Title: "Gravity Fails Me"

Author: CretKid aka Cal

Rating: PG

Summary: "it crept up on me / ignored all my pleas / begging to leave / no justice to maim me / fell out of the sky / cease it to be / without a reply / gravity fails me"

Category: CJ/Toby, CJ POV

Disclaimer: Not mine. Asked them to play for the afternoon. Title from a Guster lyric, which I have been listening to non-stop ("Parachute", if anyone is interested).

Author's Notes: Happy Veteran's Day/Armistice Day/Remembrance Day. Make sure to get your poppy.

"Gravity Fails Me"

There is something different about the wind during the Fall; a laziness, a loudness that is unique to the season. During the Winter, it's a silent predator stealing heat from exposed skin and cracks in the wall. In Spring, it is harsh and unpleasant as it betrays the expectations of warmth and sunny skies. Summer winds always bring storms and as much as I love the sound of thunder and the flash of lightning, at times the abruptness scares me.

Fall is different. The wind takes on a personality all its own. Maybe it’s the scrape of dry leaves along the pavement moving in eddies and vortices and maelstroms. Or maybe it's the whistle through barren branches. The season speaks like no other and I tend to be more contemplative about it when I should be doing other things. Like prepping for my next briefing, or coming up with ways to defend my football pool picks.

Though, I've got to say, football is an insipidly dull game and the only reason I partake in this foolish adventure called the Underground White House Football Pool is to keep the vultures off my back about why I don’t want to partake in same said waste of my time. Five dollars a week is well worth the lack of hassle every Friday afternoon when the vultures traipse through my office to loudly debate who will win this weekend as I hand over my Abe Lincoln to get them to leave.

But I don’t want to think about football. It's only going to give me a headache and I've already got one and I just want to tell the voices in my head to shut the hell up for five minutes.

That didn’t sound quite the way I intended.

I sometimes play out dialogue in my mind, not for lack of an audience but because I tend to walk through many conversations before they even happen. Sometimes obsessively, but I don’t like to dwell on that for too long. It's like practice for the real event. I think about how I could have handled a press briefing better if the subject ever came up again. Or how to deflect a reporter when they ask a question that I cannot answer. How to spin a potential story so that it's not a story at all. Or how I'm going to confront my baby brother about what a fool he's been and that the woman he's seeing is not worth it but I would never actually tell him because I've seen the look on his face when she's sitting across the table from him. That sort of thing.

When the voices in my head get to be too much, I often find myself standing outside in not enough layers, listening to the landscape. Thinking and contemplating things probably better left unsaid when I'm in a melancholy mood, or remembering a joke or a story that I had once heard and can’t get out of my head to save my life. It's peaceful, an escape and despite the cold, I rather like it out here. Even the Marine down near the portico entrance to the Oval Office no longer fazes me. And after a while, the chill will drive the noise out of my head and I can get back to presiding over the chaos that is my job.

Though, some would say that it's not the chaos of my job that has me standing out here in the cold without a coat or sweater. Some would say that I'm trying to avoid a different chaos all together. One that is not apt to follow me, as this particular chaos has an irrational fear of all things outside. At this point I'd rather not think about that one either.

And sadly I've just realized that I'm having this conversation in my head. I haven't figured out to whom I am talking but that's just going to increase the pressure behind my sinuses and things will really get ugly from there. This is precisely why I don't keep a journal because it's times like these that I would just rather have it out with my conscience and let that be the end of it. I don’t need a scandal to come out of someone reading pages I wrote in some dilapidated cloth-bound book about these once-in-a-blue-moon travesties of cosmically lousy bad-timing. It's like having a song lyric stuck in your head. It should be that simple.

The sun is starting to set and it's not even 5 o'clock yet. This has always perturbed me in some fashion from the time I was a child. I realize that I am changing the subject, but the sun setting is a fairly apt description of the type of mood I'm in right now. I once spent two months in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I was much younger and in much better shape, both mentally and physically, playing camp counselor to some disenchanted youth whose parents felt their child needed time out of the city. Or maybe the parents wanted time away from their children, I was never quite sure. It was a summer job -- more of an internship-- and it paid fairly well for being just that. And I got the chance to see some amazing sunsets. Almost my entire photo catalog from that summer has a sunset as the backdrop.

I would pull out an Old Farmers' Almanac and find out when the sun was supposed to set each day just so I could go find a place to watch it in peace and quiet. I haven't had much time to do that lately, not in the last 3 years at least. There hasn't been much time for anything, which is probably why I am out here in the cold without a sweater. So I can stop having these running dialogues in my head as I explain to my parents yet again why I am not married and providing them with more grandchildren.

This isn't working. The wind is blowing; I can feel it on my cheeks. But there's no sound, no scraping of leaves. The groundskeepers here are much too good at their jobs.

Maybe that's why I'm outside in what some might call frightful weather.

If you had asked me as a child what my father did for a living, I would have said, in my entirety of 6 years knowledge of the ways of the world, that my father was a tree doctor. He made sick plants feel better. In reality, he was the groundskeeper at the University of California at Davis campus. He has a Masters degree in horticulture science, but rather than take a job in industry or academia, he chose to run the botanical gardens on the campus. He would drive the hour or so from our house in Napa to Davis every day, leave at the crack of dawn and get back in time for dinner at 6 P.M. sharp.

I can remember one day when I was seven or eight years old. For some reason I must not have had school and I distinctly remember leaves scraping on the ground so it must have been a fall school holiday, a teacher conference or something similar. Maybe it was Veteran's Day, which would make sense to me seeing that today is Veteran's Day and I always think of my dad on Veteran's Day and I associate my dad with the outdoors. I'm willing to bet that right now he's out tending his vineyard.

Anyway, I was seven or eight and at that precocious age I refused to be left with a babysitter that wasn't a family member. Suffice it to say my parents did not go out much. My brothers had arranged to be elsewhere, probably a friend's house, and I was packed into the family station wagon with my brother's heavy flannel jacket, my vineyard boots and a paper sack lunch to spend a day at work with Daddy. It had been a particularly windy day and I remember being entranced by the leaves dancing just a few feet above the ground as I helped my father move plants from one greenhouse to another. The walks had not yet been cleaned of leaf debris. A sudden downburst swept leaves in my path and surprised me. I remember my dad laughing at my expense as I had made enough noise to wake the dead.

Somewhere my father has a picture of me trying to chase the leaves that day. I found it again when I was out there for his birthday last spring. The entire event came back to me as if it had happened only a few days ago rather than 30 some-odd years. I miss those days. Things were a lot simpler then.

There's the faint scratch of rubber-covered wood on pavement and I know I've been found out.

"I can’t believe you chose the Vikings over the Eagles."

I drop my head to keep from laughing. There's no need to turn around to discover who has just invaded my personal time and space. There's a new weight on my shoulders that I recognize to be my coat. Toby must have gone into my office to fetch it. His hands stay near my shoulders for what is longer than strictly necessary. He's probably just trying to gage my mood by the tenseness of my shoulders. I'm going to have one hell of a headache later tonight.

"I'm not going to justify my football picks to you," I say, refusing to slip my arms into the sleeves. The whole point of coming out here without a coat was to be without a coat. However, Toby-Hen sees this differently, has always seen this differently and probably will for a long time to come. I continue to look at the sky as the light starts to diminish.

"But the Vikings? They are 0-3 on the road. How the hell did you pick your list?"

"I flipped a coin," I reply sarcastically, which isn't far from the truth. I had printed out the team match-up summary as I always do when picking-time comes along, laid the laser printed pages on the floor and dropped a handful of pennies over the team names. The teams with more pennies got picked. Simple. Leave everything to chance. Any more thought into the process would be tempting fate to intervene and me with an even bigger headache as the vultures dissected my formula for who's going to win the game.

"That's just… wrong," Toby finally sputters. He knows that I hate football, yet we carry on this conversation every single Sunday for 16 weeks, 20 if you want to count pre-season. Yet he won't share his picks with me. So much for chivalry.

He probably knows that I came out here to be by myself for a time, but Toby has always had this radar sense when something is amiss. I would be surprised if he admitted the real reason why he is out here without his jacket. If asked he would say that he had come looking for me in my office under the premise of making fun of my football choices. I know that he's got a cigar in the upper left breast pocket of his knit shirt. If he had been caught on his way outside, he would simply say he was headed outside to fill his nicotine quota for the week. All the bases are covered.

I find it kind of scary that I know these things. I find it equally scary that it is a comfort in a way as well.

"Are you going to Napa for Thanksgiving?" he asks.

I don’t know why, but I look at my watch to find the date. It's really absurd. I know what the date is, but there's this symbolic gesture in looking at one's watch just to verify that you've got it right. I do it even when I know there's no date on my watch, which in this instance happens to be true.

At my action, Toby grumbles, "I'm making up for last year when I asked you 2 and half hours before dinner by asking 2 and half weeks in advance."

I curl my hands under my arms for warmth. I still refuse to put on my coat. "No. My parents are visiting my brother and his family in Santa Cruz."

"So, you’re free? No more glamorous invitations for you to pick and choose from?"

He's teasing me. I was supposed to go out to Napa last year, until I found out that I was scripted to play cruise director for the Thanksgiving Carnival. I have dumped that on Simon this year. With the promotion comes the commotion. Ha, I rather like that. I'll have to remember that one.

The fact that I had cancelled my plans last year got lost in the ether. For a week after Thanksgiving, I found a different pastry sitting on my desk when I came into work. The audacity of the man, thinking he could buy me off with a few sugar coated desserts. Not to mention the whole Troy and Eric thing.

Fortunately for him, it worked.

"I'm all yours."

Toby smiles slightly at the double meaning and joins me as I lean over the railing. We stand there silently as the last vestiges of color give up the ghost and all that's left is twilight blue.

"I thought you weren't coming in again today?" I throw out into the air. Toby chooses odd times to decide that his weekend is his and his alone and apparently this weekend is not one of them.

"I wanted to go over next week's radio address with What's His Name."

I have to laugh at how Toby shakes his hands when he can't be bothered to remember the name of one of the junior staffers. He doesn't remember the names on purpose; he can recall every detail of the Yankees' loss in the World Series last weekend and is more than willing to recount the game ad nauseum. It's supposed to be part of his persona as the boss who has more on his mind than to remember menial trivia when I know for a fact that he knows the birthdays of all the support staff.

"Tommy," I supply out of instinct.

Toby nods his head and repeats the name. "I knew it began with a 'T'. He's finishing the next draft. I should go look in on him in a few minutes. Make sure he's not drowning in a sea of no punctuation and superfluous language. Best not to leave him to his own devices."

I know somewhere in that little diatribe is a veiled concern for leaving me to my own devices, but I don't want to think about that one either. It really does spook me that Toby can pick up on any bad-day vibe I could be sending out even though he hasn't see me since I got in this morning.

Toby's starting to not exactly fidget and I can tell there are other places he wishes to be, warmer places away from the elements.

"Have you driven the voices from your head yet?" he asks to move things along.

During a particularly harassing Toby-moment, he had asked me if I had practiced the 'you are a hypocrite' speech I had just delivered right to his face and stupidly I said 'yes'. He laughed at me, asked if I did that often and it really is hard to be pissed at someone when he is laughing so hard he'd be near tears.

I smile wryly and turn so that my elbow is resting on the railing. "I'm going to regret telling you that, aren't I?"

Toby shrugs his shoulders and steps just that much closer. "Have you talked to your father yet today?"

Really, how the hell does he know I am thinking about my father?

"Yeah. Told him that I bought my poppy from the VFW stand on the Mall." I point to the bright red paper flower on the lapel of my jacket.

"Good. Are your parents still planning to visit sometime before the administration ends?"

"Latest scenario is in the spring," I reply, mentally cringing at the logistics of the entire thing. "Possibly for Easter. He wants to see the Korean War Memorial."

My father refuses to fly. Hasn't been voluntarily on a plane since he came back from Korea. There have been times when the family has been able to coax him to get on a plane, but it's like trying to drag a stubborn mule to water. The plan of attack is to get him on a train across the country. He's never visited any of the national parks in the East. If we can convince him to leave his vineyard for a month, my brothers and I think he would have an excellent time travelling by car and train across the United States. My mother, on the other hand, will probably want to dump his body in the Potomac, or any other handy body of water for that matter.

Toby just nods and looks forlornly through the glass doors that lead to the West Wing. He looks at me and by the look of recognition in his eye he knows I'm not quite ready to go back inside. Grabbing my coat, he holds it out for me.

"At least put this on properly."

I acquiesce and push my arms through the sleeves. Toby turns me around so that he can fasten the buttons.

"I'm not five years old, Toby. I can do up my own coat," I say, but make no move to push his hands away.

"I will not be the one to have to call your father to say you've caught pneumonia and are spending the Thanksgiving holiday in the hospital," he says softly. From his back pants pocket he pulls out his wool scarf and wraps it around my neck. "Don't stay out too much longer."

As he moves to leave, I catch his hand. I don’t want to ask if he's doing anything special this evening and if he wouldn’t mind --

"Give me an hour to finish what I need to do here," he says as if reading my mind. "Sit down or take-out?"

"Take-out's fine."

"Okay. I'll come find you in an hour and it had better not be out here," he adds with a hint of warning and mirth.

I smile and go back to my musings. I know he's going to be looking through the window every few seconds to make sure of where I am. And I have to wonder if in some small part of my brain I came out here because I knew that eventually he would follow. That on some instinctual level I knew that he would pick up on the fact that I need a shoulder to lean on or cry in to or whatever it is that's bothering me. That I would have to ask otherwise and I really, really hate admitting this sort of thing.

There's just this nebulous sense of -- hell, I don't know what it is. It's sitting on my shoulder like some sort of incubus and at the best of times whispers in my ear that there could have been a different life for me if I had chosen to go one route over another. Every once in a while I go through this stage of second-guessing everything I've ever done in my life. What if I had finished the PhD instead of taking on a second Master's degree? What if I had stayed in California as I had always intended? What if --

What if Toby hadn't recognized the first time this happened during the first campaign and convinced me to stay? Otherwise, I might be pretty pissed that he thinks he can read me so easily. Or the fact that he can anticipate these episodes before I even recognize one's coming.

It just infuriates me.

I don’t like this little dependency thing I've developed. I don’t like the fact that it keeps me up at night.

My father used to anticipate what he would call my 'Claudia episodes'. The pre-first-day-of-school jitters that I am ashamed to admit did not end until well past college. The mid-term butterflies. I don't know when the torch passed on to Toby, but I'm grateful just the same.

As I turn towards the entrance to go back in, I catch Toby's eye as he stands there waiting for me. He's trying to be nonchalant about it, for which I suppose I should be thankful. Anchoring my resolve, I shove my hands in my coat pockets to warm them. He's at the door, holding it open for me and I have to wonder how long he would have stood there waiting and watching, clearing the path and catching me before gravity fails me.

End