Title: Tired
Author: Victoria (atlantic_iced_tea@hotmail.com)
Rating: PG-13 to be safe
Summary: CJ's tired, and an early night isn't going to cure this kind of exhaustion.
Spoilers: "Two Cathedrals"
Disclaimer: I didn't create these characters, they were born into the mind of the incredible Aaron Sorkin. I didn't create their love, it was there already. All I did was write this little story. It's not worth suing over. Seriously.
Authors Note: I wrote this right after 'Devil in a Blue Dress'. I really am a die hard Josh/Donna 'shipper, but seem to have some kind of writers block at the moment when it comes to everybody's favourite sparring partners…
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The night she found out about the Presidents MS, Toby had been there. He'd told her that he'd be in his office when she was done. She knew now he had done that with all the senior staff, but at the time…
CJ leaned back against the comfortable seat, breathing in deeply. It was going to be a long flight - she could feel it. Not that there was anything terrible about spending time on Airforce 1, it was just that she was tired. Not only from the constant hum of reporters around the staff during the three day trip to New York, but because her whole being was exhausted from the daily battle that her life had become.
Before the plane took off back to Washington, as everybody else crowded under black umbrellas, dashing from sleek car to aeroplane, she stood apart unnoticed by the others in the darkness. Drops of wet rain soaked her through as a cold November rain whipped around her.
There was this aching loneliness inside her. It made her insides feel hollow, as if she were an empty shell, a vessel, devoid of everything but the dull numbness that shrouded her soul.
Every day she went to work in the White House, to serve at the pleasure of the President. Sometimes she felt as if there was no one else in the world who could do her job as well as she did. Sometimes she felt like a little girl, grasping at the meagre straws of knowledge her colleagues deemed fit to feed her. But always, always, she held in her heart a smouldering love for Toby Ziegler.
Try as she might to forget him, she could not. As if it wasn't enough she practically lived in the office next to his, barely footsteps away, but CJ saw his eyes every time she closed her own and heard his voice whispering to her in sleep. He was everywhere.
She knew it was impossible to love a man like him. Her red hair clung to her face and she shivered, wishing that things could be different.
And if she were a different type of woman, hot tears might burn against her pale skin as she allowed herself to feel the pain she had spent so long concealing. But Claudia Jean was strong and wouldn't cry over Toby. She wouldn't allow herself to.
She was so tired though. It took all her energy to keep going each day, knowing that it was another day without him. And it took every ounce of her being not to reach out through the haze to him and ask him to take her in his arms and rescue her because she needed rescuing. She needed sleep. She needed him.
Instead she stepped up the silver metal stairs into the warmth of Airforce 1, taking a window seat so she might look down on the esplanade of lights that was America. And when Toby sat down opposite her she merely smiled a tired smile at her old friend before turning her face to the rain soaked window, the sky crying the tears that she could not.