Work Text:
scratch my name on your arm with a fountain pen
this means you really love me
and though i walk home alone
(i just might walk home alone)
but my faith in love is still devout
-- 'Rusholme Ruffians', The Smiths
The bar is the same. Two years has changed nothing about it and Toby is glad, because it is easier this way.
*
Sam is angry, and for a while -- in the cab from the airport, on the couch in Sam's apartment, the next morning, running into him coming out of the bathroom -- Toby doesn't know why. Sam scowls, keeps his lips pressed together, makes Toby feel like he's keeping score, keeping count as he never would have before, of every wrong word, every insult present and missing, that lampshades their distance.
Toby keeps expecting him to ask the obvious questions, the big ones, the ones that gathers in the dark corners of any room they share these days. All of them 'why' questions. Toby particularly expects him to ask the one that starts 'why did you come?' He's got no answer, or no answer that would make any sense to anyone else. Or no answer whose sense he would want exposed to anyone else, even Sam, who probably knows anyway.
Instead they sit in Sam's kitchen and drink coffee, and avoid things -- painful things, better things, the memory of things that were better. They reminisce in silence, and wonder what happened to the people they knew, who are now wearing their clothes and talking with their voices, but are not them.
"I heard about Ricky Rafferty," Sam says, without a tonal expression of judgement either way. "Josh was really pissed."
Toby feels like countering with a few reasons why he's been 'really pissed' at Josh since he started wearing the future on his chest like a medal, but they all die in his throat. The fight is too close. He can still feel the small cut on his cheek. He has run his fingers over that place every day since it happened, before he sleeps. Right now he wants Sam to put his mouth over it -- the little scar from which great hurts have now begun to grow; the hard black acorn he keeps nourished now that he is being abandoned, now that it is almost over and he can't bear it to go on, and can't bear it to stop either.
"Yeah," Toby says. "You know me and no-hope candidates."
"Did you fuck her?"
This is unexpected coarseness from him, and Toby wants to say: what has California done to you? or: you see, I said all this sun was going to addle what little was left of your wits but he can't. The look on Sam's face seems to be suggesting that he'd thought that Toby's sexual indiscretions with prominent party members began and ended with himself and the Congresswoman for the Maryland 5th, and even though it is tempered, slightly, by the hurt in his eyes, the tiredness with everything -- with these races, with the game, with Toby's own bullshit issues -- it is still a surprise. And so he does not know what to say.
"C'mon, Toby, it's a simple question. Nothing wrong with ... well, you know."
"Wow," Toby says, slowly, "Josh was pissed, huh?"
"You don't want to answer, fine."
Toby stares at him, trying to do the same trick that worked before, the one that is a mental thumb wrestle between their two viewpoints, in which Sam always backs down, unless it's a matter of personal liberty or the pursuit of the American dream. The trick doesn't work this time. Sam only keeps on looking at him, a slight square of his shoulders suggesting that he's wise to Toby's approach in a way that, of course, he was before too -- only he has no problem showing it now.
"No, I didn't ... fuck her."
Sam looks at him some more, as if he's trying to see the lie in the changes of light in Toby's eyes. Then lets his mouth shrug an acceptance that looks like it couldn't matter less to him, and says, "Okay."
He had been expecting a certain amount of clumsy sympathy, because if Josh has told Sam about Ricky Rafferty then he has definitely told him about David, about the funeral, about the fuck-ups, and about the fight. But then maybe Josh told it from a slightly different angle than it appears to Toby, who is still in the period where he needs to warn himself for the objects in his rearview mirror seeming closer than they are. Or perhaps Sam just doesn't care. To Toby this seems unlikely, but then, if he'd been asked before he got on the plane at Dulles, he'd have said that profanity, anger, and distance were unlikely traits for a Seaborn too, and look where that got him.
Perhaps Sam just grew up, while Toby wasn't looking. And he thinks that, if true, that might be the thing that hurts the most. Too many brothers have become uncomfortable men lately, and not the boys he loved, not the boys he kept safe, with his imperfect hands and his secret heart.
"Listen," Sam says, all in a long exhalation, his hands thrown up against the white background of his kitchen walls, "Do you wanna get out of here?"
Toby nods. "Sure. Where?"
Sam smiles the first smile Toby has seen since he landed in bad old CA. "I know a place."
*
The bar hasn't changed. The route there hasn't changed either, so Toby knows the punchline of the joke before Sam has delivered half the lines. He doesn't mind. He has nice, warmly drunk memories of this bar, where they drank every night of the last week they ever spent in each other's pockets. Sam resolutely downing bottle after bottle of beer despite Toby's best efforts to nudge him toward the hard liquor, the casual touches of their hands on the bar, and the tender kisses in the parking lot that were as far as they ever went then, by mutual silent agreement not to ruin each other's lives, back when they still thought those lives had further promise.
He smiles at Sam as they go through door. He has run ahead again, pushing through the doors like he finally understands how important he is. Not for the first time Toby wonders what has happened to him, which heart that was as cruel but not as kind as Toby's own pointed out the losses of kindness, instead of the virtues of arrogance. He doesn't buy it; he thinks it's an act. He's just not sure who Sam is acting for.
The bar smells the same too and Toby's never experienced such a dazzling proof of the connection between smell and memory: for a minute, as he walks in the door, with the smell of the ocean and the hotel and Sam's strangeness on his clothes and in his hair, he forgets all of it: he is wearing a tuxedo shirt and the associated uncomfortable tie and he is feeling the kind of sadness he doesn't mind letting onto his face, because it's Sam, and he's worth a proper goodbye, and a hug, and a promise. As he follows Sam to the bar and slips onto a stool, he nearly asks the waitress for two shots and a glass of beer, but stops himself. Sam is watching him, with an expression on his face that Toby cannot parse.
"Nice place," Sam says.
Toby looks at him, and gives up. " ... Yeah."
"You should drink something."
Toby shrugs and turns to the waitress, who is looking at both of them like they're crazy which though she cannot know the circumstances, Toby thinks is nevertheless perfectly fair, and orders himself a double shot of bourbon.
"Bud for me, thanks," Sam says, by Toby's shoulder, and Toby grins.
"Beer?"
"Did you want to get me drunk, Toby?"
In his peripheral vision Toby sees the waitress raise her eyebrows and make for the cooler cabinet and pull out a bottle of Bud, shaking her head. He can't help the smirk that arrives on his face. But Sam just looks at him, thanks the waitress, and downs half the bottle in one go.
*
It would be facile, Toby thinks, to just come out with it and ask him what the fuck is the matter with his life that he actually said yes to Toby's proposition of a long weekend together. Maybe he just heard the desperation in Toby's own voice; the need to get the hell out of dodge, just for a few days. D.C. stinks of disappointment and work that doesn't seem to matter anymore to anyone but him. Maybe Sam just figured that with his lost battle for a congressional seat, his latest failed relationship, and his $250,000 a year lawyer's salary, he would be able to appreciate the sentiment. Maybe he was just curious about the kind of plot twist that would make Toby Ziegler admit that he needs Sam Seaborn. Maybe he just wanted to poke at a wound. Toby doesn't know, but neither does it seem quite right to ask.
Actually Sam seems to be in a buoyant mood, once the first Bud has gone down and the second is being twisted in his fingers while he talks about Californian political in-fighting that was old news to the West Wing two weeks ago. But it is soothing just to hear him speak, with animation, with passion; like he still has what it takes to crash through every wall the Democratic party can put up in front of him, head first, at full speed ahead. And while Sam is talking Toby doesn't have to think about his own reasons for being here; exactly like last time, he can fill his head full of the other guy's problems.
Sam talks and Toby listens, orders more bourbon and enjoys the burn of it on his tongue and the slow dulling of his endless awareness of the steps of the dance they are doing around each other. He leans on the bar and lets himself drift. Sam keeps on talking; Toby could almost sleep.
*
Eventually he has to get up: if he doesn't either the lull of Sam's voice or the natural effects of the bourbon are going to get the better of him. So he makes for the bathroom, after a moment during which he didn't know if he should squeeze Sam's shoulder to say 'I'll be back soon' or just walk away, deciding on the latter, nearly colliding with one of the less sensibly placed of one of the bar's tables, exhaling his relief when he gets into the quiet, deserted restroom, and going to take a leak then splash some water on his face.
Toby is washing his hands when Sam comes into the restroom, his only warning a flash of white shirt in the mirror. Sam is steady, despite the three bottles of beer and the alcohol tolerance level he must have caught from Josh, but in his eyes something has happened: something that requires a response from Toby, some kind of acknowledgment of whatever has happened to them -- in this bar, or in the last decade of their lives.
Sam stands in the doorway and says Toby's name, then shuts the door ostentatiously, checking for any roaming patrons before he does so, and then leaning back on it, palms flush to the door.
"Sam, what the hell?"
"Just shut up, okay?"
"You know, I've tried not to say anything to offend what is clearly your terminally addled brain -- "
"You wanted to get me drunk, Toby. You wanted an excuse. Mission accomplished."
Toby thinks about saying: I want you to explain to me what the fuck is going on here and why you're acting like the spoiled seventeen year old jerk I know you never were, but he never gets the chance. Sam is across the restroom floor in a few seconds and his mouth is covering Toby's a second after that. They crash painfully into the stalls when Sam tries to walk him backwards towards some semblance of privacy, but he's better at that game than he looks and when he finds an open stall door he pushes Toby in first, then slips in himself, and locks the door behind him.
It's no use trying to say anything, but Toby gives it his best college try anyway: putting his hand on Sam's chest and trying to push him back against the door, make him say something, make him explain. Sam just shakes his head, no, Toby. There is, perhaps, the hint of a plea there. Let me do this. I'll explain afterwards. I promise, I promise. Either way there is no more time to argue, because Sam pulls him up from the seat of the commode and starts kissing him again, frantically -- not the way he used to, when his kisses were always bound up in his hero-worship and his need to get Toby's approval, as well as his lusts and the things he would rather have kept secret. Now he doesn't seem to care, not at all. He's unbuckling his belt and unzippering his pants as Toby starts to find the stride of the kiss, starts being able to give back rather than he taken from, and as soon as he hears the sound of the zipper Toby finds himself being pushed away, first back, with Sam's hands flat on his chest, then down, down, Sam's hands on his shoulders. Sam hooks one thumb in the waistband of his boxers. Toby shakes his head.
"Stop. I'll do it," he says. He pulls down the boxers, and pushes up Sam's shirt and tee, because he always liked that particular landscape, and it hasn't changed. Still warm enough to vacation in. He kisses Sam there, just the press of his lips. In the past it might have meant 'I'm sorry' but it doesn't anymore.
Toby thinks about how vulnerable he looks, how vulnerable any man looks with his pants around his ankles. He gave up the count of how many times he saw Sam like this, before. (He thinks 'in the old days', like some kind of inane nostalgic, like he could mark the time when old days became new days became the time he lives in now. The time he sleepwalks through.)
Still he gets on his knees. They hurt almost instantly -- the floor of the bar's back bathroom is linoleum over what appears to be some serious concrete; cold and dense and anathema to fifty year old joints -- but he rests his hands on Sam's thighs and tries to concentrate on that convergence of warmth and the contrast between the bones in his own fingers and the thick knots of muscle in Sam's legs. The hair on his legs is still negligible, just like a boy of fourteen and nothing much to show for it, but Toby wants to feel it against his skin anyway. There is a furry patch just before his thighs become his hips, where the line of muscle is most clearly defined. Toby passes his tongue over this, then his bare lips, his cheek. It is a strange thing to want, perhaps, but apparently needful because his cock jerks with the contact, coming up painfully tight in his pants. He readjusts his position, tells his knees to shut the fuck up, and suggests to Sam -- palms flat against the inside of his thighs -- that he part his legs a little wider.
He isn't hard, and Toby's glad about that. There's something about starting a blowjob on a full erection that has always made him feel powerless, like an accessory, and even now, even when he's getting off on his own self-pity and despair, even now he's not prepared to stop wanting to be the one who pulls every come out of the bag. He wants credit for this. He wants to make Sam feel it. Like he used to.
So, soft and tender, Toby fills his mouth with Sam's dick. When they first started doing this, Toby used to get drunk on the taste of Sam's cock, the tastes that lurked just under the head, where sweat gathered and that peculiarly Sam smell of soap, clean-living and idealism came from. He would spend whole weekends with his head between Sam's thighs, coming himself from the pure physicality of this guy's body -- the shapes; smells; tastes; textures; the sounds he made, coming; the relentless twist of his hips when it felt like he was trying to get away so Toby held him down; the way his beard would get wet with semen and he would rub it off on Sam's belly. When they first started doing this, Sam didn't even need to touch him back. All the reciprocity Toby needed was the look in Sam's eyes and the warm bulk of his body, and his own fisted hand.
Now, it's different. Sam is different, and Toby supposes he is different too, though he can't really see how. Now Sam holds the back of Toby's head, the heel of his hand digs into Toby's neck, and occasionally he pushes down, and Toby gags. There is an extra note in Sam's smell, and it reminds Toby of that day on Laguna Beach: watching him get washed out on the sea of a better career, or the distant promise of one. It had seemed like they were the only two who understood that he wouldn't be coming back, and if Toby hadn't hated the ocean before, he did after that. The smell is distance, and salt, and Sam's independence.
When Sam is hard, with a sweat gathering at the back of his knees but a ways away from his orgasm as far as Toby is any judge, Sam pulls away from him. His cock slips out of Toby's mouth with a pop and all at once Toby feels emptier, and colder, and shuts his mouth all in a hurry.
He gives Sam a look that means: what the hell? And Sam shakes his head, as if he's late for a meeting and doesn't have time to explain: just come with me and shut up for a minute. Toby rocks back on his heels but Sam gets hold of his arm and pulls him up, displaying the kind of strength Toby is sure he didn't have before. (Or was it just that he seemed like a ninety pound weakling?) Sam compounds the cognitive dissonance by shoving Toby hard up against the door of the stall and kissing him, rather like he's performing an interrogation. Which Toby supposes he kinda is.
Sam's hands pull at Toby's tie and the first few buttons on his shirt and then, when those are undone, his fingernails scratch underneath the neckline of Toby's undershirt and pull on his chest hair, and are joined by Sam's mouth -- biting, sucking, marking. He kisses along Toby's jaw, still using his teeth, biting through the hair, pulling, making it hurt.
Toby wonders: is this so different from what happened with Josh? Are there so many things between us that are broken that we don't know where to start? that it seems easier to knock it all down and start again? Did I fail you as badly as that, Sam? Are you going to write some more hatreds over this palimpsest? Are you going to break the skin?
He does, eventually, though it is only Toby's lip, which quickly feels swollen and tenderised, the iron taste of his own blood surprisingly arousing, if only for being different. The split hurts in a pleasant, throbbing way, and when Sam takes hold of his shoulders and pulls him around so he is facing the stall door, Toby is still running his tongue over the bump, pressing it, making it hurt. If he thought Sam was in the mood for it, he'd offer that up as a metaphor, free to all comers, but Sam is busy unbuckling Toby's belt and pulling his pants down past his hips.
The preparation is only slow and generous because they don't have any lube beyond spit and precome. Toby remembers a younger, sweeter Sam Seaborn lying on Toby's bed in his apartment in D.C. wincing and pretending that it wasn't excruciating to lie on his back or walk to the bathroom. Toby had laughed, behind his hand, at the time. But now he appreciates the kindness.
Sam's fingers are sure and light, and after each instroke he withdraws, spits on his hand, and goes in again, and again. But the limit of his generosity is strained by this strange, un-Seaborn-like desire to be angry, to behave badly, to take out on Toby whatever wrong thing has happened in his life since the night they said goodbye, in the lobby of that hotel, when Sam lied and said I'll see you soon and then fell off Toby's radar for a year and a half and only called when Toby had put away childish things like the strange emotion he can only call 'happiness' that he started missing more acutely once Sam had gone. Sam is angry, and Toby doesn't understand why, because, if either of them should be angry, shouldn't it be him?
Sam penetrates him slowly, to start with. Toby concentrates on the prickling sweat gathering at the base of his neck and the dislocated pulling sensation his knees are still giving him; one kind of pain being rather more preferable to the other. Sam starts slowly, but he goes as deep as he can, then waits, breathing against Toby's neck, his hand, his left hand, reaching around first to hold on to a fistful of Toby's undershirt and then to pull it up and rub his hand over the hair on Toby's belly, and then to take loose hold of Toby's desperately sensitised cock.
That hand stays loose and gentle all the time that Sam is fucking him, which he does with great enthusiasm, and great violence, and great sadness. Or so it seems to Toby. He feels like quipping, in the middle of the (admittedly pleasurable) beating his ass is taking: isn't this kind of thing my job? But when he says it in his head it just sounds like something Sam would say, and he feels confused all over again.
Sam comes, not inside him but pressed up against the small of Toby's back, so that the semen trickles down between his ass cheeks and makes him think of Andrea and how he could get turned on all over again, a matter of minutes after coming, from looking at her thighs glisten with his own ejaculate.
He's thinking about her still when Sam's grip on his cock gets tighter and faster and harder, and he comes himself with a unique mixture of images in his mind, and a stifled cry that could be anybody's name, and his forehead pressed up hard against the stall door.
It's hardly getting any less confusing when Sam turns him around again, gently this time, his hands fitting to the shape of Toby's shoulders, and kisses him. Anxiously. Apologetically. And fervently, like Toby is the thing that is going to save his life, or at the very least his soul. Toby instantly feels five years younger and five hundred per cent more certain about his purpose in life. Then Sam breaks the kiss and looks at him -- sweaty face, red flush on his neck, eyes much too blue and his eyelashes comically long and dark -- and Toby crashes again, remembers again, and sighs.
"Did I hurt you?" he asks.
This time Toby actually says the first piece of cryptic passive-aggressive bullshit that comes into his head: "I could ask you the same question."
"Toby."
"Sam?"
Sam smiles. Then really smiles, like he used to. "God, I missed you. I mean, I knew I'd miss you and I thought ... well, I thought, with you and Andy ... but I didn't think ... I thought it would be easier. Than this. Than pushing on the ocean."
"Easier than that?" Toby says, quietly.
Sam nods, and his hands on Toby's shoulders squeeze. "Yeah. Easier than that."
Toby shivers, without really knowing why. Then he smiles back and presses a light, dry kiss just to the left of Sam's mouth. "If it were easy you wouldn't enjoy it. You need to quit with the Catholic guilt. Some things in life are enjoyable. Easy. This isn't one of them, but my point stands."
"Well it would if you'd stop alluding to my completely fictional Catholicism."
"You don't have to lie to me, Sam, I can keep your secrets."
"Yeah, it's just getting you to hear what I'm actually saying that gives me trouble."
They smile at each other. Toby is dimly aware that he is still naked from the waist down and that Sam's come is drying on his thighs, that Sam's cock is pushing at the hem of his tee shirt, that his lip is still bleeding, that they look like the two most undignified men in California (which, Toby thinks, is probably saying something). But, astonishing though it is, the darkness seems now to be a shade lighter.
Toby can't help what he asks next, the secret question and the invisible plea folded into it, the thing that brought him here, to this bar, again.
"Would you ... will you, uh, come home?"
Sam smiles, and he gives Toby a look that seems to mean now? you're asking this now? And Toby shrugs, and tries a smile back, and picks at his shirt, and finds his hands closed inside Sam's.
"No," he says. "No, Toby."
The world collapses, and then rebuilds itself in one blink of Toby's eyes. But it's a long blink. He sighs, and nods.
"Yeah. I knew you'd said that."
Sam's hands are stroking his face now, thumbs picking out the flow of Toby's beard, pushing back against the growth then smoothing back down. He looks sad still, but no longer angry, as though all that was needed was one person to say --
"But it was nice of you to ask," Sam says.
"Yeah," Toby says, "I figured I could just have emailed, but I needed the vacation." He tries to smile. Sam tries to smile. They kiss again. Sam is holding on tight, with his fingers curled into Toby's shirt, then his arms wrapped around Toby's neck, his whole body making up for the distance, trying now to break through the incomprehensible matrices of these bodies that stop them, that will always stop them, being as close as Sam needs to be. Skin, muscle, blood and come: he wanted all of that, once, back when his easiest method of comforting his hurts was to press his head into the side of Toby's arm, in their bed, fast asleep.
Toby puts his arms around him and holds him as close as he can. Sam sighs against his shoulder, just like before.
"I guess I should say I'm sorry," Sam says.
"No, I don't think so."
"You didn't call me either, Toby."
"No."
"Andy. The house. Zoey." He pauses, takes a breath. "The twins."
"Your girlfriends that Josh fills me in on. The law firm in Manhattan -- yes," he says, "Josh let that slip."
Sam nods, sadly. "It's not the same anymore."
"No."
"Was it as good as I remember it being?"
Toby nods, once. His fingers stroke the hair off Sam's forehead. "Yeah. It was."
Sam nods again. "I'm sorry anyway."
Toby lets his eyes shift off to the blank space above Sam's shoulder. "Write me," he says. "Please."
"You want the corporate greed weekly newsletter?"
"No-o."
"Oh. Okay. Yeah. Okay."
Toby smiles. "Gee, that Word of the Day calendar is really paying dividends."
"Shut up."
"If I said 'make me', would that be a horrible cliche?"
Sam is grinning. "Yes."
"I'll think of something else."
Sam lays his head down against Toby's chest then, and holds on, so tight. He has his own futile request, Toby thinks, and it sounds something like don't go. He recognises it from his children, the way they cling to every available limb when he's about to go out the door. Four years old and they already know exactly how abandonment feels. He hugs Sam tighter.
"There's a later flight," he says. "And anyway, apparently I'm meant to take some vacation right about now."
"All right."
"Shall we, maybe, leave this toilet?"
Sam grins. "The waitress busted us two hours ago."
"Is there a back way out?"
Sam laughs, and takes hold of Toby's hand. "Come on," he says.
*
It is not perfected: the hatreds are still there, the angers, the rough stones of the reality of their lives now. As they make their way back to his place Sam walks with his eyes on the sidewalk, though now they walk closely enough that their sleeves brush, clip. And every few minutes Toby wants to grasp Sam's fingers, or allow his own fingers to slip inside Sam's cuff, just for a second, brushing them across Sam's wrist. When they are inside Sam's door, he pulls on Sam's hand --
"Wait -- "
"Toby -- "
"Just wait."
"I'm not coming back, Toby. I'm not coming back for you."
"Don't decide yet." Toby pushes him, gently, up against the door, kisses him. "Don't decide yet."