Rating: PG
Pairing: Toby/Ginger
Spoilers: Too many to mention - up to and including the end of season three to be safe!
Feedback: Makes my day
Disclaimer: If it was in the show, it's not mine.
Archive: At my site The Band Gazebo (helsinkibaby.ahkay.net) Anywhere else please ask first.
Summary: It's Toby's birthday.
Author's Note: Blame Sunny - I say that a lot don't I? This is a response to the challenge on the Toby list - it's May, which is Richard Schiff's birthday month, and thus Toby's unofficial birthday month too. The challenge was to write anything you wanted as long as it had Toby's birthday in it.

Someone once sent me an email entitled Ten Things It Took Me Fifty Years To Learn. I think that it could have been Sam, sending it around to everyone in his address book. Then again, it could have been Margaret, although I would have thought that she learned her lesson with the one about the calorie count in the raisin muffins. But this email, I read, even though I complained about people clogging up other people's inboxes with items that were totally unrelated to work.

And this one was funny.

But there was one that struck me as strange. Funny, but strange.

Number fifteen to be exact. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.

It struck me as strange that it should take someone fifty years to learn that.

It's been a while since anyone made a big deal about my birthday, certainly not in the last four years anyway. In fact, in the last four years, the month of my birthday has been taken over by several life-shattering events, that pushed any thought of celebration, of frivolity, out of my head.

Four years ago, it looked as if things weren't going to be that way. We'd just got some pretty good polling numbers, a nine point bump, unheard of, as welcome as it was unexpected. Leo had just unleashed his "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet" strategy, we were buzzing with enthusiasm, with energy, ready to take on the world.

Instead, the world took us on.

It was supposed to be a normal speech, nothing unusual, until we walked out of the Newseum and the sound of gunshots filled the air. People were running, screaming, crying, and the President was shot. And Josh nearly died.

My sisters rang me that year to wish me a happy birthday, and all I could think of when I was listening to them, hearing their kids' cheerful chatter in the background, was the look that was on Josh's face when I found him.

Needless to say, that wasn't a happy birthday.

The next year didn't seem to go any better for me, for the administration in general. Christmas was a particular nightmare, watching Josh coming unravelled right in front of us, not knowing what we could do to help him. The leadership breakfast disaster didn't help matters, but after the State of the Union, after the President did so well, I was almost hopeful that things were beginning to look up for us.

And then our esteemed Vice President, and I use the term lightly, agreed to slap down the Petroleum Industry. Since he was a known champion of said industry, had always supported it, my suspicions were raised. I couldn't understand why he would agree to do something like that, particularly as it helped us out. Hoynes had had to be held at gunpoint in the past to help us out. When I asked him about it, he made some cryptic remark about how the total tonnage of things that he knew that I didn't could stun a team of oxen in its tracks.

So I did some digging. And some thinking. Found out that he had put a poll in the field, the results indicating that some voters were nervous of his ties to big oil. Found out that he was giving a speech on clean air in Nashua, New Hampshire, in the middle of a three-day camping trip in Killington.

All of which lead me to believe that the Vice President believed that the President wasn't going to run again.

All of which lead me to sit in the Oval Office, to be told that the President had Multiple Sclerosis and had concealed it from the public.

We all know how that ended.

And that would have been bad enough, would have been enough to handle, except for the fact that one lady went to pick up her new car and had the sheer bad fortune to encounter a group of drunken kids who didn't know what a stop sign was.

On my birthday three years ago, I got a phone call early in the morning from my sister and her kids, and pretended that everything was fine.

A matter of hours later, I was a pallbearer at Mrs Landingham's funeral.

Two years ago, we were in the middle of a re-election campaign that was brutal, bloody and unforgiving. And which was not going our way exactly. Not only did we have Republicans to deal with, there was infighting with Hoynes, there was infighting with Bruno and his minions, and there were death threats against CJ. She couldn’t go anywhere without her Secret Service detail, and every time I saw him there, standing behind her, shadowing her, I remembered the danger that she was in, remembered just how easy it would be to lose her. Remembering again how close we came to losing Josh two years earlier. Knowing how it could happen again.

It was not an easy time, for anyone, and when my sister called me that morning, I'd honestly forgotten that it was my birthday.

That might just have been the lowest emotional point of my tenure in the White House. And a person who was given to uttering clichés might, at that point, have reminded me that it's always darkest before the dawn. I of course, hating clichés, would never have said such a thing.

I'd forgotten that such sayings are clichés for a reason.

Because at that time, when things were so dark that I couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel, could barely see the tunnel come to that, that was the time that she came along and saved me.

Oh, she'd always been there, silently in the background, supportive, efficient. But that summer, she became more so somehow. That's appalling grammar, don't think I don't know that, but apt. Because suddenly it seemed like she was always there, reminding me to eat, reminding me to go home, making sure that I could do my job as she always did, but more than that. Making sure that I could function as a person as well as the Communications Director.

I've often wanted to ask her if she knew that she was doing all that, but I've never quite got around to it.

The first time that I held her in my arms was on Election Night, when they called the election for us. We knew it was going to be close, knew it was going to go down to the very last vote, and the tension in the room was unbelievable. Manicurists the city over did very well out of our female staffers I'm told. When the announcement came, there was silence to begin with, then pandemonium as everyone hugged everyone else. And she fairly leaped in my arms and held on tightly, and if I held her a little tighter than anyone else, for a little longer than anyone else, I didn't care if anyone noticed.

The first time that we went out for dinner, really went out for dinner, was a week after that. It took that long for me to get my courage up, sure that she'd never want to go out with me. She was too young, too beautiful, for that.

But I asked her and she smiled and she said yes.

The first time that I held her all night long was that Thanksgiving, when neither one of us went to our respective families or friends' houses. Instead, I took her out for dinner and she had dessert waiting at her house, and we curled up on the couch and watched movies all night. When midnight came and went, I made to leave, but she caught me by the wrist and she looked up at me with those big blue eyes and she asked me to stay.

And I did.

Last year on my birthday, I walked into the Oval Office for the last time as the Director of Communications, and I told the President that it had been an honour to serve him, and I handed in my resignation.

He was shocked at first, as they all were, and he tried to talk me out of it, as they all did. But my mind was made up.

It's odd, I suppose, that I was the longest serving Senior Staffer from the campaign, aside from Leo of course, and yet I was the first to leave. And odder still that having spent years searching for the Real Thing, having gone through so many losing campaigns, then finally finding it, reaching for and grabbing the highest prize of all, I was now walking away without a second thought.

But you see, I'd found another Real Thing, another project to work on, that was as precious, as valuable, as putting a man in the Oval Office.

More so in fact.

They tried to talk me out of it, including her. Told me that it wasn't necessary, that I didn't have to do this, not for her. But I knew you see. I knew what the press, what the Republicans, what Mary Marsh and her ilk would write about us. And while I didn't care what they said about me, I wasn't going to put her through that.

And so I walked away from one dream with no regrets, because I was walking right into another one.

This year on my birthday, I wake up with a smile on my face. Not that that's anything new, I've been doing that for the past year. I'm on my own in bed, and I rise and shower and dress quickly, heading downstairs as speedily as I can.

When I get to the kitchen door, I can hear her talking, and I stop for a few seconds outside the door, just listening to the things that are being said. And when I can't stand just having the commentary any longer, when the need for the visual as well overpowers me, I step into the room. Her back is to me at first, and I just stand there, looking at her, hardly able to believe how lucky I am.

And then she turns to me, and smiles at me, and my breath catches in my throat.

"Look who's up," she says, and the bundle on her hip looks over at me too and emits a high-pitched squawk of delight, making her laugh. "Is that your way of saying happy birthday to Daddy?"

I laugh at that, going over to her and taking our daughter from her, kissing her on the lips, slipping one arm around her waist. "Good morning," I murmur, kissing the top of her head before I pull away, doing the same to the child. "And good morning to you too."

"Faith has a surprise for you," her mother tells me, going over to the kitchen cupboards, and I shake my head.

"You didn't have to do that Ginger," I protest, and her blue eyes are shining with laughter when she tells me that she didn't do anything, that Faith did.

"She's six months old," I point out. "I hardly think she can shop yet." As I speak, I sit down at the table with Faith on my lap, and she reaches up and begins playing with my beard, and I mentally steel myself. She's got a grip of iron, this little one, and one of these days, she's going to pull out a lump of my beard by the roots, thus I keep it neatly trimmed. Her cheeks are red and dimpled, her brown eyes, just like mine, dancing, and the red hair that she inherited from her mother is sticking up in tufts. She's wearing blue jeans, and a T-shirt that says, "I love my daddy," and she has never looked more adorable to me.

Mind you, I find myself saying that a lot.

I have to tear my eyes away from her when Ginger brings over a cake, with one candle in the middle of it, the flame dancing brightly. Faith eyes it with interest, and I move my chair back a fraction, just in case. On the table, there's a selection of cards that have come from all over which Ginger has been stockpiling all week, and on top is one with neatly printed writing saying "Daddy" on the envelope. That's the one that I open first, and sure enough, it's from Faith, wishing her dad a happy birthday.

I'm finding it quite hard to speak past the lump in my throat, and Ginger sees that, putting her arm around my shoulders and kissing my cheek. "Happy birthday Toby," she tells me. "From both of us." I nod, and perhaps she takes my silence as something that it's not, because she asks me, not for the first time in the last year, "Any regrets?"

And I can look at her when she asks me that and say, in a firm and clear voice. "None." I don't miss the relief that flits across her face. "I love you Ginger. And I love our life. And there's nothing that I'd change."

All of which is true. This is why I walked away from the White House. Because I knew that I loved her, because I knew that we were going to have a baby, and because I wasn't going to put either one of them through the media circus that would inevitably follow should it get out that the Director of Communications was involved with his assistant. Also, the administration had had more than its fair share of scandals, and I wasn't going to cause another one. I thought that it would be harder, that it would hurt more, but I got home that day and looked at Ginger, and I knew that I'd done the right thing. A week later, when she became Mrs Toby Ziegler, I was even more sure of it. And when Faith was born, six months ago, I was happier than I'd ever been.

She kisses me again, only pulling away because Faith can't resist the opportunity to grab a fistful of Mom's long red hair and pull it hard, and we're still trying to prise her little fist loose when the phone rings. Looking at the clock, I know who it's going to be, and I hand Faith to Ginger as I stand to answer it.

And I smile when my nieces and nephews sing "Happy Birthday" down the phone to me. Because for the first time in four years, it really is.