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the_wordbutlerAvengers/The West Wing crossover
CJ Cregg, Josh Lyman, Donna Moss, Toby Ziegler, Mike Casper, Clint Barton; 1,902 words
Rated G; no spoilers
In which CJ Cregg encounters some very impossible arms.
--
“Impossible arms!” CJ Cregg exclaims before lunch on a Tuesday.
At least, Josh thinks it’s CJ Cregg. He has to look up from what he’s typing, pen in his mouth, to be sure and—yes. Yes, it’s CJ Cregg, standing in his doorway, her fingers clutching the doorjamb like she thinks she’s going to swoon. Josh likes the word swoon. Donna used it a couple weeks ago, talking about some new reporter with—incredible abs, or something, and he thinks—
“Arms!” CJ exclaims again.
Definitely going to swoon. “What?” Josh asks, and drops the pen.
“There is a man,” she says, and her fingernails dig into the wood, “with impossible arms.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot of men with impossible arms but—”
“He’s in the lobby. In a—shirt with cut-off sleeves. Jeans. I think—” She glances over her shoulder for a half-second. “I think he’s chewing gum, too.”
Is chewing gum a thing, now? Did Josh miss that article the last time he flipped through Donna’s Cosmopolitan between meetings? “Uh—”
“But these arms.”
“Okay,” he says. He turns his chair away from the computer and tries to—what, exactly? He’s not the negotiator. Sam’s the negotiator. He’s more the—burn it to the ground and start over if it’s really going that bad. Iator. “I know right now, you think you’re saying words, but they’re actually just—”
“Oh, no, you have to come with me.”
“I—what?”
But what is all Josh can get out, just that one syllable, because CJ comes around his desk, grabs his arm (and his must not be incredible, or impossible, or whatever word she’s using, because she man-handles it), and drags him out of his chair. You know how you fight a six-foot-tall woman?
No, really. Do you know how? Could you tell him? Because—
“CJ,” he protests, but she’s strong. He hates that she’s this strong. How did she get this strong? “I have a memo to write, I have at least three fires to put out, and that’s all before I go to lunch with—”
“There,” CJ hisses, and shoves him into a doorway. Why he’s the one on display in the doorway, he doesn’t know. She can’t really hide behind him, not unless she wants to get on her knees or something.
“Where?”
“There.”
And CJ points.
Josh—well, get enough beers in Josh and maybe he’ll tell you about his college roommate and whose bed they’d woken up in, together, the one time they experimented with illicit substances, but he’s not one to admire other men. Oh, he can admit that Sam’s got that clean-cut all-American thing going on, or that he wouldn’t turn Charlie down if he offered to buy him a drink, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Most the time.
But this guy—
“Are those—real?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” CJ replies, and yeah, she’s dangerously close to the swooning.
He’s a younger guy with sort of light brown hair and this serious face. But his body looks like it came out of some kind of—shaping mold, because people, normal people, they don’t look like that. They don’t have shoulders like that, or a chest like that, and they don’t wear black sleeveless shirts and jeans that are both completely filled out with muscle when they come sit in the White House lobby.
His toe—black combat-booted toe, actually—taps while he reads the newspaper.
But there’s just—there’s so much arm, corded-muscle type arm, that Josh—
“Who is he?” he asks, twisting to look at CJ.
It takes CJ whole seconds to pull her eyes away. Josh doesn’t blame her. It’d taken effort on his part, too. “He’s waiting on someone, I think,” she whispers. Every third word, her eyes dart back to the guy, just to make sure he’s still there. He hasn’t even looked up from his paper—not that Josh is monitoring the situation, too, or anything. “He has some kind of clearance. Signed in as Barton.”
“Barton?” Josh repeats, blinking.
“Barton.” She cocks her head. “Do you know him? Do you—do you know the impossible arms and didn’t warn me they were coming?”
“No, but I think I might know who—”
“Josh,” says a voice that sounds like Donna. Josh turns because it is Donna, walking toward him with her arms full of files that he’s probably supposed to go through and probably won’t get to until he’s skipping dinner tonight. Which’ll be great, given that he’s ogling arms instead of going to lunch and—
“Josh?” Donna says again, and he blinks.
“Sorry, I—what?”
She frowns. “Are you okay?”
Impossible Arms—maybe-Barton—rustles his paper to turn the page and CJ shushes both of them at a volume that’d drown out a hurricane. Donna’s pretty, and Josh’s always thought so, but she’s significantly less pretty when scowls like she’s doing right now. Scowls, twists to see what they’re looking at, and—
“Oh,” she says dumbly.
“I know,” CJ sympathizes.
“Those—but they can’t—”
“They are.”
“But— Oh.”
They’re both going to swoon. Josh is sure of it. They’re both going to swoon, right there, and he’s going to be left explaining why his assistant and the White House Press Secretary are on the floor, melted into puddles of—something, while he’s still standing there, working really hard not to look at the most impossible arms to ever—
“What’re we looking at?” Toby asks, and Donna and CJ both shush him.
Josh sighs. “Arms,” he explains. He nods, vaguely, in the direction of Arms Barton. Arms Barton. He likes that name. He thinks if this Barton isn’t that Barton, he should seriously consider changing his name to—
“Who’s that?” And god bless the mere existence of Toby Ziegler, a man who cannot be waylaid by even the world’s most impossible arms.
“He’s beautiful,” Donna murmurs.
“CJ thinks his name’s Barton,” Josh explains.
“Barton?” Toby raises his eyebrows. “Barton as in—”
He nods. “Maybe.”
“Barton who?” CJ demands, finally lifting her eyes from that massive tract of muscled real estate to glower at him. Well, him, then Toby, then him again, and the height definitely helps with the glowering. Short women can’t glower, not like that. “Do you know him?”
“Not know him,” Josh replies. “Not really.”
“You either know someone or you don’t know someone,” she argues.
Arms Barton turns the page in the newspaper, and Donna sighs.
Toby rolls his eyes. “Neither of us have ever met Barton. Who this might not be. We’ve just heard a little bit about someone named Barton, and—”
“From who?”
CJ’s voice cracks when she asks, and a couple heads—though not Arms Barton’s—lift to look over at them. Too little sleep, Josh decides. She gets too little sleep, works too many long hours, and this is how she’s cracking. Over admirable arms, in the lobby, and a man who—if he is the Barton that he and Toby think—will never fully appreciate—
“Josh,” someone else says, and there’s Special Agent Mike Casper, striding down the hallway. He stops and holds out a hand.
“Mike,” Josh greets, and Mike’s polite enough to shake Toby’s hand as soon as he’s done. “How was the meeting? Leo and Nancy, right?”
“About the same as every meeting with Leo and Nancy.” He pauses, glancing between the lot of them. They must look crazy, clumped in a doorway, with Donna and CJ staring unsubtly at Arms Barton. It makes Mike frown. “Is everything okay here? You all look a little—”
“Oh god!” CJ squeaks, and before Josh can even jerk his head around to look at her, she’s taking off down the hallway at maximum speed. Donna’s eyes immediately drop to whatever file’s on the top of the stack. It takes him a couple seconds to figure out what’s going on, but then he glances out into the lobby.
And sees that Arms maybe-Barton’s put down his newspaper, stood up—and now is looking right at the group of them in the doorway.
Even Josh wants to go a little red, at that.
Mike smiles this funny, tight little smile. The only people with smiles like that are feds. No other groups of people can all fake-smile with the same cold efficiency as the ones who wear suits and go by “agent.” “Well,” he says, “I’ll see you all soon.”
“Yeah, definitely,” Josh replies.
He watches Mike move from the doorway and into the lobby—and watches Arms Barton step away from the couch at the same time. They meet in the middle, lean close enough to exchange a few words, and then Mike smiles a real smile. Just Mike, though, and not Arms, who keeps the same serious look even after they fall into step next to one another.
“Barton?” Toby asks.
“Barton,” Josh confirms.
“What?” Donna’s looked up from the file, and she’s scowling again. She should really stop scowling. She’s going to get lines in places she’ll regret, and then Josh’ll have to listen to her complain about them. For probably years. Decades, even. “You do know him?”
Josh realizes when she asks that it’s at least the second time, because she sounds annoyed. “Not personally, no,” he explains, “but I think his first name’s Chris or something. Chris Barton?”
“Clint,” Toby corrects.
“Right. He works with Mike.” His word choice makes Toby snort. “He does,” he stresses, because—well, because it’s technically true.
Donna’s scowl deepens. “Why’s that funny?”
“It’s not,” Josh assures her.
That wipes the smile off Toby’s face. He lifts his eyebrows. “You’re not going to tell her?”
“Tell me what?”
“She doesn’t need to know,” Josh replies.
“Of course she needs to know. Technically, they both need to know, but I’m willing to let CJ live in a delusional fantasy land for a few weeks after the ketchup incident.”
“You know that was an accident.”
“No, Josh, I don’t know it was an accident. And even if it was—”
“Josh!” Donna’s voice echoes down the hallway, and a half-dozen heads swivel to look at her. Josh sighs. “What don’t CJ and I need to know?”
“It’s really not—”
She actually, literally, live-and-in-person stamps her foot. Right there. In the hallway. What’s next, the temper tantrum? “Josh.”
Josh looks at Toby. Toby shrugs.
“Mr. Impossible Arms—Clint Barton—is Mike’s . . . ” Josh presses his lips together. There are a lot of very good words he could use, but he’s not sure which one— “His subordinate,” he decides.
She blinks. “His . . . subordinate?” she repeats.
“His subordinate.”
“But why would CJ or I need to know that he’s Mike’s su—”
It’s luck—wonderful, miraculous, overwhelming luck—that Donna glances at Toby in that second. That she glances over at Toby’s ever-neutral face, that Toby raises both his eyebrows in one sweep, and that he nods a little when her lips pop open. Because that second of eye contact closes Donna’s lips, and the frown turns to something else.
Enlightenment, maybe. Enlightenment’s a good word for it, actually.
“He—really?” she asks, quietly.
“Really,” Josh confirms.
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Toby says.
“Oh.” She pauses for a half-second. “But they’re—they’re really nice arms.”
“Yeah, they are,” Josh commiserates, and pats her on the shoulder before they head back to the bullpen.
--
Author's Note: This is inspired by two separate twitter conversations involving Clark Gregg's The West Wing character, Mike Casper. I take very little responsibility for my actions.
