Character: Lou

Rating: Teen

Disclaimer: I don’t make any money off of anything that I write in the realm of WB, John Wells, or NBC owned characters. Lou Thornton and Leo McGarry are not my original characters and I have no rights in regard to them.

For John. Rest in Peace.

It is quiet when she enters the room. The silence is merciful compared to the hours and hours of ruckus. She doesn’t know what it’s like to live in a room without the TV on, but she can’t. Not right now. Not now, as the sun is rising over the city. She closes the curtains to the glare.

The silence is odd to her. She doesn’t know what to do without an election prediction to yell at or a newsman to throw her food at. She wonders how many remote controls across the country she’s broken. She stares at the floor, her shoes seem different, as if somehow over the course of the night they switched feet. They come off and she looks at her toes, dimmed inside the trouser socks she’s wearing. They come off and she stares at her toenails, purple, freshly painted. She wanted something festive for election night and not knowing the outcome, decided that it would be better to just get a mixture of red and blue.

Purple. The country is purple. Tonight, with an election this close, the country is purple.

Her jacket hits the bed, somewhere in the back of her mind she recognizes the soft sound of the fabric hitting the bed, but it hardly registers. Her pager, her cell phone. She stands, alone, in the silence of the hotel room, in her bare feet and pants and camisole with her purple toenails and the weight of the world on her shoulders.

There is no time for celebration. The winners do not celebrate, they make policy. She wonders if she gets to be part of that team. She wonders if she wants to be. She knows that she does. She wants to work alongside Josh and Donna and everyone else. She wants to work alongside Leo.

Leo.

She looks down at her toenails again. Purple. It had been his idea, they’d been talking, he couldn’t sleep and she’d had her way with the twenty-three year old speechwriter who wasn’t getting a job in her communications department. She’d gone for a walk, she’d bumped into Leo, he’d convinced her that purple nail polish had been a good idea.

Wear it for me. I think it’s funny. You women and your nail polish and your hair. Wear it for me. I want to see it on election night when we win. And then I want to watch you repaint your nails blue. We’re going to win. I’ve got a good feeling about this.

Purple. He hadn’t known. He’d hedged his bets as much as she had.

The silence was deafening but she couldn’t break it with the television. They would be talking about Santos. They would be talking about Leo.

She doesn’t remember moving to the mini-bar, but the tiny bottle of scotch is in her hand and the cheap liquor makes her shudder as it goes down. The second bottle is easier. The third she sips. In the silence, the sounds of her swallows are too loud, and she reaches for the television, and stops. She doesn’t want the noise, to hear them talk about Leo.

Are you sure, Leo? I mean, really, it’s purple.

The bed creaks under her weight, the sound is too loud, to foreign. She can’t remember when she last actually paid attention to the small noises of a room, to the sound of a bedspring or the sound of fabric sliding across a comforter.

You’re covered in tattoos; you think a little purple nail polish is strange?

Her hands are stained with blue dust, dust from the white board. It feels strange to be relieved that it isn’t red – it would feel too much like blood. She wonders if what they did tonight was the best thing for the country. She knows that it is.

She thinks of Josh’s eyes, the look when they knew, before it was even pronounced, that it was over for Leo. She thinks of how she knew then that it was up to her to get them through the night. This is why Josh hired her, right here. She knows that. She hates it. She thinks of everyone in the room, and how she’d been the one to have to rally them back to work. She wonders if they think she is heartless.

She can feel the tears on her cheeks, but doesn’t know what to do with them. She does not cry. She gets angry, she bosses others around, but she does not cry. Emotions are for those who have no other outlet. Tears are for those who have the time to cry. She does not have the time. She has to keep the troops together. Josh can cry her tears for her; he will cry all of Washington’s tears. And yet, the tears are there on her cheeks.

Yeah, purple nail polish. It’s you. But I get to watch you paint those nails blue when we win. Good night, Lou. I’ll see you in the morning.

She never saw him again.

Her body starts to shake, it starts in her shoulders and down into her chest and she shakes. She thinks her head will explode from the pressure of the tears, a pressure she is not used to feeling. She does not cry.

She cries.