Title: Fractured Fairy Tale
Fandom: West Wing/CSI
Pairing: Leo McGarry/Calleigh Dusquesne
Rating: PG
Spoilers: AU from season two of West Wing, spoilers for Two Gunmen; Lost Son for
CSI Miami.
Word
Count: 1,051
Notes: For Heidi, who asked for a Leo/Calleigh first kiss.
Summary: They’re not that different really.
When he first sees her, Leo tells himself
that they couldn’t be more different. He’s an old and rapidly aging warhorse,
another
She is young and vital, all smooth skin and glossy blonde hair, with a ready smile and a Southern lilt to her voice that couldn’t be more different from his Boston-Chicago-Air Force hybrid.
They could not be more different, yet when he talks to her, he finds they have more in common than he might have thought.
For starters, he first talks to her at an AA meeting. He’s lost count of how many he’s been to, is sure that it’s her fifth, but she’s never spoken, has always stayed silent at the back. She hangs around afterwards, has coffee and cookies, but never talks to anyone.
Until he goes up to her.
The first thing she tells him is that she’s not an alcoholic.
It sends up a red flag straight away, but he listens to her, lets her explain about her friend – and there’s the tiniest, most significant pause before the word “friend” emerges – who died in the line of duty. They worked together as Crime Scene Investigators, and one day he walked into a robbery, got shot and died more or less instantly. Her father, she explained, was an alcoholic, and after her friend’s death – and he can’t help but notice that she never mentioned her friend’s name, not once – she’d noticed that, more and more, she was turning to alcohol to help her forget.
She’s not an alcoholic, she says, but she has definite leanings.
There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her, but he stayed well clear of the topic of alcohol, instead saying simply, “I know what it’s like to lose someone to gun crime.”
He expects questions, gets a nod instead, and those big green eyes are hugely sympathetic. He remembers then what it’s like to live your life in the public eye, to have your every tragedy scrutinised and magnified by the press. He’s seen Rosslyn from a dozen different television cameras, images that add to his own to make the nightmares even more three dimensional, can close his eyes and summon up the images, still and moving, that held a nation transfixed for the better part of a week.
Their first year in office hadn’t all been
sunshine and roses, but no-one had expected that. Just like no-one had expected
to be standing in a cold
On his return to
One day, he thinks he might even succeed at that.
But it’s not going to be tonight, not when Calleigh is looking at him with those big green eyes, not when the pain he sees there is so like his own.
“Does it get easier?” she asks him, the words returning him to the present, and when he considers it for a moment too long, her face becomes stricken. “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have…I mean, I need to go.”
She pivots and flees, faster than Leo would have believed possible given the size of the heels, and he follows her faster than he would have believed possible. He catches up to her outside, easily enough since she’s stopped on the top step of the building, one hand on her hip, the other over her lips, breathing hard. He touches her shoulder and she jumps, so he takes a step back, positioning himself on the other side of the step.
When her breathing has steadied, before she turns to face him, he speaks. “There are days…” he says slowly, “Where it’s easier. Where I don’t think about it… don’t remember. Whole days where I don’t want to drink to forget it. Then, out of the blue…”
“Something happens to rip your heart out all over again.”
They’re his thoughts, but Calleigh’s words, and he nods, lets his breath out slowly. “Yeah.”
There is a long pause where the only sound is silence and the distant rattling of coffee cups, and when Calleigh speaks again, her words are laced with frustration. “I just… I get so angry with him sometimes… and then I remember that he’s gone, and I get angry with myself and I wonder if there’s something that I could have done differently, and I know there’s not and I just go around and around and I can’t… I can’t…”
Her voice breaks off as she buries her head in her hands, shoulders trembling and every instinct screams at him to touch her, to comfort her, he doesn’t move. Instead, he speaks slowly, calmly. “You don’t have to do it alone you know.”
Her hands drop from her face, her eyes – wild and pained – meet his, and she swallows audibly. “Yes,” emerges in a ragged whisper. “I do.”
She moves then, towards the steps, ready to flee into the night, but stops at the last minute, turns around and comes towards him again. To his very great surprise, her arms go around his neck and her lips press hard against his. Sheer shock doesn’t stop him responding, wrapping his arms around her, holding her close, and it’s only when the shock dissipates that he realises that her kiss tastes of two things, desperation and whiskey.
Then she tears her lips away from him, stares at him with an expression of mingled horror and dismay. He thinks she’s going to apologise, but instead she just turns and runs away from him for the third time tonight, his very own modern day Cinderella.
But he’s nobody’s idea of a handsome prince, and at the moment, it doesn’t look like a happy ending is anywhere in sight.