So, these ideas, and this one in particular, just keep popping into my busy head, and I can't get them out until I get them out, so I figured I'd write them so that they wouldn't buzz around so much. This may or may not turn into a series of one-shots about Huck and Molly, with a supporting cast.
Disclaimer: The Bartlet administration would never have had to leave the White House if I owned The West Wing.
Andrea Wyatt knows she should be getting some sleep, rather then standing in the doorway of the twins' room. She has the day off tomorrow, but she knows she won't be able to reset her internal clock and will be up just before the crack of dawn anyway. And she knows that the chances that Huck will stumble out of bed, sleepy eyed and bed-headed shortly afterward, are very high.
Huck Ziegler is the spitting image of his father at age five. Andrea has a picture of each of them tucked away in the top drawer of her dresser, where she keeps all her really important photos, and if it weren't for the age spots and faded corners of Toby's, she probably wouldn't be able tell the difference between the two boys.
Huck's thick, not quite black hair is just starting to curl around the edges, and is starting to fall in front of his eyes, in that way that Toby's did when she first met him, all though years ago in Brooklyn when they somehow were brought by fate to the same campaign. The hair has disappeared since then, but it's still thick where he has it, and some part of her mind will always see him as the passionate, sad 32 year old who could write better then anyone she had ever met.
Both of them are really proof of genetics, and how big of an effect they have. There's Molly with her long red hair spilling over thin shoulders and challenging green eyes, her constant energy and her can do, will do, must do attitude that is an undeniable spitting image of Andy. But with Huck it's different.
He's so like Toby that sometimes it scares her a little. He's already so serious and quiet, scratching his head as he thinks, which seems to be a lot of the time, far too much for a five-year-old little boy it seems to her.
But the thing that reminds her the most of Toby is his eyes. They're deep brown and slightly sad, but they light up like twin night skies when he smiles. Andy smiles as she thinks about those burnt chocolate eyes lying behind her son's small eyelids.
She wonders if he'll ever get the crystalline edge around his eyes that his dad has, the little bit of glass around his eyes that is such a reflection of who they are as a person. They've both got this shell around them, and while it's thin and crystal, it's tougher then a lot of people realize. Huck's, she can already see, is going to be just like his dad's, and while that worries her sometimes, it makes her proud most of the time, that her little boy is going to grow up like his dad.
She looks at her son, the stuffed basketball that Josh gave him for his third birthday, because it was the only suitable present they had at the gas station he'd had to stop at on his way to the party, snuggled tightly against his chest. She knows that a lot of moms might be angry if an honorary uncle almost forgot a present for her son, but Andy thinks that it adds that busy Washington charm to the small gift. Huck hasn't slept a night without it since.
She looks at her son, sleeping peacefully with his dark hair already mussed and his eyelids calm over those dark eyes of his. Andy knows that he'll be stumbling out of bed far too early for a five-year-old and even after she tells him that he should go back to bed for a little while, he'll patiently sit at the kitchen table and wait for her to pour him a glass of orange juice. And for a while, while Molly sleeps and Toby catches up on all the sleep he missed for all those years on the couch, it'll just be her and her boy, so like his father as he sits and gulps his orange juice.
Let me know what you think!