Title: "Stand Clear"

Author: CretKid aka Cal

Category: post-ep to "The Women of Qumar", CJ/Toby

Rating: PG

Summary: "you can rattle off your talk / all that matters is all I see / if you break me down / selfish desire / is all you'll blame / 'cause desperate times / call for desperate measures / and I am not ashamed / oh it took me a long time to come to this / and I've chosen my path"

Disclaimer: Not mine and not used with malicious intent.

Author's Notes: Title and summary again from a Guster lyric, "Eden". It's been on repeat in my CD player for a long time now. Thanks to my beta readers, you know who you are.

"Stand Clear"

===========

The door to her office bounced instead of clicking closed. It stood open a fraction of a foot, yet another thing in her life guilty of betrayal. It's not like she slammed it closed. This time. Hell, they could take the damn door off for all she cared. A door was supposed to keep the bad guys out, the fire in the corridor, the monsters at bay. Fat lot of good it was doing lately.

CJ hadn't called a full lid, though she wanted to. The Labor Secretary was going to be briefing the Press Corps in less than 20 minutes: that alone would require some sort of response from the White House. She did know that she was not the person to do it: if she had to think about school to work initiatives for more than the few seconds it took her tongue to wrap around the words it was going to send her fatigued mind into fits. The presumptive positive had been farmed out to the Department of Health and Human Services. The public would be informed at the very least, she could stop thinking about that one until it hit the papers tomorrow morning. Fourteen hours to come up with a response was more than enough time, even if it was a statement of deferment to the Health Department.

She dropped like a lead weight onto her couch, leaned forward and started to massage her temples.

The day wasn't supposed to be this draining. This sort of mind numbing, bone tiring exhaustion -- it wasn't supposed to be this way. She had woken up energized, despite a pitiful 4 hours of sleep. She had been ready to take on the world. Staff with her deputies had gone well. There had been no surprises waiting for her until Toby walked in on her meeting.

CJ supposed that she had telegraphed well the message that this was it for her today. It had taken a few minutes for CJ to get into the swing during the 5 o'clock briefing; the catch in her voice had been a dead give away. Carol had been watching her like a hawk from the moment she stepped up to the podium. Carol had not followed her when CJ slunk out of the birthday celebrations. Just before CJ left she had spied Carol talking to Henry, no doubt getting him to take the last briefing of the day.

She didn't know exactly when Toby started showing up in the back of the room during one or several of her briefings throughout the day, only that his visitations had become more frequent with the 'relieved' remark last May. There had been no rhyme or reason to his appearances in the back of the room and for that reason alone she did not resent his presence. If he had only been there to monitor what could be foreseen as politically problematic if she misspoke even one phrase, she would have laid into him with more than just words.

But he showed up today, after their show down in her office when Josh was told of the Mad Cow case. After she had barged in on his meeting with the veterans. He had stepped on her toes in her arena on how to deal with public opinion. She had stepped on his toes in his arena of dealing with patriotism and freedom of expression. They had been so wrapped up in their private war of one-up-man-ship that neither could present an argument for their case until forced to in front of the President.

The hand gesture threw her for a loop. In his own way, she decided, Toby was trying to apologize.

Maybe for the Administration's stand on the Qumar matter and the fact that she had to justify it even though she didn't believe in it.

Maybe for springing it on her in public, in the middle of a meeting with her deputies, when he knew well of her response to the news.

Maybe for siccing the National Security Advisor on her right before her briefing.

Maybe for dragging her into this rat race from the onset.

CJ didn't know and really didn't want to consider the options. It had gotten noticeably darker outside in the last hour. It had been a long time since she had seen sunlight in all its glory. In to the office before 7 AM, lucky to be out before 11 PM. Too many nights at home had been spent playing catch-up from the day before, the week before, the month before. There was a mountain of work waiting for her on her desk. She just wasn't ready to attack it just yet.

Several briefing binders were sitting on her coffee table. She chose one at random with one hand and grabbed a throw pillow with the other. Propping the pillow against the arm of the couch, she leaned back against the cushion, careful to remove the clip from her hair before lending any weight against the pillow. She pulled her knees up so that she could rest the binder against her thighs. Patting her chest she searched for the glasses she had hooked through one of the open button holes of her blouse on the way back to her office.

At least she could pretend she was doing work.

She started awake when the floor lamp above her head was illuminated. Reacquainting herself with her surroundings took a few moments while her eyes adjusted to the sudden glare.

"You're going to go blind," Toby said, walking behind her desk and taking a seat.

"Already there," CJ replied, shaking the cuff of her blouse away from her wrist in order to look at her watch face. Thirty or so minutes she had been out. She sat higher against the couch so that she could still see him in her peripheral vision.

"You left the party."

CJ absently turned a page. "I had work to do."

"Carol saved you cake." Toby pointed to the small foil covered plate on the corner of her desk.

When CJ looked over her shoulder to see if her assistant was at her desk, she noticed the door was closed. She went back to her reading, pointedly ignoring the man seated behind her desk. The words on the pages were blurred before, now even more so.

She continued to pretend to work; he found the antics of the goldfish swimming in a bowl on her desk fascinating.

After some time had passed, Toby asked, "Henry's doing the last briefing?"

CJ gave up the pretense of doing any work and rubbed tiredly at her forehead. She removed her glasses and dropped them on the coffee table. "Don't go there, Toby."

Toby shrugged his shoulders. "I just need to know what to tell people when they start asking me what's up with you, as you know they will inevitably do because apparently I am the pulse of your mood and I did a piss poor job of it earlier today."

"I'm still monumentally pissed." She dropped the briefing book to the floor and draped one arm over her forehead and eyes. "And though you're not number one on my list of people who've pissed me off today, you've been moving up and down within the top five."

"May I ask who's number one right now?"

"Right now? The duly elected leaders of Qumar that have decided they need guns to fulfill our request for a landing strip. Followed by you, Nancy McNally, the kid that cut me off today when I drove into work, and Al Roker."

"Al Roker?"

This time CJ shrugged her shoulders. Her arm was still draped over her eyes. "His voice has been grating on my nerves all day. And he made me think it was going to rain."

Toby nodded. He fingered the wood grain of her desk. "I got chewed out by Nancy. Does that make you feel better?"

"No." CJ sat for a moment, thinking about his confession. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why did you get chewed out by Nancy?"

"Because I asked her to talk to you. She said that she's tired of the men of this Administration asking her to deal with you because she thinks we're scared of you."

CJ tried not to laugh. "She did not."

"Yes, she did, though she used much more colorful language. She can out-swear a sailor." Toby paused, played with a pencil on her desk. "I vehemently denied that I was afraid of you."

The snort was barely muffled by her arm.

"I also got yelled at for sending her on a mission without all the specifics. If she was going to be on the blunt end of your rage, she wanted the whole story."

CJ peered at him under her arm. "What are you driving at?"

"I told her about Karen."

"Why?" CJ felt herself deflate and hoped her voice didn't sound as whiny and tinny as it did in her own ears. Her arm dropped to her side and she stared aimlessly at the ceiling.

"Nancy's read your file, CJ. We all had extensive background checks done before we signed on to this campaign. She knows you volunteered at that crisis clinic in San Francisco. And the shelter thing."

CJ sat forward fast, turned so that her feet were on the ground. "Don't trivialize that by calling it a 'thing', okay? It bugs the hell out of me that we do this." She stood and started to pace, waving her arms angrily. "When the hell did 'thing' become the all-encompassing, all explaining word? It was important work. Don't demean it by calling it a 'thing'."

Toby demurred, held up his hands in surrender. "I'm sorry. Bethlehem House. You helped raise a lot of money for them; it was important work. Nancy asked if you had some personal stake in all of this. That your reaction to Qumar seemed a bit out of character and wanted to know what could have possibly set you off. She knows you worked with Bethlehem House and left rather abruptly. After some time off, you worked for EMILY's List. She asked me to connect the dots."

CJ stopped pacing and sat down. Leaning back, she let her head fall against the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling again. "What exactly did you tell her?"

Toby continued, speaking softly. "That you and Karen were friends. That you stood up for her at her wedding. That you were volunteering and helping to raise money for Bethlehem House for as long as I had known you. That one night you were on call for the crisis center and found your best friend in the emergency room, raped and beaten to within an inch of her life by her husband. That Karen lived at Bethlehem House for a few months after the incident. That her soon to be ex-husband hunted her down and finally did beat her to death. That you went back to Napa for a few weeks. And soon after, you started work with EMILY's List. Worked with candidates that supported stiffer anti-stalker laws and stronger penalties for domestic abuse."

"Is that all?"

"Pretty much."

CJ sighed, rubbed at her eyes until her skin felt raw. "Wonderful."

"Nancy doesn't think any less of you," Toby supplicated.

"That's the least of my worries." Her laugh sounded hollow, shallow.

Toby put down the pencil he had been playing with and laid his hand flat against the wood grain. CJ looked tired, though there was no resignation, no embarrassment in her voice. There would be no excuses and he would never ask her for one.

"Tell me something," Toby began, wanting her anxious hands to stop their tell-tale exhaustive dance across her face. "If our deal with Qumar did not involve an arms sale, would you still have the same reaction?"

CJ sat stock still, knuckles nearly white with tension against her temples. "Yes, but that's not the point."

"I'm listening now."

The admission was not lost on CJ. She turned and looked at him for several seconds and in a moment of mirth wondered what pod person had taken over his body. Two proto-apologies in one day had to be one for the record books. She wondered briefly that if they had not had their pissing contest earlier in the day if the headache she was sporting now would be missing all together.

CJ started slowly, calmly, crafting her argument with careful words and quiet tones.

"We let other agencies handle announcements that we don’t want the public to think twice about. We say we're not going to announce anything until we have all the details. We walk this fine line, pass the buck when we can just so that we can feel better in the morning with a justified response."

"It's what we have to do to control the news cycle."

"We should care about these issues, Toby. And before you say it, I know some of them are not the pretty girls at the dance. They get left standing in the corner until the ball is finished."

"Just because we do it doesn't mean I, -- we have to like it."

CJ took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "This isn't about money or guns. This is extortion, pure and simple. 'You don't sell us guns, we won’t let your jets land here'. What kind of message are we selling when we accept deals like this? We pick and choose what battles we're going to fight because they're easy or convenient. Meanwhile, not only are we arming a country that may very well turn against us in a land war in the Middle East, we're feeding Anti-American sentiment in a part of the world that already hates us. So let's practice what we preach, Toby. Let's sign a piece of paper that allows prostitution, since, you know, we just sold our souls for $1.5 billion. How's this any different?"

Toby leaned forward, braced his arms against the desk. "You know that it's different."

Closing her eyes, CJ tried not to sigh out loud. "Yeah, I do."

There was a knock on the door. Both turned towards the intrusive noise. CJ sat forward and called, "Come in."

Carol pushed the door open and let her head slip through. "Toby, there's a Mr. Ronald Cruikshank looking for you."

Toby shot a look at CJ as he stood up, asking silently for permission to let the elderly man in to talk with him. CJ nodded and quickly ran a hand through her hair to smooth it.

"Let him in," CJ said, rising.

Mr. Cruikshank shuffled into the office, straightening slowly from his age-induced stoop. He looked with surprised interest at Toby behind the desk and CJ near the couch. "I'm sorry, Mr. Zielger. I thought your office was across the way."

"It is," Toby answered. "I'm here studying the décor."

Mr. Cruikshank looked first at Toby, then CJ and then back to Toby. "Ah, yes, well, I believe we have you to thank for the agreement with the Smithsonian people."

"Yes, sir." Toby walked from behind the desk to the guest chairs and pulled one around for Mr. Cruikshank to use.

The older gentleman eased slowly down, smiled his gratitude and leaned his cane against the arm of the chair. "I understand the motivation behind explaining some of the displays. The propaganda that was used to enlist young men in the war effort in 1941-- nowadays it would be seem shameful. But the 1940's were a different time, a different world."

"There is a time and a place for us to reinvestigate history," Toby said with a sidelong glance at CJ, who had just reclaimed her seat on the couch. "Today is not that time."

Mr. Cruikshank nodded knowingly. "I lost one brother on the USS Oklahoma; another was shot down in a dogfight over the Admiralty Islands. I didn’t need those posters to convince me to join up."

"You don’t need to explain yourself, Mr. Cruikshank." Toby sat down on the edge of the couch.

"Oh, but I think I do. And I think specifically to you, young lady."

CJ's eyebrows rose in surprise. "Me? If anything, I should be apologizing to you."

"I'm afraid my colleagues were a little too pig-headed to give your hypothetical any merit. And given the current political climate, I think your questions deserved to be answered. Even if you did feel the need to apologize, I wouldn't accept it." Mr. Cruikshank smiled cryptically and continued with his story. "I was stationed with the USS Shamrock Bay in 1945."

He looked CJ in the eye. "You asked us what would we think if the Nazis were part of Europe and we were allies with them now. How would I feel if we sold them munitions and fighter jets. I didn't fight the Nazis; I fought the Japanese. I know what I felt."

"The Allies occupied Japan until 1952, when we signed a mutual cooperation and security treaty in response to Commies in China. I was livid. We were now going to be seated at the same table as our enemies. Their pilots ran suicide runs against our ships. I'll never forget the kamikaze attacks on the Shamrock Bay. I felt betrayed. My friends, my brothers died, and now we were helping them fight against Communist China.

"My parents blamed the Japanese for the loss of two sons. Until the day she died, my mother swore never to buy a Japanese product and she stood by that promise until the ripe old age of 101. And I've pretty much lived the same way. I drove American cars, built in America, made by Americans.

"But it's been nearly 60 years since I was on the Shamrock Bay. The world's changed. Some of us are a little slower to change with it. I don’t harbor any ill will against the Japanese. Not anymore. Still won't buy any of their stuff, though.

"And I'm not so old that I don't know what's going on in the world today. We're following policies we've always followed: we give aid, military or otherwise, to countries we once or do despise in order to keep an eye on countries that can do more harm than good. I know your outrage, young lady. You're not the first; you certainly won't be the last. But have faith in the notion that things change. And sometimes they are for the better."

Mr. Cruikshank struggled to stand. Both Toby and CJ rose to offer assistance. The elderly man shook off their helping hands and warily stood his ground. "Will you be there at the exhibit opening?" he asked, accepting his cane from CJ.

"We both will," CJ answered.

"Good. Those museum people did a good job, but I could tell you the real stories."

CJ walked to her door and called for Carol. Her assistant came to her side immediately and CJ asked, "Could you please bring Mr. Cruikshank to the rest of his party."

"Certainly. This way, Mr. Cruikshank," Carol said, looping her arm through one of the older gentleman's as they walked through the press office.

When Carol and Mr. Cruikshank were safely out of hearing range, Toby stage whispered, "That was interesting." He casually swept his hand at the door and gently nudged it closed.

CJ dropped back on the couch, rubbing her temples but with a smile on her face. "You're telling me." She rolled her head and there was a very audible crack of vertebra with the motion.

Toby winced at the noise and dropped next to her on the couch, careful not to crowd her. "How much sleep have you had in the last week?"

"You're starting to sound like a broken record." She massaged the back of her neck where the troublesome noise had erupted.

"Then change the tune." He tentatively touched her back, careful to gauge her response. His hands took over when hers ceased to move. "We're okay?"

"Yeah. You're out of the top five." She patted his knee and leaned into him, necessarily stopping the neck rub. "By the way, why did you sic Nancy McNally on me?"

Toby wanted to shrug his shoulders, but didn't dare with CJ lying against him. "I needed you focused for the briefing and you were less likely to tell Nancy to shove it up her ass." He wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

"We have a woman as the National Security Advisor. We have two women on the Supreme Court. We've even had a woman Secretary of State."

"Nancy's doing all that she can," Toby replied. He brushed her hair behind her ear and continued to gently stroke her temple. "I know for a fact that she thinks the Qumar deal is lousy, but we do need the airbase if only to keep an eye on things there."

"It's not enough. It's never going to be enough."

"It will someday," Toby said softly. "Five years from now, I'll be your campaign manager. We'll use this as the platform."

CJ laughed tiredly and snuggled closer. "I'm still incredibly pissed. I am the master of the opinion poll. Don't ever doubt that I know what I'm doing when I say we have to tell the American people something that they may not want to hear. I can sell water to a whale."

"Interesting analogy, CJ." Toby brushed the hair from her forehead.

"Shut up, I'm tired. And you massaging my forehead isn’t helping my concentration. I'm going to fall asleep if you keep doing that." Instead of pulling away, she nestled closer.

"Is your headache any better?"

"Yes," CJ replied sardonically.

"Do you want me to stop?"

"Don’t you dare."

Toby reached behind him and turned off the floor lamp. If this was the only way CJ was going to get any rest, he would gladly act as a human pillow. He was fairly certain she was near sleep when he said softly next to her ear, "We don't dictate foreign policy."

CJ turned into his neck and replied in a whisper, "Maybe we should."

END

"I took a cane from a blind man / I've tasted the fruit in the Garden of Eden / when I walk out of here / I know I'll stand clear / but the taste in my mouth still remains / still remains / oh it took me a long time to come to this"