XVII

Josh arrived in his office with his urgent face on. Not the 'mommy, I need the restroom now' style of urgency that infused his day to day dealings, but the stressed out, haven't-slept-for-a-week-and-I'm-about-to-snap aspect that surfaced when things were close to the wire.

Josh was obsessing. This was nothing new. Toby sat back in his chair to regard him. "Josh."

"Toby, listen." The Deputy Chief of Staff was leaning too close over his desk, already forcefully selling an argument he hadn't started making yet. "I was speaking to Stuart Walters yesterday about the budget for the fire administration. He shut me down, but I think I found a-"

"We settled on the USFA months ago," Toby reminded him bluntly.

"I know, but-"

"We sat people down around a table and made compromises, Josh. You know we made compromises, because you were the one who sat down in that meeting and made them."

"Peter Daltrey has a bill," Josh said earnestly.

"No," Toby shut him down.

"Daltrey's all about funding for the services. He eats that kind of thing. All I have to do is have him slip in a-"

"-An obstruction to the passing of a bill that was going to sail through Congress like so much prune juice, at a time when we do not need anything crawling its way into the middle of the news cycle from hell-"

"Okay- Okay, euw, mostly, and thank you for that visual, Toby, and... how could our news cycle possibly get worse?" he demanded.

He just let that hang in the air for a moment, so Josh could listen to himself. They all knew there was no such thing as 'low as it can go' when it came to presidential politics. Josh made a wry face.

Toby laid it out in flat, stark terms. "We can't stop the news cycle. We can't help the president. We can make sure that there is nothing, nothing, to suggest that the government is running as anything less than a well-oiled machine as a result."

"Okay, coupled with the prune-juice metaphor, this is taking me visual places I don't want to go."

It was reflexive snark, the kind that meant he'd run out of argument, but was waiting for somebody to take it from him because he couldn't bring himself to concede on his own.

"Josh." Toby spoke brusquely, but not particularly unkindly. "Not only have you lost... there isn't even a battle. There isn't even a battle, Josh."

"Yeah." He slumped, looking defeated. "Yeah," he repeated softly.

"Leo."

There was no mistaking that familiar voice; he sat back, pushing his work aside, and smiled tiredly at her. "Hey, Abbey."

She smiled briefly in response and stepped into his office, trailing her fingers absently along the desktop. She sat down, with a heavy sigh.

"How's it going?" he asked softly, although both of them knew the question was really 'How's he doing?' Abbey pushed back her hair and was silent for a moment.

"I'm trying to help him, Leo," she said sadly. "I'm trying, but he won't let me near him."

"He won't let anybody near him," he reminded her gently, although he knew that was small comfort to the woman who was normally allowed the access everyone else was denied. Jed guarded his private pains jealously, a mix of pride, stubbornness and misguided refusal to be a burden. Normally it was Abbey who could find her way through to force him into opening up... but this was something that stretched back even further and deeper than their marriage. He couldn't imagine how that must feel for Abbey, to be on the outside looking in for the first time in long decades.

"It's..." She didn't finish the thought, sighing again. She looked as impeccably stunning as always, but the weariness radiated off her in waves. Leo gave her a gentle look.

"How are you doing?" he asked, with just enough of an accent on the 'you' to push the concern behind the enquiry home. He was more than half expecting a brush-off, but when she looked up, her eyes glistened with naked emotion.

"I hurt when he's hurting, Leo," she said simply.

He closed his eyes. "I know," he said softly. "I know." Of course he did. He understood that far too well. "Everybody's hurting for him, Abbey," he reminded her. "They love him, Abbey. Half the time they're secretly wishing they could drop-kick him into the Potomac and the other half they're creeping round like little kids afraid of disappointing their favourite teacher, but... they love him. And it's killing them to see him like this."

"It's killing me," she admitted hoarsely. Leo stood up, and walked around the table to give her a warm hug. To him, a rare and almost alien gesture in his semi-self-imposed isolation; probably to her, a familiar comfort too long missing in this painful morass of tension and worry.

For a moment they just stood together, taking comfort from a love they both shared for a man that neither could help. Then Abbey pulled away from his arms, and smiled up at him for a moment.

"He's lucky to have you," she said, and planted a gentle kiss on his cheek before walking out of his office and leaving him alone.

He was standing there for a long time before he snapped back to himself, and returned to his desk.

Stanley wondered, in a vaguely detached sort of way, whether his knees were visibly shaking. Certainly, he wouldn't like to test the strength of his legs right now.

This wasn't a run of the mill appointment. He'd known that from the moment he'd realised Josh wasn't to be his client this time around, and it hadn't take five minutes alone with Jed Bartlet to be sure of it. He'd known full well that he was dealing with the leader of the free world here, and things could be expected to be... a little different.

He'd been fully aware of that. And, if he'd been asked to enumerate the many ways in which this varied from dispensing therapy to John Brown down the street, the Secret Service agents outside the door would certainly have rated a mention somewhere down the list.

From here on in, their position was going to be rather higher. As a trauma specialist like him should be well aware, there was something about a large number of gun-barrels trained in your direction that tended to have a lasting effect on you.

The president's fury had dissipated as quickly as a summer storm, but the confrontational attitude was still firmly in place, and it was going to take every inch of the calm professional detachment he was scrabbling desperately to retrieve to try and get around it.

"Mr. President, it... bothers me that you don't seem to understanding exactly how seriously people are taking this," he tried.

"Too seriously!" the president scowled. "It's all in the past, and it wasn't... it's not what they're making it out to be. I'm the one who was there, I should know!"

"With all due respect, Mr. President, you're the last person in this building who's in any position to make an objective assessment," he pointed out dryly. The older man gave him a sideways look from under his brows.

He let out his breath in a sharp, shotgun sigh that twanged Stanley's already jangling nerves. "Fine. Fine. I can't be trusted to judge the severity of my own personal experience. Then we'll turn to more objective measures. Do I seem traumatised to you?"

"Sir, I'll freely concede that if half the things I've heard about your childhood are true, you've made a quite remarkable recovery." Indeed, Jed Bartlet was quite the poster boy for the fact that repressing the past wasn't always the emotionally crippling mistake most psychoanalysts preferred to paint it as. In fact, given that the president's trauma was safely confined to the past, choosing to completely bury it had probably served him far better than spending the rest of his life obsessing over it.

It was when a team of external agents came along with bulldozers to dig it up that the effectiveness of that particular coping strategy started to fall down.

"Well, most of them probably aren't, but thank you." The president looked him in the eye with steely resolve. "I'm not a victim, Stanley," he said firmly. "And I won't be made into one just because that's what expected of me. I am not a victim!"

"Okay. You're not a victim," Stanley conceded levelly. He hesitated for a beat. "But that doesn't mean there wasn't a crime."

They held each other's gaze for a long moment, and then the president stood up. "We're done here," he announced, with the same gesture of dismissal he'd used to send out the Secret Service agents.

"Mr. President, I don't think we are," Stanley protested gently.

"Well, that's a shame for you, because we're done here. I have a schedule to keep, and we've already overrun it."

He wasn't sure he believed that was true, but the hell of it was that it could become true just by the president saying it - there were never any gaps in the president's schedule, only moments when taking a break had to take priority. The fact that his staff had been working themselves to death to clear free time for him didn't mean there weren't a whole swamp of other commitments ready to slide in to fill it.

He could try to force a continuance, but the president had already shut him out, and the truth was he was still feeling more than a little antsy about throwing his authority around right now. A good solid door usually felt like plenty of insulation from the outside world during a therapy session, but with the knowledge that those agents were waiting so alertly just outside made it seem uncomfortably flimsy.

He shook hands with his client. "Mr. President, you know where to call if you need me."

The president might be sceptical of the likelihood of that, but he was a mannerly man, and he accepted the spirit of the offer with a nod.

Stanley left, wishing he could feel like he'd accomplished more... and trying very hard not to attract the attention of the Secret Service agents as he passed.