Chapter Text
Yeah, yes, thank you — Josh knows he’s supposed to have figured out ties by now. It’s on his list of things; he’s gonna get to it eventually.
Scratch that, actually, because Josh does know how to tie a tie. He just happens to need fifteen minutes and unmitigated access to his bathroom mirror.
The problem is: the power went out last night (in only his apartment out of all of D.C., it would seem) and so his alarm clock fails. Usually, the two ( two, count’em, two) battery-powered backups on his dresser would be enough to make up for it. They would have been. Except for the fact that they both suckered out last week and Josh has had yet to change the batteries.
Great. Fine. Whatever. He sleeps in his office most days anyway — it shouldn’t have mattered.
It matters now, though. Yesterday was the first night since they got Bartlet elected that he’d managed to make it home before three a.m. He crested over a full six hours of sleep, and of course, that sort of blessing comes wrapped in the form of the universe flipping him the cosmic bird. To cap it all off, his wake-up call ends up being Leo who, after determining that Josh is not actively dying, informs him that he has an hour to make it into the office before his White House access is revoked. Permanently.
So the tie.
He doesn’t have time for fifteen minutes or the bathroom mirror. He barely has time to shower, shave, and make sure his pants are on the right way. He’s still damp when he shimmies into his undershirt and his only choice is to put his fate in the hands of God and leave the tie for his commute.
This, of course, when he assumes commute still equals car, as it does every other day of the week.
Thankfully, his brain catches up with him the moment he steps outside into an unfamiliar angle of the sun. It’s eight in the morning, the time he’s usually a quarter of the way through his memos from the night before. It also happens to be the time droves of regular people are driving to work. It’s not New York, but D.C. morning rush hour isn’t anything to sneeze at; if he has any hope of making it to the office in the remaining forty-five minutes, he’s going to have to take the metro.
It mostly works.
The nearest stop is only two blocks away from his place and he only needs to switch lines once. He hasn’t taken the metro much since he’d officially moved back, but he’s had the routes memorized for years. No self-respecting person working in politics would let something as pesky as public transportation get in the way of their path to the White House. Now all he has to do is jog, pray, and tie his tie.
He does just fine with the first two. Admittedly, he fumbles the bag with the third. Or, rather, he’s in the middle of fumbling when it happens:
A woman.
Blonde, only just shorter than he is, and murmuring something into a cellphone tucked between her cheek and her shoulder. Between the din of the train and the other passengers, Josh can’t hear anything she’s saying. He doesn’t know where she’s come from, nor does he have any earthly idea as to who she is. She looks familiar, but there’s nothing about her that warrants familiarity.
She’s wearing a navy turtleneck, a polka-dot skirt, and lime green galoshes, even though it’s not raining; no one would hire an aide who looks so ridiculous even on their off days and there’s no way, even clueless as he can be, that he wouldn’t notice if he had a straight-haired Ms. Frizzle-type for a neighbor.
What’s more: that kind of look would be frumpy or dotty on anyone else, but she pulls off like something out of Penthouse.
He can barely look away from her now — he would remember if he’d seen her before.
He doesn’t remember, though, and so he’s confused to see her walking towards him with such purpose. There’s a frown pulling at the corner of her lips, her focus clearly captured by whatever’s happening with her phone call. Josh would think she’s headed for the exit behind him if it weren’t for the way she’s stopping in front of him and making direct eye contact.
He figures it’s only polite. “Hey—”
She shoves a finger to his lips. An actual… Her actual fingers, ice-cold and slender, shove against his mouth, gentle but firm. Shh, she mouths at him. I’m on the phone.
What the hell?
He means to say as much. To ask her or shout or whatever, but all he manages is an aborted floundering before she’s tsking at him away from the mouthpiece and pressing him against the safety pole.
And then her hands go for his throat and Josh… just sort of stands there?
He means to do something. Somewhere in his mind, there is a faint alarm going off — Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! — but nothing comes of it. His mind whites out for a moment. All he can feel is his heart hammering in his chest and a warm flush washing over him, a feeling not too dissimilar to the time he was fifteen and accidentally stumbled upon the adult section of a video rental place on a day trip to Boston.
(He opts not to examine that too closely.)
But the cut-off to his air supply doesn’t happen. Her hands don’t wrap around his throat, her nails don’t bite into his skin. He hadn’t consciously closed his eyes, but when he opens them, he sees her tugging at his collar. No, no: his tie.
No break in her phone conversation, she had begun fixing his tie. She’s coming closer to mangling him and his neckwear, honestly, but she’s making the effort that knocks him for six and back again. She’s making much more progress faster than he ever has, but her fingers seem to stutter on the second loop. At one point she whips the thing off of him entirely and pulls it over his head to get a better leverage on the knot.
Before she sets to work, she thrusts it at him a little with a pointed look on her face. Seriously? How did you manage this?
Stops come and go. He barely has the wherewithal to be concerned that he might miss his; muscle memory and the lack of acute panic are the only things that tell him he’s in the clear for now, but to be ready soon. Before he can even get a peek at that concern, she shoves the tie back on over his head and tightens it (perfectly, of course, because why not) at the base of his throat.
“Um,” he says, because he’s the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, overseer of 1,100 White House employees and, y’know, just generally good at things. “Hi?”
She remains unamused. Instead of a greeting or explanation or anything, she eyes around him. Something seems to register with her because she steps to the side and then forward and then—
And then she’s gone.
Huh.
+
“I was spruced up.”
He took the newspaper to the nose from Leo, still dazed and seven minutes under the gun. His scolding is slid between meetings and not pleasant, but it’s fast and he doesn’t catch half of it anyway. (He does catch the bit at the end where Leo breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth, and quietly admits, Hey, at least you’re getting some sleep. Don’t do it again.)
He decides to take the wins where he can get them.
After, before he knew it, he’d made the rounds of the communications bullpen and left with only one viable option.
Tucked behind her desk, packet in hand, CJ looks at him over her glasses. “You were spruced up?”
“I was spruced,” Josh says. “I’m a victim here.”
“Of a sprucing?”
“It was a drive-by sprucing. One minute, I was going about my life, tie akimbo, and then wham! ”
“You got tidied up?” CJ supplies wryly. “I’m struggling to see the downside here.”
“There was a woman!” Josh is shrieking now and talking mostly with his hands. “It was a woman who did this to me!”
“Okay, now I’m really struggling.”
“It was a woman on the metro,” he sighs, running his hand through his hair as he collapses onto her sofa. “Just… Some girl in this insane outfit. Walked up to me, fixed my tie, and disappeared .”
CJ shrugs, as affected by his tale of woe as she might be by a potted plant or the Sunday Times sudoku. “Maybe it wasn’t about you.” She takes her glass off and leans back in her chair with crossed arms. “Maybe it was a karma thing.”
“I don’t know what I could’ve done to the mystic powers of the world to have them throw this at me on a Tuesday morning.”
“I meant her karma.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway,” she goes on, rocking back and forth a little in a way that makes the whole thing seem mocking. “Don’t go around complaining about mystic powers in my office. You have your own office for that.” She gestures about the room with one hand. “I don’t want to be struck down in my fields or blighted with a bad harvest because you can’t be grateful for the little things in life.”
“I was happy reveling in the little things in life, CJ. I flock to the little things in life. This was a big thing. This was—”
“Look, did anyone see you?” CJ asks. “Is this, in any way, something that might pop up in my press room?”
Josh, begrudgingly, shakes his head.
“She didn’t happen to mention if she was a call girl, did she? I mean, two high-profile members of this administration? I want to be thinking, ‘what are the odds’, right? But this is a big and mysterious world we live in, Joshua, and I’m not leaving it all to chance.”
“No, I don’t think Aunt Dot is a woman of the night.”
“She’s elderly ?”
“She’s eclectic,” Josh corrects. “I wasn’t kidding about the outfit. The boots were lime green. Haven’t seen anything like that since the eighties. She could be landing planes with those things.”
“There are worse mistakes a girl can make than being fashionable and friendly.”
“Still.”
“I gotta say, I’ve never known you to be one to look a sartorial gift horse in the properly aligned tie.” CJ quirks an eyebrow. It would be a face he might mistake for her scheming if he believed she actually cared about his crisis at all. “You look better than Sam today. Best just keep your head down and hope you haven’t invoked a striking.”
“Mine or hers?”
He doesn’t get an answer to that.