Title: A History of Lovers, Given and Taken in Ink
Fandom: The West Wing
Characters: Andrea Wyatt/Toby Ziegler, brief Huck and Molly
Prompt: tww_minis: Epistolary; fanfic100: #04 – Insides; un_love_you: #07 – Prove it.
Word Count: ~2,560
Rating: r
Summary: Their history was in scraps of paper.
Author's Notes: Thanks to amy_vic and raedbard for the encouragement.



It was a stash of scraps – some half-formed, some not sent – that each had but never talked about.

Andy’s was (embarrassingly, she thought) the closest thing to a hope chest she ever had – a cedar box her mother gave her when she was 16. She’d never known what to do with it; now it held papers from him and underneath it all, a small jewelry bag with her engagement ring.

Toby’s were in an accordion file with everything else even remotely related to her. (Except for the slip of paper on which her phone number was written, given to him in a sweltering parking lot when she was 27. That was faded and creased irreparably but stayed in his wallet.) The file lived at the front of his file cabinet at home, under A for Andrea.

Cobbled together, as Molly and Huck did when they found them decades and volumes later, it became a history of lovers, given and taken in ink.

*****

On the letterhead of the candidate he was working for in Annapolis, just a month into their relationship. It took him three days to get up the nerve to send it, and added the postscript at the last minute, hoping it was endearing rather than demanding.

Andy,

It doesn’t seem right to be in your home state without you to show me around. Come visit next weekend?

Toby

p.s. Bring bagels from Max’s.

She came, and secreted him away to her family’s house at the shore for two days. He didn’t see any more of her home state that way, barely even saw the outside of the house, but he really didn’t mind the trade-off.

*****

Left on his pillow, which didn’t hold any traces of his body heat by the time she woke up.

A –

Out to get coffee - omelets when I get back.

The bruises are a good look for you.

T.

She laughed upon reading it, and tugged on the necktie (still tied to his headboard) that had bound her wrists the night before. That’s how he found her, curled around his pillow, a grin on her face, bruise-blue skin around her wrists just waiting to be kissed and soothed. They didn’t get to omelets until mid-afternoon that day.

*****

Propped against the coffee maker on a Saturday morning; Andrea had come home from work late and knew he’d be going to Temple in the morning and would see it before he left.

TZ –

We need milk.

I adore you.

xx A

Technically, it wasn’t their apartment (yet), but she’d barely left in three months, and all her plants had died at her place. The next week, he asked her to stay for good.

*****

Forwarded to her new address in Maryland, after they’d both fucked it up beyond recognition, from zero to sixty too fast to see what had happened. They were both too stubborn to bend, and it took him weeks to write to her, a whisky-tied tongue preventing his phone call but aiding his bravery.

Andrea –

Let me apologize in person.

I do love you.
Toby

It wasn’t enough. Their fight had been explosive and hurtful, and she’d run far and fast, scared that she’d just shatter for lack of him, scared that he didn’t love her as much in return.

*****

In his file, never meant to be sent, doodles in the margins of speeches, legal pads, anything with blank space. Twists and turns in dark, dark pen that, in his eyes only, always formed her name.

*****

In the margin of a newspaper crossword puzzle, written during their most combative breakup, in pencil fading over the years. Her words trailed lightly alongside the half-completed puzzle they’d started during their first trip to the beach house.

I want to kiss you until we can’t breathe.

It was seven and a half months apart; half of the eastern seaboard between them, all to prove each loved the other just as fiercely.

*****

Finally, a letter that started to repair the rift. He relied on another’s words, not trusting himself not to fuck it up again.

I really couldn’t say it any better than Uncle Walt –

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you – you have not done justice to yourself;
None but have found you imperfect – I only find no imperfection in you;
None but would subordinate you – I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you;
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Never question that I love you, Andrea.

He was on her doorstep the next day, no flowers (it just wasn’t his style, and she knew that), but so much remorse, so many apologies. He gathered her into his arms in a tight hug, her face buried against his neck as he murmured in her ear.

*****

One note that couldn’t be saved – written in pen on her thigh, with the fancy pen she gave him for his birthday:

I love you.

*****

He had six drafts of wedding vows stuck in his file, but none of them were what he ended up saying that day. He struggled up until the morning of the wedding, the most frustrating writer’s block he’d ever had. He looked at her countless times a day, and nothing could do her justice – the gold of her hair, the twist of her spine, her arch and bend, smile and shine.

Of course he came through in a pinch, as he always did. But he tried so hard to tell her, in all of their quiet moments, the thousand things that didn’t make the final draft.

*****

In her file, the one scrap that was harder to see than the others. Her fingertips burned whenever she came to it in the stack. It was gibberish to her eyes, mostly, except for her name, her medical ID number. To her, it was only a list of tests with letters and numbers, percentages, rises and falls, and glaring spaces where she could always see the name of this child that they’d never met.

*****

Tied together with ribbon, she had a collection of postcards from different states he’d brought her from the Bartlet For America campaign. Some were simple – from Georgia:

I’m bringing peaches. Pie?

Some told her a litany of things that they just didn’t have time to talk about while he was on the road, or that he never wanted to give voice to (tempting fate). From a long trip to California:

Do you really think this isn’t a fool’s errand? CJ does, and Sam, but those two are such incurable optimists that it’s absurd. You are too, but I know your love to prove me wrong will take precedence over your optimism.

He’s finally hearing us, I think – which isn’t to say that he knows our names. Josh still needs a sedative most days.

We’re back on Thursday. See you then, baby.

She had a postcard from almost every state – mostly bought in hotel lobbies and random convenience stores. Her favorite, though, was from Wall Drug in South Dakota:

T ♥ A

*****

Late in the life span of their marriage, he no longer made it home for their scheduled dates. She left this update on the table where he always threw his keys.

Ziegler –

I won the bet – O’s took it in 12 innings. Pancakes tomorrow, please, sweetness.

A.

He slept at the office that night. She could’ve taken the high road and discarded the note, but it was the latest in a string of too many abandoned commitments, so she left it for him to find whenever he finally made it home.

He woke her with pancakes (with strawberries) on Saturday morning, and a daisy, because he missed her smile.

*****

On a buckslip from Rep. Andrea Wyatt, MD-5, clipped to their divorce papers. She delivered the envelope in person, but knew he’d let them sit for a few days before opening it.

T-

I’m so sorry.

Always,
A.

*****

A poem, photocopied from a book, that went in the Andrea file even though he never showed it to her:

I've come by, she says, to tell you
that this is it. I'm not kidding, it's
over. this is it.
I sit on the couch watching her arrange
her long red hair before my bedroom
mirror.
she pulls her hair up and
piles it on top of her head-
she lets her eyes look at
my eyes-
then she drops her hair and
lets it fall down in front of her face.
we go to bed and I hold her
speechlessly from the back
my arm around her neck
I touch her wrists and hands
feel up to
her elbows
no further.
she gets up.
this is it, she says,
this will do. well,
I'm going.
I get up and walk her
to the door
just as she leaves
she says,
I want you to buy me
some high-heeled shoes
with tall thin spikes,
black high-heeled shoes.
no, I want them
red.
I watch her walk down the cement walk
under the trees
she walks all right and
as the pointsettas drip in the sun
I close the door.

-Charles Bukowski

*****

Clipped to a picture he nicked from a White House photographer of the incoming freshman Representative Wyatt’s first official meeting with the President. She’d been sent a copy of the real portrait, but this outtake was the one that Toby loved – President Bartlet laughing broadly, Andrea leaning in with a grin on her face, her hand at his elbow. Conspirators.

You’re going to be trouble for us, I can already tell.
TZ

He had a framed copy in his office, on a high shelf, next to Leaves of Grass.

*****

Scribbled on the top of the White House financial disclosure report and sent to his office:

Sure, we divide up our assets BEFORE your windfall. I think you owe me dinner at the very least. Maybe dinner and diamonds. The Hay Adams on Friday at 8?

xo - AW

*****

On a slip of paper torn, she knew, from the notebook he always kept in his suit pocket. He passed it to her in the middle of the Bloomberg party three years after their divorce.

I could fuck you where you stand.

She’d been in his bed a week earlier, a comedy of errors and alcohol and attraction that had never gone away after their divorce. After he slipped her the note, she waited a few minutes before following him onto a mostly-abandoned balcony, where they kissed impetuously until her knees were weak. It was the dumbest thing she’d done since taking office, and they made it into a blind item in the next day’s gossip column. That was clipped behind the note:

These two usually fly under the radar in Washington circles, and they’re certainly not our usual targets, in spite of their lofty titles (in two different branches of government). They were so hot and heavy on a balcony at the Bloomberg party that we almost turned a fire extinguisher on them. But aside from the PDA, no scandals here – their current dalliance is a surprise, but these two have a history together.

*****

In her nightmares, she could only see the dirty email she wanted to write him being leaked to the Post. Instead, she taped a note to his bathroom mirror before she slipped out while he slept.

There are days when all I can think about is fucking you.

He called her late that night, long after she’d fallen asleep on her couch, and he woke her with a gentle prodding. She was quite alert by the time he started listing the places he’d envisioned them fucking since reading her note that morning. At the end of the list (her skin flushed), Andrea chuckled.

“So not so much with the solving the world’s problems today, huh, Toby?”

“I took a long lunch.” He fidgets a little. “Sorry I woke you.”

“Oh really, honey…it’s okay. Give me a few more minutes and I think you’ll have truly made it up to me.”

“I could do you one better.”

“No doubt you could,” she countered. “Can you get together tomorrow night?”

“Or maybe tonight?” Toby rang her doorbell.

Within minutes, he had something to add to the list: against the wall next to her front door.

*****

In large block letters on a piece of lined paper, the perfect size printing for six-year-old eyes – found inside their suitcase:

Dear Molly and Huck,

Thank you for coming to visit me this week. I can’t wait to see you again for the 4th of July (only 26 days). I hope you’re excited to go to the baseball game. Go Yankees!

Huck, have fun at soccer camp and swimming lessons. When I come see you, we can practice the backstroke more.

Molly, be careful and have fun with the horses. Don’t forget to wear your helmet, and ask your teacher if you can bring the horses some apples or carrots, they usually like those.

Please help Mom at home, especially with cleaning your rooms as nicely as you did in New York. Give her a big hug from me.

I love you,
Dad

*****

He never wrote the book he was planning on writing, nor the book he felt he was always expected to write. Instead, he wrote fiction, and she was on every page, thinly veiled in the headstrong heroine, her words coming out of a grizzled homeless man, their relationship spelled out on with serifs more elegantly than he’d ever been able to say it to her.

Friends, relatives, and former colleagues recognized the pieces of her, but the only outward acknowledgement was the dedication page. He’d kept the book from her until it was bound, with an ISBN and a barcode and a cover he was starting to not hate. He left her a copy on the kitchen table and went to bed. When she arrived home hours later and finally cracked the spine, she sank onto a stool at the kitchen counter when she opened to the page (a copy of which now lived tucked in both of their files):

For AW – bashert.

Though it was nearing midnight, she read until the sun came up, until she finally closed the back cover with a sigh and left her reading glasses on top of the book.

After starting a pot of coffee, she padded into her bedroom (his, too - though unofficially – for the last six months since he moved back from New York). His constant internal clock would wake him shortly, so Andy didn’t feel bad when she slipped into bed behind him, wrapped her arm around his torso, and nuzzled his neck, sinking into his warmth.

Perfect, fated match.