SUNDAY:

Faces were graver than usual as the staff gathered together. Katie's question about the president's childhood in the briefing four days ago had been the first rumblings of an avalanche that was still even now cascading around their ears. Here was a well of potential deep enough to fill whole books, let alone newspaper columns - the secret truth about Jed Bartlet's childhood.

Gasp at the dark buried horrors hidden from a nation! Hiss in disgust at the evil patriarch who tried to deny the greatness of a future president! Marvel at the determination and strength of will that brought Josiah Bartlet on the long and rocky road to the White House! And do it all safe in the knowledge that the president was the hero of this story, so it could hardly be called sleaze or muck-raking or scandal-mongering to grope for every last tiny detail about it...

It was the news cycle from hell, and it was going nowhere. It was eating all the column inches typically allotted to the White House, pushing aside or leeching into every positive story the administration wanted to put out. The president was a virtual prisoner of the knowledge that any even remotely public engagement would be used as excuse to get him up to the podium and start asking the wrong kind of questions.

And none of his staff gave a damn about any of that... not while they could see the man himself suffering at the centre of it.

Toby leaned back against the wall of Leo's office, watching the other three as they babbled nervously. CJ's face, freed of the deceptively animated mask she wore in the press room, was creased with frown lines. Josh looked as if he'd been dragged backwards through the White House grounds by his hair a few more times than usual. Sam wore a permanent grimace of concentration, and that ridiculous excuse for a beard he'd been growing had become the source of a new nervous habit, as his fingers worried at his chin in moments of extreme tension.

In other words, pretty well constantly.

"He looks pale."

"I know he looks pale, Sam," CJ grated.

"I'm saying, even paler than-"

"I know how pale he is, Sam."

"I think he's smoking again," Josh interjected worriedly. "CJ, is he smoking again?"

"Oh, how the hell would I know?" she snapped irritably. Predictably, the Deputy Chief of Staff grew prickly in response.

"Well, I'd think you'd-"

"Leave it, Joshua," she warned sharply. Sam stepped in with his hands raised placatingly, and got the force of both their laser glares turned on him for his trouble.

"Okay, can we just take a moment to-?"

Toby never got to find out what trite calming platitude was about to emerge from his deputy's mouth, as Leo chose that moment to finally return.

"Leo, is he-?"

"How's the-?"

"Did you speak to him, is he-?"

Leo shut them all down with a scowl. "He's the President of the United States, people, not your great aunt Mary who just fell down and broke her hip! Give him some room to breathe. He doesn't need you talking about him behind his back the whole day long!"

They looked appropriately chagrined, and he let up a little, massaging his forehead tiredly. "Seriously, folks, I know you're concerned, but you know how he feels about being in the centre of a goldfish bowl. You're not doing him any good by making him feel like everybody's staring at him all the time."

CJ looked at him worriedly. "Seriously, Leo... how is he doing?" she asked plaintively.

Leo sighed heavily. "CJ..." He broke off, and shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. What do you want from me? I don't know. He's not talking to me any more than he's talking to you about this." He looked up, sweeping his eyes soberly across the rest of the staff. "All I know is that this is hurting him. This is hurting him a lot, and it doesn't look to me like any of us are doing a whole lot that's helping right now."

There was silence, for a moment, and then Leo moved forward to his desk and shuffled the papers there. "Okay," he said, sitting down. "Let's do this."

Jed hesitated outside the door to his Chief of Staff's office. They were all in there, he knew. Talking about... what? Easy question.

Talking about him.

Oh, it would hardly be arrogance to say that they were quite often talking about him, but... not like this. His staff should be talking about things he had done, things he would do, things he ought to do - not things that had happened to him in the dim and distant past. He was the president, not a test subject in some college psychology study! How was what had or hadn't happened in his childhood remotely relevant to what he did today?

Bad enough that his past was being dissected by every idiot out there who could get near a computer keyboard or a microphone. That was infuriating, but he could push it aside, file it away in the part of his brain he kept for the opinionated words of ignorant people.

But this... this was harder. To know that the people he cared about, the people he trusted, were clustering together in corners, eyeing him worriedly, analysing his every move to see if he was on the verge of cracking up.

Why would they think that? Couldn't they see that this was all just smoke and shadows, a warped and exaggerated reconstruction of events long buried and forgotten? They hadn't thought he was some desperately fragile creature on the edge of collapse before - so why did they suddenly have to look at him differently now?

He could have gone in, and no one would have said anything to him - but he would have felt their worried gazes on him every time he turned around, and that was even worse. He left the Oval Office, heading out into the reception area. Charlie was gone from his desk, on some errand or other, and Jed was glad; one less person to gaze at him with that stomach-churning mix of pity and concern.

He wandered through the West Wing, for that was most likely to be deserted on a Sunday when the senior staff were still clustered in Leo's office. Even now, the solitude was not complete; interns and aides gaped or snapped to attention, startled by his presence passing through them. And, of course, there were the silent dark shadows that flanked him everywhere. At least the Secret Service knew how to maintain an impassive expression. They were trained to spot clear and present danger - surely they at least understood that these whispers from the past couldn't hurt him.

"Mr. President?"

It wasn't the voice out of silence that startled him so much as its perky, friendly tone. He'd almost forgotten what it was like to be approached any way but tentatively. He turned, a small smile touching his lips almost automatically. "Donna!"

She smiled at him pleasantly and, so far as he could tell, completely guilelessly. "Good afternoon, Mr. President. Were you looking for-?"

"Oh, no, I was just..." He gestured vaguely.

"Okay," she accepted lightly. Not pouting with worry at the idea of the president wandering the halls for no reason, or scrutinising him closely for the first signs of cracking up. "Oh!" she recalled suddenly. "I meant to say... congratulations. On Zoey and Charlie's baby. You must be looking forward to being a grandpa again."

A genuine smile visited him now, and he was surprised to find it could still feel natural. "Well, thank you, Donna. I am indeed."

She beamed back. After a moment, he realised she was probably lurking around purely out of politeness.

"I'm sorry, am I keeping you from-?"

"Oh, no, no," she explained quickly. "Josh just called me in to pull some stats for him on the USFA. I'm pretty much..." She gestured lightly, and grinned. "At a loose end."

He smiled back. "Oddly enough, I am too."

"Well that... doesn't sound like it happens very often, Mr. President," she observed.

"No. It doesn't."

"Sir... if you don't mind me asking," she began suddenly, and his muscles suddenly grew taut. "Have Charlie and Zoey said anything about picking out baby names yet? Only there's this pool Ed and Larry are starting, and..."

He laughed, and the some of the tension bled out of him. A normal conversation! He'd forgotten that sometimes people had those. "Well, they haven't said anything to Abbey and I just yet," he told her, leaning back against the wall. "But I have to say, I've got a few ideas myself that I might just be advancing..."

As he settled himself for a few moments' chat about matters completely inconsequential, Jed found he was already feeling better than he had in days.

Carol offered her boss a sympathetic smile as she returned to her office, muttering tiredly to herself.

"Hey, Carol." She paused. "Did Melissa Berrington get struck by lightning yet?"

She grinned tentatively and shook her head.

CJ sighed heavily. "The powers that be just aren't on the ball with the smiting these days." She glanced at her assistant. "Has she said anything else I should know about?"

"Not since the 'heroic image' thing," Carol supplied.

CJ scowled. "I swear, if I could get my hands on that woman..." She shook her head and sighed heavily.

The Republican pundit appeared to have taken great delight in composing her column suggesting that 'the Bartlet revelation' was an artfully engineered attempt to build on the president's 'heroic image'. For reasons past understanding, she chose to believe - or just to claim - that the president's closest advisors had deliberately dropped or even wholly invented this bombshell in order to build public sympathy. Apparently the fact that Jed Bartlet had swept in out of nowhere to win the candidacy and then the presidency - and then faced down an assassination attempt and the revelation of his chronic disease to retain it - was a sign that his people were trying to present him as some sort of mythical hero.

It was preposterous, not least because, well, how did you engineer a myth out of events that everyone knew had actually happened? But people were reading it, people were discussing it, and no matter how crackpot a theory you were trying to sell, somebody out there was willing to listen and believe it.

Even more dangerous, harder to track down and refute, were the internet rumours that could be started up by anybody with a modem and a yen for making trouble. This was all a smokescreen for some terrible thing the president had done in his past. The president's troubles with his father were because he was the illegitimate child of another man. This news had been deliberately leaked to take attention away from whatever conspiracy the government was up to this week.

These kind of rumours were like smoke; insubstantial, but impossible to catch or contain and spreading everywhere - reaching out to a whole host of people who might or might not believe them, but would definitely pass them on.

CJ sighed, and massaged her forehead for a few moments. She sat back in her chair, and looked up at her assistant.

"Okay, Carol. Hit me with the latest."

Ellie hated herself for following the news, yet somehow she just couldn't help it. It was everywhere; internet, radio, TV, newspapers, you couldn't turn around without getting hit by somebody else's take on her family history. The articles were trash-talking at worst, deeply invasive at best, but she still felt compelled to read them. She needed to know. The articles probably couldn't tell her, but she scoured through them anyway, searching for the tiniest clues to the history her father had hidden from them all.

Her mother had braced her for this media firestorm, but she hadn't really told her much. Only that her grandfather, this man she only knew from a few stiffly-posed photographs that had taken on a whole new menace in retrospect, had been... what?

Abusive. That was the word, but her mind slipped away from it, unwilling to grasp something that so obviously couldn't belong there. Not here among the Bartlets, the family that had raised wholesome and good to levels that had threatened to suffocate her through her teenage years. Her dad was like a TV-dad, good old pop from some old sitcom or other who would always sit down with the kids at the end of the episode to explain to them the Very Special Lesson they'd learned.

Her dad was a giant in his presence, intimidating without trying, overshadowing all just by being there. The thought of him as a frightened little boy just didn't... couldn't...

It was an inversion of everything in her world that had seemed frustratingly certain. It couldn't be true, shouldn't be true, but it was true, and so she gorged herself on poisonous articles, forcing herself to take it all in.

Nothing she read made any sense to her, but how could she judge the possible from the ridiculous when the world was so askew? Perhaps only her father knew for sure, but the idea of trying to talk to him...

Ellie had never been able to talk to her father about simple things, the basic facets of a relationship that came so easily to cool, collected Liz or feisty little Zoey. Even Annie had always been effortlessly comfortable with her grandpa, leaping into his arms or chattering excitedly to him about whatever crossed her mind.

Ellie had always suspected she'd inherited some kind of recessive 'quiet' gene - was this where it had come from? The thought gave her a chill. Had she inherited some of John Bartlet's emotional distance, that inability to connect? Had she been hurting her father all her life, an unknowing echo of earlier times when he'd reached out constantly and been rebuffed?

Was there something wrong with her... or had she just been a whiny little brat, inventing personal problems out of nothing while her father had gone through who knew what kind of hell and buried it without a word? Every further word she read made her feel sicker and sicker, like the way she'd had when she was younger of chewing over her miseries again and again and again until she forced herself into a panic attack and needed to run off and puke.

She was torturing herself with horrors both real and imagined, creating a mental picture that was perhaps many times worse than the reality had been, or perhaps not nearly bad enough. There was no way she could possibly know, but she kept trying anyway, forcing down every last muck-raking story and malicious rumour in a bid to understand.

She was making herself sick with distress - but a part of her, the same demon that was always telling her that she wasn't good enough for her father, kept whispering that after the way she'd always behaved, maybe she deserved it.

"Sam?"

He looked up from his computer screen as Ginger appeared in the doorway. "Yeah?"

"Gareth Vance is here."

"From the-?"

"Shield of Innocence charity, yeah."

"Okay, thanks." He straightened up, feeling his back protest, and staggered a little as he made his way out into the bullpen. Bonnie smirked at him.

"It's the beginning of the end, you know."

"What is?" he frowned.

"The beard. Classic midlife crisis material."

"It's only a few short steps to comfy slippers and curling up by the fire with a blanket," Ginger chimed in.

"Hey!" Sam protested. "This is not an old man's beard! It's a youthful beard. It's full of youth."

They exchanged a look and nodded in unison, humouring him. "Of course it is."

"Maybe you should get an earring, too," Ginger suggested.

"And a motorbike."

"And dig up your old electric guitar and try to reform your teenage rock band."

"I wasn't in a rock band," Sam admitted. He paused in the doorway. "I played the glockenspiel."

He hurried away to his meeting.

Josh wandered along in a moody haze.

"Hey, Josh."

"Hey, Charlie." The answer was vague and automatic, and it took him a few steps more to collect himself and turn around. "Hey, Charlie," he repeated, with an apologetic smile.

"Busy day?" the young aide surmised with a sympathetic quirk of an eyebrow. Josh rubbed his forehead tiredly.

"Hell, yeah... Listen, I'm sorry, I've barely stood still to speak to you all week... Congratulations!" he grinned.

"Thanks." Charlie shuffled a little awkwardly.

Josh smirked. "How are things going?"

"I'm afraid to leave my desk," Charlie confessed with a slightly glazed look. "Every time I come back, there's something else there. So far I have six books of baby names, a copy of 'Parenting For Dummies', and an article on the spiritual benefits of celibacy. I have a fairly strong suspicion on who's behind that one."

He snickered, but the expression soon slid into something like relief. "He's messing with your head?"

"A little." Charlie pulled a face. "He's... himself, but he gets pretty down. He's not even angry, he's just... sad."

Josh sighed miserably. "This is... this shouldn't be happening. They shouldn't be allowed to do this to him, Charlie."

The younger man matched his grimace. "I guess that's the price you pay for the freedom of the press," he said wryly.

"Yeah. Well, he's got my vote for a dictatorship," Josh said wearily. Charlie smiled.

"See you later, Josh."

"Yeah."

He sighed again, stretched his shoulders, and headed back to his desk.

"Toby." Leo nodded absently as the Communications Director appeared in his doorway.

Toby shuffled in, and waited a moment for attention to be turned his way. He spoke when it became apparent Leo wasn't about to stop working. "I wanted to talk about-"

"The Cambodian Ambassador," Leo finished for him.

"The position needs to be filled," he pointed out.

Leo tugged his glasses off, the better to reveal his exasperated glare. "Yes, well, strangely enough, Toby, the applicants aren't exactly queuing down the street."

"It looks like the president's spinning his wheels," he objected.

"The guy's been dead a week, Toby, even international diplomacy can take a back seat to respect."

"I'm saying, the president hasn't even spoken to the press, it looks like he's spinning his wheels."

"He's spoken to the widow," Leo snapped irritably. "He goes out there, they'll turn this thing into a three ring circus. It's more respectful to Nathan Williamson's memory if he doesn't make any address at all."

"The press aren't gonna see it that way."

Leo gave him a look. "Well, now you've shocked me, Toby."

Toby touched his forehead. "Leo..."

"No, seriously, Toby, what do you... what do you want me to do? We can't put him out there. We just can't. They'll tear him apart."

"They're not gonna go away if he ignores them! Leo... He can't play a waiting game with the press. He's the President of the United States, he can't duck media coverage for any length of time without things starting to fall apart."

The way the Chief of Staff shook his head was more frustration than denial. "He's not ready."

"Is he going to be?"

"Oh, how the hell should I know, Toby?" he demanded with a scowl. "This is not a presidential sulking session! This is very painful for him."

Toby bowed his head in acknowledgement; Leo shook his head sadly.

"No amount of time is gonna make this any easier for him, but every moment we can give him away from the media frenzy gives him a chance to regroup, and their interest a chance to die down." He hesitated, and sighed. "It's all we can do."

Toby met his gaze, and neither of them needed to say aloud how little they both knew it was. After a moment he turned to go, and Leo called him back, mustering a smile.

"Hey. You heard about Charlie and Zoey?"

He found a smile to return. "Yeah."

But as he made his way back towards the Communications department, the expression quickly faded into weary solemnity.

"Mr. Vance? Hi." Sam shook hands briskly with the charity representative. He was a handsome black man in his thirties who just seemed to exude that teacherly, guidance-counsellor vibe.

"Sam Seaborn?"

"That's right."

He sat down, and gestured for the other man to do the same. To his amusement, Vance did so gingerly, as if a little afraid someone might come rushing in at any moment and demand he get off the furniture.

"First time in the White House?" he guessed gently.

Vance gave a slightly embarrassed smile. "Shows, huh? Yeah, it's just... if mom and pop could see me now, you know?"

"I know," Sam smiled. He would have said 'you get used to it', but... you really didn't. Some days it was just the place you worked, and then other days... it could whack you up the side of the head without warning.

He pulled his papers toward him, professional habit although he'd read them over before coming to the meeting. "You're here as a representative of the Shield of Innocence children's charity, correct?" He flipped through the pages. "We gave your organisation funding eight months ago for a television advertising campaign to run-"

Vance leaned forward in his chair, interrupting him with an apologetic smile. "Actually, Mr. Seaborn-"

"Sam, please," he extended automatically.

"Thank you." He smiled, then grew serious. "Sam... I'm not here to talk to you about funding."

He frowned, and sat back in his chair. "Okay. What are you here to talk about?"

Vance looked him in the eye. "I want to talk to you about the president."

Donna caught the phone on the second ring, still typing with her other hand. "Josh Lyman's office."

"Donnatella."

She grimaced at nobody in particular, but kept her voice neutrally cool. "Alexia." Ah, yet another haughty phonecall from big sister. Fun.

"Have you spoken to Joletta yet?"

Donna rolled her eyes ceilingwards. Her middle sister's divorce had been in the works for months, but now that it was finally clear that she was fully intending to go through with it, Alexia had decided it was her place to step in and 'save her from making a terrible mistake'.

That was Donna's mission too. However, so far as she was concerned, the terrible mistake had happened eleven years ago, and involved getting married to Mike Vincent.

"Alexia, last time I spoke to her she was perfectly happy-"

"So she wants you to think," her sister cut her off imperiously. "Honestly, Donna, if you were home, you'd be able to see-"

"This is my home, and I see fine from here," Donna informed her shortly. Once she wouldn't have dreamed of fighting against the way her mother and older sister bullied her, but years of deflecting Josh's best efforts had taught her valuable new skills. "She's made up her mind, she's getting rid of Mike, and I say go Joletta!"

"That's easy for you to say. She's throwing her whole life away, and you're just letting her do it!"

"Yeah, well, frankly if her whole life is Mike Vincent, it's better off thrown away."

Alexia let out her breath in a dissatisfied huff. "You're a fine one to talk."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Despite herself she was tensed for a jab to the still-sensitive 'Dr. Freeride' area, but her sister had a different target in mind.

"The way you threw away everything you had in Wisconsin to go chasing after your goodfornothing boss. I thought you'd come to your senses when you came back home to us, but no, you didn't last a matter of weeks before you had to go chasing after him like a puppy. It's embarrassing."

Donna barked a short laugh, amused. "I've got to tell you, Alexia, if you really think the only thing keeping me in Washington is Josh Lyman, you know a whole lot less about me than you think. It happens that I have a very good, very important job here, and I happen to think I play an important part in the running of a nation. Now, if you'll excuse me, I actually have to get back to it, so goodbye."

She put her phone down, and in rolling her eyes met Josh's. He gave her a faux-wounded look.

"I'm hurt, hurt I tell you."

"You'll get over it," she shrugged casually.

"That was your sister?"

Donna heaved a heavy sigh. "Yeah. She's bugging me because Joletta's finally had the good sense to go through with ditching Mike, and she wants me to put a stop to it."

Josh frowned. "And you're supposed to stop her getting divorced how?"

"Well, you know. We crazy people know how to talk to each other."

"Ah." He gave her a sympathetic shrug, and headed towards his office.

"I called Congressman Walters," she called after him. He half-turned.

"Yeah?

"Monday, late afternoon."

He nodded. "Okay, thanks.

Sam's eyebrows were somewhere up around his hairline. "I'm sorry, you want to talk to me about... the president? President Bartlet?"

"We watch the news, Sam," Vance told him with a slight smile. "We've been following his story after that book came out."

Sam rocked back in his chair warily. "Well, now-"

"Sam, you have no idea how huge it is to see a public figure like the president admitting to something like this is his past."

"Oh, we have a pretty good idea," he said dryly.

Vance ignored his aside to continue earnestly. "The single biggest problem we face with the victims of child abuse is self-imposed isolation. Children believe that what's happening to them is normal, that it happens to everybody else and there's nothing out of the ordinary to report - or, conversely, that it's something so strange and terrible they must never tell anybody. That's why we run campaigns like the one your administration helped us get the funding for. We have to get the message out to as many children as we can that when things like this happen, they need to tell somebody about it."

"And that's admirable, but-"

"Sam, despite our best efforts, a lot of abused children continue to suffer from the lethal misconception that there's something wrong with them - that the beatings, or punishments, or sexual abuse, wouldn't happen to them if they were better sons and daughters. Their parents indoctrinate them with that belief, and it's a very difficult and painful thing to shake, even after they've come to terms with the reality of what has been done to them."

"I understand that," Sam said softly. He'd seen for himself the president's reflexive desire to speak up for his father's good name, the crazy dichotomy between cold truth and the bonds of family relationships.

"Most of the time, we're reliant on concerned outsiders to save these children - neighbours, teachers, doctors, social workers. It's terrifying to think how many more are slipping through our nets all the time because nobody sees. If we're ever going to take steps towards eradicating abuse, we need to reach out to those children and convince them to come forward for themselves."

"Well, okay, but I don't see quite how-"

"The president is a symbol, Sam," Vance said earnestly. "A very powerful symbol. We teach our children from an early age to aspire to the presidency, that it's something powerful, that you have to be a very special kind of noble and wise person to do it." He gripped Sam's sleeve. "Can you imagine the good it would do for those children to hear the president speak out honestly about his childhood? If they could be shown that these things can happen to anybody - not just the bad kids, or the useless kids, or the unimportant kids, but anybody, up to and including the most respected man in this country?"

Sam was silenced, slightly stunned by this torrent of impassioned words. Vance continued, more softly. "It could be an incredible thing, Sam. If you could only convince the president to speak out, it could help to blow so many of the myths about child abuse wide open. He could help so many people."

Sam got slowly to his feet, a little dazed. "I- I'm sorry, I... You're gonna have to give me some time with this. I can't just- you're gonna have to give me some time."

Vance stood too. "I understand that," he said with a nod. "I'm not asking you to just-"

"I'll, uh- I'll talk to some people," Sam interrupted. "I'll... can you come back later in the week. If we could meet again on... Tuesday - I'll ask Ginger to set something up..."

"Sure," he agreed gently, shaking Sam's hand. "Thank you. Thank you so much for considering this." He turned to go, but paused in the doorway. "He really could... he could save a lot of lives with this, Sam. He could save a lot of children's lives."

He left, and Sam was left staring after him.

"Hey, Leo."

"Hey, Charlie. Has he got a minute?"

"He's got a few," the aide acknowledged, while somehow managing to communicate by facial expression alone the fact that the least of these were taken up with official business, the better it would be.

"It's okay, Charlie, I just want to talk to him a moment," Leo reassured him. He moved towards the door, then paused halfway. "How are you doing, by the way?"

In answer, he held up a pile of baby name books with a studiously blank expression. Leo chuckled.

"You just wait 'til they start telling you pregnancy horror stories," he warned.

"I'm looking forward to it," Charlie said dryly.

Leo headed into the Oval Office. The president looked up at his approach and smiled wryly. In his jeans and Notre Dame sweatshirt he normally looked younger and more relaxed, but not today.

"Mr. President."

"Leo." He sat upright, with a groan it obviously took effort to keep below the audible. "You needed me?"

"No, I just dropped by. We're pretty much wrapped up for the day."

Jed nodded. "Good... good," he said vaguely.

"I see Charlie's getting hit with the baby names already."

"Yes." He seemed a little off focus; not quite absent completely, but lacking his usual spirit of sharp, witty responses - much like he had been all week, actually.

"I think Josiah Bartlet-Young has a certain ring to it," Leo offered, and was recorded with a low-key smile.

"What, no little Leos running about the place?"

"Leo Bartlet?" He winced. "I don't think so."

"What about Thomas? Little Tommy?" Now Jed was smiling a little wider, and he was more than happy to be the butt of the teasing.

"I think if I really have to be immortalised in someone else's children, I'd prefer it not to be as Tommy."

"If it's a girl, they could call her Leonora."

"Or Josie," he shot back.

Jed glowered and pointed at him warningly, but it gradually turned into chuckle. "Don't even think about suggesting that to Zoey," he warned.

"Okay," Leo smiled. For a moment they were comfortable in silence together. "You should get some rest," he suggest softly.

"It's early yet," the president refuted automatically.

"You've had a hell of a week."

For once, Jed didn't argue with that assessment. "Yeah," he sighed tiredly, and met Leo's eyes. "Don't suppose you'd like to give me the odds on next week being any better?"

He had to look down at the carpet.

"Sam!" Josh ducked into his associate's office, brain bubbling over with stats and initiatives. "I wanted to talk to you about a meeting I've got set up with- What's up?"

He frowned. Sam was sitting tilted back in his chair, eyeing the ceiling as he did when his thoughts were preoccupied.

Sam swivelled back down to look at him. "I, uh... I had a meeting with this guy today. Gareth Vance."

"From Shield of Innocence? About the funding thing, right?"

"Yeah... no. That wasn't what he wanted to talk about."

Josh pulled a puzzled face. "No? What did he want?"

Sam looked at him gravely. "He wanted me to... he asked me about approaching the president to talk about his childhood."

Josh stared at him. "He wants the president to do a PSA?" he demanded loudly.

"No, I-" Sam grimaced and ran a hand through his hair. "He's got a point, Josh," he said awkwardly. "It's... the president's a symbol with a lot of power, a lot of abused kids could benefit from, from-"

"Ripping his most painful secrets out on national TV? No way, Sam."

"You don't think-?"

"Sam, I- I..." He raised a hand to his forehead and sighed in frustration before looking at him. "I remember what it took for me to... to go out in front of that press room and talk about my PTSD, explain about the symptoms and what it did to me, and... You can't ask him to do that, Sam. Not something this old. Not something this painful. These things, they're not... you don't volunteer to talk about them."

Sam nodded solemnly, and was silent for a long moment. Then he met Josh's eyes, his own troubled with the evidence of long and deep contemplation.

"But what if... what if talking about what happened to you could have saved a lot of people going through the same thing? What if you could have convinced a lot of people to get help for post traumatic stress before it went too far? Could you have done it then?"

Josh held his breath in for a long moment, then let it out in a sigh and dropped his gaze.

"I don't know, Sam," he admitted. "I really don't know."

Andy hovered somewhat awkwardly just outside the Communications bullpen. Strange that she should feel so, well, nervous about being in the White House.

Normally when she was here it was in the cause of government business - and, more often than not, in the grip of white hot rage at some stupid initiative of her ex-husband's. But now that she was here as Toby's... what? 'Girlfriend', she supposed, although the word sounded ridiculous to her. Now that she was here as... whatever you called an ex-spouse you were trying to reconcile with... she felt out of place and self-conscious. This was Toby's home ground, not hers.

And dangerous ground right now, at that. She'd been blown away with shock at the questions raised about the president's childhood in Wednesday's briefing - even more so that evening when Toby had confirmed there was truth behind them. He'd been evasive and reticent in a way that went beyond usual Toby squeamishness about emotional matters, and she had a sinking feeling that he'd managed to hit the president with something deeply insensitive somewhere along the line.

That was the hellish thing about fighting with Toby Ziegler. She'd had shouting matches with plenty of men she'd dated - somehow seemed to naturally attract that sort - but most argumentative people struck their blows with exaggerated, twisted versions of their points, and apologised for it afterwards. When Toby went for the throat, he always did it with the truth.

He was a volatile, obnoxious, arrogantly self-righteous man, impossible to coexist with peaceably. But - God help her - she'd gone out with plenty of 'nice' men since their divorce, and not one of them had ever produced quite that spark she still had for Toby Ziegler.

So here she was again.

"Andy! Hi." A harassed-looking CJ checked her headlong rush to smile at the other woman. "Do you and Toby have a date?"

She shook her head. "We're gonna have a quiet evening in together. I figured..." She shrugged. "Everybody's under enough stress already without keeping up appearances in public."

"Yeah," CJ said, that one syllable loaded with heartfelt weariness. Then she brightened up, obviously a conscious effort. "Oh, but it's not all bad. At least Charlie and Zoey are giving the president something to celebrate."

Andy frowned, and CJ noticed her puzzlement.

"Zoey's having a baby - didn't Toby tell you?"

"No," she said softly.

CJ didn't notice her tone. "Oh, well, you know Toby. Continuation of the human race? Not his pet issue. I think he thinks that children should be popped out fully-grown, fully educated and old enough to vote."

"Yeah." Andy mustered a smile, but it felt a little false. CJ would normally have been perceptive enough to notice, but right now she was running on the absolute limits of her endurance.

"Listen, I'm sorry, I've really got to get back to my office. You and Toby have a good time tonight."

"I'm sure we will," Andy agreed. The automatic bright expression faded as CJ moved away. She chided herself for it, but somehow she couldn't help it. Charlie and Zoey were having a baby - well, good for them. People had kids all the time; couples of all ages and durations were doing it all over the world.

Just not her and Toby.

He could hear Steve in the kitchen, whistling to himself while he cooked. Even after several months of living together, Sam hadn't quite got used to the concept of real food, in his own home. It felt like forever since he'd existed on anything but coffee and microwave noodles.

Steve returned to the lounge, absently wiping his hands. "Call it twenty minutes 'til the pasta's done? I've gotta go back in and chop the salad in a minute."

"Want me to help?"

"No, that's okay. It doesn't need fingers."

Sam shot him a look - somewhat mitigated by the fact that Steve's assessment of his food preparation skills was not exactly inaccurate - and then smiled and leaned his head back against the headrest. "You're too good to me," he sighed.

"I know," Steve agreed cheerfully.

"Thanks for that."

"Hey, it's not my fault I'm such a great catch." The cushions dipped as his boyfriend sat down next to him, and Sam pulled upright in time to catch his affectionately concerned expression. "Sam, what's on your mind?" he asked gently.

Sam sighed. "I spoke with a guy today, from the Shield of Innocence children's charity. He thinks the president should talk to the public about his childhood."

Steve frowned. "Like a PSA?"

"Yeah. Child abuse - it can happen to anyone." Sam looked across at him and smiled wryly.

He shifted position on the couch. "Sounds kind of rough on the president," he observed softly.

"Yeah," he agreed heavily. "But the thing of it is..." He met Steve's eyes. "I really do believe it could do some good. I think it might help some of these kids to understand that things like this could happen to anyone, or that even though it's happened to them they can grow past it, they can go on to do anything they want to. But... but how could I ever ask the president to do that? Should I? I mean, would he be willing to put himself through that to help people, or would he feel obligated if I asked him even if I wasn't really sure how much I was asking...?"

"I think..." Steve broke off and sighed. "I think I am way not qualified to answer that question."

"Yeah." Sam shook his head and slumped forward. "Yeah, me neither." He brushed back his hair, and Steve slipped a comforting arm round his shoulders.

"Seriously, Sam, how's he doing? This has got to be hell on earth for him right now with the media dissecting everything he's ever said and done."

Sam could only shrug. "Seriously? I have no idea. He's keeping to himself, which I guess you can't exactly blame him for..." He mustered a slight smile. "I'm just glad the First Lady's home right now to be with him. He couldn't do this without her."

Steve smiled affectionately at him. "Everybody needs someone to cuddle," he agreed.

"Or to cook them dinner," Sam added.

"That too."

They grinned at each other, and then leaned together to share a gentle kiss.

Steve pulled back, and abruptly hopped to his feet. "Right. Salad." Sam smiled, and watched him go.

"Hey, Zoey."

"Hey, Charlie!" She smiled brightly at her husband as he came in, and moved to hug him.

That was still a 'whoa' moment for her at the oddest times. Her husband. The father of her child - the one that was even now growing somewhere down there in the middle of her. She might have been told that, but she wasn't sure she actually believed it, or would be able to until it was actually there, in the room with her and bawling loudly.

Her hand stole automatically to her belly, and Charlie caught the gesture and smiled at her. He captured her wrist in a loose grip, and place a light kiss on her lips. "Did you call your sisters?"

"Yeah. Annie squealed the place down - she's so excited she won't be the youngest in the family anymore. Liz started giving me all this advice until I threatened to put the phone down." She smirked, but it faded away a little. "Ellie was kinda upset - not about the baby, but, you know, stuff. I think the press are maybe giving her some trouble; she's all alone up there."

"She's got her Secret Service with her," Charlie reminded her comfortingly.

"Yeah, but they can only kick the guys out, they can't stop them from ringing the phone off the hook or shouting questions at you whenever you go out."

He regarded her worriedly. "Have they been hanging around here at all?"

"It hasn't been too bad. I haven't been out, though. There were some guys in a van parked outside for a while, but Tony and Mitch went and glared at them until they went away."

Charlie grinned and pulled her closer. "See, sometimes it pays to have an apartment full of Secret Service guys just across the hall from you."

"Yeah, we could have our own wacky sitcom," Zoey said dryly.

He just smiled, and gave her a warm but careful squeeze.

"Charlie, I'm like two and a bit months pregnant, I promise I really won't explode if you hug me too tight."

"Sorry," he smirked, and obligingly tightened his grip. She rested her head against his shoulder.

"Have you been talking to people at work?"

"It's been doing the rounds. People keep giving me baby books."

She grinned, but then grew serious. "We should talk to CJ about announcing it. I don't want this to just leak out by accident like it did with the engagement."

"Yeah," he agreed soberly.

She looked up at him. "Do you think maybe it might help take some of the focus off my dad?"

"I don't know," he admitted seriously. "Maybe. Or it might just get lost in the feeding frenzy."

"Yeah." She didn't want their good news to be obliterated like that. The announcement of their engagement had been truly botched, she and Charlie had only got it together and finalised their wedding plans after he'd nearly been killed... couldn't they have one thing go right?

"I'll talk to CJ about it," Charlie decided, and she nodded in agreement. "She'll know what's the best thing for us to do."

"Yeah." She kissed him, and he pulled away, beginning to shrug out of his suit jacket.

"I need to get out of these clothes, I've been in them all day."

"Okay. Want me to order takeout?"

He gave her a mock-stern look. "You should be watching your diet, young lady."

"I'll get Chinese," she shrugged. "It's got vegetables."

He grinned and shrugged back at her. "Well hey, that sounds good enough to me."

Andy sat on the edge of his couch, staring into space in obvious preoccupation. It still felt strange to have her here - in this place that had never been their home, only his. It was strange to have this at all, this situation that felt unnervingly like a second chance.

He poured them both fresh glasses of wine, and took hers back to her. She accepted it with a distracted nod, and he sat down beside her. "Andy?"

"Hmm?"

"Andy." She looked round at him now, and mustered a slight smile. He didn't bother to put his questions into words, just looked at her.

After a moment she sighed, and folded her hands in her lap. "CJ... told me about Zoey's baby."

"Oh." Oh. Ah.

It was stupid, of course, to not have passed the news on, for how exactly did one conceal the pregnancy of the daughter of the leader of the free world? But still, he hadn't broached the subject with Andy, wouldn't have known how to. He hoped CJ hadn't said anything unfortunate; he didn't think she knew about the miscarriages Andy had suffered. He certainly hadn't told her. She'd known he and Andy were having troubles, probably that it involved the issue of children, but those months and years of private pain were not something to be shared.

However CJ might or might not have put the news across, he was sure he could have somehow managed to be more insensitive if he'd done it himself. He might write speeches that set the world on fire, but these were the things he didn't have words for.

Andy twined her fingers, looking down at them instead of him. "It's good news," she said after a long silence. "She's... it's good. It's good news."

"It is," he agreed gently, and tilted her chin up with his hand.

She held his gaze for a moment, and then her smile crumpled. Toby pulled her into his arms, and kissed her forehead gently. He might not have the right words, but he knew how to do this.

After all, they'd been here often enough.

MONDAY:

Wakefulness came gradually; the room was still dark, but something had stirred her from slumber. Not a noise, just a feeling of subtle wrongness.

Jed was awake. She could feel that in the vibe from his body, an alertness in the darkness. It was scarcely unusual for him to be unable to sleep, but usually he was restless, rolling from side to side, snatching the covers, and inevitably nudging her awake until she cuddled up to him and quieted him.

This strange stillness was troubling. Jed Bartlet was by his very nature dynamic; always in motion, frequently made clumsy by his body's inability to keep up with his frantic brain. When he sank into dull immobility, it was never a good sign.

"Hey babe," she murmured, not needing to turn toward him.

"Hey." The reply was automatic, and devoid of the rumbling warmth that normally filled it in the cosy closeness of their shared bed.

"You're awake."

"Yeah."

"Did you sleep?"

"Yeah." He didn't look at her, and she couldn't tell if he was lying.

That was probably the most unnerving thing of all.

"Hey, CJ."

"Hey, Sam." She looked up tiredly as he hovered in her doorway.

"You look awful," he noted.

"Thanks for that, Sparky," she said dryly. "I see you're your usual dapper and, dare I say, bearded self."

Sam touched his chin self-consciously. "I think it gives me an air of dignity, nay, maturity, that-"

"Sam." She smiled at him, exasperated but not unkind. "What did you want?"

He stepped inside, pulling the door to behind him, and took on a more serious air. "I spoke with a guy from the Shield of Innocence charity yesterday."

"Gareth Vance?" she supplied, shifting mental gears as she dredged up associations from months past. "About their advertising campaign?"

"No, uh... kind of." He shifted uncomfortably, and she set down the papers she'd been perusing and sat back, frowning.

"Go."

Sam hesitated. "He... He asked me to approach the president about-"

CJ was already shaking her head. "No way."

"I know, it's just that he-"

"No way, Sam," she repeatedly warningly.

He got it out in a quick blurt of information. "He thinks that if the president were to talk about his experiences, it would encourage a lot of children to come forward about abuse."

CJ digested that. "He thinks?"

"Yeah."

She eyed him intently. "You think?"

Sam sighed heavily, and sat down on the edge of her desk, looking at the ceiling. "I- I don't know, CJ." He got back to his feet and paced rapidly. "I see can both sides of this, and to be honest they're both pretty well driving me crazy."

"You can't put this on the president's desk," she warned.

"I know that-"

"I'm saying, he's not in any kind of position to make that kind of decision right now."

Sam halted his pacing, and nodded in acknowledgement. "No."

"Take it to Leo."

He winced. "He'll go ballistic."

"Probably. But... take it to him."

"Yeah," he agreed with a resigned sigh.

"And Sam?"

He paused on his way out, and looked back at her.

"I know it's pretty hard to see past a whole lot of kids in serious danger," she said, meeting his eyes soberly. "Just... remember the president's hurting too."

"Yeah." Sam nodded, and opened the door with a swift, angry twist of the handle. "Yeah."

He left.

Leo gratefully set aside his papers as the senior staff began to file in. It was tough to find patience for the picky minutiae of government with Jed's distress weighing on his mind, and he had more of it than usual to contemplate as he struggled to keep the load off his old friend's shoulders.

Everybody looked deathly tired, CJ especially. Her job had been hell over the past five days, as she wrestled with the slippery hydra that was a press corps with a story in their sights. His palms itched with every inappropriate question, and he couldn't imagine how she restrained herself from lashing out in fury at the things some of them asked.

Sam... Sam was hard to read right now. Presumably he liked his new beard - or had been too rushed off his feet to stop and think of it - but, either way, it remained. It darkened and reshaped the line of his jaw, making it harder to tell the difference between a pensive frown and a tired smile.

And Josh... well, Josh looked like he usually did, only more so. Events had spun him into one of his more manic phases, where he bounced between frenetic highs and maudlin lows with little chance to find any rest in between.

Unfortunately, when Josh was in that kind of mood he slid around the emotional spectrum too much to guarantee the success of any direct route in approaching him. Leo glanced at him from across the room. "Josh; what are you working on today?" An opened-ended question that he knew most of the answers to, but as good a way as any to gauge what was pressing most on his deputy's mind.

Josh rubbed his forehead vaguely. "I'm... meeting with Stuart Walters this afternoon about funding for the USFA."

CJ glanced sideways at him, and Leo grimaced. The last thing Josh needed right now was to fixate on something-

He might have spoken a few cautioning words, but then Toby arrived to complete the quintet, and the moment was lost.

Leo straightened up, and sighed. "Okay, guys, we've got a busy day ahead of us. There's a lot going on, and I don't want any of it landing on the president's desk. He's got a lot of weight on his shoulders right now, and he shouldn't have to carry it alone. That's what we're here for."

Sam lingered behind after the meeting. "Leo?"

"Sam." The Chief of Staff removed his glasses with a pinch of his fingers and looked up at the younger man expectantly.

"I had a meeting with Gareth Vance from the Shield of Innocence charity yesterday afternoon," Sam supplied.

"What did he want?"

"He feels that the president should-"

"No." He could have let it slide at that, but that damn conscience of his...

"Abused children need role models to help them understand that the things that happen to them are not normal and are not their fault. The benefit it would bring them to have as strong a public figure as the president speak out about his past-"

"-Does not, in this office, outweigh the pain it would cause the president to have to be pressured into doing so," Leo shut him down sharply.

Sam looked down, uncomfortable with the weight of the fierce protective instinct behind that glare.

"This doesn't reach the president," he continued warningly.

"No," he agreed solemnly.

"You bring this before him, he's going to think about doing it. He's going to seriously think about doing it, Sam, and whatever decision he has to make from that is going to haunt him for a very long time."

"I know," Sam admitted quietly.

Leo nodded, and turned back to his work, subject closed. Sam wandered slowly over to the doorway, and lingered long enough for the Chief of Staff to feel his continued presence and look up.

"It's just..." Sam met his eyes. "Which one of those kids is gonna grow up to be the next Josiah Bartlet?"

It was Leo's turn to look away.

"Hey, Ellie."

Karen gave her a commiserating smile as she arrived at the hospital. She tried to match the expression, but it wasn't easy. It was hard to pretend everything was normal when you'd just been rushed into the building with a wall of Secret Service bodies around you. The number of people approaching her at random on the street had risen sharply since Wednesday's revelations, and her agents were taking no chances.

It would have been nice to stay hidden away at home for a few days... weeks... years, possibly. But life at the bottom of the medical food chain was the same for everybody, whether you were the daughter of the president or not. If she wanted a hope of getting anywhere in the hospital, she was going to have to grit her teeth and bear it.

Gritting her teeth and bearing things, Ellie would be the first to admit, had never been one of her strong points.

"Dr. Acton's on the warpath," Karen warned her as they started walking together. The Secret Service followed discreetly behind, and for once Ellie was glad of the shield instead of mortified by their incongruity.

When Ellie only grunted vaguely in response, the other girl glanced across and gave her a sad smile.

"Oh, Ellie... You've got to stop beating yourself up," she sighed. "I keep telling you, don't read the press coverage."

"I know, I know, I just..." She trailed off in despair and frustration. How could she begin to articulate the solid weight of guilt that had built up in her chest? The knowledge that for years she'd been snubbing and turning away from her father, never seeing his pain, only loading him up with her own invented miseries.

Maybe if she'd been a better daughter, a proper daughter to him like Zoey and Elizabeth...

But that was a familiar thought, although one that never seemed to lose any of its power with the repetition. The spectre of her father's disappointment, real or hypothetical, had dogged her whole life.

Usually, though, it wasn't quite so easy to imagine she saw echoes of it stamped on every face she passed.

Toby appeared, like some particularly lugubrious wandering spirit, in his doorway. Leo sat back and gave him a wry look, removing his glasses.

"Toby."

"Leo."

There was only one possible subject of discussion. "Don't come to me for presidential updates," he warned preemptively.

"We have to come to you, because we can't go to the president," Toby reminded him.

Leo sighed.

"Well, really, Toby, how do you think he's doing?" he snapped. "You think any part of this is fun for him? It's his life they're ripping apart out there - it's his family."

"That depends on how loosely you define family," Toby corrected.

"Nobody defines family, Toby, it defines itself for you, whether you like it or not."

"He has to understand that his father can't be defended from this," Toby said forcefully. "He shouldn't be defended from this."

"Well, hell, Toby, you think I'm about to argue that point with you?" Leo scowled. "But you know what? He wasn't my father, and he wasn't yours, either."

"He forfeited his right to be called anybody's father the first time he went with his fists as the easy answer," Toby said, eyes flashing with an almost surprising depth of venom. Not the emotion, but the fact that it was visible so close to the surface.

"Yeah, well, Toby, nobody checks your licence at the door when you become a parent. And yes, the guy was a scumbag, but the moment anybody starts saying guys like that shouldn't be allowed to have kids, the rebuttal to that argument is sitting on the other side of that door in the Oval Office." Toby had gone oddly silent, but Leo was working up to a full rant from the force of his suppressed frustrations.

"If that man was still alive, then I'd be the first one out the door lighting torches for the lynch mob, but he's not. He's dead, and he's buried, and all the righteous moralising in the world isn't going to undo sins that were written in stone forty years ago." He scowled at the Communications Director.

"You know what? I don't care about John Bartlet. I don't care that he was alive, I don't care that he's dead. I don't care if they paste his name up there next to Adolf Hitler's or canonise him as a saint - the only thing I care about is what it's doing to the president. And what it's doing to the president, Toby, is forcing him to relive things that should have been long buried and long forgotten. The media can be self-righteously horrified all they like, but they're not conducting this witch hunt for the benefit of the victims, and they know it. So don't talk to me about John Bartlet, because frankly, I don't consider him worth the contemplation it would take to vilify him."

Leo was aware, in the silence once he'd cut off, that he had been shouting.

Toby took the outburst as impassively as only he would. He gave a brusque nod, and left without speaking. There was a longer than usual pause before Margaret tentatively appeared to fill the open doorway.

"Leo?"

He dismissed her with a swift hand gesture, and sighed heavily to himself as the door once again swung closed.

"I still say Sam would be perfect."

"I think they could use Toby."

"Sam's better."

"Or even Leo."

"Sam is universally acceptable."

"Plus, Sam is unisex," put in Ginger, leaning over his shoulder. He smiled at her.

"Thank you, Ginger." Sam paused, and the smile faded a little. "I think."

Bonnie rolled her eyes at him. "Oh, come on. Sam Bartlet-Young? It just doesn't work."

"Samuel Bartlet-Young," he corrected firmly. "It has dignity."

"Not if they called him Sammy."

"I don't think they would do that." Sam frowned, slightly perturbed.

"I think we should do that," Ginger decided.

"I don't think you should do that," he said hastily.

Bonnie smiled tigerishly at him. "Well, we'll take that under advisement, Sammy."

Fortunately for Sam, at this point Toby returned. "Hey, Toby," he called across the bullpen. "What d'you think Charlie and Zoey are going to name their baby?"

"Little Leo," Bonnie insisted.

"Josiah junior," Ginger responded.

"Samuel Bartlet-Young."

"Shut up." Toby continued on his way and closed the office door behind him.

Nobody was surprised.

"What about if it's a girl?" Ginger spoke up after a moment of silence.

"I think Bonnie Bartlet-Young has a rather sweet ring to it."

"Samantha Bartlet-Young would also work..."

Donna knocked cautiously on the door before pushing it open - an unusual gesture when the only person in the office was Josh himself, but lately he was jumpy and she didn't want to startle him any more than she had to. Despite the advance warning, he was staring vaguely at the wall when she came in, and didn't glance to meet her.

"Josh?" she said hesitantly.

That caused his head to whip round, and after a blank moment he pasted a smile in place and pushed back his dishevelled hair. "Hey."

"It's nearly eleven, you've got Paul Baker and Jason Jones in the Roosevelt Room...?"

"Yeah. Thanks." His distracted acknowledgement spoke volumes; most days, he'd be refuting any need for a reminder, be it snappishly, playfully, or woefully unconvincingly.

She crossed over to his desk, and recognised the page of figures he'd been poring over. Hardly a surprise; the same ones he'd been obsessing over all week.

At least the pamphlets were gone, or at any rate buried beneath other parts of the pile. Those photographs of burned out rooms and awful, brutal images like partly-scorched teddy bears gave her chills, and she didn't like to think of him sitting in here staring at them.

Josh followed her gaze, and slid the open folder closer to him. "I've been going over the numbers again. I've found some places we can make cuts, and-"

"Josh." She cut him off, and gave him a sad look.

"Donna, I'm not- This is..." he sighed heavily. "I know you think I'm... this is because of Vicky Henderson's little girl and everything. But I'm not... I just... this is important. This is an important thing here."

She smiled tentatively. "I know," she said gently. "And it's good that you're trying to do this. But just don't- don't throw everything into trying to get it, okay? You're looking at the figures and you're trying and that's good, and don't... don't beat yourself up, okay?"

"I'm not- I'm not doing that." He refuted her too quickly, and the way his eyes flickered away from hers said everything. Donna smiled again, sorrowfully, and gently squeezed his hand. He squeezed back for a moment, and then she had to pull away.

She returned to her desk with a heavy heart, knowing that whatever she might wish and whatever she tried to tell him, it would only be a matter of moments before Josh once again returned to the US Fire Administration's data, searching for a way to fix the world.

"Hey, Carol."

"Hi, CJ." Her assistant moved effortlessly into step beside her as they navigated through the corridor. Carol handed across her notes.

"Did Toby give you the-?"

"It's there."

"Thanks." CJ took a quick, absent gulp of her coffee. It was near-cold; she'd been walking around with it in her hand for an age, but had yet to have a chance to stop and drink it.

Carol glanced at her. "Charlie stopped by your office earlier."

"Yeah?"

"He wanted to know if he could have a few minutes sometime."

CJ looked up briefly from her notes. "Urgent?"

Carol smiled and shrugged. "He didn't say."

"Pencil him in for some time... tomorrow morning? He's gonna be as busy as I am today."

"Okay." Carol didn't need to note it down; her spelling might be wobbly at times, but her memory for events was flawless. When you worked in the White House press office, you had to be able to bring together every throwaway line that had been tossed your way, or you were in trouble.

"Okay." CJ stopped walking, took a moment to compose herself, and handed off the coffee cup to Carol. "I'm good. Let's do this."

Carol nodded, and swung towards the press room. The PA crackled.

"Please take your seats, folks. The briefing is about to begin. Please take your seats..."

CJ tuned it out, and strode up the podium. Calm, cool, confident, controlled. Not giving an inch. Whatever they chose to throw at her, she'd be ready for it.

Ha. When had that ever held true?

Pushing the bloody-minded voice of experience aside, she launched effortlessly into today's prepared spiel.

"Well, hey there, folks, and a hearty good morning to you. As you'll all no doubt recall, it's the Transportation Secretary's birthday today, and I hope you've got your cards in early, because let me tell you, once that guy's fan club get going you won't get a word in edgeways." Blow the unimportant stories off quickly, give them no room to wedge in an impertinent question between the lines.

"Senator Collins has taken the time to clarify his comments after last week's edition of Capital Beat, and Janet will be able to give you a transcript of that on the way out. The British Prime Minister's visit has undergone yet another rescheduling-" she paused to allow the good-natured groans - "after his visit to Taiwan was called off due to the outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of influenza. Not, I should hasten to add, on the part of the British Prime Minister. We can now expect him to drop by in the first week of January - assuming, of course, there are no further delays."

A small wave of gentle snickers. At another time, she would have been content, feeling the rhythm of the room, knowing she was in control. But not with the shadow of the Rogers biography hanging over them. It was a multi-headed beast that could pop up to bite you anytime, and from any direction.

Keep stalling. "The Congressional Budget Office have released the new figures, which show a dip of point three billion below even the most conservative estimates from this time last year. There's a more detailed breakdown which should be circulating around the room before the end of the briefing."

A breath. "Well, that's your targets for today, ladies and gentlemen, all lined up, step right up and take a shot. Any takers? Anyone?"

"CJ."

"Chris."

"Has the president made any official comment on the Michael Rogers biography?"

What a surprise. CJ pointed accusingly. "You, my friend, do not get the kewpie doll." Chris smiled slightly, but refused to relinquish her line of attack.

"CJ, has he made any-?"

"The president has not released any official comment, nor does he intend to. This is not official White House business, and he has no intention for the administration to get bogged down in irrelevancies." Yeah, good luck with that, Mr. President. "Sandy."

"CJ, why were the president's comments on the death of the Cambodian Ambassador released in the form of a written statement instead of a briefing to the White House press corps?"

Oh, why the hell do you think?

"The president felt it was owed to the memory of Nathan Williamson, and out of respect for his grieving widow, not to turn his death into a media circus."

They all knew damn well that if he'd come out in front of them to make a statement, not one single question would have had the slightest connection to Nathan Williamson's murder. She knew them, and they knew themselves. And yet none of the vultures had the grace to look at all chagrined or embarrassed.

"CJ!" She hadn't pointed, but the strident voice that rang out from the rear of the room used volume as a substitute for authority. Expert training kept the grimace of distaste from showing on the surface or permeating her tone.

"Jackie." Jackie Grant. No way in hell this question wasn't going to be about the most graphic, sordid detail of the president's childhood the jackals had been able to dig up.

She was prepared... but when the question came, it was nothing she'd ever thought to anticipate.

"CJ! Does the president have any comment on the internet rumour that he and his brother suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their father?"

And then, something unusual happened.

CJ was silent.

Not the flustered, helpless silence of a rookie press handler in a room out of control. Not the open-mouthed silence of a press secretary who had just been blindsided with the mother of all unexpected questions. A cold, awful, horrible silence.

The clamour of the shouting reporters abruptly died out, and nobody quite dared move. CJ softly pushed up her glasses, straightened her shirt collar. And when she looked up at Jackie Grant, her mild expression was more threatening than any mask of rage.

"Okay," she said dangerously softly. "A, I've never heard anything from anybody that would support that rumour. B, I should think just about the last place on earth you're going to hear accurate information about something so intimately personal is on the internet. And C, if that's anybody's idea of an appropriate question for the White House press room, God help us all." She neatly picked up and folded together her notes. "This briefing is over, and I'd think very carefully about how long you want the rest of your career to last before any of you start shouting my name."

She turned around, and walked with perfect, cast-iron control from the podium.

And nobody made a sound.

Leo's office was filled with a babble of frantic hysteria.

"How did we not-?"

"Where the hell did-?"

"Is there nobody in this room who-?"

"Quiet!" Leo roared above the hubbub. The words of the others gradually stuttered into silence.

Josh looked sick. "Leo, we didn't..."

"We didn't anticipate this," Leo finished for him, spitting out the words as if they left an ugly taste. "How the hell did we not anticipate this? Is this not- this isn't something we should have thought about? How did we not anticipate this?"

CJ had a hand to the side of her head, and looked as pale as if she had a migraine. "Because we didn't want to think about it," she said sickly.

Sam turned solemn eyes to Leo. "Was the president watching the briefing?"

"No, but I don't think we can hide it from him!" Leo exploded.

The standard question right now would have been 'Is there any possibility this is true?'

Nobody asked it. Nobody thought it. There was no possibility it could be true, and none of them were going to let there be any possibility it was true.

Toby looked up, and met Leo's eyes. "He's going to flip out," he said, softly but authoritatively.

"No kidding, Toby!" Leo snapped sharply. It was hard to keep his temper from exploding; the thought that someone could idly unleash such a rumour, casually chatter over the unimaginable as if the truth wasn't bad enough, as if there had to be some way to exaggerate it more, make it bigger-

Toby's voice remained serious and low. "Leo. He's been going crazy not leaping out there to strike the story down when he knows every damn word of it is true." He was silent for a beat. "How, exactly, do you think he's going to react now they've thrown a complete falsehood into the ring?"

The silence exploded as Leo's office door slammed inwards and bounced against its hinges. "Leo!" the president bellowed.

Normally, Leo would have been the only one in the room to calmly take his best friend's temper without flinching.

Today, normal was a distant dream.

The president's face was an unhealthy red, and his eyes ablaze with such fury that CJ and Sam, nearest the door, both took a step backwards.

He turned cold, almost unrecognisable eyes on CJ, and she felt her heart shrink several sizes within her chest. "CJ..." he warned. The soft, affectionately paternal rumble was gone, buried beneath the voice he used to reduce his enemies to a trembling ruin. For the first time, in the white heat of his anger, she thought she saw his father's hand in him, and she had to fight the instinct to recoil.

"Mr. President, I-"

"I want that reporter out of my White House," he said, dangerously evenly. This was far beyond his quickly passing squalls of blustering rage, and deep into the cool, hard fury she hadn't seen unleashed since Charlie was attacked. "I want her out of the press room, I want you to take her badge, I want her gone."

"Sir-" Sam's interjection was soft, but the president whirled as if he'd shouted, and the Deputy Communications Director visibly flinched.

"We do not stand for that kind of journalistic behaviour in this White House," he snarled. His voice was rising. "We do not stand for it anywhere in the civilised world! That kind of- That kind of- Those kind of lies-"

Leo stepped forward, taking his arm, trying to take control. "Mr. President, you need to-"

The president wrenched away from him with a startling violence. "No!" he bellowed. "I don't want to calm down, Leo! I want a full retraction, in writing, I want to see that woman sued for libel! My father would never- He would never-"

"Jed." They all registered the change in Leo's address, an intimacy they'd never heard from him even back in the campaign days.

The president had lowered his head into his hands. "It wasn't like that," he choked quietly, and the naked pain in his voice was paralysing to his audience. "They're making him out to be some kind of monster, Leo. And he wasn't a monster, he was just my father, and I love him, and I don't want to do this, Leo, I just-"

CJ was distantly aware of the fact that there were tears gathering on her cheeks, and she should have been ashamed and embarrassed and horrified to be crying in this office, in front of these men, but she wasn't even thinking of it.

Leo took his old friend by the elbow with incredible gentleness. "It's okay," he said softly. "It's okay." He slid an arm across the president's shoulders and glanced back once, briefly, at the frozen staff. "Come on," he guided gently. "You need to sit down, and breathe for a moment, and it's gonna be okay..."

The president allowed himself to be led away. And the four of them were left, just staring after, unable to move.

After a long, endless moment, Toby moved quietly over to CJ's side, and gave her arm a brief, wordless squeeze. Josh moved closer and did the same, and then Sam thirded the gesture. And they just stood, together and apart, watching the doorway through which the leader of the free world had just been led, near-paralysed in pain.

Knowing there was nothing they could do to fix it.

Not a damn thing.

Stanley sat alone in his office, reading through case notes. His normal focus was lacking, and it didn't take a genius to figure out why.

It was a necessary part of a psychiatrist's routine to be able to jettison case details as easily as you assimilated them; blank your mind to the depths of human suffering you plumbed every day, and be alone with your own thoughts. Those who spent their professional lives helping others with their hidden pains had to do it without dwelling on those pains, for the good of the patients as well as for themselves.

With some cases, it was easier than others.

He could swear blind that the president was just another patient to him, but that didn't make it true. It wasn't a case of being awed by the position, or dazzled by social rankings, it was simply that the president's job was so intertwined with every aspect of his being that you couldn't set it aside so easily. Excise that from the discussion, and you were left with no meaningful discussion at all.

The president lived his life of a different scale to other men. He didn't have the luxury of personal time, of allowing himself moments to rest and regroup. He didn't get to put his own well-being first; before the man came the nation resting on his shoulders. And when his secrets were exposed, he didn't have the option of retreat or escape. Stanley had treated patients before who had delicate responsibilities and sensitive jobs. He'd sat with men who would be unceremoniously kicked out and pilloried in the press if deemed to be mentally unfit for their duties.

But how could you even begin to compare that to a man who lived with the knowledge that every tiny aspect of his life was international news? For the President of the United States, there were no safety zones and no respected boundaries. He belonged more thoroughly to his people than they could ever belong to him.

Sympathy and empathy were tools of his trade; empathetic pain was a new one to him. There was no escape from the endless speculation on the president's childhood, and Stanley found himself wincing by association, knowing how desperately private the president needed to be about these things, how fiercely he hoarded his secrets to himself and kept them...

He'd been expecting every phonecall to be the one for days. This time, it was.

"Stanley Keyworth."

"Stanley." He recognised the voice of Leo McGarry, and the depth of the tightly wound tension in it.

"Leo. Do you-?"

"Whatever you've got, cancel it. We need you here. Now."

Stanley never even contemplated arguing the directive. He sat up straight in his chair, feeling an icy chill scrape down his spine. "I'm on my way."

"So anyway, Dr. Acton's all 'Do you think we're in ER? Do I look like George Clooney?' And of course, Mike has to just go ahead and say-"

Karen cut off, abruptly, as the glass doors before them burst open - propelled, not by a speeding gurney, but by a man with a hand-held voice recorder.

"Eleanor!" he snapped, faster than Ellie had a chance to process his appearance. "Edgar Drumm, Charleston Citadel. Eleanor, how has your father's dysfunctional background affected your relationship with him?"

The words didn't even seem to enter her brain, reflecting off the wall of incredulity with a resounding 'huh'? But the reporter kept going, ignoring the Secret Service agents advancing on him.

"Do you feel that your father's abusive history contributed to the divisions in your own family?" Agent Chowdry had him by the collar and up against a wall, yet somehow he kept talking. "Was it the family atmosphere that encouraged your older sister to leave home at such a young age?"

Disbelief had faded into outrage. "What? You can't-"

"Do you feel that your father emotionally neglected you? Was that the reason behind your lack of contact with him after you moved away for college?"

The words were barbed, leading, insidious, but with that painful edge of an almost truth that kept her off-balance as the barrage of questions flew at her, even as Drumm was dragged away by her agents. Of course her family hadn't been any of those things he was suggesting - but hadn't she played that game, hadn't she slumped around in a teenage drama wailing about how her father never paid attention to her? Only now that the darkest edges of such a suggestion were being paraded before her did she really realise how shallow the old 'scars' were... and yet they were old, and she'd dwelled on them and chewed over them for so long that stripping the truth out of the melodrama felt next to impossible.

Her jaw was flapping like a fish as she scrambled to pick out the right words, the emphatic denials that should have been blazing from her lips before he even started speaking. But of course, she was Ellie. The one who never spoke up for herself. "I- It-"

Karen took her arm. "Don't even answer him, Ellie. Don't listen to him."

She turned troubled eyes on her friend. "I-"

"I know. I know. Don't even think about it. He's not worth it. Your agents are kicking him out, don't think about him anymore. Just come and sit down in the lounge, take a moment."

Ellie let herself be led. After all, that was her nature. The meek, quiet, useless one who couldn't stand up for herself, who couldn't say what she wanted, who couldn't seem to do anything without needing someone else to push her into it. Her father didn't neglect her - she just shrank so completely into her own lack of self-esteem it was a wonder anyone could see her at all.

Sitting down in the lounge, she tried not to hyperventilate while Karen frowned worriedly and twirled a ringlet of hair around her finger as she regarded her.

"I think you should go see your therapist, El," she said finally, not unkindly.

Ellie blew out her breath in a miserable sigh. "Yeah." Here she was... self-destructing again.

Just like she always did.

"Yeah," she repeated softly.

Jed entered his private study in a foul mood. He'd acceded to this only to get Leo off his back - he didn't need a therapy session, dammit. He didn't need to see a psychiatrist at all, let alone have an encounter rush-crammed into his schedule as if he might implode if it was put off a second too long.

Yes, he'd been ranting and raving - what, that was supposed to be wrong? Of course he was angry! He was downright pissed, and so he should be. Nobody should have to listen to obscene accusations like that about members of their own family.

He'd thought Leo, at least, would have been able to see past this modern-day vogue for tearing into a man's family history to try and deconstruct his psyche. These days, it seemed, it wasn't enough to just admit that maybe your relationship hadn't been all that it could have. You had to keep digging for more, assassinate every last little aspect of your parents' personalities until you could warp them into monsters to blame for every poorly-judged action you'd ever made.

Sexual abuse! The very thought was enough to make his head swim with a blend of white-hot anger and nausea. That they could accuse his own father of... what, an everyday tale of harsh words and the occasional beating wasn't good enough for them?

No, of course not, because it wasn't sensational enough for them, was it? You had to have more. Why should John Bartlet be just a poor excuse for a father figure, when you could make him the devil himself? Why should the president's childhood only have been a little rocky, when you could turn it into the worst kind of hell imaginable?

Stanley jumped to attention even faster than usual, perhaps spurred on by the embers of frustration smouldering in his client's eyes. "Mr. President."

"Stanley," he said curtly, dropping into his seat with a scowl. He didn't want to be here, and he didn't see any reason to attempt to make himself act pleasant when he was feeling anything but.

"I, uh- Leo explained to me about the press conference," the therapist began somewhat tentatively.

"The press are vultures," he growled. "I got mad. I'm still mad. It's not an unreasonable reaction."

Stanley traced patterns along the arm of the chair with his fingertips, looking at his own movements instead of the president. "No sir, it's not," he agreed softly.

The silence was probably an invitation for him to 'open up'. Well, screw that. He let it hang unfilled until Stanley spoke again.

"If I could just ask, Mr. President, was it the content of-?"

"Oh, what do you think?" he snapped impatiently. "You think I'm losing it because some half-assed, two-bit excuse for a trash-talking gossip columnist outright accused my father of being some kind of child molester? Of course I am. It's a terrible, terrible thing to tar a man's reputation with. And you know what? It doesn't matter that she flat out made it up, it doesn't matter that she invented the whole 'rumour' out of nothing but blue sky, all anybody who follows the news is gonna remember is that the question was asked, and-"

"Mr. President." Stanley's soft words inserted themselves into his tirade with a surprising level of force. He waited until Jed trailed off and looked up at him. "Mr. President."

"What?" he mumbled resentfully.

"I have to ask you..." He hesitated for a moment. "I... have to ask... is there any... truth, at all, to the accusation?"

And that soft, mild, seriously delivered question stopped him in his tracks with all the finality of running into a brick wall. "What- what?" He literally couldn't process it, just could not comprehend that the question was being asked, by this man who took such things seriously, in a tone that rendered it something real, something that needed to be answered.

"Mr. President... I know you're angry, I don't need you to be angry. I need you to tell me, is it true? Is any of it true?"

"I- I- no!" He shook his head, beginning to find his confused indignation, pulling away. Stanley refused to let that distance open by leaning across and softly gripping his arm.

"Okay," he said simply. "Okay."

"That's-" Jed stared at him in honest disbelief. "My father would never-"

"Mr. President," Stanley said slowly and solemnly, keeping his gaze locked on Jed's. "You talk about this as if it's something a hundred million miles from anything your father would be capable of, and... maybe that's true. I don't know. I don't know, because I don't know anything about your father apart from what you've told me, and what you've told me is inherently unreliable."

Jed sat up, beginning to muster a scathing response, and Stanley cut him off with a gesture.

"You say your father never sexually abused you, and fine, I believe that. I do. You obviously feel that it's something he would never and could never have been capable of, and..." he spread his hands- "maybe you're right, I couldn't begin to have any basis to judge that. And yes, you're outraged that your father's being accused of something he didn't do, and that's only reasonable, too." He met Jed's eyes. "But I don't like this kneejerk reaction, I don't like how fast you are to be appalled that anyone could level this particular accusation."

"You don't think I should be appalled?" Jed asked, eyes narrowed dangerously.

"Of course you should. It's an appalling accusation, it's an appalling possibility - all forms of abuse are horrifying to contemplate, and of course they should be." He tilted his head to the side slightly. "What I don't like is this attitude that one form of abuse is somehow quantifiably worse than another, that there are somehow different levels it can take."

The president gave him a sceptically searching look. "You don't think there are different levels of abuse?"

"I think that trying to classify levels of abuse is where we run into trouble," Stanley corrected softly. "Because the moment we start talking about 'worse', we introduce the concept of 'better'... and that's the first step in drawing lines between what is and what isn't acceptable treatment. And those lines... are not drawn where they should be."

Sam wandered into Toby's office, and stood inside the doorway. Toby continued typing. After it became apparent that he wasn't planning to come to a break point anytime soon, Sam said "I've been thinking..."

"Don't," he said shortly, without looking up.

Sam gave a flicker of a smile, and ignored this interjection. Waiting for a receptive mood from Toby was not the world's most fruitful pursuit.

"I've been thinking about my dad," he continued after a moment. "About whether this puts things in perspective... or if it should..."

Toby didn't respond, but Sam was mostly musing aloud anyway, and he absently pushed the door to swing closed and leaned back against the wall to study the ceiling tiles.

"I've been thinking... talking to Gareth Vance, and thinking about the president's dad... And it seems like there are so many bad parents out there, and there are so many worse things he could have done... So am I taking it too seriously?"

He looked at Toby, but Toby wasn't looking at him.

"Should I be more forgiving? I mean, should I be saying 'well, dad, you never used to beat me up or torture me so I guess you weren't that bad'? 'It's okay, because it could have been worse'? Is that the big life lesson here?" He sighed heavily.

"I mean... I don't know what I mean. He... he's not the worst dad in the world, but it wasn't- it's not like it was a little thing. And... I'm supposed to forgive him because there are worse things he could be? Isn't that, like, the all-time crappiest reason to forgive anybody anything?"

Still no response, although Toby was still now, and staring at his laptop with enough intensity to be seeing through the screen, not reading it. "Toby?" he queried tentatively.

Toby tilted his head up to meet Sam's eyes.

"My father killed people, Sam," he said bluntly. "He was part of an organisation... they killed people. What do you want from me?"

And to that, Sam found he didn't have anything to say.

He wasn't sure if it had ever been this hard to tell if he was getting somewhere.

The crack in the president's emotional veneer had seemed like a starting place, a chance to finally break through the shell of defensive barriers and get at the buried pains beneath. But leave it to Jed Bartlet, of course, to flout the conventional path of a therapy session.

Stanley wasn't sure if it was incredible strength of character or just plain old stubbornness that kept the president from breaking down under the incredible pressures being heaped on him. Weak men might bend under outside forces; even the strongest would eventually snap trying to hold them off. Jed Bartlet seemed to be determined to set his shoulder against them and be pushed slowly but inexorably backwards. He might not be winning the battle, but he was damned if he was going to give an inch unnecessarily.

It was a tenacity it was hard not to admire, but Stanley could see the strain it was taking on him. All men had their breaking point, and that was right and natural; a good, clean break would often heal wounds in a way that no amount of pain-free feelgood fixes could accomplish. But Jed Bartlet was steadfastly refusing to hit that breakpoint, and was grinding himself down as a consequence.

Stanley had faced off with his share of stubborn patients before. But the president was more than his equal in battle of will and wits, and far too sharp to be manipulated subtly or overtly. And, worse, he was lacking the one key element that helped psychiatrists to break through the most openly hostile set of defences.

He didn't want to be helped.

"Mr. President-"

"I have things to do, Stanley."

"I think we should talk this over."

"I think we've talked this over quite enough already." There was a curl of good humour in the remark, but it was only a faint shadow of even the subdued version of himself he normally showed in these therapy sessions. The president was on the very edge of his emergency reserves, and was beginning to slowly chip away at those.

"We keep talking, but I don't get any sense of anything being over," Stanley admitted wryly.

"Well, maybe that's because there's nothing that needs to be said."

"Mr. President-"

He was already on his feet, and raising a warning hand. "I have a country to run," he reminded him. "And much as I appreciate your desire to neatly sum me up and fix me within the shortest period possible, I really don't think we're going to accomplish anything here in another forty-five minutes that we're not going to in five."

"No," he admitted quietly.

He stood up, and looked across at the president.

"I'm coming back tomorrow," he decreed; softly, but with force.

The president could have argued, but instead he looked down at the carpet. "Yeah," he said, and sighed.

It was as close to an admission that things were not at all okay as Stanley was likely to get.

Congressman Walters regarded him through unimpressed eyes as he walked in. He didn't bother to stand or offer to shake hands. "Josh."

"Stuart." Josh matched his curt tone as he sat down opposite him. He wasn't in the mood for the exchange of meaningless pleasantries anyway. "I wanted to talk to you about-"

"Some stupid-ass idea you have for pumping up whatever scheme's got a bee in your bonnet this particular week," the Congressman cut him off. "Josh, what the hell are you doing? We settled this-"

"I think we need to talk about routing more money into the US Fire Administration's safety schemes," Josh said tightly.

"Of course we do." Walters rolled his eyes impatiently. "We need to route more money into the USFA, and the police force, and social security, and paying the teachers... if we could afford to fund every scheme on the basis of it seemed like a good idea, half the people running this government wouldn't need to exist. There's a reason we have wrangling over the budget, Josh-"

"Actually, we mostly have wrangling over the budget because Congress are a bunch of argumentative sons of-"

"Josh."

Josh sighed heavily, and rubbed his face. "I've been looking at the numbers."

"The money isn't-"

"I can find the money!"

Walters gave him a look. "I'm not challenging your ability to juggle the math, Josh. I'm saying, why this, why now, why's anybody going to go for it when they wouldn't do before?"

"The United States has one of the highest fire death rates in the industrialised world!"

"It has one of the highest gun death rates in the industrialised world too, why don't we talk about that?"

Josh glowered. "We're talking about that too."

"Oh, I'm sure you've got half a dozen controversial policies up your sleeve for this week," Walters said, narrowing his eyes. "I'm sure you're going to be sending the president out there any moment now with a bold new offensive. Why don't we just wait and see?"

Josh gave him a challenging look. "Don't play this game now, Stuart," he warned.

"You're toothless, Josh!" Walters snapped. "Your guy's under siege from the press, and who exactly do you think is gonna come rallying beyond you to jump on board some crack-brained half-assed scheme with no tangible return?"

"No tangible return?" Josh demanded, voice rising dangerously.

"The government can preach fire safety 'til your face turns blue, Josh, but it's not gonna do a damn thing if nobody listens to them. Because guess what, Josh? People are stupid. They know fast food is poisonous, but they still eat it. They know cigarettes can kill you, but they keep on smoking. And you can keep telling them and telling them that fire alarms will save their lives, but that doesn't mean they're going to believe you!"

"No?" he said tightly. "Well, how about we just go over some statistics on that, huh?"

"Josh." Walters sat back in his chair, looking annoyed.

Josh ignored him, picking up a folder, and begin to recite. "Over forty percent of residential fires occur in homes with no fire alarms. More than three fifths of fatalities occur in homes with no fire alarms. The leading cause of residential fire deaths is careless smoking, and studies show-"

Walters rolled his eyes, and flopped back in resignation.

Jed wandered through the corridors, slightly at a loss. The rest of his day had been cancelled for him, despite his protestations - protestations, it had to be admitted, that were not too forceful, just in case anybody actually felt compelled to act on them. He didn't need to take a break from working, but if one had already been created for him, then, well...

The only trouble with not working was that it left entirely too much time for thinking. He didn't want to dwell in these circular tracks of thought, already wearing dangerously smooth with overuse.

He could go to Abbey... but she would look at him that way, that loving and sad way that said she was desperately worried about him, and he wasn't sure he could take that right now. If one more person looked at him as if he was surely on the verge of shattering into a billion pieces, he might actually do it.

He found himself, perhaps following the echoes of the last conversation he'd had that hadn't physically hurt, meandering over to Josh's office area. Donna sat at her desk, typing, and he leaned against the wall and watched her for a moment, feeling vaguely bemused at his own urge to come over here. Donna glanced up, did a double-take, and then smiled warmly at him. "Mr. President!"

She stood, and he immediately felt guilty for interrupting her work. Great - not only was he being useless, he was now actively preventing other people from accomplishing anything. All in all, a great day for his leadership of the nation.

"Hey Donna," he acknowledged softly, and managed a smile in return. "Don't let me interrupt."

She ignored that, probably under the impression that he was actually supposed to be doing something important. "Josh is still in his meeting with Stuart Walters," she offered semi-apologetically. "Do you want me to ask him to-?"

Jed shook his head hurriedly. "No, no, I was just..." He shrugged. What the hell was wrong with him? Wandering the halls aimlessly... it was a wonder nobody had yet decided he'd flipped completely.

Donna didn't seem to find it particularly odd, however. "Yes, sir," she accepted with a quick nod.

"I'll just..." He pointed vaguely away.

"Okay, Mr. President," she said brightly. She returned to her desk, and he slowly started to leave. Not so much reluctant to leave as... lost. Completely and utterly lost. Where was he going, what was he doing? He felt like a wraith, haunting the corridors of his White House before he'd even had a chance to depart the mortal coil. Drifting from place to place, isolated from the world around him...

"Oh, and, Mr. President-"

He whipped around too fast when Donna called him back, startled to be jerked out of the shapeless blur of his thoughts. She smiled at him a little self-consciously.

"Did Charlie and Zoey say anything to you about names yet? Only there's this pool, and a girl has to maximise her budget-"

Jed chuckled, and was amazed to hear himself do it. "Looking for a few insider tips?" he asked teasingly. Donna grinned back, and he had a feeling that she was only starting this ridiculous line of conversation to make him feel better, but oh God, he didn't care.

She began enumerating on her fingers. "Well, Sam's pushing for a little Samantha or a Samuel, and Bonnie and Ginger think they're going to name the baby after you, and I don't think I have to tell you what idiot put money on 'Fifi Trixie-Belle Moon-Unit'..."

Jed leaned back, and just let the wave of cheerful babble wash over him... and, for a while, escaped from the pains of dwelling on his thoughts.

The aides and interns had abandoned Communications as if swarming from a sinking ship. Indeed, had this been the middle of the ocean, CJ knew exactly what deadly warning would be marked on all the navigation maps.

Here be Toby Ziegler.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Toby had been a foul mood for several days. Under the circumstances, that was hardly a surprise, but still, CJ thought there was something more to it than frustration at the press firestorm surrounding the president. Toby had known about all this as long as she had - some aspects of it even longer. Of course, knowing and experiencing were quite different things, but still... something was off.

"Toby." She waited until the doorway until he looked up. He had one finger pressed into his cheek as he regarded her through unreadable stormy eyes. He didn't say anything.

Opting to keep a light touch, she sauntered in and smiled at him. "Heard you've been showing off your usual sweet and sunny disposition." Toby shrugged. "Toby, if you go around ripping into the communications bullpen every time they raise their voices above a whisper-"

"They were placing bets on baby names," he growled.

"They were letting off steam, Toby," she reminded him gently. "Charlie and Zoey's baby is the only good news we've had this week, of course people are talking it up. What do you want them to do, dissect the president's psyche like everybody else is doing?" Including us.

"I want people to stop talking about babies," he grated with a scowl.

CJ gave a small chuckle of affectionate amusement. "Oh, Toby, some people like babies."

"I like babies," he said, quietly enough that she had to strain to hear him. "I liked mine, even before they were born. Even though they never were."

CJ stared at him, trapped in a long, silent slice of horror. "Toby..."

"Andy has... a thing," he mumbled. "Or we have a thing. We tried, but it didn't work, and... it didn't work."

Her eyelids prickled with tears of distress for the pain she hadn't even know was buried there. "Toby, why didn't you...? When was this, back when you...?"

"The... campaign. Just before the campaign, we... had some troubles." Just before he and Andy got divorced, he didn't say, but didn't have to.

CJ felt vaguely dizzied by the force of sudden, horrible understanding. She'd known, through a mixture of subtext and instinct, that the subject of children was one not to be brought up or teased over with the couple, but she'd never known any details, wouldn't have felt right about pressing for them. She supposed she'd assumed, if she'd assumed anything, that they'd argued over the right time to have children, conflicts over careers and priorities. She hadn't known that there was... this.

Before Bartlet For America had come along to yank her back to the side of one lifelong friend and into the company of a whole set of new ones, CJ hadn't seen much of Toby and Andy. She'd been off in California while Andy was running for Congress and Toby cycling through his long list of failed campaigns; there had been random intervals between phonecalls and letters, but Toby had always been a master of words and carefully judged silences. Face to face, it was a struggle to pry out of him anything he didn't want pried; without the valuable guide of that incredibly expressive body language, it was impossible.

And this pain, he hadn't wanted to share. She hurt too much for him to let it hurt her. He'd held onto this for - how long? - probably sharing only with Andy, too deep in her own pain to help him out of his.

"Toby... you could have talked to me," she said softly.

He looked up at her, eyes solemn. "What would it have fixed?" he said quietly.

And because she couldn't answer that, she only squeezed his arm in silent commiseration.

Carol bustled through the corridors, her quick step as much from agitation as urgency. Fielding the fallout from painful questions was hardly anything new, but Jackie Grant's obnoxious enquiry in the midday briefing had set everybody reeling - even, she suspected, many of the rest of the press corps.

There was a line between public and personal even for the president - a line drawn entirely too far back for any human being to live comfortably behind, but still, it was there. You didn't ask a question like that in the White House - especially when your 'source' was a rumour that could be traced back to that famously reliable and stringently fact-checked information source 'the internet'. Political journalists might take few prisoners, but they tended to have a stronger sense of social conscience than your garden variety gutter press, and they had a certain amount of respect for lines of jurisdiction.

The logic behind exact positioning of said lines was a mystery to everyone but the journalists themselves - like it might be okay to report dark insinuations about a public figure's sexual shenanigans, but you didn't ask them directly to their face if they'd ever cheated on their spouse - but still, there were days when you were glad they drew them at all. Like when you came up against somebody who showed no hesitation in storming right over them.

Jackie Grant had been silently and coldly given her marching orders, with no protest from her peers, but the damage was done. A question, once launched, had a life of its own, and sometimes the answer was secondary to the fact that it had been asked at all. The fact that the president hadn't been sexually abused by his father - at least by everything they'd been told so far, and she was damned if she was going to go tagging hypotheticals onto a situation already too painful to think about - didn't cancel out that deadly phrase "rumours of sexual abuse".

Perhaps those 'rumours' had been nothing more than one person posing a question in an internet chat room, but now life had been breathed into them, and a rumour once born could never be killed. No proof - even if it hadn't been inherently unprovable - would ever completely quiet the insidious voice of conspiracy theory. People liked to speculate, to gather furtively at the water cooler and show off cynical and sordid tales like precious gems.

Everywhere across the country, people would be looking at President Bartlet and mumbling to each other "Well, I always thought he had kind of a haunted look sometimes, and you know what they say about victims wanting to lash back and prove they can accomplish things... you've got to worry, really, about someone like that being in charge of the big red button, haven't you? I mean, you never know what might make him snap..."

And Jed Bartlet was wise enough in the ways of gossip journalism to know it, too.

It was crazy to think anyone in the press office could have stopped the question before it happened, but the shroud of guilt had settled over them nonetheless. CJ might be tearing herself apart over letting the president down, but CJ's people were tearing themselves apart over letting CJ down.

The president didn't need this. This kind of dredging up of past injury was quite hellish enough for him without dealing with rumours and false allegations on top. Carol winced at the memory of the whispers that had travelled through the halls when CJ met with the rest of the staff after the briefing. The president had been horribly upset by the allegations, this attack on what little foundation he still had to retain any semblance of love and respect for his father. He'd been hurt, and badly enough that the people who'd seen him were shaken.

They were his press office. They were supposed to prevent him feeling body blows like this. They'd failed him...

Preoccupied with her own thoughts, she almost bumped into somebody, coming to a halt as she realised it was Charlie. "Hey, Charlie. What are you doing down here?

The young aide flashed her a tight, tense smile. "The president's wandering. I don't know if he needs me, but I want to give him some space."

Carol nodded sympathetically. It was a fine line walked by aides and assistants in times of crisis; when those above you were powerless, you were even more so, and sometimes it was hard to see past your own helplessness to tell if your support was welcome or a hindrance. "Is he-?" she began cautiously.

Charlie sighed, hard. He rubbed his face. "He... talked to a guy." There was a name and a face mentally associated with 'a guy' that certain higher-ups in this administration talked to during the dark times, but it was carefully filed away in the mental drawer marked 'Nope, wouldn't know anything about that'. "He's... calmed down a bit, I don't know if..." He could only shrug.

"Yeah." What could she say? President Bartlet was a peripheral presence to her, as much a concept of a man as a personality; she saw him often, but mostly through his interactions with CJ and the others, and that was a public persona. A warmer, closer, less formal persona than the one known to the American public, to be sure, but still a distance from the private man. She thought she knew President Josiah Bartlet pretty well, but Jed Bartlet was a rarer beast, glimpsed only in unguarded moments from the corner of her eye. A knowledge like this was a body blow, opening up frightening worlds of pain and history never dreamt of.

Both were silent for a moment, and she nervously filled the gap before it grew too large. "I, uh, I spoke to CJ... she said she can fit you in early tomorrow." It seemed like a million years ago that she'd been casually filling her boss in on requests for her time before the briefing.

"It isn't urgent," Charlie told her quickly. Trusting her to tell him whether it should wait, because he knew that CJ wouldn't. Carol smiled at him.

"Go see her after the early headlines have come in," she advised. "Trust me, that time in the morning, she'll be glad for anything to take her mind off... well, you know."

"Yeah," said Charlie heavily. His eyes were sad and tired as he offered her a lopsided smile. "I only wish there was some way we could do the same for him."

Walters listened to Josh rant on for quite some time, but eventually his patience snapped. "Josh, you're not telling me anything I don't know," he barked, slapping his palm against the tabletop for emphasis. "Yes, smoke alarms save lives. Yes, people should pay more attention to fire safety. But guess what? We already knew that when we hashed this out before. Just because you've got a bug up your ass about doing something about it now does not change anything!"

Josh glared at him sullenly - anger fuelled, in no small part, by the fact that he recognised the truth in the statement. This wasn't an out-of-favour pet project he could dig up and breathe new life into. There was no disagreement on issues here, only the forces of budget and pragmatism at work. And against those, even the slickest of political operators railed in vain.

Seeing hostility fade into depression, Walters softened his tone. "Josh. It's a worthy project, nobody's arguing with that. But you don't have anything new to swing here, and you don't have anyone to back you if you did. You're wasting my time, you're wasting your time, and you knew that before you came in here."

Josh looked down - caught in the futility of his own battle, but unwilling to give it up anyway.

"Josh," the Congressman said gently. He knew what this was about, had heard about poor Congresswoman Henderson's little girl just like everybody else. Joshua Lyman had an oversized heart and he wanted to save the world - but some things, there just were no easy fixes to. You couldn't stop tragedy in its tracks, that wasn't how the world worked. "You think nobody ever died in a house with a fire alarm?" he asked rhetorically.

Josh met his eyes. "I think nobody's life was ever saved by not having one," he said softly.

He turned and left the room, looking tired, and old beyond his years.

She was down one husband, and it was beginning to bother her just a little. The fact that he wasn't working was good; the fact that he was out there, wandering the halls, not so much so.

Abbey had heard from Leo the moment she got back about Jed's little outburst. She bitterly cursed the fact that she'd been out of the White House at just the wrong time. Anything media intensive had been rescheduled and she'd insisted on no trips that would keep her away overnight, but with her husband out of circulation the onus fell on her to keep up the ritual of public engagements. It was necessary to keep up the pretence that everything was normal and going swimmingly even when it was so obviously not.

She hadn't missed the guarded looks and hushed conversations that accompanied her presence, obvious speculations on her husband's state of mind and being - but it was hard to fault the whisperers when the exact same concerns occupied her own mind. She hated being away from him when he was so vulnerable. Not least because he guarded that vulnerability fiercely, letting nobody close enough to tend to his hurts. This wound was so old and deep that even she wasn't allowed to reach the heart of it, but at least she had the comfort of knowing her presence brought him solace.

By the sounds of things, he could have used some solace earlier in the day.

Perhaps, all things considered, though, it had been just as well she hadn't been in the building when that outrageous question was asked. There was a limit to how much good she could do her husband after being hauled away for beating a reporter to death with her own notepad.

Not all of the anger which still burned brightly through the core of her being rested fully on the shoulders of Jackie Grant. She knew her husband well enough to know exactly what had pushed him over the edge about this latest fatuous allegation, and that knowledge was a brutal, ugly truth.

After all this, after everything... Jed was still hurt more by a lie than the truth. It was not pain or fury that had pushed him into his emotional outburst, but love - horribly, terribly misplaced love. That his father's reputation be shattered was a worse crime to him than anything his father had ever done to him.

And screw Christian duty and turning the other cheek - for that, and that alone, John Bartlet would never earn her forgiveness. The bruises had faded, the flinches and hesitance faded into memory, but the legacy of a child's unquestioning love for his father lingered on. One of Jed's greatest strengths, his ability to give his love without reservation, had been used to cruelly bind his pain to him for the rest of his life. That love might not be blind, but it had no perspective, and Jed would never be able to demote his father's memory to the insignificance it deserved.

Abbey wanted rather desperately to punch something, but more than that, she wanted to grab her husband tight and refuse to let him go. She might not be able to protect him from the pains of a harsh past and an insensitive world, but she could at least wrap him in the cocoon of warmth that came from being one half of a two instead of one alone.

Of course, she had to find him first. She decided to seek out Donna; the sensitive young woman had been put on alert to monitor her husband's emotional condition, and besides, she tended to be more observant than most. Perhaps she would know where he'd disappeared to.

As she approached Donna's bullpen, however, she heard a male voice that was definitely not Josh's. Even before she was close enough to identify the words, the faint shapes of sound beginning to reach her felt intimately familiar. That voice had spent too many years sending strange thrills along her neural passages for her to mistake it now.

"...Theodosia. Means divinely given."

"Ianessa... that means gentle ruler." That was Donna's voice, startlingly bright and cheerful for both the lateness of the hour and the events of the past few days.

"Hmm, yes, a suitably regal name for a little princess... I like that one. Now, for a boy, I still say-"

Abbey was surprised to find herself actually smiling. She stepped forward to make her presence known, cutting her husband off with a pointed look. "I know exactly what you're going to say, and don't even think about it."

To a flood of relief that was so strong she literally felt it flow through her, Jed smiled. "I think Lysander Caradoc Bartlet is a perfectly fine name," he said, with a flicker of his usual dry humour.

She approached him across the empty bullpen, while Donna beamed at them both. He looked up at her as she reached out and took his hands. "I should warn you now, the 'no child of mine' rule can be extended to cover grandchildren," she chided lightly.

"Ah, you shoot down all my good ideas." He slowly steered their linked hands outwards so that she was pulled inexorably closer to him. "That's why all our children have such boring names," he claimed when they were almost nose to nose.

"That's why all our children are eternally grateful for the childhood hell they didn't go through," she corrected.

He grinned up at her, and then abruptly tugged on her hands so she near-tumbled into his lap. Pleased with this handiwork, he gave her a kiss on the nose. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Donna blushing and quickly glancing away to give them privacy.

Abbey adjusted herself into a more dignified position beside him and rested her head against his shoulder. "Were you looking for me?" he asked softly. She grinned at him.

"Actually I was looking for Donna, but you'll do as second best."

Donna, obviously wanting to give them some space, straightened up and pointed vaguely away. "I should probably-"

"Oh, don't let me interrupt," Abbey said quickly. It was beyond precious to see Jed engaged in any conversation, no matter how silly, that made him smile right now. And if that meant ransoming the happiness of future Bartlet generations... well, she'd just have to get to Zoey before her father could start making 'helpful' naming suggestions. "Please... go ahead and tell me what the naming options are, so I can figure out how many hours of therapy to order as a Christening present."

Jed briefly squeezed her closer, and for just a few moments, they could pretend that everything was perfectly fine. And for now, that was as much as they could ask.

CJ intercepted Sam on his way back from a late-night foray to the White House mess. "Got a minute, Sam?"

"Sure." He allowed himself to be tugged into a nearby empty office.

CJ looked at him seriously. "Sam, I want you to have a word with everybody in the bullpen. Get them to can all the baby chatter, okay?"

He frowned. "Why? I mean, I didn't think it was a big secret or anything, and-"

"It's not. But you guys need to stop chewing the fat in the bullpen the whole time. You're upsetting Toby."

Sam snorted in faint bemusement. "We're upsetting Toby?"

CJ locked eyes with him, dead serious. "He and Andy had a couple of miscarriages before they broke up."

Sam literally took a step backwards as if he'd been struck. "Oh..." He looked up at her, mouth open. "Oh my God. CJ, I didn't- why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know. I mean, I knew he and Andy had some kind of a thing going on about kids, but I always thought they were arguing about having them, and you know, and-" She sat down heavily on the edge of a desk. "Hell."

He was still trying to process the information. "He's... I mean, he never said anything about- I didn't- Why didn't he tell anybody?"

"He's Toby, Sam, what do you want from him?" CJ's tone was more biting than she wanted it to be, reinforced with the flavour of her own guilt. How could there be this huge dark blot in Toby's private life, and she'd never known about it? What else didn't she know?

"But I mean- Jesus, this was- was this in the middle of the campaign? This was all going on while we were running Bartlet for America, and he never said anything?"

"Toby doesn't talk about things, Sam. Especially not things that are bothering him."

He was silent for a moment, then he looked up at her, determined. "I'll speak to Bonnie and Ginger, ask them to tone it down around him," he promised softly.

"He'll hate it if he finds out we've done that," she noted.

Sam nodded. "Yeah. And... I don't care."

"Good," CJ agreed. They might not be able to do much to protect Toby from his own painful memories, but what they could, they would. And if he didn't like it... well, they'd go ahead and do it anyway.

"Eleanor." Doctor Kensington smiled at her over the familiar wire-framed glasses, and Ellie wondered if this had all been a big mistake. She always felt ill before visiting her therapist, horrible roiling waves in her stomach and sweaty palms at the thought of being asked to crack open her private emotions in front of the outside world. She'd given up attending fifteen months ago, purporting to be a well-adjusted, self-secure and balanced excuse for a human being.

Total crap, of course, but at least she wasn't bringing herself to the point of throwing up with nerves over the sessions that were supposed to make her feel better.

And yet, here she was again. Same old office, same old slightly musty smell as if the windows were never opened, same old bushy, blunt-leafed plant that she still wasn't sure was either real or plastic. Back on the couch again.

Not that it was actually a couch. A couch would have been good, because then she could have looked at the ceiling and not had to make eye contact. Dr. Kensington was big on eye-contact. Just like her dad.

Look at me, Eleanor. I can't see your face and I can't hear what you're saying when you're staring at the floor like that. Look up at me.

"Well, Eleanor, it's been a while."

"Yeah." She tucked her hands under her legs and mindlessly bumped a heel against the bottom of the chair. What was she doing here?

"Have you come to talk about your father?"

Ellie hesitated, knowing that it wasn't truly the current media storm that was the crux of the matter, but as always tongue-tied, paralysed by the weight of too much attention on her and unable to steer the conversation the way she wanted. "I guess."

"You've spoken to me before about your father being distant to you, not receptive to your problems or your needs. Would you like to talk about that?"

Ellie nearly choked on her own words reflected back at her. That old self-pitying refrain was so familiar it was hard not to follow its well-worn grooves, only now they were tangled with guilt and recrimination. Her father wasn't some towering, emotionless fortress looming over her, he was mixed up and hurting like she was, and all her life she'd been pushing him away. Pushing hard, and then crying herself to sleep every time when he didn't immediately come rushing back.

Not because he didn't care. She hugged that newly revealed truth close to her, clutching onto its sharp edges in a form of self-imposed punishment. Not because he didn't care. Because he really thought she wanted him to leave her alone, and he cared so much that he'd rather hurt himself by doing so than hurt her.

God, this was all such a bloody, twisted, horrible mess.

Dr. Kensington was waiting patiently for her to speak; blank, impassive, non-judgemental. She hated that, that... emptiness. Like sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper, being asked to write about yourself, and feeling that sickening, haunting fear that you wouldn't be able to find any self to write about...

Dr. Kensington was still waiting. "I... talked to my dad," she said. Approaching the subject from a distant, tangential run-up, which seemed like the only way she knew how. "At Zoey's wedding. We talked a bit."

The therapist nodded wisely. "And did you tell him what you told me? About how you feel like he isn't there for you when you need him?"

No. This wasn't right. This wasn't what she meant anymore, it wasn't what she wanted to say-

"I found out about- the..." Go on, say it, Eleanor Emily, I dare you to say it- "-About this." Dr. Kensington knew what she was referring to - how could she not? You'd have to be blind to have missed the explosive news cycle.

"From your father?"

Ellie laughed at that, a choked, bitter, painful sound only fractions away from sobbing. Her father, talk to anyone about this? Talk to her? "From mom. She told me how he- he didn't ever have a proper relationship with his dad, and he doesn't always understand it when we, when I-" The knowledge was there, inside her brain, but she couldn't force it out into words, didn't have that effortless flow of eloquent language that had fallen on all the rest of her family.

"It's natural to feel guilty, Eleanor," Dr. Kensington said, almost painfully calmly. "We forget sometimes that the pains that others cause us come from fears and hurts of their own. But that doesn't make your pain any less real, or less valid. Your father neglected you because his father neglected him-"

"But he's not-"

"Ellie. Eleanor," the therapist said comfortingly. "I need you to let go of thinking about your father for a moment. Yes, he went through an appalling childhood, but you exist too. You have to stop defining your world in terms of how it affects other people."

"But-"

-But it's not like that, I know always said he neglected me, I always said he didn't love me, but I didn't really believe that - not deep down, not right the way under the skin for real. I know he's never in his life wanted to hurt me, I know he'd drop everything in a heartbeat to help me, I've always known that. I know he loves me, I didn't mean it when I said I didn't think he loved me, I just meant-

How could she explain that? How could she explain about that uncrossable gap, about desperately wanting to be like Liz and Zoey, to be understandable, to be somebody he could connect with? About knowing all that love was there for her and she just didn't know how to reach it, didn't know how to reach out and grab it and make it hers the way her sisters could without even thinking about.

She'd never been able to figure out how to be a Bartlet, how to have that special spark that somehow drew you in to the centre of things and let you feed off each other's energy. She'd always been too withdrawn, too different, unable to take part in that electrical give-and-take that the rest of the family took for granted.

It had never been in her nature to be the kind of personality that her father needed to have around him, the kind of fierce, resilient person who could resist being sucked under and drowned in that wave of towering charisma. But he still loved her desperately and she loved him right back, and she hadn't understood until far too late that in his world that wasn't something that was unquestionable.

All of that ran through her mind in a heartbeat. None of it came out.

Dr. Kensington smiled - a smile that was knowing, and yet had no understanding behind it. She didn't know what was going on in Ellie's head, she didn't understand the truth or how she felt, and Ellie didn't have the words to put it across.

"Eleanor," the therapist said gently. "You don't have to defend your father to me. I believe that you love him. I believe that he's a good man. But I also believe that good men can be bad fathers sometimes, and I think you need to address that. You need to be able to acknowledge that he did hurt you, and he did treat you wrongly, and that you're not to blame for that."

Ellie was hit, suddenly, by a mental image so strong it was almost a vision - one that made her feel about half an inch from throwing up. She suddenly saw her father sitting in a room just like this, having a conversation just like this... Only his pain was real.

His pain was real... and hers had only ever been make-believe. A spoiled little girl throwing a self-pity party, demanding that the world bow down and give her what, she knew deep down, there had never been any question she already had.

She stumbled to her feet, almost knocking the chair over. Dr. Kensington raised her hands placatingly. "Eleanor-"

"It's not like that," Ellie spat out, on the edge of tears of frustration. "It's not what you're making it into. He's not what you're trying to make me say he is. He never neglected me, he never did that!"

"Eleanor, I want you to-"

"You don't know him! You don't know anything about him! He's my dad. He's not a monster, he's not anything, he's just my dad."

She turned and ran from the room before she could collapse in on herself and break down completely.

The phone rang, and Donna reluctantly excused herself. There was something almost awe-inspiring in being allowed a glimpse into this more private side of the first couple. The president was tired and in need of cheering up, his wife was trying to provide the air of comfort and normalcy he so desperately needed, and by some strange confluence of events she'd ended up a witness to their private little circle of warmth. She felt simultaneously extremely honoured and very much like a third wheel.

The sound of the phone from the office signalled an end to whatever unlikely spell had been cast; she knew that she would feel too awkward to barge back into their conversation even if they invited her. Both seemed quite happy to sit and chat with her as if there was nothing abnormal in that... but then, both of them were incredibly friendly people. Her heart ached for the president, forced by the nature of his hurts to avoid the very things that usually brought him solace. Jed Bartlet's friends were his heart and soul, but that was what made it so difficult for him to stand to see them look at him with sympathy and sorrow.

"Excuse me, ma'am, Mr. President." Donna quickly ducked back into the office to answer the call. This late, it could well be something important. "Josh Lyman's office."

"Donnatella." Her sister's clipped tones dissolved the comfortably, cosy feeling of close conversation as quickly as a slap to the face. "Still at work, I see." She didn't even need to articulate the world of disapproval of her younger sister's job that was loaded into that comment.

"Yes, and I can't really-"

"Really, Donnatella, I have to insist you talk to Joletta. I do believe she's hell-bent on signing those divorce papers, without a thought for what it will do to her reputation."

There was a whole universe of wrongness driving that particular mindset, but now was not the time to beat her head against the brick wall that constituted her older sister's set of Rules For Living a Socially Acceptable Life. "Alexia, I can't really talk right-"

"And what does she think she's going to do next, hmm?" her sister continued, barrelling right on over her as she'd always been accustomed to doing. "She's leaving Mike, but does she have somewhere to go to? Who does she think is going to take on a penniless divorcee with two young children? She's signing her whole life away without even thinking about-"

"Alexia!" Donna finally grated. "I've got the President of the United States and the First Lady sitting outside the office, I can't really sit around debating our little sister's right to run her own life right now!"

There was a beat of heavy, textured silence.

"Well, really, Donnatella, your excuses get less believable every day."

"I'm hanging up the phone now," Donna informed her shortly.

"Donna, don't even think about-"

"I am hanging up the phone now," she repeated. She glanced up at a movement, and saw the president hovering in the doorway to give her a quick nod of acknowledgement - how like Jed Bartlet, to think that it was necessary for him to politely take his leave before walking away. She cradled the phone momentarily under her chin, ignoring her sister's continued haranguing. "It's okay, Mr. President, it's just my sister," she explained dryly.

"Your sister that I met?" he asked politely.

"Uh, no, sir, my older sister."

"Oh, well, tell her I said hello."

"The president says hello," Donna said, into the suddenly silent phone. She guessed those familiar rumbling tones carried rather well even over phone lines to Wisconsin.

"Goodnight, Donna," the president said lightly. The First Lady arrived to take him by the arm, flashing Donna a quick smile in passing.

"Hey, babe, quit hassling the poor girl, she's obviously hard at work."

"It's just my sister," she felt obliged to re-explain.

"Well, then, tell her hello from us and we'll leave you to it. Goodnight, Donna."

"Goodnight, sir, ma'am." Donna shifted the phone back against her ear as they left. "The First Lady says hi also," she added. With perhaps just a touch more malevolent glee than was strictly necessary, but hey - it had been a long day.

Alexia spluttered; Donna didn't stop long enough to let her get her act together.

"Frankly, Alexia, I have more important things to do than listen to you all the time, and I'm getting pretty tired of you phoning me up and hassling me at work. Guess what; the world isn't going to end if Joletta gets divorced. Not my world, not your world, and certainly not her world. In fact, considering she's spent the past eleven years married to Mike Vincent, I'd say her quality of life is on its way to getting a whole lot better. Now, if you'll excuse me, I work for important people who deal with real problems... and my time is really far too precious to waste on your little delusions of running this family. Goodnight."

She put the phone down. Then, after checking very carefully to see that the bullpen contained nobody resembling her country's premiere couple, she spun around in her swivel chair and performed a little victory air punch.

It was amazing what hanging out with the leader of the free world could do for your sense of self-confidence once in a while.

Leo sat in his office and sighed heavily. He could feel that the point where he might get any further work done had gone, yet he was reluctant to follow it.

He didn't want to go home. He wasn't sure exactly what he was supposed to be accomplishing, sat here in his office not doing any work, but... he didn't want to go home. What if Jed needed him? Hell, there was no 'if' about it - Jed did need him.

It was just that he had no goddamn idea how he could possibly help.

By nature a taciturn man himself, he understood and respected Jed's need to keep private pains private. But that privacy had been cracked open, and he ached to see his old friend hurting so openly, and be able to do nothing to stop it. There were no strings to pull or deals to cut, no political manoeuvring that could take the sting out of long ago wounds and humiliations spread out before the world for everyone to see.

It was still difficult to think of, impossible to imagine. Old memories of the darkest times with his own father were more bitter than brutal; there had been disgust and disappointment and endless frustration, but not the kind of constant, relentless terror Jed must have lived with all his childhood. He had never feared his father - feared becoming him, yes, that was the nightmare that had dogged him since his early teens and showed no signs of ever slackening - but never feared the man himself. He had been altogether too pathetic and broken a man to ever be intimidating.

Had he loved his father? Leo supposed so, although the flavour of the feeling that lingered was a kind of washed-out, sorrowful regret. There had been good in his father in between the drunken times, and it still twisted his heart to think that if he'd only had a friend the quality of Josiah Bartlet, he too might have been able to save himself.

As much as Leo could call himself saved, anyway, which was a variable that changed from day to day. The lure of the bottle was ever-present, but it waxed and waned; today, no doubt fortunately, he was too preoccupied with worries over Jed to pay his own familiar weaknesses much heed.

That scene after the press briefing had been painful to see. The staff had been set reeling by what Leo had known his old friend well enough to already suspect; Jed wasn't thinking about his own pain. Travesties that, visited on anyone else, would have had him storming through the corridors roaring in fury simply rolled off his shoulders as he focused on the duties he had kept to long beyond the point they were required of him.

Honour thy father and thy mother. Leo's lips quirked in a smile of bitter recognition. It was John Bartlet who had committed the crimes, but it was his son who punished himself for not deflecting the long-overdue recriminations.

He wanted to wrest that crazy mindset from his old friend, cast it down and let him at last stop swimming against the tide and be at peace, but knew he couldn't. It was too much a part of what made Jed Bartlet the man they loved so fiercely. He would never cease to drive himself, never stop forcing himself to stretch for a perfection nobody should ever have to demand.

The door creaked open, and he looked up to see Margaret. "Leo, it's late," she said softly.

Leo gave a tired smile. "It usually is."

She handed his jacket to him, and somehow it was just less effort to stand and shrug it on than try to resist. "I'll sort everything out here before I go," she assured him, steering him gently but inexorably towards the door.

He made half a sound of protest, but she ignored him as she usually did. No matter how hard he worked himself, Margaret was always at his shoulder, trying to be there before he arrived and stay until after he left. He didn't know if she knew it, but it was the most effective weapon she had in her arsenal of ways to pressure him into working less hours.

He smiled at her tiredly as he made ready to leave, not having the words of thanks but knowing she wouldn't expect them from him anyway. She knew she was needed and appreciated and, incredibly, she honestly seemed to think that was enough.

Margaret closed the office door behind him, perhaps just in case of a last-minute dash to return to it. "Is the president okay?" she asked softly, searching his face.

Leo could have given her an empty reassurance... but he wasn't sure he had any left to spare. "I don't know," he admitted, with naked honestly. "I really don't know."

He went home.

Charlie was still at his post as they made to return to the Residence. "Good evening, Mr. President, ma'am," he said, although by now it was really closer to being night. Abbey mentally rolled her eyes over the titles, but didn't bother to pick a losing battle over it; in certain closer settings they might convince him to treat them as family, but this near to the Oval Office he was as resistant to informality as Leo.

"What are you doing here?" Jed frowned. "I thought I sent you home hours ago."

"I stayed in case you needed me," Charlie said matter-of-factly. Abbey felt a warm surge of affection towards the young man for his loyalty to her husband. She couldn't have asked for Jed to have a better protector, never mind son-in-law.

"You shouldn't have done that, son," he said, but there was love in his tone and she could see from Charlie's smile that he felt it. "Now, go on home, you've got a pregnant wife waiting for you, you shouldn't be here babysitting me."

"She's not that pregnant, sir," Charlie reminded him.

The president lowered his eyebrows, a trace of his delightedly pedantic side returning to him. "It's a binary state, Charlie, she either is or she isn't," he chastised sternly.

"Thus speaks the man who's never had to walk around feeling like he's got a bowling ball sitting on top of his bladder," Abbey said wryly. Jed nudged Charlie.

"Quick, run for your life, before she brings out the 'you have no idea what it feels like to be pregnant' speech," he advised urgently.

She let that slide. However, if he didn't think she was storing all these little things up to revisit when he was in a less fragile mood, he was in for a rude awakening somewhere down the line...

Charlie just smiled. "Goodnight, Mr. President," he said dryly.

"Goodnight, Charlie."

Abbey echoed the sentiment, and then, impulsively, stepped up to give the young man a kiss on the cheek. He grinned shyly, both pleased and embarrassed, and Jed looked on fondly. He slid an arm around Abbey's shoulder.

"Come on, babe," he counselled. "Let's get to sleep."

She'd found herself increasingly reassured by the return of his sense of humour, and the relaxed mood the long and pointless conversation about baby names had put him in... perhaps that had been premature. As they withdrew from the company of others, so he withdrew from her, sinking deeper into solemn silence. As they undressed for bed there was none of his usual chatter or the lascivious comments he liked to trade even when they both knew they were far too tired for it to be anything more than talk.

When the lights went down, he pulled her close to him, and held her wordlessly and tightly. Abbey embraced him back, a grip that had nothing to do with lust and romance, and everything to do with the kind of unconditional comfort she had meted out to the girls in moments of childhood distress.

She only wished that her husband's pain could be erased with so simple a cure as a kiss on the forehead and a night of dreamless sleep.

TUESDAY:

Carol arrived and proffered the day's stories without bothering to conceal her wince. "Jackie Grant?" CJ assumed.

"And Edgar Drumm."

Oh, great. Even those media bloodsuckers who'd been banned from the White House and one step shy of getting slapped with a restraining order were crawling out of the woodwork now. She pushed up her glasses and held out a hand. "Give me Drumm."

Carol gritted her teeth as CJ read - her boss's reaction didn't disappoint.

"Cycle of Abuse Continues - is Jed Bartlet the wholesome father figure he pretends to- Okay, somebody get me a baseball bat. Get me one now."

Carol remained prudently silent while she continued reading.

"Ellie- he went to Ellie? Oh, the president's going to blow his stack. We don't need this right now. We don't need this any time, but we do not need this right now." She looked up, meeting her assistant's eyes incredulously. "He flat out accuses the president of neglect and emotional abuse! Flat out! This is- I don't even know what this is. I don't even know what this is because my brain is leaking out of my ears trying to hold this article and reality at the same time."

"Ellie didn't call," Carol pointed out hesitantly, probably not wanting to get the no doubt harassed young woman into trouble for failing to stick to established press protocols. But right now CJ had no interest in gunning for Eleanor Bartlet.

"Yeah, well, she's probably had twenty-five reporters chasing her a day, and she thought she didn't give him anything." CJ grimaced. "She didn't give him anything. The guy hits her with a question so mind-bogglingly crazy she probably just stares at him for fifteen minutes, and he comes away with 'President's daughter suspiciously quiet when asked about her father's neglect'. Poor kid's probably kicking the hell out of herself for not coming up with an instant rebuttal... it's not her fault."

CJ sat back in her chair and let out a heavy and heartfelt sight. She'd been in the office a grand total of twelve minutes... already, she wanted to get back home and crawl into bed.

She sat back upright, and gave Carol a weary smile. "Now give me some good news?" she asked with a wry twist of a grin.

"Uh... the legitimate press won't go near Jackie Grant's insinuations with a twenty foot pole?"

"Okay, good. Now tell me that ninety percent of the gutter press have spontaneously decided to become legitimate?"

Carol smiled sympathetically. "I'll go get coffee."

It was going to be a hell of a day.

"Josh." Donna gave him a worried frown. "You went home straight after your meeting last night?"

"Oh, I-" He rubbed his forehead tiredly. "Sorry, I should've- sorry."

"That's okay," she shrugged quickly, although she would have bugged him for hours about it on a different day. He must look as drained as he felt.

"I'm... really fine, Donna," he told her earnestly.

She looked him in the eye. "No, you're really not," she said matter-of-factly. "But you have staff in five, so-"

"I'm on my way," he nodded, grabbing folder and coffee together in one less than graceful move. He felt Donna's worried eyes burning into the back of his neck as he left... so he didn't look back.

He was the last to arrive for senior staff; Leo gave him a distracted nod, and Sam squeezed his shoulder briefly as Josh slumped into the chair beside him. He lounged bonelessly, knowing he couldn't manage to look alert but at least aiming to shoot for 'conscious'.

"Okay," Leo began brusquely. "There's some trash in the papers today - Jackie Grant, but we knew that. Also, Edgar Drumm's been up to his old tricks."

"Who'd he get?" Toby mumbled, as Sam let out a disgusted huff and shook his head.

"He went after Ellie at the hospital - didn't get a comment, but he went ahead with the story anyway. He's roped some crackpot academic into giving him some quotes on 'cycle of abuse' and is trying to sell that the president neglected and shut out his girls." Leo's usually brisk and impassive tone wobbled a little into the territory of contempt.

"Oh, come on," Josh protested disbelievingly, stretching back in his chair. Surely even Edgar Drumm knew better than to try and hang a story off such a ridiculous premise.

"The entire country knows Jed Bartlet's always been a brilliant father," Sam objected, frown lines gathering above his glasses.

"I know they do, but the entire country's got a selective memory," Leo reminded him. "Now, I want this whole thing kept way off the president's radar. Let him know Drumm's trash-talking if you have to, but he doesn't have to know what he's selling, and he sure as hell doesn't need to know the guy was hassling Ellie. I don't want a repeat of yesterday's debacle."

It was easier, somehow, to retrofit the president's reaction to the press briefing into the mould of righteous anger over a question that should never have got through. That made it their mistake, a failure of their defence net, and therefore something they could fix.

Better that, than to remember the look in the president's eyes, and know that it was nothing to do with their actions at all, but the fires of an internal suffering they could do nothing to ease.

Leo glanced across at CJ. "I'm not expecting an insurrection in the press room after yesterday, but if they do-"

"Oh, I'll slap 'em," CJ agreed firmly, with just enough of a dangerous spark in her eye that it was uncertain whether she meant it literally.

"Good. Josh, what are you doing?"

The question caught him out, and he had to fumble for a response, his schedule blurred and faded from his mind. "I've been, uh- I was meeting with Stuart Walters about funding for the USFA, but-"

Leo shot him a glare that would have been steely if it wasn't tempered with a flicker of concern. "That's not a priority right now."

"No." Josh studied the floor between his shoes. He thought CJ might be looking at him, but he didn't raise his head to find out.

"Sam, you've got Gareth Vance again?" There was an edge of challenge in Leo's voice, ready to warn him to take care of it, but the Deputy Communications Director spoke firmly.

"I've got it in hand."

"Okay. Toby, work with CJ. Like I say, I don't think we're gonna need a response to the Drumm article, but have one. And CJ, be prepared to keep dodging on the president's upcoming engagements. There's no way he's ready to face the press yet." Leo sighed, and his voice dropped. "I'm not sure if he will be," he admitted softly.

CJ followed him out of the meeting and into his office. As he sat down, he rested his chin upon his palm and gave her a silently eloquent look.

Perhaps not eloquent enough, or else she was, as usual, ignoring his signals.

"Hey there, Tobus, how's it going?"

"You were at the meeting," he reminded her flatly. She gave him a look.

"I meant-"

"I know."

She was silent for a moment, and then sighed. "I'm sorry... I'm sorry I spoke to Andy about Zoey's pregnancy, without knowing..."

He shrugged an eyebrow, as expansive an expression of forgiveness as he needed. "The youngest daughter of the leader of the free world is expecting a honeymoon baby. Odds are she would have found out eventually."

"Yeah, but I just stumbled right in there and- Well, I messed up your plan for breaking it gently." CJ eyed him sideways. "You had a plan, right?"

"Yes. I called it 'Project Cowardice'."

She smiled briefly, but then turned earnest. "Toby, seriously, we've all been insensitive. Babbling on about pregnancy stuff, when you-"

He took umbrage at this attempt to usurp one of his major qualities. "I know insensitive. I'm a certified wielded of insensitive. Insensitive requires a finely weighted balance of knowing, and not caring."

CJ gave him a slight nod that said she would accept that argument but still reserve the right to beat herself up over it, and then smirked at him. "They give you a certificate for that?"

"Yes, but I handed it back and told them I didn't like the colours."

CJ moved across to him, and lightly kissed him on the top of the head. "I'm sorry, Toby," she said softly, and this time she wasn't talking about anything she might have said or done.

He met her eyes for a moment in silent acknowledgement, and then they went back to work.

Gareth Vance stood up and shook his hand with a smile. "Mr. Seaborn."

"Sam," he repeated, politely but firmly. He was never going to get used to being called 'Mr. Seaborn', and didn't really want to.

Vance retook his seat, pulling it close to the table. "I hope you've had a chance to consider my proposal. I realise it's incredibly forward and you must have a million and one other things you need to be thing about right now, but the amount of good it could do-"

"Yeah," Sam agreed neutrally.

"I work with these kids every day, Sam," he said earnestly, "I know what it takes to try and get through to them - how long you can be hammering at walls of defences that aren't easy to break through, that you may never break through. They've lived through things you and I can't begin to imagine, and they don't trust well or easily."

Sam nodded, knowing what his eventual answer was going to have to be but feeling obliged to hear the argument out anyway. Both his inner lawyer and his sense of fairness demanded it.

"We can pour all we've got into campaigns, awareness drives, childlines, but all the goodwill in the world can only do so much. These are kids who have learned firsthand that talk is cheap. We can keep trying to convince them that it's safe to come forward, that we'll believe them, we won't blame them, but victims of child abuse live lives steeped in the deceptions of authority figures, and too many of them just flat out won't believe us."

He locked eyes with Sam. "But kids trust the president. They trust him, Sam, because we taught them since they were old enough to recognise the star-spangled banner that this is our leader, this is the man we trust, this is the man we turn to whenever we need an answer." He snagged Sam's sleeve, as if trying to communicate his point of view by sheer force of proximity.

"If they could see him, if they could hear him speak out about the terrible things that were done to him... If we could show them that these things that happen to them could happen to anybody, even the President of the United States... If we could teach our children that terrible things can happen to even the greatest of people... wouldn't that be an incredible thing?"

"Yeah." Sam folded his arms on the desk in front of him. "Yeah, it's not gonna happen."

"CJ?"

"Hey there, Chuck."

"Yeah." He decided to ignore that, in the hope that it would go away. "I asked Carol yesterday if I could maybe have a minute of your-"

"I know." She leaned back to stretch out her long legs to look up at him. "What's on your mind, daddy-to-be?"

His heart jolted, in the way he had become somewhat accustomed to it doing. "Okay, can we not say that?" he pleaded earnestly.

"Better get used to it," she smirked mercilessly. "Soon enough there's gonna be a little fluffy-haired moppet running about the place, chirping all kinds of-"

"Okay, yeah, that's enough." He rubbed his forehead, wondering again if he'd woken up in the middle of someone else's life all of a sudden. Fatherhood...? "Actually, that was kind of what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Fluffy-haired moppets? I've got to tell you, Charlie, I'm really not the office expert."

"Well then, you're just about the only person who's not pretending to be," he noted wryly. Amazing how everybody within a thirty-foot radius had suddenly become a never-ending fount of pregnancy tales and name suggestions. "CJ, Zoey wanted me to ask about announcing this to the press."

CJ grew more serious, biting her lip pensively. "I won't lie to you Charlie, this isn't-"

"The best time in the world?" he completed with a curl of his lip. "Yeah. Is it ever?"

She frowned. "I'd like to say that the good news would be a nice change of a pace, pull some of the press attention away from the president... but the fact is, the way things are going it could just as easily get lost in the crush."

"I know," Charlie acknowledged. He met her eyes. "But we don't want this to just leak out like before." His and Zoey's engagement had got off to a somewhat ignominious start when it had found its way to the headlines before it even reached the ears of his prospective in-laws. "It's already buzzing round the West Wing, if the press weren't all so distracted they'd have the story already."

"Yeah." CJ rubbed her forehead. "Okay. I'll have Toby and Sam maybe draft an announcement for you to look at, and we'll... we'll talk about this." The unfinished part of that sentence was 'when things get a bit less hectic', but why add it in when they both knew it was never going to happen?

"Okay. Thank you, CJ." He headed back to rejoin the president.

Jed eyed the psychiatrist balefully. "You know, I really do have better things to do with my time," he warned, as he settled into his chair.

"Mm-hmm." Stanley nodded neutrally. That was what Jed hated most about these sessions, that complete passive non-reaction - how was he supposed to respond to that, how was he supposed to keep throwing out his thoughts if they did nothing but disappear into a black hole? Probably it was supposed to relax him, make him feel as if he wasn't being judged, but instead it left him edgy as hell. He was a man of words, concepts and abstract ideas, and how could he feel like he was communicating anything of note if it didn't get a reaction?

He sat back, and regarded the other man impassively. Waiting for Stanley to crack was a pretty fruitless pursuit, but that didn't mean he had to give in easily.

Probably recognising that Jed was intending to be stubborn, he shifted in his chair and spoke first. "If we could go back to what we were talking about yesterday... I feel we were beginning to get somewhere."

Get somewhere? Where the hell was there to get? He'd had a rocky relationship with his father, it was too long ago to matter now, and the sooner the press could get over it, the sooner he could get back to doing his job. Yes, the press invasion was making him uncomfortable - but there was hardly any great psychoanalytical mystery there.

"Not only do I have no idea what you think we were talking about yesterday, Stanley, I have no idea where you're trying to get with it."

"Oh, I think you do. You just don't want to go there," Stanley replied implacably. "And we were talking about acceptable levels of abuse."

"There are no acceptable levels of abuse," Jed pointed out sharply.

"Well parroted, Mr. President, now could you tell me why you don't believe it?"

"Of course I believe it," Jed scowled impatiently. This line of questioning was ludicrous! "I do not condone... certain of my father's actions, whether in my case or in the absolute, I'm saying... it was more complicated than you, or those jackals over there in the press room, would like to paint it."

"Complicated isn't an excuse, Mr. President," Stanley said, eyes boring into his own.

"And nobody's trying to make it one." He met the challenge full on, unblinking. It was childish to score it like a game of stare-out, but there was still a certain measure of satisfaction to be had when Stanley looked away and took a breath to regroup.

He raised his head again. "Mr. President... do you believe in moral absolutes?"

"I'm Catholic, Stanley," Jed reminded him dryly.

"I hadn't forgotten." He shifted in his seat. "So you believe that... certain sins are sins, no matter what the circumstances."

"Well, thank you for distilling centuries of faith into Readers Digest form for me there, Stanley." Sarcastic commentary was much less fun when it provoked neither anger nor visible amusement. "Yes. I do believe that," he conceded.

Sometimes sins had to be committed for the greater good... but that didn't stop them being sins. Every death he caused in his capacity as president was an equal stain on his soul, no matter how many other lives he might have bought with it. Human souls were infinite and immeasurable; you couldn't add and subtract them like so many sacks of potatoes.

Stanley nodded and mused on that for a few moments. Then he looked up. "Mr. President, if I could ask you... how often did you used to hit your children?"

Jed jumped to his feet, knocking the chair backwards in fury. "I don't know just what the hell you think you're-"

The study door slammed open, and in microseconds there were an uncomfortable number of guns trained on his suddenly rather cowed-looking companion. Jed stood and breathed in for a long moment, before waving the agents away in a quick hand gesture. "It's okay."

The Secret Service agents hesitated a moment over leaving; scanning the scene, checking for any signs that the view before them was other than what it seemed to be. None of the guns shifted their aim until all the agents had scoped out the room and the nearest spoke coded words of reassurance into his wrist radio. Then the dark-suited figures melted away as rapidly as they'd arrived, door falling softly shut behind them.

For the first time, Stanley looked distinctly rattled.

"You're lucky I didn't have them escort you out of the building and throw you into the street," Jed told him coldly.

Stanley gradually recaptured his equilibrium. "Mr. President, your..." He took a deep, shaky breath and continued; "Your reaction was... wholly appropriate."

"Damn right!" Jed snapped, still standing stiff with angry tension.

Stanley pressed his fingertips together, and looked up at him slowly. "So now, the question becomes... where does that reaction go when I ask you about your father hitting you?"

Josh arrived in his office with his urgent face on. Not the 'mommy, I need the restroom now' style of urgency that infused his day to day dealings, but the stressed out, haven't-slept-for-a-week-and-I'm-about-to-snap aspect that surfaced when things were close to the wire.

Josh was obsessing. This was nothing new. Toby sat back in his chair to regard him. "Josh."

"Toby, listen." The Deputy Chief of Staff was leaning too close over his desk, already forcefully selling an argument he hadn't started making yet. "I was speaking to Stuart Walters yesterday about the budget for the fire administration. He shut me down, but I think I found a-"

"We settled on the USFA months ago," Toby reminded him bluntly.

"I know, but-"

"We sat people down around a table and made compromises, Josh. You know we made compromises, because you were the one who sat down in that meeting and made them."

"Peter Daltrey has a bill," Josh said earnestly.

"No," Toby shut him down.

"Daltrey's all about funding for the services. He eats that kind of thing. All I have to do is have him slip in a-"

"-An obstruction to the passing of a bill that was going to sail through Congress like so much prune juice, at a time when we do not need anything crawling its way into the middle of the news cycle from hell-"

"Okay- Okay, euw, mostly, and thank you for that visual, Toby, and... how could our news cycle possibly get worse?" he demanded.

He just let that hang in the air for a moment, so Josh could listen to himself. They all knew there was no such thing as 'low as it can go' when it came to presidential politics. Josh made a wry face.

Toby laid it out in flat, stark terms. "We can't stop the news cycle. We can't help the president. We can make sure that there is nothing, nothing, to suggest that the government is running as anything less than a well-oiled machine as a result."

"Okay, coupled with the prune-juice metaphor, this is taking me visual places I don't want to go."

It was reflexive snark, the kind that meant he'd run out of argument, but was waiting for somebody to take it from him because he couldn't bring himself to concede on his own.

"Josh." Toby spoke brusquely, but not particularly unkindly. "Not only have you lost... there isn't even a battle. There isn't even a battle, Josh."

"Yeah." He slumped, looking defeated. "Yeah," he repeated softly.

"Leo."

There was no mistaking that familiar voice; he sat back, pushing his work aside, and smiled tiredly at her. "Hey, Abbey."

She smiled briefly in response and stepped into his office, trailing her fingers absently along the desktop. She sat down, with a heavy sigh.

"How's it going?" he asked softly, although both of them knew the question was really 'How's he doing?' Abbey pushed back her hair and was silent for a moment.

"I'm trying to help him, Leo," she said sadly. "I'm trying, but he won't let me near him."

"He won't let anybody near him," he reminded her gently, although he knew that was small comfort to the woman who was normally allowed the access everyone else was denied. Jed guarded his private pains jealously, a mix of pride, stubbornness and misguided refusal to be a burden. Normally it was Abbey who could find her way through to force him into opening up... but this was something that stretched back even further and deeper than their marriage. He couldn't imagine how that must feel for Abbey, to be on the outside looking in for the first time in long decades.

"It's..." She didn't finish the thought, sighing again. She looked as impeccably stunning as always, but the weariness radiated off her in waves. Leo gave her a gentle look.

"How are you doing?" he asked, with just enough of an accent on the 'you' to push the concern behind the enquiry home. He was more than half expecting a brush-off, but when she looked up, her eyes glistened with naked emotion.

"I hurt when he's hurting, Leo," she said simply.

He closed his eyes. "I know," he said softly. "I know." Of course he did. He understood that far too well. "Everybody's hurting for him, Abbey," he reminded her. "They love him, Abbey. Half the time they're secretly wishing they could drop-kick him into the Potomac and the other half they're creeping round like little kids afraid of disappointing their favourite teacher, but... they love him. And it's killing them to see him like this."

"It's killing me," she admitted hoarsely. Leo stood up, and walked around the table to give her a warm hug. To him, a rare and almost alien gesture in his semi-self-imposed isolation; probably to her, a familiar comfort too long missing in this painful morass of tension and worry.

For a moment they just stood together, taking comfort from a love they both shared for a man that neither could help. Then Abbey pulled away from his arms, and smiled up at him for a moment.

"He's lucky to have you," she said, and planted a gentle kiss on his cheek before walking out of his office and leaving him alone.

He was standing there for a long time before he snapped back to himself, and returned to his desk.

Stanley wondered, in a vaguely detached sort of way, whether his knees were visibly shaking. Certainly, he wouldn't like to test the strength of his legs right now.

This wasn't a run of the mill appointment. He'd known that from the moment he'd realised Josh wasn't to be his client this time around, and it hadn't take five minutes alone with Jed Bartlet to be sure of it. He'd known full well that he was dealing with the leader of the free world here, and things could be expected to be... a little different.

He'd been fully aware of that. And, if he'd been asked to enumerate the many ways in which this varied from dispensing therapy to John Brown down the street, the Secret Service agents outside the door would certainly have rated a mention somewhere down the list.

From here on in, their position was going to be rather higher. As a trauma specialist like him should be well aware, there was something about a large number of gun-barrels trained in your direction that tended to have a lasting effect on you.

The president's fury had dissipated as quickly as a summer storm, but the confrontational attitude was still firmly in place, and it was going to take every inch of the calm professional detachment he was scrabbling desperately to retrieve to try and get around it.

"Mr. President, it... bothers me that you don't seem to understanding exactly how seriously people are taking this," he tried.

"Too seriously!" the president scowled. "It's all in the past, and it wasn't... it's not what they're making it out to be. I'm the one who was there, I should know!"

"With all due respect, Mr. President, you're the last person in this building who's in any position to make an objective assessment," he pointed out dryly. The older man gave him a sideways look from under his brows.

He let out his breath in a sharp, shotgun sigh that twanged Stanley's already jangling nerves. "Fine. Fine. I can't be trusted to judge the severity of my own personal experience. Then we'll turn to more objective measures. Do I seem traumatised to you?"

"Sir, I'll freely concede that if half the things I've heard about your childhood are true, you've made a quite remarkable recovery." Indeed, Jed Bartlet was quite the poster boy for the fact that repressing the past wasn't always the emotionally crippling mistake most psychoanalysts preferred to paint it as. In fact, given that the president's trauma was safely confined to the past, choosing to completely bury it had probably served him far better than spending the rest of his life obsessing over it.

It was when a team of external agents came along with bulldozers to dig it up that the effectiveness of that particular coping strategy started to fall down.

"Well, most of them probably aren't, but thank you." The president looked him in the eye with steely resolve. "I'm not a victim, Stanley," he said firmly. "And I won't be made into one just because that's what expected of me. I am not a victim!"

"Okay. You're not a victim," Stanley conceded levelly. He hesitated for a beat. "But that doesn't mean there wasn't a crime."

They held each other's gaze for a long moment, and then the president stood up. "We're done here," he announced, with the same gesture of dismissal he'd used to send out the Secret Service agents.

"Mr. President, I don't think we are," Stanley protested gently.

"Well, that's a shame for you, because we're done here. I have a schedule to keep, and we've already overrun it."

He wasn't sure he believed that was true, but the hell of it was that it could become true just by the president saying it - there were never any gaps in the president's schedule, only moments when taking a break had to take priority. The fact that his staff had been working themselves to death to clear free time for him didn't mean there weren't a whole swamp of other commitments ready to slide in to fill it.

He could try to force a continuance, but the president had already shut him out, and the truth was he was still feeling more than a little antsy about throwing his authority around right now. A good solid door usually felt like plenty of insulation from the outside world during a therapy session, but with the knowledge that those agents were waiting so alertly just outside made it seem uncomfortably flimsy.

He shook hands with his client. "Mr. President, you know where to call if you need me."

The president might be sceptical of the likelihood of that, but he was a mannerly man, and he accepted the spirit of the offer with a nod.

Stanley left, wishing he could feel like he'd accomplished more... and trying very hard not to attract the attention of the Secret Service agents as he passed.

"Mr. President!" Leo stood at his old friend's arrival, as much from surprise as habitual respect. Jed waved him quickly back into his seat.

"Leo."

"You've finished with-?"

"I sent him home," he said shortly. "I'm done talking with him." He was brusque rather than angry, the edges of what would have been an acerbic tone blunted by the ever-present weariness. Leo looked up at him carefully.

"Sir-"

"You think talking's going to help?" Jed asked flatly, looking him in the eye. Leo had to look down. No, he hadn't really thought so, but he'd hoped. Stanley seemed to have provided the president some solace on other occasions, even if only in the form of having somebody there he could comfortably line up his thoughts in front of. But for something as intimately personal as this... no, he really hadn't expected it to solve things.

Stanley had helped Josh... but then, Josh had been openly exploding in his self-destruction, whilst Jed Bartlet's quiet combustion remained strictly internal. And besides, Josh was from a different generation, almost a different world, where the rules of Things That Men Did were not what they had once been. A better world, no doubt - but one that he and Jed, products of a different time, still only had one foot in.

It was easy to accept the new order of things, hard to seamlessly mould yourself into a part of it. You were pleased and proud and gratified to see women become accepted as equals, take their rightful place in society... but you didn't stop holding doors. You admired the fact that emotions were now something it was okay to have and share and hold up and examine... but that didn't mean you were ready to put yours on display. The old ways were dead and dying - and in most cases, good riddance - but the shadows of long-ingrained codes of behaviour lingered on.

It was easily forgotten sometimes, with the way Jed Bartlet was so casually comfortable with himself and the people around him, that he was a product of that same culture too.

"Okay," he acknowledged softly. Pushing the president to open up and talk about things was a route that would lead exactly nowhere... and besides, he was hardly the man for that. He shifted tack, slipping back into brisk professionalism. "You're meeting with O'Bannon?"

Jed nodded. "Yeah. But I'm free until then. What's happening?"

He wanted to say 'nothing you need to worry about', but that wouldn't help, now would it? "It's in hand. Josh is meeting with Baker and Carrington on Tennessee, and Toby's meeting with Mel Wicks to discuss the changes to the language."

"And Sam's meeting with Gareth Vance from the children's charities," the president completed softly. Leo met his eyes, momentarily startled and trying not to look it. How had the president found out about that?

"Sir. He's-"

Jed dismissed it with a gesture. "I know what they're meeting about."

Of course he did - how could he not? Child abuse PSAs from a suitably scarred and battered president? He was surprised they weren't queuing down the street to try and book him for the chat show circuit.

"Mr. President-"

"It doesn't matter," Jed said softly. He shifted, moving for the door. Leo had to call after him.

"Sir. Are you... okay?"

The strength of their friendship earned him the right to more than a brush-off... but not much more. Jed gave him a shrug, and a wry smile. "I'm fine," he said, and left.

Gareth could have almost cried with frustration. They'd come so close, he'd really started to believe they could do this... and now, abruptly, 'We'll have to think about it' had become a flat 'no way'.

Seaborn had seemed so receptive in their first meeting; not a hardened politician but an earnest, conscientious mind, ready to be swayed by arguments of doing the right thing and how many children they could save. He'd been wavering, but now his mind seemed made up, lips set in a firm but apologetic line.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Vance," he repeated, "but there's just no way we can ask the president to do this."

Gareth knew he was asking a lot, of course he was asking a lot, but wasn't it worth it? If even one abused child could be convinced to come forward, wouldn't it be worth it? Surely President Bartlet would see it that way. He was a good man... and he'd been through the exact same hell these children were trapped in. He had to see it that way.

"If you could just take this proposal to the president," he pleaded. "If you only explained to him, I'm sure that he'd-"

"Want to do it? Yes," Sam agreed. "More than that, he'd feel obliged to do it, and that's not fair. I won't be responsible for putting him in that position."

"Sam-"

But he wasn't finished. "Mr. Vance... you work directly with victims of this kind of abuse?" His voice dropped, probably unconsciously, adopting the hushed tones people nearly always did when they talked of the things no one wanted to think about.

"That's right," he nodded, hoping Sam's conscience was beginning to sway him.

"I can't imagine what it must be like for them," he said softly.

"It's... hard." Gareth stared at the table. No matter how long you worked in this kind of field, it never stopped affecting you. "Sam, if you could see them... They're, they're lost, they're frightened... abuse is the only life most of them have known, and they cry to be taken away from it. They love their parents, they don't want to be saved from them. They don't even understand the, the wrongness of it. They don't know that there are lives other than the kind that they've been living."

"They find it difficult to talk to you about their pasts?"

"Very, very difficult," he confirmed solemnly.

Sam sighed. "Mr. Vance... I understand your position, I understand why you want to do this, and that it comes from the purest of motives, but there's one thing you've overlooked."

Gareth frowned. "What's that?"

"You've been trying so hard to find a way to help these kids, you've forgotten that President Bartlet is one of these kids."

He was silent.

Sam rubbed his face. "Contrary to... anything you might read in the papers, this isn't some open secret that we've been running interference on since the days of the campaign. The president doesn't talk about his childhood - he's never talked about his childhood. We didn't know, his children didn't know... I'm telling you now, I'm not even sure that the First Lady knew."

He stood up, sighing, before he continued. "I know that you think this could help a lot of victims of child abuse, and for what it's worth, I think you're probably right. But it would also do a lot of damage for one of them, and he's the one I work for, and I can't let you ask him to do this."

Gareth looked down. "Yeah," he said quietly.

There was a soft knock at the door, and a young black man stuck his head through apologetically. "Hey, Charlie," Sam acknowledged.

"Hi, Sam." He turned to look at Gareth. "Mr. Vance?"

"Yeah?" he frowned, puzzled.

"The president would like to speak with you."

"Hello?"

"Eleanor?"

Ellie smiled automatically at her godmother's voice, but it didn't ease the ball of tension gathered at the centre of her stomach. "It's me."

"How are you?" the Surgeon General asked kindly.

"I feel awful," she admitted frankly.

"I'm not surprised, honey. I know this is tough for you."

"No, I-" She struggled to articulate her confused thoughts. "There was this reporter, yesterday, he-"

"Ellie, you cannot blame yourself for the actions of the gutter press," her godmother told her sternly. "That little rat Drumm would have written his story no matter what you said, and you know it."

"Yeah, but it's my fault," she said sickly. "All that stuff about dad neglecting us, about him being a bad dad... they got that from me, from me being an idiot and stomping round in a teenage sulk all the time..."

"That's ridiculous, Eleanor - everyone knows you love your father."

"He didn't!" she retorted. "He always thought I... He didn't know that-"

"Eleanor, you can't blame yourself," the Surgeon General repeated more softly. "Not for the newspapers, not for your father's past, not for any of this."

"Yeah, I- I suppose. Listen, I've- I've gotta go. Bye."

"Eleanor- goodbye," her godmother cut herself off just before Ellie put the phone down, sounding faintly exasperated.

Ellie sat and looked at the phone in its cradle for a few moments, brooding. Then, decisively, she picked it up and began making calls.

Jed looked up as Charlie ushered a nervous looking man into the Oval Office. "Mr. President? Gareth Vance."

"Thank you, Charlie."

He nodded at the newcomer, and was silent for a moment as Charlie retreated to his area outside.

Vance shifted uncomfortably, and then blurted "Mr. President, I-"

"You came to talk to Sam about me, didn't you," he said, somewhat wryly. It wasn't really a question.

The charity representative's eyes seemed glued rather firmly to the carpet. "Sir, I realise it was... intrusive of me to approach the White House on the basis of the news reports, and-"

Jed sighed softly. "I know why you did it," he acknowledged.

"Sir." Vance finally looked up.

Jed rubbed his eyes, and was silent for a long while. "I... Don't think I don't have... the greatest admiration for what you do," he said finally. "And don't think I don't want to give you all the help I can possibly give you. But... I can't be your poster boy. I have a job to do, and a life to live, and I can't be your poster boy."

"I understand, Mr. President," the younger man said softly. "And... thank you. For your time, and- Thank you."

Jed nodded quietly. "Okay. I just wanted to tell you that... I admire what you're doing. It takes a greatness of spirit to dedicate yourself to helping the public."

"I realise that, sir," Vance said, with a soft smile that was more directed at Jed than self-congratulatory. He turned to leave, then hesitated. "And, Mr. President? I know this isn't... well, you probably couldn't call this a consolation, but... We've had a lot of calls. These past few days... we've been getting a lot of calls."

He left, and Jed remained alone with his solemn thoughts.

"Hey, Donna." Leo smiled at the assistant, and tilted his head questioningly towards Josh's office. She nodded and pulled a face.

"Yeah, he's working late."

"Okay, thanks." He gave her a kind look. "You can go home, you know."

"When he does," she replied without missing a beat, and he had to smile. It never ceased to amaze him how a bunch of bumbling workaholics like them could somehow inspire such loyalty in their assistants. The Margarets, Donnas and Carols of this world didn't get nearly enough credit.

He stepped inside.

Josh had, for reasons unknown, swivelled his chair to face the back wall. He spun it around now, beginning "Donna, I said I'm- Hey." He blinked blearily at his boss, and started to stand. "Leo. Do you need me to-?"

"Sit down and shut up for a minute? Yes I do."

Josh dropped inelegantly back into his seat, perhaps aiming to look alert and curious, but only succeeding in seeming exhausted.

He glanced down at his deputy's desk, saw the leaflets and folders still spread across it, and smiled sadly. "Josh? It's time to let it go."

Josh followed his gaze. "Leo, I'm not-"

"You're trying to fix the world. And nobody's gonna tell you you're wrong for that, but I'm telling you... let it go."

Josh looked up at him solemnly. "I'm trying to save lives here, Leo."

He was silent for a long beat - knowing that some of the lives Josh was still trying to save were gone beyond hope of recovery. "Yeah," he agreed with a heavy sigh.

"Leo-"

"Josh. I know what you want to do, and I know why you want to do it. And you know we can't do it right now."

He looked down; quiet, almost contrite, an emotion that didn't sit well on him. "Yeah," he agreed softly.

"We do the best we can, Josh. We don't get to be Superman, spinning back the world to put things right. We just do the best we can."

"I-" The syllable was a sharply chopped off burst, the start of a sentence that bled away into nothingness as he sank back into his chair in resignation. He held his forehead for a moment, then looked up. "I feel helpless, Leo." He shrugged angrily. "I feel... helpless."

Leo nodded, and smiled wryly. "Yeah, I know how that is." Ever since he'd learned of the president's private pains and seen them put up on display, he'd been feeling nothing but.

Even through his own slumped weariness, Josh found a concerned look to shoot at him. "You okay?"

"Well, I'm not planning on running off for a shot of Jack Daniels, if that's what you mean," he responded, acerbic though the question was probably fully justified. He made a hand-gesture of apology, but Josh shrugged it off. They were comfortable in silence for a moment.

Leo sighed, and straightened up. "Go home, Josh," he said; fondly, but with the cadence of an order. "We've always got tomorrow."

"Which is, so I'm told, another day," Josh observed sardonically.

"Yeah, well, just try and get out of here before it turns into today."

"Right back at you."

"Oh, I will," Leo agreed. Josh eyed him disbelievingly. "What, you don't think Donna got on the phone to Margaret the moment I walked in that door?"

"Point," Josh acknowledged. They exchanged a brief smile. They were two of the most politically powerful men in the United States of America, but their assistants still owned them.

And they wouldn't have it any other way.

"Hon, is that you?" she called at the sound of footsteps entering the room. She turned, in the process of removing her earrings.

"It's me," he confirmed, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed to remove his shoes. Abbey crossed the room to sit beside him, and smiled up at him. He smiled back tiredly, and laid his head briefly on her shoulder.

"Tough day?" she asked sympathetically, with just enough of a wry twist to acknowledge what a stupid question it really was.

He sighed, and began to loosen the knot in his tie with heartbreaking lethargy. "I met this guy from the Shield of Innocence children's charity... he wanted me to do some speaking for them, but..." He shook his head. "Those poor kids, I wish..."

He didn't have to finish for her to recognise the weight of responsibility pressing on his shoulders. Jed had always somehow believed that it was his duty to mend the world, and the fact that as president he sometimes could didn't outweigh all the things he felt he wasn't doing enough about.

"You can't do everything, babe," she reminded him, as he stood and moved away to drop the tie on the dresser.

His reply was rendered an inaudible mumble as he tugged his suit jacket over his head, but she was sure he'd said that he ought to be able to do.

"Did he want you to talk about your father?" she asked, hoping she could see an opening, a chance to slip her way in through his defences. Maybe it was wrong to press him when he was exhausted like this... but when wasn't he exhausted?

He turned to face her, misery written plainly across his features. "I just- I wish people wouldn't keep doing this, keep equating my childhood with all these nightmare stories, with all these people who've really suffered, when it was, it wasn't-"

"Jed-" She stood up and moved towards him, her words half an exhortation not to work himself up but also half a warning. Was he still doing this, standing in the face of overwhelming evidence and just flat out denying that it had happened? No, worse than that, because he wasn't denying its truth, only its importance, and that was just... "Jed..." she repeated softly, almost pleadingly.

He met her eyes, his own blue portals to naked dismay. "Abbey, I just..." He lowered his head. "He was my father, why can't anybody understand that? He was my father."

She moved closer, wanting to reach out for him but somehow afraid that this was too fragile a moment to dare so. "He still hurt you, Jed. He was your father, but that doesn't change the fact that he still hurt you."

"It wasn't like that-"

The tightly wound coil of self-restraint, one she'd never been particularly inclined to exercise at the best of times, abruptly snapped. "Oh, dammit, Jed, will you get your head out of your ass and stop pretending that he never hurt you!"

Abbey was no stranger to roaring her disapproval in the middle of a fight, but that burst of long-suppressed frustration and anger startled her even as it came out of her mouth. She expected Jed to shout back, or to argue, or to turn away from her and close off, but instead he just stared at her.

And then, completely without warning, he started to cry.

His head bowed and his shoulders quaked with the muffled sobs of a man who hadn't done so in a long long time, and didn't want to be doing it now. Her fury melted away in too short an instant to measure, and she flung her arms around him. "It's okay. I love you. I love you." She kissed his hair, and whispered the only words that had ever mattered.

Jed hugged her as fiercely as if she might be pulled away from him if he let go, struggling to wrest his anguish under some kind of control. There were tears streaking down her own cheeks, she knew, as instinctually linked to her husband's pain as his own choking distress.

He managed to lift his head to meet her gaze, eyes cloudy blue and even now still beautiful. "They want me to hate him, Abbey," he told her in a tear-strangled voice. "They all want me to hate him, and I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it."

Abbey closed her eyes and pressed against him even closer, as if sheer force of will she might be able to blend the two of them into a single being and take on his hurt for herself. "It's okay, babe," she promised, with the authority of one who would move earth and heaven a dozen times to make it so. "I'm here, and I love you, and it's all gonna be okay. I promise. I promise."

WEDNESDAY:

He drifted awake slowly; the sun was yet to rise, but he could feel that night had passed into morning. He'd slept through, at least as far as the President of the United States could be allowed to.

Abbey was sleeping beside him; he could hear her quiet breaths rustle in the dimness, a welcome, familiar sound. She was still pressed up against his shoulder, sharing a pleasant, comfortable warmth, and he allowed himself the luxury of lying back to enjoy it for a few moments.

His eyes were gritty, but not so much from exhaustion. Jed remembered the emotional collapse of the night before, now slightly glazed with a patina of distance and unreality. He felt drained, now, but also lighter. That horrible choking tightness in his chest had eased, expelled with the pressure of all those pent-up emotions, and now he felt... clean.

He had to get up. A depressing thought - but suddenly not a paralysing one. Oddly, in feeling so hollow he felt stronger than he had in a long time. The stresses of the past seven days had been, at least to some degree, purged from his system, and with that poison gone he felt ready to get back on his feet and start moving.

He slid out from under the covers, careful not to disturb his sleeping wife, and dressed himself in silence. When he opened the door to leave, the light from outside splashed across the bed, outlining her profile and giving highlights to her hair. He smiled down at her.

"I love you," he murmured, too softly to wake her, and pressed a gentle, feather-light kiss to her forehead before leaving to begin his day.

He was woken by the now extremely familiar lurch of the bedsprings as his other half made a panicked dash for the bathroom to throw up. "Zoey, are you okay?" he called, voice deep and slightly hoarse from still being half asleep.

"Don't get up!" she insisted quickly. "I'm okay." Charlie would have gone to join her anyway, but he knew she didn't like him hovering over her when she was suffering from morning sickness; she preferred to be allowed to be - to use her words - 'gross and icky' in relative privacy.

He lay half awake and knowing he'd soon have to be all that way. He heard the sound of running water and the toilet flushing, and then Zoey padded out of the bathroom and towards the kitchen. She was nearly as much of a holy terror as her father to risk waking before she was ready to, but once she was up, she was up, and couldn't get back to sleep.

He listened and mentally traced her steps; funny how this apartment already felt so familiar to him. He'd lived in the old house with Deanna and, earlier, their mother for the whole of the life he could remember, but... this felt like a home to him. Maybe it was to do with being part of a family, being a husband... being a father.

In what must now be less than seven months, he'd be a father. In fact, he supposed he already was one. It was still impossible to believe... perhaps it wouldn't really sink in until he felt the baby kick, or even until he was at the hospital and someone was pressing a squalling bundle into his hands. So hard to believe that there could be a little life growing in there, a life that was half him and half Zoey and so much more than the sum of both of them.

He heard the rustle as Zoey stooped to pick up the morning papers, and knew she was taking them into the front room to read. He really should be getting up sometime about now...

"Charlie!" His wife's voice was urgent, but, oddly, not laced with the outrage he'd come to expect from her scanning of the headlines this past couple of days. "You've gotta come check this out!"

He rolled out of bed and scrambled to join her.

"Hey, CJ!"

She came to an abrupt halt outside her office, startled by the decidedly unexpected vision of a widely grinning Carol. She rested a hand on her hip and gave her assistant a stern look.

"Okay, Carol, if it's some kind of artificial stimulant producing that expression... I just hope your parents taught you that it's nice to share."

"It's not drugs," Carol told her, still grinning. CJ started to smile tentatively back. Good news? Seriously? She tried to think what it might be, but had real trouble beginning to imagine what.

"The press corps were abducted by aliens?" she suggested.

"Not quite that good."

"Ah, damn," she sighed.

Carol reached for a nearby sheaf of papers and handed them to her. "Ellie Bartlet's been making calls. She's pissed, she's outraged, and she's telling the world about it."

CJ hastily put down her coffee and flicked through, grinning in happy amazement as she registered some of the more inflammatory phrases. "Everyone's got this?"

"Direct comment from a family member? They're lapping it up. Everybody's so grateful not to have to come up with yet another way to rephrase 'shock childhood revelations' they've jumped in with both feet."

There were probably hypocrisies to be mused on when it came down to the press printing stories about people slamming the invasive nature of the press, but who cared about that right now? Every paper in town was carrying the story of a furious daughter coming to the righteous defence of her embattled father. You couldn't ask for that kind of coverage... and, given that it was Eleanor, none of them would ever have thought to have done so.

CJ surveyed the pile of stories with growing delight. She looked up at a similarly gleeful Carol. "I think," she said slowly, "today might just turn out to be a good day after all."

"This could be it, Leo." Sam was grinning widely. "This really could be it."

Josh too seemed infused by the same sense of energy, leaning in over his boss's desk to emphasise his words. "This is our chance to take the press coverage and make it ours."

"You've got Eleanor Bartlet's voice coming from every major news outlet saying enough is enough," CJ agreed. "Americans want to read every scrap of gossip they can about the president's private life, but they also want to see him running the country. We've got to march out there, take that ball, and whack it all the way into 'Quit holding us up, we've got jobs to do'."

Leo, though as unexpectedly pleased with Ellie's show of support as the rest of them, was more cautiously restrained. "What's our gameplan here?" he asked.

"We've got to take the focus off the entire childhood tragedy element of it," Toby spoke up. "He went through hell, and he rose to become the president - so let's stop talking about hell."

"We've gotta stop writing a Dickens novel and make this a blockbuster movie," Sam concurred. "He's not a victim, he's a survivor. He's an American hero!"

Leo grimaced. "He's not gonna like that," he pointed out.

"He doesn't like this," CJ countered wryly.

"You think the press pool are ready to be weaned away from this?"

"They're political journalists, Leo," she reminded him. "They love a good dirtbath as much as the next reporter, but the only guy the muck's sticking to right here is long dead. We can pull the emphasis back onto the here and now, make it about where he's got to, not where he came from."

"They're gonna want to know how he's coping," Josh put in with a grimace.

"So we tell them he's coped for the last forty years, he can damn well cope with it now," Leo snapped; the extra bite to his words born from the fervent desire to believe that they really were true.

"We've got to march out there, tell them Ellie's absolutely right," CJ said firmly. "We've let the press hijack the business of the nation for long enough chasing after a decades old story. When they're scraping the bottom of the rumour barrel to come up with new sensations, it's time to move on. No more questions, no more answers; the White House has commented its last comment."

"You think they're just gonna let it go?" he said sceptically.

"They're ready to be moved, but if we want them to, we've got to forcibly push this off the front page," Toby said.

"What with?" Leo demanded curtly.

"There's Charlie and Zoey," CJ suggested, slightly hesitantly. Josh looked up at her.

"They want to announce the pregnancy?"

"I've spoken to them," she confirmed. "They don't want this to leak like last time. I didn't want to just throw it out there and let it get trampled on in the middle of all this crap, but maybe now-"

She broke off at the interrupting creak of a door. Expecting it to be Margaret they all swivelled that way first - apart from Leo, who'd already recognised it as being the other door.

President Bartlet stood in the doorway to the Oval Office, his expression unreadable.

"CJ?"

She straightened up as she twisted around to face him. "Mr. President?"

He smiled faintly, and slipped his hands into his pockets before he spoke. "I think it's time I talked to the press."

She answered the phone somewhat tentatively when it rang; yesterday's blaze of fiery courage had fizzled away after sleeping on it, to be replaced by the usual paranoia. What if the newspapers started cutting up her words? What if the press office was going to be angry at her for calling up reporters on her own time? What if she'd sounded too... pretentious, stupid, naïve, inarticulate, snobbish, immature, dumb, insecure, childish, scatterbrained, pathetic...?

"Hello?" she asked hesitantly.

"Eleanor."

Some of the tautness in her stomach eased. "Mom!" She didn't sound mad.

"How are you feeling, honey?"

"Nervous," she admitted. She could talk to her mother in some strange way, an ability to communicate that she'd never quite had with her friends or her sisters or even her therapist - never mind with her dad.

Her mother's tones were kind and comforting. "That was a brave thing you did, Eleanor. Your father's very proud of you this morning. You made him very happy."

"That makes a change," she noted wryly.

A warning note entered her mother's voice. "Eleanor..."

"No, mom, I- I've been so childish for so long about dad. Having all these stupid fights for no reason, always acting like he was never there for me when I knew he really was... I must have really hurt him."

"Oh, honey," her mother sighed lovingly. "Don't start blaming yourself for things you can't control. Your father had a hard start in life, and it left some bruises on him; you can't try to take responsibility for the things that scarred him forty years ago."

"I wish I'd known," she mumbled quietly.

"I know, I know. But it wouldn't have changed anything and it couldn't have stopped this, so don't you go beating yourself up over it. Your father's a strong man; he's been through some dark times, and he'll come through this."

"You think?" Ellie wondered tentatively.

"I'm sure."

Her mother's certainty made her feel stronger.

"Toby." The president smiled at his most ornery advisor as he shuffled in. Toby had been avoiding him this week, probably on the - not unreasonable - assumption that if they were in the same room together, he would sooner or later end up saying something less than sensitive. It wasn't that Toby set out to offend, just that in his world, tact and careful dancing around awkward issues were things that happened to other people.

It was a bluntness that could bruise; but was also, in its own way, more refreshing than unrequested sympathies.

"Mr. President." He sat down.

"You and CJ got that statement together for me?"

"Mostly, sir," he agreed neutrally. They both knew that in the end, it was going to be Jed himself who dictated what was and wasn't said out in that pressroom. He had that much control... but it wasn't total. The press could be restricted and ordered as the White House liked, but if an out-of-line question was loosed anyway, and it struck home, the world was going to see it.

But he was ready to do this.

He had to be.

There was silence for a moment and it hung between them, because Toby was a man who knew as he did that a good silence filled a space as well as any words, and sometimes better. Jed thought about his father, and all the ways things could have gone differently than they did.

Even now, there was no hatred in him, and the anger only felt more like frustration. You could articulate a catalogue of abuses, small and large, but the fact that the accounts were real didn't make them complete. On the outside, you could separate out the bad times cleanly, and say; 'This is what this is'. On the inside... the times in between mattered too. You couldn't sum a life, a relationship, a human being, in tally marks of good and evil.

His father had been a man who had done things the wrong way... but whether, underneath that, he had or hadn't been a good man was not for Jed to say. He only knew what he knew, and for good or ill, he had loved his father, and still did. A part of him still ached with the belief that some way, some how, things could have gone differently. And maybe it was wrong... but it would always be there.

He glanced up at Toby. "Did you ever think about being a father, Toby?"

Surprisingly, his advisor stayed looking at the floor, and spoke quietly. "Yes, sir."

"You and Andy talked about having kids?"

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you?" It was a personal question, but meant in honest curiosity. He'd been thinking on this a lot lately; what made a person decide to become a parent, and how could you know that you were ready, or that you weren't? Had his father been caught off-guard and off-balance by a child he'd never understood how to deal with... or had he thought all along that he was doing right, raising his son as men were supposed to raise their sons?

It was a question he could never know the answer to, but he was doomed to chase it forever all the same. He wouldn't, couldn't believe that his father had been a bad man at his core... so where had it gone wrong? It was the wondering that haunted him.

Toby sighed very quietly, a melancholy whisper of sound. "We tried. It didn't... we couldn't. The babies never... well, they never turned into babies."

Jed's heart had always broken more easily for others than for himself - and the measured, collected solemnity of Toby's words was a harder punch than any blast of grief-stricken histrionics.

"Oh, Toby..." he breathed in fractured dismay. "You never said a word." It was a twist to the gut to be so sharply reminded that his own old pains were only one small part of the tapestry of silent grief that underwove all human dealing. Everybody had scars under the surface that they didn't like to show.

"It's not... a thing you say," he said softly, with a small, tight smile behind his beard.

"You shouldn't have to..." Jed shook his head "You shouldn't have to go through that sort of thing alone. You should have come to us, Toby - why didn't you come to us?"

"And you would have done what?" he asked. Not in sarcasm, just in weary honesty.

"We would have known," he said simply.

It honestly wouldn't have occurred to him to think of his words as at all hypocritical. It just wasn't in his nature to view himself through those eyes.

Toby shook his head mutely, somewhere else across time and space. "We didn't... There wasn't a time to... It was hard on Andy," he finished. As if this was the be-all and end-all of the repercussions, the sole fact of importance.

"You were there too, Toby," Jed reminded him gently.

"It was... a hard time," he said neutrally, and it was difficult to tell that if this was agreement, argument, or just a simple statement of fact.

Jed sighed, and reached out to take his sleeve in muted sympathy. "You could have come to us, Toby," he said softly. "You know that. Everybody has their hard times, and there's no shame in admitting that."

He was silent for a beat, and then he repeated, quietly, reflectively, "There's no shame in admitting that."

Abbey watched her husband take the podium with her heart wrapped in a familiar web of pride mixed with fear and anticipation. Beside her, Zoey clutched Charlie's hand tensely. The press were remarkably controlled, but their collective gaze was sharp and intense, prepared to catch the slightest falter or stumble.

Please, God, just don't let him stumble.

He smiled, and it was the slightly melancholy smile, not the brilliant beam he usually showed the press. She could never say she liked that smile, knowing there was such a thread of sadness underneath it, but it laid a fragile beauty on him, an echo of the solemnly earnest young student she'd long ago first known.

When he spoke, his voice was as firm and as steady as it had always been, and even after all this time, she found his strength could still amaze her.

"Good morning." He swept his gaze over the assembled press and found, from somewhere, a flicker of wry amusement. "I'm sure you've got a lot of questions you want to ask me, most of which I will not be answering, but let's see if I can get through this first, if I may." He had the prepared statement printed out in front of him, but she could see his occasional glances were little more than casual reassurance - he was in control, and comfortable with his words.

"There's been a lot of nonsense about me in the papers lately..." he took a breath- "and, admittedly, some truth as well. I appreciate that, as the president, the details of my life carry some interest for the people of America, and that I don't have as much privacy as I would like about my past and my family... but my childhood is my own, and I see no need to dwell on it. I'm touched by the people's concern-" funny how, in that simple and commendable statement, some of the press could still find enough guilt to drop their eyes- "but it's unwarranted. I am... as strong as I've ever been."

He gripped the edge of the podium for emphasis. Watching him, Abbey realised like a great weight being lifted from her heart that she believed him. It was only now, seeing him up there in his element and bending the world around him to the force of his charisma, that she truly knew that he was going to be all right.

He was her husband, he was Jed Bartlet, he was the President of the United States of America, and he could do anything he wanted. Whatever life threw at him, he would overcome it.

He nodded slowly at the reporters. "My father was... my father. I'm not sure what else you think I'm going to add to that, or should be able to. He was my father, and whatever did or didn't happen so long ago is between him and me. And forgive me, but I intend to have it stay there. My childhood shaped me, and I won't pretend that it isn't a part of who I am today... but I think the time for discussing its ins and outs is long past. You want to know more? Read a biography."

There was a ripple through the room at that, not so much quite amusement as a startled titter. She wondered if it was only in her imagination that she read an echo of her own relief to hear him joking.

Jed smiled, and the light in his eyes - that wonderful, beautiful light - was back. "This is not a place for dwelling on the past. We are not a people who are locked in the past. America is young and strong and vibrant, and we look to the future. We are not an old, decaying empire resting on its laurels and polishing the remains of ancient victories - our day of destiny is still ahead, and we're walking towards it with open arms. So we've come through dark and dangerous places - so what? We're American. And the American dream is about making it better."

If this had been a partisan crowd, they would be on their feet and cheering. Instead, they were seasoned political journalists and they were straightening in their seats and drinking it in, feeling the power of his words as only fellow wordsmiths could. Abbey felt her skin tingling, not just for the man she married but for something larger; for what he was and what he represented, in this time, in this place.

"I didn't become President of the United States because I wanted to fix my father, because I wanted to spite the past, because I wanted to be more or different than what I used to be - I became the president because there's so much future out there." He flung a hand out, alive with the passion of his words.

"So much future, and so many ways to grasp it, to make it better. So many ways we haven't begun to imagine yet, and we never will, if we keep looking backwards. Forget the past- we've got our eyes on the horizon, because that's where our destiny is. Where we came from isn't important, only where we're going, and why we want to. The world of the past we carry with us, for better or worst, but the world of the future is ours to shape. Our fathers made this world for us; now we get to make the one we pass on to our children."

He held out an open palm to Charlie and Zoey, and the young couple stepped forward hesitantly, both beaming. "Today, I have the great pleasure to announce that I'm soon to be a grandfather for the second time. And I'd just like to say... my presidency is not about my father. It's about my children, and my children's children, and giving them the future they deserve. Charlie and Zoey, ladies and gentlemen, give them your congratulations."

In the shelter of the swell of applause that the press were perhaps grateful for a good excuse to give, he stepped down from the podium, and moved to join his wife. Abbey pressed a kiss to his lips without a single thought of their audience, and smiled up at him.

"You did good, honey," she said, letting her tone say all the things that the words didn't begin to.

The little grin that appeared on his lips blossomed into a full blown smile. "I know," he agreed, and kissed her back.

Around them, cameras flashed, capturing the scene for posterity. A president, a First Lady, a pair of young parents-to-be, but more than that...

A family.