Title: The D Line
Fandom: The West Wing
Characters: Andrea Wyatt/Toby Ziegler/Molly Ziegler/Huck Ziegler
Prompt: Riding the D Line
Word Count: 595
Rating: PG
Summary: A moment in time.
Author's Notes: I though of this on the train home from school today.

I see him everyday, even though I don’t want to. I’ve done everything I can to escape him, to escape my mother and my brother. At the beginning of each day I see my father and I see him in places most unexpected. Today it’s in my reflection in the window of the train: and I remember the scores of people that claim I have my father’s eyes. I have his eyes, I have his hair color, and I had his name. I keep telling myself that we are fundamentally different, yet it seems to come back to me that we are the same. 

I have been living here in this city for over ten years and to this day it doesn’t feel like home. I have no home any more: my parents have been dead for years, my mother in the ground and my father on the inside. The concept of home died and was buried along with my mother at Arlington. 

I’m heading back to my apartment to respond to a request made by my brother, Huck Wyatt, junior congressman from Maryland. He’s been asked to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Important moment and he needs the words. My brother: capable, intelligent, yet unable to write his way out of a wet paper sack. I reluctantly agreed, vowing silently yet again that this would be the last time I help him. 

Huck and I were inseparable as children. We did everything together except pass English classes. He would pass and I would fail them. When I was coming into my own, when I could compose the words the comparisons came about how my words were like my father's. I couldn’t abide by them, so I gave up writing. A few years before, when we were thirteen years old, my brother and I agreed to change our last name when we legally could. In our youth, Ziegler was not the burden it was until we came of age and President Bartlet died. These two events compounded our lives and we agreed that the minute we turned eighteen we would change our last name. Huck chose our mother’s name. I chickened out at the last minute: I could never be a Wyatt, I couldn’t live as a Ziegler. I read somewhere once that Tova was the female version of Tobias. As much as I wanted to abandon my father, I could not. I became Molly Tova. Our mother cried for eleven days. Our father had nothing to say: as if the betrayal was expected. 

I didn’t complete high school until well after our eighteenth birthday, without my father’s name and when the comparison of my writing to my father’s writing ceased. Since then, I’ve always provided the words: for the Westins, the Faisons, the Youngs, the Lymans, the Concannons, the Learys, who are the decedents of the McGarrys. The children born of the shadows of their parents and grandparents: people trying not to live the lives of their ancestors and failing so spectacularly. I even drafted comments for Dr. Bartlet once. 

I have all of these thoughts are in my mind as the train grinds to my stop. I have to find some paper I tell myself, I’ve always worked better on paper. As I gather my bag, I seem to recall that there might be some in a box beneath my bed. Important thoughts require paper to be properly expressed or else they hold no meaning. As the train leaves the station, I see his eyes reflected in the chrome of the train cars.

Title: Chelsea
Fandom: The West Wing
Characters: C.J. Cregg/Andrea Wyatt/Toby Ziegler
Prompt: N/A
Word Count: 528
Rating: PG
Summary: A moment in time.
Author's Notes: This was part of a larger idea that wasn't working. Here is a remnant. "There's something about the buildings in Chelsea that kills me."

Winter, 1984

It was a fifth floor walkup, the size of a closet, but it was theirs, and it showed. The only purchase that they made together was a solid square table, with four solid chairs. He couldn't tell you what kind of wood it was, because it was covered in law books and papers and folders and files. They had sold his hatchback for the money for a deposit on the apartment and that table.

Toby was militant about the mail and dinner and had both in hand when he came home. There was a butcher down the street and a grocer around the corner, and they knew him by name, because he would be at one or the other or even both at least four times a week. Both of the owners knew he was going to school, he and Andi, and they would be fair with the prices. There was even a few times where they'd let him take what he needed and pay them a day later. All they would ask is for him to remember them when he was a big shot lawyer.

Today wasn't one of those days. Winter holidays were almost about to start, and in that, there would even be a day where he and Andi could go shopping or ice skating and not think about law school. Clerking for the city didn't pay much, but they were prompt about it, and where most of it was saved for the next semester, there was enough left over for the phone bill and the whole chicken for tonight.

Once dinner was started, and after having a glass of day old wine, he returned to the mail. He wasn't disappointed; there was a letter there for him. He checked his watch, and saw that he had some time before Andi was due home.

He didn't like to read these letters in front of her; and she didn't ask. His sister in Chicago would write him once in a while, but most of her news was channeled to him from his mother. Hell, he wasn't even sure Andi knew that he got letters; he was the one that collected the mail. Of course, she had her own letters to contend with from her family in Maryland. He had supposed that she would ask who was sending him letters from Ohio, had she noticed.

Today's letter was in her hand; they would be from time to time, when she wanted to finish a thought in class. She had admitted once that she spent more than one class writing to him than noting the lecture.

As he stood there in the kitchen reading her words, he exclaimed "Yes!" aloud for the walls to hear. He finished her words, and tucked the letter into his briefcase. He poured himself a second glass of wine and held it high it the air in congratulations for her.

C.J. was leaving Ohio for California.

When Andi came home, they had the last of the wine with dinner over law books and typewriters, and he turned the radio up and they danced together. On that night, the two of them were happy.

Title: Walk Away
Fandom: The West Wing
Characters: C.J. Cregg/Andrea Wyatt/Toby Ziegler
Prompt: N/A
Word Count: 951
Rating: PG
Summary: After C.J. visits Toby to ask about Andi requesting a Presidential Pardon, Toby reflects.
Author's Notes: Something I was unable to finish. I had no title for it, and the Franz Ferdinand song came on. It doesn't fit except for this: "I cannot turn to see those eyes; as apologies may rise. I must be strong and stay an unbeliver."


"I missed you."

"Yeah; we had it good there for a while." She smiles.

"Yeah," he agreed, and then told her, "You should go." Sudden, because he is thinking of the office she holds. She shouldn't have come here.

"Are you kicking me out?"

"Yes."

With that, she gets to her feet, and collects her coat. He walks her to the door.

The hug they share is strange, it's not the same as other embraces they have shared, and it is in that moment, in his hesitation, he doesn't want her to go, even though they have a history of him leaving her behind.

It's when he shuts the door behind her that he realizes for the first time ever, he was the one that was left behind. It was difficult for him to acknowledge that they would part like this, leaving the unspoken just that, but somewhere in the back of his mind, down in the darkness that loitered there; he knew it to be a truth. Something like knowing the stars were in the sky above and that the earth was constantly below him.

For a fraction of a moment, in selfishness, he wanted to see her look back up, maybe glance up at the window, some outside acknowledgement that she too knew that this was all there would be. That she would view it as him forcing her away instead of what it really was. Perhaps the fact that she didn't should have given him some sort of hope. Maybe she was thinking that as long as he couldn't see her that this parting would be like others that they had endured before.

For a moment shorter than the thought, he hoped that it could be the same between them. Hope was something that never came easily to him; he found it more seductive to sink into despair. In that moment, hope was lost from his thoughts.

Their lives had taken them different places, and even though years had come and years had gone, there was love there. Even the period of seven or so years when he was married where they didn't even hear from one another could dislodge that. He had always loved her, in his own way, just as she had loved him in hers. Love, to him, was not a singular thing. It was not an item that was required to be constantly limited to one person, place or thing. She was surprisingly traditional in that regard, she wanted to give all or nothing and there was no in between. She wasn't the only person on the planet that shared that particular disability.

In time, she was one of the few people that understood his kind of love. He only wanted her know that she could love like he did; and there was time where he thought she could, but he was ultimately disappointed by his own aspirations for her.

As her car moved away, he moved away from the window.

He still loved her, and tonight, just being near her brought back all of the things that he loved about her. He loved to talk to her, to spar with her, to agree with her, challenge her and to put her in her place when he was right and she was so blatantly wrong. She was so stimulating to him, because he could be the teacher or the student when it came to her.

Sometimes the here and the now are disjointed from one another. One of them could be in a place, but not in the moment, or in the moment but not in the place. He had often felt that that was what it was between them. They shared the same places, but not the same time. They had even shared the same time, but not the same place.

At some point, he served himself dinner. He pushed the pieces of carved chicken around his plate for a time as he stared at her half empty glass.

One of the things that Andi had listed as a complaint about him was his lack of sentimentality. He didn't remember things like what the first outfit she ever wore was, or the shoes that she chose on their third anniversary. He didn't remember the wallpaper at the hotel they were married in or anything else that she that she deemed important. He didn't keep mementos like she did; not everything was worth having. Andi had never given him anything worth keeping, he decided once, and that angered her when he said it to her.

He thought of this as he went to his bedroom, and looked for a shoebox; one full of letters.

When it was found, he sat it on the table in front of him, for an undetermined amount of time. Long enough to push aside his anger at Andi, because he was angry at her, yet again, but she had no place in that box, and needed to clear himself of her presence in his mind.

Once he opened the lid, he brought a few letters out, like rare treasures out before him, in no order he began by opening one of the folded papers. He had no favorites; it was like asking him to like a single strand of her hair over the others. Each one of these letters was a memory, and she was poor about dates. He later learned that she would start letters and fail to finish them until days, weeks or even months later. He thought one day that he could group them together in general frames of time based on the stationary or the kind of typewriter, and never got past reading them instead.