XIII

Jed could see the sympathy in his Chief of Staff's eyes the moment he walked through the door, and he hated it.

I don't want this. Please, why can't anybody understand that I don't want this?

Toby's blunt accusations during the re-election campaign had been grim enough, but he'd take the Ziegler lack of tact over the concern of others any day. He'd much rather have Toby brashly trample over his thoughts and feelings than CJ and the others tiptoeing around him as if he'd shatter if they breathed too hard.

And now Abbey had spoken to Leo. Leo, who'd seen him through the worst and best of himself, and never hesitated to cut him down when he was full of himself, and slap him down when he was full of crap.

Dammit, Leo, don't you dare look at me differently. Don't you dare.

"Any news on Cambodia?" he asked, hearing the hollowness in his own voice.

"We're still waiting, Mr. President." Leo's voice was as perfectly controlled as ever, but his eyes were everywhere. Anywhere but Jed's face. The association took him a moment to place, but when it did it made him smile with a bitter lack of humour. Ellie. The daughter who was too afraid of her own mental vision of him to look him in the eye.

Well, he might never have mastered the art of getting through to Ellie, but at least it gave him a brutally familiar place to start.

"Look at me, Leo."

Unlike his middle daughter, Leo didn't hesitate to obey the command. He raised his head, and gave him a sadly quiet smile.

"Abbey spoke to you," Jed said. It wasn't a question.

Leo hesitated, looking as if he wanted to reach out but wasn't certain of his welcome. If this had been Leo's pain, Jed would have crossed the gap between them in a heartbeat. But it wasn't. And this was different.

"This isn't anything, Leo," he said, and Leo stared at him, letting out a frustrated huff of breath.

"Of course it's something, Jed, it's-"

"It was a long time ago." His voice was getting louder, but he didn't really care to modulate it.

"Jed."

He couldn't stand the silent empathy radiating off the other man, and the pity it was too small a step away from.

"No!" he scowled. "Why- why does everybody have to do this? Why does this have to become some Shakespearean tragedy of motivations? Why does everybody have to dramatise my life? It's not- it's just- it's just my life. That's all it is. It doesn't- it doesn't have to have a moral. It doesn't have to have a storyline. Sometimes... sometimes you can just live, and who you were and what happened thirty years ago doesn't matter because Jesus, it was thirty years ago!"

Leo smiled faintly, and touched his sleeve as he calmed down, listening to the air heave in and out of his lungs too fast.

"Jed, we're just... we're just worried about you," he said earnestly.

"You don't need to be," he said softly.

"Your father-"

"Dammit, Leo, your father got drunk and shot himself in the head, and what's that supposed tell me about you?" The words burst from him in a blaze of frustration, and thought of how they sounded only followed afterwards.

They just looked at each other for a moment. Leo didn't snap, and Jed sure as hell didn't feel better, only vaguely nauseous. He turned away, making a sharp hand gesture of apology.

"That was way over the line. That was unforgivable. I'm sorry."

Leo shook his head, brushing it off the way he did undeserved insults and well-deserved compliments alike. It seemed sometimes as if Leo McGarry considered himself the least important player in his own life, not requiring praise, consideration or validation, and meeting no harsher standard of judgement than his own.

"Nah. You're-"

Jed raised a warning finger. "I swear to God, Leo, if you tell me I'm under a lot of stress right now, I might actually hit you."

Leo snickered, an unanticipated snort of amusement. "You expect me to believe you even know how to make a fist?"

Jed had to laugh himself, and some of the day's tension rolled off his shoulders. "I'm aware of the general principles." He balled his hand and made a casual motion of demonstration. "Action, reaction - I'm up to speed on my Newton," he shrugged.

Leo shook his head, grinning, and the atmosphere suddenly made it feel a completely different room. "You're such a geek."

"Ah, but we're the ones you've got to watch out for. Other people just flail about blindly - we're the ones who do the actual math."

"Yeah." The light-hearted comment fell flat with the memory of the subject hanging unspoken between them.

"Leo." He waited until his Chief of Staff looked him in the eye. "Don't do this. I'm not anybody different. I'm the exact same guy I was this morning, and all the days before that."

Leo nodded slowly, and turned to go. He hesitated in the doorway, and looked back. "Mr. President?" He met Jed's eyes. "It tells you I'm the son of guy who drank too much and shot himself in the head. And everything that comes with it."

Jed looked him in the eye seriously. "You're more than that, Leo." He hesitated for a beat. "We all are."

Leo closed his eyes in a brief moment of understanding. "Yeah," he said softly.

"We're not defined by what our fathers made us, and Isaac Newton couldn't make equations out of the sum of our experience. There are a billion people who could have had our childhoods, and none of them are Jed Bartlet and Leo McGarry."

Leo nodded, and smiled. But still he lingered for an extra moment, one hand on the doorhandle. "You're wrong about one thing, though."

"What's that?"

"That you're the same man to me you were before I knew. Because every extra thing I learn about you, I learn that you're a greater man than even I knew to believe you were."

He left the room without looking back to see what Jed's reaction might be.

She wasn't entirely surprised to find Josh's office darkened, but this time there was no haunting music, only thick silence. CJ stepped inside, and gave him a gentle smile as he looked up.

"You okay?"

He nodded mutely.

"I heard about Vicky Henderson's little girl."

Josh looked down, tracing patterns on the desktop with his fingertips. "I just- I was bitching her out for not turning up to my meeting, you know? And all the time-"

"Yeah." She laid a hand on his shoulder, knowing that it wasn't just that irrational guilt that stirred up his brooding mood. Today he'd already had heavy news laid on him, and the old associations it stirred couldn't have been pleasant. She sat down on his desk, and looked at him. "What's on your mind, amigo?"

"The past," he admitted, and she cracked a smile.

"Well, that's never good."

Josh sighed, and pushed back in his chair, eyes somewhere far away from the rest of the room and her. "Kids, they're so... they're so fragile, you know? They're these little people, and they can just... it's so easy to damage them."

She wasn't sure if he was talking about little Naomi Henderson, his sister, or himself. Maybe all three of them at once.

"Everybody's fragile, Josh," she reminded him softly.

"Yeah, but... they're kids. They-"

"Yeah," she sighed quietly.

He was silent for a moment, and his fingers went back to drawing lines and circles. "Did she- Does she have any other kids?" he asked.

"I don't know." CJ wanted to say she hoped so, for her sake, then wanted to say that she hoped not, for their sake, then realised that there really wasn't any way to hope that would make it better.

In the way Josh looked at her, she thought she could see the ghost of the frightened little boy he must have been three decades ago.

"Things... happen, when you're a kid," he said slowly. "And you don't have the same control over your life... you don't see things the way you do when you're an adult. There are... ways you see the world, and even when you grow up, even when you're old enough to know that it's not true... you're never gonna see it any other way. Like..." Suddenly, unexpectedly, the boyish grin snapped back into place. "Did your big brother ever tell you that story how spiders can crawl in your ear when you're asleep, and eat through into your brain?"

CJ blinked. "No. But I'm gonna be living with that one for a while now, I can tell you."

He smiled. "That's my point. You know... you know that's not right, it's not true, but it sticks with you. Things you believe when you're a child... they stick with you."

She sobered up abruptly. "Josh..." she said earnestly. "You know you couldn't ever have done anything about what happened to your sister."

Josh nodded. "And the president knows that his father was an abusive son of a bitch who treated him worse than he ever deserved. But sometimes... sometimes what you know doesn't make any difference."

CJ held a breath, and let it out slowly. "It's gonna be hard for him," she agreed softly.

"CJ, I don't... I don't know how we can protect him from this. I don't honestly see any way we can protect him from this."

And CJ wanted to reach out and take his hand and tell him it would be all right, but he wouldn't believe her. So instead she stood up, and surprised him by stroking back his hair to press a quick kiss to his temple.

"We get through things, mi amor," she told him. "That's what we do."

He gave her a tired smile of thanks.