XVI

Josh pulled his best innocent face as he proffered the wine glass. "Drink?" Donna glowered malevolently at him and he bounced off, smirking. It was nice having somebody else be the hung-over one for a change.

He decided to go see if CJ could be similarly irritated. However, she seemed to be frustratingly composed for somebody who'd spent the night before calling him Joshy and expounding on some theorem he didn't quite understand which involved bridesmaids' dresses, sex, and cross-country hiking.

Of course, it was entirely possible that CJ would do those things sober. He just hoped she'd forgotten the 'Joshy'.

CJ gave him a nod, and he followed her gaze to where it rested on the president.

"He looks better," he observed thoughtfully.

"Hmm?"

"The president. Since he's been on this new diet thing. He looks better." They'd all been watching their leader extremely closely since the scare a few months ago when it had seemed terrifyingly possible that his MS would turn out to be progressing. The strict new health regimen the First Lady had ordered him onto, however, looked to be turning the trick despite his grumbles. He seemed to move less stiffly and act with greater energy, although Josh supposed the latter could be as easily attributable to having the Hate Crimes Bill to focus his attention on.

Josh smiled to himself, picturing Sam deliver the smackdown he'd described to the military lackeys earlier that morning, but CJ sighed.

"Yeah. I just... I feel guilty about bringing him stress, you know? He's been through all this stuff with everything going wrong all at once, and then Charlie..." She shook her head. "He doesn't need anything else laid on him right now."

Josh took in her melancholy expression, and remembered that CJ had been through just as much as any of them, and more. She hadn't spoken much about her father's death since she and Toby had flown out to Ohio for the funeral, but he knew it still weighed heavy on her mind. It had been five years for him, and yet still sometimes he caught himself folding down the corner of an article because his father would like to hear about it next time he called. Inside the Washington machine it was too easy to believe the outside world you never saw kept turning as it always had.

Josh squeezed her arm in a gesture of comfort. "Hey, we eat stress," he shrugged with bravado, "all of us. It's what we do."

It was what they did. It didn't matter what the world threw at them, because every time it gave them hell they bounced right back and kept going. None of them were the kind to cave under pressure. None of them knew the meaning of the word surrender.

So why, then, did his eyes become magnetically drawn to Leo, and his forehead feel compelled to crease in a frown of helpless worry?

"Hey."

"Hey."

Charlie smiled at his fiancée as she came to sit beside him. "You're sitting out," she noted a little concernedly, absently stroking his hair in a way he rather liked.

"I'm sorry, I'll get out my funky shoes and dance," he told her dryly. Zoey shoved him lightly, and then laid her head against his shoulder.

"Do your ribs hurt?" she asked softly.

"They're okay." There was still a band of dull pain across his chest that would sharpen into a twinge at unexpected moments, but compared to the white-hot agony when they were freshly broken, it barely seemed noticeable. The ribs were the last of his injuries to heal; his fractured wrist had finally recovered, although it would be a good long while before he dared try playing basketball with it.

"Well, good." She grinned playfully. "We want you in tip-top condition for the wedding, you know."

"Hey!" He was glad his face didn't clearly signpost a blush the way hers did. "Could I just remind you that your father's only just across the room?"

She giggled. "Charlie, do you know how many hundred people you could fit in this room?"

"Do you know how many of them could be spies for your father?" he shot back, eyeing the nearest party guests with suspicion.

"I don't care," she said, planting a swift kiss to his lips to prove it. She pulled back to smile at him. "In two months' time we're gonna be married, and my dad can't do a thing about it."

"He could change his mind and refuse to walk you down the aisle," Charlie pointed out. Zoey shrugged without removing her hands from his shoulders.

"My mom would do it." She smiled at him. "There's no stopping it now, Charlie. In fifty-six days' time, you're gonna be Mr. Zoey Bartlet."

"Bartlet-Young," he corrected, laying a chiding finger across her lips. She giggled again.

"I think it's sweet that you want to keep your own name," she smirked. "Next thing you know, you'll be suggesting you go out and work instead of stay at home cooking and looking after the kids."

"I'm a masculinist, I don't want to be just another house-husband," he quipped. And felt the borders of reality suddenly begin to swim away from him in a heady, scary way.

Kids?

His imagination conjured rows of little coffee-coloured children with big eyes like a cross between Deanna as a little girl and Zoey's baby pictures. Suddenly, he felt decidedly dizzy.

Zoey, her arms still around his neck, didn't seem to notice his moment of mind-expansion as something caught her eye. "Hey, it's Sam and Steve," she beamed. "I'm gonna go say hi."

"Okay," he nodded vaguely after her.

Kids?

Whoa.

"Gerald!"

Leo mentally groaned, and looked for an escape route in the crowd but was too slow to find one. He didn't need this right now. He really didn't.

This dinner party was killing him. He wanted desperately to sneak off back to the sanctuary of his office, but, ironically, it was Jed's concern for him that was keeping him in a bad position. The president had been hovering around him all evening, and he'd be sure to come after him if Leo left the party. And he didn't know if he could deal with another private moment of Jed giving him concerned and anguished looks without cracking entirely.

Which meant he had to stay. At a dinner party full of mingling people, every one of them holding a drink, and nothing to distract him but vapid, inane conversation.

And talking of that... The British Ambassador came threading his way through the crowd towards him, grinning expansively. At least the fates had seen fit to allow one small shred of mercy, and for once Marbury carried a glass of champagne instead of the stronger drinks he usually favoured. Leo was fairly sure that the combination of Marbury and the enticing scent of well-aged whiskey would not have gone well for anybody.

"Gerald!" he said again, patting Leo on the shoulder. "Enjoying the party?"

"It's a thrill a minute," he said dryly.

"Quite, quite," he agreed, seemingly oblivious to the tone. "And may I just say that the First Lady is looking radiant tonight?"

"You can say it, but that doesn't mean the president won't kick your ass."

Leo's eyes automatically sought her out, although it was difficult to think of any occasion when Abigail Bartlet had looked anything less than stunning. Bubblingly cheerful, angry, or even tired and resigned, she was always beautiful, and when there was the light in her eyes that her husband put there, she was more so. Leo felt a stab through his heart as he spied the couple, leaning together in the midst of some snatched moment of affection. There they were, his oldest and dearest friends, the people who had helped him, trusted him and put everything on the line for him. And how was he repaying them?

Marbury smiled, and sipped his champagne. "I'm sure the president has better things to do than, as you so melodramatically put it, 'kick my ass'." He didn't fake any approximation of an Americanised twang, and yet hearing his words parroted back in that flawlessly aristocratic accent made Leo feel incredibly vulgar and uncultured.

Leo considered himself a man of the world, educated well enough in what you might call art and literature and what made for a gourmet meal, but there was something about the sheer sense of... history... that the Brit wore like a cloak that felt as intimidating as his foppishness was annoying. Politics was a place you met plenty of people who had their own opinions on what constituted 'good breeding' - the main tenet of their philosophy generally being that they had it and other people didn't - but Marbury was irrefutably the genuine article. And something of the hardworking Catholic boy that remained at the core of Leo itched uncomfortably in the presence of a power that was bred instead of earned.

"I'm sure he does," Leo replied on auto-pilot, glancing around the room. He was jittering to be on the move, desperate to get away, and it was hard to maintain his usual laconic facade. This was like being stuck in hell; an endless parade of people he didn't want to talk to, and people he was too ashamed to talk to.

"You seem a little distracted, Leo," Marbury observed mildly.

"Well, if you'll excuse me, your Lordship, there really are some things I have to attend to," he lied.

"Then by all means, be on your way," the ambassador agreed with a wide shrug.

As he attempted to lose himself in the crowd, Leo fancied he could feel the British Ambassador's eyes on his back. But probably that was just his guilty conscience talking.