skywaterblue

Title: Three Letters Toby Ziegler Never Sent
By: Tori Morris
Disclaimer: They don't belong to me.
Subject: Spoilers for s7. Three double drabbles, connected by theme.
Rating: Um, maybe PG-13 for language.

Tova let the booklet slip out of her fingers. It hit the table with a thwack, stapled binding meeting warped wood. "What is all this shit?" She took the cigarette out of the corner of her mouth and used it to gesture to the papers on the dining room table. In the living room, their mother coughed between spins of the wheel.

"I'm writing letters," Toby said without looking up. He took a drag off his own smoke. "We write letters to governments all over the world, on behalf of prisoners of conscience and in the name of freedom."

She shifted on a hip, and squinted her eyes at him. "Oh, prisoners? When was the last time you wrote our father? How about you try writing him for once?" She tilted her head as their mother called for her hoarsely.

He didn't answer her, and clicked his ballpoint pen, trying to coax a little more ink out of it.

"That's bullshit, Toby, bullshit. Get a job." Their mother coughed and called out again, and she stubbed her butt out on a rough draft. "Coming!"

Tobias Zachary Ziegler signed his name with a flourish, and then began to address the envelope.

***

His windows were open in January because the paint hadn't dried on the walls yet. The look Leo gave him over his glasses was enough to freeze him and it wasn't the cold. "Try me again."

He bowed his head, worrying the edge of his lip and half-laughed through his fingers. "I wrote it on behalf of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Myanmar. She's been under house arrest -- "

" -- I know who she is," Leo growled. "What I want to know is, what were you thinking?"

"That I stand, with one voice, one voice, in defense of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That those are not only American values but the rights of all people -- all people and that I will not allow MY voice to be silenced in the growing chorus of those who decline to accept things as they are."

Leo stood immobile, blank slate for a moment and tossed the envelope on his desk. "Your voice belongs to the President of the United States."

Toby bit his tongue until he left. "Like hell it does."

The very next morning, the posters went up in his office.

***

Prison felt like dying to Toby Ziegler. He had gone stoically into that good night while still in shock, and now he couldn't find his bearings. He was losing himself, losing track of days and time. If the picture of prison he'd gathered over the years was a dark place of fear and shame, then minimum security for white collar criminals was sadistically designed to be both worse than anything he could have imagined and a complete let-down.

He was cold in the jumpsuit all the time. The walls were beige and the lights florescent. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Two hours of television every other day. The prison had a library, thank God, otherwise Toby would have lost it completely. He blew through The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the Collected Writings of Martin Luther King Jr and straight through to the Torah.

That was how the days passed.

Until one day the guard stopped in front of him. "Mr. Ziegler?"

He looked up from the bent paperback of The Wall and Other Stories. In his hands were rubber band packages of letters, opened. "Mail." He tapped the envelopes against the table and then slid them over, leaving them on the tabletop.