A/N: One last post before the holidays I thought. Took a slight break from the West Wing, to concentrate on job, school, and life in general. I have now decided that I am going to remain single for the rest of my life, seeing as all of my friends get screwed over in relationships. Meh. But anyway.

Yay. I love Josh's mommy. Thanks for all of your feedback guys! Wow…fifty reviews…I know to those of you seasoned writers it's not a lot, but to me it really is. I love you all!!!!!!!

Disclaimer: See previous chapters. Too stupid to make one up right now.

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Toby Ziegler's POV

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Despite what CJ and others had said about me, I had never felt more like a complete insensitive asshole than when I said that sentence to Donna. "Josh…was hit." Her face seemed to crumple before my very eyes, turning from ecstasy to shattered disbelief. She pretended like she didn't know what I was talking about. I wanted to let her keep that sense of sweet innocence, I wanted her to keep what we had all lost that night, but she had to know.

"He was shot in the chest," I said softly. I could see tears beginning in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall down her cheeks.

"I…I don't understand," she said, trying to stave off the inevitable. "Is it serious?" her eyes pleaded with me to lie to her. For a second I almost did. It would be so easy to lie to her and to just pretend that nothing had ever happened here. But then reality hit as I heard the words escaping my mouth.

"Yes…it's critical," I said, my voice unnaturally soft and gentle. I hated this tone. I wanted my regular tone back, so I could pretend that everything was normal. This tone made it sound like Josh was already dead. Donna clapped her hand over her mouth to stop the soft gasp from escaping.

The hospital man person started talking again. I tuned him out, my mind still caught in everything that I had to do and most of all, the overwhelming guilt, fear, and uncertainty. He left us alone, supposedly to start gathering up things and leave.

"I'm going to go to the Residence and get some things for the President," Charlie announced, standing up awkwardly. He patted Donna's hand before exiting the room. CJ followed suit. Sam sat on his chair, staring straight ahead at nothing. I walked over to him and touched him on the shoulder. He made no move until I waved my hand in front of his face. He broke his thousand yard and looked up at me in confusion.

"I think I'm going to go back the office for a few minutes," I whispered softly. "I think I'm going to need to start drafting a speech for the President to recite tomorrow, and I know I'm going to have a few official responses to questions if anyone starts asking."

Sam nodded and then turned back to the wall. I left the room, closing the door softly behind me. I walked outside before realizing that I had no way to get home. I had not driven myself to the meeting, someone had driven us. Josh, Sam, and I were in the same car as we went to the meeting. I saw a black car start to pull out of the hospital parking lot and I started to run towards it. It was CJ and Charlie! I had to catch up with them; otherwise I would have no way of getting back to the West Wing.

I started running after the car, waving my arms to try to get their attention. Instead of slowing down and waiting for me, the car seemed to speed up and try to get away from me. I angrily sped up, cursing at CJ and her childish behavior. CJ, now is really not the time to be doing this, I ranted inwardly in my brain. I saw a way to cut the car off. I ran between the lines of cars, inwardly preparing a crushing remark to say to CJ. I got up beside the car and banged on the top. "I'm here!" I yelled. The car stopped and I leaned up against it, waiting for a driver, and/or CJ to stick her grinning head out of the window.

The window rolled down and I prepared a long, angry remark about how playing "Catch Me If You Can" in a hospital parking lot after the President and Josh had been shot was really immature. However, instead of CJ I saw a little, terrified, old man stick his head out. He must have been at least eighty-six years old. I stepped back in astonishment.

"I'm sorry sir," he said, raising his hands above his head. I saw that his hands were trembling from fear. "I don't know what you want….I didn't meant to do anything wrong." I think my mouth nearly hit the ground. It was one of the rare occasions in which I am not only lost for an eloquent word, I'm lost for a word at all.

"Oh, no, I'm sorry, this is all just a really big misunderstanding," I said, backing away from the car. I noticed a license plate on the car as I walked away. If I had just bothered to pay attention I could have avoided giving an old man a heart attack. A car horn beeped at me and I turned around to see an arm waving outside of another black car. I walked slowly over there, running my hands through what hair I had left.

I opened the door and slid inside, ready for the smart remarks that would come. "So, what was the old man doing?" CJ asked. I turned sharply to her, expecting to see a smarmy grin on her face, but was surprised when I saw her face devoid of any emotion at all. Even my humiliation had failed to bring her out of her mood?

"CJ, are you all right?" I asked, gently laying my hand on her forearm. She nodded and absently rubbed her neck.

"I'm fine," she muttered, staring straight ahead at the windshield. "I just need to concentrate on what I'm going to say at the press conference."

"CJ, you don't need to worry about that," I said, in a vain attempt to cheer her up. "You know exactly what they're going to ask; it's not going to be that big of a deal."

"Toby, I don't know what they're going to ask," CJ said dully, completely shocking me. "I have no idea what to even expect. Right now, AP knows more than I do, hell, they probably know more than the Secret Service does. We don't know where the suspect is, we don't know how many of them were there, and we don't know if Josh is going to be all right. So no Toby, I don't know what to expect in the press conference."

I sat back on the seat, completely stunned. CJ's made a career out of being a press secretary. She's a natural at it. She's glib, thinks quickly on her feet, and she can word statements so that they're ambiguous without appearing to be. Last year, she learned how to outright lie to the Press Corp. but her best talent for being a Press Secretary is her ability to guess what questions the press is going to ask before the fact. I've seen other press secretaries do it, but never with as much skill as she does. She's a natural at it; it's what she's built her career on. And now she was telling me that she didn't know what the press was going to throw at her? It was enough to make me lose all thought of what I was going to say, again. This was getting to become a habit with this night.

Charlie spoke for the first time as we came inside the gates. "If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Residence," he said, disappearing up a staircase. CJ and I waited before starting to walk down the hallways. We came to the junction where I would split off to go into the Communications office and she would go down the hall to her office. We lingered at this place, each uncertain of what to say. True to my nature, I spoke first.

"CJ," I began, but she took another one of my trademarks and interrupted me.

"Thanks Toby," she said, smiling a horrible, false smile and walking down the hallway backwards. "I know what you're going to say, and thanks. I'll…I'll see you in a few minutes?" she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she disappeared past the double doors. I followed her for several steps, staring through the doors to see where she was going. She was pausing in front of a door, staring intently into it.

I winced as I realized what she was looking at. I had forgotten that she would have to walk past Josh's office to get to hers. She waited outside of the office. It was almost like Josh was on the phone and she was waiting for him to finish so that she could yell at him again. I felt like running past the doors, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. "He's not there!" I screamed in my mind. "He's not there! Stop making this harder than what it has to be!" with a large sigh, she finally walked past his office and disappeared into her own. I watched her door for a few more seconds to see if she would venture out. She did not. I sighed, turned back, and walked into the Communications office.

No one seemed to notice my appearance. Not that there were usually drum rolls and cheering when I entered the Communications office, but usually Bonnie or Ginger would pause and say hello. But Bonnie and Ginger weren't' here now and everyone had much more important things than me on their minds. Come to think of it, I had more important things on my mind.

I went to my office door and pushed it open. In all my worry about the space shuttle, I had forgotten to lock it like I usually did. I turned on the lights and went through some papers, trying to get my mind calmed down enough to work. I heard a small noise behind me and turned around. Ginger was standing there, her eyes wide and terrified.

"Ginger, I didn't know you were here," I said, trying to get the 'I had just been stabbed by a close friend' look out of her eyes. She shook her head and gripped her scarf tightly, trying to get her words out.

"I got the phone call," she started, shaking her head. "And I turned on the TV…" her voice trailed off and I was suddenly terrified that she was going to start bawling. That would not be good for team morale if they saw someone break down.

"Hey, come here," I said, holding out my arms. She collapsed into them, hugging me tightly. I rubbed her back for a few seconds until I was sure that she was all right to go. I muttered some comforting words to her that didn't really mean anything, but Ginger didn't need to know that. After several seconds we separated. "You feel better?" I asked. She smiled bashfully and nodded. "You ready to get to work?"

If we had done that any other time, then there would have instantly been at least twenty rumors floating around the school about how we were now an item. The rumors probably would have been started by our own, very beautiful, Ms. Donnatella Moss. But now no one was worried about us. No one really cared about us, come to think of it. Ginger smiled and moved off to her desk.

As I started to walk into my office, I could have sworn I heard a voice. "What was that?" I asked, turning around. The voice did not sound like anything I'd heard before in the West Wing.

"I didn't say anything," Ginger said, looking confusedly at me. I turned back to my office and my memory almost immediately catapulted me into a bar, several years ago.

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I set down the phone, feeling decidedly worse than I had just minutes ago. Leo sat posed on the edge of my desk. "Have you ever met Josh's mother?" I asked, trying to remove some of the feelings I had felt from that conversation.

"Just once at a fundraiser," he said, shaking his head. "It was around Christmas, and josh had invited her there so that they could spend the holidays together. I was friends with his dad, but I'd never met her before."

"I didn't know that you were friends with Josh's father," I said, looking up sharply. "You didn't leave after he died."

"That was because I was the main factor in trying to get this President elected," Leo said, his voice suddenly sharp. I decided to let it lie and turned back to my papers that I had been working on before Ruth Lyman had called.

Leo nodded and made like he was going to leave. Before he walked out of the door he turned back to me. "What are you working on?" he asked, looking with interest at the large pile of papers on my desk. I rummaged through them, trying to organize some of them.

"Just some official statements, a few press releases," I said, trying to make one notepad disappear underneath my desk calendar. Leo, being the smart and observatory person that he was, noticed it right off the bat.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing at the half of the notepad that I had not been able to hide underneath the calendar. I pulled it out, cringing in anticipation of what I was going to say.

"It's just a few get well remarks for Josh," I said, staring at my scrawled sentences. "And…some other things," I said, looking up at Leo. He was looking intently at me and I turned my gaze back to the notepad. The blue lines on the yellow paper seemed to waver and shift before my eyes. I spoke to the paper, choosing my words carefully and speaking distinctly. "If…if Josh doesn't make it…" I finally looked up in Leo's eyes, seeing the disbelief in there. "If Josh doesn't make it, someone's going to have to write a eulogy."

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Sigh. Poor Toby. Poor josh. I actually feel sorrier for Toby because I can never get him EXACTLY in character. It's annoying. His character always seems to let part of itself be captured, and never its entirety. Poor writer who has to actually put Toby in character and make up lines for him. I'm using lines from someone else, and I STILL can't get him in character. V. annoying.

Happy Holidays!!!!

Alasse