V

Sam returned home to an apartment full of boxes. He paused in the hallway briefly, wondering how he'd possibly managed to accumulate enough stuff to fill them all.

"Steve?" he called.

"You're supposed to say 'honey, I'm home'." The younger man's voice floated out of the next room. Sam grinned, and went in. He crossed the room to Steve's side and gave him a quick kiss.

"I think I'll save that for the new place," he smiled. He raised an eyebrow. "So. Did you find any theoretical heterosexual porn?"

"No." Steve pointed a finger at him. "But the fact that you have to ask me tells me a lot. I did find this, though."

He indicated Sam's chess set, now set up on the coffee table. "You play chess?" Sam asked him.

"I know the little horsey ones move in an L-shape," he offered.

"Well, that's you all set," said Sam dryly.

"I don't know from chess, but I know when I'm holding something worth several years of my salary. Where did you get this? You could buy my car with it."

"It's a Lotus set, made out of hand-carved camel-bone. It came to the Indian Prime Minister through a descendent of Tan Sen, a very famous sixteenth century musician," he recited.

"Yeah?"

"Well, that's what the president told me. But sometimes he's just making it up."

Steve shot him a sharp look. "The president gave you a priceless hand-carved chess set?"

"Mostly as an excuse to use it to whip my ass," he smiled self-depreciatingly. Not to mention honestly. He could play chess against... well, somebody else who didn't play chess very often, but the president was an expert at it.

"You play chess with the president?" Steve said wonderingly. It had been three months now, and his boyfriend was still very much getting used to the occasional grandeur of Sam's White House life.

But then, so was Sam, some days.

"It's really more of a 'losing' thing than actual playing," he admitted.

"He must think you're pretty smart," Steve observed, absently picking up one of the chess pieces and rolling it with his fingers.

"Not after he's seen me play chess."

Steve shot him a look. "Seriously."

Sam shrugged. "It was just... he likes to do his little mentoring thing sometimes." Remembering, he smiled to himself. "He told me I should run for president one day, I don't know what-"

"He told you that?"

He registered the sudden abrupt change in tone, and held up his hands. "Steve-"

He put the chess piece back down in its place. "You- seriously, you could've had a shot at being president?"

Oops. Possibly he'd just started a big deal out of something that really wasn't- "Steve, it was just-"

"You didn't tell me this," Steve said, jaw set warningly. "You said you didn't care if we got splashed all over the tabloids, you said it didn't matter, and you didn't tell me this."

Sam laughed. "It really wasn't- Steve, you seriously think I was ever gonna run for president?"

Steve refused to be lightened up. "I seriously think President Bartlet doesn't go around telling just anybody they could do his job."

Sam shook his head slowly. "Steve." He laid his hands on the other man's shoulders and looked him in the eye. "I? Do not want to be president. I never wanted to be president. I never thought about running for president. It... hell, it's so far away from being a thing it's, like, the anti-thing."

Steve pointed a warning finger. "Stop that with the Joshtalk, you're not confusing me out of having this argument."

"Joshtalk?" Sam asked, amused.

"He's a very bad influence on your vocabulary. But that's not we're talking about." Steve pushed back a stray lock of blond hair and thrust his hands into his pockets; items number one and two on his 'defensive' list. "Sam, I... I can't believe you didn't tell me this. I can't believe you didn't... You could have, you could have been- You really had the chance to-"

"Steve... don't make this into something it isn't," he pleaded. "I didn't give up anything for this. I didn't give up anything to be with you. You can't give up something you never had."

Steve shook his head slowly and met his eyes, looking saddened. "You can, Sam," he said gently. "You can, and that's worse than any other kind of giving up."

Sam smiled softly, and ran his fingers over the cool surface of the chess board. "Listen, Steve, it's- it's really not the big deal you're making it into. It was just... the president was just, you know, congratulating me on figuring something out. He was doing this whole thing about seeing the whole of the board, and-" Abruptly, it clicked. "Military training bases!"

"What?"

"Military training bases!" He grinned delightedly. "That's the link!"

Steve blinked at him. "Okay, did we just, you know, miss a page of the script or something?"

Sam started patting his pockets, looking for his cell phone. "I have to call Josh." Maybe it was still in his coat. Wait, think smart. There was a phone across the room. He could use that.

"Hey!" Steve objected indignantly. "Argument, here!"

Sam planted an absent kiss on his cheek in passing. "Yeah, sure. We can finish it later. I just need to make this call."

Ignoring the sudden disgruntled huff of air from his boyfriend, Sam grabbed for the telephone and dialled the White House.

"That's the link?" Josh kicked back in his chair and stretched out his shoeless feet. Donna had been bugging him to go home - well, now he had reason to show why he'd been right not to listen to her.

"I'm sure of it," came Sam's voice through the phone. "All five of our mystery dissenters come from areas with a large and high-profile military presence."

Josh rubbed his forehead. "You seriously think the military's putting pressure on members of Congress to vote us down?"

"We're talking about repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, you don't think they've been a little too quiet?"

"Yeah, but doesn't it seem a little... unconstitutional?"

"Well, I'm sure that's of great concern to the guys who think it's okay to drum somebody out of the service because somebody beat a confession of their sexuality out of them."

Josh made an awkward sound of agreement. It was stupid to be suddenly shy around his old friend on gay rights issues - Sam was still Sam, only with a... slightly more boyfriend-having quality these days. But still... it was the way he felt debating any kind of religious issue with Toby, the feeling like he maybe didn't quite have the qualifications to take part. Except Toby would just quite casually take a jab at him if he thought Josh was getting too big for his holiday-Jewish theological boots, and it would be much harder to tell if he offended Sam.

"Okay, so these guys are putting on the pressure... what buttons are they pushing? How are they shoving our guys around? I mean, I'm giving them some credit and assuming they're not, like, turning up in Congressional office and doing the whole hand-on-the-holster scene."

He'd obviously been working with Sam too long if the tenor of the brief silence sounded like a shrug.

"Maybe it wouldn't take as much as you'd think," he reflected. "A sudden military presence around one candidate's camp, a little bit of honour-guarding that maybe leans more to one side than the other... suddenly, voting Republican starts to look awful patriotic."

"I beg you, never put those words together in the same sentence," Josh scowled. "Okay. However they're doing it, our boys in uniform are leaning on members of Congress. What are we gonna do about it?"

He could picture Sam's determined smile. "Lean on our boys in uniform."

"Okay. I'll set up some meetings; we can shake a few military trees, see who falls out."

"Yeah."

"Thanks, Sam."

"No problem. Listen, I should go. I'm kind of in the middle of something."

He heard a muffled voice that had to be Steve say something like "yeah, don't mind me" in the background.

"'Kay, Sam? Whatever you're in the middle of right now, I don't think I want to hear it."

"An argument," Sam supplied. "Involving, amongst other things, chess."

"Yeah, I didn't want to hear that," he decided. "Night, Sam."

"I'll see you tomorrow."

Josh put the phone down and padded, still in his socks, to the office doorway. "Don-" she materialised "-na," he finished more subduedly. "How do you do that?" he demanded.

"I have my ways, Joshua."

"You do indeed. I need you to set up some meetings."

She gave him the look. The 'how do you still exist on this planet?' look. "I'm going home."

"I need you to-"

"And yet, I'm going home."

"But-"

"I can do it tomorrow morning."

"Yeah, but this is time sensitive," he objected.

Donna looked at him for a long moment. "Josh... what time is it now?"

He looked at his watch. "Uh... something past ten?"

"And what will I get if I call anybody now?"

"Uh... an answerphone?"

"And when will they call me back?"

"Tomorrow morning?" he admitted in a small voice.

She patted him on the head. "Good boy. Goodnight, Josh."

"Goodnight." She left him standing somewhat helplessly in the doorway to his office.