For Holly, who asked me to write a Sam fic and succeeded in making me write Sam/Josh angst. God knows how. Although really this presents my view of their relationship: Sam is in love with Josh, but it's not reciprocated. Enjoy.
Quioxant
ADJECTIVE: 1. Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality. 2. Capricious; impulsive. From English Quixote, a visionary, after Don Quixote, hero of a romance by Miguel de Cervantes.).
It really wasn't odd, Sam told himself, that Josh was straight. He wasn't the type to ever really think of not being straight. It would honestly never occur to him that there was an alternative to women. Of course, he knew that gay people existed, but he never really put two and two together and considered homosexuality as something that could apply to him rather than just those around him.
In many ways, Sam wished that he had been like that. Life would have been so much simpler. He could have married Lisa and had the picket fence and the two-point-five children, like the people he addressed every day in his writing. He had tried to be like that, tried to be the person everyone wanted him to be: the happily-married, rich, successful lawyer. It had taken him years to realise that that was not what he wanted, and even longer for him to leave it. He never would have left it, if Joshua Lyman hadn't waved to him. He would follow that man to the ends of the earth, if only because Josh's fire was more real to him than anything else he'd ever experienced.
Following in Josh's wake felt like everything he'd ever wished for himself. He got to meet people he couldn't imagine living without; he got to make a name for himself; he got to make a difference. It was because of Josh that he had shivered when he saw his name on cream-coloured stationary with a picture of the White House embossed above it. It was because of Josh that his words were heard across the globe, that they had the power to build airplanes and cure cancer and rid the world of all its evils. Some days, that responsibility weighed heavy on his shoulders; he wondered if perhaps someone else could do better, could take the worldwide platform he addressed every day and use it to better ends than his.
It was that acute awareness of the people he could reach that made him so conscious of their actions. He felt bitter, sometimes, that the others took their power for granted. A single word out of place could ruin everything that they had built for so long, bring it tumbling down like a carefully constructed house of cards hit by a small gust of wind. Every word he wrote now was weighted with that consciousness, and gradually it had become heavier and heavier as the house became taller and more precariously balanced. And the fire which had attracted him, the fire which Josh had dangled in front of him like a toy, was too dangerous to be allowed near this house. It hurt Sam deeply, that his own quioxant nature that had led him to this place in his life was no longer allowed past the barriers of political sensibility that had been built around it.
Even if he couldn't admit it - and this pained him more than anything, because above all things Sam was always honest with himself - he knew that it had been Josh who had built those barriers. It was always Josh who limited him; Josh, and Leo who he loved like a father. Josh had never stood up for Sam's idealism, and when he did choose to listen Sam felt that was being humoured by this man rather than valued.
Perhaps that was why he walked out of the only job that had ever allowed him, however briefly, to be purely what he was. Or perhaps it was disillusionment, that despite all the truths he had ever written, they would all forever be overshadowed by one single, small, white lie.
Or perhaps it was pain, that the man who he had fallen in love with such a long time ago could so needlessly destroy him.