Rating: PG
Pairing: Toby/Ginger
Spoilers: Let Bartlet Be Bartlet
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: After the meeting in Leo's office, Toby goes home.
Author's Note 1: Blame Sunny. How many times have I said this? This is a (kind of) response to the June challenge on the Toby list; to have someone literally turn blue. Now, it was a silly fic challenge, but I can't do silly to save myself, and I was in the middle of the next Tests of Faith when she posted the challenge. And this little fluffy piece of fluff just came to me. I asked if I could still do it as a response to the challenge, and Sunny agreed….so this is doubly her fault!
Author's Note 2: Slight case of going backwards to go forward here. Those of you who were expecting something to do with the shooting - that's coming. Really. This is fluff. Those of you who haven't read Tests of Faith before, the basic premise is that Toby and Ginger have been married since the campaign. All previous installments can be found in episodic (not posting - and my beta reader is having a canary trying to keep it straight!) on my site. They are Parting the Clouds (Six Meetings Before Lunch), Until The Sky Falls Down (Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics), If I Ever Lose My Faith (Mandatory Minimums) and A Wonder Told Quietly (Dead Irish Writers)

"Ginger! I'm home!"

I can't remember the last time I left the White House this energised, this positive about where we were working and what we were doing. It certainly hasn't been in the last year, not with everything that's been going on, or not going on, around there. Today is different though. We were all feeling frustrated, hamstrung, Sam with the meeting on gays in the military, CJ with Mandy's memo, Josh with the thing on campaign finance reform. Then we got the news that we dropped five points in a week when we didn't even do anything. I've never seen the Senior Staff as depressed as we were when Leo went into the Oval. We didn't even talk, that's how bad things were.

And then, after a few minutes, Leo came into the room looking a good five years younger, talking about how we were going to raise the level of public debate in this country, about how we were going to crash into walls, but we were going to be running into them at full speed. As I listened to him, the craziest sense of déjà vu crept over me - those were exactly the kind of things we used to talk about late at night on the campaign, when winning the White House was looking like a pipedream. Then Leo went and got Josh, who brought Sam, and he sent me to get CJ, and the core campaign team were brought together, and every day I felt just like I feel now.

It's a great feeling.

And it's one that I want to share with my wife, so I call her name again as I hang up my coat, shaking myself slightly to rid the last of the drops of rain from my face and body. It's teeming out there, has been off and on for most of the day, despite what First Lieutenant Emily Lowenbrau might have told Sam this morning.

I really do worry about that man sometimes.

But not now, because I intend to make the most of this good mood that I'm in, and celebrate hopefully turning a corner in the life of this administration with my wife.

Which I would do except that I realise as I walk down the hall and into the living room, she doesn't appear to be home. I frown as I note the silence, because she's normally here waiting for me, unless she's told me otherwise. "Ginger?" I call again, checking the kitchen, and it's there that I see, on the corkboard on the wall, a note in her handwriting. I read it, and my jaw drops open. I'm not sure when exactly my wife lost her mind, but I've got the evidence of it here in my hand.

"Toby, gone for a run. Won't be long. Love, me."

I read the note several times, hoping that during one of them, the letters will rearrange themselves to tell me something else. When it's evident that that's not going to happen, my head turns to look out the window, at the dark skies and the teeming rain, banging against the window. She went out jogging in weather like this?

I'm considering if I should get in the car and go looking for her when the doorbell begins to ring, and for a second I feel sorry for whoever's on the other side, because I'm not going to be the world's most welcoming host.

Dropping the note on the table, I make my way back down the hall, wrenching open the door, ready to bark out a greeting. When I see who it is however, any words that I might have said disappear from my throat.

Standing there, soaked to the skin, is Ginger. And when I say soaked, I mean it in no devalued sense. Her sweatshirt and sweatpants are stuck to her skin, and her hair is plastered to her head. She's shivering violently, and is so cold that I swear her skin is literally turning blue.

It takes a second for me to fully take the sight of her in, and when I do, I grab her by the shoulders and propel her firmly in the door, into the warmth of the house. "Are you all right?" I ask her, alarm diluting my anger, but her teeth are chattering so violently that she can hardly answer me.

"C-c-couldn't g-g-get my key in the d-door," she manages to gasp out, dropping the keys that were in her hand on to the hall table.

"Jesus Ginger, you're going to catch pneumonia going out in weather like that," I mutter, leading her down the hall to our room. She leaves a trail of water in her wake, and I can feel the dampness seeping into my arm that's around her.

"I kn-kn-know…" she whispers.

I'd love to know why the hell she picked tonight to go out running, and don't doubt for a second that I will, but now is not the time. Now is the time to get her warmed up before she really does make herself sick. "Come on, we've got to get you out of those clothes," I tell her, and despite her shaking, a smile flits across her face. I know exactly what she's thinking, and despite my worry, I laugh a little. "That's not what I meant, and you know it," I tell her firmly, taking hold of the bottom of her sweatshirt, peeling it from her body. "Arms up." She complies without a murmur, and between us, we get her out of the wet clothes, and I wrap her robe around her. She's still cold and clammy to the touch, so I slip my arm around her, bringing her to the bathroom. "Under the shower," I order. "And don't come out until you're warm."

"Y-y-yes Sir," comes her reply, but she does as she's told, leaving me shaking my head. Back in our room, I pick up the clothes that are scattered all around, not the first time in our marriage that I've found myself performing that particular task. It is, however, the first time that water runs out of the clothes as I take them in my hand, and I grimace as I realise anew just how wet and cold she must have been, resolving to keep a close eye on her over the next couple of days, because all we need is to have her come down with something.

Once the clothes are in the laundry basket, I go to the kitchen, boiling the kettle, getting ready to make some hot chocolate for her. A quick glance in the cupboard assures me that yes, we do have marshmallows for her, and I leave them on the counter, going into the kitchen and lighting up the gas fire.

Then I sit down, turn on CNN and wait for her.

It's a good twenty five minutes before she comes in, looking distinctly less blue and more pink than when I left her. She's wearing a different robe to the one that I wrapped her in, my robe in fact, and it swamps her. Her hair is swept up in a towel, her hairbrush in her hand and she smiles sheepishly at me. I stand, pointing to the couch. "Sit," I order, and she complies without a word, while I go into the kitchen, making two cups of hot chocolate.

When I come back, she's curled up on the couch, arms wrapped around her middle, legs curled up underneath her. Her eyes are closed and her head is resting against the back of the couch, but her eyes open when I sit down beside her. "Drink this," I tell her, my tone softer now than it was a few minutes ago. I think it's the sight of her sitting there like that, looking so small and vulnerable. She accepts the cup, grinning brightly when she sees the marshmallows, taking a couple of small sips. While she's doing that, I take the towel from her hair, letting the dark strands of red fall around her shoulders. She's cut her hair recently, so that it falls to just below her shoulders. It used to fall almost to her waist, but she complained that it took too much effort to maintain it. She was threatening to get it cut as short as Mandy's, but my own threat of divorce if she did put paid to that. I love her long hair, and I take her brush in my hand now and carefully begin to brush out the tangles. She's perfectly quiet as I work, only hissing every now and again when I hit an especially nasty one. It doesn't take long before I'm finished, the result of many nights of practice, and I lean back against the couch, sipping my own hot chocolate.

"Thank you," she finally says, breaking the silence.

I nod. "You're welcome." I take a beat before I speak again. "You want to tell me why you were out jogging on a night like this?"

A pale rush of pink creeps up her cheeks. "In my defence, it wasn't raining when I went out," she tells me.

"It's been raining off and on all day Ginger," I point out, a hint of exasperation finding its way into my voice. "We had to move the damn speech this morning… what the hell were you thinking?"

She drops her head, staring into her cup. "It was a bad day," she murmurs.

"What?" I frown, and her head lifts up, her eyes meeting mine.

"It was a bad day," she repeats, her voice getting stronger. "Everyone was walking around feeling terrible, it felt like there was nothing getting done, like we were going nowhere…and then the numbers came through…" I know exactly how she was feeling because I felt that way too. We all did today. "And I was fed up of feeling so frustrated, and when I got home, I felt like the walls were closing in on me…so I went out for a run." She does that sometimes, I know that. Ginger deals with frustration and upset in different ways. When she's upset over something, when something is troubling her, she cleans. When we got married, it was done quickly during the campaign - and when I say quickly, I mean that I proposed and we got married a week later. The campaign staff knew, but not our families, not until after the fact. My family was surprised, my brother was furious, and Ginger's family wasn't that happy about it either. It all added up to us having one of the cleanest hotel rooms in campaign history, and Ginger was a one-woman filing machine for weeks - we'd never been so up-to-date, nor have we been since. When she's frustrated however, she needs space. She goes out walking, or running, or to the gym, and there have been times when she's scared the life out of me. Never more so than that day in New York where she met my family. We had a particularly brutal lunch with David, where he was very cold to her, and she disappeared afterwards for over an hour. I was frantic by the time she got back, and when she told me that she'd just gone out for a walk, acting as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, the only thing I could think of was what could have happened to her, a pretty young woman wandering the streets on her own. Not unlike my feelings tonight in fact.

"You could have caught your death of cold out there," I grumble, her dejection now helping my anger to dissipate.

"I know."

"Have me phone up your mother…" I continue as if she hadn't spoken. "Have to listen to a lecture about how I don't take good enough care of her little girl, about all the things that I should have done, followed by a list of instructions on how to nurse you back to health…" Her lips are twitching as I continue my diatribe, because we both know that that's exactly what her mother would say. "She might even insist on coming to visit, to ensure that you really are recovering…" A giggle escapes her at the note of dread in my voice. "You see what your little excursion could have done to us?" That does it. She collapses laughing, and by the time she's sobered up, she's nestling against my shoulder, my arm wrapped around her.

"It really wasn't raining when I went out," she tells me. "I thought that I'd be able to get back before it began again…I didn't know that it would come down so quickly."

"You feel better now?" I asked her, kissing the top of her head. She looks better anyway, and she's not shivering any more.

She nods, draining the last of her cup and reaching over to put it on the table. The robe opens a little as she moves, and my eyes are drawn to the gap. When she realises what I'm doing, she grins but doesn't say anything, rearranging the robe and pressing herself closer to me, wrapping her arms around me. My own arms tighten around her too, and we sit in silence for a few moments. "How did the meeting go?" she asks eventually, knowing all too well my frame of mind when I left to go Leo's office, having had the job of bringing the new polling numbers to me. I vented my own frustration to her then, which wouldn't have helped her mood any, then told her as I was heading out that she could leave if she wanted. I thought that she might wait for me in my office, like she sometimes does, but when I came back, in a far better mood than when I'd left, her computer was turned off, her coat and purse gone, so I came straight home to find her, to share my good news.

"Well," I tell her. "None of us had such a good day either. Then CJ gave Mandy's memo to the President."

She winces. "How did he take it?"

"He called Leo in, talked to him about it. And Ginger," I chuckle slightly, I can't help it. "I don't know what was said in there, or what happened, but you should have seen Leo when he came back."

She lifts her head from my shoulder, sitting up properly. Her eyes are narrowed in confusion, but they're lit with a hope that's been missing all day. "What was he like?"

"Energised," is the only word that I can come up with. "He was talking about not being threatened by issues, and about gearing up for battles and running into walls at full speed…and he told Josh to tell the Hill that we've picked our guys for the F.E.C." Her eyes widen at that news. "I haven't heard him talk that way in…God, I can't even remember the last time." She bites her bottom lip in amazement, her smile huge, and she shakes her head thoughtfully. "We're back in the game Ginger," I conclude. "That sound all right to you?"

She nods slowly, before she says something that has me reaching for her. "I serve at the pleasure of the President," she announces, hardly getting the words out before I place my lips on hers and her arms slip around my neck as she responds enthusiastically, moving so that she's straddling my lap.

Before long, we're making out like teenagers on the couch and her hands slip between us, fumbling with the buttons on my shirt. My own hands aren't idle either, undoing the tie on the robe, allowing me to push it away from her body, exposing to my hands the smooth skin that tantalised me a few minutes ago. She gasps into my mouth, and I begin to kiss my way down her neck. "You're shivering again," I tell her between kisses.

"I'm not cold…" is her answer, and my lips curl up into a smile, because I did notice that. I tell her as much as she chuckles, a sound that changes into a low moan thanks to my hands' activities. "Toby…" she whispers, before finding my lips again.

"You want to move this to the bedroom?" I ask her a few minutes later, and her eyes light up then, and she smiles wickedly as her hands move down to my belt, and the clasp of my pants.

"No," she whispers, and that's the last word on the subject for the time being.

When we come back to ourselves, I'm lying on the couch with her on top of me, and she's dragged my robe up off the floor, managing to partially cover ourselves with it. There's a peaceful smile on her face, and I'm pretty sure that I'm grinning too as my fingers trace patterns over the skin of her back. "You ok?" I ask her, feeling myself about to drift off to sleep.

"Yep," she tells me, and if her voice is drowsy, she still manages to be drowsy and sassy all at once. "I'm all warmed up now."

"Good." I kiss the top of her head and tighten my hold on her, and seconds later, we're both asleep.

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