All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. A Handful Of Thorns Violet
It shouldn't have happened like this, she thinks, and then she throws up in the gutter. He lets go of her arm and steps back quickly, checking his expensive shoes. Then his hands are sweeping her damp hair back, rubbing her shoulders, and his murmur in her ear, "I'm sorry -- the egg rolls, probably -- are you okay?" She nods, or shakes her head, and is glad she missed his clothes and his loafers. He will remember the night badly enough without the cleaning bill.
When she was a small child, dandelion-haired at her parents' feet, they used to read her stories. Mostly fairy tales, about princesses and mermaids and peasant girls, tailors and frogs and heroes on horseback. They stopped doing that when she was four, when she began to demand answers to her questions. Why were these girls so silly? Why did they sit around mooning in towers and cottages? Why didn't the miller's daughter just tell the king flat-out that no one could spin gold from straw?
She cast herself as the prince instead, and she made the first move. She decided on it late one night, laughing on the phone with her old college roommate about how people were already pairing them up. How she knew there were winks and nudges in the bullpen, in staff meetings, whenever someone passed her in the hall. How gossip was so silly, so presumptuous, that if they really were a couple it wouldn't surprise anyone, just confirm suspicions.
"Honestly," she'd chuckled, "I could pounce on him in the Mural Room and he'd be the only one shocked."
That was when she decided. Because he was lovely, sinfully so, like dark Godiva chocolate or skipping work to sip wine on the beach. She was a grown woman and not a romantic, but she looked at his sleepy eyelids and sharp jawline and couldn't help picturing them blurred with lust. And if he thought of himself as riding a white horse, she could deal with that. She could make it clear that she was the same, a believer working for a cause.
It should have happened, she thinks now, the night they wrote jokes for the Correspondents' Dinner. That night he bickered and bantered with Josh and Donna until they sounded like three pieces making up one whole old married couple. That night he barely attempted to state a decent case for the ERA, and it rankled with her that he didn't think she rated his full powers of debate. But that night, too, she saw his forehead wrinkle as he studied Toby's glare. There were moments where she wanted to slide her arms around his neck, nibble his earlobe, draw him out of the bright room and pin him to a wall. But the rhythm was off, or the moon was in the wrong phase. She went home alone, and dreamed of forests and wolves and sarcastic reporters.
Things changed a few days later. She didn't know how or why, but the air vibrated with it, the walls sweated with it. She knew by the extra security in the halls that the President spent most of his day in Babish's office. And when her new boss stopped by her office, his lips were pressed together, his animated face unusually steely. She spent the next few days poring over files on prominent Republican attorneys, not knowing what she was looking for -- ruthlessness, she realizes now, not the vicious kind but the unrelenting kind driven by morality. Meanwhile, upstairs, it felt like a wall had gone up around the Senior Staff, or a hedge of thorns she couldn't hack her way through.
Babish assembled his deputies twenty-four hours before the press conference and told them. Her own reaction surprised her, still surprises her. She bit her lip while he talked about the disease first, then the possible implications of conspiracy. "You know what the best part is?" he asked, unable to resist the chance to lecture. "There is no malice, no clear-cut cover-up. It's all kind of touching and human and painful. Delicious, isn't it?"
He looked right at her then, as if he expected her to jump out of her seat with joy. Instead she swallowed to moisten her throat, and tasted blood. A lie is a lie, she thought; I should be morally offended. She was, of course she was. Deception on a grand scale; disgrace to the highest office. But below all that, on a level that rhetoric didn't touch, she was unexpectedly, unutterably sad. Partly for the man she'd barely met, but more for the men and women who worked closer to him, and then for herself.
She did not go home that night. She wandered the halls, stopping here and there to talk to almost-strangers: the redheaded Communications assistant, the short, round guy from House Legislative Affairs, a Deputy Something of Whatever who was running around with frantic energy, putting in calls to every Democrat she'd ever heard of and several she hadn't. She does not remember any of those conversations clearly now.
What she remembers is that somehow she walked the corridors until she was in the Communications bullpen, that she found herself leaning on the narrow strip of wall that separated the two offices, watching the traffic and waiting. She sank to the floor at some point, chin in her hand, and was sitting there in some kind of trance or daze or spell when he found her.
She was tired. He looked infinitely more so. His hair was spiked in different directions, as if he'd been pulling his hands through it for hours. His shirt was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot. When he helped her to her feet, his hands were damp and trembling and cold.
"Mrs. Landingham," he had said, talking to himself more than her. "The funeral. It's in the morning."
She had nodded dumbly. "I never met her."
"She was great -- she was--" He shrugged. "I can't talk right now."
"Sagittarius," she said.
He laughed, hoarsely and harshly, not sounding at all like the man she'd been keeping her eyes on. "Stupid. That we're still doing that, with the password, I mean. It's practically out of the box."
"I guess it is, isn't it?"
"I don't want to do this now," he said absently.
"What?"
"This. Dateline. The whole circus. It seems disrespectful, somehow." His expression grew distant again. "There ought to be a moment of silence, of mourning."
"You could put it off," she suggested, knowing it was crazy.
"We can't," he said, with a wistful, contradictory note in his voice.
She debated kissing him then, but it would have been like kissing her five-year-old nephew. She didn't want to take advantage of him, any more than she wanted him to sweep her off her feet. "Well," she said, smoothing her skirt, "I should get back downstairs. Um. If you need anything."
"Thanks," he said, and brushed past her gently on his way into the office.
Fairy tales, she remembered from her childhood, are about justice. Bad fortune comes to wicked witches and wayward children, to those who step off the path or break the rules. One of the men she'd been researching would be the prosecutor, the interrogator. He was the villain of the piece; or else he was the hunter, the hero. She wondered if Leo McGarry knew this day would come when he hired her. She wiped her brow in the heat of her office and thought: I am sitting in someone else's chair.
The thunder and the rain were not audible from the bowels of the building. She watched the press conference in Babish's conference room, the table crowded with colleagues who still rarely to her and some who granted her tenuous respect. When he spoke, they were all silent, as if they were in that room, as if there were not miles of cable and electricity but molecules of air bringing them his voice. "Yes," he said, "yes," and a moment of silence, then a rush of noise, applause, laughter, disbelief, questions in the room and on the screen.
The hours that followed were delirious. She remembered, sometime near dawn, carrying an armload of cans of Diet Coke while someone else hunted up more coffee filters. She remembered hours of debating niggling legal details, remembered C-Span's logo in the corner as the President announced the appointment of the Special Prosecutor. Shrieking reporters and rustling newspapers made her head throb. They were all gathering documents, so many forms and folders, so many sheets of paper forming a man's trail to the White House.
Somewhere in the chaos, she decided the day had come.
It was late again, very late, when she climbed the stairs, but it was hard to tell. No one had gone home, or slept more than an hour, or had a moment of downtime. But it was markedly different from the night before. The energy was not so desperate; fear and shock were giving way to business. Every gesture, every warning spoken, every movement was saying, "let's get this done." She didn't want to feel awed, an outsider again, but it rose in her chest and made her blush and smile.
She tossed her head up as she raised a hand to knock on the door. Before she could, he opened it, still obviously bone-tired, but as alert as was possible. They both stepped backwards in the same instant. "Oh, hi," he said, his voice scratchy and squeaky. "I was just going to find something, um, to drink."
"Coffee," she told him with authority, and thought randomly: Coffee, tea, or me? She made her move, reached out to him. "Come with me."
He looked at her hand quizzically. "Where are we going?"
"The mess hall's wiped out," she explained, shading the truth a little, but it was still true. "People have been scavenging the place for hours, Sam, and there's not a drop of caffeinated liquid left in the place. I think you might have some difficulty finding Powerade at this time. They won't be able to restock until tomorrow morning. Come with me."
His resistance to her smile had never been that high, she knew, and guessed it had been weakened by days of hard rain, hard decisions, death and disease and destruction. "Okay," he said, and they walked out of that place like a prince and princess, fingers joined, graceful, gliding and entirely unnoticed.
He lived a little further out than she'd expected, but his apartment, and his car, for that matter, were sleek, modern, angular and neat as she'd imagined they would be. He brewed coffee in his kitchen while she browsed the books on his shelf. She'd expected the political tomes, the old law texts and the classics of fiction, Dickens and Shakespeare in handsome editions. The yachting pictorials surprised her. "You sail?" she called.
He placed his elbows on the counter, watching her closely. "Some. Not as much as I used to. Not as much as I want to. You?"
"I don't do great on the water," she told him, remembering the nausea that always overwhelmed her when there was no dry land underfoot. "I think it's an interesting hobby though, all those sea shanties and legends."
"Here there be dragons," he said wryly.
She nodded as she shrugged out of her jacket and laid it on a chair. "And the other saying. Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Or shepherds, was that shepherds?"
"I'm lousy with weather forecasting." The coffee finished brewing, and he poured for them both. He sat down on a stool in the kitchen; she stayed on the living room side, keeping the counter between them. He downed his coffee quickly, not noticing its temperature, and was already on his second cup before she'd half finished her first.
"So," she said softly, blowing on the hot liquid. "Are you excited?"
"Sure." But he frowned. "I really don't want to talk about it. I've been talking about it all day and all night. I need to let it sit in my head for a while without analyzing or dissecting before I begin to know where I'm at. I don't mean to blow you off or--"
"Okay," she said, laughing quietly. "And I thought I was the one who talked too much, Sam. I just asked. I'm sorry."
"No, I'm sorry." He rubbed his eyes. "I'm out of it."
"I'm starving." She peered past him at the tiny, gleaming kitchen. "You got anything to eat back there?"
"Um. I haven't been grocery shopping in a while." When he opened the refrigerator, she noticed that he'd clipped magazine articles where he was mentioned or quoted, stuck them on the fridge with dingy sports magnets. It was funny, she thought, and depressing. "There's some Chinese food," he said. "Egg rolls, chicken chow mein."
"How old?"
He screwed his face up, trying to remember. "Monday, I'm thinking. I didn't eat much of it." He pulled out the carton and sniffed deeply. "It smells all right, but I wouldn't take any chances."
"I'm sure it's fine," she said, reaching across the counter to take it from him. "Anyway, I've got a cast-iron stomach. And at this point I'd eat a whole pig, complete with an apple in its mouth."
He passed her some silverware. "That would be quite a spectacle."
Giggling, she dug into the leftovers, not waiting for the plate he offered. He watched her, eyebrows raised, smiling with brilliant warmth. "You must have some kind of weird marathon runner's metabolism."
"Yeah, I'm a freak, Sam." She chased a forkful of noodles with a gulp of her cooling coffee. "That's better. I feel human again now."
"You look calm," he noted, his eyes intense on her. "You look like you haven't been on the rollercoaster from hell for the last couple days.
She welcomed the gaze, tilted her head back and stroked her throat. "Are you excited?"
"Ainsley, I--"
"I wasn't talking about work, Sam," she said, and her eyes were as blue and piercing as his. She was a sensible woman, and the first thing she did was slide her coffee mug to the side so it wouldn't get spilled.
Her first serious boyfriend, in college, had been too tall and gawky, an Adam's apple that bobbed unevenly, a cowlick that wouldn't lie down. And despite all of that, he'd been phenomenal in bed. Eric told her, one night while stroking her hair, that he was sure no girl would ever fall in love with him for his face. "I figure I have to make it worthwhile for you to stick around once you've seen me naked," he'd said, and she'd chuckled into his shoulder.
She knew Sam had never had that problem.
His grip slipped on the material of her skirt as he drew her up toward him. She knelt on the wooden seat of the stool, grabbed the edge of the counter for support as his tongue pushed between her lips. It was a good kiss, not magical at all but deep and sloppy. She started to undo the knot in his tie while he slipped his hands under her shirt. Soon she found herself impatiently climbing over the counter, almost tumbling into his arms while he unbuttoned her shirt, his mouth connecting with her chin, her cheekbone, her forehead, almost anywhere before it came back to her lips again.
She straddled his lap, facing him, and he bent to kiss her breasts, expertly removing her bra with one hand. He tongued her nipples, moving a little too slowly for her taste, so she wiggled emphatically in his lap, feeling him hard against her thigh. She ducked her head to kiss his ear, and when she pulled back, stray strands of her pale hair were streaked across the darkness at his temples. It was ridiculous that she was thinking about that, she decided, ridiculous that he was still wearing so many clothes. She got his dress shirt off, but gave up on trying to tug the undershirt out of the way when he kept lowering his arms to cup her breasts, and then part her legs.
She wasn't wearing nice panties, just cheap cotton ones in a faded leopard pattern, and she thought he noticed. But he didn't hesitate to move them down her legs, balling them up with her stockings and tossing them aside. His fingers toyed with the wet, swollen flesh between her legs, strangely but pleasantly arrythmic. Yet as she arched into the touch, it occurred to her that he was playing out a pattern, something he'd worked out, no more spontaneous or erotic than an instruction manual.
Somewhere between eagerness and anxiety, she reached to unzip his pants, wanting to touch him, guide him, take the lead. He shifted forward to counter her weight and keep them from toppling backward to the linoleum. He lifted her hips enough to enter her; she moaned louder than she meant to. As he pressed up into her, as she rocked against him, his kisses on her throat and shoulder grew more urgent and more despondent. There were moments where it was almost right, almost as transcendent as love. And then it fell back into this forlorn, foolish grind, uninspiring and unsatisfactory.
It had been something like a half-hour when he cursed and pushed her gently away, slipping out of her. "I can't," he mumbled, face furiously red. "I mean, I'm not going to."
"I'm sorry," she said, and immediately wondered why she was apologizing. She stood up awkwardly. "It's okay."
"It's not you," he said, adjusting the zipper of his pants. "It's just everything, and I -- shit."
"It's okay," she repeated, kneeling to gather her scattered clothes from the floor. She felt strangely calm, as if he hadn't touched anything inside her. "It's no big deal. It happens."
He blinked, and she assumed his long eyelashes were moistened by sweat. "The thing of it is, I think you're really beautiful."
"Well." She decided not to bother with her bra, pulled her blouse on over bare skin. "I think you're really beautiful too, Sam. And I think you should take me home now."
"It's late. You can stay," he offered. She was tempted, even though she could see the fervent hope in his eyes that she would refuse.
There was a fairy tale about cruel words and kind words, one that had never made much sense to her toddler-self. Wouldn't it be just as bad to have hard diamonds and gold nuggets fall from your lips as you spoke as it would to have toads and spiders? She had always tried to be nice without simpering, firm without being contentious. She had always tried to be honest, and then nothing unpleasant at all would form in her throat.
"You don't want me to stay," she observed casually. "You don't want to have to think about this, or look at me in the morning. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. Add to that, this is a very bad idea; I mean, my father would have you killed just to begin with, and I can't imagine that any of our many, many employers would be very pleased--"
"I was just asking," he interrupted.
"Yeah." She tilted her head. "This isn't the right time, that's all. Take me home."
So they'd finished getting dressed in the bright kitchen. Now they come down to the street, and she assumes they'll ride to her place in silence and she can go inside, shower, order her thoughts then. But he stops her for a second, catching her arm.
"What did you think?" he asks, almost demands. "When he said he would run. When you found out, and you thought he wouldn't, and now he is, what did you think?"
She doesn't know the answer, and shuts her eyes briefly, closing out the need on his face and the sparkle of streetlights on wet blacktop. "Yes," he had said, and things had been knocked into a different orbit, a train had changed tracks, a ship was sailing in a different direction. The story was a new one. There is, she thinks, reverting to the language of law, no precedent. They are aiming to do an impossible trick.
"I have no idea," she says. "I guess I thought this is going to be quite an interesting campaign."
"Will you vote for him?" he asks.
"I wouldn't have voted for him anyway," she reminds him, but suddenly she is not sure.
He narrows his eyes as if he sees her for the first time. She suspects he is remembering their arguments, their embarrassments, and she remembers herself that he doesn't really know her that well. "Okay," he says, voice bleak and empty and cold.
It shouldn't have happened like this, she thinks, and then the world seems to spin, her body seems to clench and the pavement waves like the ocean under her feet. She throws up in the gutter, and he steps back before he reaches to console her. And really that's everything he needed to say.
At home, she leans against the wall of the shower for so long that her fingertips crinkle, her mirror is clouded, her walls drip with condensed steam. Unresolved desire and groundless fear cycle through her, uncomfortable as physical wounds. She thinks: I am still a stranger to these people, still not on their level, still not within their walls. But she made the first move, and she will make the next one.
When she finally climbs into bed and rests, she dreams of gardens and the promise of a morning. In the dream, she is celebrating, and remembers that the word 'inauguration' has something to do with gold. In the dream, she is sure what she wants, and whose side she is on. Some of that even stays with her the next day, after the alarm squawks her into consciousness, and she dresses and makes her way to work.