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They meet on a train in 1979.
It’s hot, August in the South, but he’s still in a three-piece suit and smoking a very nice cigarette out the window. He looks like something out of an Elia Kazan movie.
When he turns to look at her, she realises she said it out loud.
“Flattering,” he says, sarcasm and bitterness dripping from the words, and she rolls her eyes.
“At least I didn’t accidentally let slip that you remind me of a depressed Shakespeare.”
He looks at her, properly looks at her, then, and hell, it’s not like her to wax poetic about someone’s eyes, but hell. Grey. With that lonely look singers and writers like to go on about. He turns and blows more smoke out the window.
There is silence, and she gets off the train before he does.
She assumes she’s never going to see him again.
As it turns out, she’s wrong.
1985, the night of her thirtieth, he has somehow ended up in the same bar as her and the rest of her friends in downtown Seattle.
“Hello Mitch,” she says, slipping into the seat next to him, slightly too drunk to be doing this.
He glances at and dismisses her in the same breath. Then he does a double take and she can see the moment he remembers her from the train. It’s comforting to see that his eyes haven’t changed, and she hasn’t been imagining things about them.
“Not my name. And wasn’t Mitch an abusive asshole?”
Shrugging, she tries to stop her lips twitching into a smile. “I don’t have anything else to call you.”
There’s a moment she thinks he isn’t going to tell her his name, but then he turns halfway to face her and holds out the hand not curled loosely around a glass of brown alcohol.
“Toby Ziegler.”
“Addison Brook.”
“Catholic?”
She smiles. “Not since I was confirmed.”
That earns a laugh from him, and Toby turns back to his drink with an amused almost smile. “Celebrating something?”
Addison nods, gestures to the corner where most of her friends have started taking shots, and nodding down the table at one other who has sat by another guy at the end, is smiling in a way that lights up her face. “Birthday. Mine. That one,” she says, referring to the baby of the group, Harper, “is still in her twenties, the fucker.”
‘Toby’ looks her up and down, a slow drag of his eyes that seems to be more about the friction on her skin than any genuine observation of his.
There is a lull in the conversation, and someone in her friends’ corner whistles.
“You should get back to them,” Toby says, waving his hand.
Addison buys herself a drink and ignores him.
They end up sitting in companionable silence for the rest of the night, while her friends get drunk and go home and the air around them starts to thicken with Toby’s cigarette smoke. He keeps his eyes ahead of him while she observes the room, but Addison doesn’t imagine the weight of his gaze twice when she’s looking towards the back.
“I’m engaged,” he says in the taxi, only after she’s done kissing the whiskey from his lips.
She leans back in her seat and crosses her legs. Enjoys the way she can feel the heat in the car rise when she does. “I’m not.”
The taxi stops outside her place and she gets out, throws him a look that means ‘you can if you want to’. When the car pulls away, he’s standing in the road, looking at her like she’s always secretly wanted to be looked at.
“Come on.”
He leaves his number on her bedside table after he’s done fucking her through her mattress.
In 1987, she gets a call from him after nearly six months of no contact.
“I’m getting married.”
Addison pauses halfway through typing the email, phone pressed between her ear and her shoulder.
“Okay.”
The wedding is lovely, and Addison mingles and swaps numbers with several other people involved in running a campaign. She meets CJ Cregg, who is witty and clever and is completely wasted in PR. Andi is beautiful and tall.
Toby looks happier than ever for most of the day, but when Addison looks up from a conversation with her new friend Claudia Jean and a grumpy man who may or may not be the bride’s cousin, she catches his eye.
For a moment, he looks like he’s grieving.
It’s new year’s day in 1993, and a knock on her apartment door startles Addison awake at one in the morning.
He’s waiting there, hands in his pockets, looking everywhere but her eyes.
“I think it’s done. With Andi. I think- It’s done.”
She steps to the side and lets him in.
Later, after the silence and the drinking, they’re sitting on her bed and Toby curls his fingers around her wrist. He doesn’t move, doesn’t lean across to kiss her. He just holds her wrist and stares at where his fingers meet around it, while his other hand is a clenched fist on his knee.
They stay there until she leans over and puts her forehead on his shoulder, and then he does kiss her, hard and exactly the way men trying to forget horrible things always do. Addison lets him, leaves her wrist limp in his grip and loops an arm behind his neck, keeps him there, right up against her.
“Come on,” she says, pressing her head back, exposing her neck, “come on.”
It’s just as good the second time.
In 1997, he calls her from LA, CJ frantically packing a bag in the background.
Addison wonders briefly if that’s become a thing.
“I’m helping Bartlet run for Democratic candidate. Leo McGarry wants you looking after the back.”
There’s a pause when CJ swears and throws something.
“CJ can’t find her dictionary. Do you know where it is?”
Looking over at Casey, in her bed, asleep and dreaming, she feels vaguely sick.
“I’m engaged.”
And the pause is more pronounced, is filled with something that tastes a little like regret, but eventually, he breaks the silence.
“Okay.”
She flies out to New Hampshire without her fiancé that weekend.
In the winter of 1998 they get the President of the United States of America elected, and Toby kisses her against the back wall.
She lets him, doesn’t encourage it, the weight of her engagement ring heavy on her hand, but she wants desperately to thread her fingers through the hair at the base of his neck and get him closer. Inside, Casey laughs and calls her name. And suddenly she’s furious with him, because how dare he decide that just because it was fine for him, it must be fine for her?
Jerking back, she feels an ache at the crestfallen look in his eyes, but she looks pointedly at the wedding ring he still has on his finger. “I should go back in,” she whispers, and Toby does nothing.
He watches her walk away. Watches her laugh and run her fingers through the close cropped blond hair on Casey’s head, watches when she goes inside with the guy she is actually going to marry.
Suddenly, she understands the look on his face the day he got married.
Two weeks after the inauguration of Josiah Bartlet in 1998, Addison marries a soldier in a courthouse the day before he goes on tour.
Three months later, someone in uniform appears outside her apartment with a folded flag and a set of dog tags.
That evening, Toby arrives with CJ and Sam and Josh and Donna and a bottle of scotch. She doesn’t know how he found out. The flag watches over all of them like a martial god sat high on the shelf.
Toby puts his hand on her shoulder, squeezes once.
It’s that, that sends her over the edge.
Once the tears start they don’t stop, and Addison should be embarrassed that everyone files out and leaves her alone with Toby, but she’s too busy leaning against him like he’s the only real thing left in the world to care.
“I loved him,” she chokes out past the tears, “I did. He was good.”
Toby curls his fingers around her wrist and says nothing.
Fourteen hours later, Leo McGarry is asking her to help the CIA run the back, and Addison hears herself agree.
2000, a successful town hall, and Addison has taken off her rings for the first time since she put them on.
Gunshots ring out and Toby tackles her to the floor, keeps himself against her behind a car, but all Addison sees is Casey behind her eyelids, getting his head blown off by a sniper nearly five hundred metres away. She clings to him and doesn’t move until someone pries them apart.
She accounts for everyone and then does it again and realises she can’t find Josh.
Toby calls for help. It’s the only word he can say when he catches their friend’s head on his way into unconsciousness. There’s blood on Addison’s shirt. She doesn’t know whose.
They pile into the ambulance with him, ignore the SS agents telling them not to, and when one tries to move Addison bodily away from Josh she throws him a glare she has only ever used on enemies of the President.
When Donna arrives at the hospital and finds out Josh is critical, Addison is the one who catches her on the way down.
The day after, Toby finds her in her bathroom, hiding in the corner with blood dripping down her arms and onto the pristine white tiles that make up the floor. They both know it isn’t from the shooting. For some reason, she wants to apologise.
He says nothing, and helps her with the bandage wrap.
When they get Bartlet reelected, Toby kisses her again, outside, her back against a wall.
This time, she relaxes into it, lets him and helps him and digs her nails into his shoulders and his back. “Come on,” she hears herself say, her old rings on a chain around her neck underneath her shirt, half the weight they were four years ago.
He traces a scar on her forearm with a reverence she has only ever seen once before. His fingers curl around her wrist, a comfort, even after all these years.
Despite his gift with words, he has never needed any with her.
Inside, CJ laughs.
“We should get back.”
Toby smiles. “Okay.”