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Snow White and Rose Red
Heavily adapted from the brothers Grimm
by Exfilia
Danny's lips closed over C.J.'s, and her body moved itself to press against him like iron filings in a magnetic field. Their hands clasped, and her knees began to tingle as if they might fall out from under her at any minute.
"Ahem."
She forced herself away from Danny in stages, first breaking the prolonged kiss, then pushing away from a series of kisslets, and then stepping back and turning toward the door where Leo McGarry was standing.
Danny might be horribly attractive, but he was a coward. He kissed C.J. once more, this time on the cheek, then headed out the door. Leo stepped aside for him, then closed the door behind them.
"I thought I told you...."
"I was rebuffing his advances!"
"Pushing him away with lip pressure?"
"I was going to tell him when we..."
"What?"
"...came up for air?"
"Which will happen sometime in the middle of the twenty-second century? Get this straightened out, C.J.! The Press Secretary cannot date a reporter. She cannot be in love with a reporter. Either the relationship ends, his job ends or yours does. Am I making myself clear, here?"
She nodded, and Leo stormed out the door. C.J.'s knees finally gave and she landed on her couch, fighting a losing battle with angry tears. The door opened again and Josh came in. She forced herself to sit up.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Leo give you a hard time?"
"He told you?"
"Danny did."
"Oh. Is he okay?"
"He wasn't crying as hard."
"He was crying?"
"He wouldn't admit it." Josh sat down beside C.J. and put an arm around her. "He did his growly bear act, pretending he was mad."
"Growly bear?"
"Yeah, he's just a big loveable bear who doesn't understand the strength of other people's reactions to him."
"He's an idiot."
"Maybe. You all right?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Thanks."
There was another knock, and the First Lady stepped inside, closing the door yet again.
"Sit still," she told them. "Leo's upstairs ranting, and I thought I'd better see how much damage he'd done."
"So," asked C.J., "the whole world knows he thinks I'm selling you out?"
"Actually it's me, the president who thinks he's being silly, a bunch of secret service agents who aren't going to be talking and my granddaughter who thinks it's kind of neat."
"Neat?" said Josh.
"It's the rebellion thing," Abbey told him. "Annie dated a Republican for a while. And Leo's not angry with you, sweetie."
"You could have fooled me."
"He's furious with Danny for taking a chance on ruining your life."
"You make me sound like a fourteen year old dating an older guy because of his car."
"Quite possibly that's how Leo feels about it."
"Danny wouldn't hurt C.J.," said Josh. "I've known him for a long time, known people he's dated, and he just wouldn't."
"It'll work out," Abbey told them. "Why don't you lie down, sweetie, and see if you can get a nap? I'll tell Carol to wake you in time for the next briefing. Come on, Josh."
"I should...."
The First Lady's voice deepened.
"Come on," she insisted. Josh followed her out, flipping the lights off as he left.
Well, that had been an unmitigated disaster. If she was drawing sympathy from Josh and the First Lady, there was probably worse to come. Why couldn't Danny have been a janitor, or something? C.J. pulled a pillow into her lap and cuddled it. Why couldn't he be the guy on the lunch truck, and therefore available? Why did she always fall for the guys she couldn't have, for the guys who could hurt her?
She snuggled into the corner of her sofa, still hugging the pillow, and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, she was lying on a snowy bank watching flakes do gymnastics among the frosted reeds in a frozen pool.
She jumped to her feet, stifling a scream, and then did scream when someone grabbed her.
"What are you doing? Hey, hey, easy! You're going to pull us in! Come on, that water's cold!"
"Josh?"
"Who's Josh?"
"You're Josh."
"No, I'm Rosey."
"Aren't you kind of tall and, you know, hair deprived to be someone named Rosey?"
"Could be, but that's my name. What were you doing lying there in the snow? Are you okay?"
"I don't think so. Okay, what's my name?"
"Snowy. Actually it's Nieve, but that's kind of highbrow for folks around here, so they call you Snowy."
"I'm Snow White?"
"Depends what sense you mean that in." He snickered until she hit him.
"And you're the handsome prince?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Josh, listen to me. Your name is Joshua Lyman and mine is C.J. Cregg, and we work for the President of the United States."
"My name's Rosey, and I work at the Big House."
"You work... think you work at a prison?"
"No, up at the house! I'm a footman, and you're the housemaid."
"Me? Josh, have you ever seen anything I've tried to clean?"
"We keep it pretty neat. The Master and his Lady think so, anyway. They don't treat us like servants, not at all. It's almost like we're their own children."
"You have lost your mind."
"One of us has, anyway. Come on, come up to the house with me. You don't look too good."
She followed him along a muddy path to a square gray tower overgrown with the canes of climbing roses, each with a coating of frost. On a bench beside the door sat a small man smoking a cigarette. Now they were getting somewhere.
"Mr. President," she said. He looked up.
"I beg your pardon?"
"She fainted, I think," said Josh. "She was lying in the snow. She's not really sure where she is or who we are."
"Come inside, then," said the president. "Let Abbey have a look at you."
Abbey, at least, was still Abbey. She drew C.J. into a sort of hearth room, an arched area made of unplastered stone, ten feet wide and eight feet deep and eight feet high at the center with a fireplace at the back. Abbey stripped C.J. out of her wet clothes and ensconced her in a small bed at one side of the arch. After dosing her with something vile, Abbey left Josh/Rosey with orders to take care of C.J., although she bustled in and out nevertheless. The president, or the master or whoever he was, came and sat at the foot of her bed with a copy of Homer in Greek, which he translated as he read. Josh sat on the floor leaning against a box containing an injured lamb and listened. C.J. tried to do the same, but it wasn't long at all before she felt herself dozing off again.
It was a rush of cold air that woke her that time. There were people by the door, the president and Abbey and Josh and someone she didn't know, a great bear of a man in a wet fur cloak.
"He's chilled through," said Abbey. "Get him out of these clothes, and we'll make him a pallet by the fire."
C.J. sat up.
"He can have the bed," she said. "I'm okay, now."
"What's your name?" asked Josh.
"C.J.," she said.
"You just lie back down," Abbey told her. They peeled wet clothing off the human bear, eventually revealing a still hairy but very attractive man with a scraggly red beard and alarmingly blue eyes. They dressed him in one of the master's nightshirts-C.J. couldn't imagine the president wearing such a thing-and laid him on the floor between C.J. and the lamb. Josh lay down beside him, and they all fell asleep.
When she woke the next morning, the bear was sprawled across Josh's chest, fingers combing through untidy black hair while Josh played with his beard.
"Good morning," she said.
"Oh, hi," said Josh. "This is Danny."
"I know. What are you doing with Danny?"
"Helping him get warm?"
"She maybe thinks I'm warm enough," said Danny, withdrawing a bit.
"It's okay." Somehow it was. C.J. slid down on the floor beside them, then discovered that even hearthstones are cold against bare skin. Josh pulled her down on the pallet with them, and she burrowed under the covers against his warmth.
"You two do this with everybody that comes through?" asked Danny, settling back against Josh's other side.
"We haven't done anything yet," C.J. told him.
"Umm...." Josh was staring at the arched ceiling and blushing. C.J. cringed.
"If I land in the wet spot, I'm telling Toby."
"Who's Toby?" asked Josh.
"You don't want to know," she said. "Will you be staying long?" she asked Danny.
"I've got something I've got to do."
"Pretty cold out there," said Josh. "Wet, and all."
"There's someone I have to see. A dwarf."
"A dwarf," said C.J., her fingers toying with the mat of gingery hair on Danny's chest.
"A dwarf," he repeated. "A soon-to-be deceased dwarf."
"So," said Josh, "you're trying to catch up to this dwarf before in the natural course of events...."
"I am the natural course of events," said Danny. "He took away everything that meant anything to me, and made it look like it was all my fault."
"That sucks," said Josh.
C.J. snuggled closer.
"Tell us?" she said. This she had to hear.
"I went up to town to sell off some cattle," he said. "When I got back, my wife and my brother were dead, and people thought he'd killed her because she chose me and then killed himself."
"Well did he?" asked Josh before C.J. smacked him.
"He chose me, too," said Danny, "and the damned dwarf killed him and killed her and stole every bit of the gold we had saved up to buy more land, and...." Danny dissolved into tears. Josh wrapped his arms around Danny and rolled him over to lie between his body and C.J.'s.
"You should tell the master," he said. "He knows everybody around here. He'll help you find your dwarf."
"And you should stay here," said C.J., "where it's warm and safe."
"If it were your family," he asked, "would you?"
But Danny did stay with them. During the day he scoured the woods for any sign of his dwarf, but at night he crawled into bed with Josh and C.J., where he fit as if he belonged. When the snow melted, though, that changed.
"I've got to go," he told them. "I can't stay here forever and forget about him. I have to hunt him down."
That night, he didn't come back. C.J. and Josh kept house for their master, and in their free time they wandered the woods asking everyone they met for news of the wandering bear.
Everyone but one, that is. One day as they approached a patch of strawberries in a clearing near their tower, they heard a horrendous racket. They dropped their baskets and crept forward, and saw a small man beating at a giant crabapple tree and cursing it. Josh's eyes widened, but C.J. stood up, laughing.
"Leo!"
The man, who certainly looked like McGarry, cursed silly women and importunate trees and "Leo, whomever he might be."
"Hey," said Josh, "what did our tree ever do to you?"
"It's got my beard!" howled Leo. Sure enough, this man, unlike the Leo C.J. knew, had a long gray beard, and it was caught in a split in an ancient branch.
"Hold still," said C.J., and she and Josh tried to untangle it. It was too great a mess, though, and not-Leo wouldn't stand still and let them work, so eventually C.J. pulled out her scissors and cut off the end of the beard. The man fell on his butt, but sprang up immediately and cursed C.J. again, bemoaning the damage to his beard. Then, without a word of thanks, he scooped up a small bag full of something very heavy and disappeared toward the road to town.
"Well," said Josh, "that was weird."
"No kidding."
They told Abbey and the president about it that night.
"He's around," Abbey said. "Has been for years. He used to come to the door and try to sell needles and stuff."
"Although with that personality," said the president, "I don't imagine he could sell water in a desert. Just ignore him."
They thought no more about it until the day Abbey sent them to the mill pond to catch some fish for their dinner. Just as they reached the edge, they heard the noise again. Leo, it seemed, had been fishing, and had got his line tangled in his beard. To make matters worse, something very large had taken his bait and threatened to drag him into the water.
"Hold still," said C.J., groping for her scissors.
"Not again!" he screamed. He scrambled away from her, which gave whatever was in the water the leverage to pull him several steps closer. Josh caught him and held him while C.J. lopped off another bit of beard. That earned them another stream of expletives, but nothing else. Leo scooped up the small chest he'd sat on to fish and vanished once more.
"This is getting old," C.J. told Josh.
They saw no more of the strange little man until midsummer's day, when they climbed the rocky side of their narrow valley in search of a missing ewe. High up on the treeless ridge they heard once more the familiar string of curses.
"I say we let the fish have him," said Josh. C.J. smacked him, and they crawled to the crest and looked over.
There was a nest a few yards away. Leo clung to the edge for dear life, for the nest belonged to a great eagle whose talons were planted in the Leo's shoulders. Josh and C.J. ran forward.
"Not the beard!" cried Leo. "Not the beard again!"
Josh swatted the eagle with his walking stick, and it dropped Leo. He dove for the nest, but C.J. caught him.
"Let me go!" he cried.
The eagle swooped in again, only to be pushed away by Josh's staff.
"She's got my bag!" cried Leo.
Sure enough, nestled between two great eggs lay the bag Leo had carried when they'd first seen him. C.J. snatched it up, and they all three ran. The angry eagle circled overhead for a while, then vanished back toward her nest as they emerged on a flat rock above a sheer drop to the valley below.
"Give me that," growled Leo.
He snatched the bag out of C.J.'s hand, but it fell open and spilled out dozens of bright coins.
"Sorry," said C.J., and bent to scoop them up. She fully expected another series of curses, but instead she heard a nasty whack. She looked up to see Leo holding Josh's staff and Josh prone on the rock.
"Tie him up," said Leo.
"I'm not going to...!"
"Tie him up, or I push him over." His booted foot nudged Josh, rolling him toward the edge.
C.J. took the cord from the bag and looped it around Josh's hands.
"The two of you'll fetch a decent price when the Vikings come slaving again," he said. "Might be enough to make up for my beard." He rubbed at the cut end. "Nah," he said. "But you and I," he told C.J., "are going to have fun while we wait."
"You're crazy," she said.
"Yeah?" He touched the end of the staff to her neck, then let it slide down the neckline of her blouse to her chest. C.J. could have grabbed it and fought him, but he might have pushed her over the edge, or worse, pushed Josh. She bit her lip and glared at him. He grinned, and then suddenly stopped.
"No!" he shouted, and scrambled backwards. He slipped and fell just as a fur-clad body sprang past C.J. and Josh and landed on him. There were some unpleasant sounds, and then Danny stood up and came to them. Not-Leo didn't move.
"Are you all right?" Danny asked. "He didn't hurt you? Either of you?"
"He cracked Josh... Rosey... he hit him over the head." She unwound the cord holding Josh's wrists as Danny's fingers probed his hair. Part way through, Josh moaned and sat up.
"We found your damned dwarf," he told Danny.
"Yeah, I know. I tracked him this far, but when I saw you guys...." Danny kissed Josh, and then kissed C.J., and she thought for a moment that the world was spinning. But no, it was just the usual magnetism of Danny's kisses, which overwhelmed C.J. no matter what world she was in. She closed her eyes and leaned into it.
"Whoa," he said. "C.J.?"
She opened her eyes and found herself back in her office. Danny was beside her on the sofa, his lips close to hers.
"Carol says it's almost time for the briefing," he said.
"Okay. You mad about Leo?"
"He's being a prick. He'll get over it."
"You sleeping with Josh?"
"Not... am I what?"
"Never mind," she said, and kissed him. "It was just a bad dream."
"Some dream."
"Yeah. Remind me to tell you about it some time, but right now, I have to brief."
"Yeah. So we should stop kissing, right?"
"Yeah," she said, and kissed him again.
The End
And the character assignments, 'cause that was part of the challenge:
Snow White: C.J. Cregg
Rose Red: Joshua Lyman
the mother: Jed and Abbey Bartlet
the bear: Danny Concannon
the dwarf: Leo McGarry
Please remember that all this took place in C.J.'s dreaming head, and that she was very angry at the time. He's not really like that, of course, but at the time she felt like he was.