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Andy didn’t love Toby Ziegler anymore. That wasn’t posturing, it wasn’t playing hard to get. It was just the way that it was. She had loved him once, because he was funny when he wanted to be, because he was incredibly intelligent, an absolute visionary. And she had grown to love his beard and his furrowed eyebrows, his tendency to fluster and huff and puff with the petulance of a child. But she didn’t love him anymore.
He was a sad, sad man, Toby. He had so many good thoughts, good ideas for change, but he could never seem to get past the shortcomings of the present. He could never handle the idea of an incremental difference, taking small, measured steps. He would try to surge forward into some great utopia, then come back smarting and angry at everything, because Rome could not be built in a day, and one White House staffer could not uproot the status quo.
He would let pessimism flow, then. He blamed anyone he could — Jed Bartlet, who was suddenly a cowering centrist, Leo McGarry, who was now an old codger clinging to the way things were, Josh Lyman who– well, in truth, was a bit of an idiot who was willing to give away the store for a political win, or the American people at large, for their fears and their contradictions, their half-baked values and casual indifference to great suffering — and spiraled downward, on and on.
Andy didn’t love him anymore. But Toby was the father of her children, her Molly and Huck. That scared her, sometimes. She wanted them to believe that the world was what they made of it, to know that they had the capability to do anything and everything they put their minds to. And, no matter how good he seemed with them, she would always worry that Toby couldn’t let anyone believe something that optimistic, that was, in his opinion, foolish. She was terrified that he’d shatter that hope in them, that they would end up like him — an idealist who had learned that the world was not safe for his ideas. She had realized years ago that she could not help him, could not carve out for him a place where he believed he didn’t have to snap at everything like an injured dog, because he would not allow it, would not allow himself to be truly loved. But their children, her babies, still had a chance. And she would not let him crush that spirit in them like it had been crushed in him.
She didn’t love him, she didn’t want to marry him, but she understood that he would always be important to their children. And she understood that she was his closest friend. In the wake of his indictment, C.J. Cregg and all of his other friends had abandoned him. It was for their own good, she knew. He was practically radioactive, and they couldn’t go down with him. And he had betrayed them.
He had done it, as he always did, in a fit of passion, emboldened by his morality. He had done it, just this once, in memory of his brother. But it didn’t matter why he had done it. Not to CNN, or the New York Times. Not when it came to Leo McGarry taking a phone call from him.
It mattered to Andy, though. She knew that C.J, that Jed Bartlet himself, were still feeling burned by what Toby had done. And she knew Toby knew that, that he wasn’t willing to prostrate himself in front of them, the proud son of a bitch.
But Toby was going to jail for six years, and Andy didn’t love him, but she still cared about him a hell of a lot. She cared about what it would do to him, sitting there alone for so long. There was already so little in the world for him; she was scared of the person he would become, sitting in those concrete rooms.
And she was scared about what it would do to Molly and Huck, to see him only through a plastic sheet an inch thick, to start picturing him in an orange jumpsuit and not a shirt and tie. She knew Toby’s father had been in prison for much of his young life, and while she understood that Julie Ziegler had done much worse than save the lives of 3 astronauts, she still couldn’t help but wonder if that was part of what had broken him.
So, despite Toby’s insistence that he didn’t need to be pardoned, that he deserved to serve his full sentence, the self-sacrificial bastard, here she was. Here Andy walked, where he had no doubt paced a hundred thousand times, through the halls of the West Wing. She was going to speak to C.J. Cregg, going to implore her to have mercy on her old, dear friend. To bury the hatchet for the sake of his young children, if not for him personally.
If it didn’t work, she didn’t know what she would do. So it would just have to work.
Andy didn’t love Toby Ziegler anymore. But she sure as hell wasn’t about to lose him like this.