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"Josh!"

He paused, coffee cup halfway to his mouth, and wondered if he could get away with ducking down the nearest side turning. Probably not, unfortunately. He wheeled around. "Toby."

They started walking together. "We need to use more aggressive language," Toby said, without preamble.

"In general?" he wondered, deliberately obtusely. "'Cause, you know, once that first morning dose of caffeine starts circulating-"

"It's the State of the Union! It should be bold, visionary - not read like we just got set an essay to write 'What I did in my last year in office'. We need to be pushing new initiatives, not rambling about whatever little success we could squeeze of the old ones."

"We're trying to keep our feet, Toby," Josh reminded him.

"Which implies we're standing still!"

"In my book, that beats falling over." Too many screw-ups and scandals in the last twelve months: a flurry of political losses, the dissection of the president's unhappy childhood, Sam's relationship with Steve, and now this thing with Hoynes... If the election had fallen a year later than it had, it was hard to believe they could have pulled off even the narrow victory that they'd managed.

"That depends which direction you fall in," Toby muttered darkly.

He knew full well what this was about. "Toby, this isn't the time to go after gun control."

"This is exactly the time to go after gun control! We have a high profile case, we have the biggest platform we get for launching ideas, we have-"

"We have no chance in hell of forcing any bill with anything resembling teeth through Congress," Josh reminded him forcefully. "Toby, we can't send the president out there to push for a new initiative that'll self-destruct in a matter of months. We don't need a symbolic implosion, we need victories!"

"The debate is coming right to us, and we're turning it away."

"Because we can't win it! Toby-"

"This is one of the ones we should go for whether we can win it or not."

"In other circumstances, yes. But not now."

Toby eyed him sideways. "I expected you to support me on this."

"Why?" he demanded. It was hardly his place to be the champion of idealism over practicality around here. "Leo already said to put it down until after the speech was over. Did you think I wouldn't back him?"

"I would have thought that you at least would have some kind of-"

Josh had a sudden dark suspicion that he knew where this was headed. "Don't finish that thought," he warned.

"No." Toby at least had the grace to look mildly chagrined.

There was a burn in his chest that he knew was wholly psychological. "Leo's right, Toby. We don't go after this now. We can put out feelers after the speech, but we can't take another public failure right now."

He turned and walked off in the direction of his office.

"Hey, Sam."

He straightened up in surprise. "Oh, hi, Leo."

Leo frowned at him in puzzlement for a moment, and then waved a hand vaguely. " Okay, what's-?"

"I shaved," he supplied, after it became clear that the answer wasn't going to present itself.

"Oh. Yeah. You had a beard, didn't you."

"Apparently, not a very memorable one," he noted wryly.

"You look better without it," Leo told him.

"Okay. What's up?"

"Oh, I just came by to tell CJ to be prepared for Mark Winston having made some comments."

"He's jockeying for the VP spot?" Sam guessed.

"With an incredible lack of subtlety. He doesn't have much support, but the word is Tony Phillips is picking up a following. Of course, he's got the sense not to shoot his mouth off to the press and kill any good will he might have had going for him."

"Does he have any?" he wondered.

"Not nearly enough. There's no halfway suitable Democrat to take the position if we give Hoynes the boot, and these guys ought to have the brains to know it."

"They're still putting pressure on to get rid of him?"

"Well, it just wouldn't be the State of the Union without somebody pressing us to fire somebody," Leo said sardonically.

"Toby still thinks we're being too neutral," Sam informed him.

"Well, that's politics for you, Sam. Right now, all we want to do is get in, get out, and if the president doesn't fall flat on his face? We're calling it a good day."

"Hey." Ash rapped his knuckles against the doorframe, and Josh blinked up at him. "Where's Donna?" he wondered.

"That's a question I ask myself ten or twenty times a day."

"I'm in here!" Donna called from the sidelines. Josh paused.

"Why is she in there?" he asked, somewhat helplessly, as if Ash might be able to provide him with the answer.

"I had to leave the room," Donna supplied. "Your incredible personal magnetism was pulling the staples out of my filing."

Josh lowered an eyebrow. "Hmm. My sarcasm detector is sounding, and yet I can't quite..."

"You asked me to pull those files on the thing for Sam. They're all over the place. It's gonna take me a while."

"Yeah, okay." The Deputy Chief of Staff did not, on the surface of it, display the face of a man who remembered ordering any such thing. He appeared to dismiss it a heartbeat later, and turned his attention back to Ash. "Hey. You ready to meet the president?"

"No, actually," he admitted.

"Relax," Josh counselled with a hand on his shoulder. He reconsidered. "Well, don't. Just try not to you, know, salute or pee in his closet or anything."

Ash blinked at him. "Those are options?"

"You'd be surprised. This way." Josh steered him around a corner.

"You know, we could always leave this and Charlie could keep working right up until he needs paternity leave and I could, uh... go home and live on dog biscuits or something."

It was the equally unpleasant prospects of trying to scrape a living flipping burgers or crawling home to his parents that had convinced him to take a wild stab at the job opportunity Josh had offered him. However, Ash couldn't help feeling he was in way over his head. What was he doing, being interviewed by the president? A month ago, his most important duty had been preventing Congresswoman Wells from double-booking lunch.

Josh clapped him on the shoulder with a cheerful lack of sympathy. "You'll do fine. Here we go."

He marched straight towards the Oval Office without the slightest hesitation, and stopped a young blonde woman passing by with a pile of folders. "Hey, Nancy, where's Charlie?"

"He went to take a message. The president's expecting you, you can go right in," she invited, as if it was nothing at all.

"Great. Come on, Ash."

His stomach defied several laws of physics by simultaneously churning and freezing solid. If there hadn't been a rather alarmingly visible Secret Service presence, he might have actually followed the overwhelming instinct to make a run for it. He crammed more tiny steps into his journey towards the Oval Office than it should have been physically possible to fit in such a small distance.

"Josh!" That too-familiar voice, loudly intimidating even in a friendly greeting, wound his nerves several times tighter. Ash finally crossed through the doorway, trying not to actually look at the carpet he was walking on. Which meant that he came eye to eye with the president almost immediately.

He had a good six inches in height on his country's leader, but when that steely gaze pinned him he was utterly unaware of it. The president's face was every bit as stonily imposing as the bust of Abraham Lincoln behind him. In a perfectly crisp navy suit jacket and subtly striped tie, he looked every inch as magnificently presidential as he did on TV.

Josh, for some incomprehensible reason, didn't seem to be at all overawed or intimidated. "Mr. President? Ashley Bowers."

The president nodded, and extended a hand to him, face still impassively unreadable. "Jed Bartlet."

Ash rather thought that had gone without saying. Trying to ignore a pressing desire to scrub his sweaty hands on his pants leg beforehand, he shook hands with the president. "It's an honour to meet you, sir." Bartlet's brief but not perfunctory grip was as firm as the set of his jaw.

That whole getting over the nerves thing? Not happening very fast.

Josh smiled. "Well, I'll just leave you to-"

Ash was saved from the indignity of having to lunge across the room, grab him by the leg and beg him to stay by the fact that Charlie arrived. The aide spared them a brief glance, but focused almost immediately on his boss, handing him a square of folded paper. "Mr. President?"

The president unfolded a pair of glasses from his breast pocket, and slipped them on to read. After a moment, he handed the note back to Charlie, and straightened up. " I'm sorry. We're going to have to do this another time."

"Situation Room?" Josh guessed, and the president nodded. Those two words made Ash's guts twist with nerves; he had a feeling that any room in the White House with that kind of name was not going to be used to handle budget problems or staff shortages.

The president brushed past him. "I'm sorry, Mr. Bowers, we're going to have to reschedule this meeting for later. Charlie, is Leo-?"

"He's already on his way down there."

"Okay. Thank you, Charlie. Josh, I'll be-"

"Yes, sir."

The president and his aide left at the same breakneck speed everybody else around here seemed to use. Ash blinked to himself. "Well, that happened fast."

"It does." Josh led him out of the Oval. "Sorry about that. I'll speak to Nancy, see if he has any time free later today..."

"Is this a regular occurrence?" he wondered uneasily. For all he knew, the president getting called to the Situation Room could be the precursor to all out nuclear war.

"They have to keep the president apprised of international issues as soon as they start to develop," Josh explained. "The situation can change at any moment, so they need to make sure the president's aware of things that could get ugly even before they do."

"Oh." Potential situations sounded a whole lot better than actual situations. "How long will he be down there?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On whether they're just giving him the heads up on a situation, or they want him to give a strike order."

Ash swallowed slowly.

This really wasn't your everyday job interview.