Lost is all Tony is, has been ever since that accursed night in Rosslyn, when he watched his family be caught in a haze of bullets, unable to protect any of them. He is adrift, swallowed in the deep ocean without a life raft, caught between the morality of the law and his thirst for vengeance. There's no island in sight to grab onto, nothing to cling to, because those who committed the act are dead, and the one who assisted them is in jail, far out of his reach.
He closes his eyes at night and sees Josh, slumped against the concrete wall, eyes wide with shock. Silence surrounds him and he hears the panicked screams of the victims, both physically and psychologically affected. Those who were there will forever be scarred, simply because they wanted to meet the President, because a certain group couldn't stand the idea of a black boy dating a white girl.
The worst part is everyone is going through the exact same thing. They're all struggling, try as they might to hide it. The expression of that struggle seeps out through the cracks, reveals itself through the obsession with a school board race or a sudden snap at the end of a long day. It's madness, really, that they won't discuss it, but no one can risk being seen as weak.
His conversation with Bartlet does him some good, because there's an uneasy comfort that even a man so powerful as he is still touched by the difficulties in life. He's also slightly cheered by the shared longing for revenge, that he's not the only one who wants to not bend the law, but completely shatter it, consequences be damned. However, no amount of revenge will erase the scars in Josh's stomach, or take away the guilt in Charlie's eyes. The wounds will still remain, unseen as they may be.
That's what truly sickens him, at the end of it all. The fact that there's no quick or easy fix for this, that time given is the only option. He'd prefer that they were all healed, that they could go back to the way they were, but that's not possible. In all honesty, he misses feeling safe when he walked outside, not like his eyes should be glued to the sky. He misses it almost more than he can bear.
That's nothing new, however.