XXI

Abbey rushed into the waiting room with her Secret Service team behind her, trying not to let herself feel the ghosts of three years past. Today it wasn't a husband and a friend she was running towards, but a future son and the love of her daughter's life.

And she didn't have her medical licence. Never mind that the doctors here were as qualified as any in the world, that Charlie's most pressing need for medical attention had been long before she got here, that even were she not First Lady she would never have been called upon for assistance - she didn't have her medical licence, and she felt naked and helpless without it.

She couldn't be a doctor - but there was still one role she could play here, the same one she'd played that terrible night when all she'd known was there was a bullet in her husband's gut and no one would tell her how serious it was.

"Mom!" Zoey rushed into her arms and Abbey squeezed her tightly. Deanna hung back, but Abbey swept her up for a swift hug as well. Charlie's sister needed a mom every bit as much as her own daughter right now.

"Nobody's telling us anything, mom." Zoey's eyes begged nakedly for her mother to find a way to get answers that weren't there. "He's still unconscious, I don't-" She didn't seem to know how to finish the sentence, or else she didn't want to.

Abbey cursed her future son-in-law's doctors for keeping the girls in the dark even as her inner medic reminded her that there was probably no information for the them to give. And then she realised that there were more glaring absences than that of the attending physician.

"Where is everybody, Zoey? Where's your father?"

Zoey looked big-eyed and confused. "I don't know. It was dad, he said they had to go back to the White House, I'm not sure-"

Oh, please. Please God, not a national crisis. Not now. Anything but that.

Her worry must have shown on her face, because Zoey asked anxiously "Mom, you don't think it's-?"

"I don't know, sweetheart," she admitted. "Is there a TV around here?"

"Charlie has one in his room," Deanna pointed out quietly.

Abbey nodded slowly. "Well, I don't think he'll mind if we use it, do you, honey?"

Zoey offered her a fragile smile. "Maybe if we find some Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reruns to tune into he'll wake up just to make us change the channel."

For a second, the tightening around her heart at her daughter's bravery made it hard to breathe.

As they entered the room, she didn't miss Deanna's little gasp at the forcible reminder of her brother's condition, or the way Zoey's hand tightened in her own. Even as her inner physician dispassionately assessed swellings and bruises, her inner mother was urging her to defy all medical wisdom and just take the injured boy into her arms and hold him until he got better.

Come on, Charlie. Wake up for us. Please, just wake up for us.

Zoey crossed to the bed and took his hand in hers, pressing a kiss to his forehead that broke Abbey's heart. She spotted the framed photograph at his bedside, and recognised her husband's touch in it.

Jed loved the people around him more deeply and completely than anybody else she'd ever known. The fact that he wasn't here...

She turned on the TV. Despite the fact that she knew Charlie was unconscious, not asleep, and that anything that might wake him up was good, some stupidly misplaced instinct for good manners made her keep the volume hushed.

She switched to CNN for the news, in time to catch the anchor with a hand to his earpiece. "-And once again, in fifteen minutes we go live to the White House for a presidential address. Nobody knows exactly what we're about to hear, and the president is- ah. We're taking you live now to Julie, who's just outside the White House. Julie; has there been any indication of what the president intends to say?"

As the journalists debated amongst themselves, Zoey and Abbey exchanged troubled glances. What was going on?

"Joey." Josh rushed across the room towards her, relieved. "Kenny," he nodded as an afterthought. The translator blended so well into his partner's words and personality that it was sometimes difficult to remember that he had a whole existence of his own to go with it.

"What's going on, Joshua?" Joey demanded in her own voice. She started signing rapidly to Kenny.

"I got your message. You want me to pull together a poll right now? What about? What's happening?" She frowned at him, momentarily pulling her gaze away from Kenny's flashing fingers to take in the hive of activity that had overtaken the White House corridors.

Josh moved closer. "The president's giving a national address," he explained quietly.

"What's he going to say?" Kenny translated.

"Hey Sam," said Joey herself, as the speechwriter approached. Josh was so used to hearing Kenny as her voice that he was momentarily disoriented to hear her talk over her own statement.

"Hi, Joey," Sam smiled. "Hey, Kenny."

Josh turned to him. "That's a good point, Sam. What is he going to say?"

Sam gave a small smile; tense, but laced with a fiery self-satisfaction. "He's going to blow the roof off," he said, and the quiet, matter-of-fact tone made the statement ring with truth instead of hyperbole.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Josh frowned. "Did you see Leo?"

He shook his head. "Donna was trying to call him."

"Yeah."

"He's not answering his phone?"

Josh couldn't help feeling a tiny bit worried, but thrust it aside as nothing more than itchy nerves from the upcoming address. "He must be sacked out, or else he's at the hospital."

"Yeah." Sam shook his head slowly. "I can't believe he's going to miss this."

"I know."

Josh realised Joey was still looking at him expectantly. "Okay," he said. "The president's gonna address the nation in about ten minutes; it's pretty much unprecedented, I don't know what he's going to say, but we need you to put together a poll and we need the results as fast as it's humanly possible to get them."

Joey made a rapid series of signs to Kenny.

"Would you like fries with that?"

Josh gave her a brief smile. "Can you do it?" he asked seriously.

Joey made an exaggerated shrug. "Whatever!"

It only took that to make him sure the polling was in good hands.

The president's face as he spoke to the camera was stern and firm-jawed with determination. "My fellow Americans, good evening. All of you are no doubt aware of the shooting that took place at Rosslyn, Virginia three years ago; considerably less of you will be aware of the attack that occurred yesterday evening - despite the fact that it was carried out for the exact same reason. Or rather, the exact same lack of reason."

His eyes were steely as he look directly ahead. It was a face his staff, his friends and his family had seen many, many times before - but not one that the public were usually permitted to.

"Last night, a racially motivated attack was carried out on my future son-in-law. He's lying in a hospital bed right now because somebody thought it was an unforgivable sin for him to have skin of one colour and love a young woman of another." He raised his head. "And why was three years ago international news and last night not so? Because I'm okay." He hesitated for a beat, and smiled wryly.

"But I'm not okay. This isn't okay. Last night, my son was the victim of a hate crime - and the assault of a bright, innocent young man who never did a wrong thing in his life will never be okay."

Nobody in the White House witnessing the broadcast missed the way he slipped into calling Charlie his son. And not one of them believed for a second it was calculated - or that he even knew he'd said it.

"Now, I'm told I shouldn't make this personal. But it is personal, and not just to me; it's personal to anybody who ever saw a loved one wounded or killed or rejected or hated for reasons that defy all reason."

The smile twisted again, a curl of fiery determination that was a world away from the cheerful, avuncular president the American public thought they knew. "I'm not prepared to lose a son to ignorance and pointless hatred," he said fiercely. "I'm not prepared to lose anybody. Too many precious lives in this country are ruined every day by racism, by homophobia, by religious intolerance... well, it stops here and it stops now. It's time we stopped letting bigots hide behind the Constitution. The Constitution wasn't written to defend your right to hate your fellow Americans - it was written to defend their right to be an American. And it's time we stopped pretending that making out any one citizen to be less than another because of race - or gender, or religion, or how they choose to live their life - is anything less than the travesty it is."

The power of his gaze was such that everybody in the room felt it turned on them alone - and perhaps even those seeing it through their TV screens felt the same. "Too much innocent blood has been shed already - and every further drop is a greater crime. We want to call our country the land of the free - well, it's about time we lived up to that. Because freedom is freedom for everybody, and until every man, woman and child in this country can be who they are and what they are without fear, without apology, and without the suggestion that they are somehow less of an American than their neighbour, we haven't achieved that." His hands were tight in fists as he spoke.

"America is more than a country, it's an ideal, born in the minds of men who wanted a better world for their children and their children's children. And being one of those children isn't about sharing the colour of their skin or following the same religion, because America is bigger than that. America is an idea that was built to house everybody." He smiled then, and slipped his hands into his pockets in a gesture that a few key people would recognise well.

"We are America, we are the people, and whatever it takes and wherever it takes us, we are going to build a more perfect union."