Maybe it's the pen. This isn't my favourite pen. Hell, it isn't even one of my pens. I bummed it off of Toby on Airforce One.

That's got to be it. It's Toby's pen, so it's infused with Toby-ness. It's stubbornly refusing to write what I want it to write, because it has ideas of its own, and, of course, they must be better than mine. It's the one making me work when I should be relaxing a bit.

I'm writing a speech in a *bar*, for God's sake.

I am writing the President's speech for his election campaign in a smoke filled bar.

There's something intrinsically wrong with that.

It's got to be the pen.

There's a garbage can by the bar, looking really rather incongruous.

I whip my arm around before I've even processed the thought. There's a small, hollow clunk that sounds supicously like an oblong, flying object hitting cheap plywood, then dropping to a tiled floor, which I hear faintly over the ambient noise.

"Nice shot," comes a voice as Margaret slips into the chair beside me. My table has long since emptied out. I guess no one wants their fun to be disturbed by the man who is forced to work. She places her plate softly on the table, and offers me half of the club sandwich sitting there. "I probably would have bet against you if you were offering odds that you could have hit that garbage can," she continues. "Too bad you weren't. I could have used the extra few bucks." She smiles at me as I take the proffered sandwich. "It was pretty close, though. You only missed by a few inches."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," I say.

"Hey, I would have bet against anyone one of ours in this bar." She pauses. "Except maybe Charlie." She leans in closer to me, grinning widely. She smells like oranges. "I just saw him take Toby down in pool. Charlie got the break, and Toby didn't even get a chance to shoot. He may as well have taken the cue, tied a book to either end of it, and gone kayaking."

I whistle a bit as I lean back in my chair. "Wow. I never would have thought..."

"I know." Her eyes are sparkling as, impossibly, her grin seems to widen. "I wonder if he'd help me a bit. I'd love to learn to play. I mean, I know that I'd never send Toby kayaking, but it'd be nice to beat him."

The image of Toby hurtling down white water rapids in a bright yellow kayak, as he flails wildly with a pool cue with a copy of the constitution tied to either end of it fills my mind, and before I can help myself, a let out a snort. The snort turns into a choking laugh, and I start shaking my head.

I think that I must manage, somehow, to stutter out exactly the picture that I have in my mind, tell her about the expression on his face as his suit is soaked, because she's laughing too, the noise ringing high and clear over the din of the bar.

When I finally get myself in control again, I glance over at her, and almost go off again. I don't know why this is so funny, but it is. I like to laugh with her.

She grins at me widely, sliding back in her chair. Reluctantly, I turn back to the damned speech, only to realize that I no longer have anything to write with.

"What are you writing?" She asks me, peering at the paper through the smoke that hangs in the air.

"Oh, nothing much. Just a speech to launch the President's reelection campaign."

She pats herself down, then finds what she's looking for. She drops a pencil on the paper, where it rolls slightly.

It's completely covered in green sparkles. It is a sorbet-green sparkly pencil.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" She asks with a raised eyebrow, brushing a hand past her cheek to tuck her hair behind her ear.

"Inspiration." I pause. Then I pause some more. "And, well, that's a girl's pencil."

"Well, I don't recall buying it in a special store. It's not like there are specific shops for office supplies for women or anything."

"The sparkles come off," I say, pointing towards her cheek. "You took it out of your pocket and put it right down, and you've managed to transfer the glitter to your cheek already."

She rubs quickly at her cheek, only she rubs the wrong one, and all she succeeds in is transferring sparkles to that side of her face as well. "All gone?"

"Yes," I say, glancing quickly down at my papers so that I don't have to look at her face.

"You sure?" She asks, and I keep my eyes firmly fastened downwards.

I reach for half of the sandwich where it sits on the plate. "Positive."

A sudden pain flares through my arm, and I realize that she's given me a good fwap. "Ow," I say before I can stop myself. "Okay, I realize that I sound like I'm about three, but that hurt."

"They aren't gone, are they?"

"No. No they're not. When you tried to rub them off, all you did was spread them to your other cheek."

"Ow," I say again as she gives me another smack.

"That's for lying," she says, and sits back in her chair again.

"I guess that I deserved that."

"Yes. Yes you did."

I finally manage to take a bite of the sandwich without being attacked or distracted.

It really wasn't worth the effort.

She sees the expression on my face, and, without preamble, grabs it from my hand. I don't put up much of a fight. She delicately takes a nibble, then puts it back down on the plate with the other, untouched, half. For a second, I think that she's going to stick her tongue out, but she merely pushed the plate to the other side of the table.

"Well, that's a rather..."

"Gross?"

"It's really rather a gross sandwich."

"I agree completely."

That settled, she stands, and I turn back to my speech after smiling goodbye to her. After a couple of seconds, I look, and she's perched on the edge of the table, looking down at me.

"Well?" She asks.

"Well what?"

"Aren't you hungry?"

I pause for a second. "Well, yes, I am, but I really don't feel like eating that particular sandwich."

She sighs, and the background noise somehow distorts it, so that it sounds suspiciously like `It took him that long to figure out if he was hungry?' She tosses her hair a little, and the glitter, still on her cheeks, flashes. "Come on," she says.

"Come where?"

"We're making a burger run."

"Oh," I say, tapping the eraser of the glittering pencil against the paper.

She reaches in, and I don't know what she's doing until her hand touches down on my papers. I think that I squawk a little bit as I slap my hand down on top of what precious little work I have done. "What do you think you're doing?"

She raises an eyebrow at me. "I'm assuming that you want to take it with us."

"Where exactly are we going, again?"

"I told you, Sam. We're making a burger run."

"Oh," I say again, as she reaches in with her other hand and tries to work the papers out from under my grasp.

She pauses for a second. I wonder if she realizes how this must look. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?" she says.

"Not particularly, no."

"Well, for the most part, a burger run is when you blow off a party for a bit, and go and hit the drive through, usually at a burger joint."

"Oh," I say, yet again. "That makes a lot of sense, you know."

"Yeah. I do." She pauses. "You didn't go to many parties as a teenager, did you?"

"Not particularly."

I lean back in my chair for a second, and she takes the opportunity to yank the papers out from underneath of my fingers. "I really don't think that I should," I say, no small amount of remorse tinging my voice. "I need to finish the speech."

Damn speech.

"You're not going to be good for much, and especially not writing, if you don't eat something."

She has a point.

But still....

"Besides," she continues. "I have your speech. You can't exactly work on it without *that*, now can you?"

So I follow her through the bar, winding in and out of people whom I don't know, yet whom I need to be able to reach by tomorrow morning. I don't see any of the others anywhere.

When we get outside, I find that it's gotten chilly. It was nice enough earlier, but the air seems to have sucked all the heat out of the night.

I really wish that I'd brought a jacket, even if just so that I could offer it to her.

*

The pages lie scatter across the table before me, pencil smudged between the lines, purple pen marks scratched through here and there like confetti on a tree.

The fries are long since cold, but when I look up at her, reading over my last page, she's still munching steadily on them. There are burger wrappers and apple turnover containers littered liberally around us on the carpet of her room. We'd better remember to clean it up, or the hotel staff are going to be none too pleased with us.

We had a bit of a difference of opinion on where to go. I wanted McDonalds, she wanted Burger King. She won because she was driving.

After we left the bar, she stopped to talk with one of the SS agents standing outside. He knew her name. She knew his. They seemed to be good friends. No reason for me to get jealous, but I suspect that I would have been, if I wasn't so wrapped up with this speech. He gave her a hug and the keys to one of the cars that we brought here, and told us to drive carefully.

There's one last scritch, then she puts her pen down and smiles at me. "It's good," she says. Her eyes are bright.

Is it wrong that I want her to like it as much as I want Toby to?

It's different from the other ones that I tried before. I felt like a change. I figured that the other way hadn't been working, so this couldn't be any worse.

"You think that the President will at least make it all the way through this one?"

She smiles again. "I think that he'll do more than read it all the way through. I think that he'll use it to launch his campaign. The thing about the other speeches was that they were kind of all the same, you know?" Actually, I don't, and I don't know when she would have seen my other attempts, but she continues. "You were trying to find different ways to say the same thing. It'll work on a lot of people, if you dress up the words so that they're pretty. It's how a lot of bad people got a lot of good ones to support them." She pauses there, shakes her head as she realizes that she's eaten the last of the fries. She glances around, but we've eaten everything. With a shrug, she continues. "You couldn't get the President to agree to any of the other speeches, because no matter how good you, or I, or anyone else may have thought that they were, *he* didn't agree with the basic sentiments. He's a rather stubborn man that way, if you hadn't noticed." There's a bit of silence then, as she rises and throws that single fry box into the garbage. "And you shouldn't let that get to you, you know. He's stubborn, and it doesn't mean that he doesn't like your work, or you."

I just nod. I start to gather up the papers, shuffling them until they're in the right order. I tap the bottom of the sheaf against the table to even them out, and my hand somehow manages to slip. "Oww," I say, for perhaps the twelfth time tonight, as I shake my hand in the air.

There's a drop of red staining the right-hand corner of the pages. My finger hurts.

"What'd you do?" She asks, sliding into the chair beside me.

I hold my hand out for her inspection. She takes it into hers, her neat, short nails pressing lightly against my skin. There's blood pooling on the pad of my index finger. It may not look like much, but it *hurts*.

"Don't be a baby," she says. "It's just a paper cut. Not even a bad one."

I feel a bit embarrassed, but she kisses my finger absently, then rises. "All better?" she asks. "There are band aids in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom," she says, nodding her head towards it. She yawns a little bit, covering her mouth.

I'm grinning like an idiot.

I flick on the light in the bathroom wincing a bit at the sudden brightness. We didn't exactly have every light in the other room on. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror as I go to push it aside to get at the medicine cabinet. The smile on my face stretches from ear to ear, rather at odds with the dark circles developing underneath my eyes. I hear Margaret yawn again in the other room, and all of a sudden the last few nights catch up with me.

"I guess yawning really is contagious," she calls from the other room.

"It's a scientifically proved fact," I tell her, sticking my head back out.

"Makes you wonder about exactly what kind of research our tax dollars are going towards funding," she says.

"I think that Republican was in office at the time," I say.

She doesn't say anything, so I pop open the mirror, and search through what appears to be the hotel's complimentary items, shoved haphazardly in. The band aids are hidden at the back. I peel the strip off of one, and wrap it around my finger. I drop the garbage in the trash, and stop to yawn again.

The counter is covered with straightening gels, and what appears to be a flattening iron.

Don't ask me how I know that one looks like.

There's not much makeup out there, just a bit of powder, some lipstick, and what appears to be an eyeliner. The soap sitting by the sink is oatmeal, and looks to be well used.

Then I start to feel like I'm snooping, even though I haven't as much as moved a thing, so I leave the room, sleep hanging over me like a cloak. I think that I turn the light off, but I'm not sure.

"Margaret?" I call with some confusion when I can't seem to find her. I finally find her, lying on the couch, her head pillowed against the arm rest. I noticed extra blankets above the unenclosed closet when we came in, so I pull one down and drape it over her. She stirs a little bit, and cracks one eye open.

"Sam?" She asks.

"Yes?"

"I meant what I said before. You write good stuff. The President, and Toby, for that matter, they're very stubborn men. What you do with them, even so, it's good stuff."

I should probably go back to my room, but that seems like an awful lot of walking. I sit down on the floor by the couch. The carpets here really are quite soft. "Thanks," I say, absently. I can hear the heater click on, and soon enough warm air floods the room. I lie down, pillowing the back of my head on my arm. "Margaret?" I ask, turning my head to look at her.

"Yeah?" She asks sleepily, her eyes focussed on a point just past my shoulder.

I don't know what I was meaning to say, but I think about the straightening gels, and the iron, and the magazines that I've seen scattered carelessly across her desk at the White House. "You don't always have to be how you think that people see you."

She smiles slightly, her eyes closed, and I don't know if she heard me or not. I don't know if I wanted her to have heard me or not.

I just turn my head back again, watch the square tiles above us. The soft sound of the heater is somehow soothing, and I can feel myself start to slip off. The darkness slides in around the two of us, almost cradling us in its arms, and it's enough.