The Ferryman's Tithe

by Probeda

The price of following the real thing.

Title: The Ferryman's Tithe

Author: Michelle

Rating: PG

Summary: The price of following the real thing

Spoilers: Big ones for 100k Airplanes, minor for ITSOTG

Author's Notes: Well, I wrote this one quite some time ago. It can be found in slightly less edited form at www.samfanfic.com. It's a bit of a different story for me. For one thing, it's less than 100 pages and the POV is a bit of an experiment. It's only my second finished WW story as well. The other one probably won't make it here because I believe it holds the dubious distinction of being the longest fan fic in history, but it can be found at the above listed archive. Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts, if any, you have about this.

She had always known she was not quite enough for him. Once in a while he'd go too fast for her, or reach just a little farther than she was capable of grasping. Usually the difference didn't seem to matter, even intrigued her a little, but sometimes late at night, the jagged edges of their relationship would catch, and the fissures that seemed small earlier that day stretched into wide, unbridgeable canyons. Even wrapped around her, he'd seem miles away, already lost to her. In the early days, he'd sense she wasn't there beside him and turn back for her. In those early days she'd always let him take her hand and pull her up along side. But she'd stopped taking that hand so long ago she couldn't remember when it had begun, and in the space between he'd learned no longer even to look for her.

They had all thought, even Sam, that she'd brought him to New York because she missed the dazzle of the clubs and the celebrities. She'd let them believe it; it was not entirely untrue. Josh had resented her for it. He'd always thought that Sam's place was rightfully in Washington, with him, and that she was killing the finer parts of him by stifling him in a job he didn't want, in a lifestyle he could never entirely belong to. But she'd always known that she was living on borrowed time, that all it would take for Josh to have Sam scurrying back to Washington and all he had left behind was one phone call. In the end it had taken even less: just one smile on a rain-drenched afternoon.

Josh had known it, too, and the smiles he always wore for her now held that smug satisfaction, though Sam always read it as excitement. It was that smile that gave her the strength to go through with this, when the moment before she had doubted even the icy bite of her loneliness would give the strength.

Josh thought he was rescuing Sam from a shrewish fiancee and a life that was slowly killing him. Josh would enjoy playing that role. The self-satisfied condescension in the look he was giving her just now said as much.

"You never understood him," he'd said the afternoon he'd appeared and ruined all their lives with his talk of what waited for them in New Hampshire. "How could you ever think he'd be happy here?"

He'd gestured contemptfully at the carefully decorated apartment, with all of its tasteful, expensive décor. She'd spent months arranging it just so, each piece added one at a time with exacting consideration. She'd wanted it so badly to be perfect: for him, for them, for the life they now would never make together. Sam sometimes said it made him feel like he was living in a museum. At least he'd said it with apology.

A part of her knew that some of what Josh said was right. There were things about Sam that Josh could understand, even share in, that she could never comprehend. It was not in her to care about the make-up of the supreme court, or lines of legislation that spun out in elaborate webs as complicated as the arch of a fractal curve. But it was just as true that there were parts of Sam that Josh could not even see, let alone understand, and that were hers alone. The part of her that knew that had feared that afternoon every second of their stolen years in New York.

Because Josh didn't see all of Sam, just like he never could acknowledge that Lisa might actually need Sam as more than a trinket that would look good on her arm as she wound through party after party. It had always enraged her that none of Sam's friends had ever thought her capable of valuing him quite enough. She had always known what she had, and she had loved him as much as she was able to allow herself, even now, and that was considerable. It irritated just as much that her own friends wondered at their attachment, if for opposite reasons. They couldn't see how someone as committed to clawing their way into the social elite as she was could ally herself to someone so incomprehensible.

Yet there were so many reasons to love him, and the strength and breadth of them could still surprise her. She loved him because he was beautiful, even if he didn't acknowledge it and sometimes even felt trapped by it. In the beginning it was what had drawn her to him, though his personality and what drove him had been such an alien thing to her. Sometimes still his undeniable physical beauty had the power to hold her. Back before the end—before Josh—her favorite thing to do was just to lie in bed with him on one of the rare Sunday mornings he'd allow himself to sleep in and just look at him. She'd revel in the small pleasure of just being able to touch him that was hers alone. She'd run a palm over the thin soft hairs of his abdomen, enjoying the press of hard muscle beneath, or she'd trail sensitive fingertips up his side, counting the ribs under his quivering skin.

The passing years had taught her even deeper, more enduring reasons to lose herself to him, and these were things no one but she could own. She loved him because he believed in the best in people, and because he cared passionately about things most people were too uncomfortable even to acknowledge. She loved him for the way sometimes he had to get dressed twice in the morning, because at least once a week he spilled coffee on his tie while eating breakfast. She learned to appreciate quiet: especially on the crisp clear nights when he'd take her outside the city to a place he knew and they would sit together on the grass sipping chocolate as he pointed out the constellations to her, one by one, as they appeared in the sky. He would sit behind her, wrapping his body around her. Even now just the memory of his solid presence supporting her and the warm intimate puff of breath on her ear as he named stars for her was enough to dispel some of the chilling emptiness within. And sometimes he would open his mouth, and the words that would come out of him were so wondrous that her breath would catch and even the most jaded of her friends would stop and listen and think, just for a second.

Josh didn't know all of these things. Most people, meeting Sam, would just notice the physical perfection that sometimes he hated so much, or maybe the impossible standards that made him just a touch unpleasant to be around, or perhaps the uncompromising idealism that created ripples of resentment everywhere he went. Unlike her, Josh wasn't afraid of Sam's passions, she had to give him that. He was strong enough to see them as a challenge and not an accusation, and use them as a tool to make himself grow enough to meet them. But Josh for all his political suave was still too blind to see the danger there.

Because Josh didn't know how thin Sam's skin was, under all of that beauty and cleverness and passionate drive. He hadn't seen, all those years ago in their first time in Washington, how Sam had crashed himself against wall after wall and instead of breaking through had met only resistance. Back then Sam had been able to blame the system. Back then there had been no real thing. But Josh had appeared with his dangerous promises of a man who could change all that. And how could Sam not want to be a part of that?

And even she, who knew so dearly the dangers, could not entirely wish to prevent him, not knowing how much it meant to him. She'd brought Sam to New York to protect him. Maybe in later years he would have come to hate her for it, but that was better than him hating himself. But she'd known her desperate ploy to salvage the both of them could have failed, even without Josh in the equation. The unsleeping nights Sam had lain next to her, wondering if he was not betraying his younger ideals had made that clear enough. But she also knew that he loved her, in his own fashion, and that maybe that and the children she'd promised him and knew he longed for would be enough. She enjoyed being the soon-to-be wife of a Gage Whitney attorney, but she could have given that up for him, if he'd only stayed with her. There were higher purposes to be found, even in New York, and Sam probably eventually could have found satisfaction if not true happiness in them if not for Josh and his real thing.

She'd met the Governor, and had even heard him speak. She had to admit that even she'd been impressed by the dignified if short figure she'd been presented with. He'd been in a nasty mood when she'd met him, and had not even remembered Sam's name right. When he looked at her, though, and shook her hand, she had seen that his eyes were kind and there was a great deal of wisdom in them. Later, when he had gotten up and taken the podium, and Sam's beautiful words had rolled out over the auditorium, she had known that Josh was right. That here was a man who could change things, who could do real things for America. It was a strange feeling, as patriotism had always been too naïve of an emotion for her crowd. But she had known right there, listening to those words, perhaps even before the rest of them, that this man was going to win. The poll data had made that idea ridiculous, even ludicrous, but it was a deeper conviction than she'd ever experienced.

It had saddened her, that realization, and later she would decide that it was the first step on the road that had led her here, to this moment. It perhaps would have been kinder for Sam, and even for this Governor with his terrible sincerity and bright ideals that were so close to Sam's own, if that hadn't been true. If their great hope had been perhaps a trifle less convincing. He could have gotten up and made his speeches and maybe touched a few people along the way. But the nomination should have gone to Hoynes as it was meant to. Bartlet with his unfashionable passions could have gone back to New Hampshire and resumed his role as shepherd to a state whose old fashioned morality could tolerate his standards, even welcome them. Sam could have returned to her, or even to Washington, saddened but not broken, not quite. It would have killed a part of him, because Sam always thought that being right should be enough to make you win, and the thought that they might not probably would not have occurred to him right up to the moment when someone else's name was placed on the ticket. But it would have been the sorts of wounds that could have healed.

Now Sam was on his way to the White House, even if the nomination had not been officially tied up yet. And when they failed to meet his vision, as they inevitably would, those were the wounds that would break him, at last. Sam, and certainly never Josh, had never acknowledged that she understood their world a little better than they gave her credit for, perhaps even better than they themselves. The worlds of Cosmo and the Capitol weren't as different as they would like to pretend. In her circles they might use perfume instead of rhetoric to cover a stench, but the end result was just the same. In another sort of life she might have done very well in Washington.

Sam refused to understand that, just like he refused to understand that not everyone was like him. Sam put all of himself into everything he did, held no part of himself in reserve. She admired him for it, for that ability to strip himself naked before a world full of barbed wire. It was yet another reason to love him, but it was dangerous, and not everyone was capable of it. Sam had never been able to see that the reason that some people didn't reach for the stars was not because they were lazy or selfish, but because the stars were too high, and they were afraid of falling. Some people weren't able to climb out on that limb, no matter how hard they might try. Or maybe sometimes people had lived under smog choked streets for so long they had forgotten that the stars even existed. Not everyone was able to stand and risk being shredded like that and this didn't make them cowardly or evil, just human. There was a comfort in admitting your own human limitations that she didn't think Sam would ever allow himself and that added a great deal more sadness to what she must now do to him.

Sam had good people with him, and maybe they'd be able to stand for a while. Maybe this Governor with his human compassion might be able to lead the charge. But the long-time puppet masters in DC would resent him for it, and eventually, bring him down to their level. She'd seen it before, and had no reason to believe it wouldn't happen again. They would hate him for reminding him of their own long-forgotten, compromised ideals. Josh and the others would waste no time sweeping in and trying to remake the world in their own image, and maybe they'd win for a time, but not forever, and their victories would only fan the flames of resentment higher. And then Josh and Toby and the others, good smart political advisors all, would begin to council compromise, and the dissolution of their bright crusade would begin. They would fail Sam and his unworkable ideas for the future time and again, perhaps in turn resent them themselves and use them against him.

Lisa had heard that Leo McGarry, the future Chief of Staff, was the Governor's own best friend and that he had brought him on the campaign with his own version of a rain-soaked grin. She'd wondered how someone who seemed so firmly planted in reality could do something like that to someone he claimed to value so dearly. She had met Mrs. Bartlet once, and thought maybe something of her thoughts were reflected there, but neither time nor circumstance had made it appropriate to ask how she too could just sit on the sidelines and feed her husband to the lions.

Josh she knew wouldn't view it that way. But Josh was just the sort of boy who in his enthusiasm broke his favorite toys and then blamed them when they wouldn't work anymore. Then when they crumbled even further they were discarded for bright, shiny more durable things. He would be the one that would break Sam eventually, not on his own maybe, but it was his promise of the real thing that Sam would be unable to fulfill that would supply the final nail in the coffin.

She had wanted desperately to ask the Governor's strong confident little wife where she got the strength to do this, even to lend support, but she hadn't, and she thought she could never have the strength anyway. She loved Sam, but not enough to watch him shred himself on the rocks, and she had always held enough of herself apart from him that she knew that she could recover from this, no matter how sharp the pain was.

She looked up and met Josh's self-congratulatory gaze. He must have read something of her intentions there, because something in him faltered. Later she would find satisfaction in thinking that when the inevitable came, he would look back onto this day and know it had begun here and that it had been his own smug glee that had sparked it. It allowed her to smile her own in return, especially after the victory in his eyes died. Trepidation began to fill his expression as she moved closer to Sam.

She knew he thought she'd try to keep her claws in Sam until the last, and her giving him away now was surprising to him. It pleased her to have been able to shock even something as unassailable as the confidence of Josh Lyman.

She turned the ring over in her hand, warm now from her skin. The hard unyielding diamond bit into her flesh, punishing her. It would hurt her to give it up. She'd always loved beautiful things, and this one was extraordinary. Typical of Sam, it wasn't flashy, but the single stone in its simple band had been the finest his considerable wealth could buy. It must have taken the finest diamond broker in New York months to find it. The color was pure white, and not even a trained eye could find the slightest inclusion in it. It was cut to sparkle brilliantly in the faintest light and it had shown like a pale flame on her finger. Most of her friends had had larger, more obviously expensive rings, but they'd recognized real quality when they'd seen it. She'd enjoyed the envy in their eyes as she'd enjoyed the occasional envy that had flared up when she'd talked about Sam and how perfect he was. But now the stone's fire was dark, hidden in the palm of her hand.

Sam smiled up at her, and despite his obvious exhaustion his expression still managed to hold a tender affection, even if it only was a shadow of what it might have held. It was enough to make this more painful than she'd expected, and that forced her to be crueler than she'd planned.

"I came to return something to you," she said.

"Lisa, don't do this, not like this," Josh said quickly, but neither she nor Sam paid any attention.

Sam blinked, still managing to be charmingly a step behind. "I thought you came to visit. I know I haven't had much time for you lately, but I swear, after the next few weeks I'll have a break and we'll spend some time in New York or maybe LA." He smiled again. "We'll even go to Moomba every night, if that's what you want."

She had forgotten that he could be like this. That sometimes even perfect Sam could be perfectly cruel without meaning to be.

"No one goes to Moomba every night and I know you hate it there," she said, her voice unattractive, biting. She hated that. She had wanted so very much to be cold. "I imagine that will make this easier for you."

"Make what easier for me?" Sam said, his tiredness robbing his voice of its politeness. "Lisa, hon, you're losing me here. Could we maybe wait until morning?"

"Don't worry, this won't take very long."

With that she lifted his right hand, the much-loved, long-fingered writer's hand that could do so much to her, and she placed the gorgeous ring in his palm and closed his fingers around it. His eyes went wide and for once he was speechless. The love and hate she had for both of them propelled her into kissing him once more fully on the lips, with all of their long forgotten passion. She knew what it would do to him later when he thought back on this, and it eased some of her own hurt to wound him in this way. Sam was hers, and if anyone was going to break him, she wanted to at least be the one to make the first crack. Josh and his friends could do the rest.

She released Sam slightly and pressed her lips against the sensitive skin beneath his ear.

"I hope you find your real thing," she said, trying to mean it. "But later, if it doesn't turn out the way you'd expect, I want you to remember that you could have had something else just as real, maybe more so, and that you gave it away."

She slipped away from him and headed for the door, glad that she'd never bothered to unpack her things from the car.

"Lisa," Sam's voice finally came, hurt, surprised. She didn't look back, though the real pain she heard in that one word almost made her pause.

"Lisa, wait," Sam said as she opened the door, his voice stronger now. But once started she couldn't falter on this path, and so she walked the rest of the way out the door and closed it firmly behind her.

After a moment it became obvious no one would be coming after her, and the only sound she heard as she walked down the hotel hallway with its dingily cheerful carpeting was the soft thud of her own footsteps carrying her away.