TITLE: "Say the Word"
AUTHOR: S.N. Kastle <snk@wearemany.net>
FANDOM/PAIRING: The West Wing, Josh/Sam
RATING:
R, unless you're playing by MPAA rules, in which case it would
probably be
NC-17, just because they're boys. Go away if you can't
handle that
(the rating, not the injustice, I say in my best Toby voice).
SPOILERS:
None. Inspired by a few seconds from "Ellie" but otherwise
unrelated
to the content of that episode. A stand-alone story that
could fit
most anywhere, including after my last piece, "Something
In
Between."
DISLAIMERS:
Not mine; thanks to Aaron Sorkin for the loan. Notes/source
info at
end.
SUMMARY:
Josh uses his magic powers for good and not-so-good. Or, the
power
of a singular moment. (A snippet.)
DISTRIBUTION:
List archives OK, all others please send URL of archived
location.
Apologies for cross-posting. Are we all on the same lists?
THANKS:
To all the wonderful fans on these new lists I'm subbed to. The
response
has been amazing. Originally posted 1 March 2001.
FEEDBACK:
All comments and constructive criticism welcome at
snk@wearemany.net.
---------------------------
"Say the
Word"
by S.N. Kastle <snk@wearemany.net>
Say the word and you'll be free
Say the word and
be like me
Say the word I'm thinking of
Have you heard the word is 'love'?
-- The Beatles
IF JOSH HAD to pick the moment when he knew, it would be:
He was standing in Toby's office, half-listening to the man ramble
about
something -- the decline of the American Left, maybe, or how when
his ex's
office called him the day before they'd spelled her last name for
Ginger,
like he didn't know -- and staring off through the window to
Sam's office.
Sam was sitting at his desk, glasses on, three thick
texts piled open on
top of each other.
Sam wasn't looking at the books. He was staring at a clear expanse
toward the far edge of his desk. He had a partial grin around the
corners
of his mouth, the kind that meant he'd stumbled onto about half
of a perfect
solution and his microcomputer of a brain was cycling
through the possibilities
for the matching combination that would solve
the puzzle.
And then, in a sudden whir of upward movement that drew the thin
Oxford shirt
tight against his chest so the sleeveless undershirt stood
out in relief,
a white-on-white demarcation like the marble shadow of a
cloak's fold on
a statue, Sam stood and strode toward the door. He
yelled something
at Cathy and took off down the hall.
And Toby was still talking, still saying something that, as he was
in fact
still talking, was almost certainly of some consequence, but
Josh was enveloped
in the rewind-repeat silent performance of Sam's
flight. The frames
were as distinct as Zapruder's, the color painted
grainy and vintage as the
sequence of motion -- stare, stand, stride --
melted themselves into his
memory. The backdrop of Sam's office faded
away, the windows and bookshelves
and the old "Don't Tread on Me" flag
moved out like temporary walls on a
TV set, or like a kind of reverse
nuclear fallout that left neutron Sam the
only structure remaining as
the temporal setting fell away like ash.
It became the embodiment of
his singular Sam: the warrior setting off to
battle, the hero emerging
from a daring rescue, the explorer taking the first
steps on Mars.
It was what got him through everything else.
---------------------------
IT HAD
ONLY ever happened that clearly once before, when he was 15, when
Chris Manning
gave a wild whoop before jumping feet first into the
reservoir formed by
a rock quarry near their homes in Connecticut, arms
waving around his head
and a high-pitched "Yeahhhhhh" blowing like a
gust from his mouth.
The cool, clear water swallowed the naked body and distorted the
view Josh
had of Chris' seemingly-Herculean form with unnatural bends
and twists of
light and refraction. Where there had been a smooth,
straight spine
and a perfectly symmetrical, golden-toned ass still
fleshy with baby fat,
the back was now disjointed like a straw beneath
the surface of a soda, the
cheeks speckled and silvery like the spotted
old mirror in his dying grandmother's
attic.
Josh had been terribly, terrifyingly sure of what he had wanted of
Chris
in that moment before he jumped in after the boy and wrestled
him back to
the water's edge. Where, after enough rolling around in
the rough sand,
they both sported still-childish, curious erections and
conversed haltingly
but enthusiastically about Mary Bennett's tight
sweaters as they jerked each
other off.
That was all before -- before Chris had avoided him for the rest of
summer
and half the fall, dodged him in the hallways until Josh secured
his own
girlfriend whose sexual preferences he could loudly discuss in,
of all the
cliched places, the locker room. Before the age of AIDS had
made merely
floating the possibility of one having bisexual tendencies --
let alone oneself
-- no longer edgy, not even radical, just dangerous.
Before he'd learned
that his much-ballyhooed brilliance and gift for
spin could be used most
effectively to convince himself that one perfect
sunny afternoon did not
a lifetime make.
Before he'd admitted that his lifetime could somehow, distressingly,
encompass
both golf and liberalism, both deep hopes for the fate of a
nation and profound
cynicism for their achievement, both happiness in
the arms and beds of women
and a deep, nameless -- he would *not*
name it, not then -- sense of emptiness.
Before Sam.
---------------------------
AFTER
SAM, AFTER three weeks of sitting through staff meetings and
speech meetings
and policy meetings and -- the most unsettling two hours
of his life -- one-on-one
meetings, after he'd let the word "ambiguous"
bounce around the caverns of
his mind like an Atari game's Pong ball, he
knew. Really knew, not
just for a moment.
He let "ambiguous" blossom into "tingling" and mature into "awakening"
before
a brief detour back to "delusional." He settled on "possible." It
was possible, he reasoned, that Sam's presence in his life had become so
dependable, so reassuring, that he was displacing a sense of professional
accomplishment and pride. It was possible that Sam looked at everyone
that
way -- everyone did, in fact, look *at* Sam that way. It was possible
that
something denied for so long could not be salvaged in a manner that
even
remotely resembled what was commonly called a possibility.
It was possible he was in love.
END.
Feedback to snk@wearemany.net.
----------------------------
NOTES:
Lyrics
from "The Word" are by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, from
*Rubber Soul.*
In the process of breaking myself into a new fandom of
slash, I've challenged
myself to a series of shortish stories that draw
from that album's lyrics
for titles. Don't ask why; I just had the
first one stuck in my head
when I wrote "Something In Between" and now
I'm being a masochist.
I can't promise the others will have anything to
do with these two pieces,
but I might be convinced: Feed me!
And,
just for the record, I hate those stories when a character suddenly
-- always
by accident or the interference of a third party -- realizes,
duh!
They like boys. Or girls. Or both. (See *In & Out,* for
one.)
Please. There's a point at which you don't quite understand what
you're
feeling, and then there's adolescence. Understanding what what
you're
feeling means in the real world is another thing entirely. And
that is
not to say that denial is merely a river in Egypt. I hope I've
made the
distinction clear.