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Charlie stuck his head around the Oval Office door. "Mr. President? Josh."
"Send him in." The president stood up expectantly, and beside him Leo did the same, the dry reports they'd been going over completely forgotten.
One look at Josh's face told the story.
"Josh?" asked Leo, beginning to grin. Josh's smirk threatened to take over his whole face.
"It's in the bag," he said emphatically.
"We got Tavestock?"
"We got Tavestock," he nodded, still grinning. Leo looked across at the president, who looked delighted. He pulled his glasses off and blinked at Josh.
"I can tell everybody the Healthcare Bill is going through?"
"You can."
"Well done, both of you," the president smiled at them. "Very well done."
Leo was fairly sure the credit for this one didn't belong on his shoulders. He stepped forward and laid a hand on Josh's arm. "You did good, Josh," he said quietly. At this point, he discovered he'd been wrong in believing his deputy's grin couldn't get any wider.
"Well, go on," the president urged. "Go tell CJ!"
Josh went to do his bidding, but paused in the doorway. "I think she already knows."
"Let me guess. There was shouting?" Leo raised an eyebrow.
"Also hugging. Possibly some tap-dancing."
"Get out," he advised. Josh positively bounced out of the room.
The president turned back to his old friend. "We should seriously consider giving Donna a pay raise," he said dryly.
"I'll say." Leo rolled his eyes. "He's gonna be unbearable for the rest of the week."
"He's earned it."
"He has." They exchanged a smile.
"The hostages are alive, the Healthcare Bill is going through, and my wife and youngest daughter will both be home tomorrow." The president savoured the words, as if half surprised to find them true.
Things were beginning to look up.
Sam read the final draft over a few more times. Every I dotted, every T crossed? Every typo caught, and every possible point of contention changed and changed and changed again?
He couldn't see one single tiny thing wrong with it. Every sentence had been tweaked to the point of perfection; every syllable rang with exactly the right sound. He couldn't see one single thing Toby could possibly take issue with.
Of course, he hadn't been able to see any of the other ones, either.
There should probably have been some kind of trepidation as he picked up the draft of the speech and approached Toby's office, but he was beginning to discover that he just didn't care anymore. Maybe Toby would rip his hard work to shreds. So what? It didn't mean anything anyway. It was just words on a page. Words that didn't do anything to change the world.
Why should anybody care what words came out of the president's mouth? Everybody knew they were carefully calculated, put there by scheming politicians and spin-doctors. Presidential speeches weren't about truth, they were about scoring points, carefully shaped and sculpted to strike exactly the right balance between all the sections of society you needed to court today.
Once he would have leapt up and struck out against such a cynical definition of his profession. Now it seemed about right to him.
When had all the hope bled out of him? Maybe it had happened a long time ago. Maybe even as long ago as that day he'd discovered that the president had lied to them, that the Real Thing might be real, but he was still as human as the rest of them. There had seemed to be brighter times in between - but maybe that had just been the false thrill of battling for reelection.
Why had they even fought that fight? It wasn't as if they were doing anything with their time in power. It was more like they were babysitting the country, keeping it safe from the likes of Ritchie until somebody who would make it better came along.
If such people existed. Maybe they didn't. He'd thought he could be one of those people, but looking back that belief seemed pathetically nave. He didn't change the world, he just wrote speeches.
And, apparently, not even good speeches.
He handed the paper over to Toby, and looked at the floor; not out of any particular deference or embarrassment, but because it seemed to take too much energy to bother to do anything else.
Toby seemed to take an inordinately long time to read through the speech. Sam used it to think of all the other things he could have done with his life. Depressingly, he couldn't really think of much at all, except to have stayed at Gage-Whitney and married Lisa. And maybe that would have been a soulless, thankless existence, but hey, at least he would have known to expect that right from the beginning. Instead of building himself a nice tower of high hopes, and hitting the ground that much harder.
Toby rustled the papers as he slid them back into the folder, and cleared his throat. He gave Sam a slight nod. "It's fine."
To Toby, apparently, this was more than sufficient response. He'd slaved over about twenty drafts in the past week, making changes he didn't even understand the reasons for, and now it was 'fine'. Not, he noted, 'great' or even 'good', but 'fine'.
Glutton for punishment that he was, he had to say something. "You don't want me to-?"
"It's fine."
Toby casually shoved the folder on top of a pile on his desk, and seemed vaguely surprised to find that Sam hadn't gone anywhere. Because he of course existed only when it was convenient for Toby.
"So we're done?" He really wasn't after any effusive praise here. Even a quick 'you've nailed it', couched in biting Toby-sarcasm about how long it taken him, might have given him some clue. It would be nice to at least know whether he'd at last turned in an acceptable speech, or his boss had just given up all hope of making him do so.
But Toby, being Toby, just nodded. "I need a summary of the Peterson Report," he said, and went back to his work. Sam stared at him for a few moments, then walked out.
He didn't bother to stomp or slam the door. Toby probably wouldn't have noticed.
Bonnie and Ginger exchanged glances as Sam emerged from the lion's den. Should they ask? His face didn't betray the near-broken frustration he'd shown the last couple of times he'd spoken with Toby, but he didn't look happy, either.
Anybody who'd met both Sam and Toby for more than, oh, thirty seconds, would have no trouble picking which one to label inscrutable. Well, Toby certainly was impossible to read, but it was a mistake to assume that Sam's wide baby blues betrayed his every mood. When there was something wrong, a pneumatic drill and an FBI forensics team wouldn't get it out of him.
Still, there hadn't been any shouting... Bonnie took a chance.
"Did he like this one?"
Sam snorted bitterly, a sound that really didn't sit well with her mental image of Sam Seaborn. "Apparently, it's 'fine'," he said harshly.
Under normal circumstances, such lacklustre praise from Toby was about all you would expect. But the number of times he'd sent Sam out with alterations the entire bullpen couldn't see the point of...
Which was not to say Toby's amendments didn't make the speech better, because they did. What was baffling everybody, however, was just what the hell had been wrong with it in the first place. It was just an after-dinner speech, but he was polishing it like it was the State of the Union, and he was irrationally mad at everybody else for not doing the same.
She and Ginger had taken their share of the shouting, and every junior staffer in the place had learned to cringe at the sound of Toby's office door, but it was Sam she worried about.
Sam was depressed, and everyone could see it. It was stupid to say that they didn't know why, because really it was pretty obvious, but none of them really knew what to do with a depressed Sam. Toby's moods they were all accustomed to dealing with, but in his once bright and cheerful deputy it was unsettling.
They both watched him surreptitiously as he scowled at his desk, pushing bits of paper about and gripping a pen as if he wanted to stab somebody with it. He tried to read something, and then pushed back his hair as if that could be the reason the words weren't penetrating.
It wasn't as if they themselves weren't swamped with work, but all the same... Ginger hovered in his office doorway and gave him a cautious smile. "Need me to do anything?"
Sam blinked at her, then stood up abruptly. "Actually, yeah." He handed her a thick report. "Toby wants this summarised." He grabbed his suit jacket from the back of his chair and walked out. "I think I'm gonna leave."
The two assistants looked at each other, then at the clock. It was half past seven; way late by any normal office standards, early for the White House.
"Does he, like, work here part-time now or something?" Bonnie wondered aloud, and Ginger shrugged.
Leaving early, coming in late... how long before Sam stopped bothering to turn up at all?
"Hey, you're early." Sam was on either beer six or beer seven when Steve took a seat beside him at the bar. He supposed he was a regular now. A regular drinker, and why not? It was probably about time his job drove him to drink.
"Yeah, well. My boss was doing a remarkable impression of a-" He waved his hands helplessly, and took another sip of his beer to avoid having to come up with a suitable finish.
"That's Toby, right?" Steve asked, signalling the bartender. Sam blinked at him.
"I told you about him?"
"He was the main focus of your semi-drunken rambling, yes," he agreed. "Thanks," he said, accepting his beer from the bartender.
"Yeah, but... you listened." He hoped the note of plaintive surprise in his voice was mostly to do with being drunk.
"I got ears, don't I?" Steve shrugged.
"Nobody listens to me," Sam told his beer. Yup, he was definitely drunk.
"I like listening to you. You're an interesting guy." Steve smiled at him, and Sam couldn't help smiling back.
After a moment, he turned back to the bartender. "Hey. 'Nother beer?"
Why not be drunk? It was a hell of a lot easier than being sober.