Spoilers: Uh... I haven't actually seen anything past Two Cathedrals. But I've heard very few early S3 spoilers and I wrote them in, so call it that.
Disclaimer: Aaron owns them and it's probably best that way. I borrowed, I wrote, I'll give 'em back by tomorrow.
Summary: It was a good campaign, but it was doomed from the start.
Author's Notes: Many thanks go out on this one. Thanks to Rob for keeping me up late so I can have the three o'clock spark of inspiration. Thanks to Ayelet for having me over so I can write it on the train on the way back. Thanks to Luna for the beta. Thanks to Arkin for relentlessly annoying me until I actually got it posted
There In The End
White Star 2
It was a good campaign, but it was doomed from the start. Much like Roger Becker's movies and New Coke, she thought, the effort was wasted, because the core was rotten, the product. The candidate. And that's one problem even the best of advertisers, strategists, and PR people couldn't put a good face on.
And so they lost. It wasn't her fault, she tried to tell herself, none of them were to blame. Maybe the President, in the end, but no one would say it to his face. After the year and a half they had been through, no one would have thought about laying any of the blame on him. And so she tried hard not to take it personally, and she failed miserably.
She wasn't going to get to keep the job she'd grown to love and Democrats weren't going to get to keep the White House. It was a double loss for her, and it seemed like, at least in part, it was her fault.
"CJ?" Josh knocked softly on her open office door. She looked up slowly, her hands still deep inside the deep bottom drawer of her desk, discovering treasures that had been lost for four years and long since forgotten. Life Savers, pennies, Post-Its with names and numbers she only partially recalled. Nothing of any value, so far.
"Listen," Josh said with the same hint of desperation that had been in everyone's voices all month. The building was suffocated with it. "We're all going out for a beer in a bit. Sam and Toby and Donna and me. And maybe Ginger, too, if Sam manages to convince her by then."
"I'll pass," she said. She hated it - the sudden increased sense of community between them, trying to gather up good memories as fast as possible before they all go their separate ways.
"Are you sure?" Josh asked.
"Yeah," she said heavily. "I think I'll stay here."
"I'm going to miss this place," Josh thumped his fist against the doorjamb as he left. CJ looked around what was once her office but now was nothing but a disarray of half-packed cardboard boxes. It was night already, and it was snowing. The windows were fogged up just a little, failing to ward off the cold from without.
This was one of the better days. Since the election, she'd had worse. She'd had days when she could barely stand coming to the office in the morning. But now it was hardly an office anymore, and in six days some Republican who thought he knew what the world really needed would occupy it, the new voice of the new administration.
It wasn't as if her life was going to stop. She got job offers from all over the map, both political and straight-up PR. None of their lives were going to stop. Toby had accepted a job at Atlantic Intermedia. "Sold out," he said with a smile so tiny no one else would have noticed it. He was giving up on politics, leaving his losing streak behind him. Because, he said, if Josiah Bartlet lost, it was time to hang up his hat.
Sam was off to write speeches for some Governor from the Midwest that might be running for president in three years. Josh was taking a job with the Senate Majority Leader, set out to do exactly what Ann Stark had failed to do - reduce the new president to Prime Minister. "I'm going to make him regret ever running," Josh said, almost managing to sound proud.
Donna was going with Josh, Charlie was off to law school, Leo was moving back to Boston to consult. None of their lives were going to stop. But she wished the world would, for just a second, so she could catch her breath again.
Her time in the White House was out, and in six days she would have to take her things and leave. No one talked about that part - about having to clear out. They just silently packed their boxes, ready to leave empty rooms for their predecessors.
* * *
"You know, I always figured we'd get another four years," Sam said, as Toby played with his pink rubber ball. "I always figured that it's meant to be, that he's a good president and they'll see that."
Toby threw the ball against the wall, and Sam was slightly startled. It came back and Toby caught it, expressionless.
"We should do the farewell address," Sam said, hoping it would get some kind of reaction out of Toby. It didn't. "It's five days from now."
"It can wait another day," Toby said finally. Sam knew he was right. In the glumness of the building, everyone was tempted to procrastinate, even Toby. And Sam, willing as he might have been to just get it done with, knew it was hopeless to try.
The whole building was foreign, suddenly, cold. Computers were packed, files were moved, desks were bare. And Sam saw how it was the little things that made a place home. Even Toby's office, which had never seemed very decorated or homely to him before suddenly seemed deserted, a shadow of what it had been.
They were working half-days, as if time had stood still and the country wasn't there to be run anymore. It was someone else's concern now. The staff was wandering aimlessly through the halls, some, like Toby, like defeated giants, slumped and afraid to look up, others, like CJ, like ghosts ready to haunt the place and maybe scare all the Republicans out of it once they arrive.
They were going out almost every night, the whole gang, this bar or another, once or twice a restaurant so that Leo could come along. They talked about good times they'd had in the White House, friendships they'd shared in the past, how shocked they were four years earlier to wake up and find that they were working for the President of the United States.
But none of them talked about plans for the future. He knew almost everyone had them. But they were never discussed when they were there as a group. The feeling of friendship was just too fragile to be disturbed. One nudge in the wrong direction, and it would break. And then that bitter taste would be all they'd have.
The closer their eviction deadline got, the more aware he was that he didn't really know what he wanted to do. He'd accepted an offer to write for Terry Windham in Ohio, but that was nothing more than a first instinct of self preservation. He agreed to write - that was what he did now, write speeches, great speeches, even.
But he didn't want to be doing that forever. He wanted out of politics at some point. But he couldn't damn well go back to Gage-Whitney, or any other firm in New York. He could move back to California, to try to forget why he ran away from it in the first place. Maybe Chicago. Or, like Josh had said with a smile that wasn't cheerful but was a lot better than most he'd seen around since the election, he could stay and accept his fate as a whore for the Democratic Party.
It was an appealing thought some days. Maybe he'd even get to see the inside of the White House again. But, starting five days from now, they would be the opposition, the other guys. He wasn't used to that.
At least they got the Senate and the House, he thought. For the first time in twelve years, the Democrats had some legislative power. "And that," the President had said, "Is final proof that it's not Democrats that the people have a problem with, it's me. The American people are punishing me."
If he wasn't the President, if he wasn't smarter than all of them put together, if he wasn't twenty years their senior, if he wasn't in so much pain at that moment they couldn't bear it, one of them might have said something tactless like, "You deserved it." But he was all those things, and they knew better.
And so suddenly the West Wing developed a new set of unwritten rules for what you can and can't discuss. No talk of the future or of MS. No talk of why and how they lost. And suddenly he imagined Ann Stark in Leo's office and it made him sick to his stomach.
"We should start on it tomorrow," he told Toby.
"Yeah," Toby said and threw his ball against the wall again. This time he was just a little less expressionless.
* * *
As fast as Margaret was packing things from his office, Leo was taking them back out. He needed to work. He loved this job and he knew he only had four more days to do it. Not even four, he thought. Three. In four days, Robert Ritchie would be sworn in, and his office would be occupied by someone he'd probably loathe if he had the chance to meet.
No one else had their head in the game anymore, they were too busy packing and remembering old times and planning ahead. He was that young once, he thought. They'd move on, do other great things.
He didn't worry about them. He worried about the man in the office next door, the one with a wife, three kids, and MS. The man who just lost a Presidential election under the most horrible of terms and would probably never be remembered for any of the good he managed to do while he was in office.
On any given day, there's no knowing what he'll choose to care about, he told CJ once. More than ever, it showed now. There were days when he dragged himself into the office late and grumpy, swearing he'd take out his rage on anyone who dared mention a Republican. Other days, he'd wake up with more energy than Leo had seen him with in years.
Leo put away a memo from the Assistant Secretary of Transportation and put his hand on the knob of the door that connected to the Oval Office. He hesitated. Today was one of the worse days. When he finally opened the door, the sight pinched his heart. Unlike the rest of the building, which was being slowly packed into boxes, dissolving into nothingness, the Oval Office didn't change.
The President noticed him standing there, half inside, and said, "Leo, come on in." It startled him out of the thought and he stepped in and closed the door behind him. The President was sitting on the couch, the jacket of his suit draped on the chair next to it. He put down the book he was reading. "This should be wonderful," he said in a tone somewhere between lost and ironic. "For the first time in a long time, I can sit down, I can read a book. No one expects anything from me." Anger started seeping into his voice, though his face never showed it. "Let me tell you, there's a certain advantage to being a lame duck."
"Yes, sir," he was careful not to smile. If he knew anything about Jed Bartlet, it was that right now he didn't want to joke around, he was doing it out of habit. He didn't want to be left alone, either.
The President seemed to be the only one in the building with nothing to do. Toby and Sam were working on the farewell speech, Josh and CJ were overseeing the packing efforts. And only the man with the hardest job in the building, had nothing to do but sit in his office and read a book.
"Why don't you go up to the Residence?" Leo suggested, knowing it probably wasn't the best of ideas, either. Like the rest of the building, any part of the Residence that was customizable was being placed into boxes and trunks and shipped to various locations.
"Nah," he replied. "Abbey's up there scaring the stewards. I don't really want any part in that."
"Probably not."
"Hey, Leo," the President said after a moment of silence that wasn't really awkward, just intolerable. "I'm supposed to do this farewell address, right?"
"Toby and Sam are working on it."
"And then go out to the lawn and shake hands with Ritchie?" Leo nodded. The President sighed. "I don't want to." And suddenly he was the eighteen-year-old boy he'd only just met, wanting to stand up to his father and knowing nothing would come of it.
"Jed," Leo started and trailed off. He had nothing to say that was worth saying.
"We got beat," he said, simply, quietly.
"We got beat," Leo repeated.
* * *
Republicans were idiots.
They were idiots and their constituents were idiots. And Josh had long since given up on trying to make them see that, and so his only other option was to make them pay. And if that meant going back to work for people he'd had to insult and take out for a ride all through the Bartlet administration, then so be it.
It was weird to suddenly think of a Republican White House. It was not the right order of things.
Republicans were idiots, and it was starting to get to him.
Twice in the past two elections a president was elected whose party was in the minority. The first time it was the fault of the Electoral College. The second, it was the fault of the American people.
But Bartlet acted like it didn't really matter that much, most days. Josh knew him well enough by now to know that wasn't true, but he was a private man, and Josh respected that.
As for himself, he was as devastated as anyone else in the building, but what killed him was that he wasn't sure why. He'd been the one that looked at the polling numbers first, he'd had late-night conversations with Joey Lucas about the likelihood that they'd change. He'd been preparing for defeat just a little longer than everyone.
He'd known it was coming, and so by the time it had finally come, what really bothered him was knowing he was going to lose all of his friends. Sam was picking up for Ohio, Leo for Boston, the President was going to retire to New Hampshire, CJ had just accepted a job for some feminist lobby in San Francisco whose name he couldn't recall. Even Toby was running away - leaving politics for good.
Only Donna was staying, coming with him in hopes Wiley would make a good enough Senate Majority Leader to put him in the White House in four years. "Even if just as vice president to your guy." Sam had smiled back, nearly mirroring his smirk, and said, "We'll see."
And the days dragged on and on, and the body count in the White House slowly dropped. First it was the interns who went on Christmas break and never came back. After them, it was the congressional liaisons. Then the associate counsels, and finally, these past few days, even the assistants had slowly started dropping out.
Ginger took a job with some law firm in Baltimore. Bonnie was off to the other coast with some boyfriend he never knew she had. Margaret was still around, packing all of Leo's things - and her own - for the move to Boston. Charlie had already left, in time to make it to the start of Spring Semester at Yale Law. The President, for just that one last week, was left in the capable hands of Nancy. She left today. For two days, he would be alone.
They were all alone.
And in three days, they would all go their separate ways. He wondered how often they would look back, how hard it would be. He wondered if they would stay friends, any of them. His friendship with Sam had survived through thick and thin, though politics and distances and call girls. He like to think it would survive now, too. But he had no idea if it really would. He had no idea about any of them, and that devastated him more than anything.
"Josh," Donna said, grabbing his arm as he walked, almost sleepwalking, past the empty desk that used to be hers. He told her she didn't really need to come in anymore. She should worry more about their things being moved to their new office on the Hill.
"Donna." He smiled. It's all he had the strength left for, anymore. "You didn't have to come in today."
"I know," she said, more apologetic than he'd seen her, well, ever. Something was up. "Listen..."
He motioned with a jerk of his head and they stepped into his office. "What?" he asked.
"I talked to my parents yesterday. We talked for a very long time, about the election, about everything. And we decided that it's best if I go home for a while." And there it was.
"Donna..."
"I know I said I'd start at the new place with you, but I need some time off, Josh. I really need this. I wouldn't do it otherwise."
"I know."
She wrapped her arms around him tightly. "Thank you for understanding." He smiled, a little more wearily than last time.
They were all alone.
* * *
Masochists had always seemed stupid to him. He never understood what kind of person could possibly experience pain and then come back for more. And suddenly, he was one. This job had turned him into one.
He ran his bicycle into a tree, back in his first year. He came back to work. He got his weaknesses published in the Post and the Times, and he came back to work. He got shot, and he came back. He told the world he had MS, and he came back.
But none of it ever prepared him for the biggest pain of all, losing the election. In his entire life, he'd never lost an election until this one, and even that, right now, seemed like too much. It was the knockout, the killing blow, the one that would not be followed by any more pain, the one after which he did not need to go back for more, after which there was no way to come back.
Nothing in his life ever prepared him for how it felt. More than anything, it felt lonely.
Sure, Abbey was there for him, but she was never really on his side on this one. She was almost relieved when they lost, he knew she wished for it, even if it was only unconsciously. He was forced to live up to his promise that way, one term.
The staff were all handling defeat their own way. It was true, he felt close to them, he thought of them as his own children. But that kind of closeness, and with this job, only went so far. And so, now, they all seemed distant.
Leo was the only one that seemed to notice. He surfaced from his papers and phone calls every few hours to check up on him. Again and again he'd come in, asking him how he's doing, afraid too much time alone in the Oval Office with nothing to do might drive him mad. He might have been right.
"Mr. President?" Leo appeared through the door again, quiet as a prowler. He waited to be waved in before he entered, closing the door behind him. And suddenly the thought surfaced - tomorrow he wouldn't be Mr. President anymore.
Tomorrow he'd just be Jed.
"You know, it never changes," Leo said and he raised a questioning eyebrow. "The Oval Office, from administration to administration. The whole building changes, but this room stays exactly the same."
"I guess there's some measure of comfort in that," he said and Leo nodded in agreement. "Or futility," he added and saw Leo search for a response.
"I just got off the phone with Charlie," he said.
"Are you checking up on him?" Leo chuckled.
"Well, someone ought to," he said. "At least he's doing well."
"He likes Yale?"
"He hates it."
"Why?"
"Because it's three states away from Georgetown."
"He misses Zoey?"
"Wouldn't you?"
Leo smiled.
"This was my last job, you know," he said suddenly, surprised at his own moment of darkness. The months since the election had been flooded with them, but they caught him by surprise every time. "This is it."
"Well, it was a good one, Mr. President," Leo said with that rare smile of nostalgia and joy that he hadn't seen on him for months, maybe years. "It was a good one."
"It was," he replied, "But it's gone."
"No," Leo said. "Not until tomorrow."
* * *
Toby moved slowly through the crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue. The motorcade was coming through, and they were cheering senselessly. Once in a while there was a strange look from someone who recognized him, but they were all too happy to care. They'd put a man in the White House. They drove the evil Democrats out.
These people, covered in scarves and coats and earmuffs, out cheering for their new President in the freezing January cold, reminded him too much of all those people who'd come out to see them four years before. They looked almost the same. Somehow, he found that morbid.
It had been a frustrating campaign. He was trying to run an intellectual from New England who'd been scandalized and branded a liar. And if that wasn't hard enough, their opponent had campaigned himself as "an honest man of the people". He suddenly wondered if he was going to pull a Jimmy Carter and hop out of the car.
No, probably not. It was too cold, and Bob Ritchie was probably too stupid to see the value of the gesture to the people the way Carter had when he'd done it.
The first campaign, back when getting Jed Bartlet elected president was improbable and only seemed impossible, was an intellectual exercise. This campaign was impossible repressed and denied to the point where it only seemed improbable. It was devastating, and more than any of his other failed campaigns, because this time he knew what it was like to win.
He felt almost like a small child, running away at his first failure. But it wasn't his first. At minimum, it was his thirty-first, and he'd had it. He was good, that was true, but there was only so much disappointment he could take.
The crowd cheered Ritchie all the way from the car to the podium on the steps of Capitol Hill and Toby clenched his jaw. It stung, more than anything else. For that one minute, Ritchie's slow walk up the stairs, all of his tragedies, his humiliating moments, seemed inconsequential, miniscule. He wanted to scream.
Twice in two elections, the White House was occupied by the minority. Somehow he felt like both were his fault. The first time, he managed to get Bartlet elected. With only 48 percent of the votes, true, but he put his man in the White House. The second time... some days he wondered if he hadn't started sniffing around Hoynes and the oil industry, if he hadn't gone to Leo, would any of it have happened.
Would it have been wrong? Yes. Would he have felt better about it? Yes. And right now, listening to them cheer for a man he felt wasn't worthy of holding any public office, much less the presidency, he thought he might have been able to live with it.
He was tired of it. He knew it, but he never knew how much until Bartlet asked him to write the note he was supposed to leave on his desk for Ritchie. "I don't want to do it," he'd explained apologetically, "But I already told CJ I would and she told the press."
And so he sat down at his computer and wrote words of encouragement he didn't mean and a few praises he had up his sleeves for the people he really had nothing to say about. And he realized exactly how tired of politics he had gotten.
He started thinking of things they'd planned for their second term. There was so much they still wanted to do. "You have goals," CJ had told him when he announced he was quitting. "And even though you wouldn't like the rest of them to know, you have ideals, too. This is what we do. This is how you make them happen."
And it occurred to him that tomorrow morning he wouldn't be going to the office, he wouldn't be listening to her brief, he wouldn't be annoyed by Josh and Sam. And he didn't know how long until he'd see any of them again. Phone calls on special occasions, Christmas cards, birthday e-mails. Maybe dinner or drinks if they were in each other's new home. They were all going to go off and be rich or famous, and the group was a shattered glass, its pieces strewn all over.
And then, as if only to kick him when he was already down, the speakers rang out with the words he least wanted to hear. "I, Robert Ritchie, do solemnly swear," the knot in Toby's stomach tightened. Everything around him seemed surreal for just one second, then hard reality struck him again, and it hurt. "That I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States," he continued in a southern drawl, inconsiderate or unaware of how sharply each word twisted the knife in Toby's gut.
He didn't expect it to feel this bad. He didn't remember what it was like, maybe. Or maybe it was suddenly different. Perspective was everything, truth was nothing. It had been his job to prove that right. But perspective had changed, and the truth, inconsequential as it should have been, was not on his side anymore.
And so he did the thing that defined his political career as a whole, the thing
he was best at. He turned around and walked away.