Scribbling by Charlotte Unsworth RATING: PG CATEGORY: Toby POV SPOILERS: None SUMMARY: She doesn't know if he writes for fun anymore. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Blank pages mock him, daring him to scribble something to fill their emptiness. Words dance through his mind, fleetingly, rushing past and out of reach before he can put them down. Sometimes he will rise to the challenge of the blank page, drawing sketches and motifs until words appear to him through the apparent chaos. Words he didn't realise he was writing, and he wonders if this is how it is. He wonders if this was how Jefferson's speeches were written, doodles on a page before inspiration comes with sudden force and he scribbles until long past midnight to write it all, capture it all before it is lost. Perhaps, he thinks, this is how the great writers did it. He can't picture it though, Nathaniel Hawthorne pacing the floor at midnight for the perfect phrase, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte staring through the window in vain, Shakespeare at home on his own struggling to find the opening line. It doesn't seem right. Sometimes he ignores the mocking challenge of the pad in front of him and throws it across the room. Instead, he walks through the halls muttering to himself until finally, finally, he rushes back to his office scrambling for the paper. He often feels dwarfed by the written word, by its awesome power to move and inspire, despairs that he could ever hope to harness it. He doesn't believe himself capable, not anymore. He did once, when a woman loved him and there hadn't been the disappointment that has haunted him for years. At work he reads the New York Times, the Washington Post, legal documents, and speeches of past leaders and presidents that brought audiences to their feet in admiration. At home he reads classics and cheap airport novels, science fiction and thrillers, poetry and romance. If anyone were to ask him, he would tell them his first love was politics, but he would be wrong and only she knows it. Only she remembers that when they first met it wasn't at a political rally, or a debate, or in a smoky bar when he was despairing over yet another hopeless candidate. She remembers seeing him in a coffee shop in California, just after he'd lost another candidate. It was before the drinking started, before he needed something more powerful than caffeine, something to dull the pain of never being able to get a good man a position he deserve, something to make him forget the broken marriage. He was writing then. She doesn't know if he writes for fun anymore. He used to, pages and pages in a spiral bound notebook he always carried. She could always tell when he'd been writing, there was something after spending an hour with just a notepad and paper that made him feel something she was never quite sure she could make him feel. Now, she wonders if he writes for fun or just because he gets paid. She remembers the legal pad he tried to stop her reading the morning after. She can see, when she tries to recall, the paper filled with drawings and scribbled words and underneath, pages covered in his close handwriting. No speeches, no dissertations or political words. Just lyrical turn of phrase and poetry, passages of a novel she always knew, after that, was in his head waiting to be written. He took those pages from her and dismissed them as meaningless. He doesn't know that she took one of those pages with her on her way out later that afternoon and has had it in her drawer ever since. If anyone were to ask her she would tell them his first love was writing, and her first love was him.