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Sam glanced again over at Toby. His boss seemed utterly absorbed in the words on the screen of his laptop; no surprise. Sam had been waiting for some hours now for exactly the right time.
It had recently occurred to him that with Toby, he quite possibly wouldn't recognise a right time when he saw it. How, exactly, did you pinpoint a moment when Toby Ziegler was most approachable? He supposed the fact that he wasn't currently being at screamed at would almost qualify...
Toby abruptly stood up, walked over to the door and shut it. He leaned his back against it and raised an eyebrow at his deputy. "Sam. Speak."
Okay. This would appear to be... a moment of some sort, if not necessarily the right one.
Um.
"I, uh-" he stuttered, searching for words.
Toby looked unimpressed. "You were waiting to talk to me all morning. You then proceeded to wait to talk to me all through lunch. It is now afternoon. Either talk to me or, you know, find some way to cease to exist."
Sam hesitated. "I just wanted to tell you that I, um, I'm... in a relationship, and-"
Toby's response was immediate and to the point. "Better or worse than a call-girl?"
Well, obviously better. Apart from the bit where it could technically be considered worse. "Well, um, the thing is- I'd say... Uh, well, you see-"
Toby looked him directly in the eye and spoke flatly. "Sam, do you have a boyfriend?"
"Um- yes." He blinked at his boss in confusion. "Did you... did CJ talk to you?"
"No. It was a logical guess."
Sam looked at Toby. Toby was looking... expressionless and Toby-like. It was decidedly unnerving. "You could at least try to sound surprised."
"I'm not."
He frowned. "Why not?"
Toby shrugged. "I always knew you were the type."
"Type-?" A flare of disbelieving anger sparked at the insinuation. "The type to be gay?" he demanded furiously.
"The type to not care."
Well, that shut him down. Toby was unsurprised by him having a boyfriend because he knew Sam wasn't the kind who would automatically rule out having a boyfriend.
Suddenly, his head hurt.
"You know what? I'm gonna- I'm gonna just, you know, go be in my office." He got up and scurried for the door.
"Sam." He turned. Toby gave him a small nod. "Try not to get caught publicly having sex, and make sure to ask your boyfriend if he's a prostitute."
Apparently this was all the relationship advice he was getting from Toby. He stopped in the doorway smiled hesitantly. "So, um, you're okay?" he had to ask.
Toby indicated his still-impassive expression. "Look at this face. Is this the face of a man who gives a damn?"
Point taken. Sam couldn't help smiling as he returned to his office.
Okay. Two down.
"Toby." CJ acknowledged his presence before she looked up from the reports she was poring over.
"CJ." He came in and closed the door behind him. She peered over her glasses to regard him with a slight smirk.
"So... do you want to talk about sex again?"
Toby gave a slight shrug. "Yes and no."
"Well, give a girl mixed signals, Toby." She stretched out her legs and leaned back in her chair.
"I spoke to Sam," he told her.
"Yeah?" She met his eyes, and then nodded slowly. "Yeah."
"He called you?" Toby asked with a single raised eyebrow.
"I called him out," CJ corrected.
He guessed what that meant. "Who?"
"Katie Jackson."
"And?"
"She's solid." Katie had only vague suspicions, and CJ thought she knew her well enough to be sure she wouldn't try too hard to verify them. This wasn't her kind of news.
Toby nodded slowly, respecting her judgement, or perhaps agreeing with it. But they were both smart enough to know that Katie's willing silence would only buy them so much time. "We need information," he said, running a hand through the remains of his hair. "Republicans, the news media, Democratic enemies... everything with the faintest whiff of homophobia."
CJ smiled, and spread her hands to indicate the reports she was reading through. "Operation Pre-emptive Homophobe Identification already underway." When this story broke, everybody and his brother were going to be all over Sam Seaborn. Nobody but the most rabid members of the Christian right would actually openly attack him for having a gay relationship - so they'd have to go the more insidious route of claiming he must have been in the closet the whole time, a betrayal of the administration's gay supporters.
She for one believed without hesitation what Sam had told her about a chance meeting with this Steven Radcliffe - but the allegations could and would get some attention. The best way to counteract that was to throw doubt on the true motives of the people who made them.
Hence, Operation PHI. They couldn't stop this story breaking, but they could make damn sure that when it did, they had every bit of ammunition they could find to take down Sam's detractors.
Toby nodded, and gave her a quiet smile of acknowledgement. "This is gonna get nasty," he said aloud.
CJ shrugged. "We've seen nasty before." She'd got it all out of her system talking to Sam; now she was geared up for the fight.
"Sam doesn't have to."
She gave Toby a smile that made him look down at the floor before he could blush. He would die before admitting it, but Toby was Sam's self-appointed older brother, and operated on the unwritten brother's code that he was the only one allowed to give him any crap. Oh, Sam was no hopelessly naïve little boy, needing to be protected, but he had... something. Something that had been missing from his eyes for far too long, and that CJ had seen a glimpse of when he she'd spoken to him that morning.
Sam Seaborn was an innocent in the truest sense of the word; not someone who hadn't seen enough of the world's evils to be jaded, but someone who'd seen them and expected good to triumph anyway. And there was something about that utter faith in the world that made cynical people like her and Toby want to shuffle around behind the scenes, surreptitiously kicking people in the kneecaps to make sure they didn't get in the way of that.
It wasn't about protecting Sam, it was about giving him the kind of world he deserved to live in. She grinned at Toby. "They come after Sam? We're kicking their asses."
Toby gave her one of his rare smiles back. He turned to go, but then hesitated in the doorway and hung back. "Operation Pre-emptive Homophobe Identification?" he asked, with a raised eyebrow.
"Operation PHI," CJ elaborated.
"Ah."
"It's a Greek letter."
"Yes."
"Plus it makes for a really cool codename."
"Which we will not, under any circumstances, be using."
"No."
Toby left.
Well, this was a turn-up for the books. Josh was parrying a continual stream of barbed remarks with wit, charm, and - shock of all shocks - a remarkably cool head.
Donna, on the other hand, was this close to leaping to the front of the studio, cameras be damned, and ripping Melissa Berrington's oh-so-neatly-made-up head off.
It had started as soon as Josh sat down, even before the cameras were rolling. Snide remarks about whether he'd be okay, would they need to dim the lights for him, should they take extra breaks and talk softly so as not to startle him. Donna's teeth had been set on edge, but Josh had just smirked and been... polite.
Scary.
And she'd been the same all through the program. Sly, smirking, sneaky remarks, never coming out and stating anything but always insinuating it. It should have driven Josh crazy - Lord knew it was working on Donna - but he just refused to be baited.
Joshua Lyman was exercising self-control. In the face of a woman with a cruel smirk, a moral code out of the Victorian era, far too much make-up, and the world's biggest helping of smug.
Okay, so smug wasn't always bad. On Josh, 'smug' was natural. He wore it like a suit of armour. But on Melissa Berrington, it was pure, unadulterated evil.
And she had Republican hair.
That was one of Josh's observations, the kind that she slapped him round the head for but secretly filed away to giggle over when he was out of earshot. Republican hair, he had explained, was a very specific type of hair, worn by a very specific type of woman. It was hairsprayed within an inch of its life, and then twisted around itself into a style Princess Leia would have rejected as too unnatural-looking. And it never moved, not one strand of it, not even in a gale-force wind. Josh's pet theory was that these women pulled their hairstyles together so tightly it squeezed their brains, thus explaining why they didn't have room for anything but the most narrow-minded worldview.
Her sister Alexia had hair like that.
So did Melissa Berrington. And she had just the narrow, vicious, Rottweiler of a mind to go underneath it. Even Mark Gottfried was beginning to look embarrassed to be sitting next to her.
So far, the only thing keeping Donna sane was contemplating whether, if she was to slap Berrington hard enough, the immobile hair would get left behind.
When they broke for commercials, Donna rushed to Josh's side, giving his opponent the most evil glare she could muster as she disappeared off. Probably to touch up her make-up again. "Okay, Icy McFrosticle," she demanded, "what drugs are you on?"
Josh smirked at her. "Icy McFrosticle?" he mocked.
"You are not Josh Lyman," she frowned. "And the reason I can tell, see, is because we have yet to be yanked off the air for breaking the rules for obscenities in a live broadcast."
Josh shrugged, and leaned back in his chair. "I'm fine, Donna. She's just a Republican blowhard. She's not even worth getting angry over."
Donna stared and him, and then very slowly straightened up and backed away. "The earth is flat," she said in tones of fear.
"Huh?"
"The earth is flat. The sun is falling. Oceans are rising. Oh my God, it's the apocalypse!"
And Josh just laughed. "It's not the apocalypse, Donna. It's just the new, more relaxed, more mature, more self-aware me."
Donna wasn't sure that explanation was any less scary.