IX
Sam walked in the office with a cheerful spring in his step. Toby handed him a razor without missing a beat. "Go. Shave."
"Hey, Toby-" he began to protest, and then paused. "Did you go out and buy this specially just to make a point?"
Toby gave him a flat stare. "I refuse to share office space with anybody who is one acne outbreak away from the facial characteristics of a fifteen-year-old."
"I never suffered from acne," Sam felt obliged to point out.
"Of course you didn't. Shave," he tossed over his shoulder as he headed into his office.
Sam turned as Ginger walked into the bullpen. "He's mocking my beard, Ginger," he said in injured tones.
She frowned and shrugged. "I thought you said you only grew it as revenge on Steve?"
"It's growing on me," he confessed, stroking his chin.
"That's generally the normal procedure for beards, Sam."
Ignoring that, he spun back to Toby as he re-emerged. "Toby, do you know why CJ wants to see me?"
Toby paused, and while his expression was unreadable, Sam could feel there was a reason why he made it that way. He held his boss's gaze for a beat.
"Go to the meeting, Sam," was all he said, before he walked off.
"Hey, babe."
Jed smiled, and his heart lightened. "Hey."
"I spoke to CJ."
"Oh." There was an irrational stab of... what? Dull anger, frustration... that accompanied the knowledge that even this simple pleasure couldn't be free from the taint of this same shadow hanging over anything. Dammit, it was past, it was over, why couldn't anybody let it rest?
Abbey read all that in one syllable, or else she just knew him. "I could be home by this afternoon," she offered gently.
And he wanted her there, but... This wasn't anything. It wasn't anything but good old muck-raking journalism at its finest, turning over long-buried troubles to air them with a good splash of sensationalism and no context. It wasn't some repressed horror story of torture and brutality waiting to flood out and overwhelm him, and he didn't need to be treated as if he was made of crystal.
He didn't want that. He'd never wanted that.
"Your thing doesn't finish 'til Thursday."
"I can cancel."
"You don't need to do that."
"I want to be there."
"And I want you here!" Jed smiled gently into the phone, for all that she couldn't see it. "But if that was how it worked, you'd never go anywhere."
She chuckled softly, a sound that resonated with him like the purring of a cat. "I want to be there," she told him with quiet intensity.
"It's only two days," he said, instead of all the other things he could have said.
"Two days is a long time, babe."
"Don't I know it," he agreed with a wry twist of a smile. He meant it only as an echo of the same longing they always felt when they were apart, but despite himself something of his maudlin mood crept into his voice. It was too much to expect that she could miss it.
"Jed, I can be there in-"
"You should finish your thing," he insisted, unwittingly using a hint of the tone that had commanded the girls when they were younger. The result was explosively predictable.
"Oh, dammit Jed, will you forget about my thing?"
"You don't like it when I do that," he pointed out, keeping his tone light enough to strip away the passive-aggressiveness that might have suffused it when tempers were frayed. Neither of them was looking for a fight today.
He obligingly filled in for her with a mental picture of the eye-roll she would be sending his way.
"I don't know why I ever decided to keep you," she sighed to herself.
"'Cause all the other boys were not nearly so cute," Jed supplied with cheerful confidence.
"You are not nearly so charming as you think you are, mister," she warned playfully.
"That's okay. You're charming enough for both of us."
Today, she let him get away with such a line, without a dry aside to puncture it. There was a brief, comfortable silence.
"Jed..." she said finally. "It's okay to be upset."
"It was a long time ago, Abbey," he reminded her. "It was a long time ago, and I'm not a little boy anymore. It's all the past."
It was all in the past.
He just wished it would have the decency to stay there.
And there they were, gazing up at her, all innocence. Well, Sam looked innocent. Josh had yet to master the art, even when he was as close to that particular state as he ever got.
Like now. Neither of them was blind; both had realised there was something in the air, both had approached her at separate times for assurances that when they needed to know, they'd be told.
And now they needed to know.
"CJ, what's this about?" Josh asked, brow wrinkling. Sam leaned back in his chair to frown at her. She would have found the way his fingers persisted in worrying at his fledgling beard amusing under other circumstances.
There wasn't a whole lot of amusement going on for her right now.
Keep it brisk, keep it professional. Get it out before somebody exploded from the tension. Probably her. CJ took a breath, and reached for the print-outs Carol had made for her.
"This is an excerpt from a book review by an internet critic called Paul Kafka. It's about the new presidential biography that's just going on general release later this month."
They took the papers she handed them, puzzled when she gave no further explanation, and exchanged a troubled glance before reading. Sam, obedient little legal-eagle that he was, finished his first, and looked up at her with startled eyes.
"What-? CJ, they can't-"
Josh's habit of skim-reading had obviously just been tripped up on an inflammatory phrase, as he shot bolt upright in his chair, nearly upsetting the table. "The hell? CJ-"
"Where do they get this stuff from? They can't possibly-"
"Boys." They both fell silent at her tone, and looked up at her.
"CJ...?" Sam questioned hesitantly, and she had to brush back her hair in a gesture that any rookie reporter would have leapt on as an avoidance tactic.
"This is-" she smiled slightly, but only from a flash of nervous awkwardness that she'd thought she'd left behind long before her press secretary days. "This isn't just... This is real."
They both stared at her, Josh frozen halfway through gesturing with his paper. The sight of a static, silenced Josh Lyman was a frightening thing, like some harbinger of the apocalypse.
Sam slowly shook his head. "CJ, no-"
"The president had..." She had to force the words out through teeth that wanted to be gritted, and look anywhere but at either of their faces. "The president had... a bad relationship with his father. I don't... I don't know the details, but it... but it was bad."
Hmm. So much for that Matrix award for her contribution to articulate, professional communication.
Sam rubbed his face and struggled to process it. "Still. This is talking like-"
"CJ... how bad?" Josh spoke softly, but managed to override Sam's firmer statement anyway. "I mean, is this... are we talking...?" He trailed off, and it was her job to fill the silences, God help her.
"There was... I'm given to understand that there was an element of physical violence." The coolly technical phrasing refused to do its job of robbing the words of their resonance. Josh let out an explosive huff of breath that might have had a curse buried in it, and Sam squeezed his eyes shut in dismay.
There was silence. Slowly, Josh pulled his chair in to the table, and sat looking into its not quite reflective surface for a moment. He met her eyes. "CJ... is there any way we can protect him from this?"
And she had to mechanically shake her head. "I... honest to God, I don't see how."
"Margaret, I'm just-"
"Take a break."
"I'm just, you know, sitting here-"
"Take a break!"
Leo glared at his assistant. She remained stubbornly unmoved. "I'm taking a break!"
She had her hands on her hips, for God's sake. Did people actually do that? "I don't see you getting up and moving around."
"What do you want me to do? Yoga?" he snapped irritably.
"It's not good for you, all this sitting around. You've been sitting in the same position since four AM. You should at least walk down to the mess. Or even the restroom. You haven't even been down to the restroom! And, you know, bladder problems are no-"
Okay, this was a decidedly worrying tangent. Next thing you know, she'd be supplying him with some long list of herbal remedies or badgering him into booking in with the doctor for a physical. Once Margaret got started on the subjects of possible ailments he could be suffering from...
"Margaret, could we possibly leave my bladder out of the discussion? 'Cause I'm really not-"
She sniffed. "Fine, but don't come running to me when-"
The phone rang.
"Oh, sweet merciful release." He grabbed for it, earning him another glare for the grand impertinence of answering his own phonecalls. "Leo McGarry."
He listened. "Okay. Yeah." He put the receiver down.
He'd been told he had a stony face, but Margaret could read it. All bladder-related talk forgotten, she asked nervously "What's happened?"
He looked up at her gravely. "They found a body."