XX

WEDNESDAY:

He drifted awake slowly; the sun was yet to rise, but he could feel that night had passed into morning. He'd slept through, at least as far as the President of the United States could be allowed to.

Abbey was sleeping beside him; he could hear her quiet breaths rustle in the dimness, a welcome, familiar sound. She was still pressed up against his shoulder, sharing a pleasant, comfortable warmth, and he allowed himself the luxury of lying back to enjoy it for a few moments.

His eyes were gritty, but not so much from exhaustion. Jed remembered the emotional collapse of the night before, now slightly glazed with a patina of distance and unreality. He felt drained, now, but also lighter. That horrible choking tightness in his chest had eased, expelled with the pressure of all those pent-up emotions, and now he felt... clean.

He had to get up. A depressing thought - but suddenly not a paralysing one. Oddly, in feeling so hollow he felt stronger than he had in a long time. The stresses of the past seven days had been, at least to some degree, purged from his system, and with that poison gone he felt ready to get back on his feet and start moving.

He slid out from under the covers, careful not to disturb his sleeping wife, and dressed himself in silence. When he opened the door to leave, the light from outside splashed across the bed, outlining her profile and giving highlights to her hair. He smiled down at her.

"I love you," he murmured, too softly to wake her, and pressed a gentle, feather-light kiss to her forehead before leaving to begin his day.

He was woken by the now extremely familiar lurch of the bedsprings as his other half made a panicked dash for the bathroom to throw up. "Zoey, are you okay?" he called, voice deep and slightly hoarse from still being half asleep.

"Don't get up!" she insisted quickly. "I'm okay." Charlie would have gone to join her anyway, but he knew she didn't like him hovering over her when she was suffering from morning sickness; she preferred to be allowed to be - to use her words - 'gross and icky' in relative privacy.

He lay half awake and knowing he'd soon have to be all that way. He heard the sound of running water and the toilet flushing, and then Zoey padded out of the bathroom and towards the kitchen. She was nearly as much of a holy terror as her father to risk waking before she was ready to, but once she was up, she was up, and couldn't get back to sleep.

He listened and mentally traced her steps; funny how this apartment already felt so familiar to him. He'd lived in the old house with Deanna and, earlier, their mother for the whole of the life he could remember, but... this felt like a home to him. Maybe it was to do with being part of a family, being a husband... being a father.

In what must now be less than seven months, he'd be a father. In fact, he supposed he already was one. It was still impossible to believe... perhaps it wouldn't really sink in until he felt the baby kick, or even until he was at the hospital and someone was pressing a squalling bundle into his hands. So hard to believe that there could be a little life growing in there, a life that was half him and half Zoey and so much more than the sum of both of them.

He heard the rustle as Zoey stooped to pick up the morning papers, and knew she was taking them into the front room to read. He really should be getting up sometime about now...

"Charlie!" His wife's voice was urgent, but, oddly, not laced with the outrage he'd come to expect from her scanning of the headlines this past couple of days. "You've gotta come check this out!"

He rolled out of bed and scrambled to join her.

"Hey, CJ!"

She came to an abrupt halt outside her office, startled by the decidedly unexpected vision of a widely grinning Carol. She rested a hand on her hip and gave her assistant a stern look.

"Okay, Carol, if it's some kind of artificial stimulant producing that expression... I just hope your parents taught you that it's nice to share."

"It's not drugs," Carol told her, still grinning. CJ started to smile tentatively back. Good news? Seriously? She tried to think what it might be, but had real trouble beginning to imagine what.

"The press corps were abducted by aliens?" she suggested.

"Not quite that good."

"Ah, damn," she sighed.

Carol reached for a nearby sheaf of papers and handed them to her. "Ellie Bartlet's been making calls. She's pissed, she's outraged, and she's telling the world about it."

CJ hastily put down her coffee and flicked through, grinning in happy amazement as she registered some of the more inflammatory phrases. "Everyone's got this?"

"Direct comment from a family member? They're lapping it up. Everybody's so grateful not to have to come up with yet another way to rephrase 'shock childhood revelations' they've jumped in with both feet."

There were probably hypocrisies to be mused on when it came down to the press printing stories about people slamming the invasive nature of the press, but who cared about that right now? Every paper in town was carrying the story of a furious daughter coming to the righteous defence of her embattled father. You couldn't ask for that kind of coverage... and, given that it was Eleanor, none of them would ever have thought to have done so.

CJ surveyed the pile of stories with growing delight. She looked up at a similarly gleeful Carol. "I think," she said slowly, "today might just turn out to be a good day after all."

"This could be it, Leo." Sam was grinning widely. "This really could be it."

Josh too seemed infused by the same sense of energy, leaning in over his boss's desk to emphasise his words. "This is our chance to take the press coverage and make it ours."

"You've got Eleanor Bartlet's voice coming from every major news outlet saying enough is enough," CJ agreed. "Americans want to read every scrap of gossip they can about the president's private life, but they also want to see him running the country. We've got to march out there, take that ball, and whack it all the way into 'Quit holding us up, we've got jobs to do'."

Leo, though as unexpectedly pleased with Ellie's show of support as the rest of them, was more cautiously restrained. "What's our gameplan here?" he asked.

"We've got to take the focus off the entire childhood tragedy element of it," Toby spoke up. "He went through hell, and he rose to become the president - so let's stop talking about hell."

"We've gotta stop writing a Dickens novel and make this a blockbuster movie," Sam concurred. "He's not a victim, he's a survivor. He's an American hero!"

Leo grimaced. "He's not gonna like that," he pointed out.

"He doesn't like this," CJ countered wryly.

"You think the press pool are ready to be weaned away from this?"

"They're political journalists, Leo," she reminded him. "They love a good dirtbath as much as the next reporter, but the only guy the muck's sticking to right here is long dead. We can pull the emphasis back onto the here and now, make it about where he's got to, not where he came from."

"They're gonna want to know how he's coping," Josh put in with a grimace.

"So we tell them he's coped for the last forty years, he can damn well cope with it now," Leo snapped; the extra bite to his words born from the fervent desire to believe that they really were true.

"We've got to march out there, tell them Ellie's absolutely right," CJ said firmly. "We've let the press hijack the business of the nation for long enough chasing after a decades old story. When they're scraping the bottom of the rumour barrel to come up with new sensations, it's time to move on. No more questions, no more answers; the White House has commented its last comment."

"You think they're just gonna let it go?" he said sceptically.

"They're ready to be moved, but if we want them to, we've got to forcibly push this off the front page," Toby said.

"What with?" Leo demanded curtly.

"There's Charlie and Zoey," CJ suggested, slightly hesitantly. Josh looked up at her.

"They want to announce the pregnancy?"

"I've spoken to them," she confirmed. "They don't want this to leak like last time. I didn't want to just throw it out there and let it get trampled on in the middle of all this crap, but maybe now-"

She broke off at the interrupting creak of a door. Expecting it to be Margaret they all swivelled that way first - apart from Leo, who'd already recognised it as being the other door.

President Bartlet stood in the doorway to the Oval Office, his expression unreadable.

"CJ?"

She straightened up as she twisted around to face him. "Mr. President?"

He smiled faintly, and slipped his hands into his pockets before he spoke. "I think it's time I talked to the press."