Breaking Down

By Nomad
July 2003

Spoilers: This story goes AU somewhere around late season three, but backstory established in the season four episodes "Debate Camp" and "Holy Night" is also fair game.
Disclaimer: The characters and concepts used within belong to Aaron Sorkin; I'm just borrowing for non-profit purposes.

You can lose your hope and pride
When it comes to broken dreams you'll get your share
Sometimes a man breaks down, and the good things he is looking for are crushed into the ground
Get on up, look around; can't you feel the wind of change?

- Wind of Change, The Bee Gees

I

MONDAY:

It was still strange, waking up in the mornings. Strange, and not at all strange, in a way that made it seem for the first few breaths of wakefulness that the last five years had been a very convoluted dream.

Most days, it was hard to say if that was an attractive proposition.

Toby had always woken early. Stealing off in the last gasps of the night had been a habit long before there had been reason why it might be a better idea than waiting around for daybreak. This morning, however, he could tell from the tenor of the silence beside him that Andy was awake. Strange, how you could be apart for longer than you were together, and still remember the pattern of someone's breathing.

He rolled over. "You're awake."

Andy snorted slightly, perhaps amused by his stating of the obvious. "Yes."

There was a pause. Toby had never been one to be inclined towards unnecessary small talk, and Andy knew that about him. They still fitted together; even the places they were awkward felt familiar. Their gravitation back towards each other had been, he supposed, somewhat inevitable.

Whether it would last was a more of thorny question, and not one he thought he had all the data to calculate an answer to. Their marriage had foundered in the middle of a re-election campaign and the growing realisation that the children Andy had wanted so desperately were less and less likely to become a reality. With those factors not gone, precisely, but at least muted by the passage of time, it was difficult to predict where this was going. If it was going anywhere.

She tilted her gaze his way. "You're going to work?"

"Yes."

Andy nodded, and that would have been that, but he hesitated because something was a beat off, and he didn't know what. He waited long enough that she looked up at him again in the darkness.

"What?"

"You're... strange."

This time it was a real snuffle of laughter. "And you're a real sweet-talker, Pokey," she sighed, brushing back her hair.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing... nothing," she repeated more firmly, when her first assurance came out with not quite the tone she'd intended. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps it wasn't.

He had to go to work.

Sam was stirred out of sleep by a strange and unidentifiable creaking of the floorboards. Registering Steve's absence at his side, he pushed himself upwards with a frown.

"Steve," he said eventually, "what are you doing?"

"Push-ups," his boyfriend said matter-of-factly, letting out small huffs of breath that suggested he was counting just below the point of hearing.

"At..." Sam glanced over at the alarm clock, but couldn't quite make out the digits, "the kind of hour where, you know, it's still too dark to actually see what time it is?"

"I'm trying to cure my writer's block."

He hesitated for a beat. "By building really strong arm muscles?"

Steve fell momentarily into decidedly more lopsided push-ups as he pointed an accusing finger at Sam. "You," he panted warningly, "should not mock me. You're a writer. You should feel my pain."

"Well, I'm feeling pain right now, but I think it's mostly repressed memories from gym class. Can you stop doing that, please?"

Steve lowered his chest onto the floor, and frowned up at him. "It clears my head."

"And that helps you write?"

"Not so far, but I'm optimistic."

Sam rolled his eyes, and dropped his feet over the side of the bed. "I'm gonna take a shower and get ready for work."

"Oh, fine, fine. Leave me to my agony."

He bent down in passing, and brushed a quick kiss over Steve's cheek. "You'll get over it."

He went to take a long, warm shower in preparation for work. The January air was miserably cold to his California-raised skin, but he always liked the stillness of the world in winter. A new year; a new beginning.

Perhaps this one would pass a little more smoothly than the last.

"Okay, Josh, what the hell happened?" Leo demanded, rolling his eyes.

"Well, for once, it wasn't me that did it," he announced, brushing back his hair from his forehead.

"The deal got leaked?" Toby asked. CJ pulled a face.

"I don't know how they got hold of it. Who even knew?"

"Us... McGann, Wiley and Goss," Sam enumerated helpfully. CJ shook her head in puzzlement.

"It doesn't make any sense. They're our guys."

"This setback could push us back weeks, maybe even months," Josh groaned. "We had those votes, Leo. We could have pushed it through committee like that." He clicked his fingers.

"Now?"

"We can still do it, but it's gonna take time to regroup. The second they found out what we had on the table, they were wooing our senators away like a con artist through an over-sixties singles bar."

Leo grimaced. "Joe Bridges is gonna be laughing."

Sam looked up. "Any possibility he could have-?"

"How?" Toby demanded. "We had it sewn up our end. And nobody their side is a friend to Senator Bridges."

Leo glanced at Josh. "Josh, find out how this happened. And make sure it doesn't happen again."

Josh nodded solemnly. Leo shuffled his papers.

"Okay, what else?"

"Leo, is the president okay?" Sam asked, leaning forward. "He seemed a little... subdued, Sunday."

Everyone was relieved when Leo smirked. "Yeah. The president has a bit of a winter cold. Because the president is four years old, and when it snows, he has to go outside and play in it."

"He caught a chill?" CJ asked incredulously.

"Yeah."

"President 'Back home, this would be unseasonably warm for summer' Bartlet caught a chill?"

"I know."

"Was he wearing a coat?"

"You know how the president feels about coats."

"I have to tell the press corps that our New Hampshire born president went outside in the snow without a coat and caught a chill?"

"Apparently, in New Hampshire, people do not wear coats out into the snow. Which really begs the question of why the population of New Hampshire is still as high as it is."

"Survival of the most thick-skinned," Josh put in sardonically. CJ snorted.

"You can talk, Benadryl boy. One sneeze and you're calling out the CDC to put you in isolation."

Josh shot her a wounded look. "I'll have you know, that was a particularly virulent strain of twenty-four-hour flu."

"So virulent, apparently, it was gone in fifteen minutes," interjected Toby.

Leo smiled. "So, yeah, it's just a cold. But people, try and keep the little things off his desk, okay? It's not that long until the State of the Union, and he'd run himself into the ground if we let him." He secured a series of nods, and straightened up. "Let's try and keep this a light week."