Title: Little Things
Author: freak-pudding
Disclaimer: The West Wing and all associated articles are the sole property of Aaron Sorkin and NBC. No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: It's the little things he finds himself thinking about. The lights and the whispery twinkle of stars in the dead of night. The glint of flame against a cool, crystal tumbler. The sound of ice as it hits the bottom of his glass.
Author's Notes: Watch Dead Poet's Society, read some Whitman, get a glass of brandy (if you're old enough), listen to Jeff Buckley. Ready? Start reading.
Author's Notes 2: Oops. It's been brought to my attention that I forgot to add that I did, in fact, lift the end scene from a S.1 episode (the Christmas one). This was done intentionally. Sorry for the confusion.
Little Things
It's the little things he finds himself thinking about late at night, when he's all alone and the last song's been sung, the last vote tallied, the last cigarette smoked. It's the little things he lies awake thinking of, folded up in darkness and a blanket too short to cover his feet.
He's always liked the little things.
He likes going to the same bar every night, wearing the same double-breasted jacket over torn ties and stained shirts, even if it's only because that's all he has left. He likes living in the same room, sleeping in the same bed, watching the same shows, reading the same old clippings.
He likes getting the same letters.
Drunk they scream from the Midwest. Wastrel druggie they call him in the South. He's bastard in the East, jackass to the far West. He's Daddy to some, Uncle Leo to others, sir to a few, and Oh Captain My Captain, once, in a card from Josh for his birthday.
He stumbles bar to bar some nights, when he's too poor or too lost or too old to remember the way. Good whiskey, the ping of ice hitting the right glass, these are memories of a long-gone October that burn his throat and sting his eyes. He takes whatever they give him now.
It was the little things he's found himself thinking about lately. The colored lights like fireflies trapped inside a gauze-veiled jar, the whispery twinkle of stars in the dead of another Maryland night. The glint of a lighter's flame against the facets of a cool, crystal tumbler. The sound of ice as it falls from the right height, hits the bottom of a thick glass.
He wants to think that's why Mallory and Sam won't let him come see the kids anymore.
He keeps up with them all, in letters and clippings and short, staccato reports on CNN when he can find a television to watch. Politicians and lawyers and above-the-fold headlines, he knows it must be hard for them to remember. Or harder to forget.
It's gotten hard for him to forget, too.
That's how he finds himself one cold December night, standing in front of the White House, threadbare overcoat and mismatched socks and no hat on his head. The snow falls in gentle white flakes, a halo around his grey head, as he leans forward, sobbing and clutching the bars of a wall too high to toss his cap over. Not that he has a cap anyway.
He turns and leaves, quietly, amicably, when the guards step forward and tell him to move. Can't have drunks messing up the lawn.
Leo stumbles his way back home, bleary and shaking and pulling the remains of his tattered coat closed, trying to get warm again. There's a dirt-splattered lobby, a flight of widened rickety stairs, and he finds his room at last, falls into a lumped pile of fabric, a thing that was once a mattress with springs and padding and a general shape.
There's a TV on somewhere above him; the old guy next door coughs and shuffles past the dirty wall.
Leo's hand shoots out, fumbles against the upturned box he uses as a nightstand. His spindly, waste-thin fingers close around a cold, clanking bottle. He draws it to his lips; empty, he tosses it away.
Shaking, unsteady, he stands and staggers to the bureau shoved against the far wall. He rummages through drawers, scours the corners of worn-out cardboard boxes lying against the wall, deflated, like forgotten drums with the skins punched out. Little pieces of his life lie scattered around the room, like bits of a colossal corpse, butchered and thrown away.
His foot crushes something plastic and crackly; it's the model fighter jet his grandson—he thinks it was a boy—gave him on a Christmas long past.
He picks up the plastic shards with reverence, cradles the chassis in his clawed hands, staring at the featureless face of the pilot inside. He sees himself in that face, empty and featureless, crushed by the weight of his own crimes, war and politics and he knows it's all worse than hell, because hell has no innocent bystanders or fury like a woman—an electorate?—scorned.
He pulls the plane close, presses it into his chest, sobs, lets his tears splash off shining decals and sloping green lines.
Leo thinks it might be Friday, later, when his numbed fingers scrape out Josh's number on the old rotary phone in the lobby.
"It's busy here. But we'll have lunch some time," Josh says, oily uneasiness coating his voice, slithering across a thread stretched too tight between there and now.
"Tell me you'll come," Leo blurts out, not quite sure what he means.
"Absolutely. Be there with bells on."
And the laugh that follows, peppering Leo's ear across the line, is too strong, too false, too much to mean anything. K Street teaches everyone something new; Josh has learned better how to lie.
When they hang up, he feels empty. He knows he should've said something, clinging to the vestiges of an imploded life, and he knows they'll never have lunch, never have breakfast or coffee or dessert or scraps of bread in a snow-shot back alley.
And he knows it's over now, that life, that place where he was someone to someone once, as he slides down onto the stairs, too tired to go back up to his room. It's taken too long to get here; he knows he can't go farther.
It's the little things, he reflects bitterly, that hurt the most when they're gone.
He isn't sure where they'll find him, or if they'll remember at all, but he takes his coat in one hand, stands and weaves his way out of the building. A napkin lies crumpled and crushed in the gutter, and he bends down, picks it up.
There are little things, little failures, in everything he's done, every lie and every story and every vote he's ever gotten. He knows now what he wanted, what he couldn't have, what he'll never find again.
Shoulders hunched, he stumbles down the street, mindless, vodka-tinted breath puffing the way through the night.
On Friday, he thinks, he finds a bar. On Saturday, no one even remembers he was there.
- - -
They find him one cold December morning, curled up at the foot of the Vietnam memorial. Hands and feet sticking out of a worn suit, like a turtle that died too deep in its shell. Warm woolen coat with a business card in the pocket, and the DC police call the card's listed man down for questioning.
"You Cliff Calley?"
"Yeah."
"At the White House?"
"Yeah."
He's riveted by the closed eyes, the half-open mouth hanging limp and useless, like a doll that's been kicked too much to be beautiful again.
"Found your card in the pocket."
He works in the White House now, big times and big lies, a public figure with a public face.
"I gave that coat to Goodwill," he tells them, earnest and frozen and staring at the grayish, uncovered face.
"You know the guy?"
The cop glances left and right, glaring tourists back. The coroner's van won't get here for another hour.
"No," Calley says, looking into the world-weary face.
"Just another nobody, then."
"No," he says again, looking up and away, tracing the path of a bird through the sky. "He was someone once."