XIV
Andy blinked rapidly to dry her dangerously wet eyes - not that she would have been the only one in the room bawling, but still. A familiar arm slid around her shoulders without needing to be asked, and she leaned back against her husband.
Ex-husband. Whatever. Mental Freudian slip there. But, emotional as she was, she couldn't bring her rational centres to bear on chasing it down and stomping on it in the usual fashion.
Toby lightly covered her hand with his own, and when she looked up, he was asking the question with his eyes. Are you all right?
Was she all right? Stupid question. Of course she was. Just all this talk of sons and daughters... She closed her eyes briefly, and he momentarily tightened his squeeze. And despite herself, there she was, locked in the frustrations of the past.
Tests, tests, endless tests. Endless dead-ends, procedures that weren't available, attempts that didn't work. And worse, far worse, the phantom memory of those terrible, agonising cramps and the knowledge of yet another life that wasn't going to be. Her hand almost stole automatically to her belly, but she stopped it before Toby could notice.
His lives too. Those little souls that had never arrived had been his lives too. Oh, but it had been hard to believe that, hard to accept that he could be feeling the same way she did - that anybody else in the world could be feeling the pain that she did...
Pain and guilt and misery and frustration, and the dissolution of a marriage.
How much had those days of quiet desperation been to blame for that? Had their troubles been the cause of it all, or had they simply widened the cracks that were always going to have been there?
She looked up at Toby, at the concern in his eyes, and wished she could just come to a damn conclusion one way or another.
She smiled faintly, and said softly "The chicken or the egg, Toby." And wasn't that an apt little metaphor, when you stopped and thought about it? Eggs and chickens. Fear and infertility. "What came first?"
He didn't seem phased by the non-sequitur. Perhaps he'd been following the same, well-worn tracks of that circular train of thought - or perhaps he was just Toby.
"The egg," he said, without a trace of hesitation, and she had to laugh.
"It's a simple little life over there in Tobyworld, isn't it?"
Toby had never had any trouble being sure of things. She couldn't decide whether she envied him that... or she just wanted to bludgeon him over the head with a heavy object.
He frowned, with an expression that on a less dignified face would have been petulant. "Dinosaurs laid eggs," he explained, and she patted his hand, signalling to him that yes, fine, she accepted his argument.
"You always have all the answers, don't you?"
"I'm well renowned for it," he accepted without a trace of humility.
And she almost said 'So what about us?' But then she didn't, because Josh was standing up to make his speech, and someone else's wedding was no place for dragging up the ghosts of your own.
But still, against Toby's shoulder wasn't such a bad place to rest in the meantime. And when he quietly rubbed her back with a comforting hand, it was as easy to lean into the gesture as it would have been to pull away.
She realised something was horribly wrong a fraction of a second before he stood up. "Josh... where's your speech?"
He gave her an innocently dimpled grin. "I decided to improvise."
Her heart lurched with dismay. "Josh-" She held out a hand to implore him, but he was already standing up to speak. The noise level in the room faded out as everybody recognised the best man.
Donna crossed her fingers under the table.
Don't say anything stupid, don't say anything stupid, don't say anything stupid... she chanted inside her head. Did prayers only work if you believed in them? If so, they were all in a whole heap of trouble.
Josh gave the assembled crowd a smile as they focused on him - an unusual smile, the shy one instead of the big, exuberant, 'everybody see how cool I am?' grin. Good, Josh, good start. Now, just keep it short enough that you don't say anything cringe-worthy, 'kay?
Of course, that could be a definite problem. They didn't usually let the best man get away with a ten word speech. And besides, her boss had proved himself more than capable of screwing up even with that little rope to hang himself. Indicted for tax fraud... secret plan to fight inflation... keep that investigation open until it finds something...
She crossed more fingers, and held her breath.
Josh looked down at the table for a long moment, and then let his breath out all in rush. "I am... a phenomenally screwed-up individual," he began. "And when you live inside a person like me, it can be difficult sometimes to believe there are places where the world really makes sense and you know, fits together like it's supposed to." He hesitated for a beat. "People like Charlie and Zoey; those are the places where you can see it fit together."
Josh had mocked her mercilessly for the way she'd welled up at the president's speech, even while his own eyes were looking suspiciously moist. And now she was doing it again, damn him. His hesitant delivery as he felt for the words was a world away from the president's effortless eloquence, but there was something just as powerful in it. This was the private Josh, the secret Josh, the shy and surprisingly insecure little boy he kept hidden behind a shell of arrogance.
He straightened his head up, and suddenly grinned. "You know, poets and philosophers and songwriters have been trying for thousands of years to define love, and none of them ever came up with it. Well, I guess that makes me smarter than the lot of them, 'cause I know how to do it." Josh raised a hand, and simply pointed at Charlie and Zoey. "Look. That's it, there."
He ran a hand through his unruly hair, and she had to quell a disturbing urge to grab his arm and tell him to quit fussing with it and stand still. Oh holy God, I'm turning into my mother. Or Josh's mother. Either way, it was rather scary. She focused back in on his words as he slid his hands into his pockets.
"Now, I think we can all agree that the two of them are quite nauseatingly young and cute. But there's a lot of places where they're a lot more grown-up than me."
The warning look he sent out at that was directly solely at her. She would have pulled a face if she hadn't been paranoid about getting caught on camera.
Oh, yeah. And the whole 'four milliseconds away from helpless sobbing' thing. Damn weddings.
Josh continued. "Because they've found each other, and they've found something... something that some of us are still looking for. Something that some people never find. They've found... the place where it fits."
She wondered if he was conscious of the way his hand had stolen across his chest to linger over the scar.
"Now, we've been through some hard places and some dark places. I've got scars, and Charlie's got scars, and we've all got scars on the inside and the outside, but it doesn't really matter. Because I... If anybody ever turned around and asked me, 'Was it worth it?', I don't think I'd... I don't even know what that question is about. Because I've walked in this world, and I've known these people, and I've seen this love, and... how could there ever have been a way that I wouldn't want to have been a part of that?"
He smiled, suddenly looking all of six years old, and shook his head. "I love you people. And, you know, I should get it out here now that I'm drunk when I say this, so let's not make a thing of it, okay?" Before anyone could react, he abruptly sat down.
The room thundered into applause, with an undercurrent of both amusement and tears. Donna managed to choke on both as she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a squeeze.
"Didn't do too bad, did I?" he murmured quietly, close to her ear.
"No, you didn't," she admitted, and gave him a quick kiss on the temple before sitting back down. He blinked at her in bemusement for a few moments, and then beamed.
He decided it was probably a good thing that his brand new bride had descended into some kind of manic depressive mood swing thing where she alternated between beaming, sobbing helplessly, and doing both at once. If she hadn't been there to make him look positively stoic, his manly pride might have taken a beating.
The ceremony itself had been a blur. He remembered dead clearly Zoey's face, and very little else. Still, he was fairly sure he hadn't fainted. Unless he had, and this was all some fevered dream - which didn't seem all that far outside the realms of possibility.
Married. Married. He was married to Zoey Bartlet, who wasn't Zoey Bartlet anymore because she was Zoey Bartlet-Young. And all of a sudden he wasn't Charlie Young anymore, he was Charles Bartlet-Young - funny how it suddenly had to be Charles when you put that hyphen in there - and he was going to have to get used to introducing himself that way now...
Mr. and Mrs. Charles and Zoey Bartlet-Young. Husband and wife. Bride and groom. Married. A married couple. Their union blessed by the church. Okay, not his church, but Zoey's and the president's, and that was good enough for him. After all, they were his family now.
His family.
And I hope he'll permit me the honour... of calling myself his father.
Oh, oh, where was that napkin? There was something in his eye.
Probably a great big hunk of over-emotional sentiment.
His stomach was roiling with a nervousness he hadn't felt before or during the ceremony. Not over the promised end of this evening - although the prospect of the president lurking with a scowl somewhere in the same hotel certainly cast a little anxiety over that - but for the rest of the future.
A whole lot of future, and all of it with Zoey as his wife, and him as her husband.
He looked across at her, and she was looking back.
From this day forward... for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.
He reached out, and took her hand in his own.
And promised himself that he'd never let it go.