XXIII
MONDAY:
"Mr. McGarry? This is your Monday morning wake-up call."
The chirpy young woman at the other end of the hotel phone had no idea that truer words had never been spoken.
He levered himself up on his elbows, feeling the familiar thickness in his throat, and already the urge. Just one more drink, to make it better. Just one more drink, to take it away.
The bottle was empty. This hotel room that doubled as his home had no mini-bar, something he was frustrated by even as it relieved him.
It was funny how, when you hadn't had a drink in years, you thought you knew what craving was. But now, with the memory of last night's consumption still in his system...
He clenched his hands into fists, for a moment fighting himself so hard he literally couldn't move. He wouldn't take another drink. Wouldn't. Wouldn't. Wouldn't. He wouldn't have one, didn't need one - but that was a lie, that was a lie so big it was impossible to swallow, he needed one so badly he could feel himself shake...
He wouldn't. Wouldn't. Wouldn't. He'd beaten it before, he could do it again. He could. People were depending on him.
People had been depending on him last night. And he'd let them down so badly... but oh, how easily another a drink would wipe the pain of that away...
Leo tried to find some semblance of poise in the morning rituals of dressing and shaving, but it eluded him. The itch at the back of his mind that never fully went away had been boosted, and now it was a constant blur of white static, getting in the way of all his thoughts.
He found the phone and checked his messages.
Bleep. "Leo, this is Donna. Are you there? The president's calling everybody back to the White House."
Bleep. "Leo, are you there? The president's going to address the nation."
Bleep. "Leo, it's me. If you're hearing this, turn on your TV. Seriously, Leo, turn on your TV."
Bleep. "Leo! Still asleep? Good! You work too hard. No, don't make that face at me. Anyway, Charlie's awake! He's pretty beaten up, but Abbey assures me all parts are in working order, and he spoke to Zoey before he went back to sleep again. I'll see you tomorrow, when you will no doubt be kicking my ass for pulling what I did last night without consulting you. And Leo - don't let me catch you creeping back into work at four AM, or I'll have the Secret Service throw you out of the building. Clear?"
Leo automatically glanced at his watch. Almost seven; early for some, but unbelievably late by the internal clock he lived by.
Charlie had woken up, the president had been doing God only knew what, and meanwhile he'd been here, passed out and drunk in his hotel room. Once again, a major league screw-up, courtesy of Leo McGarry. He'd let everybody down, and if the president turned out to have done something rash or irrational, it was on his head and nobody else's. He'd failed in his duties, and abused the trust Jed put in him.
But, since he didn't know what else to do with himself, he simply went to work.
And tried not to think about having another drink.
Unsuccessfully.
His hand hesitated over the speed-dial. Oh, for God's sake, do it, muttered an irritable voice in the back of his head that sounded disconcertingly like Toby. He dialled.
"Hello?"
"Mom, it's me."
A dangerously long silence, and then they both spoke at the same time.
"Mom, I-"
"Sam-"
He started talking, before she had a chance to say anything and shake whatever instant of courage had made him make this call. "Mom, I needed to- I just had to-" He could hear the way his voice was cracking, but he couldn't seem to prevent it. "Mom, a friend of mine was just beaten up because of who he's getting married to, and I-" He knew what he wanted to say, he was a speechwriter for God's sake, but the words just wouldn't choke themselves out. "Mom..."
Please... why won't you talk to me? Why won't you listen to me? What did I do, what's wrong with me, why can't you let me be who I am? Why can't you just be my mom? Please...
"Sam..." He could hear in her voice that she was upset. And he hated that she was upset and he hated that he'd upset her and he hated that she found this so upsetting...
"Mom, I just- I love Steve. I know you don't- I know you don't really understand that, but it's true. I'm... I'm sorry that I couldn't, that I didn't talk to you before, but I can't just... Mom, I'm just, I'm just what I am, and if you can't-" He could barely stay coherent as he skirted on the edge of breaking down.
Please mom, say something. Can't you just... say something?
When his mother's voice finally came, it was heartbreakingly hesitant. "Sam, I'm sorry, I- I don't understand it. I don't understand why you-" She broke off, and when she spoke again, he could hear the mother that he recognised. "But you're my son, and, and I'm your mother. And I don't have to understand you to still love you."
"Okay, mom," he said, breaking into a smile through unshed tears. His voice still sounded hoarse and ragged in his own ears.
"You're my boy. I don't want- I don't want you to be hurting."
"I'm okay, mom. I... I am. Really."
"Mrs. Harris from the corner shop was saying terrible things about you."
"It doesn't matter, mom," he told her gently.
"I told her to shove it up her ass."
"Mom!" He spluttered into startled laughter.
"You're my boy, Samuel. And it doesn't matter what they say about you, because I know you, and just because I- I know you would never do anything wrong. You're my boy, and you'd never do anything that was wrong."
He smiled softly. "I have to go to work now, mom," he pointed out quietly.
"Okay, Sam. You take care now."
"I will. Goodbye, mom."
He put the phone down, and looked up. Steve was leaning against the doorway, smiling fondly at him.
"Everything okay?" he asked gently.
"Yeah. Yeah, it is." He crossed the room, and gave Steve a quick kiss on the cheek. "I'm going to work."
Steve nodded. "And I'm going back to bed. Where I will stay until gone eight o'clock, like any normal, civilised human being."
"Oh, you do impressions?"
"I'm multi-talented."
Sam smiled. "I'll see you later?"
"If I haven't run off with somebody who keeps more reasonable hours."
"Okay." Before he left, he planted another quick kiss on Steve.
Just because he could.
Jed smiled brightly at his oldest friend as he entered the office. "You missed quite the fireworks display last night," he said dryly.
"Yeah." Leo sounded exhausted; Jed gave him a worried, assessing look. His Chief of Staff always worked himself too hard, but it wasn't like him to be anything less than impeccably presented on the surface.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine." Leo answered too quickly, not looking at him. Jed regarded him sternly over the top of his glasses.
"I could order you home, you know," he threatened.
"I'm fine," Leo repeated snappishly. Jed didn't believe it, but he let it slide. He shuffled papers on his desk.
"I smoothed things out with Abbey."
"Yeah?" Leo looked relieved.
He pulled a face. "I have been put on a Diet." He considered it more than worthy of the mental capital letter he assigned it. "Abbey's taking the White House staff to DefCon three - if I so much as think about breathing the wrong air, she'll hear about it."
Normally Leo would have made a smart remark about now, but today he said nothing. Jed sighed, and looked up at him.
"I'd be lying if I said I was thrilled, but I guess I had it coming. It's a small enough price for the conceit of believing I had a right to do this job. We all have to make our sacrifices." Indeed, the myriad ways it could have turned out worse... Yes, when you stacked it up against the alternatives, a Machiavellian health plan suddenly didn't seem so bad.
Jed assumed, from the uncomfortable expression on Leo's face, that his Chief of Staff privately agreed with him.
Everybody fell silent as Josh, Joey and Kenny entered the room. For somebody with such an abysmal poker face, the Deputy Chief of Staff was doing a remarkable job of revealing nothing. Only the preternatural brightness to his eyes and the bounce to his step betrayed the whirlwind going on under the surface.
The president stood, and the others copied him. They all awaited the verdict; Sam frowning with nervous tension, CJ grinning for the same reason, Toby blank-faced as ever but with a burning intensity in his eyes.
Josh turned to the pollster beside him, and gave her an encouraging smile. "Mr. President," she acknowledged, and then began signing rapidly to Kenny.
"We're just starting to get a decent section of the results in now. Obviously the figures are very soft at this stage, and we can expect a certain amount of bias along employment lines owing to the timing of the sampling period-"
"That's fine," the president nodded understandingly.
CJ nodded. "Nobody expects perfect numbers this soon; just anything you can tell us about what America thought of last night's speech."
Joey hesitated.
"The numbers on practicality are wobbly - general feeling is the president was pretty vague on what he was actually proposing."
"I noticed that too," the president said dryly. He glanced around at his senior staff. "That's what this lot here are for." They all straightened up, some more perceptibly than others.
"First Amendment issues?" Toby queried.
"Pretty well split," Kenny relayed. "To a certain extent along party lines. He got good numbers on taking a stance on these issues, but-"
"But that doesn't mean much on an official government poll," Josh nodded.
"The bigots aren't registering their prejudices with the government?" CJ queried dryly. "Colour me surprised."
Sam looked to Joey. "What about sincerity?" Everybody tensed.
Joey grinned widely. "Eighty-four percent," she said, in her own voice.
The room exploded. Eighty-four percent of Americans believed the president had been sincere in his determination to get tough on hate crimes and stamp out prejudice. Soft numbers be damned, that was the kind of figure no sudden downward swing could possibly erase.
The president waved his ecstatic staff into silence. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Before we all get carried away, I have a second announcement to make." He hesitated for a long moment, and then smiled brightly. "As you all know, Charlie woke up yesterday evening, and is well on the way to recovery. Well, he and Zoey spent most of the night talking... and I can now tell you that in five months' time, my daughter will officially become Mrs. Zoey Patricia Bartlet-Young."
"Congratulations, Mr. President!" CJ said, amidst the other exclamations of delight. Her eyes were beginning to glisten with tears of both relief and suppressed grief, and Toby lightly touched her hand. She smiled at him gratefully.
"I think commiserations are more the order of the day," he refuted, pulling a mock-stern face that he couldn't quite maintain for long enough. His face was split by a brilliant grin, and the staff exchanged another round of hugs and gleeful words.
The crisis point was past. Charlie was going to be okay, the tabloid scandal over Sam's sexuality had been blasted out of existence by more newsworthy events, and the hate crimes initiative they'd been forced to set aside had just been given a kick-start of a magnitude none of them could have envisaged. Things they'd long dreaded had come to pass - and they were still standing. If that wasn't reason enough to celebrate, then what was?
And if, amidst the celebrations, Leo McGarry seemed a little more subdued than his companions... well, nobody saw anything incredibly unusual in that.
END