitors who trust you, speech drop-ins, arms sales to Qumar, Raggedy Ann dolls with knives through them, lying fathers, home soil terrorism, death and the endless soul-chewing compromises you make to get a shadow of your bill through a hostile Congress weren't even in their nightmares. They were so sure they would win now they're not even so sure they will survive.
They'll tell our story one day. One day the papers, the TV stations, the journalists and all those media commentators who can't see what we have achieved or even how hard, how desperately hard, we're trying, will tell our story.
As a senior staff member Sam has a parking spot adjacent to the West Wing, but some days he parks at the multi-story three blocks away and walks. He lets people think it's like the gym at lunchtime, one of his fitness kicks. Truth is he does it so he can walk up to the White House, go through the gate where everyone else has to stop, and walk up the steps to the door of the White House. There are days when that makes it all worthwhile - all the compromises, all the late night meetings when your eyes are gritty and your mind seems numb, all the slow wearing away of your principles, all people and things you miss, all the cancelled dates and broken promises - just to walk through those doors.
Strange to tell, though, the one image of those doors that Sam will never lose is of a snowy night when he sat outside in his car. The snow fell past the spotlights in shining whirls of white and piled up on the ground around the steps. As the wind changed some flakes landed on the door and clung to the panelling. It thickened on the portico and frosted all the bushes. Sam watched as the door opened and shut and people trooped out, waving to the security and calling out greetings and farewells. They wore pathways in the snow and left patches of darkness, but the snow would begin to cover them before the next group came out. Each time the door opened lights blared out and Sam caught glimpses of holly and fir, of shining ornaments and glittering gold ropes of tinsel.
Finally the snow covered the pathways and began to pile back up on the doorstep. The trail of people coming and going had dwindled to a stop. It was Christmas Eve and even the White House closes occasionally. A light still burnt in one of the veranda rooms though and Sam kept his vigil. It was a crazy, pointless, quixotic vigil; he knew that even as he wriggled his feet and blew on his fingers. When he got out to clear the windscreen, piled up snow crunched under his feet and his fingers burnt in the cold. When he got back in, the flakes that were caught on his hair and shoulders slowly melted into little patches of dampness.
He felt the cold inside him far more. It was the same icy chill that had wrapped around him for days after Roslyn. What was beyond it was more than he could bear to think of, more than he could bear to feel. He had lived through the terror of losing Josh back in those days only to realise now, too late, that somewhere between speeches, meetings, conference calls, position papers and Congressional votes he had lost him. They all had. And Sam, who was supposed to be his best friend, didn't know if he could find his way back or how to help him do so.
Suddenly light spilled out from the door, turning the snow into something that shone with a silvery radiance. Through the snowlit doorway Leo stepped out, shepherding Josh into the portico. They paused while Leo called greetings back to the man who held the door and Josh did up his coat, a little awkwardly with a bandaged hand. He moved down the steps and paused there, looking up at the crystal-pointed sky. He looked weary but he seemed to have lost that terrible need to keep moving that had pushed him all day. The door closed and Leo came down the steps behind him. He put an arm around his shoulders and they stood there looking at the sky and the snow-altered world.
They'll tell our story one day. They'll tell it in Junior High history classes and in books of commentary on the political process. They'll tell of our wins, and of our losses. I hope they'll tell of our battles.
It was 1976. She wore a long maxi skirt in swirls of green and purple and a white halter neck top. She was sitting out on a stone wall when he saw her, leaning back as she laughed. The sunlight caught glints of red in her hair and gave a glow to her California tan. There were two men with her - one sitting up beside her and the other, more careful of his convention suit, leaning an elbow on the wall and looking up at her. Just for that moment, she knew what it was to be victorious - to feel the power an attractive woman can have. Toby, solemn in his good shirt and, for the first time in his life, hotel-ironed jeans, watched her from the safety of the crowd around the vending machine.
They didn't speak until hours later when they met in the eddying crowd of a Young Democrats of the Mid-West room party. Then Toby called her a fascist for supporting a strong CIA. She read him a definition on just what was, and wasn't fascism and told him he was no patriot. He quoted her Erich Fromm on patriotism. She started a debate that drew in half the room - including a passing senator and three Congressional aides - on what patriotism meant in the 70s.
At 1.30, they went for doughnuts and coffee. They found an all night drug store down the block and sat squeezed in a booth for hours discussing nationalism, democracy and ambition. When they left, with the garbage trucks rumbling down the streets and the first streaks of dawn marking the sky, Toby noticed for the first time how she slouched as she walked to hide her height.
They'll tell our story one day. They'll tell it in the schools we built. They'll tell it in the rundown streets we tried to make safe. They'll tell it in the forests we saved for our children to walk in.
Charlie was younger than Mrs Landringham's grandchildren might have been if her boys had made it back from Vietnam. Some days as she watched him, she wished she could give him all the strength and wisdom her years had given her. Instead, she gave him cookies, advice about his sister's clothes and lessons in etiquette. More than that, she gave him the grace of seeming not to notice when Zoey came to sit on his desk and hold his hand or when he walked her to the door just for the feel of her against his side. She remembered the pleasures of being in love.
Mrs Landringham was old enough to know that first loves don't last. She expected the end to come amid prickly fights about favourite bands and who forgot to call or who was late for a date or maybe for it just to fade out under the pressure of work and college and the disunities of family and religion. She didn't expect it to end amid a hail of bullets.
Mrs Landringham spent the night of Roslyn praying for Josh. In the weeks that followed she added a daily novena for the two children who had woken up to a world where a friend almost died because they dared to cross a colour bar that was supposed to have been lifted before they were even born. In the months after, it became clear that cauldron of blood and frightened voices and flashing lights had torn apart more than Josh's artery. There were no more secret gestures of love and Mrs Landringham, watching, knew that soon their love would be an old snapshot found at the back of drawer and bringing back memories of summer and some slow song.
We'll tell our story one day. We'll tell to our children - or someone else's. We'll tell to those who weren't there. In the dark reaches of the night or in the final aimless days of old age we'll tell it to ourselves. We'll pull out old photos and discover our story isn't there. It is in the tiny unwatched moments and the half-forgotten fragments of arguments. It is in the unspoken words and the pictures we never took. It is in snowfall, sunshine and a night of blood and pain.
We'll tell our story one day .
"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult." - Erich Fromm