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Perhaps whatever strange malaise had overtaken the president was contagious, for even Charlie looked dead on his feet. Leo frowned at him. "You look beat, Charlie. Didn't you get any sleep last night? Wait... you're a married man, and I don't wanna know that."
The young aide managed to muster up a sketchy smile, and opened the door to the meeting room. "Mr. President?"
The president looked up, seemingly almost relieved to be interrupted from whatever interminable meeting he was engaged in, but the expression soon faded when he saw Leo's face.
"Mr. President, we need you in the Situation Room," he said. Wishing that for once he had something different to report, like 'Mr. President, your daughters have unexpectedly decided to drop by', or 'Mr. President, there's a new peace treaty in the Middle East' or even 'Mr. President, I just dropped by to bring you an ice-cream'. Not that the president was allowed to eat ice-cream. Whatever stresses he was under, his new health regimen didn't even allow him the solace of comfort eating.
And dammit, why did he know so little about what was bothering the president that he was turning to dietary solutions, for God's sake?
Jed excused himself from the meeting and stood up wearily, following Leo out of the room. "Cambodia?"
"They found a body."
His face tightened in a grimace of dismay. "Damn."
"Yeah."
They walked along in silence for a while, and then Jed glanced across at him concernedly. "Is everything okay with Sam? He looks like he hasn't shaved in days."
Leo grinned, relieved to be able to put at least one presidential worry to rest. "Well, he claims to be growing a beard."
Jed's eyebrows raised. "Okay." He gave Leo a curious look. "Is that some kind of masculinity thing?"
"I think it's actually a 'making a point to his boyfriend about facial hair' thing, but to be honest, I'd stopped listening by that point."
"Ah."
The moment of levity was short-lived, moods and stomachs dropping as they entered the Situation Room. No matter how many times he'd been down here, he never got rid of the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in some old war movie, where the colours were dull and washed out and they cast the actors for the sternness of their jaws and the ability to weight each line with stony gravity.
He'd seen too many movies... but too much of the movies rang true.
The briefing was as frustratingly enigmatic as he'd expected. The body of Nathan Williamson had been found in a back alley with a single bullet wound through the back of the head. Nobody had seen anything, nobody had heard anything, and the body had been stripped and dumped. And no one was claiming responsibility.
"Goddammit, can't anybody here tell me anything?" the president exploded, thumping a fist on the desk.
He'd seen the eruption coming in the president's attitude of slumped frustration, but he couldn't say he didn't sympathise with it. "Nancy, how does a representative of the US Government get shot through the back of the head without anybody seeing anything?"
She shot him a sideways look, as if to say she expected this from the president but he should know better. "He ducked his protection detail, Leo. It happens."
It happened. Three and a half years on, the sound of gunfire still echoed in his ears in every darkened alley, and the roaring of a crowd could never sound entirely innocent. The younger members of his staff might still believe that one day it would fade. Leo, still waking some nights to the whine of engines and the taste of stale cockpit air, knew different.
His palms itched, and deliberately not thinking about whiskey took up more concentration than thinking of it.
Jed had subsided, running a weary hand through the front of his hair. There was grey creeping in at the temples, and Leo wondered if that was new, or if it had always been there, hidden behind the aura of vibrancy and invincibility. "Can we trust the local police?"
Nancy gave one of her trademark non-reassuring shrugs. "We need their cooperation on this, Mr. President. We start getting heavy-handed and move our boys in, no one's going to tell them a damn thing, and we run the risk of destabilising the entire region."
Leo scowled. "There's corruption stretching to the highest level out there, Nancy! For all we know we could be trusting the investigation to the same organisation that was behind it."
She gave him a 'settle down and quit agitating the president' look. "You know we have to tread carefully out there. Stirring up resentment towards the US is only going to bolster Phnom Penh's ties with Beijing."
"They shot our ambassador in the back of the head, I'm thinking there's some resentment going on out there already!" Leo pointed out acerbically. The president sighed heavily.
"This guy was somebody's father, somebody's son," he reminded them. It was always that way for Jed; never statistics, never expenditures or manpower or dry facts in a file... always people. As Commander in Chief, it was his greatest strength and his heaviest burden.
Jed looked at his National Security Advisor. "Tell me our options, Nancy."
And so the argument rolled onwards, circling continually without drawing any closer to a conclusion.
Josh returned to his office an itching ball of tension and agitation. His instincts were telling him to go on the offensive, and he didn't have anybody to charge at yet. Only a couple of faceless names on the internet, and it wasn't really their fault, and anyway, CJ had done something to his web browser so it came up with a warning every time that said simply "Motherboard, Josh".
Still, he was nearly certain that she didn't really have the spy camera and the instant messenger alert that told her every time he went further than his email account.
But anyway, blasting a few guys who made insensitive comments in response to a book review wouldn't do anything but make him feel better. The press were probably picking up the whispers by now, but they weren't going to ask until they were sure this wasn't a quickly blown out hoax, and that took time. Time they could afford to take, because this story wasn't going anywhere, and why not? Because it was totally irrelevant, but would that stop them? No.
He could predict right now exactly what-stupid ass things were going to come out of whose ferociously right-wing mouths - things about weaknesses and mental instability and other such stereotypical claptrap - but CJ failed to see the beauty in his theory of giving pre-emptive smackdowns. Apparently, he was supposed to wait for people to actually say their stupid things before he was allowed to smack them for it, which pretty much sucked.
Josh passed through into his office, vaguely registering Donna's presence on the periphery of his field of vision. Donna knew. CJ had told her months ago. He understood why, and even agreed with her... Donna had a way of seeing through jobs and titles to the people beneath, and she never missed signs that other people couldn't see.
His hand, in a gesture he was completely unconscious of, stole briefly to his chest and traced the line of his scar.
Still, he felt a strange mixture of... what? The same feeling he'd had when Toby had told her about the MS, a stab of relief that he hadn't had to see the expression on her face, coupled with the disoriented sensation that he should have been the one to tell her. Because she was his assistant, and his... well, his Donna.
That seemed the simplest term to file the conflicting list of things she was and wasn't to him under, because it wasn't as if he was particularly likely to ever meet another. The other staff in the office might have assistants, but none of them had a Donna. Although the president had once had a Mrs. Landingham... But she was gone now, and with that in mind, Josh wasn't about to begrudge him a shared guardian angel.
He wondered what Donna would think of this confusedly meandering little train of thought. It would probably have earned him a smack round the head for being possessive. That, or a hug and a smile.
Hmm. He really should learn to get better at reading Donna.
She followed him in, and he struggled to remember what he'd last asked her to do. It seemed like a very long time had passed in the space of a half hour meeting. Ah, yes. "Did you find out why Vicky Henderson stood me up?" Josh tried to inject a note of humour into his voice, but it fell even flatter than he'd expected when he saw the expression on her face.
"Yeah, um, she, um... she hasn't been in the office. Her... her little girl died."
He stared at her. "She, uh... what?" For a moment, he was in another place and time, with the sounds of a victory party echoing loud behind him, and the look on Donna's face filling up the world. He knew that face well, but he wished he'd never had reason to. Donnatella Moss could never be the bearer of bad news without it leeching into her own compassionate being.
"What- what happened?" he stuttered out.
"There was an accident, I- I don't know. There was a fire. She, um, she died Sunday night."
And he couldn't think of anything to say. "Oh. I... oh."
Donna's eyes were huge with worry. "Josh, are you-?"
"I'm fine," he told her automatically. "I'm... really fine."
Well, not fine, because fine wasn't a good thing to be when you heard about anybody's children dying, no matter how well you did or didn't know them, and right now he was feeling seventeen different kinds of asshole for bitching about her missing the meeting, but... he was fine.
It was a terrible tragedy, but a tragedy completely unconnected with him, and he had no good reason to be anything other than fine.
Josh looked up, and met Donna's eyes. "How old was she?" he had to ask, although he knew the answer was going to hurt no matter what it was.
"Nine. She was- she was nine."
Donna gave him a sorrowful look, and left the office. He sat alone, staring at the wall.
For just a moment, he imagined he could smell burnt popcorn.