V
Sam sat back in his chair to frown over the paragraphs he'd just highlighted, and stroked his beard thoughtfully. Then he glanced across at his boss to see if he'd noticed.
Toby scowled at him fiercely, and leaned over his laptop to tap the delete key.
"Hey!" Sam protested, and quickly hit undo. "You wound me, Toby."
"Not yet. Soon," he promised darkly.
"There's really no need for that kind of thing, Toby," Sam shrugged. "We're men of the world. Bearded men," he added.
Toby pointed at his own beard. "This is a serious beard! Do not make a mockery of it by attempting to categorise it with your wispy little three-day growth!"
CJ, just arriving in the doorway, snickered loudly. "I'm sorry, did I come at a bad time?"
"He won't take my beard seriously, CJ," Sam pouted.
"Well that's... hard to believe," she said dryly. She glanced across at Toby. "I need a statement on the Cambodian Ambassador."
"The Cambodian Ambassador is missing, nobody knows why. No questions."
"Possibly a tad longer than that," she said dryly.
"I'm sure Sam could furnish you with some unnecessarily florid embellishment."
"My descriptive passages add colour," Sam protested.
"Yes. Mostly purple."
Sam was mustering an appropriately biting response to that when Ginger stuck her head through the door beside CJ.
"Toby? Andy's here."
CJ and Sam both turned to look at him. "Hey, Toby, you've got a date?" Sam grinned.
CJ took charge. "Well, okay, what's going to happen now is-"
"I'm going to leave this with Sam while I go on my date," Toby cut her off.
She blinked for a moment. "Well, okay, that's what I was going to suggest, but now I feel compelled to ask 'who are you, and what have you done with the real Toby Ziegler?'"
"See, he trusts me more now," Sam grinned. "Because I look more mature." He pointed at his beard.
Toby tapped Ginger on the shoulder on his way out. "Have somebody have him killed before I get back."
Leo watched with some concern as the president dropped into his seat with only a sloppy gesture for the military personnel to sit down. He'd accepted the non-explanation explanation that the office was just weighing heavily, as it did from time to time, but the fact was that now wasn't anywhere near the top of the presidential stress scale. Something was eating at the president, and apparently it wasn't work-related. Not good.
He just hoped it wasn't another bout of poor health. Wasn't the new diet and rest schedule supposed to take care of that? Not that the president looked like he'd been getting all that much rest lately...
The president dropped into his chair and pulled it close to the table. "Nancy, give me some good news," he said shortly.
Nancy glanced across at Leo, who could only give her a tiny shrug of an eyebrow to say he couldn't put a finger on it. "Mr. President, our man in Cambodia, Nathan Williamson, disappeared outside his home in Phnom Penh at nineteen hundred hours local time last night. Given the unsettled nature of that region and his failure to return for several official meetings scheduled for this morning, we're treating this as a suspicious incident."
The president smiled thinly. "Apparently our definitions of 'good news' rather differ." His sarcasm had the sharper edge it took on when he was under strain. "I thought we were on good terms with Cambodia?"
"We are," she agreed. "For what it's worth. The infrastructure's so corrupt it's difficult to tell the bad guys without a scorecard."
"Any word on who's responsible?" Leo asked, taking the lead.
"Not a peep," Nancy told him. "Pick a villain; you've got Golden Triangle heroin passing through, the cannabis trade... there's narcotics-related corruption at almost all levels of government, and the CPP's up to its eyeballs in accusations of election fraud."
"What about the Khmer Rouge?" Leo asked.
Nancy could only shrug. "They're still operational in the northwestern part of the country. A lot of their support's bled dry, but... yeah, it's still a possibility."
"Great," the president grimaced. "Where were our guys in the Embassy while this was going on? Asleep?"
"Our protection out there's pretty thin on the ground," Mick spoke up from his left.
"And Ambassador Williamson had a well-documented habit of ducking it at every opportunity," Tom added.
The president grumbled something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like "I should be so lucky."
"Okay. So what are doing about getting the details?" Leo scooted forward in his chair, suspecting he was going to be the one directing the rest of this meeting. It was far from unusual for the president to be sullen and ornery, but usually he at least knew what was at the root of it.
He felt like his own problems with alcohol earlier in the year had placed a strain on their relationship - not that Jed Bartlet had ever been the poster boy for openness in the first place. But now he was doubly careful not to offload his problems on his Chief of Staff, and that meant that when Abbey was out of town, he had nobody.
Oh, there was Stanley Keyworth - his visits to the White House had become a semi-regular occurrence, and damn the political aspects, that was probably a good idea. But Jed was at best sceptical of and at worst vehemently opposed to the whole practise of psychotherapy. It might help him a little to bounce his feelings off a neutral sounding board, but Leo knew he'd never be comfortable enough to fully expose his most personal issues in such a setting.
No, whatever was eating at the president, he was keeping it under wraps - but that didn't mean it was well hidden. No one could miss his disconnectedness from the meeting around him or the weariness stamped across his features, and Leo only prayed that whatever the cause of this mood, he broke out of it before the psychological pressure spilled over into something more physical in nature.
Toby was impatient while she deliberated over the menu. He was careful not to show it, but she still knew. In Tobyworld, food was fuel, to be got out of the way with minimum interruption to the business of argument. She, however, liked to take the time to consider all her options and allow the appropriate weight to deciding whether to go with what could be trusted or take a chance on something new. She wasn't about to make a rush decision just because all the waiting around irritated Toby.
Just as he no doubt knew she was silently bristling over his brusqueness to the serving staff; he would argue that he was like that with everybody, she would argue that they didn't know that and it made him seem like a snob...
There were times when you had to ask why they were doing this again.
"You know, dating you hasn't changed in all this time," she observed, relaxing a little after the orders were placed. It was true. Toby had never pretended to be anything other than the stubborn, self-righteous, endlessly argumentative person he was now. It was one of the things she'd found refreshing about him, after meeting so many people in politics who hid their darker sides behind false fronts and slimy smiles. Toby Ziegler wore his flaws with pride and his best points as if they were a quiet embarrassment to him.
That hadn't changed, although, like many other things, it had lost a certain amount of its charm with the passage of time.
"Last time, you agreed to marry me when I asked you," he reminded her.
"Last time, I didn't have the benefit of having experienced that happy state once before."
"So you won't marry me." He scowled, as if this was a particularly frustrating negotiation with a member of Congress who was being illogical.
"Give it time, Toby. A girl wants to be romanced," she added with a playful smirk.
Toby spread his hands to indicate the room. "Is this not romance?"
"This is a restaurant."
"There's a difference?"
She chuckled. "I continue to be amazed I let a catch like you go."
"As do I."
She smiled, and squeezed his hand. They were silent for a moment, still growing re-accustomed to the contact that had once been second nature. Then;
"Would you marry me if I got you pregnant?"
The waiter, returning to their table, gave Toby a very funny look. He tilted his head to looked up at him challengingly.
"Yes?"
Ah, dating Toby Ziegler. An experience few sane people would be prepared to go through once, let alone twice. She was out of her mind.
And she was enjoying every minute of it.
Of the many virtues he would be happy to recite to anyone who asked, even Josh himself would have to admit that patience didn't top the list.
Or, indeed, appear on it.
If Donna was here, she'd have been poking him in the side to quit fidgeting by now. Then again, had Donna been here, she'd probably have had contact phone numbers and other organisational things like that.
He'd had three cups of coffee, and paced off to the restroom and back enough times that the young woman taking orders had begun eyeing him with suspicion.
He kept checking his phone for messages, but there was nothing, and his cell was working fine. Donna wouldn't have failed to contact him if Congresswoman Henderson's office had called her for any reason. Unless he'd done something, of course, but he couldn't remember Donna being especially pissed at him for anything in recent memory. Of course, when he had done something, he rarely knew it...
She wasn't coming. Here he was, Deputy Chief of Staff getting stood up by a two-bit Congresswoman for some district he couldn't even remember. Okay, he'd set this up as purely an informal chat, and it was only one in a long chain of meetings for him, but it should have been a big thing for her.
Congress. Always so convinced of their own importance. He wouldn't have pegged Vicky as the type to show off how important she was by skipping a meeting with the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, but you could never tell.
Well, he wasn't wasting all his time. He signalled that he was ready to settle the bill.
"If a short woman with red hair comes in, can you tell her I've gone back to work?" he asked the waitress. "I'm Josh Lyman."
She gave a smile that was almost but not quite a smirk. "Your girlfriend stood you up?"
"It's a business meeting," he corrected quickly, but from the way she made a big show of nodding and accepting that, he didn't think she believed him.
He stomped out to hail a cab in a foul mood.