XVIII

"Leo?" Margaret hovered in the office doorway. She cleared her throat. "Leo?"

It took the second try to get a reaction; her boss was pretty much slumped over his desk; not so much dozing as in a near-zombie state. He shook himself out of it and blinked at her. "Margaret. Any news?"

Right then, her desire to be able to give a positive answer was as much for Leo's sake as for poor Charlie's. But she didn't have anything to give.

"He's still unconscious. They won't know more until he wakes up."

She didn't miss the way the hope deflated out of him - and that, in itself, was worrying, because even when Leo was deeply troubled he usually hid it much better than that. Margaret ran a concerned eye over him. "You should go home."

He shook his head, not that she'd expected him to do anything different. "Josh is still out of state. With all this going on, he needs one of us in the White House." Margaret didn't experience even a moment of pronoun confusion - when Leo meant the president, you could hear it in his tone of voice.

She also knew the president wouldn't be any happier about Leo wearing himself into the ground than she was. "He also needs you to be, you know, alive and semi-conscious."

"Margaret-"

"I'm just saying-"

"Leave it, Margaret," he ordered, sharply enough that she did.

"Are you all right?" she asked tentatively, in the silence that followed.

He exploded. "Charlie's in hospital and the president- How all right do you want me to be?" he demanded harshly. The tone of his voice made her flinch. Leo was regularly cranky, but now he sounded genuinely angry, and not at her. Leo was tearing himself up, and she didn't know how to fix it.

So she pointed him in the direction of someone who might.

"The president's ready to tear the building down trying to get out," she told him.

Leo stared at her. "He's still here?"

"There was a problem with the security clearance. Zoey's team called in a group of boys behaving suspiciously close to the hospital."

Leo pushed to his feet, his own exhaustion forgotten with the prospect of a duty he could discharge. "I should go calm him down before he hurts somebody."

"Yeah."

But as Margaret watched him go, she wondered who was going to calm Leo down before he hurt himself.

Donna arrived in the waiting room like a blast of cool refreshing air.

"Hey Deanna. Hey Zoey." She smiled kindly at the two girls, huddled up together like the sisters they almost were. She got two wobbly grins in return; it was hard not to smile at Donna.

"Hey, Toby. Is he still-?" Toby nodded.

"We're still waiting." Not the best news - but after a certain night three years ago, he was very glad he didn't have a worse bombshell to drop on her. The look on her face after he'd broken the news had been as much a part of his nightmares afterwards as the blood on his sleeves and the image of Josh, falling.

"I got through to Josh. He and CJ are coming back on the next flight out of Ohio."

He must have frowned; or maybe there was something to Josh's claim that she could read minds. "CJ's father died around one o'clock," she told him. He was pretty positive she'd never met the man, but the compassion and sorrow in her voice was deep and genuine. He remembered once telling Josh that if more people reacted like Donna Moss, things might go a lot better.

He nodded slowly, hoping that CJ had got there in time to talk to him - and that the conversation had been something other than the painfully circular telephone calls he'd overheard towards the end. CJ had always quietly worshipped her father; losing him at any time would have been a devastating blow, let alone with all the other things that were weighing down on them right now.

Donna had spoken softly, perhaps to keep the mention of death from the ears of the two girls waiting for news on their own loved one. Now she raised her voice, rustling in the bag slung over her arm. "I brought food! And this." She handed a framed photograph across to Zoey, who took it and gave it a sad-edged smile. "The president said we've got to put it by Charlie's bed, so it's the first thing he sees when he wakes up."

Toby managed to get a look at the picture, and saw it was a shot from the engagement party a week before; Charlie and Zoey gazing adoringly at each other, while the president stood with one arm around his wife and the other around Deanna.

Zoey looked up at her solemnly. "Is my dad coming?"

"As soon as he's finished biting the heads off his Secret Service people," Donna promised, and Deanna let out an involuntary giggle. Toby suspected it was more true than either of the girls realised - arguments like the importance of his own safety would never impress the president when there was a distressed daughter to rush to.

Zoey lapsed into silence as she gazed reflectively at the picture, and Donna came over to sit next to Toby. She nodded at Sam, back to being curled up in an exhausted heap. He hadn't stirred when she came in.

"Is he okay?"

"He's had a tough few days," Toby reminded her. "I'd send him home, if it wasn't for the possibility of reporters." Sam was better off getting his rest with his face pressed into a plastic chair than facing that gauntlet again.

"I doubt they're there," Donna told him. "They're mostly at the White House. I don't know how, but they know about Charlie."

He frowned. "Who's briefing?"

"Carol." She smiled. "I think she's pretty much scared out of her mind, but she's doing fine."

Toby nodded, but he still hoped for CJ's speedy return. Not just for the administration, and not just so he could resume his customary watch over her. On an unspoken and probably irrational level, he would just... feel better if CJ was there.

Leo slipped inside the president's private study, not missing the frustration that tightened his old friend's face.

"Stanley gone?" he asked neutrally.

"He just left," nodded the president, taking a puff on his cigarette.

Leo hesitated. "So, did you-?"

"Not now, Leo," Jed told him warningly. He acquiesced with a nod. Jed smiled bitterly. "I doubt he's coming back," he added. "He thought he'd seen me mad before..."

Leo supposed that was exaggeration. Or not. He couldn't blame Stanley if he'd quickly fled the scene - it probably took more than years of training with trauma victims to handle Jed Bartlet in a full blown impotent rage.

The president stood up, abruptly, and the icy calm of his most deadly anger settled over him. He turned steely eyes to Leo. "Whoever did this, Leo, we will find them, and they will pay the full price for their crimes."

It was Leo's job to defuse the president's rages, and to stop him from doing anything irrevocable in a fit of anger... but some things, it was hard to disagree with. "Yes, sir," he said coolly. Whether this had been a gang of street-punks out for trouble or a pre-meditated attack on the president's future son-in-law, they'd messed with the wrong family.

The door opened with no knock to precede it - it was one of the few people who had that privilege in any and all circumstances. Ron Butterfield gave the president a sober nod. "Sir, you're cleared to go."

Not even wasting enough breath to rant about the security procedures that had forced him to wait, the president crushed out his cigarette and headed for the door. "Leo, come with us," he ordered casually over his shoulder.

Leo shook his head. "Sir, I need to stay in the White House."

The president came to a halt. "Leo, you've been here all night," he objected.

"Josh is flying back from Ohio," he replied. Without actively stating that he would in fact leave when that happened. He didn't want to go home; not when home was still a featureless hotel room. That would not be a good place for him to be right now.

The president looked less than thrilled at his reasoning, but nodded. "Okay." He followed his Secret Service man out of the room.

And Leo was left alone in the president's private study, very conscious even beyond the thick smell of smoke of the faint thread of bourbon in the air. He knew without looking where the crystal decanter would stand, from long memory of good days and bad days alike where it was always the first thing to catch his eye when he entered the room.

Today was a bad day.

He didn't turn around to mark that spot where he knew without question it would be. But he did flip open the president's abandoned cigarette case, and steal one to smoke down to the butt with shaking fingers.