Title: Words in Air and Silence
Pairing: Sam/Toby
Category: Drama
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Spoilers through Manchester Parts 1 and 2.
Summary: Toby is pragmatic for Sam, because then Sam can say all the words that he can't. Established relationship, set during Manchester Parts 1 and 2.
Disclaimer: West Wing is not mine but remains the exclusive property of Aaron Sorkin et al.
A/N: Written for the Toby Ziegler Ficathon for amchau who asked for slash with Sam, banter and arguments that end happily. Betaed by raedbard, so many thanks to her!

'We've already fixed the content, Sam!' Toby said.

It was just the four of them. Doug, Bruno and Connie had already left by the time Sam had started talking about the apology again. Toby had the feeling that Sam probably wouldn't have mentioned it if they had stayed, although he didn't consider even that incentive enough to keep the three of them around. So it was just CJ, Josh, Sam and him - yelling at each other in the President's barn.

'No we haven't,' Sam was protesting his comment. Given their progress that day, he had a point. 'There is not a single point about this speech that we're all agreed on, so I don't see why I shouldn't be able to make my argument to the President on the same basis as everyone else.'

'Because everyone else is going to him saying that we need more focus on the military, or that we should be using different words to describe the American public. You want to go to him and tell him he needs to say sorry.'

'He does.'

'No, he doesn't.'

'This,' Sam responded, waving the pages of the speech at Toby, 'this doesn't mean anything if he doesn't apologise for lying.'

'Not lying. Omission. I seem to recall having had this conversation before.'

'Semantics.'

'You're a writer, Sam, semantics is what you do.'

'I don't lie.'

'No one is asking you to! The speech may not be great oratory, it may not be the speech of our careers, but it's locked, and it's fine. It's fine for an announcement that he's running for re-election, it's fine for damage control, and its especially fine for Manchester, New Hampshire, where no one cares that he hasn't apologised!' he punctuated each repetition with a jab of his hand. 'No one cares but you, Sam.'

'You do. You don't think this is semantics any more than I do. This should be the substance, Toby, everything else is smoke and mirrors.'

'That's what we need right now.' They sat, glaring at each other, temporarily out of words.

'So,' Josh observed curiously, 'this is what writer smack-talk looks like.'

CJ tried to lead him away from the scene. 'Josh...'

'I always thought there'd be more "your momma's so fat even her modifiers are dangling"... stuff like that,' he mused.

'Josh...'

'This is sort of tame.'

'Josh!' she exclaimed finally.

He focussed on Sam and Toby, and on went the switch in his head. 'So I'll be going.' CJ and Josh hurriedly walked out.

They were alone now – Sam could come over to him, sit closer. Or Toby could go to him – place a hand on his shoulder, and run fingers through the dark hair. Let him know that things were not as bad as they appeared. Neither of them moved.

The force of Sam's anger seemed to have left him. 'Smoke and mirrors is what we need?' he asked quietly.

'Just right now, yes, that's what we need.'

'We didn't come here to write smoke and mirrors.'

'This is Presidential speech-writing, you didn't suspect there might be some glossing?'

'When I joined, honestly, I didn't. It was campaign speech-writing for a candidate who no one thought would be elected. It didn't occur to me that he was hiding a life-limiting disease and that we would one day have to excuse its cover-up, no. Did it occur to you?'

'Why do you keep putting me on the opposite side of this, Sam?'

'Because you slept in the same bed as me for weeks, knowing that this was all about to come falling down around us, and you didn't say a word,' Sam said.

'I couldn't say anything.'

'I know that.'

'So why do you keep bringing it up?'

'Because there's "us" and there's the President and us, and by any standard of the first, you should have told me.'

'And by the second?'

Sam sighed, and looked at Toby sadly. 'This argument we've been having. It's not really about us, is it?'

'No.'

'This is about the President.'

'Yeah.'

'So why are we fighting about it?'

'Because every argument we have is about the President. The next four years, every argument, the President is going to be somewhere in the background. You've got to understand, Sam, that for the next four years, anything about us is going to come second to anything about running the country. You have to understand that.'

'The fact you think that needs to be explained to me is somewhat troubling, Toby.'

'Sam...'

'No, Toby, don't stand there like that, telling me that you're less pissed off at him than I am, and try and tell me that I don't understand that personal isn't the same as political. I understand that as well as anyone else here.'

'I'm not sure that you do, Sam, or you wouldn't be acting as if I had personally wronged you by keeping it secret.'

'No, Toby, as I believe I may have said, this isn't about us. The President wronged both of us, and you're just as mad at him as I am, but instead of talking to me about it and letting me help you, instead of treating me like your partner, you're treating me like a kid who needs coaxed out of a sulk.'

'Because that's how you're acting!'

The door slammed. Toby sighed.

The President's speech - not the real one, but the one he gave to them in that little classroom – bought them all a few hours peace. He had that effect on people. Some days, even without the aid of a team of highly-trained speech-writers, Jed Bartlet could produce words which sparked something in his listeners they didn't realise they still had. Belief or piety or devotion. Something grown men shouldn't have towards other grown men at any rate.

But Toby wasn't basking in the glow. He was watching Sam. He saw the back straightened when the President spoke, watched the blue eyes widen with life as their boss brought fireworks out of a lacklustre speech. And he saw it fade. He saw Sam retreat further and further into himself even as Josh and CJ lauded the performance. He saw what they didn't. That although Sam had got something what he wanted in the apology, it wasn't what he needed. Sam needed the President to be in the right again, and that was impossible. He couldn't undo the omission, there was no justification for it that any of them really believed, and he couldn't apologise to the public. So Sam would have to live with his loss. Toby understood that. When Sam disappeared from the living room, Toby waited a few minutes, and followed.

He tracked Sam down to one of the studies. It was a warm, fire-lit room, but Sam didn't seem to be taking any comfort from it.

'You've packed?' Toby asked, keeping his voice neutral.

'Yeah,' he answered.

'The speech was good.'

'Yeah.'

'The polls should show a couple of points jump.'

Sam shrugged.

'You have to talk to me eventually, Sam. First, because if you want to complain to someone about the guy you're sleeping with, it needs to be someone who already knows who that is - which only leaves me. And second, I'm the only one that understands about you and the President.'

Sam turned to him, angrily, with Josh or CJ's name on his lips.

'CJ's more worried about the press briefings and whether she's been perpetrating a massive fraud against the country. And Josh is a politician.'

Again Sam would have protested, but Toby knew what he was going to say.

'He's a politician first, so his first concern is how to deal with the political consequences. It's not a criticism, Sam - it's just how things are. Josh is pragmatic.'

'And I'm not?' The question was laden with old bitterness.

'You and I, both of us, are writers first. So you don't like, neither of us like, writing this way.'

There had been a time, not so long ago, when talking like that to Sam would have fixed the problem, or at least papered over the cracks. Simply acknowledging that the two of them were writers together, separate from the rest of the White House, would have bought him one of Sam's soft smiles, even when they were angry at each other. But they had both gone too far for that these days, and all Sam did was parrot Toby's earlier justification. 'I thought it was what we needed.'

'I stand by what I said,' he answered firmly. 'We need to get through this. But we will, and then we get to write the way we write best.'

'And it's nothing about being mad at the President?'

'Sam!' Toby cried in exasperation. 'Yes, I'm angry at him. We are both angry at him. We're probably angrier at him than any one who isn't married to him. But that's not the most important thing right now. We need to get him re-elected, we need to achieve the rest of the agenda we set out, because if you think we have a hope of that with anyone else, you're deluding yourself. And then, then, after his second term, we can be as angry and bitter as you like. We can sit in our shared garret writing furious epics about our betrayal!' he finished on a crescendo, and then added, 'But today was about re-election.'

'So what's this about?'

'Go and stand over there,' Toby said.

'You're sending me to the corner now? Do I get a paper hat?'

'Just go.' Sam went, resentfully, and stood behind the desk. 'Read me your speech. The one with the apology.' Toby instructed quietly.

'What?'

'Read it to me. Do the President's voice if you'll feel better.'

Sam was being mulish. 'The speech has been made. Like you said, it did what it was supposed to do. This won't change anything.'

'I know. But the words should be said, and they should be heard.'

'By the whatever from high atop the thing?'

'That's exactly who.' Toby wasn't superstitious except when he was. The "was" category included votes and words. Words had power, everyone knew that. They had more power when written down, and even more when spoken. No one at the school would hear Sam's speech. These words would go the same way as so many of the words the two of them had written working for the President. Words that couldn't be speeches because they weren't allowed to reach so far, or upset so many people. So they went out into the air to be heard by no one but the whatever from high atop the thing and each other. That didn't mean they would do nothing. Sam wasn't capable of writing words that did nothing.

So Toby sat back in the chair in a Manchester study, and heard President Bartlet apologize for misleading the American people. It wasn't the cleanest speech Sam would ever give – the prose was a little uneven, and a little too impassioned. It couldn't quite decide if it was an apology from the President, or a note of forgiveness from the writer who put the words together. But Toby let the words ring out into the air as Sam lost himself in them. Sam said the words that both of them felt: that lying was a sin they had thought this man above. That wanting to be President wasn't a good enough reason not to tell the public. That wanting to be President was not a good enough reason not to tell a staff that would walk barefoot on broken glass to get something done for him.

Sam spoke the words for him and Toby both. He was free to say them because Sam had never pretended that he was above believing in politicians. Sam had believed the best of Jed Bartlet because he believed the best of people. Toby had believed the best of Jed Bartlet in spite of believing the worst of them. Both of them had been betrayed, and Sam had enough words for both of them.

He didn't say a word while Sam talked. When Sam stopped, breathing hard as though he had run a marathon, Toby watched him, still silent.

Sam took a deep breath and smiled. He walked to the fire and tossed the speech into the flames. He sat down beside Toby, curling up against him for the first time since they had got here, and they watched the words vanish into the smoke.

When Toby woke up, there was a blanket over the two of them, He wondered vaguely which one of his co-workers he would need to be threatening around to avoid the inevitable comments about how cute they had looked.

Sam stirred. 'Toby?'

'You realize that anyone else could have been there to hear that?'

'Anyone else whose beard was leaving stubble-burn on my cheek?' Sam asked sleepily. 'I hope not.'

Toby favoured the top of Sam's head with a half-smile. 'In the room, Sam, not asleep beside you.'

'Okay. We should probably go and find real beds then. Even on Air Force One it's an early start to get back to Washington.'

'It is.' Toby stood up, with Sam muttering protests as he followed, despite it being his idea. Sam followed him upstairs to their rooms. They reached Toby's door first. 'Coming?' he asked, grinning behind his beard, the rare good mood not having left him yet.

'Toby!' Sam yelped. 'We're in the President's house!'

'We work in the President's house,' Toby reminded him.

'Okay, a, we don't do anything there either, and that's your rule. Not that I disagree, but you're the one that made it. And b, we don't. We work with the President, in the White House, which the seat of government. He's the man, not the government itself. There's a difference.'

'You can kill a mood better than any twelve people I know.'

'Why twelve?' Sam pondered.

Toby looked up and down the hallway. Placing one hand firm against Sam's chest, he pushed him into a shadowy alcove, in the President's house, and kissed him. When Sam gasped against his mouth, he pulled back. If he hadn't, Sam really would have stubble-burn to explain the next day. 'See you in the morning.'

'Night, Toby.' Sam answered quietly. 'And thanks, you know… for the speech. For listening.'

'You too.'

'You didn't say anything.'

'I didn't need to.'

FIN - Feedback is lovely, even if you're not a Sam/Toby shipper. Which I appreciate that many, many people are not...