MONDAY:

He dreamed.

Not lingering images or words; sensations, a blur of emotions with no concrete base. If there was a coherent storyline, it flowed out of his mind as easily as it flowed in, leaving no trace of its passing but for eddies in the deeper currents of old memories.

Fragments only, gone too fast to snatch at, but through it all a feeling of tightness in his chest. Desperation, urgency. The need to do it right; find the magic word, the secret combination, the pattern behind the random sequence. Looking for the key, the logic, the correct decision, the right move.

That nagging feeling, that niggling sensation that it could all turn out differently if he could just get it right...

Jed woke up.

The dream and the recollection of dreaming faded into nothing, but the edge of urgency cut onwards. Cigarette, he needed a cigarette.

He didn't smoke.

Dammit, he was the leader of the free world, he couldn't stomp out there to that building full of people who worked for him and demand one of them give him a cigarette?

He wasn't supposed to smoke.

He sat up in bed and breathed for a few moments, feeling the heart in his chest hammer away and not really knowing the reason. Panic attack, was this a panic attack? Was that what this felt like?

No, of course not. Just dreams. Just bad dreams.

He breathed.

His heart was winding down, slowly, but his chest still ached slightly from the pounding. It was dark in his room; he'd woken before the alarm again. Since when had he started doing that? It happened all too frequently lately; he couldn't get to sleep, but once he did he couldn't stay there.

And now his pulse was calm.

Jed stood up and made his way over to find his clothes by instinct, all the while hearing Abbey's voice chide him not to stumble about in the dark. He wished she was there, even though she'd still be sleeping. He was gripped by a sudden urge to call her, just to hear her voice, thick with sleep at this ungodly hour and fading down the scale from bright panic into annoyance.

And maybe she wouldn't mind, if he told her how much he missed her. Told her he'd needed to call her, because-

(Nightmares, but he didn't remember, couldn't feel the shape of them, couldn't explain them... Sourceless faceless nameless panic, building in his chest, and he didn't know why-)

And he wanted to tell her that he couldn't do it right. He didn't even know what it was, but the nervousness in his belly kept telling him that he couldn't get anywhere, wouldn't be able to succeed at anything, if he couldn't get it right-

The desire to try and put these nonsensical feelings into words quickly passed. Jed dressed in the dark, and got ready for work.

"Tony."

"Mitch."

With their dark suits, over-precise nods and the brisk, curt way they greeted each other, the two men could have been any pair of young urban professionals out on an assignment in the early hours. They were not.

The two Secret Service agents let themselves into the apartment across from their young protectees. Both of its occupants quickly glanced up to ascertain the key was being used by who it was supposed to be, and just as quickly went back to scanning their surroundings. You never relaxed when your relief arrived. Twice as many agents in the house could go from being your strongest point to your weakest if there was a moment when everybody was distracted.

"Anything to report?"

"Negative." The young woman kept her eyes on the quiet street outside as she spoke. "Motion in the apartment at four AM, but it was Osprey." The First Daughter's graduation from college had rendered her old codename of Bookbag somewhat obsolete, and the christening of the home she shared with her new husband as the Nest had provided opportunity to give them both new monikers at the start of their married life.

"She's sick again?"

"Maybe. Lights are out now. Peregrine'll be up for work in fifteen."

"Okay."

It wasn't until the new arrivals were fully settled in that the agents they were replacing made any move to go. Peregrine's detail would arrive for the day with his car; the two of them would remain here with his young wife.

As the other agents left for a well-deserved dose of sleep, Mitch glanced across at his partner.

"You think she is?"

Tony shrugged non-committally.

Mitch answered his own question. "I think she is." He settled down for a long day of waiting and watching, and added thoughtfully to himself "I wonder how Eagle's gonna take it."

Either Tony disapproved of his partner's uncalled for speculation... or he couldn't begin to guess, either.

"You okay?" Charlie asked, glancing up from his computer as his wife - his train of thought still bounced a little on its tracks at the interjection of that word - as she shuffled past in her dressing robe. Mussed up, tired, free from make-up, and as beautiful as he'd ever seen her.

"I'm fine." She flopped back against the bed and yawned. "I'd be better if you didn't wake me up at unholy hours of the morning all the time."

He refrained from pointing out how she'd woken him first half an hour beforehand, because he suspected reminding her that she'd been throwing up was not the way to go in avoiding a repeat performance.

He closed Deanna's email and spun around in his chair. "You're going in today?"

"Yeah." She had her eyes closed, but he knew from experience that it took her ages of tossing and turning before she could easily drop off to sleep. Strangely, even being repeatedly elbowed in the side had yet to lose its charm and novelty.

"Sure you don't want me to come with you?" he asked again. She looked up at him from under her eyelashes.

"And just skip out on work for the morning? I think my dad would have something to say about that."

"We could tell him why," he pointed out.

Zoey pulled a disbelieving face. "Sure, if you want to do that."

"Maybe we should wait until we're sure," he agreed dryly.

"Yeah."

"Still-"

"I'll be fine, Charlie."

"Okay." He stood up, shutting the computer down.

"How's Deanna?"

"She's okay. Going on about how college is the best thing ever and living in halls is the greatest thing that's ever happened to her. I gotta tell you, it's a real ego boost."

"Hey, you'd prefer her to be living with us?"

And on that point, he conceded. It was weird and a little disorienting still to not have Deanna around, but he supposed she was safer in a hall full of students than living in their old neighbourhood on her own.

"Fair point. I've gotta get to work."

"Yeah. See you tonight, Charlie."

"Yeah." He came over to place a gentle kiss on her cheek, and she smiled with her eyes still shut. He pulled the door to softly and switched the light off to let her get some sleep.

It was still weird having his own Secret Service escort take him to work - even if the limo did come in handy. He would have traded in the transport in a heartbeat for the freedom to go where he wanted and do what he pleased, but he supposed that was behind him now.

Still, he could daydream that one day he would no longer be at a high enough risk to merit a Secret Service presence. The president, he knew, would never have that luxury. Former presidents might no longer have to worry about politically-motivated assassination, but glory-seeking lunatics and those with twisted vendettas paid no heed to term limits. The face of a young black man who married well might fade from the history books, but nobody forgot former presidents.

The weight of the position had always shown clearly in Jed Bartlet's quiet moments, and it was stamped across his features stronger than ever these days. Charlie regarded him worriedly as he arrived at work. The president was staring into space, as he did a lot lately; not the exhausted spacing out that had happened when his MS was at its most punishing, but a sign of preoccupation with some unknown mental torment.

Charlie had to clear his throat for attention. "Mr. President?"

He shook himself out of his fog of contemplation. "Charlie," he nodded brightly.

"Are you all right?" He had to ask it, although he knew what the answer would be.

"I'm fine." He smiled, and the lines of worry in his face momentarily straightened out. "How's Zoey?"

"She's good." He hesitated for a beat too long before giving the answer, but the president didn't seem to notice.

And so the day began.

"You're making a big mistake," Steve warned.

"I don't care." Sam knotted his tie in the front of the mirror, ignoring his boyfriend's reflected face as he hovered behind his shoulder.

"Sam-"

"Look, I said I was gonna do it, I'm gonna do it, okay?" he said firmly.

"I wish you wouldn't."

"Well, you know, I don't really see what it has to do with you, anyway."

Steve massaged his forehead. "This is because I said-"

"It's my decision. You were fine with it when I told you Friday."

"Yeah, but I didn't expect it to last this long."

Sam narrowed his eyes. "You think I've got no sticking power?"

"I think this is a terrible idea."

"Well, I don't."

"Sam, trust me, don't do it. I say this for your own protection."

Sam folded his arms. "Steve, you're not talking me out of it."

He rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Fine. Whatever. But don't say I didn't warn you." He leaned forward to give him a goodbye kiss. Sam looked at him curiously as he pulled back, probably expecting him to make some comment, but he refused to give him the satisfaction. "Bye, Sam."

Sam hesitated, and gave him a slightly sheepish smile. Somehow he seemed to feel the need to be apologetic about arguing even when he was sure he was right. "See you tonight?"

"Get ready to hear the 'I told you so's," Steve warned. Sam rolled his eyes, and left.

Alone, Steve shook his head, and strolled resignedly back to bed. Well, he'd tried to warn him... what more could he do?

Toby appeared in her office with his usual bright smile and sunny disposition.

"It's early. Why am I here?" He stomped over to her desk. CJ smirked at him.

"I'm sorry, did I drag you away from Andy?"

"No."

She peered at him over the top of her glasses. "Well, Jeez, Toby, why the hell not?" she demanded, rolling her eyes.

"We're taking things slowly."

"You need some time to get to know each other?" she asked sardonically.

"You can't just walk up to your ex-wife and say 'marry me again'."

"How can you be so sure?" she wondered.

"'Cause I already tried that."

CJ frowned. "What did she say?"

"She didn't."

"Well, that's always a good sign."

"Andy wants to make sure of my intentions," said Toby wryly. "She's yet to be fully convinced we're on the same wavelength."

"What makes her say that?"

"Experience, mostly," he said dryly. "She says she needs to know I'm doing this for the right reasons."

"Well, why are you doing this?" CJ asked him.

"Because I want to."

She raised an eyebrow. "I'm amazed you haven't bowled her over with your irrefutable logic."

"The bowling over is a work in progress," he shrugged.

CJ offered a small smile of understanding, and shifted subjects. "So. The book."

"It's here?"

"People will have been reading. All quiet on the western front so far, but..." She shrugged expressively.

"How long?"

"It starts hitting the net today, I could be hearing the question tomorrow," she warned.

Toby grimaced. "There should have been more preparation than this."

"We have to look after the president, Toby," she reminded him.

"It helps him to have his staff kept in the dark until the absolute last minute?"

"Toby, this isn't..." She pulled a frustrated face. "This isn't something he can talk about."

"I'm thinking if it makes the international news, it's gonna be a talking point."

That, unfortunately, was nothing but the unvarnished truth. "He's not taking any questions," CJ said sharply. "I don't care if we have to keep him locked in the Oval Office for the next three years, he is not taking any questions on this."

Toby gruffly nodded his assent, although they both knew that resolution was mostly wishful thinking. They could refuse to schedule press conferences and hustle the president away from shouted questions at airports, but they couldn't sever his contact with the media if they wanted to, and sooner or later, if the press wanted to get that question through, they would get it.

But meanwhile, they were his faithful footsoldiers, and they'd protect him as best they could.

"Have you spoken to him?" Toby asked. CJ only winced in answer; it wasn't exactly a conversation she was looking forward to.

Toby made an eloquent little half shrug gesture that somehow got across that he'd offer to do it if they didn't both know that was a terrible idea. Toby's habit of speaking with blunt pragmatism had done enough damage in this delicate subject area already.

"You've got somebody monitoring the websites?" he asked after a few moments.

"I put Carol on it." This wasn't a duty she'd trust to the usual neverending pool of faceless interns.

"Okay." He turned to go. CJ hesitated, and then called out to him.

"Toby!" He looked at her. "I hope you two crazy kids work it out this time."

He nodded slowly, and sighed. "I think Andy's beginning to remember why she married me." He gave a wry smile. "It's just that she hasn't forgotten why we got divorced."

He left.

"Josh Lyman's office?"

"Hi, Donna." Despite herself, Abbey had to smile in wonderment at the younger woman's bright, efficient tone. She couldn't begin to imagine what it took to deal with Josh Lyman this early in the morning.

"Good morning ma'am- Abbey." She'd insisted on that correction immediately, but although their first such phone conversation had been months ago, Donna still hadn't trained herself into it. She seemed to find it freshly surprising every time that the First Lady would want to talk to her.

Abbey had been sceptical of this arrangement when CJ had first suggested it - not because she was at all doubting of Donna's competency, but because it seemed completely unfair to charge her with the duty of unofficial president-sitting on top of her already far beyond reasonable workload.

She'd changed her tune the minute she realised exactly how perceptive the younger woman was when it came to her husband's subtle shifts in mood. Apparently, despite Josh's notorious inability to keep his emotions off his face, there were skills involved in Lyman-watching that translated.

Abbey quite often - although not as often as Jed's paranoia led him to believe - kept a remote check on how her husband was doing in her absence via a few well-meaning observers. Unfortunately, most of them were unable to distinguish any level of mood beyond the most obvious states of "bouncy", "shouting", "sulking" and "oh God, get me out of here, he's talking about fjords again".

Donnatella Moss, however, could read him with an accuracy it took most people decades to learn.

"How's he doing, Donna?"

There was a short pause while Donna considered her answer, and she could hear the tapping of typewriter keys.

"He was quite cheerful Sunday. Josh took over the figures on the farming subsidies and he kept him there for hours talking about crop rotation. I think he was a bit lonely, actually."

Many people would have laughed aloud at the idea that the President of the United States of America could ever be given opportunity to get lonely, but Abbey understood. Jed didn't just thrive on intellectual conversation, he needed it. His constant diverging into streams of trivia wasn't merely the geekish showing off most people tagged it as, but a form of release; his brain boiled over with thoughts at times, and he needed to offload them on people or explode. Swarms of sycophants, hangers-on and over-helpful aides were exactly what he didn't want - he needed somebody to argue with and spark off.

"How about this morning?"

"I only saw him for a few minutes, but he seemed a bit subdued. Charlie looked more worried than stressed, so I'd guess he's brooding. He misses you," she added hesitantly.

"I miss him too," Abbey sighed. She paused, and then smiled. "Oh, and one last thing - what colour tie was he wearing?"

"Um, I'm sorry-?" Donna sounded like she thought she couldn't have heard right.

"Tie. Can you remember what one he was wearing?"

"The blue one, with the diamonds," she said, as if this was the kind of detail anybody would have registered. "Is that-?"

"Ah, I just want to mess with his head a little," she grinned.

There was a quick knock, and Lily appeared in the doorway, hovering. She knew she had to go. "Okay, thanks, Donna, I really appreciate it."

She hung up the phone, smiled resignedly at her aide, and echoed her husband's favourite words. "Okay. What's next?"

Josh frowned as his assistant set down the phone as he came in.

"Who was that?"

"That was the First Lady."

He froze in the process of taking his coat off. "Oh, God, what did I do?"

"Nothing, she was just checking in with me about something."

"Oh, God, what did you tell her I did?"

She smirked at him. "You're paranoid, Joshua."

"I'm not paranoid! It's just that you're all out to get me."

"We were just talking."

"The First Lady phones you up to just talk?"

"Yes."

"About me?"

Donna gave him a scathing look. "No."

"Then what are you talking about?"

"Shocking as it may seem, Josh, we're able to scratch around for a few other subject areas."

He narrowed his eyes. "You're not going to tell me, are you?"

"No."

"My instincts tell me you're plotting some kind of rebellion against me."

"I can see how you would think that. We oppressed peoples have a history of it."

"I do not oppress you!" She just looked at him. He ducked away from her gaze and walked over to hang his jacket up.

"Senior staff in twenty," she reminded him.

"I know." Although he'd actually thought it was half an hour later, but there was really no need to share that.

"And Congresswoman Henderson called to confirm your lunch meeting."

"Yeah," he agreed distractedly, entering his office searching for a file.

Donna followed him in, picked up the file he was looking for, and handed it to him with a frown. "You're having lunch with Vicky Henderson?"

"Yeah... I'd been meaning to set up a meeting with her, and I ran into her at the weekend," he elaborated. Donna didn't have quite a Margaret-like protectiveness over the contents of his appointment book, but she did possess a healthy scepticism about his ability to schedule himself.

"What's the meeting about?" she asked, grabbing her planner to ink it in.

"Marriage."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "You're planning to propose?"

"Gay marriage," he elaborated.

"You're proposing to her brother?"

Josh gave her a look.

"I'm just testing the waters."

The thought of actually moving anywhere on gay marriage and adoption was an unrealistic dream, but he felt compelled to chase it up anyway. It was the next logical step in the president's anti-prejudice initiative, albeit one that was more of a giant leap. If wrenching the military away from their beloved 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy was hard, it was nothing on taking on hard-line religious groups over the sanctity of marriage.

Still, the trick was to keep chipping away. Vicky Henderson was just the latest in a long line of Congresspeople he'd been rounding up and sounding out. Not the die-hard liberals who could be relied on to back such a move with entirely too much enthusiasm, but the ones closer to the centre; those who'd never expressed an opinion, or were excessively careful to keep it ambiguous.

He wouldn't get any of them leaping up to announce to the world that gay marriage was their new crusade. But if he applied enough of a constant pressure, and then abruptly stepped back and offered the more easily swallowed suggestion of better legal rights for gay partnerships...

That was how the game was played.

He skimmed through the file Donna had given him, and got ready for senior staff.

Sam was conscious of eyes on him as he walked through the corridors of the West Wing. He wondered if they were trying to figure out what was different about him, or if they'd even noticed anything at all. Maybe it wasn't obvious yet, at least not from a distance.

He passed into the communications bullpen. No Toby to be seen - he was probably already on his way to senior staff, or else talking with CJ. "Hey Bonnie. Hey Ginger."

The two assistants turned to greet him, and then exchanged a glance.

"Hey, Sam," said Ginger, somewhat tentatively.

He frowned down at the pile of folders on the edge of the desk. "Do we have the notes from Friday's conference?"

"Toby's got 'em." Bonnie scurried across into his office, and brought out the file to hand to Sam.

"Thanks." He took the folder from her hands, noticing she was looking at him oddly.

He headed into his office, and after a few moments, Ginger followed him in. She hovered hesitantly in the doorway, and he gave her a questioning look.

"Is something-?"

"Um, Sam, did you-?" She gestured vaguely to her face. "Did you, you know, not get time to shave this morning? Because-"

He smiled, and rubbed his chin. "I know. I'm growing a beard," he explained.

"Oh." She digested that. "Okay..."

Ginger left, pulling the door closed behind her.

A few moments later, there was a burst of poorly-concealed giggling from the bullpen. Sam decided to ignore it.

Not the most auspicious beginning ever, but... these things took time.

The phone rang, and he picked it up fast enough to almost knock it off his desk. "Abbey."

"Hey, babe." She sounded concerned, and he'd probably been too desperate to answer her call, but the promise of hearing her voice had been too much to let him hesitate. "You sound kinda ragged. Did you sleep?"

"I slept." And dreamed. And woke up in the early hours of the morning with something that might or might not have been a panic attack.

But that was just a bad dream, and she didn't need to know every little detail of his bad dreams.

"You should take it easy today, Jed. You're looking tired."

He had to smile at that. "And how would you know that?" he demanded, feeling the tension in his back relax a little as amusement crept into his voice.

"I see everything, sugar." He could picture her smile.

"Of course you do. How could I forget?"

"And now I see that you're smirking."

"Ah, that's just the process of deduction," he refuted.

"And you're wearing your blue tie with the diamond pattern."

He had to flip it up to look at it. "Okay, now you're scaring me."

She laughed, and when he closed his eyes he could picture her perfectly. It made the room seem closer and cosier somehow.

"Spies! You have spies in my White House," he accused.

"I'm just looking out for you from a distance, babe."

"I know."

He knew. And whatever joking complaints he might make about not getting a moment to himself, the knowledge that she cared enough to do it kept him warm.

She knew she was only delaying the inevitable. The president had to be told that things were about to come to a head. To let him be blindsided by this would be not just neglectful, but actively cruel. No amount of preparation was going to make this kind of raking over past injuries easy to stomach, but at least he could know when it was coming.

Still, she bargained with herself, it would be better to tell him tonight. The news was nearly spilt, but the White House Press Corps would do some very careful fact checking before they brought this kind of thing into the press room, and to tell him this early and let it hang over his head all day was hardly necessary.

Caught up in analysing her own argument to see how much was sound and how much just reluctance, CJ literally bumped into Sam coming the other way.

"Sorry, Sam- Holy God, what happened to your face?"

"Morning, CJ," he said dryly.

CJ stepped up to him and peered at his chin closely. "Is that... stubble?"

"It's my revenge."

She gave him an eloquent look. "It's your revenge."

"Steve grew a beard a few weeks ago," Sam explained. "I hated it, and it took me forever to convince him to shave it off." He grinned devilishly. "Now he too can experience the freakiness that is kissing a guy with facial hair."

CJ snickered. "Well, much as I, um, applaud the deviousness of your plan, that's really more of a facial fuzz at the moment."

"Give it time," he insisted optimistically.

CJ sighed, and shook her head. Then, impulsively, she stepped forward and gave him a sudden hug. "Thank you, Samuel," she mumbled against his shoulder.

Sam tilted his head to one side to look at her as she stepped back. "What was that for?" he smiled in puzzlement.

"Giving me something to smirk over in an otherwise crappy day," she explained.

"All part of the service," he shrugged easily, turning to continue on his way. "Coming to senior staff?" he asked over his shoulder.

"In a minute," she nodded. "I've just got to go check on something with Carol."

She hurried back to her office. On the way, her face was split by a sudden uncontrollable grin.

Leo straightened up as the senior staff started to trickle in. "Okay, Sam, Toby, what are you- Sam, did you forget to shave this morning?"

Sam brushed a hand over his chin. "It's a beard."

"It's really not," Toby scowled.

"Okay." He left that one alone. "What are you guys working on?"

"I'm going over the language on the trade unions thing for Josh," Sam explained. "And Toby's- glaring at me, mostly."

Toby glared at him.

"Sam, are you meeting with anybody today?" Leo asked him.

He frowned. "Just a few guys from finance. Why-?"

Leo gave him a sharp look. "You meet with anybody in an official capacity, that's either gonna be a real beard, or it's gonna be gone, okay? We don't need you representing the White House looking like you slept in your office for three days."

"Curiously, nobody ever says this when I have slept in my office for three days," Sam noted.

"That's because when you do that, you have the sense to shave," CJ put in as she arrived and took her seat.

"Okay." Leo glanced down at his notes. "Now, can we-"

The door creaked as Josh strolled in. He took one look at Sam, and immediately started to snicker.

"Can we start this meeting?" Leo demanded irritably.

"Can we point and laugh?" Josh wanted to know.

He changed his mind. "You know what? Let's just wrap this up now. All of you, out, before I fire the lot of you. Josh, stick behind a minute."

The others all filed out, Sam cupping his chin defensively and giving Josh a dirty look.

Leo had a feeling this was going to be a long day.

Josh looked across at his boss expectantly. "What's up? Apart from Sam's inherent comedy value," he added, smirking.

Leo gave him a sideways glance. "I seem to recall a certain law student who once thought it would be a good idea to try growing a moustache one summer vacation."

Josh became suddenly very preoccupied with his shoes. "You needed to see me?"

"You're meeting with Vicky Henderson?"

"It's just lunch."

Leo sighed. "Josh, I know you'd like to be able to go somewhere on gay marriage, but realistically-"

"I'm just testing the waters," he shrugged defensively.

"These are shark-infested waters, Josh."

"Leo, she knows I'm not- It's just a lunch."

"You're lunching your way through the moderate centre of Congress, Josh, and people are beginning to take notice." He hesitated for a beat. "You're keeping this little-league?"

"I'm not starting anything, Leo," he insisted earnestly. "I'm just feeling for our roots on this."

"Okay," he agreed quietly. "Okay. But I don't want this on the president's radar, and I don't want CJ getting the question."

"That won't happen." Whatever daydreaming he might be doing, Josh knew better than to call attention to the administration's position on such a divisive issue. If they knew they could get something through, they could just take a position and damn the fallout, but when their hands were tied, all they could look forward to were attacks from one side for considering, and attacks from the other for not doing it.

Leo nodded, and then gave him a small smile. "Josh," he added, as he turned away.

"Huh?"

"You might want to try Innes and Garvey after Henderson."

Josh grinned back. He reached for the door, but Margaret came through it as he was about to open it.

"Leo." She indicated the phone, and he picked it up.

"Leo McGarry." Josh hovered in the doorway as Leo listened, stony face betraying nothing. "When did this happen? Okay, do we-? Okay. Yeah."

He put the phone down.

Josh frowned. "Leo, what's happening?"

He looked up at his deputy gravely. "The Ambassador to Cambodia's disappeared."

Jed glanced up as the door to Leo's office swung open. His Chief of Staff looked grave; he got to his feet, wearily ready for the latest crisis.

"Leo?"

"You're needed in the Sit Room," he explained without preamble. "The Ambassador to Cambodia's disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"He left his home seven o'clock last night, never came back. And given the situation out there-"

Jed winced. "They're sure this isn't-?"

"He missed two meetings and lunch with his wife. This is a thing."

"Aw, hell." He sighed and rubbed his forehead, and Leo gave him a look.

"You okay? You look beat."

"It's been a busy five years," Jed reminded him sardonically.

They headed for the Situation Room.

Sam sat back in his chair to frown over the paragraphs he'd just highlighted, and stroked his beard thoughtfully. Then he glanced across at his boss to see if he'd noticed.

Toby scowled at him fiercely, and leaned over his laptop to tap the delete key.

"Hey!" Sam protested, and quickly hit undo. "You wound me, Toby."

"Not yet. Soon," he promised darkly.

"There's really no need for that kind of thing, Toby," Sam shrugged. "We're men of the world. Bearded men," he added.

Toby pointed at his own beard. "This is a serious beard! Do not make a mockery of it by attempting to categorise it with your wispy little three-day growth!"

CJ, just arriving in the doorway, snickered loudly. "I'm sorry, did I come at a bad time?"

"He won't take my beard seriously, CJ," Sam pouted.

"Well that's... hard to believe," she said dryly. She glanced across at Toby. "I need a statement on the Cambodian Ambassador."

"The Cambodian Ambassador is missing, nobody knows why. No questions."

"Possibly a tad longer than that," she said dryly.

"I'm sure Sam could furnish you with some unnecessarily florid embellishment."

"My descriptive passages add colour," Sam protested.

"Yes. Mostly purple."

Sam was mustering an appropriately biting response to that when Ginger stuck her head through the door beside CJ.

"Toby? Andy's here."

CJ and Sam both turned to look at him. "Hey, Toby, you've got a date?" Sam grinned.

CJ took charge. "Well, okay, what's going to happen now is-"

"I'm going to leave this with Sam while I go on my date," Toby cut her off.

She blinked for a moment. "Well, okay, that's what I was going to suggest, but now I feel compelled to ask 'who are you, and what have you done with the real Toby Ziegler?'"

"See, he trusts me more now," Sam grinned. "Because I look more mature." He pointed at his beard.

Toby tapped Ginger on the shoulder on his way out. "Have somebody have him killed before I get back."

Leo watched with some concern as the president dropped into his seat with only a sloppy gesture for the military personnel to sit down. He'd accepted the non-explanation explanation that the office was just weighing heavily, as it did from time to time, but the fact was that now wasn't anywhere near the top of the presidential stress scale. Something was eating at the president, and apparently it wasn't work-related. Not good.

He just hoped it wasn't another bout of poor health. Wasn't the new diet and rest schedule supposed to take care of that? Not that the president looked like he'd been getting all that much rest lately...

The president dropped into his chair and pulled it close to the table. "Nancy, give me some good news," he said shortly.

Nancy glanced across at Leo, who could only give her a tiny shrug of an eyebrow to say he couldn't put a finger on it. "Mr. President, our man in Cambodia, Nathan Williamson, disappeared outside his home in Phnom Penh at nineteen hundred hours local time last night. Given the unsettled nature of that region and his failure to return for several official meetings scheduled for this morning, we're treating this as a suspicious incident."

The president smiled thinly. "Apparently our definitions of 'good news' rather differ." His sarcasm had the sharper edge it took on when he was under strain. "I thought we were on good terms with Cambodia?"

"We are," she agreed. "For what it's worth. The infrastructure's so corrupt it's difficult to tell the bad guys without a scorecard."

"Any word on who's responsible?" Leo asked, taking the lead.

"Not a peep," Nancy told him. "Pick a villain; you've got Golden Triangle heroin passing through, the cannabis trade... there's narcotics-related corruption at almost all levels of government, and the CPP's up to its eyeballs in accusations of election fraud."

"What about the Khmer Rouge?" Leo asked.

Nancy could only shrug. "They're still operational in the northwestern part of the country. A lot of their support's bled dry, but... yeah, it's still a possibility."

"Great," the president grimaced. "Where were our guys in the Embassy while this was going on? Asleep?"

"Our protection out there's pretty thin on the ground," Mick spoke up from his left.

"And Ambassador Williamson had a well-documented habit of ducking it at every opportunity," Tom added.

The president grumbled something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like "I should be so lucky."

"Okay. So what are doing about getting the details?" Leo scooted forward in his chair, suspecting he was going to be the one directing the rest of this meeting. It was far from unusual for the president to be sullen and ornery, but usually he at least knew what was at the root of it.

He felt like his own problems with alcohol earlier in the year had placed a strain on their relationship - not that Jed Bartlet had ever been the poster boy for openness in the first place. But now he was doubly careful not to offload his problems on his Chief of Staff, and that meant that when Abbey was out of town, he had nobody.

Oh, there was Stanley Keyworth - his visits to the White House had become a semi-regular occurrence, and damn the political aspects, that was probably a good idea. But Jed was at best sceptical of and at worst vehemently opposed to the whole practise of psychotherapy. It might help him a little to bounce his feelings off a neutral sounding board, but Leo knew he'd never be comfortable enough to fully expose his most personal issues in such a setting.

No, whatever was eating at the president, he was keeping it under wraps - but that didn't mean it was well hidden. No one could miss his disconnectedness from the meeting around him or the weariness stamped across his features, and Leo only prayed that whatever the cause of this mood, he broke out of it before the psychological pressure spilled over into something more physical in nature.

Toby was impatient while she deliberated over the menu. He was careful not to show it, but she still knew. In Tobyworld, food was fuel, to be got out of the way with minimum interruption to the business of argument. She, however, liked to take the time to consider all her options and allow the appropriate weight to deciding whether to go with what could be trusted or take a chance on something new. She wasn't about to make a rush decision just because all the waiting around irritated Toby.

Just as he no doubt knew she was silently bristling over his brusqueness to the serving staff; he would argue that he was like that with everybody, she would argue that they didn't know that and it made him seem like a snob...

There were times when you had to ask why they were doing this again.

"You know, dating you hasn't changed in all this time," she observed, relaxing a little after the orders were placed. It was true. Toby had never pretended to be anything other than the stubborn, self-righteous, endlessly argumentative person he was now. It was one of the things she'd found refreshing about him, after meeting so many people in politics who hid their darker sides behind false fronts and slimy smiles. Toby Ziegler wore his flaws with pride and his best points as if they were a quiet embarrassment to him.

That hadn't changed, although, like many other things, it had lost a certain amount of its charm with the passage of time.

"Last time, you agreed to marry me when I asked you," he reminded her.

"Last time, I didn't have the benefit of having experienced that happy state once before."

"So you won't marry me." He scowled, as if this was a particularly frustrating negotiation with a member of Congress who was being illogical.

"Give it time, Toby. A girl wants to be romanced," she added with a playful smirk.

Toby spread his hands to indicate the room. "Is this not romance?"

"This is a restaurant."

"There's a difference?"

She chuckled. "I continue to be amazed I let a catch like you go."

"As do I."

She smiled, and squeezed his hand. They were silent for a moment, still growing re-accustomed to the contact that had once been second nature. Then;

"Would you marry me if I got you pregnant?"

The waiter, returning to their table, gave Toby a very funny look. He tilted his head to looked up at him challengingly.

"Yes?"

Ah, dating Toby Ziegler. An experience few sane people would be prepared to go through once, let alone twice. She was out of her mind.

And she was enjoying every minute of it.

Of the many virtues he would be happy to recite to anyone who asked, even Josh himself would have to admit that patience didn't top the list.

Or, indeed, appear on it.

If Donna was here, she'd have been poking him in the side to quit fidgeting by now. Then again, had Donna been here, she'd probably have had contact phone numbers and other organisational things like that.

He'd had three cups of coffee, and paced off to the restroom and back enough times that the young woman taking orders had begun eyeing him with suspicion.

He kept checking his phone for messages, but there was nothing, and his cell was working fine. Donna wouldn't have failed to contact him if Congresswoman Henderson's office had called her for any reason. Unless he'd done something, of course, but he couldn't remember Donna being especially pissed at him for anything in recent memory. Of course, when he had done something, he rarely knew it...

She wasn't coming. Here he was, Deputy Chief of Staff getting stood up by a two-bit Congresswoman for some district he couldn't even remember. Okay, he'd set this up as purely an informal chat, and it was only one in a long chain of meetings for him, but it should have been a big thing for her.

Congress. Always so convinced of their own importance. He wouldn't have pegged Vicky as the type to show off how important she was by skipping a meeting with the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, but you could never tell.

Well, he wasn't wasting all his time. He signalled that he was ready to settle the bill.

"If a short woman with red hair comes in, can you tell her I've gone back to work?" he asked the waitress. "I'm Josh Lyman."

She gave a smile that was almost but not quite a smirk. "Your girlfriend stood you up?"

"It's a business meeting," he corrected quickly, but from the way she made a big show of nodding and accepting that, he didn't think she believed him.

He stomped out to hail a cab in a foul mood.

Monitoring websites was a pretty regular part of her daily routine, but since the latest set had been added to her workload, Carol experienced a whole new level of heart-in-mouth when she sat down at her PC. These sites were her responsibility alone; there was no team of interns conducting regular sweeps to catch the minutiae she'd missed.

Of course, they weren't really looking for minutiae - more like nuclear explosions.

Everybody who might have had a chance at so much of a sniff at an advance copy of Jed: Portrait of a Future President was under close scrutiny. Carol began the usual sweep of literary critics, biographers and First Family trivia fans. The latter were a less familiar group - they didn't usually have to contend with situations where the story could break as easily via one of the groupies the president would probably be highly unnerved to know he had as from the highest echelons of Congress.

She clicked onto the next in line of literary websites, and felt her heart lurch. Read Paul Kafka's review of the New Presidential Biography.

And there it was.

There was more, but Carol was already out of her chair and in the doorway to CJ's office. "CJ? It's here."

CJ didn't need to be told what 'it' might be. Rogers had already opened the can of worms - they'd only been waiting for somebody to come along and slap a label on it.

"Where?" The press secretary marched quickly over to Carol's computer, and her aide had to scurry to keep up with her long stride.

"Paul Kafka's review."

"What are the forums like?"

"Buzzing," Carol could see after just one click of the mouse. She ran her gaze down the list of responses, more interested in who was posting than what they had to say. "Most of these people are anonymous or newly registered."

"They've been pointed here from somewhere else," CJ agreed tensely.

They exchanged a glance. "It's out," said Carol softly.

CJ straightened up, and immediately headed away.

"CJ?" she called questioningly.

"I have to talk to the president," CJ said, without looking over her shoulder.

There were times - many, many of them - when Carol didn't envy her boss's high-profile position one bit.

"Come on, Donna," Ed urged.

"You must have an opinion," Larry added.

"I don't!" she insisted.

"Oh, please. Everybody in this office has got an opinion, you don't have one?"

She folded her arms. "Seriously, I don't know."

"Make a guess!" Larry demanded.

"I give it three days before he snaps," said Ed.

"I say tomorrow."

"Hey, he might go the distance," Donna shrugged.

"Sam?"

"Keep the beard?" Ed and Larry looked at each other.

"Can't see it," they said in stereo.

"I think he might look nice with a beard," Donna suggested loyally.

"I think Toby feels threatened," Ed suddenly suggested on a tangent.

"He's losing his unique status," Larry agreed.

"The interns won't be able to tell each other 'watch out for the guy with the beard, he's the dangerous one'."

"It's damaging to his aura of mystique."

These high-level musings were interrupted by the stomped arrival of Josh, and the cloud of bad mood he was travelling under. Donna gave the two of them a resigned eyebrow flicker in place of a farewell, and followed him into his office.

"What's up?"

He stared at her. "I got stood up!"

She tried to hide her snicker, and didn't quite make it. He scowled at her.

"Victoria Henderson's small potatoes! She shouldn't be pulling stunts like this, she's been in Congress long enough to know the White House doesn't take this amateur crap! Find out what happened."

"I'm on it," she said earnestly, recognising his need to aim his temper at a suitable target. "Senator Bracknell came by to talk about the new gun bill - he's in with Sam."

"Thanks," he said automatically, even as he stormed off.

She wandered back out to rejoin Ed and Larry.

"What's up with the boss-man?"

"Josh's in a bad mood because he got stood up."

Larry blinked. "Josh had a date?"

"No."

"And the world returns to its axis."

She chuckled. "Oh, it's just a Congresswoman didn't make his lunch meeting. Probably traffic or something - Josh has a tendency to mix up his getting dizzy with the world revolving around him. I'll call her office in a while, find out what happened." She shuffled her chair closer. "But first... explain to me the odds on this whole shaving sweepstakes thing again?"

"Leo?"

He glanced up from his work, and nodded at Margaret when he saw Nancy lurking by her shoulder. The National Security advisor stepped inside, and he looked a question at her.

"No news," she told him with a grimace. He slammed the flat of his hand against the desktop in frustration.

"Dammit, Nancy-" Her pantomime shrug cut off the rest of his pointless rant, and he just shook his head. "How can a US ambassador just vanish into thin air?"

"It's some pretty thick air out there, Leo," she reminded him.

"We need to know, Nancy." With things as unsettled as they were out in Cambodia, the problem wasn't finding a suspect, but making damn sure the finger of blame was pointed at the right member of a cast of thousands. The potential for explosion... "So help me, Nancy, if they find a body-"

"Our boys are on it, Leo," she reminded him calmly, with a wry twist to her voice that upbraided him more succinctly than any verbal reprimand. The National Security Advisor didn't need him telling her what was going on.

He subsided, and sighed heavily. "I'm not liking bringing this before the president, Nancy."

"Yeah." There was a moment of silent commiseration. President Bartlet, they both knew, was a man who didn't deal well with incomplete information.

Nancy glanced up at him, with a shred look in her eye. "What's riding the president's ass, Leo?" she asked bluntly.

He shot her a sharp stern look. "Nancy, you know I can't-"

"I don't want you to tell me, Leo," she said softly, looking him in the eye. "I want to know if you know."

He looked down. Yeah, something was riding the president's ass all right - and he didn't have the first clue what, except that it was personal.

And that bothered him more than he could possibly put into words.

He knew as soon as Charlie showed CJ into the Oval Office. It was stamped all over her face with the bitter ink of pity and resignation.

He heaved a heavy sigh, and sat back to look at her. She shook her head, and held her forehead a moment, before saying softly "I'm sorry."

Jed nodded slowly, knowing it wasn't her place to be making apologies but unwilling to just brush it aside. If CJ was the voice of his position, then this was as close as he was going to get to an apology for all the things that his presidency put him through.

That he put himself through, ultimately. After all, it was only pride that had brought him this far.

Pride, and the old ghosts that were once more scratching at the doorposts.

Jed breathed, and banished the constriction in his chest back into the shadows with the boy to whom it belonged. "Maybe this will all just fade out unnoticed," he said softly, with a trace of a quiet smile.

He didn't believe it as he said it, and CJ only looked at him sadly. She hesitated, and then said "The others need to know."

He could have laughed at that. Nobody needed to know. It was past, dead, buried, gone; locked in a box of memory where it belonged. He didn't open that box anymore, and nobody else should ever need to, either.

Jed gave a short hand-gesture, signalling his reluctant acquiescence. CJ was doing her job, he couldn't fault her there, and he knew it was only respect for his emotional frailties that had kept people out of the loop far long than they should have been.

She was right, they were going to know, whatever happened, and maybe it was best that they heard it from her. Maybe then they'd have time to compose the careful masks that would hide all those feelings that he didn't want to see.

He didn't want their pity, or their sympathy, or their understanding. He didn't want to be recast in their eyes as the victim or the underdog triumphant. He just wanted it to be over. Gone, with no shadow left to linger over his life.

And apparently, that wasn't going to happen.

CJ hesitated in the doorway, and then turned back. "Mr. President?" she said, almost shyly. "If you ever need to-"

Jed smiled, his first genuine smile of the day for all that the offer was nothing he'd ever have accepted. "I'm fine, CJ," he told her softly. And he was. After all, it was nothing more than a spider's web of shadow and old memory. It could brush over him to send chills through him, but there was nothing left there that could hurt him. Not anymore.

His father was dead and buried, and there was no call to go disturbing the sanctity of his grave in search of a bogeyman. Whatever his faults, he was only a man, and he was still Jed's father, not some Victorian literary nightmare of a caricature.

He called CJ back. "They're going to tear him apart, CJ," he told her soberly. "And... I don't want that." He sighed quietly to himself. "I don't want that."

"Hey, honey, I'm home!" he called sarcastically.

"And not clean-shaven yet," Steve noted, appearing from the bedroom to run a playful hand over his boyfriend's rough cheek.

"I'm keeping the beard," Sam told him sternly, tapping him on the nose.

"Did you learn nothing from your day of mockery?"

He frowned. "How do you know I got mocked?"

Steve smiled wryly. "I took a wild guess."

"I'll have you know," Sam reminded him, "that these are some of the smartest, most professional, most high-level political operatives in the whole of the USA - hell, in the world - I work with."

"They mocked you," Steve repeatedly knowingly.

"Apart from the ones who didn't care," Sam admitted. "But I'll push on, regardless! Did they not mock Darwin when he proposed the theory of evolution?"

"Your beard is going to rock the scientific world on its foundations?"

"We never know until we try."

Steve laughed, and pulled him close for a tight hug. "Actually, I kinda like it," he admittedly, running his thumb along Sam's jawline, and then kissing him.

"Really? 'Cause I kind of grew it just to annoy you," Sam admitted.

"Didn't work." Steve kissed the base of his neck again.

"Well, that's a shame, 'cause-" He broke off at another feather-light kiss. "Although now I'm thinking that it's possible that it has other benefits."

Steve laughed, and pulled him into his arms.

Charlie dropped his keys on the countertop as he moved into the kitchen.

"You're early," Zoey called from the other room, as he shrugged out of his coat and poured himself a glass of juice.

"Your father had a few hours free at the end of the day." A few hours that had taken an act of unspoken coordination by the White House staff, as everybody pulled together to lighten the burden on a president suffering from worries unknown. But now was not the time to drop that kind of concern on Zoey.

He crossed over to the bedroom, and found her sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, lost in thought. He leaned his head against the doorframe until she looked up at him. "Did you go?" he asked softly.

She nodded. "Yeah."

"And, they said-?"

"Yeah. They said... yeah."

Charlie blinked for a few moments, and then crossed the room to flop onto the bed beside her. They were silent for a while, and then he glanced up at her. "Are you...?"

"I'm fine," she said quietly, still staring into the distance. He tugged on her arm, and she obligingly moved down to rest her head against his shoulder.

"So what do we do now?" he wondered, slipping his arms gently around her waist.

Zoey snuggled close against him, her eyes closed. "What people normally do, I suppose." She shrugged, and her hair tickled his chin.

"What's that?" he wondered only half-rhetorically, blowing strands of hair away from his mouth.

She laughed softly, and shrugged again. "We'll figure it out."

"Yeah."

He tilted her face up to look at him, and gave her a gentle kiss.

"We'll figure it out," he promised.

Ah, an early night - a precious gift, rarely heard of in the hectic day to day life of a president.

Wasted on him now, when sleep stubbornly refused to visit.

He'd been a restless sleeper all his childhood, often having to rise in the middle of the night and tug his sheets back into place to the accompaniment of his brother's snores. The habit had followed him to college, and had only finally been banished when he'd married Abbey and had her soothing presence beside him to tide him over into the dark.

It resurfaced when she was gone from his side, but normally exhaustion was enough to drag him down into unconsciousness before insomnia could put up more than a token resistance. Except for on these nights; the nights when the thoughts refused to stop churning.

He'd always had a problem with philosophy. Others might find their thoughts falling into circular patterns and abandon them, but his did the opposite - they just kept branching out and branching out until there were too many tracks for even his fast-moving brain to keep a grip on. His mind was built for finding answers, and where there were none it kept on stretching itself thinner and thinner in the quest for them until he felt almost transparent.

These were the questions that had forced him away from theology and into the safely repeatable formulae of economics.

These were the questions that visited him at three AM.

He thought of his father, and how he might feel to be embroiled in such a mess as was coming on the next tide of press questions. A futile pursuit, for when had his father's mind been anything but unknowable?

Disappointment, that was a given. He'd be disappointed in Jed for not preventing this, for allowing such things as his emotions and his private life to be aired in public, to creep in front of matters of work and duty. That wasn't how Bartlets did things. That wasn't how men did things.

And what would he say, if he knew Jed was seeing a psychiatrist? What's wrong with you, boy? that's what he'd say. And what would Jed be able to say, apart from "Nothing"?

In New Hampshire, you didn't see psychiatrists over 'nothing'. You didn't dig up the past just for the sake of getting it out, you didn't have to go rooting around for excuses when everyone in the world could see you were doing perfectly fine for yourself. He wasn't a victim! Life hadn't dealt him a bum hand. He had an amazing wife and three amazing children, he had the kind of friends nobody had the right to ask for, he had the job every all-American boy was raised to aspire to...

His father wasn't an ogre, he wasn't the bogeyman. He'd raised him harshly, but the forge of his early years had prepared him for a life that could be cold and cruel and dangerous, and he'd learned early that there was no such thing as satisfaction, no such thing as enough, no such thing as the point where you could stop and be content that you'd achieved all you needed to.

His father's hand had shaped him, where a softer touch might have let him collapse into formlessness, never learning the drive that had propelled him through all his life. He knew that, and through the filter of distance and time, he could value that. For better or worse, his past had brought him to where he was and who he was today, and for that, he could have no complaints.

And his past was also just that... past. They had no business digging it up, and raking over the coals of fires long burned-out.

No business at all.

Jed rolled over on his side, and tried to sleep.

TUESDAY:

Donna cradled the phone against her chin and spun around to look up at Josh as he came in. "Did you-?" he began.

"Yes. No. There was nobody there. I'm doing it now."

Josh blinked at her for a few moments, caught halfway through the motion of shrugging out of his jacket. "Um..."

Donna rolled her eyes. "Okay, Josh, ask."

He straightened up, and let the coat slide slowly off his shoulders. "Did you call Vicky Henderson's office?"

"Yes."

"And did you find out why she stood me up yesterday?"

"No."

"Why not?" he demanded.

"There was nobody there."

"Well, did you try again this morning?"

"I'm doing it now."

There was a short pause, and she could see the wheels of thought turning as he mentally replayed her side of the conversation. He tilted his head to smile wryly at her. "Do I need to be here at all?"

"Yes. If you weren't here, we might accidentally become efficient, and that would throw the entire system of government off the rails."

"Well, we can't have that." Equilibrium recovered, he grinned at her and resumed heading for his office. "Any messages?"

"CJ wants to see you and Sam when you've both got a moment."

He came to a halt again. "CJ?"

"Yeah."

"Do you know why?"

Donna had a sickly nervous feeling that yes, she probably did. The tension in CJ's face, the tired eyes and frown lines she'd had to report at this morning's presidential check-in session... But Josh didn't know about that particular unofficial arrangement, and it probably wasn't the best way to drag him into such a distressingly murky subject area... best to let CJ handle it.

"She just said she wanted to see the two of you as soon as possible."

"Me and Sam, together?" he checked.

"Yeah."

Josh's expression slowly melted into a frown of contemplation. "Okay." He headed into his office.

He stuck his head around Leo's door and waited for the Chief of Staff to look up. Behind the miniature shields of his glasses, his eyes were tired.

"Toby," he acknowledged.

"Any news on Cambodia?"

He already knew the answer before Leo shook his head.

"Nobody's claiming responsibility, nobody saw anything. They're still hoping for a ransom note, but they're looking for a body."

Toby nodded slightly. "And if they don't find either?"

Leo smiled wryly, an expression with no good humour in it. "Then we take this to the next level, and we do whatever we've got to do."

"Yeah."

He turned to leave, but Leo called him back.

"Toby... how's things with Andy?"

He shrugged infinitesimally. "They're... progressing. Mostly in a stationary sense, but this is an improvement."

It had been a long time indeed since things with him and Andy had been anything but actively degenerating. Any frustration at her insistence on taking their reconciliation so slowly was more than offset by the vague bemusement that such a second chance existed at all. The pain of the miscarriages and the thousand stresses and frustrations of trying everything that was to be tried might have accelerated the rate of cracking, but he was well aware that the most compliant person in the world would find him hell on earth to live with, and Andy was far from that.

Leo dismissed him with a short nod of acknowledgement. It was difficult to tell if he was lending his tacit support to Toby's efforts because it represented hope of recovery from his own estrangement, or because such hope had long since flown. Most probably, Leo himself didn't know, either.

Toby went back to his office.

"Good morning, CJ." The First Lady's voice was laced with a tension audible even over the phone lines. "Today's the day?"

"Yes, ma'am," she admitted tightly.

There was a moment's silence from the other end, and then Abbey unknowingly echoed her husband's quiet wish of the night before. "There's no chance this could-"

"It's been spreading over the internet since last night. So far they're going with 'unconfirmed allegations', but-"

"Only a matter of time before the press feel like they have enough confirmation to pop the question," she completed.

"Yeah."

"And then-?"

"Then we dig our trenches, and hunker down for a drawn out fight," CJ admitted darkly.

There was no way the press were leaving this little titbit alone - it was just too juicy. The public were always hungry for every little detail of their premier's private life, and so far Josiah Bartlet had provided them disappointingly little in the way of closeted skeletons. He had the kind of love-life that you couldn't dream of in a candidate - thirty-five years of marriage without a breath of scandal, and before that - of all things - a trainee priest. Occasionally rocky relations with various daughters notwithstanding, he was a devoted father and doting grandfather, and his speech about his brand new son-in-law at Charlie and Zoey's wedding had brought tears to more than a few eyes in the audience.

Even the biggest scandal of his political career was one that brought about as much sympathy as feelings of betrayal. The fact was that Jed Bartlet seemed almost too wholesome to be true - and as much as the American public liked to pretend that was what they wanted in a president, the truth was they liked a good smear of dirt even more.

The papers knew that truth full well, and there were far too many angles to this story they could play up to let it die quietly. From sensationalistic revelations to the good old 'underdog triumphant' theme that had graced so many TV movies, they weren't going to let this go until they'd mined every last possible source of column inches out of it.

Never mind what it was doing to the man at the centre of it all.

Abbey let out a heavy breath that crackled along the phone line. "You've spoken to him?"

"Last night."

It was hard to tell if the sigh that followed was depressed or angry. "He should have called me."

"It was late," CJ offered, although she didn't really think that was the reason.

"Okay." The First Lady's voice grew stronger as she shifted from things she couldn't control into their course of action. "Who knows, and who needs to?"

"Carol knows," CJ supplied. "And Donna."

"Ah, yes, Donna." Abbey's voice momentarily brightened. "Honestly, CJ, whatever we're paying that young lady, it's not enough."

"I know," CJ agreed. "On the other hand, what they're paying me's not enough, so-"

It occurred to her at the last minute that the comment she would have made automatically to Josh or Sam or Toby was maybe a little less than appropriate, but the First Lady only laughed. "CJ, if any of you people were looking to get rich quick you'd have moved onto greener pastures a long time ago."

"Except Leo," CJ pointed out. "I have it on good authority that Leo's loaded."

"So I've heard," she chuckled, but the jocularity quickly faded. "I'll need to talk to Leo."

CJ didn't envy her that, and in truth was glad she'd accepted the responsibility without being asked; that was one conversation she wasn't sure she could handle. Breaking the news to the others would be bad enough, but Leo... She just couldn't imagine it.

"I'll speak to Josh and Sam later this morning."

"And Toby already knows," the First Lady completed. There was a pause. "You said he figured things out for himself?" she asked, in the tones of somebody on the edge of clicking a few puzzle pieces together.

CJ wasn't entirely sure how to answer, especially considering she wasn't too clear on how he'd done it herself. "Toby has... a sense for things, sometimes."

He never missed the subtle things. Occasionally he missed the thirty foot pink neon signs that said 'Do Not Go There - No, Really, Do Not Go There, Do Not Even Think About Going There'... but he never missed the subtle things.

"Still, he knew... he didn't have his suspicions, he knew." There was a pregnant pause. "CJ... did he say something to the president?"

Now there, if ever there had been one, was a loaded question. Hearing the sheathed claws in the First Lady's voice, she was suddenly very very glad that she wasn't really party to the answer.

"He... I got the impression that there might have been... I honestly don't know."

"There was a time..." Abbey's voice grew distant for a moment as she tried to recollect. "There was a time just before re-election when Toby upset him. He never would say what they'd argued about, but... Toby upset him."

CJ struggled to recall the same incident, but there were just too many times of taut nerves and frayed tempers to try and pick out any one point where relations had been frostier. Unless...

"That would have been about the time that the president started... seeking help for his insomnia."

As opposed to 'talking to a therapist' or 'seeing Stanley Keyworth', which would have quite, quite different connotations which she knew nothing about, no sir. No knowledge of any such arrangement. Never informed. Couldn't possibly be expected to comment on that.

"Yeah." There was a silence, and then Abbey said explosively "CJ, what the hell good could he possibly think that would do?"

CJ winced at the barely restrained anger in First Lady's tone, although she suspected most of it was aimed at a target much further out of reach than Toby Ziegler. She picked her next words carefully.

"Toby... Toby doesn't think parents should be held to a different standard just because they're parents."

"Yeah," said the First Lady quietly. "Yeah."

Sam walked in the office with a cheerful spring in his step. Toby handed him a razor without missing a beat. "Go. Shave."

"Hey, Toby-" he began to protest, and then paused. "Did you go out and buy this specially just to make a point?"

Toby gave him a flat stare. "I refuse to share office space with anybody who is one acne outbreak away from the facial characteristics of a fifteen-year-old."

"I never suffered from acne," Sam felt obliged to point out.

"Of course you didn't. Shave," he tossed over his shoulder as he headed into his office.

Sam turned as Ginger walked into the bullpen. "He's mocking my beard, Ginger," he said in injured tones.

She frowned and shrugged. "I thought you said you only grew it as revenge on Steve?"

"It's growing on me," he confessed, stroking his chin.

"That's generally the normal procedure for beards, Sam."

Ignoring that, he spun back to Toby as he re-emerged. "Toby, do you know why CJ wants to see me?"

Toby paused, and while his expression was unreadable, Sam could feel there was a reason why he made it that way. He held his boss's gaze for a beat.

"Go to the meeting, Sam," was all he said, before he walked off.

"Hey, babe."

Jed smiled, and his heart lightened. "Hey."

"I spoke to CJ."

"Oh." There was an irrational stab of... what? Dull anger, frustration... that accompanied the knowledge that even this simple pleasure couldn't be free from the taint of this same shadow hanging over anything. Dammit, it was past, it was over, why couldn't anybody let it rest?

Abbey read all that in one syllable, or else she just knew him. "I could be home by this afternoon," she offered gently.

And he wanted her there, but... This wasn't anything. It wasn't anything but good old muck-raking journalism at its finest, turning over long-buried troubles to air them with a good splash of sensationalism and no context. It wasn't some repressed horror story of torture and brutality waiting to flood out and overwhelm him, and he didn't need to be treated as if he was made of crystal.

He didn't want that. He'd never wanted that.

"Your thing doesn't finish 'til Thursday."

"I can cancel."

"You don't need to do that."

"I want to be there."

"And I want you here!" Jed smiled gently into the phone, for all that she couldn't see it. "But if that was how it worked, you'd never go anywhere."

She chuckled softly, a sound that resonated with him like the purring of a cat. "I want to be there," she told him with quiet intensity.

"It's only two days," he said, instead of all the other things he could have said.

"Two days is a long time, babe."

"Don't I know it," he agreed with a wry twist of a smile. He meant it only as an echo of the same longing they always felt when they were apart, but despite himself something of his maudlin mood crept into his voice. It was too much to expect that she could miss it.

"Jed, I can be there in-"

"You should finish your thing," he insisted, unwittingly using a hint of the tone that had commanded the girls when they were younger. The result was explosively predictable.

"Oh, dammit Jed, will you forget about my thing?"

"You don't like it when I do that," he pointed out, keeping his tone light enough to strip away the passive-aggressiveness that might have suffused it when tempers were frayed. Neither of them was looking for a fight today.

He obligingly filled in for her with a mental picture of the eye-roll she would be sending his way.

"I don't know why I ever decided to keep you," she sighed to herself.

"'Cause all the other boys were not nearly so cute," Jed supplied with cheerful confidence.

"You are not nearly so charming as you think you are, mister," she warned playfully.

"That's okay. You're charming enough for both of us."

Today, she let him get away with such a line, without a dry aside to puncture it. There was a brief, comfortable silence.

"Jed..." she said finally. "It's okay to be upset."

"It was a long time ago, Abbey," he reminded her. "It was a long time ago, and I'm not a little boy anymore. It's all the past."

It was all in the past.

He just wished it would have the decency to stay there.

And there they were, gazing up at her, all innocence. Well, Sam looked innocent. Josh had yet to master the art, even when he was as close to that particular state as he ever got.

Like now. Neither of them was blind; both had realised there was something in the air, both had approached her at separate times for assurances that when they needed to know, they'd be told.

And now they needed to know.

"CJ, what's this about?" Josh asked, brow wrinkling. Sam leaned back in his chair to frown at her. She would have found the way his fingers persisted in worrying at his fledgling beard amusing under other circumstances.

There wasn't a whole lot of amusement going on for her right now.

Keep it brisk, keep it professional. Get it out before somebody exploded from the tension. Probably her. CJ took a breath, and reached for the print-outs Carol had made for her.

"This is an excerpt from a book review by an internet critic called Paul Kafka. It's about the new presidential biography that's just going on general release later this month."

They took the papers she handed them, puzzled when she gave no further explanation, and exchanged a troubled glance before reading. Sam, obedient little legal-eagle that he was, finished his first, and looked up at her with startled eyes.

"What-? CJ, they can't-"

Josh's habit of skim-reading had obviously just been tripped up on an inflammatory phrase, as he shot bolt upright in his chair, nearly upsetting the table. "The hell? CJ-"

"Where do they get this stuff from? They can't possibly-"

"Boys." They both fell silent at her tone, and looked up at her.

"CJ...?" Sam questioned hesitantly, and she had to brush back her hair in a gesture that any rookie reporter would have leapt on as an avoidance tactic.

"This is-" she smiled slightly, but only from a flash of nervous awkwardness that she'd thought she'd left behind long before her press secretary days. "This isn't just... This is real."

They both stared at her, Josh frozen halfway through gesturing with his paper. The sight of a static, silenced Josh Lyman was a frightening thing, like some harbinger of the apocalypse.

Sam slowly shook his head. "CJ, no-"

"The president had..." She had to force the words out through teeth that wanted to be gritted, and look anywhere but at either of their faces. "The president had... a bad relationship with his father. I don't... I don't know the details, but it... but it was bad."

Hmm. So much for that Matrix award for her contribution to articulate, professional communication.

Sam rubbed his face and struggled to process it. "Still. This is talking like-"

"CJ... how bad?" Josh spoke softly, but managed to override Sam's firmer statement anyway. "I mean, is this... are we talking...?" He trailed off, and it was her job to fill the silences, God help her.

"There was... I'm given to understand that there was an element of physical violence." The coolly technical phrasing refused to do its job of robbing the words of their resonance. Josh let out an explosive huff of breath that might have had a curse buried in it, and Sam squeezed his eyes shut in dismay.

There was silence. Slowly, Josh pulled his chair in to the table, and sat looking into its not quite reflective surface for a moment. He met her eyes. "CJ... is there any way we can protect him from this?"

And she had to mechanically shake her head. "I... honest to God, I don't see how."

"Margaret, I'm just-"

"Take a break."

"I'm just, you know, sitting here-"

"Take a break!"

Leo glared at his assistant. She remained stubbornly unmoved. "I'm taking a break!"

She had her hands on her hips, for God's sake. Did people actually do that? "I don't see you getting up and moving around."

"What do you want me to do? Yoga?" he snapped irritably.

"It's not good for you, all this sitting around. You've been sitting in the same position since four AM. You should at least walk down to the mess. Or even the restroom. You haven't even been down to the restroom! And, you know, bladder problems are no-"

Okay, this was a decidedly worrying tangent. Next thing you know, she'd be supplying him with some long list of herbal remedies or badgering him into booking in with the doctor for a physical. Once Margaret got started on the subjects of possible ailments he could be suffering from...

"Margaret, could we possibly leave my bladder out of the discussion? 'Cause I'm really not-"

She sniffed. "Fine, but don't come running to me when-"

The phone rang.

"Oh, sweet merciful release." He grabbed for it, earning him another glare for the grand impertinence of answering his own phonecalls. "Leo McGarry."

He listened. "Okay. Yeah." He put the receiver down.

He'd been told he had a stony face, but Margaret could read it. All bladder-related talk forgotten, she asked nervously "What's happened?"

He looked up at her gravely. "They found a body."

Perhaps whatever strange malaise had overtaken the president was contagious, for even Charlie looked dead on his feet. Leo frowned at him. "You look beat, Charlie. Didn't you get any sleep last night? Wait... you're a married man, and I don't wanna know that."

The young aide managed to muster up a sketchy smile, and opened the door to the meeting room. "Mr. President?"

The president looked up, seemingly almost relieved to be interrupted from whatever interminable meeting he was engaged in, but the expression soon faded when he saw Leo's face.

"Mr. President, we need you in the Situation Room," he said. Wishing that for once he had something different to report, like 'Mr. President, your daughters have unexpectedly decided to drop by', or 'Mr. President, there's a new peace treaty in the Middle East' or even 'Mr. President, I just dropped by to bring you an ice-cream'. Not that the president was allowed to eat ice-cream. Whatever stresses he was under, his new health regimen didn't even allow him the solace of comfort eating.

And dammit, why did he know so little about what was bothering the president that he was turning to dietary solutions, for God's sake?

Jed excused himself from the meeting and stood up wearily, following Leo out of the room. "Cambodia?"

"They found a body."

His face tightened in a grimace of dismay. "Damn."

"Yeah."

They walked along in silence for a while, and then Jed glanced across at him concernedly. "Is everything okay with Sam? He looks like he hasn't shaved in days."

Leo grinned, relieved to be able to put at least one presidential worry to rest. "Well, he claims to be growing a beard."

Jed's eyebrows raised. "Okay." He gave Leo a curious look. "Is that some kind of masculinity thing?"

"I think it's actually a 'making a point to his boyfriend about facial hair' thing, but to be honest, I'd stopped listening by that point."

"Ah."

The moment of levity was short-lived, moods and stomachs dropping as they entered the Situation Room. No matter how many times he'd been down here, he never got rid of the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in some old war movie, where the colours were dull and washed out and they cast the actors for the sternness of their jaws and the ability to weight each line with stony gravity.

He'd seen too many movies... but too much of the movies rang true.

The briefing was as frustratingly enigmatic as he'd expected. The body of Nathan Williamson had been found in a back alley with a single bullet wound through the back of the head. Nobody had seen anything, nobody had heard anything, and the body had been stripped and dumped. And no one was claiming responsibility.

"Goddammit, can't anybody here tell me anything?" the president exploded, thumping a fist on the desk.

He'd seen the eruption coming in the president's attitude of slumped frustration, but he couldn't say he didn't sympathise with it. "Nancy, how does a representative of the US Government get shot through the back of the head without anybody seeing anything?"

She shot him a sideways look, as if to say she expected this from the president but he should know better. "He ducked his protection detail, Leo. It happens."

It happened. Three and a half years on, the sound of gunfire still echoed in his ears in every darkened alley, and the roaring of a crowd could never sound entirely innocent. The younger members of his staff might still believe that one day it would fade. Leo, still waking some nights to the whine of engines and the taste of stale cockpit air, knew different.

His palms itched, and deliberately not thinking about whiskey took up more concentration than thinking of it.

Jed had subsided, running a weary hand through the front of his hair. There was grey creeping in at the temples, and Leo wondered if that was new, or if it had always been there, hidden behind the aura of vibrancy and invincibility. "Can we trust the local police?"

Nancy gave one of her trademark non-reassuring shrugs. "We need their cooperation on this, Mr. President. We start getting heavy-handed and move our boys in, no one's going to tell them a damn thing, and we run the risk of destabilising the entire region."

Leo scowled. "There's corruption stretching to the highest level out there, Nancy! For all we know we could be trusting the investigation to the same organisation that was behind it."

She gave him a 'settle down and quit agitating the president' look. "You know we have to tread carefully out there. Stirring up resentment towards the US is only going to bolster Phnom Penh's ties with Beijing."

"They shot our ambassador in the back of the head, I'm thinking there's some resentment going on out there already!" Leo pointed out acerbically. The president sighed heavily.

"This guy was somebody's father, somebody's son," he reminded them. It was always that way for Jed; never statistics, never expenditures or manpower or dry facts in a file... always people. As Commander in Chief, it was his greatest strength and his heaviest burden.

Jed looked at his National Security Advisor. "Tell me our options, Nancy."

And so the argument rolled onwards, circling continually without drawing any closer to a conclusion.

Josh returned to his office an itching ball of tension and agitation. His instincts were telling him to go on the offensive, and he didn't have anybody to charge at yet. Only a couple of faceless names on the internet, and it wasn't really their fault, and anyway, CJ had done something to his web browser so it came up with a warning every time that said simply "Motherboard, Josh".

Still, he was nearly certain that she didn't really have the spy camera and the instant messenger alert that told her every time he went further than his email account.

But anyway, blasting a few guys who made insensitive comments in response to a book review wouldn't do anything but make him feel better. The press were probably picking up the whispers by now, but they weren't going to ask until they were sure this wasn't a quickly blown out hoax, and that took time. Time they could afford to take, because this story wasn't going anywhere, and why not? Because it was totally irrelevant, but would that stop them? No.

He could predict right now exactly what-stupid ass things were going to come out of whose ferociously right-wing mouths - things about weaknesses and mental instability and other such stereotypical claptrap - but CJ failed to see the beauty in his theory of giving pre-emptive smackdowns. Apparently, he was supposed to wait for people to actually say their stupid things before he was allowed to smack them for it, which pretty much sucked.

Josh passed through into his office, vaguely registering Donna's presence on the periphery of his field of vision. Donna knew. CJ had told her months ago. He understood why, and even agreed with her... Donna had a way of seeing through jobs and titles to the people beneath, and she never missed signs that other people couldn't see.

His hand, in a gesture he was completely unconscious of, stole briefly to his chest and traced the line of his scar.

Still, he felt a strange mixture of... what? The same feeling he'd had when Toby had told her about the MS, a stab of relief that he hadn't had to see the expression on her face, coupled with the disoriented sensation that he should have been the one to tell her. Because she was his assistant, and his... well, his Donna.

That seemed the simplest term to file the conflicting list of things she was and wasn't to him under, because it wasn't as if he was particularly likely to ever meet another. The other staff in the office might have assistants, but none of them had a Donna. Although the president had once had a Mrs. Landingham... But she was gone now, and with that in mind, Josh wasn't about to begrudge him a shared guardian angel.

He wondered what Donna would think of this confusedly meandering little train of thought. It would probably have earned him a smack round the head for being possessive. That, or a hug and a smile.

Hmm. He really should learn to get better at reading Donna.

She followed him in, and he struggled to remember what he'd last asked her to do. It seemed like a very long time had passed in the space of a half hour meeting. Ah, yes. "Did you find out why Vicky Henderson stood me up?" Josh tried to inject a note of humour into his voice, but it fell even flatter than he'd expected when he saw the expression on her face.

"Yeah, um, she, um... she hasn't been in the office. Her... her little girl died."

He stared at her. "She, uh... what?" For a moment, he was in another place and time, with the sounds of a victory party echoing loud behind him, and the look on Donna's face filling up the world. He knew that face well, but he wished he'd never had reason to. Donnatella Moss could never be the bearer of bad news without it leeching into her own compassionate being.

"What- what happened?" he stuttered out.

"There was an accident, I- I don't know. There was a fire. She, um, she died Sunday night."

And he couldn't think of anything to say. "Oh. I... oh."

Donna's eyes were huge with worry. "Josh, are you-?"

"I'm fine," he told her automatically. "I'm... really fine."

Well, not fine, because fine wasn't a good thing to be when you heard about anybody's children dying, no matter how well you did or didn't know them, and right now he was feeling seventeen different kinds of asshole for bitching about her missing the meeting, but... he was fine.

It was a terrible tragedy, but a tragedy completely unconnected with him, and he had no good reason to be anything other than fine.

Josh looked up, and met Donna's eyes. "How old was she?" he had to ask, although he knew the answer was going to hurt no matter what it was.

"Nine. She was- she was nine."

Donna gave him a sorrowful look, and left the office. He sat alone, staring at the wall.

For just a moment, he imagined he could smell burnt popcorn.

Cambodia.

...The Royal Cambodian government was formed in September 1993 as a coalition of the Cambodian People's Party(CPP), Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party (BLDP) and the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC)...

His eyes were wandering. Jed tried to concentrate on his reading, but it remained a frustrating blur of entirely too many acronyms. This was supposed to be the stuff he was skimming over to get to the full, comprehensive details of the current political climate, but he just couldn't seem to get it to fix in his head; every time his eyes encountered one of those ever-present jumbles of letters, his brain just froze up on trying to remember who was who and what was what.

He was too tired for this. Too tired for this, but the political situation could explode at any moment, and he ought to know why he was doing what he was doing. Oh, Leo and Nancy would guide him through, he had no doubt of that, but he was the president. Every president should have the wisest advisors, but if he was just following them without the ability to comprehend and evaluate their choices, he might as well be Rob Ritchie.

Focus. He needed to focus.

...The Royal Cambodian government was formed...

He could really do with one of those rest periods he was supposed to take right now. But he knew it wouldn't help. Closing his eyes was torture, not respite, when all the darkness held was churning thoughts instead of sleep.

In the soft click of the Oval Office door, he realised that his eyes had somehow fallen shut anyway. He struggled upright in his seat, expecting it to be Charlie. It wasn't.

"Abbey!"

In his semi-dazed state, he was for a moment unable to process her appearance on any level other as some kind of unexpected gift from God. Hadn't he said she should stay in Minneapolis...?

She picked the words right out of his brain, one hand on her hip as she gave him a lopsided smile. "Since when do I ever do what you tell me to, Jed Bartlet?"

He smiled back, the expression feeling almost unfamiliar to his face as the furrowed lines of concentration lifted... but the words that came out of his mouth were "You didn't have to come home."

Abbey smirked and lifted her eyebrows at him. "You want me to go away?"

In no mood for games that would only betray his stumbling mental state, he wordlessly opened his arms to her. Her expression softened with compassion, and she crossed the room to sit half on the arm of the chair, half on his lap. "It's okay, babe," she murmured softly, stroking his hair. "I know it's tough, but it's gonna be okay."

Jed just pulled her tighter against him, taking a solace from her presence that no amount of comforting words could ever match up to. For a long, blissful moment, they were both silent, and that was enough. Abbey had always been able to bring him peace, the way she had all those years ago when she'd walked into his life as an overwhelmed young theology student, and he'd first learned that there were times when you could just stop thinking.

It brought him a better relaxation than his nights of tossing and turning, but it couldn't last forever. Abbey straightened up, as reluctant to pull away as he was to let her go. Her hand on the side of his face was cool, but it made him feel warm.

"You know you're gonna have to call your brother," she said, with a smile of sad affection.

Jed closed his eyes in brief dismay. "Yeah." That was one duty he couldn't fob off on anybody else, one conversation that only he could have.

A conversation about things that both had always known, and neither had ever spoken. He was breaking the code of the ages, and not by his own will. These things should never be spoken aloud; these things should never need to be.

When he opened his eyes, Abbey was still staring into them. "And Leo needs to know," she told him gently. "CJ can speak to the others, but... it can't be her who tells Leo."

He knew that was true. It should be him, but...

"I-" He couldn't articulate it, but that was okay, because she just smiled and pressed a brief kiss to his cheek.

"I'll talk to him," she promised. "You don't worry about it. I'll talk to him."

And he was grateful, desperately grateful, even as he felt crumpled up and tossed around by his own weaknesses. His control was fading. He was losing control of his own life, and that was what scared him, not some semi-mythical demons from his past. Just this feeling of helplessness, complete and utter helplessness, as he lost his ability to define himself and became what other people chose to see him as.

He wasn't a victim. But other people were taking from him his right to decide so.

Abbey shifted against him, and he knew that as much as he wanted to, he couldn't hold her there forever. "You need to go unpack?" he asked reluctantly.

"Not yet." She smiled up at him softly. "I think I'll stay here awhile."

"Okay."

She stayed, one arm resting on his shoulder, the other twirling absent little patterns in his hair. Jed picked up the briefing notes, and began to read again, and somehow this time the knots of frustration untangled themselves easier. He was still exhausted - but he knew that tonight, he would sleep.

Sam leaned back as far as his chair would allow him without tipping over - although he kept one foot hooked around the leg of the desk, just in case. Ostensibly, he was composing and assessing possible answers to the questions CJ would be facing. In truth, he was actually watching Toby.

You wouldn't automatically think of the Ziegler mood as being particularly challenging to read. Usually, even Josh could be counted on to comprehend its subtleties. You just started with a base level of 'pissed at everybody and everything' and adjusted upwards in accordance with the volume of the shouting.

However, while Toby never hesitated to inflict his negative emotions - often forcibly - upon other people, there were other things he made more of an effort to hide. Anything that might leave you with the impression that interior was less prickly than exterior, for a start. But Sam doubted, given current circumstances, that this was one of those moments.

Which left the other, even deeper buried end of the spectrum. The one where Toby concealed any slight suggestion that he might, conceivably, have ever at any point in his existence made any kind of decision that could possibly have had an element of inadvisability to it.

Toby was feeling guilty about something. Sam could tell because... well, there were no external clues. But he could tell.

"Toby-" he began.

"Would the White House care to comment on the fact that previous presidential biographies have been censored of all information relating to the president's relationship with his father?" Toby rattled off sharply. Sam momentarily forgot his line of thought to rock upright in his seat.

"They won't ask that!"

Toby eyed him sideways. "Yes, because if there's one thing we've come to rely on in the history of this administration, it's the press's reluctance to ask inappropriate questions."

"Then CJ will refuse to answer it," he shrugged sensibly.

"The White House refused to comment on allegations that President Bartlet used his position to force the non-disclosure of his relationship with his father in previous examinations of his background," Toby said, with a casual obnoxiousness that could belong to the imaginary reporter he was echoing, or equally well just be his own.

Sam frowned. "That's ludicrous."

Toby, still in reporter-mode, countered "There have been more than twenty books published in the last four years that address Josiah Bartlet's childhood years; if there was no cover-up, why was this information never brought to light before?"

The speechwriter's instinct in him reached out for CJ's voice, seeking the turn of phrase that would make his words sound natural in her mouth.

Although it wasn't as good as his Bartlet impression, even if he said so himself.

"Well, Bob, what's ludicrous is the suggestion that the president would bring the powers of his office to bear in covering up a period of his history which utterly fails to shed any bad light on his character and is, frankly, completely irrelevant to the job at hand."

Toby raised a cool eyebrow at him. "Bob?" he asked pointedly.

"You were being a reporter," Sam said defensively.

"There isn't a Bob."

"There's a Bobby," he argued.

"Bobby Morrisey's a woman, Sam."

"Yes, well, let's move on from there," he said hurriedly.

"Scratch 'fails to shed any bad light on his character'," Toby opined. "It calls attention to the reflection on his father's character."

Sam stared at him. "It does reflect badly on his father's character, Toby!" He shook his head. "Jesus, Toby-"

"He won't like it," Toby said flatly.

"He wants to protect his father?" Sam demanded incredulously. "The world's about to get hit with 'Shock details of president's traumatic childhood revealed' and he wants us defending his father?"

"He doesn't want him reduced to a pantomime villain."

Sam rubbed his forehead. "Well, no, obviously, but-"

"He..." Toby sighed heavily. "He wants acknowledgement that the relationship was more complicated than they're painting it."

Sam regarded him solemnly. "The man used to beat his son up for showing signs of talent and imagination, Toby," he said quietly. "Exactly how much more complicated does he expect it to be?"

Toby didn't answer. Sam hesitated, and then sat down.

"Toby?" he asked tentatively. "Why are you so concerned about the president's feelings in this?"

"You don't think we should be?"

"Of course I think we should be! But I'd like to know why you do." It wasn't at all like Toby to show any tolerance for the bruised feelings of parties involved when it came to ruthlessly exposing injustices, large and small.

Toby looked up at him. "It's his father, Sam," he said simply.

"Yeah."

And Sam knew what that was like. Oh, he knew what that was like all right.

He shifted in his seat. "It's his father," he agreed. "But if he's expecting to hear anything out of this other than 'President's father was child-beating monster'? It's not gonna happen, Toby."

Toby nodded slowly. "I know," he agreed heavily.

"-And we'll be keeping you updated on the Cambodian situation as it develops. Okay, that's the lid."

CJ turned and left the podium, heart still beating a little too hard. The question hadn't come, but she could sense it lurking in the shadows; the story hadn't yet been grasped, but the reporters had the scent of it. Next briefing.

Or sooner.

Katie followed her out. "CJ-" she began warningly.

"Katie..." CJ matched her tone, but the reporter wasn't discouraged. She held her tongue until they were safely away from the rest of the press in CJ's office.

"CJ, I've held back on this for long enough so you could let the president have some breathing space. But the story's breaking now, and after I've sat on this for months, I'm not about to sit back and let somebody else steal the story out from under my nose."

CJ supposed it was true they owed her that much, but it still left a bitter taste in her mouth. Nobody should be owed this story.

'Story'. A tale to be told for other people's entertainment.

Sometimes her job description and everything that surrounded it made her feel sick to her stomach.

But for better or worse, it was going to be made a story. She sighed heavily, and turned on her heel to face her. "Okay. What's your question?"

"You can't-" Katie frowned, caught off-balance by this from a press secretary who knew how the game was played. "Oh, come on, CJ, you can't just-"

"Katie, by all rights there is no way in hell I should be saying anything beyond 'We don't comment on the president's family life' out there, so-"

It was a reflexive attack, and Katie punctured it like the obvious bluff it was. "Come on, CJ, you know that line's taking you nowhere. Nobody in that press room is blind or stupid-"

"Apart from Jackie Grant," CJ mumbled, at which Katie grinned and quickly swallowed the expression as if she shouldn't have.

"I'll assume that was off the record," she said dryly.

"No, I'm more than happy to go on the record with that." She'd been looking for a good reason to kick out that flagrant excuse for a gossip columnist out of her press room for a long time, but the woman was just too sneaky. She picked her battles too well, stepping over the line at exactly the worst time, and then retreating back into a sham of chastised good behaviour... until the next time.

Better to be fielding this kind of question from the Katie Jacksons of this world than the Jackie Grants, that was a damn sure. She experienced a brief pang of missing Danny; her press room was woefully thin on friendly faces these days, and none of the ones she had would stretch the lines for her as far as he had.

But then, there'd been times when she'd stretched the lines right back.

Katie's face was almost sympathetic as she continued her argument. "CJ, nobody out there is letting go of this story no matter what you say. You slap them down with a flat 'no comment', you're losing any chance you have of controlling the angle on this."

She knew that, they all knew that, but it was still too easy to explode. "There is no damn angle on this, Katie, it's the president's goddamn-" She choked herself off with an effort, but she still saw Katie's eyes widen fractionally at the level of tension in her voice. Crap. Katie must have known from the way they were handling this that this wasn't going to be as simple as an emphatic denial, but still...

Crap.

Katie's voice was momentarily gentler. "CJ, it's not my job to help you spin things," she reminded her softly.

CJ locked eyes with her. "And it's not my job to brief on things that are so far outside the scope of this administration and its purposes it's not even funny."

"The people have a right to try and understand him, CJ," Katie said, and it was just as well she hadn't finished that sentence with 'know', CJ reflected, because it was entirely possible the file folder she was holding on to extremely tightly would have gone flying across the room. "They want to know how his mind works, they want to be assured he's the best man to do what he does. He's the president."

"He's also a human being," she countered softly.

"Not while he's sitting behind that desk, CJ," Katie reminded her. "He gave up his right to protect family secrets when he announced his intention to run for office."

"Yes, he did." She gave a short, bitter laugh. "He gave up his right to walk down the street without the fear someone would try to kill him, he gave up his right to suffer a chronic medical condition without having every stutter he makes dissected for brain damage, and God help us all, he gave up his right to keep whatever pain he did or didn't suffer in the distant past to himself. But tomorrow morning, he's going to be sitting watching the briefing when you ask me whatever the hell it is you're going to ask me, so I'm asking you... what's your question?"

Katie hesitated a moment, then looked down and quickly nodded her assent. CJ let out a quiet breath. At least now they had the tiniest chance to control the tone of the revelations as they first hit the public consciousness.

For what little good it would do them.

"Abbey!" Leo looked up and smiled, startled. "What are you doing back? I thought you weren't due in until Thursday."

"Yeah," she said softly. Her sorrowfully resigned tone wiped away the smile, and any optimistic desire to believe that this was anything as simple as an abandoned publicity stunt.

"You're not here because they cancelled your thing, are you?" he said quietly.

She shook her head. "No."

"What's wrong with him, Abbey?" It was hard to force the words out past the tightness in his throat and chest. "Is he- is he sick?"

She shook her head. "He's not sick, Leo. There's... there's a thing."

"What kind of a thing?" His voice was rising, despite his best intentions. This sounded too much, felt too much, like another meeting three years ago, with his best friend collapsed on the floor of the Oval Office, and India moving in on Pakistan.

He has multiple sclerosis, Leo.

Abbey hesitated for a long moment. "There's a book-"

"There's a book? I haven't heard anything about a book!" he said sharply. He was the Chief of Staff, how the hell could there possibly be any kind of loop he was getting left out of?

"I thought it was best if CJ-"

"CJ knows there's a book?" he demanded incredulously.

"Leo!" Abbey cut him off with just enough force to remind him that he wasn't dealing with one of his staff here. When she spoke again, her voice was taut and brittle-sounding. "There's... a book about his childhood, and... and questions are going to be asked about his father. Today... or tomorrow."

"Oh God, Abbey, what don't I know about his father?" he asked.

She looked down. When Abigail Bartlet didn't meet your eyes... it wasn't good.

Leo reached out and tilted her chin up to look at him, a gesture that probably surprised him more than her, and momentarily pulled him out of his Chief of Staff persona and into the world when he'd once just been just a friend.

"Abbey?" he asked softly.

"He... Jed and his father, things weren't good." In her lap, her fingers knotted together. "They were... bad. They were very bad."

"I don't understand," Leo frowned. "Abbey, he talks about his father, he-"

"Yes." The smile she gave him was bitter and pained. "Yes, he does. He loved him very much."

And Leo heard Mallory's voice saying 'I love you, daddy', in tones of tearful dismay, and tasted the mingled flavours of alcohol and self-disgust.

"What happened, Abbey? Tell me," he urged quietly. "Tell me!" he repeated when the silenced lingered, more forcefully than he'd intended. Needing to know, needing to understand what was getting under Jed's skin, what had been haunting him these past few weeks.

"I don't know, Leo," she said in tones of such misery that he wanted to wrap his arms around her, and didn't know if he should. "He doesn't talk about it. He never did."

Still he hesitated over what gesture of support he should make, and the moment to make it in was lost. "What does the book say, Abbey?"

She smiled wryly, her strength returning when an enemy appeared to focus it on. "A whole lot of cobwebs and shadows," she said dangerously. "Hints, Leo. But it's gonna make people dig for more, and they're probably going to find it."

"What-" His mouth was dry, and he had to lick his lips before he could continue. "What are we talking about, Abbey?"

"They're going to be calling it child abuse," she said quietly. She held his gaze. "They're going to be right, too."

He had to look away. "Oh, Abbey..." He trailed off.

"John Bartlet," she said venomously, "was a small-minded, bigoted, limited little man. He didn't like being outstripped by his son. He didn't like it at all. And he made Jed suffer for it every day of his life."

He made to speak, but she overrode him. "Jed had an appalling childhood, Leo, but somehow he survived. He came through things that would have crushed and warped and ruined a hundred other children, and he survived. He survived living with a father who denigrated him, and tore him down, and belittled everything he was and everything he did at every turn. And Jed-" her voice cracked - "loves him. He loves him a whole lot. And this-" She made a one-handed gesture that might encompass the press room or perhaps the entire outside world, "is going to tear him apart."

Jed could see the sympathy in his Chief of Staff's eyes the moment he walked through the door, and he hated it.

I don't want this. Please, why can't anybody understand that I don't want this?

Toby's blunt accusations during the re-election campaign had been grim enough, but he'd take the Ziegler lack of tact over the concern of others any day. He'd much rather have Toby brashly trample over his thoughts and feelings than CJ and the others tiptoeing around him as if he'd shatter if they breathed too hard.

And now Abbey had spoken to Leo. Leo, who'd seen him through the worst and best of himself, and never hesitated to cut him down when he was full of himself, and slap him down when he was full of crap.

Dammit, Leo, don't you dare look at me differently. Don't you dare.

"Any news on Cambodia?" he asked, hearing the hollowness in his own voice.

"We're still waiting, Mr. President." Leo's voice was as perfectly controlled as ever, but his eyes were everywhere. Anywhere but Jed's face. The association took him a moment to place, but when it did it made him smile with a bitter lack of humour. Ellie. The daughter who was too afraid of her own mental vision of him to look him in the eye.

Well, he might never have mastered the art of getting through to Ellie, but at least it gave him a brutally familiar place to start.

"Look at me, Leo."

Unlike his middle daughter, Leo didn't hesitate to obey the command. He raised his head, and gave him a sadly quiet smile.

"Abbey spoke to you," Jed said. It wasn't a question.

Leo hesitated, looking as if he wanted to reach out but wasn't certain of his welcome. If this had been Leo's pain, Jed would have crossed the gap between them in a heartbeat. But it wasn't. And this was different.

"This isn't anything, Leo," he said, and Leo stared at him, letting out a frustrated huff of breath.

"Of course it's something, Jed, it's-"

"It was a long time ago." His voice was getting louder, but he didn't really care to modulate it.

"Jed."

He couldn't stand the silent empathy radiating off the other man, and the pity it was too small a step away from.

"No!" he scowled. "Why- why does everybody have to do this? Why does this have to become some Shakespearean tragedy of motivations? Why does everybody have to dramatise my life? It's not- it's just- it's just my life. That's all it is. It doesn't- it doesn't have to have a moral. It doesn't have to have a storyline. Sometimes... sometimes you can just live, and who you were and what happened thirty years ago doesn't matter because Jesus, it was thirty years ago!"

Leo smiled faintly, and touched his sleeve as he calmed down, listening to the air heave in and out of his lungs too fast.

"Jed, we're just... we're just worried about you," he said earnestly.

"You don't need to be," he said softly.

"Your father-"

"Dammit, Leo, your father got drunk and shot himself in the head, and what's that supposed tell me about you?" The words burst from him in a blaze of frustration, and thought of how they sounded only followed afterwards.

They just looked at each other for a moment. Leo didn't snap, and Jed sure as hell didn't feel better, only vaguely nauseous. He turned away, making a sharp hand gesture of apology.

"That was way over the line. That was unforgivable. I'm sorry."

Leo shook his head, brushing it off the way he did undeserved insults and well-deserved compliments alike. It seemed sometimes as if Leo McGarry considered himself the least important player in his own life, not requiring praise, consideration or validation, and meeting no harsher standard of judgement than his own.

"Nah. You're-"

Jed raised a warning finger. "I swear to God, Leo, if you tell me I'm under a lot of stress right now, I might actually hit you."

Leo snickered, an unanticipated snort of amusement. "You expect me to believe you even know how to make a fist?"

Jed had to laugh himself, and some of the day's tension rolled off his shoulders. "I'm aware of the general principles." He balled his hand and made a casual motion of demonstration. "Action, reaction - I'm up to speed on my Newton," he shrugged.

Leo shook his head, grinning, and the atmosphere suddenly made it feel a completely different room. "You're such a geek."

"Ah, but we're the ones you've got to watch out for. Other people just flail about blindly - we're the ones who do the actual math."

"Yeah." The light-hearted comment fell flat with the memory of the subject hanging unspoken between them.

"Leo." He waited until his Chief of Staff looked him in the eye. "Don't do this. I'm not anybody different. I'm the exact same guy I was this morning, and all the days before that."

Leo nodded slowly, and turned to go. He hesitated in the doorway, and looked back. "Mr. President?" He met Jed's eyes. "It tells you I'm the son of guy who drank too much and shot himself in the head. And everything that comes with it."

Jed looked him in the eye seriously. "You're more than that, Leo." He hesitated for a beat. "We all are."

Leo closed his eyes in a brief moment of understanding. "Yeah," he said softly.

"We're not defined by what our fathers made us, and Isaac Newton couldn't make equations out of the sum of our experience. There are a billion people who could have had our childhoods, and none of them are Jed Bartlet and Leo McGarry."

Leo nodded, and smiled. But still he lingered for an extra moment, one hand on the doorhandle. "You're wrong about one thing, though."

"What's that?"

"That you're the same man to me you were before I knew. Because every extra thing I learn about you, I learn that you're a greater man than even I knew to believe you were."

He left the room without looking back to see what Jed's reaction might be.

She wasn't entirely surprised to find Josh's office darkened, but this time there was no haunting music, only thick silence. CJ stepped inside, and gave him a gentle smile as he looked up.

"You okay?"

He nodded mutely.

"I heard about Vicky Henderson's little girl."

Josh looked down, tracing patterns on the desktop with his fingertips. "I just- I was bitching her out for not turning up to my meeting, you know? And all the time-"

"Yeah." She laid a hand on his shoulder, knowing that it wasn't just that irrational guilt that stirred up his brooding mood. Today he'd already had heavy news laid on him, and the old associations it stirred couldn't have been pleasant. She sat down on his desk, and looked at him. "What's on your mind, amigo?"

"The past," he admitted, and she cracked a smile.

"Well, that's never good."

Josh sighed, and pushed back in his chair, eyes somewhere far away from the rest of the room and her. "Kids, they're so... they're so fragile, you know? They're these little people, and they can just... it's so easy to damage them."

She wasn't sure if he was talking about little Naomi Henderson, his sister, or himself. Maybe all three of them at once.

"Everybody's fragile, Josh," she reminded him softly.

"Yeah, but... they're kids. They-"

"Yeah," she sighed quietly.

He was silent for a moment, and his fingers went back to drawing lines and circles. "Did she- Does she have any other kids?" he asked.

"I don't know." CJ wanted to say she hoped so, for her sake, then wanted to say that she hoped not, for their sake, then realised that there really wasn't any way to hope that would make it better.

In the way Josh looked at her, she thought she could see the ghost of the frightened little boy he must have been three decades ago.

"Things... happen, when you're a kid," he said slowly. "And you don't have the same control over your life... you don't see things the way you do when you're an adult. There are... ways you see the world, and even when you grow up, even when you're old enough to know that it's not true... you're never gonna see it any other way. Like..." Suddenly, unexpectedly, the boyish grin snapped back into place. "Did your big brother ever tell you that story how spiders can crawl in your ear when you're asleep, and eat through into your brain?"

CJ blinked. "No. But I'm gonna be living with that one for a while now, I can tell you."

He smiled. "That's my point. You know... you know that's not right, it's not true, but it sticks with you. Things you believe when you're a child... they stick with you."

She sobered up abruptly. "Josh..." she said earnestly. "You know you couldn't ever have done anything about what happened to your sister."

Josh nodded. "And the president knows that his father was an abusive son of a bitch who treated him worse than he ever deserved. But sometimes... sometimes what you know doesn't make any difference."

CJ held a breath, and let it out slowly. "It's gonna be hard for him," she agreed softly.

"CJ, I don't... I don't know how we can protect him from this. I don't honestly see any way we can protect him from this."

And CJ wanted to reach out and take his hand and tell him it would be all right, but he wouldn't believe her. So instead she stood up, and surprised him by stroking back his hair to press a quick kiss to his temple.

"We get through things, mi amor," she told him. "That's what we do."

He gave her a tired smile of thanks.

The air was beginning to chill as the evening drew on, but he was used to the New Hampshire weather. This didn't begin to approach true cold; 'crisp', his father would have called it. He sat with his feet up, his book folded spine up beside him now it was too dark to read. Soon he would go inside, but not just yet.

He had a lot of time since he'd retired, and he liked to spend as much of it as possible outside. He'd always loved nature, felt more comfortable with it than people most of the time. He couldn't stand to live in the stifling, breathless environment of the inner city.

The back door swung open, and his wife appeared behind him. "Johnny? Phone."

He stood up, groaning slightly as his joints creaked. "Who is it?" He squinted at her in the dimness. "Frank?"

He began to make out that her expression as his eyes adjusted to the light spilling out of the kitchen, and it looked tense. "No. It's your brother."

"Jed?"

No, John, your other brother.

The sarcastic barb that normally would have tripped easily from her tongue didn't come out, because they both knew Jed didn't call late on a Tuesday night. Jed didn't call much at all, as a matter of fact, and not only because of his crowded schedule. There'd always been a gulf between them, not so much hostility as discomfort.

He made his way inside, cursing the aches in his joints, and lifted the receiver. "Hello?"

"Hey, Johnny."

Jed sounded tired. But then he always did; looked it, too, if you knew how to see behind the flash of that dazzling smile on camera to the lines of tension beneath.

He'd had a lot of practise doing that, through the years.

"What's wrong?" He didn't make a pretence that this might be a social call, and Jed didn't either. There was a long, heavy silence before he made his reply.

"There's... there's gonna be some stuff on the news tomorrow."

"About what?" John pulled the chair closer to sit down on the arm of it, suspecting he might need it. "Is it something about the girls? Are you sick?"

"No." He sighed again. "Some people have been... digging up stuff that..." A longer pause. "They're gonna be talking about dad."

It was his own turn to hold the silence. Their father was not a subject that ever came up between them; not now, nor even when he was still alive. There were just... some things you didn't talk about in the Bartlet household.

He remembered, although he pretended he didn't - to himself, because nobody else had ever known there was something to remember or forget. Angry words in the next room and cold silences at the supper table, Jed limping and wincing or rubbing his back but never saying a word.

It had always been Jed. Jed, who you could rely on to open his mouth and let theories and feelings tumble out no matter how hard you were gripping your cutlery and staring at the plate and willing him just for once to let it pass.

Jed could never learn to be mediocre like his younger brother. He didn't know how to slip through a crowd without becoming the centre of it. He didn't know how to take a class without the inevitable A-grades and commendations. He didn't know how to just talk without talking about things that were important.

He didn't know how to go unnoticed. And now, things that neither of them cared to dwell upon were going to be noticed.

The silence stretched on, because what could he say, and what could Jed say, that was timely now but hadn't been spoken forty, fifty years ago?

Jed cleared his throat, but his voice sounded more ragged than ever when he spoke again. "Anyway, I... I thought you should know."

"Yeah."

Silence, for a beat too long.

"Give my love to Sally."

"And mine to Abbey and the kids."

"Yeah." Another, uncomfortable pause. "Goodnight, Johnny."

"Goodnight." Impulsively, he picked up a phrase that his brother had several times used on him in their childhood years. "Just use the nightlight if you have nightmares, okay? I promise not to tell."

"Okay." Laughter entered Jed's voice briefly, and for a moment, things were lighter and easier. "Don't worry about me," he said warmly. "I've got Abbey."

"Good. That's good." He breathed out. "Goodnight, Jed."

"Goodnight, Johnny."

He hung up.

Sally looked up at him with some concern as he headed back out onto the stoop. "What was that about?"

And he just sighed, and softly shook his head as he sat down beside her.

Donna appeared in his office doorway, and gave him a tentative smile. "Hey, it's me."

Josh had to smile back. "And here was I thinking you were your evil twin," he said wearily.

Her grin widened. "I'm the nice one?" she queried.

"Out of you and an imaginary person?" He pretended to deliberate, and she smacked him lightly on the head with a file folder.

"It's time to go."

He frowned at her, but only playfully. "Don't you know I have to-?"

"Stare at that wall some more?"

"I'm honing my x-ray vision."

"How's that working for you so far?"

He sighed quietly, and rubbed his eyes. "I try to see things coming, but it doesn't usually work."

"We can't all be superheroes, Josh," Donna reminded him softly.

"No? What happened to Positron Man and Electron Girl?" His words were teasing, but the tone behind them serious enough.

"Even we have to recharge our spark sometimes." She took his arm to tug him out of his chair, and he obligingly stood and shrugged on his jacket. Then she recaptured his hand and dragged him out of his office.

They walked out into the deserted bullpen. After a few moments Josh paused, and looked down. "What are you doing?" he asked her, mildly bemused.

"Holding your hand," she supplied matter-of-factly.

"Okay." He blinked for a few moments. "Why?"

"In case you get lost," she said brightly.

He had to grin back. "Okay. You keep hold of me, and I'll keep hold of you, and maybe that way neither of us will get lost."

"It's a plan," she agreed. They left the West Wing walking together in step.

"Hey, Zoey."

"Charlie!" His wife greeted him with a delighted grin, and stood on tiptoe to slide her hands onto his shoulders and kiss him. She remained that way, peering into his eyes as the smile wobbled a little with uncertainty. "How's dad? Is he still tired?"

It wasn't supposed to be Charlie's place to report on his employer's condition to anybody, but Zoey had been worried about her father for a while now. He'd been showing signs of some buried stress for some time now, and this week had been worse than ever.

Perhaps, anyway. It was possible he was projecting, considering the other things that had been going on this week...

Charlie kissed her again, lightly, to reassure her. "I don't know," he admitted, "I don't think he slept well last night. But your mother came back early."

"Mom's home?" she smiled, leaning against his shoulder.

"Yeah. She wasn't supposed to back until Thursday afternoon, but I guess her thing got cancelled."

"Good," Zoey sighed, sounding relieved. It was no secret the president could only truly relax when his wife was at his side. She hesitated for a moment, and Charlie was content to just stand there holding her.

After a moment, she looked up at him. "You know, if mom's here, we should probably-"

"Yeah."

He was pretty certain his... in-laws - God, that still felt weird - were going to find out the news sooner or later, and the longer they left off telling them, the more awkward that conversation was going to be.

Like it wasn't going to be awkward enough already. He'd tried to imagine broaching the subject with the president several times, usually ending with a certain amount of panicked hyperventilation. Still, it would probably be easier to talk to the First Lady.

And yet... Zoey bit her lip, and echoed his own thoughts. "I don't want to just... dump this on him, you know? I don't want this to be, like, one more thing in the middle of a lot of stress."

"It wouldn't be," Charlie reassured her, gripping her hands, for all that he'd been having similar thoughts. She snorted softly.

"Oh, come on, Charlie, you know he still thinks I'm like, six years old. It's gonna make his brain explode."

"Yeah," he admitted. "Oh, but in a good way," he added, off her glare.

Zoey let out a breath, and leaned against his shoulder again. "Still, we don't have to do this, like, right now. It's not like there's a massive hurry."

"No," he agreed, wrapping his arms around her and nuzzling her hair, effectively bringing the conversation to a close.

He just hoped that whatever it was building in the atmosphere in the West Wing wasn't about to blow up in his face and prove him wrong.

WEDNESDAY:

It was some ungodly hour of the morning, but despite the long flight and the draining conversations she'd had the day before, Abbey wasn't sleeping.

The bedroom was unlit, but she'd been watching in the dark for long enough that the lines of her husband's face were visible to her. He was - wonder of wonders - sleeping peacefully, the stress lines of the day smoothed out by the gentle hand of sleep. He was so still compared to his usual nocturnal twisting and turning that Abbey knew it could only be exhaustion.

He couldn't have slept a wink the whole time she was away. It could almost have been flattering, if it wasn't so scary. It wasn't good for him to go so long without proper rest. It wouldn't be good for anybody, but especially not him, with the job he did and the unspoken but very real threat to his health.

She and CJ both had studiously avoided any mention of the thirteenth and nineteenth letters of the alphabet, but neither of them had stopped thinking about it for a moment. He was supposed to avoid stress...

She could have laughed. Oh, but Jed's life was nothing but stress. Most of it the good kind, the kind a man like Josiah Bartlet couldn't live without, but there was another level to it that surfaced entirely too frequently for her comfort.

And this went way beyond that.

The way Jed kept his mouth shut about his childhood wasn't the same way he froze her out of the day-to-day things that bothered him. This was a different kind of silence, not the stubborn refusal to spill that was really nothing more than a delaying tactic. This was just something that he point blank didn't want to share, with her or anyone else.

It made her unhappy, but in some ways he was right. The past was past, his father was long dead, and revisiting it wouldn't help him; it had been deceptively easy to push suspicions, insinuations and the jitters and flinches of her husband's younger years into the back of her mind. Jed had soon grown out of the skin of the reticent, surprisingly shy and naïve boy he'd once been, retreating back into him only in times of emotional hurt. He'd healed, so far as anyone was able, and become his own man. In the end, the shadow his father had tried to throw over him hadn't been nearly enough to eclipse him.

And now this.

She wanted to get out there and fight, hunt down her husband's enemies, but how could you defend against a man who was already dead? John Bartlet was the true culprit, and he was beyond her reach. The crowd of gawkers and sight-seers bent on scraping through the debris of troubled years for a few cheap thrills and an exciting story were a poor substitute, and lashing out wouldn't drive them away.

There ought to be lines that no one had a right to cross. But a president belonged to his people as much and more as they belonged to him, and in taking the position he was born for, her husband had forfeited his right to draw those lines for himself. The people would have their story, drink their fill of the troubles of the man they considered their property, to dissect and examine as they wished. And there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it.

And so she watched Jed sleep. It would almost have been better if it was like the movies, if she could watch him toss and turn in the grip of his nightmares, and listen to the muttered words that would explain his torment. But he just slept, and whatever was going on in that beautiful, complicated brain of his, she wasn't a party to it.

And that was what bothered her most of all.

Leo jumped in fright as his assistant appeared out of the shadows of his office. "Jesus, Margaret, d'you have to- What are you doing here this early?"

"Waiting to ask you that question," she informed him disapprovingly. "We've talked about this-"

He scowled at her. "Margaret, you came to work in the middle of the night specifically to tell me not to come to work in the middle of the night?"

"You just growl at me if I do it over the phone," she reminded him.

"Well, what makes you think I won't growl at you in person?" He shrugged off his coat and headed into his office, turning to switch on the light but getting beaten to it by Margaret.

"You do that too. But you can't hang up on me if I'm here in person."

"I can close doors, though," he informed her, and did so with her on the other side of it. He paused, but there was no sound of retreating footsteps. After a moment, he pulled the door open again, and glared in exasperation at his assistant, still standing in the exact same position he'd left her.

"Would you stop that?"

"It's the middle of the night, Leo. What am I supposed to do?"

"I don't know!" he shrugged. "Go home for an hour! Get some sleep on Toby's couch. Go... go eat a bagel or something!"

She looked at him as if he was crazy. "Leo, it's four AM."

He gave her a look. "What, you turn into something if somebody feeds you after midnight?"

"Do you know what kind of havoc eating in the middle of the night can play with your digestive system?"

He heaved a deeply put upon sigh. "Oh, dear God."

If it was Margaret's plan to associate the experience of coming in to work early with forms of dire punishment, he had to admit, she was doing well.

"Leo, what's going on?"

The question hit him unexpectedly, and at this time in the morning it took a moment to unstick his tongue and formulate a suitable response. "The Ambassador to Cambodia's lying in a morgue in Phnom Penh with a bullet in his brain," he reminded her sharply, "and you're asking me what's wrong?"

"I meant other than that."

"Isn't that enough?"

She obviously knew he was hiding something, but would have let it slide. Some compulsion, perhaps driven by the memory of how concerned she'd been over him during and after his relapse into drinking six months ago, made him call her back.

"Margaret..." He met her eyes. "You'll know soon enough, okay?"

She bobbed her head in a quick nod. "Okay."

She left, and then he was alone with his depressing thoughts. Leo closed the office door, and sat down to work.

Sam lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. He hadn't slept much. Thinking about the president. Thinking about how he would feel if his father's 'little indiscretion' of twenty-eight years was suddenly splashed all over the papers, every journalist in the country digging for dirt, scrambling for an angle, dissecting his psyche to see how it might have affected him.

It wasn't like being hounded over Laurie, or his relationship with Steve - those were choices, for better or worse; he shouldn't have had to have fought those battles, but he'd been prepared to. But for the things that had been done to you, the things that you'd had no control over... You could choose your politics and your relationships, and whether they were worth making a stand for. You didn't have a choice over who your father screwed around with.

And that wasn't even comparable to- To-

How were they supposed to handle the spin on something that he didn't even want to fit inside his head? It was hard to imagine the president as a child, almost impossible to ever accept that the child he'd been could ever have gone through...

Child abuse. Jed Bartlet, child abuse. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't get the two ideas to co-exist inside his brain. The president was so, so... comfortable. So open and casual and easy with people. Too many movie melodramas were insisting that victims of abuse weren't like that, they were jumpy, they were basket cases, they were irrevocably damaged.

It was a dangerous stereotype, but one that was hard to shake. You wanted to believe that there were markers that you would recognise, that you would instantly know, because that was how you coped with the idea that these things could be going on anywhere around you. You salved your conscience by saying 'Well, if that was happening to anyone around me, I'd know about it'.

But you couldn't. You couldn't pick the victims out any more than you could tell the villains by their squinty eyes and shifty expressions. Anybody at all could have these secrets in their past, and you would never know unless they confided in you.

Or unless the secret was ripped from them, brutally, and displayed before a world that would see it as just another movie melodrama; the thrilling story of how an emotionally and physically bruised and battered boy overcame his roots to go on to become the leader of the free world. They'd lap it up, clamouring for all the details - the ultimate underdog story.

Never mind what it would do to the man at the centre of it all.

And, God help him, he'd be helping them spin it that way - because the alternative was 'President's Mental Health Called Into Question After Shock Abuse Revelations'.

After all, the journalists had all seen those sensationalist movies, too.

The springs of the bed creaked, and Steve was resting on one elbow to lean over him. "You're awake," he observed softly.

"No I'm not," he mumbled automatically.

Steve let out a small snort of breath that carried his amusement, and pulled Sam closer, absently running his other hand over his chin. "You gonna shave that off this morning?" he asked mildly.

"No." He kissed Steve's palm.

"You want to tell me what's wrong?"

Sam met his eyes. It was impossible to see the colour of them in the dark, but he could still read the concern in his boyfriend's posture. "I can't," he said quietly. Not that it was going to remain a secret for much longer, but still... Somehow he would have felt worse about passing on the secret personally than letting Steve hear it for himself. It would have felt like a betrayal, gossiping about the president behind his back, sharing knowledge he'd never been entrusted with in the first place.

"Okay," Steve accepted, laying back. They were silent for a few moments. "What time are you getting up for work?"

"Soon." He hesitated for beat, then reached out. "Call me this afternoon?"

"Sure. I promise." Steve's fingers curled around his own, and though he knew he wasn't going to get back to sleep, he still felt better.

"Carol?"

The assistant looked up from her computer as her boss entered the office.

"How's it going?" CJ asked, though she didn't really need Carol to confirm her own suspicions.

"It's all over the net, CJ," she confirmed with a sorrowful frown. "A lot of the discussion groups are picking it up; they're debating the veracity of the source, a couple of people have been sticking up for Rogers's credentials as a biographer..." She gave CJ a wry smile of commiseration. "Everybody in the press room's gonna have it by now."

"Yeah." Not that she hadn't known that, but... "Yeah." CJ nodded, and absently tapped a finger on the goldfish bowl to get Gail's attention. In a few short hours time, the president was probably going to know exactly how Gail felt. They'd prepped the senior staff to give them some time to get ready for the pitch, and Abbey would be talking to Zoey today; Liz and Ellie already knew. Everybody else was going to hear about the president's past as it unfolded in the press room.

The president hadn't liked her knowing about his troubles with his father, and had liked her talking to people even less. She could only imagine how hard this kind of media coverage was going to hit him. Technically the press had no right and no reason to bring personal issues from the distant past front and centre like this... but they all knew how far they'd get trying to take that line in the press room. The media reported what they would; shut them out completely, and there'd be hell to pay when they drew their own conclusions.

It was a familiar enough cycle of compromise, but this time the 'juicy little titbits' they were tossing out to keep the masses happy were the extremely private pains of a man she loved and respected. And she had a nasty feeling that what little the president was prepared to let them admit to wasn't going to be nearly enough to satisfy the public's lust for gory details.

CJ pushed back her hair and sat down, reaching for her glasses. "Okay," she sighed. "You'd better give me Sam and Toby's notes."

Bonnie and Ginger exchanged glances over the tops of their coffee cups. Something was going on, both of them knew it. Toby and CJ had been exuding tension for some time now, but yesterday it had leapt to encompass Sam and Josh... And that meant that whatever it was, it was on its way to making a splash.

Considering all the troubling secrets that had been revealed to them at one time or another - and a few more that they'd only ever guessed at - neither was looking forward to that much at all.

They drank coffee in companionable silence, both knowing that this could be their last chance of the day to actually sit still and take a break.

"I see Sam's still got his beard," Bonnie observed after a moment. By now their boss's attempt at a goatee had progressed to the stage where it no longer needed to be referred to using air quotes.

"Think he'll keep it?" Ginger wondered, hunched over her drink.

Bonnie shrugged.

"I think Toby'll sneak in and shave it off him next time he falls asleep on his couch," Ginger added, after a moment.

"I think Toby feels threatened by the presence of additional facial hair in the office environment."

"He's got beard rage," Ginger offered.

"He's worried about Sam stealing his individuality."

"Sam's turning into Toby-lite."

They were both briefly silenced by this disturbing possibility.

"Do we get the pool money back if Sam keeps the beard?" Bonnie wondered.

Ginger raised an eyebrow. "Ed and Larry, pay out?"

"Guess not."

There was a long silence.

"What's going on, Ginger?"

Ginger met her eyes. "I don't know," she admitted.

"Carol knows."

"So does Donna."

"Yeah."

Their fellow assistants knew, but neither of them would break the unspoken code to press for details. Your first loyalty was always to your boss, and secrets were to be passed down, not sideways. Whatever it was, they would wait for Toby or Sam to tell it to them.

Assuming it didn't become known of its own accord. Ginger recognised the signs too well.

"Whatever it is, it's breaking today."

"Yeah."

They put down their empty coffee cups, and prepared to back their bosses up however they were going to be needed.

The tension in Leo's office was thick enough to eat with an ice-cream scoop. Toby stood scowling at the floor, in a way that made it hard to tell whether he was angry or just staring blankly. Sam was reading and re-reading his notes, absently but continuously rubbing at his chin. Leo would have snapped at him to stop it if he wouldn't have felt incredibly stupid doing so.

Josh, unusually, wasn't fidgeting. He stood with his back against the wall, staring vaguely upwards so that Leo was unable to catch his eye and check if he was even mentally present.

The room was too silent and had too much breathing in it. Even the MS revelation hadn't held such an aura of discomfort. That had made everybody angry, upset and confrontational; this, everybody just didn't want to think or talk about. It carried the unpleasantly unclean feel of uninvited intimacy; an aspect of Jed's life that should never have been theirs to poke through and dissect.

Just the thought of it... Someone who thought like Jed Bartlet, facing brutal punishment every time he stepped beyond the lines of conventional wisdom, every time he stretched for the unknown solution or dreamed of changing the world... Leo had to close his eyes against the mental images.

How had that not been beaten out of him? How had he survived with that centre of his faith and optimism intact?

Leo had seen most of his own faith in the world chipped away by hard knocks from a cynical life, and the rest had been swept out from under him in the aftermath of a war that should never have been fought. It was Jed who had taught him to think otherwise, that you could recapture that spark of hope and keep it alight no matter how dark and dire the situation.

Leo had never been swayed by the school of thought that said his old friend was a pampered intellectual who knew nothing of the problems he pledged to defeat, but even so, he'd had no idea of the true heat of the fires his determination had been forged in. He'd been aware of a certain sorrowful coolness when Jed spoke of his father - which he rarely did - and had guessed at some battle of wills or gulf of disapproval, left unfixed too long and too late. He'd never imagined the man Jed had long credited for his stubbornness and iron determination could have been such a brutal influence.

Everybody whipped around as the door creaked open and CJ finally joined them. Leo could tell from her face that she was already mentally preparing her answers and defences. He questioned her with an eyebrow.

"We're briefing at two," she said flatly, shaking her head. "We can't hold them off any longer without them knowing we're doing it."

"They'll know anyway," Toby interjected quietly.

"Yeah, but they'll let me do it."

Leo wondered if any of the press were as uncomfortable as the five of them with the prospect of dragging something so deep-rooted and personal into the open. Perhaps, but that wouldn't stop them doing it; in this world of competing headlines, a crowd of journalists had only the integrity of its lowest member.

Well, they'd damn well better have trouble sleeping tonight.

Another awkward silence descending. Sam was the first to crack in the face of the question they were all thinking, half turning to face him. "Leo, how's-?"

"The president is not getting dragged into this," Leo cut him off with brusque finality.

Josh stared at him incredulously. "Leo! It's his life, how can he not-?"

"That's exactly why he's not getting dragged into it." Leo glared around at them all, meeting no resistance. "We can't protect him from this story breaking, but we can make damn sure whatever his thoughts and feelings are, they stay his own."

His conversation with the president the day before had stuck with him. Jed didn't want to be defined in terms of this. He didn't want everything in his life to suddenly become about how he was reacting to this, or everybody around him to suddenly start treating him as if he was fragile. He didn't-

"He doesn't want his father to be destroyed by this."

CJ's soft, solemn words fell like lead into the silence, and everybody was crushed by the weight of them. Your heart bled just on principle, and then you really thought about what that actually meant, and suddenly it hurt a whole lot more.

Toby was the first to snap out of it, shifting his feet and letting out a breath that might have been a sigh. He looked up at Leo. "Cambodia?"

"We're waiting."

Toby nodded, and the others started to move, coming out of stasis. Leo dismissed them with a silent gesture of his head.

Josh was the last to move, and Leo called him back. "Josh."

He turned.

"You okay?"

Josh gave him a pale smile and a slight shrug. "I'm fine."

"Okay."

Josh left.

"Hey, mom."

"Hello, Zoey." Her mother's smile was tinged with weariness, and Zoey felt a stab of worry.

"Mom, what's wrong?" She sat down. "Why did you ask me to come see you?"

Her mother sighed softly, and wrapped her arms across her chest. "Zoey, this afternoon, CJ's going to get some questions in the briefing. It..."

"Did I do something wrong?" she interrupted worriedly. "Did Charlie? Are we-?"

"It's not about you, honey," her mother reassured her with a smile that appeared quickly and left even faster. "It's your father."

Oh, God. "Mom, is it-?"

"It's not that."

Neither of them needed to clarify which 'that'. Zoey hadn't even known about the recent terrible risk of her father's MS progressing until after her parents had found out for sure it wasn't happening. She hadn't been sure whether to resent them or thank them for that ignorance, and still hadn't decided yet. Since then, her father had been put on a new diet and exercise regime that was supposed to help him. She thought it had, at first, but lately he was looking even more stressed than ever.

But if this wasn't about the MS, then she didn't have the first clue what it could be. She settled for a hesitant "Mom?"

The First Lady looked down at her hands in her lap. "Zoey... you know there's a new biography of your father just being released."

"Yeah, I saw it advertised online." She hadn't investigated further; biographies of her family gave her a strange mix of pride and the creeps. She didn't like the thought of complete strangers reading avidly through all the cute little anecdotes her father liked to tell - and the least said about her baby pictures, the better. "It's not like that horrible Burkhalt book, is it?"

She'd wanted to give that guy such a slapping for suggesting her father had been disappointed she wasn't a boy. Even if she had giggled in a slightly disturbed way over all the stuff about special underwear.

Her mother gave a small, wry smile. "No, honey, it's... I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that."

She had absolutely no idea what this was, but she already knew she didn't like it. "Mom, please... what is it?"

Her mother touched her arm. "Your father never really talked much about his childhood around you girls, did he?" she said softly.

"No, I guess, I- I usually tune him out when he starts getting reminisce-y," Zoey admitted, her automatic smile feeling awkward, as if it was the wrong size for her face.

Her mother's expression subtly darkened. "Yes, well. He didn't have an awful lot to reminisce about from that period." She looked down. "Your father's youth was a very... troubled time for him."

"Dad?" She found it hard to believe. Every mental image she had of her father as a young man was a kind of miniature, less grey-haired version of him as he was now - complete with goofy grin and geekish tendencies. She just couldn't picture him in the tortured adolescent mould.

"The fact is, Zoey..." Her voice trailed into a sigh of regret. "The book includes some things about your father and your grandfather that he's not comfortable talking about... not really comfortable talking about.

"What kind of things?" She heard her own words tremble slightly. What was this? What about Grandpa Bartlet? Zoey had never met either of her father's parents - his mother had died when he was a teenager, and his father before she was born. It had only really been in recent years that she'd noticed the way he tended to avoid talking much about them, and the tone of wistful regret when he did. She'd guessed they'd had some kind of a falling-out - maybe about him turning away from the priesthood for mom, they'd all heard that story - and never had a chance to make it up, and that was why he always made such a big thing about family never parting angry.

Now her mother seemed to be hinting at altogether darker family secrets... and she wasn't sure she wanted to hear them.

Her mother sighed, and was silent for a long moment. "Your grandfather..." Zoey heard the restrained venom in her voice, and was startled by it. "John Bartlet was not a nice man. He was not a good man. In fact, he was a pretty poor excuse for a human being all round, not to mention a goddamn abusive son of a bitch. He put your father through hell through his whole childhood and a long way beyond it. He came out of it very... damaged... when I first knew him, and I still think it's a miracle he turned out the way he did."

Zoey was shaking her head mechanically, although the look on her mother's face was enough that she couldn't deny it. But... her dad? No. This wasn't possible.

"He was a very shy boy when I first met him." She made a small sound of amusement. "Very quiet, if you can believe it. Until you got him talking about dreams and things that mattered... oh, and then..." Her eyes took on a faraway look.

"I could always see he had such a powerful soul in him, but he always acted like he didn't expect anyone to see it. He could never stop himself from speaking up, but he never expected anyone to listen to him." She smiled sadly. "It took him a long time to learn that people really did listen to him, and they really did like him, and that he had this incredible talent for... for selling ideas to people, for making them believe in things. I never really understood how one boy could be so different in himself, so incredibly confident and yet so shy and withdrawn. Until I met his father."

She was silent for a while, but Zoey just watched her face, afraid to interrupt or even to breathe too heavily.

"His father was... a very cold man. He didn't approve of Jed, or anything he did. He didn't like that he was so smart, that he wanted to be different. He didn't-" She shook her head. "I never understood it, not then and not now. I don't know why he could ever be so-" She broke off again, rubbing her eyes tiredly, and finally looked up at Zoey.

"I don't know very much at all about what happened between them, but it left your father very scarred and very mixed up for a long time. I talked to your uncle a few times, but he doesn't really like talking about it either, and I don't think he knows a lot of the story. It's something your father would rather consign to the past and not spend any more time dwelling on."

"And then along comes this book," Zoey said shakily.

"This is going to be a very hard time for him, Zoey," her mother told her softly. "And I know it's difficult to take in something like this, but it's very important that you try and treat him like you always did; he needs his family around him now, and he's never been a man who's comfortable with being pitied."

"I know," she said, her voice a near-absent whisper. When her mother and father had first sat the three of them and Annie down and explained what multiple sclerosis was, he'd taken refuge in her company. Liz and Ellie's tearful concern had been painful to him, and he'd sought comfort in the pre-teen daughter who didn't get most of the big words, and who didn't really understand much more than daddy was sick but he was going to be okay. The public revelation had been that times a million, but at least then he'd had the group of them around him to shield him with their understanding.

And at least, then, he'd had people to battle with. If unsolicited sympathy disturbed him, angry outbursts he positively relished. He was never happier than when he was locked in a battle of wills. She wondered now if maybe that was because-

No. No, she wasn't going to do this. She wasn't going to be that girl, taking him apart like he was one of the case studies in her psych course. He was just her dad, like he'd always been. Nothing different.

Her mother smiled faintly at her. "You okay, babe?"

She took a deep breath, and held it a moment before letting it out and nodding. "Yeah, I... yeah. I'm okay."

"You want to see your father before you go? Or not; you don't have to, if you-"

"Mom," Zoey cut her off by gripping her arm. "Actually, I- I'm not sure this is the best time, but... I kinda have something I need to tell you, too."

"Hey."

"Hey." Josh smiled up at her softly from where he was leaned so far back in his chair it was almost tipping over. It looked as if one swift nudge would have sent it over.

On another day, Donna would have tested that theory. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," he nodded shortly.

"You're too quiet," she objected.

"You like me quiet."

"For like the first thirty seconds. Then it's, like, totally unnatural, and I get scared."

Josh smiled and pushed himself upright, letting out his air in a whoosh as the chair groaned in protest.

"You're gonna need a new chair if you keep doing that," she chided him.

"I'm just thinking," he shrugged.

"Well, stop it!"

She was relieved when he chuckled at that. "It's just, you know." He shrugged. "Things. In my head. That I'm thinking about."

"See, normally that doesn't happen. 'Cause the things in your head usually just come out of your mouth without mental intervention."

Josh locked eyes with her, and smiled slightly to remove any perceived sting from his next words. "I'm okay, Donna."

"Okay," she agreed quietly.

Silence fell, but she didn't leave, and he didn't ask her too. After a moment, he looked back across at her.

"Did- can you find out about Naomi Henderson's funeral?"

"You want to go?" she asked uncertainly.

"No, I, uh- no. It's not- No."

"Send flowers?" she said, understanding. Whatever resonance it might have had with him, he didn't have any personal claim on the life or death of Naomi Henderson.

Josh nodded at her suggestion.

"From you?" she checked. "I mean, not... Not the White House Deputy Chief of Staff."

Josh shut his eyes in something like a grimace and shook his head. She waited for him to marshal his thoughts. "Don't-" He pulled a face. "She doesn't... She doesn't need to have my name stamped on it. She doesn't need 'Compliments of the White House'. Just... just send them. This shouldn't be a Hallmark moment. She doesn't need to know who they're from."

Donna nodded, and gave him a tender smile. "Okay."

Despite Charlie's introduction, Sam hesitated slightly awkwardly in the doorway to the Oval Office. "Mr. President?"

"Sam." The president smiled, but he looked tired.

"I brought over the notes you wanted on the-"

"Ah, yes." The president took the sheaf of notes and nodded briefly. He looked up at the speechwriter. "I'm sure they're fine, Sam. You didn't need to walk them all the way over here yourself."

Sam shrugged slightly. "I don't mind the walk, Mr. President."

"No, I don't suppose you do." He smiled fractionally. "You wait until you're twenty years older, sitting in this chair, see if you still want to do all your own fetching and carrying."

He raised an eyebrow, smiling wryly despite himself. "This particular chair, Mr. President?"

"Damn straight, if I have to drag you in here myself," the president said sternly.

Sam still wasn't at all sanguine about this crazy idea that he could still make good a presidential bid, but he let it pass.

"Any word on Cambodia?" he asked, after a hesitation over what to say.

The president sighed, and he immediately wished he hadn't brought it up, although it wasn't as if it would have slipped the president's mind without the reference.

"Our position hasn't changed since yesterday afternoon - just our degree of optimism." He zoned out momentarily. "I met him, you know. A few times. Nathan Williamson. And yet I look at his photo in the briefing pack, and I barely remember the man."

"You meet a lot of people, Mr. President," Sam reminded him softly.

"Yes." This obviously failed to soothe any pangs of self-recrimination. "I meet a lot of people. It's the high point of their day, or their month, or their year. They're just a blur of faces to me."

"Mr. President..." Sam was saddened by the weight that rested on the president's shoulders. "You can't help everybody who comes through that door."

"Sometimes I wonder if I help any of them."

"Sir-"

The president snapped out of his self-pity and waved him away with a flash of a self-depreciating smile. "Ignore me, Sam. It's one of those days."

"Yes, sir." It was more than 'one of those days'. He hesitated, reluctant to go. "Sir..."

The president peered at him over the top of his glasses. "I'm happy with the notes, Sam."

He nodded, and could have taken that out, but pressed on instead. "I just- I just wanted to say-"

"We don't need to have this conversation, Sam." The president's voice was laced with tolerant good humour, but also a warning.

He looked at the floor. "No, sir. But... I understand." He met the president's eyes. "He's your dad. I... understand."

The president just held his gaze solemnly. After a moment, he left.

"Toby."

He looked up at the familiar drawl from his office doorway, not entirely surprised at the identity of his visitor.

"Ma'am," he nodded.

She gave him a smile that came off as more feral than friendly. "I have an order here for one express-delivery ass-kicking, to be delivered to the office of the Director of Communications."

Toby leaned back in his chair and rested his chin heavily on a hand. "Okay, but I'll have to check the back catalogue. We get those in here a lot."

"Oh, you know what this one's for," she said sharply.

He did. "Yes."

"Toby..." the First Lady said despairingly, "...what did you think you were doing?"

He looked down. "I was... talking."

"You do that a lot."

"Yes."

The First Lady prowled into his office, shutting the door behind her with a deceptively gentle push. She held her position until he looked up to meet her gaze. She was glaring at him.

"Toby, you know better than to-"

"I was-"

She overrode him with her voice without needing to break into a shout - a skill that only CJ and Andy had also master. "You know better than to talk to the president about certain things, Toby."

The fact that the First Lady was in the right didn't mean he wasn't prepared to fight with her over it.

"The president needed-"

"Exactly what did my husband 'need', Toby?" she said challengingly.

The words that had been on the tip of his tongue melted away into the plainer language he knew she would appreciate. "A... kick up the ass, frankly."

She smiled; amused, but no less dangerous for it. "Ah, yes. My husband is often in need of one of those." Her gaze sharpened. "Would you mind telling me what the hell possessed you to try and administer it using that kind of an approach?"

"It was... ill-judged," he conceded.

"Toby, it was lunacy!" she yelled.

"He didn't react the way I expected," Toby admitted.

Only someone who could shout him down like the First Lady would ever receive that kind of quiet confession from him, no matter how wrong he might know he was.

"Well how the hell did you expect him to react, Toby?" she demanded furiously.

"I expected him to be more... angry."

She dropped her face into her hands and sighed heavily, fury running away under the onslaught of weary dismay. "Yeah."

"He should be angry. He... should have been more angry."

"You wanted to push his buttons."

"Yes."

"The president does not react well to having his buttons pushed, Toby."

"I know."

The First Lady eyed him knowingly. "You wanted him to fight you."

"I wanted him to fight the world," he corrected softly.

"You picked the wrong weak spot, Toby," she sighed.

"I know that now."

She sat down, heavily, on the edge of his couch. "Why, Toby?" She shook her head, and shrugged. "Tell me... why?"

"He..." Toby struggled for the reasoning that had seemed so clear that day in the Oval Office. "He wants to be... normal. He tries to hide himself. He..." He looked up at her. "He shouldn't want that. He should run from that. He should kick that to death and run away from that."

"That wasn't the way to tell him that."

"I mis-judged," he defended himself.

"You're not that stupid, Toby. You knew it was going to hurt him, and you know how he gets when he's hurting. So... why did you do it, Toby?" She gazed at him, eyes glistening with sorrow now, not anger.

He looked at the floor again, picking his words slowly and haltingly. "I wanted him to... admit... that... his father wasn't perfect. That he didn't... deserve... the respect he was giving him."

Abbey shook her head sadly. "He was never gonna admit that, Toby."

"I know."

"Toby..." She let out a slow breath. "I admire that you want him to be the best that he can be. But there are times when... when you just have to let him be a human being."

Toby didn't answer, still staring at the carpet.

"It's his father, Toby," she said quietly.

"That's not... an excuse or an exoneration." Family wasn't... you didn't excuse people their crimes because they were family. You didn't...

You didn't forgive your father the unforgivable, just because he was your father.

"Yeah," she said quietly. "Yeah."

After a moment, he heard the sound of the door swinging open and shut again.

"Hey, you."

Charlie looked up, smiling in startlement. "Zoey! What are you doing here?"

"Mom wanted me to come in. To tell me about..."

"Oh," he nodded awkwardly. CJ had cornered him and spoken to him about the book this morning. He was still torn up between dismay for the president's sake and relief that at least he understood what this funk he'd been in was about.

He rounded the desk to take Zoey's hands and give her a quick kiss.

"I told mom," she blurted when he pulled away.

"You did?" he asked cautiously.

"Yeah, she-" Zoey nodded. "She was okay. She was... yeah."

Charlie hesitated, and gestured towards the Oval Office. "Do you want to...?"

"I think it's time," she agreed. She took his hand, and the two of them headed into the president's office.

He looked up from his books, and a smile split his face as he saw his youngest daughter. "Zoey!" He tugged his glasses off and stood up to come and join them.

"Hey, dad." She threw her arms around his neck and he squeezed her happily.

"What are you doing in this neck of the woods, honey?" He pressed a brief kiss to her temple and shot a mock-suspicious look at Charlie. "This guy giving you trouble? Do I need to arrange to have him disappeared?"

Zoey giggled, but stepped back to the safer ground of resting against her husband's shoulder. "No, actually, I'm probably gonna... probably gonna need him around for a while."

"Oh?" The president tilted his head inquiringly, eyes narrowed.

She looked at Charlie. Charlie looked back. They linked hands and turned to face the president, and Zoey took a breath.

"Dad? Charlie and me, we're... we're gonna have a baby."

For a long, paralysingly breathless moment, the president looked completely blank. Then an unreadable expression spread across his face, and he moved forward. Charlie backed away as he lunged, just in case, but he only wrapped Zoey in a tight bear hug.

The president held onto his daughter for what seemed like a long time, not speaking. His breathing was just a touch too ragged, and Charlie could tell his recently fiercely repressed emotions were on the edge of getting the better of him.

After a moment he raised his head, and gave his son-in-law a gentle smile. "Come here too, you," he ordered softly. He beckoned with a hand, and Charlie moved forward to be pulled into the embrace of his family.

He snatched up the phone halfway through its first ring. "Leo McGarry."

"We got word from our boys in Cambodia."

Nancy's familiar voice sent a jolt of tension through him.

"Nancy," he warned, the 'so help me, if you don't tell me right now...' going pretty much unspoken.

"They got the guy."

"The assassin?" he said in disbelief.

"Matched the gun to the bullet they took out of our guy's skull," she confirmed.

"And he's-?"

"Nobody," Nancy said.

"Huh?"

"He's a street punk, Leo. Arrests for assault, robbery, drug offences... he's nobody's paid attack dog."

The import of this news took a moment to sink in. "This was a random gun crime?"

"Leo, this guy holds up tourists and business travellers three times a week. He sees an American in an expensive suit, he's after his wallet or his phone. Probably didn't even knew who he'd gunned down 'til it hit the headlines. The agents on the scene figure Williamson probably put up a fight, called out for his protection detail or something, and the mugger panicked."

"Unlucky son of a bitch," Leo grimaced. Williamson had probably thought his Ambassadorial status protected him. Leo had lost what little faith he still had in the power of positions and titles the day the bullets started flying outside the Newseum. It didn't matter how important you were, somebody somewhere was crazy enough to try to kill you.

"His detail are getting a dressing down, but seriously, Leo, there's a fatal shooting every other day out there. He was playing the odds sneaking out on his own like that, and there's no way he didn't know it."

Despite the grim nature of the subject matter, a grin of relief was beginning to spread across his features. "We're in the clear? This was completely non-political?"

"Just another botched mugging on the streets on Phnom Penh," she confirmed. "The only thing unusual about this one was they actually caught the guy."

"I can tell the president?"

Now he heard the smile in her voice as well. "Knock yourself out," she said warmly.

Leo put down the phone and sprang to his feet, load on his shoulders lightened as he contemplated the prospect of at least one piece of good news to bring before the president today.

He headed out of the office, bellowing.

"Margaret!"

Donna wouldn't have been entirely surprised if the tension bottled up in Toby's office right now was so strong it could be felt all the way out in the press room. They were all gathered here rather than trying to squeeze into CJ's office; there was no way the rest of the staff didn't know something was up by now, but they weren't ready to take this out into the bullpen just yet.

CJ was close to bouncing off the walls, pacing back and forth as she waited for the appointed hour to roll around. "I'm ready, I'm pumped, I'm primed, I'm on the ball," she snapped at the others as they kept nervously offering suggestions.

"Katie's gonna stick to the script?" Sam wondered anxiously.

"For the first few questions, yeah. After that, it's a free for all."

"Who're you gonna call?" Toby asked. Donna resisted the urge to say 'Ghostbusters'.

"Ghostbusters," muttered Josh. CJ clipped him round the head.

"This office is too small to contain that level of stupidity."

"I'm thinking there's a pun about 'density' to be had in there somewhere," Sam observed.

CJ turned to glare at him, hand still raised. "You want some of this, Spanky?"

"This conversation has taken a very disturbing turn," Toby muttered into the palm he was resting on.

Josh opened his mouth to say something, but Donna quickly prodded him in the side. He turned to glower at her, but it quickly turned into a smile and a shrug before he turned back to the discussion. She hated to say it, but this level of stress was doing him a world of good. He'd been yanked forcibly out of his moping and thrust into the thick of plotting and scheming, and he'd come to life.

CJ had turned back to Toby's question. "Rick Maskey's first stop on the sympathy bus. And after that- Well, after that, the sympathy bus hits a brick wall and all the passengers die horribly painful deaths."

Toby sighed heavily. They all froze as the door creaked open, and Carol gave them a tentative smile. "CJ?" She waved a small slip of paper.

CJ took the note, read it, and tilted her head back with an unexpectedly relieved sigh. "Cambodia," she said, when she straightened up and noticed everybody looking at her.

"Good news?" asked Josh.

"They caught the guy, and it's not gonna be a thing." Everybody's breath let out in the same 'whoosh' of air. Sam massaged his neck.

"We can throw that out there first?"

"Distract the lions with some fresh meat?" CJ nodded. "For a while, anyway. But it won't be long before they're baying for blood again."

"I don't think lions bay," Josh put in dryly.

CJ glared at him. "Since when were you appointed nature boy?"

"Since when did lions bay?" he retorted.

"Break it up, kids." The words slipped out before she could stop them, and Donna immediately blushed crimson. But nobody challenged her, and Toby even gave her a rare quiet smile.

"She's right." CJ straightened up and smoothed her suit jacket. "Let's get this freakshow on the road."

The press room air was thick and the reporters' eyes bright with the promise of story. Nonetheless, CJ strode up to the podium with her customary unhesitancy.

"Good afternoon. The investigation into the death of US Ambassador Nathan Williamson in Phnom Penh has come to a critical juncture. Local police have arrested a young man found in possession of a gun linked by ballistic evidence to the ambassador's murder. The suspect denies shooting the ambassador, but has an arrest record that includes assault, robbery and drug-related offences, and has spent time in jail for holding up tourists at gunpoint. The local authorities are treating it as a non-political crime."

A forest of hands. She picked one who'd have the decency not to skip to the subject du jour just yet. "Derrick?"

"Have the local police released a name?"

Oh, if only she had a few more morsels of information to parcel out and keep the journalists interested. "We'll have more details on that for you later today." Still, maybe it was best not to prolong the inevitable. She picked out the hand that would start the ball rolling. "Katie."

Katie glanced down at her notebook automatically, for all that CJ knew she'd had this particular sequence of questions polished and memorised for upwards of twenty-four hours - hell, she'd probably been honing it for weeks before the press secretary had signed off on it the day before.

"CJ; has the president read the Michael Rogers biography Jed: Portrait of a Future President?"

"He has, yes."

This alone caused a sudden halting of scratching pens across the room. If this had been a standard case of kiss-and-tell claptrap, there was no way the president would have been given it to so much as glance at, and everybody knew it.

Katie followed up with the stinger. "Does the president intend to take issue with the book's insinuation that he suffered what amounts to persistent child abuse at the hands of his father, John Bartlet senior?"

Oh, for the chance to slap that down with a 'that's ridiculous'.

A breath. "The president has no plans to take issue with Michael Rogers over the content of his book."

Silence. For such a short beat that the casual observer would never have noticed it at all, but CJ could no more have missed it than an irregularity in her own heartbeat. A skip in the press room's rhythm - the journalistic beast had been surprised.

And then the roaring resumed.

"CJ! CJ!"

"Chris."

The seasoned reporter gave her an almost disbelieving look. "CJ, the president has confirmed that his father used to physically and emotionally abuse him?"

"The president has stated he has no quibble with the factual content of Michael Rogers's book," she corrected sharply. "Such as it is," she added, with a twist of bitterness. In truth, the biography had been extremely coy about coming out with anything concrete, but just the fact that nobody was suiting up to dispute its clear insinuations spoke volumes.

"But the president feels he suffered abuse?" Chris persisted.

"I really wouldn't presume to be able to speak for him on such a delicate matter," CJ said icily. An evasion of the question, but a damn honest one at that, and it was as well for the press corps that they had the smarts not to push it any further.

"CJ! CJ!"

"Sandy."

"Does the president feel his past has influenced this administration's stance on domestic violence initiatives?"

"I think the president - and any other right-minded human being - would take offence at the implication that domestic violence is something you need to have experienced personally to feel strongly about, Sandy..."

And so it continued.

He watched the briefing with the sound muted - not turned off, because that would be silly, but... muted. Enough so that the words were there on the edge of hearing, but they blurred into each other and you couldn't really pick them out unless you concentrated.

He wasn't concentrating. Not on that, anyway. He was watching CJ, every inch the professional, coolly dispensing information and fielding questions. As if this was politics. As if this was something that belonged in the White House press room.

As if this wasn't his life, his family they were tearing apart and holding up to the light down there. He'd drawn firm lines around his children, protected them from that media invasion - why couldn't they let him do the same for his father? The man was decades in his grave - let the dead lie in peace, whatever their sins.

The door creaked open, but he didn't look up; even if he hadn't been the only one who ever came through that way, Jed would have known it was Leo. He quietly crossed the carpet to stand behind Jed's chair.

"You watching?"

He gave a half shrug. Non-committal. Whatever.

"We got news back on Cambodia."

"Yeah?" Jed did look up now. He'd been vaguely aware of a reference to the Cambodia situation at the start of the briefing, but he hadn't been paying attention. They had news? The smile on Leo's face made him automatically start to grin in response.

"They caught the guy. Ballistics data nailed him."

Jed peered at him, almost disbelieving. "And he's-?"

Leo's smile broadened. "Completely apolitical. This was a random killing - we're out of the woods. The guy'll go to trial, we'll replace the ambassador... it's not gonna be an international incident."

It was altogether too regrettable an affair to say he was pleased, but it was definitely a relief. He settled back in his chair with a sigh of lifted pressure. "Good..." He nodded slowly to himself. "Good."

"Yeah."

Jed turned his attention back to the TV as Leo fell silent. He glimpsed his senior staff lurking at the edge of the press room. All intent, focused on the briefing; he should have resented it, but in some strange way it was reassuring.

He smiled to himself as the camera caught Sam absently raising a hand to rub his new goatee, and looked up at his Chief of Staff.

"Leo, do you think I should grow a beard?" he asked, almost surprised at how easily the playful tone still came to him.

"Sir."

He smirked. "I'll assume that was a 'good idea, sir'."

"That was a 'nothing in hell I could possibly say in reaction to that statement would be permissible within the bounds of the Oval Office, sir'. Sir."

"You don't think I'd look good with a beard?" he asked, raising his eyebrows in pretended injury.

Leo gave him a dry look. "I think you'd look like you forgot to shave," he pointed out.

"For a while, and then I'd look like I had a beard."

"And in the meantime, you'd look like you're the leader of the free world, and you forgot to shave."

"I always look like I'm the leader of the free world, Leo, I have a natural air of gravitas and dignity."

"Certainly nothing says dignity like the 'I've passed puberty, and gosh darn I'm gonna prove it' look."

"Lots of dignified people have beards," Jed said sternly. "Toby has a beard; you're not so quick to mock him now for it, are you?"

"Frankly, sir, I think nobody wants to take a chance on finding out what's underneath."

Jed chuckled, and the sound felt almost unfamiliar to him. This had been hanging over his head for so long... Despite everything, it was almost a relief to get it out in the open.

Leo glanced sideways at him. "You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"And in the real world?"

He shrugged the pointed question away. "Zoey came by earlier."

"I saw," he nodded.

Jed looked up at him. "She and Charlie are having a baby."

A delighted smile spread across Leo's face. "No," he said wonderingly.

"So I'm told," Jed shrugged. "Let's not get into the technicalities of it."

Leo snickered. It was all right for him - wait until Mallory started popping out kids, he'd soon change his tune. When you were the father of daughters, you had to learn to believe in immaculate conceptions to keep your sanity.

"Another Bartlet grandbaby on its way," Jed mused to himself.

"The world trembles in terror," Leo said dryly. Jed shot him a look.

"There goes your chance of being godfather."

"I think that's traditionally down to, you know, the actual parents."

"Hey! That's my baby girl you're talking about."

Leo rolled his eyes. "I think when your children start producing more children, it's time to accept they've grown up."

"It's never time to accept that," Jed pouted, folding his arms. Leo just laughed. Traitor.

"Are you going to kidnap this grandchild and refuse to let it go like you did the last one?"

"Grandfather's prerogative."

Leo shook his head. "If Charlie survives having you for a father-in-law, it'll be a miracle and a half."

Jed looked up at him with a quietly sad smile. "It's family, Leo," he reminded him. "And it doesn't matter what you go through - family's always gonna be family."

"Yeah," said Leo softly. "Yeah."

He laid a hand on his old friend's shoulder, and Jed leaned forward to turn up the sound on the rest of the briefing.