Title: Out Here on the Border
Author: Meghan Reilly
Rating: R
Category: CJ/T, post-admin
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters. They belong to Aaron Sorkin 
and his posse.
Summary: "Out here on the border, ain't nobody asking questions. No, 
I don't need a miracle, but I could use a push in the right 
direction."
Author's Notes: This story would still be… a single little scene 
sitting on my hard drive, if not for Luna. Major props to her; she 
rocks like no other. You can also find this story on my website:

http://members.aol.com/zzariarazz/squirreilly/index.html

---
Out Here on the Border
---


In the end of all things, they were together.

"Drive, Toby. Just drive."

He'd taken the order without question. Throwing some clothes in a 
bag, watching out of the corner of his eye with fascination as she 
folded her underwear into neat little piles of lace and cotton, then 
threw them so that they landed in the bag every which way with his 
boxers, he wondered how far they'd have to go before they escaped.

The car was hot, steamy with summer; the air-conditioner was broken 
and she had taken off her T-shirt a while ago. Arizona tended to 
wrench people's self-consciousness away like dogs tearing at meat--
things were easy, things were good, things went the way you wanted 
them to and no one cared what you did. Her bra was black cotton, 
stetchy, and the tiny elastic fibers in it glistened like a mirage 
around the droplets of sweat running between her breasts.

He couldn't stop staring.

He *had* to stop staring, because he was driving- she hadn't ever 
offered to drive, not once, and he felt it was unfair of her to sit 
in her bra and expect him to keep his eyes on the road. But she was 
beautiful, in a melodramatic kind of way. She was like a bad movie: 
pathetic to look at, sometimes, and surely hyperbolic, but comforting 
and pleasing and familiar in a way you just couldn't nail down.

"This," she said as they passed through Phoenix, "this isn't... isn't 
really right."

"What's not right?" he prodded, making sure he kept his voice even.

"*Why* are we going?"

Because you came to me, you came to me and we went to bed and when 
you woke up the next morning, you said, let's go to Mexico. There 
wouldn't be any assassinations there because no one's in power. Let's 
go, Toby. Let's go to Mexico.

"Because we can drink Cuervo Gold and you can make pottery all day, 
all the terracotta cups and bowls and vases you could ever ask for," 
he replied, and she smiled.

"Yeah," she said. "I could be a potter."

Their song came on the radio and he turned it up.

"Feel like making loooove," she sang loudly, and looked at him with 
expectant eyes. "That's your cue."

He sighed and made the guitar sounds. "Dn-dn dnnn, dn-dn dnnnn..." 
She laughed so hard she started to cry and looked out the window.

"Take me to Mexico, Toby," she told him. So they drove.

--

She wanted to visit Santa Fe before they ended their lives. She 
couldn't even tell him why; "I just like the name," she kept saying.

"But it's East from here," he protested, "not South, and I thought 
you wanted to go to Mexico-" and she ran her fingernails up his back 
in bed that night and nudged his erection with her knee. Stopped him, 
because of course he couldn't say anything coherent when she was 
doing that with her mouth...

"Santa Fe, Toby," she said.

We'll do this for the rest of our lives, he thought as he kissed a 
line down her impossibly long back. It'll never go away. I'll keep 
listening to her and doing what she wants and we'll just keep running 
and running... and it'll just be us, sweating naked in cars and 
having painfully rough sex in cheap beds at every Stay-n-Save in the 
Southwest.

Until they got to Mexico.

God, Mexico, he thought. 

It wasn't that he was afraid--he just wished that her mad desire to 
run away from everything didn't involve running to a place where they 
would have even less of a life than they had here.

---

The days were carved from stone, and Toby just drove. He looked over 
at his woman every once in a while and then mentally winced that he 
had called her his woman--but what else, really, was he supposed to 
call her? He couldn't call her his lover--no, that was for apples and 
cinnamon, for reading the Post in bed together on Sundays, for 
flowers on Valentine's Day. For Josh and Donna.

They weren't lovers; they weren't in love. One day she'd die and he'd 
grieve and stay in his hotel room and drink their drink every night 
until he died too. What they had was too dark and murky and messy and 
soaked with alcohol and cigar smoke to be love.

Still, she slept in the car seat with her head tilted to one side and 
her new bra- she'd bought a red one in Flagstaff- her new bra had 
little sparkles on it that made a pattern with the light on the 
ceiling and her face. He could imagine her, in another life, sitting 
on her pristine white bed in her pristine white apartment with her 
pantyhose halfway on and wondering how she'd wear such a garment 
under her pristine white blouses.

In the store, he'd asked her that question- "Fuck it," she said, "I 
don't wear shirts anymore."

He thought he loved her for that. He could have been love with her, 
very easily, if they had still been in their world of briefing books 
and Max Mara and white tie and champagne and slow, hard sex in his 
office late at night. He had loved that. He didn't know how it 
compared to this new life, with the no-shirts rule and the cheap 
Corona and the cheaper motel rooms. This could be love, if he was 
someone else. *She* was someone else.

He didn't know what anything was anymore.

---

Sante Fe turned out to be dusty; everything looked as though it was 
trapped in time, like a bug in amber.

"John Wayne made a movie here once," CJ said. "And they couldn't top 
that, so they just stopped trying."

She had donned a shirt, or what might have passed for one in a 
nightclub somewhere; his red bandanna folded into a triangle and tied 
neatly across her breasts somehow made her believe that she wasn't 
showing everything to everyone. Toby hadn't known he'd even owned a 
bandanna. But there it was, winking at him from where he loved to 
kiss her when she was asleep, like it was bragging.

They found their motel quickly this time. Sometimes it was easy and 
sometimes it was hard; sometimes they would drive from place to place 
for hours, stopping at each progressively worse shithole until CJ 
would nod her head at the most roach-infested one and lick her lips 
in anticipation.

"This is what I need, Toby," she said when they found it, a crumbling 
Comfort Inn that could have been in the dictionary under 'irony'.

Whatever happened to the pantyhose? he wanted to ask. And the silk 
blouses? And the rosewater cologne? And the Banana Republic 
camisoles? God, whatever happened to the taste?

She still has taste, he thought. It's just in hibernation.

It was as if she was living the life she'd never been allowed, in her 
day-to-day stagnation as White House Princess. Her life in LA had 
been a waste, and now her life in DC was being stamped into the same 
category. "I just kept jumping," she said with a shake of her 
head. "Jumping from acronym to acronym, and nothing ever stuck."

He wanted to shout: It wasn't a waste, CJ. I brought you there, so it 
wasn't a waste.

They checked into the motel and walked to the nearest bar. The stars 
were bright in the sky; he looked up, entirely uncharacteristically, 
and pointed out a constellation.

"You're turning into Sam," she said, batting at his arm. Her eyes 
were suddenly desperate. "Don't do that, Toby."

Turning into Sam, he thought. It was laughable. Sam was a kid, and 
Sam was beautiful, and he had bounced back out of that scream-filled 
night with the vigor and idealism that always spared the young. Toby 
had been washing his boss's blood out of his skin for months; Sam had 
spent five minutes with the pink stuff in the hospital bathroom and 
had been clean.

CJ walked like she still had blood in her hair, and not even the 
showers they'd been taking together for a month in dirty motel 
bathrooms were making it fade.

---

She liked to steal bottles of Bailey's from the bars they went to.

"It's like a milkshake, Toby," she said as she poured some into a red 
plastic cup, also pilfered.

"It's homosexual," he replied.

She grinned and stumbled a little. The bottle was three-quarters of 
the way gone and she had yet to pour him a cup. "We should ask 
Hoynes."

"CJ..." he said, fake-stern, but he was smiling too.

"I know, I know. But I got the gay vibe." She sat suddenly, cross-
legged, and Toby could see bits of the prize where her panties 
stretched too thin.

He had to have her, suddenly, and he leaned forward and pinned her to 
the ground. "You wouldn't know a gay man if he showed you his 
membership card," he told her, and her laugh echoed into his throat 
as they swallowed each other.

Sex between them was always painful, because she would dig her nails 
into his back and bite his ear hard enough to draw blood. He 
remembered another time, before That Night, when she had been a 
different woman in bed. In her Armani suits, she had been unshakingly 
professional, suppressing shrieks of pleasure that would otherwise 
carry through the thin walls of his office; here, though, with her 
bandanna tube top and her stolen Bailey's and her sweaty, salty skin, 
she was a drill sergeant. She let him know exactly what she liked, 
she screamed her head off whenever she felt like it, and if he was 
good, she rewarded him.

In the White House, he was her boss. But in the middle of the 
Southwest, he answered to her and her alone. She made damn sure of 
that.

---

They were getting closer; the parking lots were getting thinner and 
turning into dirt.

They were in a town in New Mexico whose name Toby couldn't pronounce, 
and CJ's bra was blue this time, with clear plastic straps. She was 
sitting in the passenger's seat of the car with her fingers in her 
hair and her head in the clouds.

"What will we do when we get there, Toby?" she asked, and her voice 
was like a little girl's asking for a fairy tale.

I thought that was *your* department, he wanted to say. "Make 
drinks," he said instead. "I'll name one after you--the Jeannie in a 
Bottle."

She wrinkled her nose at it, and he did, too, internally. It was a 
thing she would have said three months ago while telling him that she 
was too sexy on the way to the briefing room. It was a very Old-CJ 
thing to say, and he started to wonder- am I turning into her? he 
thought abstractly.

If he was turning into her, then she was turning into him. Any moment 
now, and she'd be asking for a cigar.

It took all he had not to turn the car around.

---

They stopped near the border at a Taco Bell. "They piss in the beans 
here," CJ whispered as they walked up the steps, the moon lighting 
the way and turning her skin silver.

Toby wanted to hold her hand but he was afraid of the scars. That 
night he'd pulled her up out of the glass and her palms had been 
bleeding, two rivers of blood that had streamed over his own hands 
and mixed with Leo's blood until everything about him was redness and 
the pain of people he loved.

The stitches had been extensive, and he remembered her looking down 
the hall at him with glassy eyes as they heard the doctors shocking 
Leo's heart in the next room--"They're all dead, Toby," she'd 
whispered, and then the needle had cut into her flesh, pulling the 
two sides of her hand together until her palm looked stretched.

Both hands.

He felt the raised scars when she held him in her hand, rubbing him 
and looking into his eyes- ribbed for your pleasure, he'd always 
thought to himself, as sick as it was.

The Taco Bell was staffed by a single young Mexican boy, probably 
just off the peach truck; he looked at them tiredly. "Muchachos," he 
said. "It's midnight."

"And still we remain," CJ replied. "I'll have the Gorditas Supreme, 
but with no meat. Substitute beans."

The boy looked at CJ and sensed her good breeding, smelled the 
richness that wafted off of her even as hard as she had tried to 
cover it up. He saw through her like tissue paper. "You're a long way 
from home, Senora."

"Ita," CJ corrected, and it looked like she was going to cry all of a 
sudden. "Ita, ita, Senor*ita*- I'm not married. Toby, do I look 
married?"

Toby's red bandana was hanging from her old black cotton bra like the 
tears quivering on her eyelashes, ready to fall. "You look as single 
as ever," he told her.

She ate her Gorditas under the stars that night, swigging down 
Bailey's and letting Toby hold her until the sun came up; Mexico 
twinkled in the distance, and they watched it.

---

Civilization, which had been nonexistent for a hundred miles or more, 
suddenly re-created itself at the border.

Cars came from nowhere and piled up under the hot sun, their shiny 
battered tops reflecting glare into Toby's eyes like a second sun. CJ 
adjusted the bandanna and fidgeted in her seat. He could hear her 
skin sticking to the leather and every time she moved it would peel 
off painfully; the skin-on-skin sound and her wincing were the only 
noise in the car while they waited.

They had passports. They had thought ahead. The only thing they were 
worried about was someone recognizing their names and calling Josh 
and Sam to tattle on them.

"It couldn't happen," CJ said, voicing his thoughts aloud.

Oh, but it could, he wanted to say. Not the part about Josh and Sam. 
No, Toby was pretty sure Josh and Sam would never find them, never 
even come looking for them. They were safe and happy in their new 
jobs and they visited the President's grave every weekend like good 
little grieving staffers; Leo, of course, only got a visit on 
holidays, because nobody cared about real friendship, least of all 
the media.

But it wouldn't be all that odd if someone recognized them. Toby 
almost hoped that they did. Then maybe CJ would recognize herself and 
he could go to Mexico without this feeling of guilt in the pit of his 
stomach.

You've turned into me. And I'm a dark, scary person to be.

They finally reached the gate to Mexico when the sun was setting. 
Toby handed over their passports and waited.

The border guard looked into the car at CJ, with her neatly-tied 
sweaty bandanna, and narrowed his brows.

"Aren't you the one..." he began. "With the President, on the TV. 
Aren't you the one in the picture?"

The picture of CJ on her back in a sea of glass, with the President 
lying dead at her side. They had been standing next to each other, 
joking about something, and then the noise had started and she had 
fallen among the scattering, sparkling pieces of broken window, 
unharmed except for the two deep cuts in her hand. Stigmata.

A reporter had taken the President's picture, snapped the last 
moments of his life onto film, as Bartlet leaned over with the rest 
of his strength and checked to see if CJ was all right.

CJ grinned emptily at the border guard and brushed some hair off her 
forehead. "Yeah, I get that a lot. I'm not her."

They were waved through into Mexico without another glance.

---

Their motel turned out to be the only place to stay in a fifteen-mile 
radius. Finding it had been hell, and then there had come a moment 
where Toby was sure CJ would reject it for having an extra roll of 
toilet paper or an uncracked ceiling; but luckily, it had been just 
right for her. 

They stole beers from the lobby refrigerator and walked the old, 
creaky stairs to their room, making as much noise as possible to make 
up for the fact that they couldn't think of anything to say. Once 
inside the room, they turned on the TV to the single station and 
tried to concentrate on what the Mexican soap opera characters were 
saying.

"You know, Toby," she said suddenly. "This isn't us. I don't know 
what this is, but it's not us."

He could have told her that in Arizona.

Corona splashed into terracotta cups had thickened her voice, and she 
lay naked beside him, struggling with the tears in her throat.

"What's us, then?" he asked.

She wiped her nose angrily and shook her head. "I thought it might be 
this, but this is romantic. We're not romantic, Toby, are we?"

He shook his head. "No," he replied. "We're anything but romantic." 
It seemed to reassure her, and she focused on the TV again. Hours 
passed without any words.

Then it happened without any warning- one of the characters pulled 
out a gun and began shooting. And she melted, right before his eyes; 
just collapsed into a pile of shaking, quivering, whimpering girl. It 
happened so abruptly that he didn't know what to do. She lay on the 
bed and gasped, seeing things behind her closed eyes and grasping for 
someone, anyone, to stop the noise and the pain and the shattering 
and the flashes...

He crawled over to her and put a hand on her chest, steadying her. 
She opened her eyes.

"I'm all right, Mr. President," she told him. "I didn't get hit."

His eyes blurred.

She looked more closely and he knew then that she saw *him*, Toby, 
who had thrown away every job offer and warning and put her clothes 
in a duffel bag and driven with her, through their country, through 
their lives so far. Toby, who had helped her escape.

Without a word, she reached for him and pulled him to her hungrily.

They made slow, easy love under the Mexican sheets that night, 
feeling no pain and seeing no blood and death behind their closed 
lids. The moon streamed in through the movie-set-like wooden 
shutters, and they came together, arching in tense unison, screaming 
love into each other's souls.

In the morning, when she awoke, she looked softer, and her hair was 
clean. She put on one of his shirts-- she couldn't bring herself to 
button it, and a little bit of her white bra was showing, but the 
bandanna was in the trash. She smiled.

"Let's go, Toby," she said. "I'll drive."

---
End 1/1