Chapter 7: For Old Friends Of Their Fathers
Sam and I were finally kicked out of the office at almost eleven last night, when Leo threatened to revoke our security clearance if we so much as came within smelling distance of the White House in the next twelve hours. We went home, locked the door behind us, and went to bed and to sleep, pointedly ignoring the twenty-seven or so messages on the machine as well as the television and all other forms of mass communication that had the potential to make our lives a living hell.
Unfortunately, it's Sunday morning now, and the phone is kindly doing its best to drag me out of the depths of the longest uninterrupted sleep I've had possibly since college. I peel my eyes open, squint at caller ID, and recognize the number, which prompts me to pick the receiver up and put it straight back down. It gives me maybe an eight second respite before it resumes ringing. My mother is nothing if not persistent. I answer it and bring it to my ear in wary anticipation of the lambasting I'm pretty sure its about to receive.
"You never called me last night."
"Good morning, Josh, is a pretty good way to start the day, mom."
"Don't get cute with your mother, Joshua."
I make an inarticulate sound.
"Is Sam there?"
"That sort of depends on how you define 'there'."
"May I speak to him?"
Sam currently has his head buried in the pillow and, now I'm awake, I'm wondering how I could possibly have slept through the snoring. I lay the phone down and kick him in the knee. Violent, quite possibly. Effective, definitely. Once he's asleep, you could march the entire Salvation Army past the bed and he wouldn't notice. I have evidence to prove it, too. Once, fairly late on on the '98 campaign trail, we were stuck in yet another in a long line of godawful motels, in North Dakota, of all places. Sam and I had been roommates pretty much the whole campaign - and can I just say here how incredibly bad it is to have to spend nine months sharing a room with a guy for whom you have these huge, lustful, irresolvable feelings - but in this particular motel, we managed to somehow wangle two rooms between the two of us. My point being that, when a fire alarm went off at two in the morning, my boyfriend who was not my boyfriend at that point managed to sleep through it. I digress into a big pit. Anyway, so, I kick him in the knee. He wakes up with a yell and a retaliatory kick.
"My mom's on the phone," I mutter, curling back up and closing my eyes.
"Ouch."
I can feel him glaring at me as he leans over to get the phone.
"Elana?"
I roll over and look at the clock, almost strangling myself with the phone cord in the process. 10am.
"He's holding up."
I love how they talk to me instead of about me.
"He spent the afternoon cheering Matt Skinner and sticking pins into a picture of Mary Marsh."
When Donna asked me how psycho I actually was, I informed her petulantly that it made me feel better.
"Yeah. Neither of us have read the papers this morning, but once we do…"
He trails off uncertainly. I had conveniently forgotten about the existence of the print media, and I start idly wondering about the number of people whose permission I would have to get before I could revoke the 'freedom of the press' clause from the Bill of Rights. Leaving Sam to talk to my mom, I duck out from under the phone cord and go to make coffee and collect the papers from the front door, and when I return ten minutes later, I've managed to ascertain one thing from my very brief glance over the headlines. In the ten hours between the end of Newsweek and the print deadline yesterday, the shit hit the fan. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe all deem us big enough news that they've all designated us a three-inch banner headline on the front page, above the fold. I manage to put the three papers and the two cups of coffee down without spilling anything, and then I crawl back into bed at the same time as Sam finally gets off the phone.
"We're going to Florida for Thanksgiving."
"She asked you?" I give him a sheepish look. "I was kind of supposed to yesterday, but…"
"You had some stuff on your mind."
"We might not have jobs by Thanksgiving."
"You don't really believe that."
"Neither do you, and you were more pissed at him than the rest of us all put together."
"He was my Real Thing, and he still is, now more than ever, but… yes, then, I was pissed, and it's just that there are some things you're sure of…" His voice falters and I end the sentence for him.
"Like longitude and latitude."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
We finally arrive in the West Wing at 2:04pm. It took us over an hour to get round to reading the papers to begin with, an activity which, once we did eventually begin it, was prolonged somewhat by my need to verbally assassinate every individual member of the Fourth Estate and the Republican Party, almost all of whom have been far too free with phrases like 'morally reprehensible'. Except for Matt Skinner, who is still my personal deity, and Danny Concannon, who… well, let's just say that if public opinion is dictated by the press, the nose count in our favour now includes pretty well everyone who reads the Washington Post, and even if I am pissed at the rest of the world, I'm somewhat reassured by the fact that at least some people seem to be on our side. My 'pissed but somewhat reassured' mood regresses rapidly to just plain pissed when I walk into CJ's office and she makes her announcement.
"FOX News and the Washington Times are calling it Homogate."
I open and close my mouth a few times and probably turn a few interesting shades of red. CJ manages to get out of the way before I explode. An explosion which, when it comes, is not pretty. It involves screaming and me coming about two inches from putting my hand through another plate glass window. Eventually, I talk myself pretty much to a standstill. I run my hands through my hair and slump down in my chair.
"Sam and I have been together for over two years, and in that time we've been to the seventh circle of hell and back more than once. And after all of that, it's degrading, not to mention more than a little ridiculous, to have become tabloid fodder and Republican firing targets."
"Yeah." She nods and sits back down, and holds out her copy of the Washington Times.
Not really.
"Sure." But despite 'not really', I have some form of weird compulsion to read what people are saying about us, no matter how convoluted. "I'm just gonna…"
"Go."
She waves me off and I head down the short stretch of hallway between her office and my end of the bullpen. It's busier than usual for a Sunday afternoon, both with people handling the fallout from yesterday and people preparing for the flight to New York in five and a half hours. I run into Donna at the coffee pot.
"You have a call to return to Ann Stark."
"I do?" I blink. Ann Stark and I generally go out of our way to avoid each other. "Can you pass it off to Toby?"
"Why?"
"Because…" I try to think of something that won't make me sound like a chicken. "Because I get hostile around Ann Stark, and then I end up either yelling at her or making fun of her, and either way it doesn't end up working out for me. And then there's the fact that Toby's under the, albeit highly misguided, impression that she's his friend."
"She's really not."
"No," I agree.
"She's the Chief of Staff for the Senate Majority Leader."
"Yes."
"And I'm saying that Ann Stark is a Republican and Toby is, well, really incredibly not."
"Nonetheless. I know that, and you know that, and probably the Leadership knows that, but Toby doesn't seem to, is my point."
"You're meeting with the President tonight on Air Force One." Donna moves off the subject of Toby's lack of insight onto other things. "Tell Sam."
"When did that get on the schedule?"
"When Charlie said that the President wanted to meet with the two of you on Air Force One."
"Donna, have you ever been strapped down on an airplane next to the President?"
"No," she admits. "But then again, I'm an assistant, and he's, you know, the President, so I have to say I'm not entirely sure where you're going with that."
"We're going to the place where I tell you that the man is commonly known, by Republicans, Democrats and foreign dignitaries alike, as the Airplane Passenger From Hell."
"He talks?"
"About yams and red tape and icebergs, and it's not like out of the realm of possibility that he would maybe do it in Latin. You gotta ask CJ about the fjords sometime."
"Remind me to never sit next to the President on a plane." She follows me into my office as I sit down and start going through the pile of crap that has, somehow, accumulated on my desk in the last fifteen hours. "Leo wants to see you."
"Now?"
"He said when you got in."
"I've been in for a half hour, you couldn't maybe have told me before I sat down?"
"That's less entertaining for me."
I roll my eyes, relinquish my seat, and leave the room about a minute and a half after having entered it. I cut through the lobby to Leo's office, narrowly avoiding a group of tourists and running straight into Ginger. I arrive at the door of the outer office to hear the thirty-second instalment of The Saga of Leo and Margaret.
"You made an appointment with Ainsley Hayes for eight tomorrow morning?"
"Yes."
"See, this is the kind of thing you really need to tell me, so…"
"Margaret."
"'Cause then I could have told you that you're in Manhattan at eight tomorrow morning."
"Right."
"Do you need me to explain the rules on making appointments again?"
"Margaret."
"Would you like me to send you a memo?"
"Margaret! Reschedule the appointment, would you?"
"Fine."
"Josh?" Leo notices me hovering in the doorway. "Come on in."
I keep as far on the other side of the room as humanly possible when I go past Margaret's desk. She terrifies me. I think she learned it from Mrs Landingham. Except Margaret hasn't yet figured out the value of keeping a jar of cookies on her desk.
"She seems a bit…"
"She gets like that when I make appointments without consulting her. Something about invading her turf."
"What did you want to see me about?"
"I wanted to make sure that you two did what I told you and stayed out of the building for twelve hours."
"We did." I fiddle with a pencil for about three minutes before I realise that I'm driving my boss crazy. "Leo, about this meeting with Ainsley Hayes…"
"I have to reschedule it for this afternoon."
"I thought she wasn't flying back from North Carolina until this afternoon."
"Her flight gets into National at five-thirty. I'm having a car meet her from the airport and bringing her straight here, and we'll do the meeting before we leave. I don't want it hanging over our heads during the Convention."
"Right. Leo. I want to sit in on the meeting."
"No."
"Leo…"
"Absolutely not."
"Why the hell not?"
"Because it's personal. For all of us, but for you and Sam especially, and if you're in the meeting then you're liable to pick her up and throw her out the window."
"Leo, I'm not going to say anything. I just want to be there."
"Why?"
"Because I want to know why she did it. Because she's the reason our lives are now on the front page of every newspaper from here to Mexico. Because she's the reason we had a fight on Friday that ended in me either walking out or being kicked out, depending on which way you look…"
I trail off. Oops.
"He kicked you out?" Leo has that look on his face. "He kicked you out?"
"Remember when you said that we should assume you didn't want to know anything about my love life?"
"That's why you were sleeping in the office?"
"Technically." I choose to not explain the exact reasons why I was sleeping in the office, because I'm not a huge fan of sounding like a fifteen-year-old girl in front of my boss. "But that's not the point. The point is that you said that we should assume you didn't want to know anything about my love life."
"I did."
"Then we should assume you don't want to know about the fight Sam and I had Friday night."
"You are still together though, right?"
"I grovelled, and, then CJ walked in on us making out."
"That was an overshare. That, right there."
"Anyway, to return to the point I was making… actually, I didn't really have that much of a point. She did her best to screw our lives up and I want to know why she did it. That's all."
When he pauses, I hope that maybe I've managed to actually wear him down. Then I remember that I've known Leo McGarry longer than the President has, and that nothing and nobody has ever managed to wear him down if he didn't want to be worn down. In the end, it takes me forty-five minutes of reason, logic, and eventually just plain begging before he relents. The relenting, by the way, comes complete with the threat of having the Secret Service restrain me, but the point is that he does agree to let me sit in on the meeting. If I stay still, shut up, and do not under any circumstances do anything that has the potential to alienate the entire Republican Party any further than they're already alienated by virtue of being, you know, Republican.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Three hours later, I am dauntingly close to the prospect of actually having to sit still, shut up, and not alienate the Republican Party. Three things which nobody could truthfully say I'm any good at, added to which, I really, really do not like Ainsley Hayes. I think the equation of all that made me… I suppose 'flake out' would be as good a phrase as any. At any rate, I've driven Donna so far up the wall that she's gone and dragged Sam out of his office and into mine. She deposits him in the chair with the words,
"Please calm him down before I kill one of us."
"You're only going to have to walk all the way back there again," I inform him. "Margaret should be calling me, you know, soon."
"You talked Leo into letting you sit in on his meeting with Ainsley Hayes."
"'Talked into' may not be the most accurate way…"
"'Cause I gotta tell you, as far as bad ideas go, this one pretty much beats them all."
"From the guy who set the White House on fire."
"That was as much you as it was me, and… you're changing the subject."
"Yes." I grin. "You noticed."
"The actual, you know, issue at hand here is that if you sit in a meeting with Leo and Ainsley Hayes, which will in all probability end up in her being told to go back to work and not do it again, you're gonna throw the Republican lawyer out the window."
Can I digress here for a moment and say how much it freaks me out when my boyfriend channels my boss?
"Hang on. Why do we think she's gonna get told to go back to work and not do it again?"
"Because, much as we regret it sometimes, we're First Amendment advocates. Seriously, Josh, you'll throw her out the window."
"I'm not going to throw her out the window. Leo has permission to restrain me using the Secret Service if he so desires… okay, so maybe 'permission' is pushing it a bit, and 'invoked his right as my boss' would be slightly less, uh, lying, but still. I'm not going to throw her out the…"
"Josh!"
Sam seems to have blown his shot at calming me down when Donna reappears in the doorway.
"Try to arrange your body into a position that makes your clothes look less wrinkled than they actually, you know, are. Leo's ready for you."
I stand up. I'm wearing my oldest, most faded jeans and one of Sam's sweaters with a hole in the elbow. There is no conceivable way to make them look any newer, less faded, or cleaner. So I run my hand through my hair, take a look at my watch that no longer sucks since Sam confiscated it and got it fixed, and head off to Leo's office looking exactly like I look. I'm meeting with the leader of the free world on Air Force One in four hours, and I have no intention of getting changed before that, so Ainsley Hayes can just go be damned.
I do not, of course, tell her that when I slide covertly into the office and sit down, trying very hard to not be noticed. Leo relenting, apparently, did not include him agreeing to wait for me before starting the meeting, so when I sit down, he's already well into his stride. They both ignore me as Ainsley keeps right on talking, not quite in iambic pentameter but close enough.
"The point that I was making, sir, is that the public, who as this administration has already discovered, do not appreciate things about the people running their country being hidden from them…"
"The only thing wrong with the point you were making was that you omitted to mention that the public did not appreciate things about the President like the fact that he has a disease of the central nervous system being hidden from them, and that there's just a small possibility that some of them will have a bit more perspective when it comes to things about two of the President's staffers like the fact that they're in a legal and consenting relationship being hidden from them."
"Sir…"
"And I would remind you that even if the public doesn't appreciate some things that this administration has done, it's not like that stopped them from voting us as the Democratic Party's nominee."
"They haven't, as of yet, voted you to a second term, and the Republican Party, although more conservative as a whole on gay rights to be sure, by no means has a monopoly on homophobic voters, and it is my opinion that the majority of people in this country will object to having two homosexuals working at this level in the Executive Branch. And you did not win the popular vote in 1998."
I manage to choke down a strangled noise.
"But yet we got to the White House."
"Yes, you did."
"And I did not summon you here to discuss the fitness of Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn to hold their positions."
"Then for what purpose was I summoned?"
"I want to know why you felt the need to tell the press and the Christian Right about a relationship that has nothing to do with anyone except for the two people involved."
"I felt a duty to inform the public…"
"You did not inform!" Leo's face looks like a thundercloud. "You did not inform. You made judgements."
"I made…"
"You made moral and ethical judgements about two people who work in this building and you weren't what I would call shy about airing these judgements to the conservative press."
"Sir."
"Good God, Ainsley!" He finally explodes. "I was under the impression that we were supposed to be on the same team!"
"I'm a Republican."
"I noticed."
There's a long and uncomfortable silence during which I actually find it mildly amusing to watch the White House Chief of Staff and the Deputy White House Counsel practically having a staring contest. Ainsley cracks first.
"I felt that I had a social responsibility to do what I did."
"As far as libel is concerned, what you did is on fairly shaky political and legal terrain."
His eyes flick past Ainsley's shoulder to meet mine, and I'm given an almost imperceptible raise of his eyebrow as he checks with me that he didn't just screw up the Supreme Court's definition of libel. I shrug. As long as people keep on insulting my understanding of legal definitions and the amount of time I spent - or didn't spend, depending on who you listen to - studying in law school, and as long as they keep on telling me I'm not a real lawyer, then I really see very little point in me accurately remembering legislation on things like libel.
On the other hand, the 'real' lawyer in the room doesn't correct him.
"I can't, unfortunately, fire you…"
"Can you accept my resignation?"
"Your what?" Leo asks with his mouth open.
'Your what?' echoes the little voice inside my head.
"I don't feel that I can stay here with people who have ideological and moral values so different from my own, not to mention the fact that I don't think that many people will now be, have they ever been, willing to work with me or comfortable to be around me."
She stands up. We're still speechless.
"You'll have it in writing by the time you return from New York."
She leaves the room. She's completely unaware that she's managed to both render us dumb and make our days at the same time. Finally I manage to get my vocal cords back into working condition.
"That was unexpected."
"To put it mildly," he agrees.
"Oh, yeah."
"I wanted to break her neck."
"Believe me when I tell you that you weren't the only one."
"I didn't think so. But you didn't throw her out of the window," he notes. "Nor did you alienate the entire Republican Party."
"You asked me to keep out of it."
"Not that you've ever ignored my instructions before or anything."
I nod and remember our second Christmas in office - our first Christmas in the White House, really - when he had Sam and I tailed on the off chance that we were as stupid as we look.
"Yeah, I know, but… you asked me, and sometimes it's what sons do for old friends of their fathers."
I end awkwardly and shuffle my feet for a couple of minutes before Leo glances up and gives me a brisk nod.
"Right. Is the new 'Leo asked me to do it so I will' thing a temporary fad or d'you think it might have a shot at lasting until we're out of office?"
"Not a chance."
"Didn't think so." He shoos me away. "Get outta here. Round your people up, or, you know, get someone more competent in the art of keeping track of things to round your people up. We've got a plane to catch."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
I owe thanks to all the usual people for all the usual things. Rhiannon, mostly, for hanging in there and her printer, for not yet having quit and refused to print out anything else I ever send her. The people who have so far been very kind and not sued me. Lisa, for listening to me patiently rant while I scoured the Internet for appropriate names for Josh's mom... continuing in that same vein, thanks very definitely do *not* go to Jo and Ryo, who write so damn well that I had trouble convincing my addled brain that her name really isn't Adira... oh, hell, come back, I was kidding... I love you guys, really.
Technical point regarding what is about to become yet another huge anomaly between my universe and the Sorkinverse. Sam will, so far as The Shoulders of Giants is concerned, be sticking around as a member of the senior staff for the considerable future. In the Sorkinverse, he's about to be elected the first Democratic member of the US House of Representatives for the California 47th, and I'll be very proud of him, but as a writer, I've sent that part of Sorkin's timeline spinning off into an AU.
Chapter 8 is currently stuck in a big pit known as writers' block and me having no time. It will, I promise, get written eventually.
Sam and I were finally kicked out of the office at almost eleven last night, when Leo threatened to revoke our security clearance if we so much as came within smelling distance of the White House in the next twelve hours. We went home, locked the door behind us, and went to bed and to sleep, pointedly ignoring the twenty-seven or so messages on the machine as well as the television and all other forms of mass communication that had the potential to make our lives a living hell.
Unfortunately, it's Sunday morning now, and the phone is kindly doing its best to drag me out of the depths of the longest uninterrupted sleep I've had possibly since college. I peel my eyes open, squint at caller ID, and recognize the number, which prompts me to pick the receiver up and put it straight back down. It gives me maybe an eight second respite before it resumes ringing. My mother is nothing if not persistent. I answer it and bring it to my ear in wary anticipation of the lambasting I'm pretty sure its about to receive.
"You never called me last night."
"Good morning, Josh, is a pretty good way to start the day, mom."
"Don't get cute with your mother, Joshua."
I make an inarticulate sound.
"Is Sam there?"
"That sort of depends on how you define 'there'."
"May I speak to him?"
Sam currently has his head buried in the pillow and, now I'm awake, I'm wondering how I could possibly have slept through the snoring. I lay the phone down and kick him in the knee. Violent, quite possibly. Effective, definitely. Once he's asleep, you could march the entire Salvation Army past the bed and he wouldn't notice. I have evidence to prove it, too. Once, fairly late on on the '98 campaign trail, we were stuck in yet another in a long line of godawful motels, in North Dakota, of all places. Sam and I had been roommates pretty much the whole campaign - and can I just say here how incredibly bad it is to have to spend nine months sharing a room with a guy for whom you have these huge, lustful, irresolvable feelings - but in this particular motel, we managed to somehow wangle two rooms between the two of us. My point being that, when a fire alarm went off at two in the morning, my boyfriend who was not my boyfriend at that point managed to sleep through it. I digress into a big pit. Anyway, so, I kick him in the knee. He wakes up with a yell and a retaliatory kick.
"My mom's on the phone," I mutter, curling back up and closing my eyes.
"Ouch."
I can feel him glaring at me as he leans over to get the phone.
"Elana?"
I roll over and look at the clock, almost strangling myself with the phone cord in the process. 10am.
"He's holding up."
I love how they talk to me instead of about me.
"He spent the afternoon cheering Matt Skinner and sticking pins into a picture of Mary Marsh."
When Donna asked me how psycho I actually was, I informed her petulantly that it made me feel better.
"Yeah. Neither of us have read the papers this morning, but once we do…"
He trails off uncertainly. I had conveniently forgotten about the existence of the print media, and I start idly wondering about the number of people whose permission I would have to get before I could revoke the 'freedom of the press' clause from the Bill of Rights. Leaving Sam to talk to my mom, I duck out from under the phone cord and go to make coffee and collect the papers from the front door, and when I return ten minutes later, I've managed to ascertain one thing from my very brief glance over the headlines. In the ten hours between the end of Newsweek and the print deadline yesterday, the shit hit the fan. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe all deem us big enough news that they've all designated us a three-inch banner headline on the front page, above the fold. I manage to put the three papers and the two cups of coffee down without spilling anything, and then I crawl back into bed at the same time as Sam finally gets off the phone.
"We're going to Florida for Thanksgiving."
"She asked you?" I give him a sheepish look. "I was kind of supposed to yesterday, but…"
"You had some stuff on your mind."
"We might not have jobs by Thanksgiving."
"You don't really believe that."
"Neither do you, and you were more pissed at him than the rest of us all put together."
"He was my Real Thing, and he still is, now more than ever, but… yes, then, I was pissed, and it's just that there are some things you're sure of…" His voice falters and I end the sentence for him.
"Like longitude and latitude."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
We finally arrive in the West Wing at 2:04pm. It took us over an hour to get round to reading the papers to begin with, an activity which, once we did eventually begin it, was prolonged somewhat by my need to verbally assassinate every individual member of the Fourth Estate and the Republican Party, almost all of whom have been far too free with phrases like 'morally reprehensible'. Except for Matt Skinner, who is still my personal deity, and Danny Concannon, who… well, let's just say that if public opinion is dictated by the press, the nose count in our favour now includes pretty well everyone who reads the Washington Post, and even if I am pissed at the rest of the world, I'm somewhat reassured by the fact that at least some people seem to be on our side. My 'pissed but somewhat reassured' mood regresses rapidly to just plain pissed when I walk into CJ's office and she makes her announcement.
"FOX News and the Washington Times are calling it Homogate."
I open and close my mouth a few times and probably turn a few interesting shades of red. CJ manages to get out of the way before I explode. An explosion which, when it comes, is not pretty. It involves screaming and me coming about two inches from putting my hand through another plate glass window. Eventually, I talk myself pretty much to a standstill. I run my hands through my hair and slump down in my chair.
"Sam and I have been together for over two years, and in that time we've been to the seventh circle of hell and back more than once. And after all of that, it's degrading, not to mention more than a little ridiculous, to have become tabloid fodder and Republican firing targets."
"Yeah." She nods and sits back down, and holds out her copy of the Washington Times.
Not really.
"Sure." But despite 'not really', I have some form of weird compulsion to read what people are saying about us, no matter how convoluted. "I'm just gonna…"
"Go."
She waves me off and I head down the short stretch of hallway between her office and my end of the bullpen. It's busier than usual for a Sunday afternoon, both with people handling the fallout from yesterday and people preparing for the flight to New York in five and a half hours. I run into Donna at the coffee pot.
"You have a call to return to Ann Stark."
"I do?" I blink. Ann Stark and I generally go out of our way to avoid each other. "Can you pass it off to Toby?"
"Why?"
"Because…" I try to think of something that won't make me sound like a chicken. "Because I get hostile around Ann Stark, and then I end up either yelling at her or making fun of her, and either way it doesn't end up working out for me. And then there's the fact that Toby's under the, albeit highly misguided, impression that she's his friend."
"She's really not."
"No," I agree.
"She's the Chief of Staff for the Senate Majority Leader."
"Yes."
"And I'm saying that Ann Stark is a Republican and Toby is, well, really incredibly not."
"Nonetheless. I know that, and you know that, and probably the Leadership knows that, but Toby doesn't seem to, is my point."
"You're meeting with the President tonight on Air Force One." Donna moves off the subject of Toby's lack of insight onto other things. "Tell Sam."
"When did that get on the schedule?"
"When Charlie said that the President wanted to meet with the two of you on Air Force One."
"Donna, have you ever been strapped down on an airplane next to the President?"
"No," she admits. "But then again, I'm an assistant, and he's, you know, the President, so I have to say I'm not entirely sure where you're going with that."
"We're going to the place where I tell you that the man is commonly known, by Republicans, Democrats and foreign dignitaries alike, as the Airplane Passenger From Hell."
"He talks?"
"About yams and red tape and icebergs, and it's not like out of the realm of possibility that he would maybe do it in Latin. You gotta ask CJ about the fjords sometime."
"Remind me to never sit next to the President on a plane." She follows me into my office as I sit down and start going through the pile of crap that has, somehow, accumulated on my desk in the last fifteen hours. "Leo wants to see you."
"Now?"
"He said when you got in."
"I've been in for a half hour, you couldn't maybe have told me before I sat down?"
"That's less entertaining for me."
I roll my eyes, relinquish my seat, and leave the room about a minute and a half after having entered it. I cut through the lobby to Leo's office, narrowly avoiding a group of tourists and running straight into Ginger. I arrive at the door of the outer office to hear the thirty-second instalment of The Saga of Leo and Margaret.
"You made an appointment with Ainsley Hayes for eight tomorrow morning?"
"Yes."
"See, this is the kind of thing you really need to tell me, so…"
"Margaret."
"'Cause then I could have told you that you're in Manhattan at eight tomorrow morning."
"Right."
"Do you need me to explain the rules on making appointments again?"
"Margaret."
"Would you like me to send you a memo?"
"Margaret! Reschedule the appointment, would you?"
"Fine."
"Josh?" Leo notices me hovering in the doorway. "Come on in."
I keep as far on the other side of the room as humanly possible when I go past Margaret's desk. She terrifies me. I think she learned it from Mrs Landingham. Except Margaret hasn't yet figured out the value of keeping a jar of cookies on her desk.
"She seems a bit…"
"She gets like that when I make appointments without consulting her. Something about invading her turf."
"What did you want to see me about?"
"I wanted to make sure that you two did what I told you and stayed out of the building for twelve hours."
"We did." I fiddle with a pencil for about three minutes before I realise that I'm driving my boss crazy. "Leo, about this meeting with Ainsley Hayes…"
"I have to reschedule it for this afternoon."
"I thought she wasn't flying back from North Carolina until this afternoon."
"Her flight gets into National at five-thirty. I'm having a car meet her from the airport and bringing her straight here, and we'll do the meeting before we leave. I don't want it hanging over our heads during the Convention."
"Right. Leo. I want to sit in on the meeting."
"No."
"Leo…"
"Absolutely not."
"Why the hell not?"
"Because it's personal. For all of us, but for you and Sam especially, and if you're in the meeting then you're liable to pick her up and throw her out the window."
"Leo, I'm not going to say anything. I just want to be there."
"Why?"
"Because I want to know why she did it. Because she's the reason our lives are now on the front page of every newspaper from here to Mexico. Because she's the reason we had a fight on Friday that ended in me either walking out or being kicked out, depending on which way you look…"
I trail off. Oops.
"He kicked you out?" Leo has that look on his face. "He kicked you out?"
"Remember when you said that we should assume you didn't want to know anything about my love life?"
"That's why you were sleeping in the office?"
"Technically." I choose to not explain the exact reasons why I was sleeping in the office, because I'm not a huge fan of sounding like a fifteen-year-old girl in front of my boss. "But that's not the point. The point is that you said that we should assume you didn't want to know anything about my love life."
"I did."
"Then we should assume you don't want to know about the fight Sam and I had Friday night."
"You are still together though, right?"
"I grovelled, and, then CJ walked in on us making out."
"That was an overshare. That, right there."
"Anyway, to return to the point I was making… actually, I didn't really have that much of a point. She did her best to screw our lives up and I want to know why she did it. That's all."
When he pauses, I hope that maybe I've managed to actually wear him down. Then I remember that I've known Leo McGarry longer than the President has, and that nothing and nobody has ever managed to wear him down if he didn't want to be worn down. In the end, it takes me forty-five minutes of reason, logic, and eventually just plain begging before he relents. The relenting, by the way, comes complete with the threat of having the Secret Service restrain me, but the point is that he does agree to let me sit in on the meeting. If I stay still, shut up, and do not under any circumstances do anything that has the potential to alienate the entire Republican Party any further than they're already alienated by virtue of being, you know, Republican.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Three hours later, I am dauntingly close to the prospect of actually having to sit still, shut up, and not alienate the Republican Party. Three things which nobody could truthfully say I'm any good at, added to which, I really, really do not like Ainsley Hayes. I think the equation of all that made me… I suppose 'flake out' would be as good a phrase as any. At any rate, I've driven Donna so far up the wall that she's gone and dragged Sam out of his office and into mine. She deposits him in the chair with the words,
"Please calm him down before I kill one of us."
"You're only going to have to walk all the way back there again," I inform him. "Margaret should be calling me, you know, soon."
"You talked Leo into letting you sit in on his meeting with Ainsley Hayes."
"'Talked into' may not be the most accurate way…"
"'Cause I gotta tell you, as far as bad ideas go, this one pretty much beats them all."
"From the guy who set the White House on fire."
"That was as much you as it was me, and… you're changing the subject."
"Yes." I grin. "You noticed."
"The actual, you know, issue at hand here is that if you sit in a meeting with Leo and Ainsley Hayes, which will in all probability end up in her being told to go back to work and not do it again, you're gonna throw the Republican lawyer out the window."
Can I digress here for a moment and say how much it freaks me out when my boyfriend channels my boss?
"Hang on. Why do we think she's gonna get told to go back to work and not do it again?"
"Because, much as we regret it sometimes, we're First Amendment advocates. Seriously, Josh, you'll throw her out the window."
"I'm not going to throw her out the window. Leo has permission to restrain me using the Secret Service if he so desires… okay, so maybe 'permission' is pushing it a bit, and 'invoked his right as my boss' would be slightly less, uh, lying, but still. I'm not going to throw her out the…"
"Josh!"
Sam seems to have blown his shot at calming me down when Donna reappears in the doorway.
"Try to arrange your body into a position that makes your clothes look less wrinkled than they actually, you know, are. Leo's ready for you."
I stand up. I'm wearing my oldest, most faded jeans and one of Sam's sweaters with a hole in the elbow. There is no conceivable way to make them look any newer, less faded, or cleaner. So I run my hand through my hair, take a look at my watch that no longer sucks since Sam confiscated it and got it fixed, and head off to Leo's office looking exactly like I look. I'm meeting with the leader of the free world on Air Force One in four hours, and I have no intention of getting changed before that, so Ainsley Hayes can just go be damned.
I do not, of course, tell her that when I slide covertly into the office and sit down, trying very hard to not be noticed. Leo relenting, apparently, did not include him agreeing to wait for me before starting the meeting, so when I sit down, he's already well into his stride. They both ignore me as Ainsley keeps right on talking, not quite in iambic pentameter but close enough.
"The point that I was making, sir, is that the public, who as this administration has already discovered, do not appreciate things about the people running their country being hidden from them…"
"The only thing wrong with the point you were making was that you omitted to mention that the public did not appreciate things about the President like the fact that he has a disease of the central nervous system being hidden from them, and that there's just a small possibility that some of them will have a bit more perspective when it comes to things about two of the President's staffers like the fact that they're in a legal and consenting relationship being hidden from them."
"Sir…"
"And I would remind you that even if the public doesn't appreciate some things that this administration has done, it's not like that stopped them from voting us as the Democratic Party's nominee."
"They haven't, as of yet, voted you to a second term, and the Republican Party, although more conservative as a whole on gay rights to be sure, by no means has a monopoly on homophobic voters, and it is my opinion that the majority of people in this country will object to having two homosexuals working at this level in the Executive Branch. And you did not win the popular vote in 1998."
I manage to choke down a strangled noise.
"But yet we got to the White House."
"Yes, you did."
"And I did not summon you here to discuss the fitness of Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn to hold their positions."
"Then for what purpose was I summoned?"
"I want to know why you felt the need to tell the press and the Christian Right about a relationship that has nothing to do with anyone except for the two people involved."
"I felt a duty to inform the public…"
"You did not inform!" Leo's face looks like a thundercloud. "You did not inform. You made judgements."
"I made…"
"You made moral and ethical judgements about two people who work in this building and you weren't what I would call shy about airing these judgements to the conservative press."
"Sir."
"Good God, Ainsley!" He finally explodes. "I was under the impression that we were supposed to be on the same team!"
"I'm a Republican."
"I noticed."
There's a long and uncomfortable silence during which I actually find it mildly amusing to watch the White House Chief of Staff and the Deputy White House Counsel practically having a staring contest. Ainsley cracks first.
"I felt that I had a social responsibility to do what I did."
"As far as libel is concerned, what you did is on fairly shaky political and legal terrain."
His eyes flick past Ainsley's shoulder to meet mine, and I'm given an almost imperceptible raise of his eyebrow as he checks with me that he didn't just screw up the Supreme Court's definition of libel. I shrug. As long as people keep on insulting my understanding of legal definitions and the amount of time I spent - or didn't spend, depending on who you listen to - studying in law school, and as long as they keep on telling me I'm not a real lawyer, then I really see very little point in me accurately remembering legislation on things like libel.
On the other hand, the 'real' lawyer in the room doesn't correct him.
"I can't, unfortunately, fire you…"
"Can you accept my resignation?"
"Your what?" Leo asks with his mouth open.
'Your what?' echoes the little voice inside my head.
"I don't feel that I can stay here with people who have ideological and moral values so different from my own, not to mention the fact that I don't think that many people will now be, have they ever been, willing to work with me or comfortable to be around me."
She stands up. We're still speechless.
"You'll have it in writing by the time you return from New York."
She leaves the room. She's completely unaware that she's managed to both render us dumb and make our days at the same time. Finally I manage to get my vocal cords back into working condition.
"That was unexpected."
"To put it mildly," he agrees.
"Oh, yeah."
"I wanted to break her neck."
"Believe me when I tell you that you weren't the only one."
"I didn't think so. But you didn't throw her out of the window," he notes. "Nor did you alienate the entire Republican Party."
"You asked me to keep out of it."
"Not that you've ever ignored my instructions before or anything."
I nod and remember our second Christmas in office - our first Christmas in the White House, really - when he had Sam and I tailed on the off chance that we were as stupid as we look.
"Yeah, I know, but… you asked me, and sometimes it's what sons do for old friends of their fathers."
I end awkwardly and shuffle my feet for a couple of minutes before Leo glances up and gives me a brisk nod.
"Right. Is the new 'Leo asked me to do it so I will' thing a temporary fad or d'you think it might have a shot at lasting until we're out of office?"
"Not a chance."
"Didn't think so." He shoos me away. "Get outta here. Round your people up, or, you know, get someone more competent in the art of keeping track of things to round your people up. We've got a plane to catch."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
I owe thanks to all the usual people for all the usual things. Rhiannon, mostly, for hanging in there and her printer, for not yet having quit and refused to print out anything else I ever send her. The people who have so far been very kind and not sued me. Lisa, for listening to me patiently rant while I scoured the Internet for appropriate names for Josh's mom... continuing in that same vein, thanks very definitely do *not* go to Jo and Ryo, who write so damn well that I had trouble convincing my addled brain that her name really isn't Adira... oh, hell, come back, I was kidding... I love you guys, really.
Technical point regarding what is about to become yet another huge anomaly between my universe and the Sorkinverse. Sam will, so far as The Shoulders of Giants is concerned, be sticking around as a member of the senior staff for the considerable future. In the Sorkinverse, he's about to be elected the first Democratic member of the US House of Representatives for the California 47th, and I'll be very proud of him, but as a writer, I've sent that part of Sorkin's timeline spinning off into an AU.
Chapter 8 is currently stuck in a big pit known as writers' block and me having no time. It will, I promise, get written eventually.