DISCLAIMER: Please note that this story includes a lot of rather upsetting theories about planes and plane crashes and Josh's (my) reactions to such. I have a feeling that both of us will be pretty happy if we never see the inside of an airport again.
TITLE: "Something In Between"
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle <snk@wearemany.net>
FANDOM/PAIRING: The West Wing, Josh/Sam
RATING:
PG-13, for a few four-letter words and some slashy lusting
between men.
All UST, all the time. Go away if you can't handle
that.
SPOILERS:
None really, just vague references to various S1 eps. A
stand-alone
story that could fit most anywhere.
DISLAIMERS:
Too impatient for beta, so all remaining mistakes are
mine. Characters
and lyrics are used lovingly, without permission.
Notes/source info at end.
SUMMARY:
Our Favorite Duo is called away on a sudden trip. Or,
Josh's fears
of flying.
DISTRIBUTION:
List archive OK, all
others please send URL of archived
location.
THANKS:
To T1, for defending the constant subtextual eye. Originally
posted
23 February 2001.
FEEDBACK:
What passes for polling in slashland. All comments and
constructive
criticism welcome at snk@wearemany.net.
---------------------------
"Something
In Between"
by S.N. Kastle <snk@wearemany.net>
Asked a girl what she wanted to be
She said, baby,
can't you see
I want to be famous, a star on the
screen
But you can do something in between
Baby, you can drive my car
Yes, I'm gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive my
car
And maybe I'll love you
-- The Beatles
JOSH
WAS AFRAID of flying. He knew it was silly. Girlish, even.
But
every time the plane bucked an inch, his heart wound up somewhere
inside
his stomach. That goddamned old United Airlines theme was
enough to
make his pulse race. Fucking Gershwin. He had never in
his life
admitted this terrified feeling to anyone, not even his
therapist.
The well-intentioned Stan would have tried to convince
him that all intelligent,
rational men had senseless, groundless fears.
How many people flew on any given day without ever having a more
confounding
moment than "broiled beef or chicken with rice"? How
many passengers
had families who never even knew their loved one's
flight number, let alone
recalled it years later during a late-night
infomercial, the toll-free order
number summoning long-lost ghosts of
TWA 800?
Sam would know something like that. The number of passengers, not
the
ghosts. Sam always knew the numbers -- the month that O'Hare
became
the second busiest airport in the country, the fact that you
were probably
more likely to be hit by an off-course, overpowered
soccer ball kicked out
of bounds during a World Cup game than go down
in a fiery heap of metal and
melted polyester seats. Jesus, it was
easier to hear someone on his
cell phone in a Metro tunnel than whatever
the pilot was telling them now
-- probably something about an emergency
landing, grab the chutes, secure
the children first.
The 747 lurched leftward, careening him from the safety of his window
seat
-- at least that way he'd notice when they were, in fact, going
into a nosedive
-- and, despite his tightly fastened seat belt,
practically into Sam's lap.
Sam, who had graciously offered to take the tiny middle seat between
Josh
and a very bejeweled, very old woman. Sam, who was smiling now
and
pretending elaborately to tuck Josh carefully into his own seat
once again.
Sam, who had this self-amused, self-assured gleam in his
eye to match his
light, tingling touch.
Tingling? He must be suffering from oxygen deprivation, or some kind
of anxiety disorder, or *something*. Sam wasn't tingly.
"Did you ever think we'd be the kind of guys who could say, 'I hate
flying
commercial'?" Sam asked, sitting forward the few inches the
seat allowed
him. Sam's jacket was squished in the overhead bin, his
white dress
shirt rolled up at the sleeves, the tie still tightly
knotted. The
remnants of a tan from three days' sailing in Antigua
made the shirt's second-day
wear somehow less obvious; the fabric
still seemed crisp even though it was
wrinkling now in the front, too.
"You must have always planned on being a star," Josh said, the
anxious feeling
fading and replaced by a dim warmth likely nurtured
by the empty miniature
Jack Daniel's bottle that rolled back and
forth on the woman's tray table.
She'd insisted on gathering the
collected trash in anticipation of their
not-so-swift disposal. Sam
badly feigned offense. "Come on,"
Josh said. "You were dancing
around the house when you were 12 years
old, singing 'Baby, You Can
Drive My Car.'"
"Is that less obnoxious than that song from *Risky Business*?" Sam asked.
"'Old Time Rock and Roll'?"
"Yeah."
"No."
Sam grinned, his perfect movie-star smile -- how many teeth, Josh
wondered
-- resting between his reddish lips like little pearls. "I
love that
song," Sam said.
"'Old Time Rock and Roll'?"
"No. 'You Can Drive My Car, Baby.'"
"'Baby,'" Josh said, correcting him. Sam raised his right eyebrow
and
the left corner of his mouth, two facial tics that always came
together.
Sam kept the pair elevated, almost laughing for a long,
smooth minute without
one little air pocket. All flying should be
like this, Josh thought.
"'Baby, You Can Drive My Car'?" Sam said, the upspoken end soft.
"Shit, you better offer me a better time than that," Josh said, looking
away
from Josh to the putty-colored plastic clasp of his own tray table.
The motor
hiccuped. His heart jumped. "Actually, I don't think there's
a 'baby' in that title at all." Sam nodded, shifted almost imperceptibly
away from Josh.
Josh felt sure he had just escaped something, just barely. The smell
of warmed meat wafted from the prep station just two rows back, and he
decided
he was suddenly, ravenously hungry. He craned around to see
if they
were filling a cart and felt his right shoulder bump Sam's.
He sat back,
tried to erase the word 'tingly' from his vocabulary.
"How many people fly
every day?" he asked, wiggling the tray catch back
and forth, not quite enough
for it to fall, but close.
Without hesitation, Sam said, "About two million."
"Two million? That's like half the population of Atlanta." Josh
knew a few numbers, too. Plus he'd spent three hours the week before
with the junior senator from Georgia, talking about redistricting.
"That's just Americans flying anywhere in the world," Sam said in his
briefing
voice. Josh didn't mind, didn't feel talked down to. Sam
always
knew these kind of things. It was why it was good to have him
along.
"Domestic, it's about a million. Average. Holiday weekends
kind
of skew the whole thing." He paused for a second, before
launching
into: "Did you know that the crashes of TWA 800 and
Swissair 111 may have
been caused by electromagnetic interference
from five U.S. boats and aircraft?"
"Boats *and* aircraft?" Josh asked. He thought he sounded scared.
"Which
agency?" he asked, trying to sound demanding.
"Various." Sam's tone was blasé in that cool 'I have information
but
who really cares except me' kind of way. Usually he was right.
But this
was still much better than listening for every minor shift in the
turbine
flow. "Coast Guard, Navy, Air Force, I think. Both flights
left at the
same time from JFK, following the exact same flight pattern over
the same
five crafts, which were all on planned itineraries and thus also
in the
same place. And they experienced first signs of electrical failure
the
same number of minutes into flight."
Sam always knew these kinds of things. He did not always know the
best
time to share them. Josh wondered if it was too soon to order
another
drink. He desperately wanted to get himself drunk, though
never did
he feel so much like an alcoholic -- which he was not, he
was not Toby --
as when Sam ordered tomato juice and Josh promptly
got liquored up.
The old lady had coffee and gave Josh a strange
look when he passed his four
dollar bills across Sam's and her laps
to the flight attendant. He
really only drank like this on flights.
He leaned back, picked up the airline
magazine and made himself
silently count to 10 behind the shield of a Maine
tourism ad.
"Besides," Sam said, as if they were mid-sentence, when, in fact, it
had
been at least a count of 10 and possibly much, much longer, "I
didn't want
to be a star." He leaned in, conspiratorially. "I
wanted to be
a pilot."
Sam smelled like a vegetable garden, and there was a little flake of
dried
tomato juice in the crease between the upper and lower halves
of his mouth.
Josh wanted to brush it aside for no real reason at
all and clasped the slippery
gloss of the magazine to still his
wandering hand. "You're kidding,"
Josh said.
"No. The hats are cool." Sam didn't smile a millimeter, tried to
maintain the story.
"Sam, you were born to be a star." Sam scrunched his nose in that
way
that meant he didn't agree. And, also, made him look a little
bit like
a rabbit. "Come on," Josh said. "You think you get sent to
*Capital
Beat* three times a month because you have all the magnetism
of an airline
pilot?"
"You go on TV, too."
"Yeah, and then I almost get fired. Now I get to talk off-camera at
the Harvard of the mid-central South."
"They sent you to UVA again?"
"Exactly." Better than stuck in a car on Connecticut highways with
Toby, he thought. He should have gone instead, let Toby take the
speech.
"You really wanted to be a pilot?"
"No," Sam said. "I wanted to be on *General Hospital*. But then I
was informed that was a sissy career choice."
"Who said that?"
"Everyone," he said, which meant his dad. For just a second, Josh
could
remember so precisely why he and Sam had become friends all
those years ago
-- beneath the cocky veneer of the debate-camp whiz kid
was just a boy whose
father would never think his son's verbal acuity was
as important, as necessary,
as football. Suddenly the star had become just
another guy trying to
escape his family's guilt, their expectations. "Did
you know that their
ratings beat CNN's and CNBC's combined? The whole day's
programming
versus one hour."
"*General Hospital*?"
"Yeah."
Josh shrugged. "They're network."
"Still... More people know what's up with Luke and Laura than what's
happening with the IMF. And even Wolf Blitzer has better hair these
days than Luke."
Josh gave that the required half-smirk but let Sam's deliberate
admission
slide. "All these years in politics and that still
surprises you?"
he asked instead.
"No. I just thought I should point out that I'd have more viewers on
a soap opera."
"Spoken like a star."
"Please... Stars don't fly commercial."
"Remind me again why we are?" Josh asked.
"It's a holiday weekend," Sam said. "The President took his plane,
as he usually does on days when most of the country doesn't work, and
went
somewhere fabulous. We decided to do this thing last minute.
And we
didn't want to spend the next 12 news cycles reading about how
two White
House staffers spent $83,000 of the taxpayers' hard-earned
money to take
an Army plane to a fundraiser in a part of the country that
is far more temperate
than D.C. during this time of year."
"Why don't we have a plane?"
"It would be vacation-gate," Sam said.
"We should really have our own plane."
"It would be fundraiser-gate."
"We could fly anywhere we want, whenever we want."
"It would be Josh-and-Sam-gate."
"Why does it always have to be something-gate?" Josh asked. "I mean,
it's been almost 20 years. Besides, it was a hotel, not an adjective."
"Besides," Sam said knowingly, "you hate to fly."
The plane slightly decelerated and began to drop its landing gear as
superfluous,
detached voices announced their imminent descent. Josh
and Sam each
caught the other's eye, nodding. "Good point," they
said, their words
just overlapping.
Josh decided maybe he didn't need another drink. "Josh-and-Sam-gate,"
he said, smiling, as he slipped the tray back into its locked and upright
position. "That's a start."
END.
Feedback
to: snk@wearemany.net.
---------------------------
NOTES:
If I have
enough free time, this will be one interlocking part in a
little Josh and
Sam world of my own creation, some of which will almost
certainly have actual
sex in it! For this one, I tried to stick to the
flirty but ambiguous
tone of the show and let Josh get used to his (new?)
feelings about Sam.
But feedback might help persuade me to keep writing.
And it's good karma.
Sam's
electromagnetic interference theory of plane crashes is based
on the work
of Harvard literary theorist Elaine Scarry, as detailed in
*The
New York Times Magazine*. I'd like to thank her for making me so
restless on my last trip I had to write this in order to avoid thinking
about
crashing. I'd like also to give a shout-out to the Bureau
of
Transportation Statistics information
office for some quick number-
crunching.
All
the lyrics to "Drive My Car" by Paul McCartney and John Lennon
(from *Rubber
Soul*) just didn't seem to fit at the top of the piece,
but for those who
are unfamiliar:
Asked
a girl what she wanted to be
She said, baby, can't you see
I want to
be famous, a star on the screen
But you can do something in between
Baby, you can
drive my car
Yes, I'm gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive my car
And maybe I'll love you
I
told the girl that my prospects were good
She said, baby, it's understood
Working for peanuts is all very fine
But I can show you a better time
Baby,
you can drive my car
You know I'm gonna be a star
Baby, you can drive
my car
And maybe I love you
Beep beep, mmm, beep beep, mmm, yeah!
I
told the girl I could start right away
She said, listen babe, I got something
to say
I got no car and it's breaking my heart
But I found a driver
and that's a start
Baby,
you can drive my car...