XVII

SUNDAY:

CJ was barely conscious of her feet touching the ground as she raced through the hospital. Just as well she wasn't wearing the heels she sometimes wore for work. Her brothers met her as she approached the room at speed.

"Is he-?"

"He's awake," said Peter urgently. "But I don't think-"

"I need to see him."

"Yeah."

Despite the urgency of her approach, CJ found herself slowing to what felt like a crawl as she entered the room. She didn't want to go inside. If she didn't go inside, then her dad was still the hearty giant she remembered, casually swinging her up into his arms in the days long before she was nearly as tall as he was.

She had to go in. He was her father, and she owed him that much. She owed him a hell of a lot more than that, it suddenly seemed, and now it was too late. Why hadn't she said it all before he started getting vague? As soon as she realised he was getting vague? When he had his first stroke? As soon as Peter had called at the beginning of the week to warn her he was back in hospital?

Because she'd always believed there would be more time, and suddenly there wasn't any more time, just the solid brick wall of "too late" rushing towards her at the speed of light.

She entered the room. Her father lay with his head lolling back, eyes staring up at nothing; he looked as if he was already dead, but ragged breaths were still tearing from his throat. They sounded as if they hurt, and she blinked back tears without knowing why she wanted to hide them.

"Daddy?" she said tentatively, her voice sounding like a child's in her own ears. But even as a child she'd never sounded that hesitant, because when she'd been a child she had believed without understanding the possibility of disbelief that her father would always know her.

There was little movement to his slack, grey face, but she saw the ghost of a smile anyway. "Claudia Jean," he whispered, and the name that she'd forsworn ever since she was old enough to realise that was an option sounded beautiful.

"I'm here, daddy," she said, collapsing down to kneel beside him as if she was still the lanky, inelegant tomboy of her teenage years.

"Shouldn't you be at... the election?" he asked laboriously, and she was too relieved to know he knew her to care that he thought they were months ago, or maybe even five years ago.

"The election's over, daddy," she smiled through tears that were now running freely down her cheeks.

Her father was silent so long that she thought he'd drifted away again, but then he tried to speak again. "Your man... did he... win?"

"That's right dad, he did."

"Good... I shook his hand."

"You did." Jack Cregg was a man who believed in the power of a handshake, and he'd never given one to a man who he didn't consider deserved it. CJ would never have admitted to the boys on the campaign trail how she'd secretly snuck off to rub some suspiciously red eyes after her father had judged her new cause and deemed it worthy of a Cregg handshake.

"Your mother must be so proud to see you up there..." he whispered vaguely, and CJ gripped his arm.

"I'm sure she would have been, dad." Her mother had been gone a long, long time now - it had been her father through everything, daddy, tall and stern jawed and fearless, teaching her to be a Cregg just like her brothers; unbowed, unbloodied, and unafraid of anything.

Just like her father.

"I love you, dad." She didn't know when she kissed his cheek if he even still knew she was there, but she held on tight to him anyway. Her brothers came in to kneel to either side of her, Robert laying an arm across her shoulder, Peter giving her a quiet, melancholy smile.

And they waited.

Toby paced the waiting room frustratedly. Nobody at the hospital was telling them anything; they hadn't been able to see Charlie, they hadn't even been told anything beyond the obvious assumption that his injuries had to be quite serious. At this stage, he wasn't above pulling White House rank on the first person who looked like they might be impressed by it, but none of the doctors had stopped by for long enough for him to try.

Sam was coiled across two of the uncomfortable chairs, too agitated to doze but obviously needing to. What little relaxation a few beers had brought him had evaporated without trace, and the strains of the past few days were catching up with him. With so much weariness in his face he looked older - not, Toby suspected, that his deputy would ever end up resembling his actual age, but for once he didn't look like a twenty-year-old. Regardless of how depressing he found his deputy's unnatural aura of youthfulness, he found such dents in it even more disturbing. Sam had only recently climbed out of a worrying kind of lingering depression - the last thing he needed was to have these kind of stresses poured on him.

Sam's default position was 'perky'. And though there were few tortures under which he would have admitted as much, Toby had been missing it for months. Fostering somebody else's fragile optimism was a fairly novel experience for him, but with a few blunt nudges in the appropriate direction he'd had Sam on the way back to something approaching normal.

And then the universe had decided to have other plans. He wasn't entirely sure how one would go about kicking the universe's ass, but he was more than prepared to do it.

Reflections on suitable substitute asses to kick until such time as he found out were interrupted as the doors swung back. A pair of dark-suited Secret Service agents charged in, despite all their fitness training only just managing to keep up with their diminutive protectee.

Zoey spotted the two writers and dashed towards them. "Did Charlie-?"

Toby was saved from giving answers he didn't have by the arrival of the doctor. He saw Zoey and gave her a respectful nod. "Ah, Miss Bartlet-"

"How is he?" she demanded without preamble.

The man hesitated, as if weighing up how much to tell her, but Toby was having none of it. "The truth," he said bluntly. "In plain language."

Zoey gave him a grateful smile as Sam came over to give her a brief, comforting squeeze. They all looked at the doctor, who was obviously uncomfortable under the collective attention.

"Ah, it appears that Mr. Young was, uh, quite badly beaten. His injuries are... extensive, but with the proper treatment, he should make a full recovery. Fortunately there was no organ damage, although he has a fractured wrist and several broken ribs. Physically, he's stable. However..."

"However what?" Toby growled pointedly. The doctor glanced cautiously at Zoey.

"Mr. Young clearly received a severe blow to the head at some point during the struggle. Until he wakes up, it's impossible to fully assess what, if any, damage that may have done."

Zoey's eyes looked huge with trepidation. "He might be brain-damaged?" she asked tentatively.

The doctor pulled a face. "We really couldn't say until he regains consciousness."

"When will that be?" Sam asked.

"I couldn't say," he repeated.

"But he will regain consciousness?" Toby asked, forcing the issue out of some stubborn need to hear the whole truth no matter what it might be.

The man adjusted his glasses. "Well, we believe that Mr. Young was brought in not long after he was first knocked unconscious, so yes, the chances are good that he'll awaken in the next couple of hours."

That was all he said, but Toby heard the unspoken corollary; that if those hours passed and he still didn't wake, his chances would grow steadily smaller.

Zoey nodded slowly, taking it all in. "I want to see him," she said firmly, jaw set with a determination that stirred mental echoes of her mother and father both.

He hesitated. "Normally, we only allow family members-"

"I'm his fiancée," she cut him off abruptly.

Toby suspected it was more likely her parental connections than future marital ones that caused the doctor to relent - or maybe it was the not so subtle glare he was getting from two governmental speechwriters and the slightly more menacing figures of two Secret Service agents.

"Very well," he agreed with a quick nod. "But I'm afraid the rest of you will have to wait here."

If he'd meant the Secret Service agents to be included in that, he was out of luck, for they simply followed straight after their protectee. Sam and Toby, however, had neither presidential relatives nor concealed weaponry as a pass to get them inside. Toby wasn't sure whether he would have wanted to, anyway; he'd done enough torturous lingering at Josh's bedside three years before to last him a lifetime.

They went back to waiting as they had before, except that this time it was Toby who sat and Sam who paced. Agitated, he made several circuits of the room before coming to an abrupt halt. He gestured vaguely towards the door. "I'm gonna go, uh, go get- do you want coffee, or... or anything?"

Toby shook his head. He didn't want anything, and he suspected Sam didn't, either; he just needed to get out of the waiting room.

Sam left, and then he waited alone for an indefinable period of time. Though this room had obviously never been used for anything but waiting, it still carried that familiar antiseptic smell. He thought of CJ, several states away, perhaps waiting in a hospital room just like this one. For all that he wanted to be right where he was because of Charlie, and for all that he trusted Josh to be a friend to her, the nagging feeling that he should be at her side persisted. His association with CJ was one of the longest in what was by choice a fairly insular life, and the bonds that tied them together were as strong as they were complex.

Toby could picture every nuance of her reaction when she found out about Charlie, and wished he could be there when she did. And if he had been, he would probably have done nothing and said nothing - but the nothing that he said and did would still have been instinctively understood.

But she was there, and he was here, and Charlie was in a hospital bed because his skin didn't match some young psychopath's approved colour chart. That was the way the world spun today, and the struggle for Charlie's recovery wasn't a battle he could fight with words, and so he was at a loss.

So he just waited.

The night air was cool, and the stars above very clear. Josh looked across at CJ worriedly. "Are you okay?" he asked gently.

She nodded slowly, but didn't speak. He knew that she'd been crying earlier, but her eyes were dry now. Her father had eventually slipped away and after a while she'd come out here for air, and at last he'd felt able to be at her side without feeling intrusive.

"Thanks," she said abruptly. "Just for- you know. Thanks."

Josh just smiled at her in silent understanding. He slipped his hands into his pockets, and they both looked at the stars. He thought about his father. Gone for five years now, could it really be so long?

His cell phone bleeped. They both jumped, and then CJ chuckled quietly. He made an apologetic face, angry at his own instinct to switch it on as soon as he was out of the hospital, but she just said "It's probably Toby."

"Yeah." He fumbled inside his jacket for the phone. "You want to talk to him, or should I...?"

CJ hesitated, then shrugged. "Yeah, I'll... if it's Toby, I'll talk to him."

"Okay." He pressed a button and brought the phone to his ear. "Josh Lyman."

The voice at the other end wasn't Toby - but it was even more familiar to him, and there was a note in it that he didn't like at all. His chest seized. "Donna? Donna, what's wrong? What's happened?"