XX
"Leo!" the president roared cheerfully. Leo barely controlled a flinch. God, a boisterous president wasn't going to make this any easier.
But then, this wasn't supposed to be easy.
"Sir, I..." He hesitated. "I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment?"
"Sure thing, Leo." The president smiled and folded away his papers, blue eyes bright and attentive. His stomach roiled in a way that had nothing to do with coffee on an empty stomach and hangovers. He couldn't do this.
He had to do this.
That faint, affectionate, trusting smile turned up at him made him want to cry. Oh, Jed, how can I do this to you? How could he admit to the greatest man he'd ever known that his faith had been misplaced? Jed Bartlet had always had such an astonishing faith in the spirit of humanity. How much would it crush him to learn that his own best friend had proved unworthy of that trust?
His mouth dried up, and so did the words. "I..."
There was a knock on the door, and Charlie entered. "Mr. President? CJ."
"Okay. Just give me a minute, Charlie?" the president nodded.
But the moment had already flown. Leo straightened up. "It's okay, Mr. President. It can wait."
The president's gaze was both piercing and concerned. "Sure?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
He walked at as dignified a pace as ever, but that didn't make it any less like running away.
Josh had to fight the urge to leap across and restrain Charlie as CJ arrived and he headed for the Oval Office door. A few moments later, Leo emerged, and when Josh gave him a quizzical look he quickly turned away.
Josh headed back to his own office. "Donna? Could you just keep an eye on things for a little while? I need to go home and pick something up."
"Forgotten your brain again?" she asked dryly.
"I thought you were supposed to keep hold of that?" he smiled back.
"I think it got lost in the shuffle somewhere."
"Explains a lot," he allowed. As he headed out of the building, he flipped open his cell phone.
"Mom? Hi, it's me. Yeah, okay, no, I don't know who else might be calling you mom. Anyway, I just- I can't just be making a social call? Okay. Yeah. You remember that big box of stuff I came to collect when you moved out to Florida...? What exactly did I do with that?"
"Mr. President?" CJ spoke briskly, but her body-language was hesitant.
"I read it," he said, with a slow nod.
"Sir, if you want me to-"
"Let them print it," he told her.
"Sir?"
"Let them print it, CJ." He stood up and sighed heavily. "This is... this is me, CJ." He shrugged. "This is my past, this is... where I came from. For better or worse, it's where I came from."
"Yes, sir." She looked at the carpet, awkward. He was silent for a long moment.
"Do you miss your father, CJ?" he asked her suddenly.
"Yes, sir. I... he..." She found herself shrugging too. "I mean, I didn't even really see him that much towards... the end... but... I miss him. A lot."
A billion images and sensations flickered through her brain, without any particular rhyme or reason to the order. The lingering scent of aftershave, and the sensation of being lifted high into the air by hands too strong to ever let her fall. Graduation, and the first day ever that he'd walked her to school. Late nights kicking a soccer ball around the back yard with her brothers, and Thanksgiving dinners when she'd closed her eyes and listened to him say grace.
The president nodded slowly, and wandered away from her towards the windows. He slid his hands into his pockets and stood looking out, for long enough that she wondered if he even remembered she was there.
"I miss him," he said finally, so softly it was a moment before she realised he'd spoken. He turned towards her, and his quiet smile was heartbreaking. "He hated me my whole life... I miss him so much."
She wanted to embrace him, but although she'd done so before when the emotional walls were down, today it felt like there was too much distance in the room. He wasn't truly with her in the Oval Office, he was somewhere forty, fifty years away, communing with the ghost of a sad and lonely little boy that she wasn't sure she really knew.
"I wish..."
He never completed what he wished, just looked up at her and banished the shadows of the past with a gentle smile. "Let them print the book, CJ. Some people won't believe it, some people will feel sorry for me, some people will try to tell you why it makes me unfit to be the president, and some people just plain won't care." He shrugged. "But none of those people are ever going to know the truth of it, and neither will anybody else. That's between my father and me. It always was."
She nodded in understanding, and briefly clasped his wrist. He smiled, and patted her arm. "Thank you, CJ," he said quietly. She left.
"Hey." Sam gave his boss a cautious smile.
"You're late," Toby noted, fairly neutrally. He shrugged.
"It's Sunday. I have a life."
"Took you long enough."
Sam would have shot back a quick 'look who's talking', but he remembered seeing Toby dancing with his ex-wife the night before, and refrained. "You walked Andy home last night?" he asked instead.
"Yes."
"She okay?"
"Yes."
"Okay," he nodded slowly. It was clear Toby had no intention of allowing any greater glimpse into his private life, but that was not an enormous surprise. Sam knew, although his boss would never admit it, that Toby still very much carried some kind of hidden torch for his ex-wife. He suspected that Andy held one of her own; it was a sad and vaguely disquieting thought that maybe there were times and places where that just wasn't enough.
Donna appeared in doorway. "Hey, Sam. Hey, Toby."
"Donna," he smiled. "What's up?"
Her forehead crinkled and she shrugged. "I don't know. Josh just said he's gonna need you guys in a couple of minutes."
He exchanged a glance with Toby, but got no illumination. "Uh, okay," he shrugged. "Whenever he wants us."
"Okay," she nodded, and headed off.
Leo sat in his chair, looking up at the office ceiling. The door creaked open, and Margaret hesitated, plainly worried. "Leo? Josh."
"Yeah," he said quietly, not looking her way. He pictured the eloquent gaze that must be being exchanged between his secretary and deputy. Then the door closed, and it was just him and Josh.
"I chickened out," he admitted to the ceiling. Josh came over to stand beside him.
"This isn't the SATs, Leo," he said plaintively. "They're not gonna fail you if you step outside the time limit."
"I can't tell him," he said, shaking his head. He looked across at Josh. "I'm a coward."
"You're not a coward," he refuted. "You're Leo McGarry. You're one of the bravest men I know."
He laughed bitterly at that, and Josh came across to sit on the edge of his desk. He produced a small slip of paper from his inner pocket and fiddled with absently. "It took me a long time to find this," he said, almost to himself. "I'd almost forgotten I had it. It was a bit like... a bit like Dumbo. You remember Dumbo? They gave him the feather to make him believe he could fly, but he didn't really need it." He looked wryly across at Leo. "You probably didn't see Dumbo."
"I know Disney," Leo shrugged quietly, and Josh smiled at him.
He flattened the scrap of paper out on the desk, and Leo could see in long-faded ink the words 'Badge of Courage'. The handwriting he knew for Noah Lyman's.
"My dad... my dad gave this to me when, when Joanie died," Josh said quietly, near dreamily. "I was... I was so afraid of everything, and I didn't see how I could ever stop being afraid. But my dad..." He took a long breath. "He told me that I was always gonna be just as brave as I needed to be, because all I had to do was remember that I could. And he... And he wrote it down for me, like this." He folded the piece of paper in two along ancient crease-lines.
"And then he slipped it in my pocket, right here, over my heart." He touched the breast pocket of his shirt. "So if ever... If ever there was a time I didn't feel like I was brave, I'd have my badge of courage to remind me. And that way I could..." He sighed softly. "I could always do anything I wanted to."
Josh stood up, and quietly slid the paper into Leo's pocket. He patted it there, and then pressed a gentle kiss to Leo's forehead.
"Go see the president, Leo," he said softly.