Title: The cadence of the hours before dawn
Author: InternationalPrincess
Category: CJ/Toby post-admin
Rating: PG-13
Archive: Please ask first
Email: princess@internationalprincess.com
Web: http://www.internationalprincess.com/
Disclaimer: Nothing in this world is mine. I just like
to hang out in it and move things around.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Marguerite and Luna for
the outstanding beta, it'd be nothing without you two.
The comrades, as always. This one's for snuffy, who
phones in the middle of the night.

Summary: "The easy mistake to make, he realizes, is to
think that she broke when they left the White House. 
She didn't. She'd been disintegrating for years."


*

3:04am

She answers the phone on the third ring.

"I'm growing tomatoes," he says, because it's best to
begin with a non-sequitur. Catch her off guard.

"Is that supposed to make me less mad at you?" Her
voice is sharp, all razor wire and paper cuts.

"Why would you be mad at me?" he asks, although he's
really asking what reason she's chosen today.

"Let's go with your total inability to look at a clock
before you pick up the phone."

He wonders if it's wrong to consider such an innocuous
choice as a victory. "Were you asleep?"

"No."

"There you go."

"You're growing tomatoes?" Her voice softens a
fraction.

"Do you ever sleep?" Pushing his luck.

"During the day, Toby. I'm actually one of the
undead. It worked pretty well for eight years because
I never had to be outside in the daytime. Now it
makes it a little hard to hold down a job."

It disturbs him that he can't actually remember the
last time he saw her in sunlight. Even more upsetting
that the details of the last time he did see her are
falling away. A fuzzy polaroid, her throwing
suitcases in the trunk of a cab. He shakes his head
to clear the image.

"Are you even looking for a job?"

"I've been writing," she says defensively; the memoirs
are always a convenient excuse whenever the topic of
employment comes up. For a moment, he wonders if she
still writes the way she used to. Ashing Gauloises
into an empty tonic can beside her laptop, wearing
nothing but a pair of flannel pajama pants. 
Stretching occasionally to knead the knots out of the
pale expanse of her back.

"Writing what? Your long-awaited romance novel?" It
comes out sharper than he intended. There's a long
silence.

"Go tend your tomatoes, Toby," and she hangs up on
him. 

Again.

*

1:46am

It takes him fourteen rings to pick up, and she thinks
about disconnecting the call twice before he answers.

"Yes," he says, and it's obvious that he knows it's
her. She hates feeling so predictable. Considers
hanging up again.

She takes another swig from the beer bottle sitting on
the coffee table in front of her. It was refreshing
when she opened it, but now it's rancid on her tongue
and she wants something stronger.

"There was a report out of Pakistan this morning. The
jirga have been at it again."

"I saw it," he says.

Of course he did, she thinks. He probably drew a blue
circle around it for her too. Old habits die hard.

She has her own habits.

She spent the morning thinking about how she would
have handled the story, and then spent the afternoon
throwing things at the television while her successor
did it differently. Spent the evening drinking and
arguing with an imaginary Toby in her head. Finally
she gave up and decided to call and fight with him for
real.

"And?" she challenges.

"And this isn't our problem, CJ."

He sounds distracted. Bored, even.

"You don't care?"

"I didn't say that. But there's nothing you or I can
do about it."

She doesn't want her sense of futility voiced like
this. She likes her powerlessness unspoken.

"I could catch a cab over to the offices of the UN
Human Rights Commission. Throw rotten vegetables at
the windows."

She imagines he might be smiling.

"Or, you know, you could get a job at the UN Human
Rights Commission and actually change something."

Maybe not.

She's tired of his suggestions. Tired of the way he
never sounds smug, never says 'I told you so'. Tired
of the professional opportunities that present
themselves to her with his fingerprints all over them.
He works for the Senate Majority Leader, and too many
people owe him favors, want to impress. She told him
that she didn't want his help, though she didn't mean
it, and she wishes he had believed her.

Neither of them says anything for several minutes. 
She can hear C-Span in the background from his end of
the line, creating a stereo effect with the noise from
her own television.

Toby caves first. "What did you eat today?"

"You're not my mother, Toby."

"You're too thin. I saw you on TV. At the opening of
that play."

"Salad," she lies, thinking about the half-cold Big
Mac that came back half an hour later, "frozen yogurt.
What were you doing watching entertainment
television?"

What were you doing watching me? she thinks.

"It was an accident," he responds, without a hint of
irony.

It unnerves her. She didn't like him watching her on
television when it was her job. She likes it even less
now, doesn't want his anonymous appraisal. She makes
a mental note to decline social invitations for a
while. Tucks away the thought that the invitations
are a little thin on the ground anyway.

"I was wearing black. It's slimming."

"Camera adds ten pounds."

She regrets it when she realizes they have been
reduced to speaking in advertising clichés. He's so
abrupt this evening. She wonders for a dreadful
instant if she has interrupted something.

"Is this a bad time?" Her implication is clear. He
actually laughs out loud at this.

"Is there ever a good time, CJ?"

And the receiver's in the cradle before she can think
about it. 

She's always the one to hang up.

*

5:45am

"You know," she grouses without waiting for his
greeting, "this is what they mean when they say
'ungodly hour'."

"I thought you went to the gym between five and six."
He pours coffee into a mug, fidgets with his tie.
Glances briefly at the clock on the microwave. He
doesn't really have time for this, needs to be in at
the office sooner rather than later, but he promised
Leo--and himself--that he'd try.

"And yet you called me here at home."

"Are you going to the farm this weekend?" 

"Toby..." So much resignation in her voice. Maybe even
resentment.

"Because I could fly to New York. We could drive up
together." He schools his voice to stay neutral. Just
an idea, just throwing it out there.

"I'm busy," she says, too quickly.

"Of course you are." He moves around his kitchen,
slides the pad he's been jotting notes on and this
morning's Post into his briefcase. Waits for her to
say anything.

He tries to imagine her agreeing, tries to picture the
two of them in a car together with miles of
countryside buffering them on either side from the
world. But he can't conjure it in his mind's eye any
more than he can make it happen in reality.

"I don't want to go," she says. An unexpected moment
of honesty.

"Abbey will want to see you. Hell, CJ, everyone will
want to see you."

"Exactly my point."

He sinks to a kitchen stool, stares out the window at
the first drops of rain hitting the glass.

The easy mistake to make, he realizes, is to think
that she broke when they left the White House. She
didn't. She'd been disintegrating for years. 

First she became streamlined, professional. Sleek,
better dressed. Fighting weight. And then, the moments
crash over him in fast forward, the Lydells,
Concannon, Rosslyn, the MS disclosure, "relieved,"
Qumar, her father, Donovan, the campaign. Little
parts of her flying away, until she was a sun-bleached
skeleton of her former self. 

He had thought a second term would be a healing. 

He was wrong.

"CJ..." he tries again, but his voice sounds defeated,
even to his own ears. He fingers his car keys.

"Not happening, Toby."

He lets out his breath slowly and listens to the
dial-tone for a moment before hanging up.

*

11:56pm

She's sitting on the edge of the bath, and the
overhead lights are extraordinarily harsh. She asked
for a non-smoking room to discourage herself from
chaining until her fingers turned yellow. She lasted
half an hour before she lit up in the bathroom. The
air-conditioning doesn't seem to be working, and so
the smoke hangs in billowing patterns, reflected in
the mirrored wall. Gorgeous clouds cross her own
reflection, gaunt, bent. She exhales, new smoke
drifting in amongst the old. She's transfixed by it.

The phone rings, and she reaches for the receiver by
the toilet. Doesn't get up from the bath.

"CJ Cregg."

"How did it go?"

"There is no possible way you could have known I was
here. Unless you're still utilizing your FBI contacts
for illicit and, I might add, highly illegal,
purposes."

"How did the meeting go?"

"I mean it, Toby, how did you know I was here??"

"Your answering service."

Her face is even more pinched than usual. She can't
seem to stop herself from scowling these days.

"My service doesn't give out that kind of
information."

"It gives it out to me."

She sighs, and wonders if it's possible she got behind
in her bills again. Thinks about the time she rang
the power company to find herself being called Mrs.
Ziegler.

"You weren't always so controlling."

He doesn't say it, but she hears it anyway. I didn't
have to be.

"How did it go?" For the third time. Patient.
Insistent. Never demanding an answer.

"It went." She exhales swiftly, watches the smoke
whirl away from her, hit the mirror, return. "I
didn't want to work in Boston anyway."

Toby doesn't say anything. It's impossible to discern
disappointment from so far away.

"So," she says, "was there anything else?"

"When are you going home?"

"Why don't you call my answering service and find
out?"

She replaces the receiver, and then removes it again,
lets it hang down the wall. She can do without him
calling back. She's capable of most things, but she
refuses to compete with his memory of her.

*

4:33pm

The flags at half mast snap in the breeze on top of
the building opposite his window. Historically they
should be higher, just low enough to allow the
invisible flag of death to wave and flap above the
stars and stripes. Thirty days, the US Flag Code
says, but Toby tires of it on day three. It doesn't
work, attempting to temper tragedy with crisp
symbolism.

She didn't come to the funeral, which was the final
straw for the others, but made a strange kind of sense
to him.

"You were conspicuous by your absence," he says to her
when she answers, tilting back in his chair,
straightening papers on his desk. Listening to the
flags.

"Trust me, Toby, I would have been conspicuous by my
presence."

He looks up briefly as a nervous temp scuttles in with
something for him to sign. He's on his third
assistant in as many months, and he'd give anything to
be working with someone who wasn't afraid of him.

He'd give anything to be working with her.

It's all backwards. He's supposed to be the one who
foundered. The one who got bitter--and drunk. She
was supposed to get stronger and brighter. Like a
supernova.

They're even in the wrong cities, he thinks. She's
never liked New York, and as much as she professes to
adore the Soho loft he's never seen, he's sure it fits
her poorly.

And here he is in Washington, a city she conquered and
made her own, a city that makes very little sense to
him without her in it.

"Sometimes," he says, "none of this makes sense to
me."

She is silent. He won't elaborate.

The sky outside his window is a pure winter grey. It
makes him feel cold just looking at it. Finally the
words seem to come to her.

"I think, for eight years, we didn't really exist as
separate people." Her voice sounds tiny, far away,
child-like. "It was like we were constituent parts of
a whole person. You and Sam were the words and the
heart, Leo was the brain, and Josh was the hands, the
action. I just had to be the face on it all."

There's a long pause. He wants to tell her how she was
so much more than that, but he can see she's grasping
for an idea that's just out of her reach and it's the
most she's opened up to him in as long as he can
remember. He holds his breath, doesn't dare
interrupt.

"Toby, I think maybe I don't know how to be myself
anymore."

His mind races while he tries to think of something to
say that won't be wrong. Like trying to talk a jumper
down off a ledge.

He takes too long.

She hangs up.

*

2:13pm

She's not sure when it went wrong. Could have been the
fact she didn't eat breakfast, hasn't slept properly
in a week. Might have been the three glasses of merlot
she had instead of lunch to 'calm her nerves'. Not
that she was actually nervous, just that the wine
seemed preferable to the salad sitting in front of
her.

Whatever it was, she couldn't stand the looks on the
faces of the fat, balding men around the table,
perched too high in an ostentatious building with bad
art on the walls. 

So, she probably shouldn't have raised her voice, she
thinks, as she stumbles getting out of the cab. Damn
heels. She pulls her overcoat tight around her, the
first snowfall starting to dust the sidewalk. But if
they didn't want to hear hard facts, they shouldn't
have retained her. Convenient for them she's just a
consultant--key sticks in the lock--and they don't
need to give her notice to tell her to pack her bags.

She hauls an icy bottle of Absolut out of the freezer,
noting clinically that it's been sharing space with
half a bag of frozen peas and nothing else. Turns up
the heating, sinks to the couch, pours two fingers
into a tumbler. Waits for Toby's call.

Of course he'll call, she thinks, staring at the
receiver. It'll probably take Macpherson all of five
minutes to dig out his number.

'Ziegler,' he'll say, 'How the hell did you ever put
up with that woman?' Mac will use words like
"hysterical", which she doesn't need Toby to tell her
comes from the Greek for 'womb'. She hates the
implication, has always hated the word.

And so Toby will mumble something in her defense and
then he'll call her.

The phone doesn't ring.

She pours another glass, and unbuckles her shoes.
Shucks her clothing as she heads to the bathroom,
awkward, one-handed, bottle and the telephone tucked
under one arm.

She used to have candles in here, she realizes,
running the water at an almost scalding temperature.
An oil burner. Feminine accoutrements. Now there's
just mildew and a pathetic looking bowl of potpourri.
She is amazed that dead flowers can actually get
worse. Pours herself another glass. There's always
lower to sink, she thinks, sliding into the bath.

Her skin gradually takes on a rosy glow, and the water
cools. She doesn't have a watch, but the level in the
bottle indicates she's been home a while. She shakes
the phone. Stretches out the antenna. Maybe it doesn't
get reception in the bathroom.

She pushes up out of the water, wraps her robe around
her without drying herself. Tracks water in messy
puddles across her hardwood floors. Manages to find a
poor quality chardonnay in the back of one of her
cupboards. Checks the phone is plugged into the wall
properly.

She's leaving damp marks on her couch, but she doesn't
care. There's nothing but idiotic daytime television
on, and she surfs endlessly through the channels, a
cycle of infomercials, talkshows, made-for-tv movies.
No news. Eventually she clicks the phone on and
listens to see if there's a dial-tone, but discards
the idea of calling herself from her cell to see if
the line works.

The warm chardonnay is sour, and she starts to feel
nauseous. She finds a box of crackers and makes a lot
of crumbs.

When she realizes that the only light in the apartment
is coming from the television, she wobbles slightly as
she reaches to click on a lamp. If it's dark, she
reasons, it's been hours. 

And the stagnant air is finally split by noise.

"I'm disappointed, Toby," she says, without checking
her caller ID, hoping it won't turn out to be a
telemarketer. "I expected your call hours ago."

"Yeah," he says. Doesn't elaborate, doesn't offer
words of comfort or sympathy.

She wants to yell at him, make him understand that she
doesn't want him checking up on her. But she feels
abraded by his absence, so she says nothing.

"It, uh, it took a little longer than it should have."

She can imagine him shuffling as he says this. Looking
down at his feet.

"What did? Me getting fired?" Her voice rises an
octave in disbelief.

"No. Me getting here. And it's, you know, it's not
that warm. So I was hoping you might let me in."

She spins to face her front door, the phone clattering
to the ground. In the next instant she's flinging the
door open, and he's there, cellphone pressed to his
ear, laptop case slung over one shoulder.

She can't be mad. She can't be anything. She can't
even keep the tears inside as he puts his bag on the
floor, closes her door gently behind him and pulls her
close.

And he's warm, and he smells like her history, and he
places his hands on her hips and doesn't behave as if
she's fragile. He's kissing away her tears, and
smoothing back her damp hair, and he still looks at
her as if she's the most beautiful thing he's ever
seen, though it's been years since she lived up to
that. 

He makes love to her with both reverence and passion,
and he's still whispering to her when she falls
asleep.

She wakes to find him gone.

Washed-out sunlight leaks through her blinds, and she
stretches endlessly, wriggling free of rumpled sheets.


There's almost a smile on her face as she brushes her
teeth.

*

11:44am

He digs around in his coat pocket for the source of
the ringing, ignoring the glare an older man gives him
over the top of his newspaper. 

"Where are you?" she asks.

He rubs a little at his forehead, leans back in his
seat. "At the airport. I, I have a thing this
afternoon. Otherwise I'd stay." It was agony to leave
her sleeping, the sight was remarkable and too rare to
interrupt. He can still feel her hand resting on his
chest. It makes it hard to breathe.

"So this plane ticket on my dining table." Her voice
is different. It takes him a moment to identify the
change, the lack of hostility. Toby wonders if she's
dressed. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

He waits while a gate attendant calls a flight over
the P.A. "Get on a damn plane, CJ. Come back to
Washington."

"And that's supposed to fix everything?" An actual
question, he realizes, not a challenge.

"No." She knows this. Nothing will be a panacea.
Least of all him. "But you know it's going to be a
pretty good start."

"I've lost six jobs, fourteen clients and three
assistants since we left the White House. I think the
colloquial expression is 'washed up'."

He doesn't contradict her. She doesn't say anything
for a while, but her silence no longer frightens him. 

"Toby, what makes you think I can put myself back
together any better in DC?"

He thinks about that for a long moment, as a small
child chases an even smaller sibling through the
chairs in front of him.

"Because you left part of yourself there, CJ. It's as
simple as that."

And he hears what might be the most miraculous sound
coming through the slightly fuzzy connection on his
cell. 

She's actually laughing.

And this time, he's the one to hang up.

**