TITLE: On Account of Age
AUTHOR: EPurSeMouve (epurxf@yahoo.com)
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: "The Stackhouse Filibuster", but only a little bit.
DISCLAIMER: They are not mine. Which makes me sad.
DISTRIBUTION: I'll say yes, but please ask first.
SUMMARY: Kids today.
Notes at end.
On Account of Age
By EPurSeMouve
The third was a boy-not-yet-a-man, with light peach fuzz and Buddy Holly glasses. He glided through the West Wing - the West Wing! - on roller blades so well-oiled, he looked like he was flying.
"Seaborn?" he called out as he flew through the halls, and Sam dropped a lapful of notes onto the floor so he could catch up with the courier. He tripped over a pile of files on his way to the door.
"You could have left this with my assistant," Sam muttered as he signed for the package.
The courier shrugged. "Sorry, but I got class in an hour, and you were right here."
And Sam finished signing his name, with a firm dot at the end, so firm that the pen's impact shook the clipboard. "You know," he said in the same tone, "your attitude could use a little work."
The not-quite-grown-up pushed off, making his way down the hallway with the grace of an angel. "No time for love, Dr. Jones."
Donna was passing, and they both watched the courier's retreat.
"How old would you guess he was, Donna?" Sam asked.
She frowned, considering. "Nineteen at the most. Nineteen at the least, really. I didn't think you were allowed to skate in here."
"Oh, I'm fairly sure you're not."
"Pity." She smiled. "You got the thing?"
Sam ripped open the envelope, and soon had more information than he'd ever needed about the President's Volunteer Action Award and this year's recipient.
There were even more files on the floor now. It was almost starting to look like Josh's office. Or a teenager's bedroom.
-------------
After the fifth one, Sam started a tally on the white board in his office.
"Who was number six?" Josh asked in between HMO policy debate and slices of pizza.
"This blonde girl with a video camera near GW - she was filming something for a class and apparently I was in the background, so she started yelling about how I was destroying her, uh, mise-en-scene."
"Mise-en-scene." Josh's French was awkward, to say the least.
"It refers to the space within the frame. A director attempts complete control over it in order to make an expressive point."
"So you interfered with her expressive point."
"Apparently so," Sam said. "And she yelled."
"Only the second yeller, so far."
"Yep."
"Yep." Josh took another bite of pizza. "You know, a good friend might point out, at this point, that it's highly unlikely that all people born in the year 1981 have a personal vendetta against you."
Sam nodded. "You're absolutely right."
Josh set the pizza down. "So, patients' bill of rights?"
-------------
"I don't think the Starbucks boy counts," Josh was saying as they hurried across the Mall, shivering into their overcoats.
"He used skim rather than two-percent," Sam said. "And his manner was decidedly curt."
"A Starbucks boy's mistake is no fourteen-year-old intern spanking, though."
"They're baristas, you know, and she was nineteen. They're always nineteen."
Josh stopped, then, hesitating with a gentle smile and cunning eyes. "This is coming from somewhere, I'm sure. This isn't just because of Winifred Hooper, wonder intern."
Sam shrugged off the look and kept walking. "I need real milk. With fat in it. Let's get back."
Josh's eyes, enigmatic. Processing, processing, before shrugging deeper into his coat and shouldering on. "Whose idea was it for us to walk, anyways?"
Sam wrinkled his forehead. "Cathy?"
"It's the sort of insidious thing Donna does, really."
"Maybe Cathy's learning from her."
They waited at the crosswalk, watching the cars pass by. "Or maybe she thought we needed the exercise."
Sam paused to consider. "We are a bit pale. Peaky, even."
Josh laughed. "Speak for yourself, old man. I have a surfeit of life."
"Surfeit?"
"High school French class."
Sam shook his head. "You choked on mise-en-scene."
"Languages were never my thing." And Josh bounded across the street, full of youthful energy, and Sam scurried to catch up.
-------------
Yet another morning, yet another meeting. CJ ran a hand through her hair. "So, tomorrow there's the majority leader's lecture at Johns Hopkins - and I'd really like to have someone there in case he decides to start, I don't know, inciting the students to revolt or vote Republican or something. Josh? You're not doing anything then, right?"
Josh scribbled down something on his pad - then tore the top sheet off. "I got lunch with the whip and a meeting with the guy that afternoon. And Baltimore's far."
"Baltimore is not far. Baltimore is a hour's drive."
"By myself? In a car?" He started to crumple the piece of paper into a ball.
She sighed. "Fine. Sam? You'll fit right in."
The brilliant line of rhetoric Sam had been scribbling ended with a startled slash of the pen. "I resemble a college student?"
"You're in shape and you have all your own hair. You'll blend," CJ said.
Josh rolled the ball in his hands, attempting a spherical shape and trying to ignore that hair comment. "Sam's afraid of teenagers."
Sam raised his pen in objection. "I am not afraid of teenagers."
CJ turned to Josh. "Is this because of the intern thing? Because that was a while ago."
"It's not just the intern thing," Josh said. "It's something else."
Sam raised his voice. "I am not afraid of teenagers!" CJ and Josh and Toby and a few passersby stared, and he took a breath before continuing. "But I have this speech that's not done, and it'd probably be good if that changed before Tuesday."
When CJ ran her hands through her hair this time, she seemed ready to pull a chunk of it out. "Toby? What are you up to?"
"Something very important that I cannot be dragged away from," he replied.
"If you're referring to the NCAA championships, Toby, then you most certainly can be dragged away from them. By me. Using force, if necessary."
Toby made one of those faces. "Okay, then."
Josh tossed the paper ball towards the trash can - rim shot. "Claudia Jean with the sports info."
"I see the patterns. The headlines, the chatter, you and your perpetual trash bin slam dunks. I observe. I research. I learn."
"Who are you rooting for?" Josh asked, rebounding the ball.
"The Lakers, of course."
Josh's next shot made it in. "There's improvement, at least."
As they were filing out, CJ pulled Sam aside, eyes on a level with him. "Is this teenager issue something real, or is this just Josh being Josh?"
"It's nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing."
"You sure? Do you wanna talk about it?"
"You've got a briefing. It's nothing."
"Okay." And she strode away, and Sam went back to his office to continue writing the speech saluting the accomplishments of Caroline Lee, accomplished violinist, volunteer, and activist, a model citizen for young and old alike.
Number ten.
-------------
Number twelve had fluffy brown hair and a strong dislike of Macs. She poked at Sam's laptop obstinately.
"So your screensaver keeps crashing," she said. "Is it affecting any of your other files?"
Sam skimmed a review of Caroline Lee's performance at Carnegie Hall. "No, not really."
The computer beeped happily under her ministrations. "Then why do you need a screensaver, then? This is a laptop. You just close it up and you're fine."
Sam looked up from the article. "When I'm stuck on something and I'm staring into space, my screensaver comes up, and it reminds me to start writing again."
"So it's an unnecessary program that you're making into something necessary?"
He sighed. "It IS necessary."
She lifted her hands from the computer, which chirruped in protest. "Mea culpa."
The pronunciation was flawless. Sam looked up again. "Are you an intern?"
"I work part-time - it's a light semester for me." She typed quickly, her fingers moving faster than her mouth. "I have an FBI file now and I'm not even twenty."
"That's quite a thing."
She fidgeted a bit. "It's pretty scary, tell you the truth."
"It is?" he asked, surprised.
She shrugged. "I'm not a grown-up. I am in no way adult. So what am I doing here?"
"Fixing my computer."
"It isn't very hard." One last happy purr from the computer, and she shut it down with three fingers and a pleased half-smile. "I debugged the source code. Soon as it reboots, it'll be good as new."
They both got up at the same time. "Did anyone ever tell you that you couldn't do this? Fix a computer in the West Wing?" he asked.
"Only myself. Whenever I let me."
He shook his head briefly, thinking. "You're no Winnie, Kathleen."
Her eyes widened when he took her hand and shook it. "What?"
"Never mind."
-------------
Josh came in that night, eating an apple and reading from a file.
"Is that the latest amendment from the committee?" Sam asked.
He looked up from the file. "Remember when we were kids, and you'd go to the doctor, he'd take your temperature and look in your ears, and you'd get a lollipop?"
"Yeah?"
Josh sat down. "I wonder if HMOs budget for lollipops."
"It's probably in the deductible."
Josh leaned back and put his feet up on Sam's desk, taking a moment to peer at Sam's white board tally. "You're up to twelve?"
"Technical support. She fixed my screensaver."
"I didn't know we had nineteen-year-olds in technical support."
"Only exceptional ones. You want a napkin for that apple?"
"Please."
They worked in comfortable silence for a moment - Josh reading his file, and Sam staring at his computer, willing the speech to write itself. But then little trumpets flared as Sam's screensaver turned on.
"'America the Beautiful' plays as your screensaver?" Josh asked.
"It's inspiring."
"It's cliched."
Sam sighed. "Not as cliched as this last sentence reads."
"I take it that it's not going so well," Josh said, making a face as he reached the apple's core.
Sam watched Josh chew for a minute before closing the laptop, running a hand over his face. "Were you an exceptional nineteen-year-old?" he asked.
Josh grinned. "Extraordinary, maybe. More extraordinary than my roommate sophomore year, though he could speak in tongues." He paused, thinking. "Which was really creepy at the time, especially when he'd do it in the middle of the night, but in retrospect, it *could* have been considered exceptional..."
Sam got up, pacing. "See, that's the thing. What *is* an exceptional nineteen-year-old? Is it their potential? Their accomplishments? Or just the fact that this person is there, trying, when so much of their age group considers it quite permissible to do nothing and let the world pass by?"
"You know what I think, Sam?" Josh closed his file. "I think you're expecting far too much of an age group that's just barely out of infancy and can't really be expected to live up to any sort of ideal. That's why we notice the exceptional nineteen-year-olds - because there just aren't a lot of them."
"But why is that?" Sam said. "Is it because they're intimidated, or shy, or lazy, or bored? IQs don't increase with age. But voter turn-out does. Thirty-two percent of 18 to 24-year-olds voted in the last election. Thirty-two percent! And those are just the ones who bothered to register in the first place."
Josh's eyes followed Sam as he paced, and he lifted his feet off Sam's desk. "Look, I understand where you're coming from, but these are just kids we're talking about. Voter turn-out in '96 was below fifty percent around the nation, and it hasn't gotten any better since. If it weren't for the exceptional 25 to 100-year-olds, we'd all just vote for each other and it'd be one big popularity contest."
"Isn't it already?" Sam asked, frustrated.
"Not really - but it'd be less biased than campaign financing. And the girls would be cuter."
"They're already pretty cute. Why would they be cuter?"
"So they'd be more popular, dude," Josh said, pausing at Sam's lack of comprehension. "You can't have forgotten this - you don't get to block out your adolescence until you're at least 38 and old."
"I can't skip ahead?" Sam asked.
Josh scoffed. "What could you possibly need to forget?" He paused. "Aside from that Gilbert and Sullivan thing, that is."
"I'll have you know that being recording secretary of anything for two years looks good on a resume," Sam said. "Probably got me into law school."
He smiled. "I doubt that. I *highly* doubt that. I am skeptical in the extreme. And what's this big thing you need to block out? A roommate thing? I know I wouldn't mind forgetting about the tongues guy."
Sam opened his mouth - then stopped, thinking. "Do you really want to know? Because we should be doing this other thing..."
"My interest in health care minutia pales in comparison," Josh said.
"You're going to use this to embarrass me someday, aren't you?"
"Only because you have more hair than me."
Sam sighed. "Look, there was this thing one of my professors said to me," he said. "Back in the day."
Josh raised his eyebrows. "When you were nineteen, I'm guessing."
"Yeah." He paused. "'Kiddo, it's not like you're old enough to make a difference.' That was what he said."
Josh took his feet off the desk. "A *professor* said this to *you*? What'd you do, try too hard or something?"
"I argued with him."
"You didn't like this professor?"
"Actually, I revered the guy. But he was wrong one day, and I corrected him - however, it was an embarrassing mistake, and I didn't think about how it would make him look or feel. So afterwards I went up to him - to apologize for maybe being too forward..."
"But it didn't make a bit of difference," Josh filled in.
"It didn't make a bit of difference, *kiddo.* And I have no doubt that it didn't - that I didn't affect him in the slightest."
"You probably didn't. Some of my professors, you could have thrown a rock at their heads and it wouldn't have mattered," Josh said.
"It was just the phrasing. And the 'kiddo.' A great thinker of our times, I thought then, and he just..." Sam shrugged, unable to complete the sentence.
"It's a horrible thing to say to a person." Josh's voice expressed an odd kind of sympathy - his own brand.
"Exactly!" And Sam's gestures became large and grand, as he wrote a speech with the movement of his arms and the words he spoke. "We should be telling young people that they're powerful, complex, intelligent individuals, who make a difference every day and can be an even greater influence upon the world with just a little extra effort. We should be calling them by their proper names and pushing them forward into an intimidating world, standing behind them because we were there ourselves only just a few years ago."
"As I understand it, you called Winifred Hooper 'Winnie'."
Sam sighed. "And maybe I shouldn't have."
Josh's eyes flickered back towards the white board. "So these kids..."
Sam followed his eyes. "I can't imagine they were ever told that they didn't matter. Even if they did mix up coffee orders and yell."
"Well, if arrogance is exceptional, then I don't see why we're worrying about this generation at all," Josh said, smirking a little.
"It's not the arrogance, I think," Sam said. "It's just something. Not to be so intimidated at that age. Not to be intimidated at any age."
"Well, I think you recovered from the kiddo thing remarkably. Though as things go, this wasn't a big one."
"Yes, well... I wonder, sometimes." Sam looked like he wanted something to slam or hit - to express his frustration in a more dramatic way. "I mean, I write speeches. I don't give them myself. Speaking through some else... It could be considered hiding, if one wanted to argue about such a thing."
"Sam..." Josh opened his mouth, but stopped himself, brow furrowing, as he considered the words. "Even at the ripe old age of 32, you manage to be exceptional."
It was a moment between them, a nice moment, and it held until Donna walked by and poked her head in, her hair drifting downwards a moment after the movement of her head.
"Are you guys coming?" she asked. "They're getting started in a few minutes, and I've already sent a present for you, Josh, so if you don't go, it'll look like your assistant just sent a present because you were too busy to remember about it."
Josh shook his head. "Wait. Okay. Back up. Remember about what?"
"Zoey's birthday. There's a party in the mess."
Josh paled. "Oh, crap. I've become one of those people whose assistants send presents for important birthdays because they're too busy to remember."
"Is it an important birthday?" Sam asked.
"Well," Josh said, "She must be turning twenty, because wasn't she number four?"
Sam looked over at the white board. "Number two, actually."
"Sometimes, you guys..." Donna trailed off. "Yes, she is now twenty years of age, which is indeed extremely important, numerically."
"Though it means nothing in the real world," Josh added.
Donna frowned. "She's a year older. A year wiser. No reason not to celebrate. You guys coming?"
The two men looked at each other. Each other and Sam's laptop and the piles and piles of files surrounding them.
"There's this thing-"
"We shouldn't-"
"There's cake," she said, and they were on their feet.
"Just for a few minutes," Sam said as he grabbed his coat. "To give her our best and so forth."
"I bet it's chocolate cake," Josh rambled. "With fudge icing." He was first out the door, but Sam was right behind him.
Donna smiled a bit at their retreating backs, watching them rush down the hall.
"Kids," she said to herself, then sped to catch up.
END
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Notes: This was a fling, a surprising little dalliance, a flirtation with characters I've never before written but love all the same. Whether or not it's a one-night stand remains to be seen - I have, however, enjoyed the chance to play in this particular sandbox.
There are many people I should dedicate this to. There's cofax, Caz, Jodi, Lena and luperkal, who were so very often right. There's Punk and Sabine and August and so many other fine WW authors, without whom I wouldn't have considered doing this, and who stagger me with their talent (especially now, when I've learned how hard it is to write these people g). There's Sorkin and the show itself, which seduced me into this torrid little affair with its brilliant writing and wonderful characters. There's my fellow spring baby/brain twin and the Paulisper of Dreams, who are so very exceptional. There are a lot of people.
So I'll just say that it's for the nineteen-year-olds. Past, present, and future.
Feedback might make me do this again. g epurxf@yahoo.com.
And thanks for reading.