Rating/Pairing: PG, Toby/Ginger
Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be mine.
Spoilers: Post ep to Dead Irish Writers
Summary: Why did Toby not want to leave the red-headed woman to talk to Lord John Marbury?
Archive: At my site, The Band Gazebo
Feedback: Yes please!
Author's Notes: All Sunny's fault...the challenge was to write about who the red headed woman that Toby was talking to at the First Lady's birthday party. Why didn't he want to leave her? Bear in mind, I've not seen the episode yet, so there's a fair amount of fudging going on here...you have been warned!

This was supposed to be a nice evening. A party, to celebrate the First Lady's birthday. There was supposed to be food. And drink. And dancing.

Sitting in a bar with the rather eccentric British Ambassador to the United States was not part of my agenda for this evening.

I really must remember to thank Leo for this.

I didn't want to look when I heard him calling my name. And when I saw Lord John Marbury standing beside him, something, call it gut instinct if you will, told me that this wasn't going to end well for me. I know all about Leo's way of dealing with Lord John - pawn him off on whomever is convenient if it's at all convenient. And from the look on Leo's face as I approached, a kind of desperation mixed with evil intent, I knew that I'd drawn the short straw. I was hoping that I could get away with a quick answer to His Lordship, and then get back to what I was doing before I was so rudely interrupted.

Some hope.

He went off on this spiel about us negotiating with a man who had murdered countless innocents, and I took the opportunity to look at what I was missing. And once it became imminently clear to me that I wasn't going to get away from him, I asked him if he felt like a drink. Because God knows, if I had to talk to this lunatic, and look at her from across the room while I was doing it, then I was going to need one.

And he said he was in the mood for Lagavulin.

Which is served in the bar down the street.

So not only could I avail myself of some very good Scotch, I wouldn't have to look at her when I was doing it.

It seemed like a pretty good plan to me.

It was when we were walking to the bar that he asked me the question. I thought he hadn't noticed, thought he'd been too intent on Leo and driving him insane but evidently, not much gets past this man. "So tell me old boy," he says. "Who was that rather buxom redhead that you were talking with when Gerald called you?"

"Buxom redhead?" I asked, never having thought of Ginger that way in my life.

"Yes…rather striking creature, staring at you as if you were the only man in the room. No accounting for taste I suppose, but what on earth did you do to get a woman like that?"

I actually did stop walking at that. I shouldn't have been surprised - after all, when you consider what he said about the First Lady, it's pretty clear that this is not a man who knows the meaning of the word "tact".

"I married her," I told him simply, the truth being the first thing that came to mind.

He'd kept on walking after I'd stopped, and that made him stop and wheel around to face me. "Married?" he repeated. "That lady is your wife?" He sounds as if it's the biggest miracle in the world, which, I suppose it is. I've got used to the stares, the questioning glances that we get, and I don't even notice them anymore.

Most of the time anyway.

And I will admit that occasionally, I'm one of the ones throwing those glances, but he didn't need to know that.

I nodded, my hands in my pockets. "It surprises me too sometimes," I admitted candidly.

"I never realised you were married. Although I did think she looked familiar…"

"You may have seen her when you've been in the West Wing before. She works as my assistant."

I'd begun walking again during those words, and he fell into step beside me. "Your assistant?" he asked. "Isn't that rather frowned on in this neck of the woods?"

"It is. But we were together before she became my assistant…since before the campaign actually. It's our fourth anniversary this year."

"And what a way to spend it," Marbury murmured, and I couldn’t say that I disagreed with him. I told Ginger when she first brought up the idea of joining me on the campaign that it wasn't going to be all fun and games, but even I had no idea of all that we were going to have to go through as part of working for this administration. It hasn't been easy, and it's been more bad times than good - Rosslyn, Mrs Landingham, the hearings, now this re-election campaign - it's not getting any better. And there have been times when I thought we wouldn't get through it.

But we have. And that's as much to do with luck and the incredible stubbornness of my wife as anything else.

"We've had our ups and downs," is all I said to him.

"Well, you're a lucky man Toby," he told me, and all I could do is nod and smile.

"Yes. Yes I am."

Of course, a couple of hours later, going round and round on the same topic with him, I didn't feel like a lucky man any more. Not even the very good scotch was helping matters. And when we finally did reach some kind of understanding, which I'm not fully sure I understood, he left before me, and I took my time before heading back to the party.

Once I get there, I see that we haven't missed all that much. Everyone is still talking and dancing, although they're all a little the worse for wear. I stand in the doorway and scan the room for Ginger, but I don't see her anywhere. I do however see Sam and Donna talking, so I head over to them.

"Toby!" Sam greets me warmly. "We were wondering where you were."

"In a bar discussing dead Irish writers with Lord John Marbury," I tell them, and Sam shakes his head and chuckles silently, while Donna gets a dreamy look on her face, which I do my best to ignore.

"What did you do to get stuck with that?" Sam asks me.

"I have no idea." I take a look around the room again, still not seeing Ginger. "I thought you couldn't get in," I said to Donna.

"I'm American again," she tells me happily, and I can feel a story coming on, and I do my best to cut it off.

"Have either of you seen Ginger?" I ask them. "I was talking to her, and then Leo spirited me away…"

Donna shakes her head. "She was here earlier, but I don't know where she is now."

"I was dancing with her a few minutes ago," Sam tells me, and a flash of jealousy runs through me, which I do my best to quash. "She looks amazing Toby."

I raise an eyebrow. "Are you hitting on my wife again?"

Sam begins to sputter something about how he would never in a million years do something like that, and I see Donna looking from one of us to the other, trying to keep her laughter back "Sam, leave the man alone," she tells him. "Come and dance with me."

Without further ado, he allows her to drag him on to the dance floor, not that she has to drag too hard. That leaves me alone again, and having scanned the room for a third time, and seeing that Ginger isn't there, I take a guess as to where she might be.

When I get there, the door to my office is ajar, and I stand in the doorway, looking down at the couch, not in the least bit surprised to see her there. Her eyes are closed, her head tilted on the back of the couch, her legs resting on the table in front of her. Her feet are bare, and I dread to think where her shoes are - Ginger has a habit of flinging clothing everywhere and anywhere when it suits her needs.

I didn't think that I'd made any noise, but I see her lips turn up in a grin, and she says, "Are you going to stand there looking at me all night or are you coming in?"

I laugh, because that, ladies and gentlemen, is my wife, a real straight shooter. Something I would have liked to point out to Josh when he tried to tell me that that's what he was. But I take up her suggestion, closing the door with a soft click. She opens one eye and squints up at me. "You disappeared with Lord John Marbury," she points out. "I did look for you…"

"We went down the street. He was looking for Lagavulin."

Her nose wrinkles in disgust, or perhaps remembered pain. One time, Ginger insisted that she could drink scotch and keep up with me. I tried to remind her that as a member of a Brooklyn Democratic family that it took a hell of a lot to get me drunk, but you remember that stubborn nature I talked of earlier? She wouldn't listen to me, and I've never seen anyone as sick as she was the next morning. She's never been able to stomach as much as the smell of scotch since.

"And you sorted out whatever the hell it was you were supposed to?" she asks me.

"I have no idea," I tell her, sitting down beside her on the couch, stepping over her shoes as I do so. Guess she didn't fling them too far this time. I tap her leg gently and she takes the hint, swivelling in her seat to put her feet on my lap. She sighs contentedly, closing her eyes as I begin to rub her feet.

"I had to take them off," she tells me, and I hope that she's talking about her shoes. "My feet were killing me."

"I'll never understand why you wear shoes when you know they're going to hurt you." That for me is one of the great mysteries of life.

"Because with a dress like this, you need four inch heels," she points out to me, and that brings my attention very nicely back to her dress. More specifically, based on the way she's draped herself across the couch, to the slit in her dress, which currently is displaying more skin than she bargained for.

"Have I mentioned what a lovely dress that is?" I ask her, and a knowing smirk spreads across her face.

"Based on how quickly you took it off me when I modelled it for you at home, I had an idea."

There really is nothing that can be said to that.

"I'm not the only one who was admiring it. John asked me on the way to the bar who I was talking to."

"John now is it?"

"Yeah. He wanted to know who the buxom redhead I was talking to was."

She opens one eye, and her face is a question mark. "Buxom?"

I nod, concentrating very hard on what my hands are doing. "Rather striking were the other words he used…I have a feeling he's quite enamoured of you."

Both eyes are open now, and her face has changed from questioning to mildly irritated, with a glint in her eye. "You mean if I'd held out a few years more, I could have bagged myself a Lord instead of a lawyer? Damn." She grins as she finishes, and I find myself laughing, slapping her leg in mock annoyance. "Mother will be so disappointed."

"Your mother would rather see you with that dissolute reprobate than me?" I ask her, and the second I say it, I regret my words. Because truth be told, certainly at the start of our relationship, she just might have. We get along fine now, but I know that when Ginger and I started seeing each other, she worried about what a man who was divorced, without a stable job, and who was some twenty-odd years older than Ginger could possibly be after. It took a long time for Ginger's parents to fully accept us as a couple, and time was that it was a sensitive issue with Ginger.

But not tonight, and I'm not quite sure if it's because time has healed the wound, or because she's consumed quite a lot of wine. Or both. "It's the title," she tells me seriously.

"Oh."

I go back to rubbing her feet, and there's silence for a moment before she speaks. "You didn't tell me what you were talking about."

"He doesn't think that we should let Brendan McGann visit the White House."

"Does he have a point?"

I sigh. "Maybe. But somewhere along the line, someone has to sit down and talk to someone else. It has to start somewhere."

She's looking at me as if she's trying to figure out if I believe what I'm saying, or if I'm just spouting the party line. She makes a decision, because she just nods and says, "OK." She sits up at that, swinging her legs from my lap standing up. "We should get back."

"We don't have to." My voice is quiet, because right now, there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here. Although home, in our room, is looking good too.

She grins down at me as she slips her feet into her shoes. "No way Ziegler. You promised me a dance, and dance we shall." She fusses with her hair, flipping it over her shoulders so that it cascades down her back, and straightens her dress, performing a little shimmy as she checks for creases.

"And we talked about dead Irish writers," I find myself saying.

"Huh?" she asks, looking at me.

"Irish writers. We quoted them at the bar. And I just remembered another one, here looking at you."

"I reminded you of a dead Irish writer?"

"No. You reminded me of the Planter's Daughter."

She only looks more confused, but there's a little bit of amusement there too. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

"Planters were English people, who came to live in Ireland from England in the 17^th century. They were given land by Queen Elizabeth, land which was seized from the Irish Catholic landowners, and given to the Protestant English, who would then cultivate the land, using the Irish peasant population as their servants."

She's frowning now. "And I remind you of these people how?"

I shake my head. "The Planter's Daughter is a poem by Austin Clarke. It's about this village, and a planter's daughter…"

"And that's who I remind you of?"

I stand, putting my arms around her waist. "When night stirred at sea, and fire brought a crowd in, They say that her beauty was music in mouth." When I reach the end of that quote, a smile is beginning to spread across her face, and her arms go around my neck.

"Keep going."

"And few in the candlelight thought her too proud, For the house of the planter is known by the trees. You see, they knew that her father was the most important man in the area, they knew that she deserved to be proud, that she was better than they were. But she didn't act like it."

"Oh."

"Men that had seen her drank deep, and were silent."

"And that's good?"

"That's very good. The women were speaking wherever she went."

"That doesn’t sound good."

"They may have been jealous of her," I allow before continuing. "As a bell that is rung, or a wonder told quietly. And she was the Sunday in every week."

"I don't understand."

"These people worked hard in the fields, all the hours God sent…"

"Wonder what that's like?" she interrupts dryly.

"But Sunday was their one day of rest. It was the thing that they looked forward to more than anything else. The high point of their week. And any time that they saw the planter's daughter, it was like Sunday to them, because they enjoyed seeing her so much." Her face is very close to mine now, and I'm whispering. "You're the Sunday in every week to me Ginger. My very own wonder told quietly," I tell her before I close any distance between us.

When I pull away from her, there are tears in her eyes, but her smile is bright. "That's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me."

My hands run up and down her back. "That's what it's like at one of these things," I tell her. "We walk in together and every head turns and looks at you. Before Leo called me away, I must've seen a dozen men looking at you, wondering what you're doing with me. And you don't even know how many heads you're turning."

One of her hands finds my cheek, and I turn my head to kiss the palm. "Toby, the only head is want to turn is the man's that's standing right in front of me."

"Well." I can hear the gruffness in my own voice when I speak. "You've succeeded."

She doesn't say anything in response to that, just kisses me again. And when she pulls away, she tilts her head, a soft smile on her face. "I don't want to dance anymore," she tells me.

"Want to go home?" I ask her, and she nods in response. "Well then let's go." I find my coat and help her slip hers on and we walk arm in arm out of the bullpen. And there's a smile on my face as I head home with my wife at my side, and I realise that this wasn't such a bad night after all.

Back to Tests of Faith
Back to West Wing Fanfic