Title: Stronger to Remain

Author: CretKid aka Cal (AIM cretkid)

Category: CJ/Toby

Rating: PG

Spoilers: General Season 3, including the finale

Disclaimer: Not mine. 'Nuf said.

Summary: "how much strength does it take / for exploration / for split decision / or are you stronger to remain"

Author's Notes: Continuing with my Parachute series of CJ/Toby stories. Title and summary from "Parachute" by Guster (yes, I'm doubling up on songs I take titles from, but I wanted something appropriate for the tone of the story). Eventually, I will add in some of the back story and in between stories. This one takes place about 2 weeks after "Immune". You can find all of these stories at my web site www.oocities.org/rdcottrell/parachute.html

"Stronger to Remain"

================

"Hey, CJ!"

CJ looked up with the bellow of her name. Josh was strolling down the hall with Donna, Sam and Charlie in tow. Glancing at the clock display in the corner of her laptop screen, she was surprised to find that it was just past 8 PM.

"We're headed over to Hannigan's for a few drinks. Wanna come with?" Josh asked, leaning over the threshold with his hands braced against the frame of the door.

Stiff-backed against her chair, CJ regarded the crowd of faces just outside her office door. She spied Toby slowly making his way towards her office, waiting in the hallway away from the rest of the mischief seekers. Looking at the clock again, she shook her head.

"Rain check."

She wasn't keeping track, but the number of invitations to dinner, lunch and staff-night-out seemed to increase since she had lost her Secret Service detail. The invitations had always been there; it was only now she was registering them as an honest choice to make.

It had always been an internal battle waged in her brain; the agents that followed her around were willing to make arrangements should she want to go to dinner with her niece or out for drinks with the rest of the staff. But she didn't want to add the extra burden to their assignment, the added element of the unknown whenever in a crowd.

Oh, she complained incessantly to Simon about not having her life as her own, having to check in with a chaperone before taking one unscripted step. And he had told her she could do whatever she wanted; they would make the needed adjustments.

Now that she had the freedom to do as she pleased, she found she'd rather be alone.

Josh hid his disappointment well, though his arms sagged just enough to let her know that he had hoped that she would say yes.

"You sure?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

In a parody of a push up, Josh launched away from the door frame. "You know where we are if you decide to join us."

"Be good," she called after him as he joined the others in the hallway.

As she returned to the binder she had been leafing through she heard Sam say, "Toby, are you coming?"

She glanced up and found Toby looking at her, unasked questions in his eyes.

"I'll join you later," he said, rooted to his spot in the hallway.

"'Kay," was Sam's response.

Through the corner of her eye, she saw Donna usher rest of the troupe through the fishbowl hallway. CJ pondered Toby's intense stare, and as an unspoken invitation, leaned forward to close the briefing binder on her desk.

Toby unknotted his already loosened tie as he entered her office and sat down on her couch, the only concession he would make for the stretch of warm weather the District was experiencing.

"How come your office is so much colder than the rest of the building?"

CJ pointed at the whisper quiet pivoting floor fan in the corner of her office. Toby nodded and leaned his head against the back of the couch, relishing in the breeze of cold air that swung through the room with clockwork precision.

"I don't need a babysitter," she said as he made himself comfortable.

He opened one eye and cocked his head from side to side. "I don't see any babies in here."

Capitulating to the war of words, CJ took a sip from her water bottle. "There's no need for a CJ-sitter either."

Toby shrugged his shoulders and crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm here because you have a fan. Who needs alcohol now."

CJ pushed away from her desk and rolled over to the cube fridge next to the couch. "Then far be it from me to keep you from a night of revelry." She opened the fridge door and reached in for two bottles of hard cider. Twisting off the top, she handed one to Toby and then returned to her place behind the desk.

Peering over the side of the couch towards the fridge, Toby asked, "How many do you have in there?"

"Enough," CJ replied with a bit of a growl. "I don't plan on spending all night here, you know."

"Hot date?"

Toby just managed to dodge the bottle cap that went sailing his way.

"It's too nice a night to spend it in a smoke-filled bar with too loud music," she said, leaning back in her chair and resting her feet on the corner the fridge. The cider bottle started sweating, leaving a wet circle on her pant leg.

Adopting a similar posture, Toby propped one leg on the corner of the low table and rested his bottle on the arm of the couch. "So you're going to spend part if not all of it in your office instead?"

"At least my clothes won't smell like a chimney."

Nodding his head, Toby conceded the point and sipped his cider. "So what is, or was, on tap for tonight?"

Shrugging her shoulders as she took a sip of cider, CJ turned to look out the window. "Since it's stopped raining, maybe a walk. A drive, I don't know."

"Your car is in working order now?"

Smiling, CJ continued, "I should let the Secret Service store my car more often. They gave it a tune up, changed the oil, replaced all the fluids and even rotated my tires," she said wistfully, picking absently at lint on her tank top.

"Did you walk or drive today?"

"Walked, despite the threat of rain all day. It was nice this morning."

"You've been walking a lot lately," Toby said, taking another sip.

CJ glared at him, daring him to make another comment. "I like to walk."

"Just an observation."

"Josh walks to work. I can't walk to work?"

"I sometimes wonder if Josh can walk and chew gum at the same time, let alone manage Dupont Circle while behind the wheel," Toby commented, draining the rest of his cider in one long draught. He placed the empty on floor next to the corner of the couch.

"I like walking," she reiterated.

Toby nodded. "You've said that already."

"The extra exercise is good for me."

"On top of the hour or so you spend in the gym every morning, yeah, I'd say it's good for you," was the sarcastic reply.

He leaned over the arm of the couch to retrieve another beverage from the fridge. But to do so he had to lift her leg by the ankle to open the fridge door. Perusing the available selection of beverages, he grabbed another cider.

"You've been holding out. Since when have you been storing good stuff in here?"

"I always have good stuff here," CJ replied, playfully kicking the door shut.

Settling back with his cider, Toby twisted the top off and returned the favor by throwing it at CJ. "The next time I feel the need to raid someone's pantry, I'm coming here."

CJ bent over to pick up the stray bottle cap. As she tossed it in the trashcan, she said, "You should walk to work."

Scoffing, Toby twirled the bottle around in his hand. "Yeah, that will happen in this century."

"It would do your heart good."

"And scuff a perfectly good pair of wingtips. I don't think so."

CJ held the cider bottle over her heart. "I would sleep better at night if I knew you were taking better care of yourself."

"How ARE you sleeping?"

Smiling wryly, CJ paused before she took a sip from her bottle. "I was wondering how long it would take you to ask me that."

"It's a simple question, and you're dodging it."

CJ leaned her head to the side and closed her eyes. "Toby-Hen strikes again."

Toby dropped his foot and leaned forward. "Cluck cluck."

Releasing a deep sigh, CJ replied without opening her eyes, "I'm fine. Though sometimes I think I'm too tired to sleep."

Toby shrugged. "It happens. To some, more often than others."

"Just count me as one of the lucky ones." She placed her bottle of cider on the closest stack of papers on her desk. Crossing her arms over her chest as she shifted in her chair, she added, "It'll pass."

"How are you doing? Really?"

"Really," she replied, annunciating each syllable, "I'm fine."

"You've been maudlin since morning mail call."

CJ cocked an eyebrow but did not open her eyes. "Checking up on me, Pokey?"

"What if I were to say 'yes'?"

She attempted to lessen the tension in her arms, tried to unclench her fists, and she knew her efforts were not lost on Toby. Though she wanted to keep her eyes closed, doing so would only reinforce in Toby's mind that she was not fine at all.

She needed to believe she was fine.

"Abbey asked me something once that I've been thinking about a lot lately," she said, opening her eyes but determined not to look at him.

CJ took a deep breath and smiled just a little bit. "At the time, she was trying to bait me; would I change anything that had happened in the time that I'd known you."

Toby rubbed a hand over his beard. "Abbey has a sick fascination with our love lives, or lack thereof."

"Yeah, well, not that I regret anything that far back, I had said that if I had the last year to do over, I wouldn't change a thing. But now I think… there are a lot of things I would change about the last year, the last couple of months."

Toby shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I thought you hated 'what if' scenarios?"

"I do," she replied, noting the slight edge to his voice and wishing she had phrased her words better. "Don't take what I'm about to say the wrong way, but this isn't about you. Or us. I am allowed to be sad and not have you be the root cause of it," she announced with forced levity, wagging a finger at him.

"I didn't mean to imply--," he mumbled, worrying a nail bed with the pad of his thumb. He took a breath and turned his face from the floor towards her. "You're wondering what might have happened had you resigned?"

Rolling her head to work out the tension kinks that had settled between her shoulder blades, CJ tried to find a more comfortable position in the desk chair, finding the only way to do it was sit straight-backed with her head nearly draped over the back of the chair.

"I spent a small fortune in lawyers' fees during the congressional hearings," she said, staving off the real topic at hand. "I could have bought stock in Maalox and made a killing in the market."

"You picked up your groupie during the congressional hearings," Toby added, using the unspoken when agreed upon euphemism for Ryan Gossling.

"Ron told you that, did he?" CJ mused, knowing that she had never talked about it with Toby, or anyone else for that matter. She had wanted to wash her hands of the whole thing as quickly as possible, and talking about the man that had been stalking her for the better part of 9 months instead of just 5 weeks only prolonged the nightmare.

"I've asked Ron for regular updates, even after your groupie pleaded no contest to the charges."

As she realized Toby wasn't going to let the topic go, she dropped her feet from the corner of the fridge and turned to her desk. Routing around through the massive amounts of work detritus on her desk, she procured a simple squarish envelop with elegant handwriting on the address label. She held it up for him to see, then placed it gingerly on the edge of her desk.

"I got a note from Simon's mother today. She wanted to thank me for something I said after the memorial service."

She caught Toby's eye as her gaze shifted to the ceiling.

"The briefing after the funeral," he guessed. CJ nodded. "You don't remember what you said."

CJ shook her head, eyes fixed on a small crack in the ceiling plaster.

There were a lot of things she couldn't recall about that night and the days that followed. She remembered Ron Butterfield pulling her out of the theatre to tell her the news, and that it felt as if she had been sucker punched with a wrecking ball.

She'd been told that Ron had her escorted back to Air Force One soon after finding her on a bench near Roosevelt Park on his way back from the crime scene. She couldn't recollect calling her father though she knew she must have because he had phoned her later the next day to see how she was faring. She knew that she had taken some time off, but couldn't call to mind exactly what she had done in the interim between getting on Air Force One in New York and attending the memorial service.

The same thing had happened once before during the administration, in the hours following the town meeting in Rosslyn, Virginia.

"It took me about an hour to work up the nerve to open it," she said, tapping the letter with a finger. "I had to ask Carol to call up the transcripts."

"Perfectly reasonable."

"How is that I can remember the titles of every song played, in order, at my brother's wedding reception nearly 20 years ago and not recall three sentences I said in a briefing after…"

Toby left her question hanging in the air before he replied. "No one will think any less of you for having to pull the transcript."

CJ shrugged her shoulders in disbelief and picked up her half empty bottle of cider, draining the rest in a continuous swallow. "Maybe if I drink enough I may actually sleep through the night," she smiled ruefully.

Toby stood up and offered her his hand.

"What are you doing?" she asked, taking his hand and allowing him to pull her out of the chair.

"Drinking to sleep is my habit, not yours. We're going for a walk."

Laughing, CJ pulled her hand from his. "You don't like to walk."

"No, but you do." He pulled off his coat and draped it over his arm. "Let's go. The sun should be setting in the next 15 minutes. I don't want you walking home alone in the dark."

"You're serious."

"Have you ever known me to not be serious?"

Unable to stop laughing, CJ threw her hands in the air and walked around her desk to join him at the door. "And where, pray tell, are we going?"

"I thought we might walk in the general direction of your apartment, and if we happen to pass a restaurant or deli along the way, we'd stop and eat dinner."

"Don't think you can make the entire way without stopping?" CJ chided, dropping to the couch and losing her flats in favor of a pair of sneakers. "It's only just over a mile and half distance."

"Not without an ambulance and a tank of oxygen, no."

Toby's hand was on her shoulder as she stood up from her seated position. "We're gonna have to do something about that."

"You and what army?"

Linking arms with him, they walked out of her office, pausing only to close the door behind them.

END