XI

"Toby?" She found her ex-husband sitting in thoughtful darkness - never a good sign. He gave her a wry smile, but didn't speak. She sat down next to him.

"I made some calls," she offered. "It's looking like we could work this." He just nodded. "Of course, you could always take this opportunity to up the figure..."

He replied with a silently eloquent look. She wondered what had pushed him into his melancholy state. You didn't have to spend too long around Toby Ziegler to twig that a silent Toby was a troubling Toby. His natural states were sarcastic mumbling or emphatic ranting, with no moderate zones in between.

Andy wondered if his sudden reticence was her fault. It was always difficult to predict how he would react to her presence; hell, it had been difficult enough when they were still married.

Fortunately, she'd come prepared. She leaned in until they were at eye level. "Do I need to go and get the reserve pie?"

That, at least, stirred a response. "What?" He frowned at her.

"I brought one in case of emergency," she elaborated.

"You were going to placate me with pie?"

"Yes."

"Hmm." He gave a slow, inscrutable nod.

Damn the man. "What was that 'hmm' about?" she had to demand.

"Nothing."

"It wasn't nothing. You 'hmm'ed," she objected.

"I just-" He waved his hands. "Here we are, hammering out a rational political compromise, and you were going to placate me with pie?"

"Fine! I'm sorry." She stood back and folded her arms. "I insulted the spirit of your dedicated professionalism. I apologise."

He nodded.

For a beat, the room was silent.

Toby looked up at her.

"What kind of pie?"

"Ma'am?" CJ approached the First Lady hesitantly, echoes of her conversation with Toby still ringing in her ears.

"CJ." Abigail Bartlet spared her a warm if tired smile. Just because the First Lady was currently at home base didn't mean her days were any less packed with events. CJ sometimes thought that her job must be even tougher than her husband's; at least he had the satisfaction of knowing that his meetings carried more significance than an endless chain of photo-ops and meet-and-greets.

She took a breath. "Ma'am, I-"

"You can call me Abbey, CJ," the First Lady reminded her gently.

"Abbey. There's... I've been made aware of a book... that's due to be published soon." It didn't take a mind as sharp as Abbey Bartlet's to know that meant some kind of uncomfortable secret or truth in danger of being revealed.

The First Lady sat back in her chair, and frowned. "Something about me?"

"Uh, no ma'am." Directions aside, that extra layer of formality was a kind of insulation she badly needed right now. "About the president."

Abbey cut straight through to the point. "Something true, or something not?"

"I... don't know," CJ had to admit.

"Which is why you came to me," she filled in, and sighed heavily. "Okay, CJ, shoot."

"It's about..." Oh God, is there a way I can actually say this? "About the president's relationship with his father."

"Ah," she said, in exactly the same way that Toby had said 'ah'. And she knew, right then, that there was absolutely no way that this wasn't what it seemed to be.

There was an awkward silence, but Abbey had other priorities here than mercy for beleaguered press secretaries.

"What does the book say?" she demanded bluntly.

Crunch time. "There are, uh, there are various accounts of people who would have known the family at the time, and it's implied that the president's father..." Child abuse, oh, holy crap, I can't say 'child abuse'. "That he was violent."

CJ couldn't tell if the way Abbey moved her head was a short nod or just looking down at the floor. She hesitated. "Abbey-?"

When she looked up, her eyes were alight with more fury than CJ had ever seen in them, and that was no little thing. "That man-" The venom in the First Lady's voice actually made her flinch, and Abbey bit off the rest of whatever she'd been ready to say. "CJ... God help me, CJ, but I'd gladly see my husband's family history dissected in every tabloid piece of trash this country's ever known if it meant that man was exposed for what he truly was."

CJ didn't dare speak up, and the moment was only broken when Abbey sighed and shook her head. "Honest to God, CJ, there are some days I wonder how he even survived that family. The way his father used to treat them... playing one brother against another, and God knows Jonathan didn't come out of it any better, seeing his older brother taken down all the time and neither of them able to stop it."

She looked CJ in the eye. "Nothing he ever did was ever enough to please his father, CJ, and Lord knows if he was alive today, he'd still be standing over Jed's shoulder, cursing him for a fool with every step he takes. And somewhere back in Jed's head, I think he still is."

CJ had nothing to say. It was so... incomprehensible. The only frame of reference she had for a father was her own dearly beloved dad, a tower of strength through all her life and a dull, aching place in her soul now he was gone. To have come through that kind of emotional degradation... how did you get from that to Jed Bartlet? It just didn't seem possible.

She hesitated, and cleared her throat. "Ma'am, the book. I don't know- What should I-?"

Abbey laughed, the kind of low, humourless chuckle that was really nothing more than an alternative to crying. "I don't know, CJ. I really don't. I don't know what it would do to him to have this out in the open after - God, after forty, fifty years. He's... he's never spoken to me about it. I saw the two of them together, but... I had to corner Jonathan to even try and get the real story. And I'm not convinced I even know the half of it."

She was silent for a beat. "Do you know what the most terrible, horrible tragedy of all this is?" Abbey lowered her head, resting her forehead in the palm of her hand a moment as if it suddenly felt too heavy. "Jed loves his father. He always did. He always, always did."

She looked up, and sighed heavily. "You'll have to talk to him, CJ. I'm sorry, but... I can't make this decision for him. I can't rescue him from his own past." She closed her eyes, and added, almost to herself, "I never could."

CJ found herself wandering the halls of the White House with an odd feeling of emotional fatigue; the way you felt after having a good long cry, except that she hadn't been sobbing, just listening to the First Lady's pain and being exhausted by it.

She couldn't talk to the president, not tonight. She just couldn't face another conversation like that tonight.

No, she was going to go out for the evening with Donna as planned, get well and truly hammered, and talk to the president tomorrow. Tomorrow was a Saturday, he might be in his jeans and Notre Dame sweatshirt, and somehow he'd be... less the president. A little more like Jed Bartlet, a little more a human being that she could have a desperately painful conversation with. She knew she couldn't do that tonight.

She wasn't sure she wanted to talk to Toby, either, but her feet automatically guided her over to his office. To continue their conversation from earlier, or just to sit with him in silence, she couldn't have said.

The point turned out to be moot. His door was partly open, and she hesitated instead of walking straight on through.

He was sitting with Andy. She wasn't sure if they were talking or just sitting, but there was a plate of what had to be pie between them and both of them were holding forks. She couldn't see Andy's face, but Toby's held an almost wistfully sad expression that was difficult to classify.

Even had she not been wanting to catch him alone, there was no way she would ever have intruded on that room. CJ took a few steps back without announcing her presence, abruptly feeling uncomfortably invasive.

Soft footsteps alerted her to the uncharacteristically quiet approach of Lord Marbury. He glanced towards Toby's office, and she had to stop him from interrupting. "Um, they're-"

"I saw," he said, and smiled quietly at her. "I think perhaps our concluding deliberations will have to be postponed until tomorrow. Urgent business of Her Majesty's government."

"Yes?"

"I'm sure I shall be able to find some if I look hard enough," he said dryly. She nodded and smiled at him. Oh, there was far more to Lord John Marbury than immediately met the eye - and she was fairly sure he intended it that way.

He offered her his arm - an archaically chivalrous gesture that seemed completely natural and normal on him - and she took it, and allowed him to walk her away from the communications area.

Let Toby and Andy have their privacy. She was going to go find Donna.

And get stinking drunk.