A/N: Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, BORED. Have nothing to do. Decided to write. Will stop speaking in sentence fragments. Though I will admit, sometimes sentence fragments can be rather interesting and fun. But my teachers tend to think that sentence fragments are not conductive to a proper essay. Meh. Oh well.

What happened to all my people??? I updated!!!!! (I feel that I deserve some credit for that, seeing as I'm technically not supposed to update at school. I was v. sneaky.) Thank you for everyone who did review: love ya guys!!!!!!

Disclaimer: Too stupid to think of a witty disclaimer or the idea for West Wing.

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CJ Cregg's POV

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We waited with bated breath. What did Leo mean he had something to tell us? There was something worse than Josh? If there was something worse than Josh than we were all doomed to an eternity of Hell. I didn't think that anything could possibly get worse than Josh being shot. I looked around at all of my friends. Toby looked about like how I felt: scared, confused, and exhausted, though he tried to hide it. Sam looked utterly spent and defeated, completely unable to go on. Charlie was the most interesting. He had a look of utter resignation on his face. It was almost as if he knew what was coming and had decided not to fight it anymore.

"What is it?" I asked, hating the way that my voice quavered. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at hiding emotions when I'm talking to people. It's best if you always appear like you know what you're talking about when you're in front of fifty slavering White House reporters. But now I couldn't seem to keep the emotions from creeping through and violating my everyday voice. Toby heard the quaver if no one else did and turned sharply around to look at me.

"The reason that I was here before you," Leo took a deep breath and shook his head, "the reason that I was here before you..." His voice trailed off and he began again. This time it was sharp, brutal, and to the point. "The President was shot."

It felt like my entire world had been turned upside down. The President was shot? President Bartlet was shot? What? How did this happen? How did the bullet manage to get through the curtain of Secret Service agents to hit him? Who had shot him? Why? Would he be all right? What was happening right now? What should I tell the Press Corp?

My heart started to race again. It was thumping a mad polka in my chest until it felt like it was going to burst through my ribs. I couldn't breathe correctly. I looked around at everyone else, and it looked like they were going through the same thing. What was next? What horrible something else could happen? Josh, President Bartlet-who was next? Who was next on God's sadistic countdown list of White House personnel and staffers?

Zoey was standing stoically beside Leo. My heart went out to her. She might lose her father tonight. The enormity of the crime was brought home when the human aspect was considered. Not only might the United States lose their President, a girl might lose her father. And I would lose an employer who had almost become a second father to me. You couldn't help but love Jed Bartlet once you met him (some Republicans would disagree with me about that last statement). Or at least if you didn't love him, you respected him. Who could hate a person enough to kill them? What ignorant excuse for a human being could do that?

I let out a shuddering breath. Sam looked sympathetically at me. I clenched my fists, feeling the manicured nails dig deep into my palm. Leo softly cleared his throat and spoke again. "The doctors don't think that it'll be that bad," he informed. "From what I could gather, there's a clear entry and exit wound, and that's supposed to be a good thing."

He was shot, I thought to myself. After you get shot, there's really no good thing is there? After you get shot, how can your outlook not be bleak? I could tell that Toby had some thoughts that he wanted to express, but after thinking on them he realized that perhaps they weren't the best thoughts at the time. I was glad. I absolutely adore Toby, but there are just some things that you don't say to people. Leo was talking again, and I forced myself to listen to what he was saying. When Leo's speaking, it's generally about something important.

"...so I guess all we can do is wait," he was saying. "What happened with Josh?" he asked after a short pause. Everyone in the room seemed to appear to take a body blow, like they had just gotten hit with a strong gust of wind. Sam and Toby seemed to shrink and wilt with guilt. I was sure that I looked the same way. What had happened with Josh seemed to hang in the air like a thick, dark, cloud of guilt. Perhaps if one of us had asked him where he was going, or thought a little bit more about him, then he wouldn't be in the situation that he was in right now. The paramedics were taking care of my two centimeter long cut before they were taking care of Josh's sucking chest wound.

"He was behind us," Toby began in a hushed voice, so unlike his normal, brass voice that he used when arguing. "We didn't see him. Everyone thought that he was somewhere else, and it was a long time before anyone thought to start looking for him."

"How long?" Leo asked, his voice taking on a steely edge. Why does he have to do this? I asked myself, cringing internally. Why does he have to torture us more?

"A long time," Toby said in that same hushed voice. I didn't care for the voice. It admitted defeat. We were talking like Josh had already died, and now we were just going over the facts surrounding his death. I always hated when people did that; examine tragedies after they happened to see what went wrong. It always seemed to me that no matter what caused it, the end result was still the same: a lot of people died. Did it really matter who was where, and who said what?

"Leo, if you had understood what it was like..." I began. My voice trailed off and then I started to speak again. "You were there, you know what it was like. The absolute confusion, the chaos, the fear...we didn't see what happened. We should have seen what happened. Our first order of business should have been checking with each other to see if we were all right. But we didn't. We had just been the victims of terrorism. And no one expected it to happen! No one was looking for it! It was just a Town Hall meeting, and now it's something that's going to end up in the history books. We didn't look for him. But can you blame us?"

"Yes," Sam said truthfully. The simple word seemed to reinforce all of our guilt. If Josh died, then they should bring charges against us as well as whoever did it. We were as guilty as the people who pulled the trigger. My speech just proved it. It didn't matter what I was doing: I should have been looking for my friends. And even though Josh was an elitist, fascist, missed-the Dean's-list-two-years-in-a-row, Yankee jackass—he was one of my best friends, and a person that I would trust with anything.

We should have looked after him. The first thing we should have done was gather everyone around, and see if anyone was missing. We should have checked the buildings more carefully. We should have asked Josh where he was going when he turned around and left. The paramedics should have gotten there sooner. Someone should have looked around everywhere for all the wounded people. There were about sixty things that we could have done differently –and that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure that there were about three hundred and ninety other things that we could have done differently.

Leo stopped for a second. Since we seemed to recognize our guilt, he was no longer on the warpath. He shook his head as if to say that he was guilty also. "They told me that he was in the car that I went in," Leo said suddenly. "I should have realized that something was wrong then."

"What do we do?" Charlie asked. It was the first time that he had spoken since...well, since I'd seen him.

Leo waited for a second before speaking, gathering his scattered thoughts once more. "Have you called Donna yet?" he asked Charlie. Charlie shook his head. "Call her. Margaret's still there, so is Mrs. Landingham. Get them to call Bonnie and Ginger; they can get the Communication's office running. Margaret can get Operations flowing, and she can get back the people that she needs for the bullpen." Charlie nodded and went out into the hall.

"As for the rest of you..."Leo paused and looked around at us. The anger had been replaced by a sense of guilt. Wasn't anger the first step in the steps of grieving? Should we be worried that we were following the steps of grieving? Did that tell us that we sensed that Josh was going to die, and that there was nothing that we could do about that? Or was I just reading too much into the whole thing? "Probably the best thing we can do is just wait to see what's going to happen. I don't think we can do much of anything this second. We'll just wait."

"Is that all we can do?" Sam asked, sitting down in a chair. Zoey, Leo, Toby, and I copied his movement.

"If you want to add praying to waiting, then be my guest," Toby said.