Author's Note: Chapter 25, can you believe it? I took a couple extra days on this chapter because I was storyboarding through the end of part two. It's cool to have a plan! Speaking of which, stay tuned for Chapter 26, where we finally get to see what Josh has been up to all this time! Feedback is always awesome, I love to hear what people think of this story and all the stories I've been posting.

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"God, what a day!" Donna looked up from her textbook when Sam walked in the front door, already tugging off his tie and shedding his suitcoat. His dark hair was ever-so-slightly disordered, a sign of major Sam Seaborn trauma.

"Another long one?" she asked sympathetically.

"They're all long lately," he assured her, kicking off his shoes before coming to join her on the couch. "I swear to God, I think just having a Republican in the White House has released some sort of miasma into the political atmosphere. We do our best to maintain our idealism, we reach for the same stars we did in happier times, but our efforts fall short, choked by the pollution."

Donna petted his hair back into place. "Now you sound like Josh, but with much loftier prose," she teased.

"Well, I'm beginning to think he had a point," Sam complained. "I thought dealing with the Department of Labor was annoying and tedious already, but that was before the ascendancy of one former Congressman Mitchell 'Call me Bud' Williamson. Why the hell would anybody call him Bud anyway, with a name like that?"

"Because he drives them to drink?" Donna suggested, leaning in to kiss his ear. That was pleasant, so she continued on, trailing kisses along his jawline.

"That's probably a safe bet..." Sam trailed off, scooting around on the couch so he could face her more fully. He captured her mouth for a proper kiss, then asked, "Are you trying to distract me?"

"Mm-hmm." She slid into his lap and undid his top two collar buttons. "Trying to soften you up."

He tilted his head, touching his forehead likely to hers. "Uh-oh. How bad is this going to be?" Sam's apprehension didn't stop him from returning the favor with her blouse, deftly working even the decorative little buttons.

"Not too bad," she assured him. "Practically painless, really." More buttons, and a pout. "I don't like when you wear undershirts. It's not cold in California."

"No, but I do sweat," he pointed out, shrugging out of his shirt. "You're wearing a camisole."

"That's because my shirt is translucent in bright sunlight," she informed him with a grin, even as she set it aside.

Sam decided that image was pretty distracting in and of itself. He wondered if he could convince her, maybe out in the courtyard... no, probably not. But it was a hell of a picture. He ran his fingers along the lacy top edge of her camisole, knuckles brushing lightly against the sensitive flesh underneath. She drew in a quick breath, almost as distracted as he was to judge by the soft pink flush beginning to cover her pale skin. "All right, so spill."

Donna blinked at him. "What?" He chuckled and toyed with the straps of her top as she regrouped. "Right. Well, it's February, as you know..."

"Okay, that's true." He amused himself by making little curlicues on her shoulders with the tips of his fingers.

"So we've been pretty much living together here for almost three months now." Donna squirmed, but he was pretty sure it wasn't from discomfort. "I have more of my stuff here than I have at my apartment at this point."

"You certainly do have a lot of stuff," Sam agreed easily. He was already fairly sure where this was going, but he couldn't say he wasn't enjoying himself along the way. "I find that strangely endearing about you. Though we're going to need new shelves in the bathroom or something, because that's getting a little out of control."

She drew back, pouting again. "You have at least as much bathroom stuff as I do," she pointed out. "Probably more, and you don't even wear makeup!"

"Hence the shelves," he reminded her. "Is that what you wanted to talk about? We could go to IKEA." He stifled a laugh at her aggravated expression. "Come to think of it, I could use some new napkin rings, and maybe another hundred little candles..." He started laughing for real when she pushed him back flat onto the couch.

"Now you're just being difficult," she accused him, but she was laughing too. "I'm trying to do something here."

"You're softening me up," he reminded her. "I think it might not be having precisely the intended effect, but I'm certainly not about to naysay it. We could always change the venue, though."

"You're going to make me say it all at once and it's going to sound stupid," she complained.

"All right, I'm sorry, I'm listening," he told her, folding his hands behind his head.

"Okay," she began, still leaning over him with her hair nearly brushing his chest. "We've been practically living together for almost three months now, and it seems to be working out very well, bathroom shelves notwithstanding. I was talking to Carol today, CJ's Carol, and she's going to be moving out here in a few weeks to start at the Hollis Foundation with CJ. She hasn't got a place to live yet, and I was thinking, well wouldn't it be convenient and easy if I could just sublet her my apartment for a month or two while she's finding a place of her own?"

Sam tilted his head to one side and regarded her. She really was very distracting from this angle. "So you want to move in here for two months so Carol can have your apartment? You're a very good friend, Donna."

"I was thinking that maybe it would be like a test," she hedged, "to see how we really get along together in one household. And maybe if it works out..."

"Ah, so it's a proposition, then." He pulled her down and kissed her, just to put her out of her misery. She seemed inclined to go along with that plan. "Real estate is pretty hard to find around here," he finally said, his voice a little muffled because he was nibbling her ear. "And you've got what, two boxes of stuff left over there?"

"Something like that," she admitted. "It kind of just happened that way."

"Honestly, I think it's a great idea," he told her, pleased when her face brightened with that sunshine smile. "I've been thinking about asking you, but it seemed like it might be too soon. And we needed shelves first." He oofed obligingly when she gave him a laughing shove in the chest. "But you're my campaign strategist. How's it going to look, me shacking up with a gorgeous blonde with a mind like a steel trap?"

"It's 2007, Samuel," Donna pointed out. "It's California. People would be more surprised if you weren't living with somebody. Anybody who cares at all isn't going to be coaxed into voting Democrat anyway."

"Good point," he agreed, pulling her down for another kiss. "And we do have rather stunning personal charisma, if it comes to convincing people," he murmured against her lips.

She sank into the kiss and lingered there for a long few moments. "Well, that's the god's honest truth." They continued on in that vein for several minutes, until Sam had lost his undershirt and Donna her camisole, and it just seemed much smarter to continue the conversation in the very comfortable California king bed they would now officially be sharing.

As Donna led him by the hand towards the bedroom, she tossed over her shoulder. "Oh, and for the softening up bit? Danny and CJ are coming over on Friday, he wants to watch the basketball game on the big TV."

"Oh come on!" Sam protested, even as he followed her into the bedroom. "He's a Celtics fan! I can't even take him seriously!"

"I'm sure you'll survive."

By Tuesday night, Sam was at least philosophical about the idea of having to watch basketball with a Celtics fan, and Donna had moved the rest of her things into his condo. It was a bit of a shift because most of what she'd left for last was decorative items, her pictures and tchotckes, all the things that made an apartment into a home. She'd seemed reticent to unpack them, as though she weren't quite sure she ought to be intruding so blatantly into his space, so he'd taken the liberty of unpacking most of them for her while she was at study group on Sunday evening.

Despite what people said about erudite men of impeccable personal grooming, Sam did not have much of an eye for interior decorating. It didn't seem to matter where all the little statues and candles went, and hanging all the pictures in an irregular sunburst on the living room wall added visual interest, in his opinion. Donna had been a little stunned to come home and see what he'd done, but then she'd laughed for five full minutes and taken him to bed, so he considered it a job well done. She'd gone ahead and rearranged everything all over again after that, until the condo looked a lot more like both of them.

It was almost game time before CJ and Danny arrived, beers and snacks in hand, but there was still enough time for basic socialization. Donna had been going for lunches with CJ, but Sam hadn't gotten a chance to see her since they'd helped her and Danny move into their condo six weeks ago. She looked five years younger already, with so much stress melted away and replaced by the excitement of a new challenge. California, Sam decided, was a very good place for burned-out politicos. Really a lot better than Florida, no matter what anybody said. You couldn't recover from political burnout in a swing state. Danny looked about the same as always, scruffy and generally pleased with himself, but there was a satisfaction about him that Sam had never noticed before. He'd wondered if the veteran reporter would be happy taking a teaching job at UCLA, but so far it seemed to be agreeing with him. Sam asked him about it while they were waiting for the pregame show to wrap up.

"It's a lot different than reporting, that's for sure," Danny told him. "Kids these days can't spell worth a damn." He leaned back against the sofa with his beer nocked easily between thumb and forefinger. "Luckily, they sweetened the deal by giving me a couple of TAs to do most of the grading, so I'm mostly planning lessons and lecturing. Which means," he admitted, "three hours a week getting to tell all my best stories to a bunch of young and malleable minds who haven't heard them yet."

"When you put it that way, it sounds pretty good," Sam allowed.

"It's a little depressing though," Danny admitted. "Most of the kids in the program are bright, and some of them are really sharp. If they'd been coming up along with me, they'd be looking at bright futures, but god only knows what's going to happen with print journalism anymore. Half of them will probably end up freelancing for news blogs, and I don't know what to tell them." He took a drink. "Also, it makes me feel incredibly old."

"It really is unfair that we keep getting older," Sam agreed.

"Says the man who still looks thirty," Danny countered. "When are you starting your campaign? You might need to spray some gray on your temples."

"We're still revving up the money machine right now," Sam told him, one hand automatically going up to check his hair. "Another four or five months till the fundraising starts. You going to come on tour with us?"

"Not hardly," Danny said with a laugh. "The campaign bus experience was bad enough when I was covering the Lassiter campaign in 1992, and somehow they never got any better as I got older. I don't think the first Bartlet bus had any shocks at all."

"I loved that bus," Donna protested as she and CJ came in with glasses of wine and bowls of chips. "It was like my home away from home."

"That's the one you slept on for three weeks before we noticed you weren't renting motel rooms, right?" CJ recalled. "In New Hampshire, in January?"

"I was from hardy Wisconsin stock, once upon a time," Donna reminded her. "And I had a sleeping bag."

"See, there's the sort of stories I need to get out of you people," Danny observed with a grin.

"Oh no, no way. That's not going in your book," Donna protested with a laugh.

"What book?" Sam asked.

"Aside from trying his hand at teaching, Danny's decided to write the Big Book of Bartlet," CJ told him, sliding one arm around Danny's shoulders. "The President and Abbey have both agreed to give him interviews, and he's going to be trying to get all of us to spill our guts on how things really happened in the Bartlet White House."

Donna grinned at Sam. "We might need you to look up some statutes of limitation first," she told him. "But if anybody writes our story, it ought to be Danny."

Sam nodded thoughtfully. "You were right there for most of the big stuff," he allowed. "Even if most of the time you were just causing more trouble."

"Hey, journalist," Danny reminded him. "That's my job."

"And don't I know it," added CJ, elbowing him lightly.

"Are you going to interview all the senior staff?" Sam asked suddenly.

"I'm going to try," Danny said. He sobered a little. "I've already talked to Mallory, she's going to let me look through some of Leo's papers."

"Have you talked to Josh?" Donna asked. Sam looked at her, but couldn't quite read what thoughts were going through her head. It was the same question he'd been going to ask, though, so maybe he could guess.

"Not yet," Danny told her. "But I will. We go back a long way, and from what I hear, he's back to work now, sort of. Consulting and pundit stuff at least."

That was news to Sam, and to Donna as well from the look of it. "Josh is a pundit now?" Donna asked, sounding rather disbelieving.

"He's in high demand on Capitol Beat and Nightly Nation, a voice fresh from the trenches, as it were." Danny chuckled. "Plus they don't have to fish very hard to get him to start pot-shotting the administration."

"Isn't that a little tricky given that Matt Santos is HUD Secretary now?" CJ asked.

Danny shrugged. "I haven't heard him call out Santos specifically yet, but I can't imagine Josh was too pleased when Santos took the hand across the aisle. Gonna be a little awkward to run against the incumbent president when you've been a member of his cabinet for years."

"Of course, there's nothing saying that Josh has to run Santos again in four years," CJ pointed out. "Maybe he's done with campaigning."

"Maybe he just needs a different campaign," Donna mused. CJ gave her a look that was frankly skeptical, but Donna missed it on account of staring into her beer.

"Hey, they're finally starting the game," Danny noted. "The East Coast audience is probably asleep by now." Conversation drifted off, but Sam found himself unable to concentrate on the game. It had been four months since he'd last spoken to Josh, the longest period of silence since Josh had come to New York to find him nine years ago. Something needed to be done.