SINS OF THE FATHER

RATED R

FIRST PART OF THE 'HISTORY REPEATS' SERIES

SAM/DONNA ROMANCE

SPOILERS FOR 'SOMEONE'S GOING TO EMERGENCY, SOMEONE'S GOING TO JAIL'

I decided to make Hoynes more human for the purposes of this story. If you have a problem with that, or anything else I've written, please feel free to let me know.

Also, I can't quite remember what his wife's name was but I think it started with an S so I made it Susanna because I remember reading it as that in some other fic somewhere along the line.

Sam was trying to wrap his head around the fact that Vice President Hoynes was one of the hostages in the embassy. He'd never really liked the guy, to be honest, but they had needed him on the Ticket to win the South and he was the Vice President so he had always kept his views more or less to himself. Josh, Toby, CJ, and Leo knew how he felt about the Vice President, just like Sam knew how they felt about the Texan as well. The truth was that no one on the President's staff liked Hoynes all that much. And none of them trusted him at all.

However, neither the fact that Sam didn't like Hoynes or that Sam didn't trust Hoynes mattered at the moment because things like likeability and trust didn't mean a thing when it came to matters of life and death, which was exactly the type of situation that Sam was dealing with at that exact moment. If anything his consistent dislike for the Vice President made the entire situation more difficult for Sam to deal with because it was not looking good. The intel they were getting was sketchy at best, and, while they knew there had been no explosions or gunfire heard inside the embassy, that didn't mean that the hostages were still alive. The very lack of intelligence that was coming in was alarming, as was the fact that the terrorists hadn't made any moves to indicate what their goal was—beyond the usual goal of terrorists which is to promote terror.

The pathology of terrorists was something that Sam had studied extensively and he knew more than anyone else on the Senior Staff on what they could expect to come at them, so he had been sent to talk to the Joint Chiefs and find out where the US stood as far as options went. Leo was trying to get more information and the President was on the phone with the Israeli Prime Minister trying to find out if he knew anything that could help. Toby was dealing with the Press Corps, a task he loathed, but he was the only one qualified and the only one without a specific skill set to use to contribute with things at the stage that they were currently at. The task of damage control and worst-case-scenario planning had fallen to Josh, which left Sam concerned for his friend.

Josh and Hoynes didn't get along, that much Sam knew, but they had worked together for a long time and there was a sort of bond between the two men, one that hadn't been broken by Josh abandoning Hoynes to work for the opposition, and Sam was afraid that Josh would make it personal. Some people were energized when things got personal. Sam was at his best when he was being attacked—at least, after the initial fury wore off and he was just pissed off but in full control of his faculties. CJ was amazing when her emotions took over as long as she didn't reach a certain point, and if she did reach that point she was usually good at pulling herself back to where she was at her fighting best. Toby and Josh, however, tended to let other things slide when attacks became personal to them and the last thing they could allow was to let things slide at that moment.

Despite the fact that he knew what he was talking about Sam felt uncomfortable around the Joint Chiefs. The only comfort he got was the knowledge that the President, who was the boss of the Joint Chiefs, had admitted that meeting with them always made him feel like he was back at his father's dinner table. Jed Bartlet was a man that Sam looked up to, aspired to be, and it made Sam feel a lot better knowing that there were some things that even the great President Bartlet got nervous doing.

Sam had never been in the situation room before. Toby and CJ were the ones to take briefings on weapons and whatnot when preparing to tell the public what had happened, relaying the information to Sam after the fact because he had other things to take care of while Toby and CJ were briefed and it wasn't like time was a luxury that any of them could afford in situations that required both Situation Room briefings and public address'. He'd always assumed that it looked like a regular conference room, fully secure but overall unappealing to the eye. It probably had been, at one time. The White House reinvented itself with each presidency, each administration running itself differently from the last, and, presumably, decorating the building differently. Not that the Situation Room was all that decorated. It was more like a high-tech haven that Sam was sure would be like a wet dream to people who could do more than work Word and computer solitaire on their laptops.

"This isn't a protest," Army two-star General Earl Weisseman said, repeating the point he had made half an hour earlier and had continued to utter whenever he didn't like the things that other people were saying. Sam really wanted to tell him to shut up, but he knew that wouldn't do any good so he kept his mouth shut and tried to block the General out until he started saying something other than 'this isn't a protest'.

"We don't know what it is, Earl, that's the problem," Nancy McNally said firmly as she had every other time Weisseman had intoned his repetitive contribution to the meeting. "We have no intel on this. No group is staking claim. No demands have been made. We don't even know if anyone is still alive in the embassy. We can't rule anything out until we have some information."

"We can probably rule out that they want to invite us to a tea party," Marine three-star General James Grace commented. The majority of the room rolled their eyes and groaned.

"Fine, but ruling out the tea party idea doesn't get us any closer to developing a counterattack," one of the civilian advisors whose name Sam hadn't caught pointed out.

The room was silent for a moment before Sam spoke up. "There can't be a counterattack. You don't attack during a hostage situation. You negotiate, you find a peaceful solution, but you don't engage until you absolutely have to. We can't make the first move here. We look like we're going to attack and they set off the bombs. They're not afraid to die. They're suicide bombers. They think this is what they were born to do, what their god wants them to do," Sam said. "We make a move and they take out the hostages, themselves, and anyone else they can because that is what they do. I'm not taking a plan of attack to the President and anyone with half a brain-cell won't either until we've exhausted every other avenue." It was rare that he found himself getting so forceful—the last time he had felt the need to bash some heads in was the whole thing with Ainsley Hayes and the dead flowers that Joyce and Brookline sent her; they had had crossed the line and deserved the full force of Sam Seaborn's anger—but he felt the situation warranted it and he didn't plan on having any regrets.

Fitzwallace and Nancy were the only two in the room who had spent any time with Hoynes—and, if he was perfectly honest with himself Sam had been thinking of the hostage situation in terms of getting the Vice President back alive more than anything else—and no one in the room liked the Texan, his politics too wavering on defence and his stance on the military too hands off for the tastes of the men and women who had pledged their lives to national defence and to the armed forces. Sam knew that everyone in the room was a professional and that none of them wanted John Hoynes dead, but he doubted any of them would be so casual if anyone other than the Vice President was in the situation—it was almost enough to make Sam wish that they hadn't shared that detail with the Joint Chiefs. Knowing individuals who were in the situation only made the process more difficult, and that was the last thing that they needed.

"Sam's right," Fitzwallace said. "Emotional as his response is, he's right." Sam but back a scowl at Fitzwallace's comment. He'd been accused of being too idealistic and emotional many times before but never on the job and never when he was trying to keep the world from falling apart at the seams.

"So we have nothing to do because we have to be reactionary or we'll sign the death warrants of over one hundred and twenty people," Nancy said somewhat reluctantly. Sam knew that she was proactive by nature and he was sure that the entire situation was driving her more than a little crazy. He could sympathize with her on that front. Doing nothing was making him crazy, too.

John Hoynes was not a man who was easily scared. He knew he wasn't impervious—if anything he was even more aware of his own fragile mortality since becoming the Vice President of the United States—but he had the utmost faith in his Secret Service detail and he was fairly competent at keeping himself under control so as not to exacerbate the situation.

There were one hundred and twenty three innocent people in the room—he was pretty sure that they weren't all innocent, but they were innocent in as so much as they didn't have bombs strapped to their chests. Hoynes knew this because he had counted. Twice. He didn't know the names of anyone other than his Chief of Staff, his assistant, and his Secret Service detail, and while part of him wished he knew details about the other hundred and thirteen people in the room, Hoynes knew that it was better that he didn't.

He wasn't particularly emotionally attached to his Secret Service detail, but if any of them were killed he knew he would mourn. His Chief of Staff annoyed him, but he would miss him if anything happened to him. He loved his assistant and he knew he would be lost without her, but considering the fact that she was sitting two inches to his left, he doubted that she would perish without him going along with her, so he refused to think about what it would be like to watch her die and then have to go on with his life.

As he glanced around the room, careful not to move too quickly lest the terrorists find something objectionable in his motions and get trigger-happy, Hoynes tried to figure out what their cause was.

He had always been good with languages and when the first Gulf War broke out he began learning different Middle-Eastern dialects because he wanted to be President and had always been a man who played to his strengths. Greeting dignitaries in their native tongue sometimes went a long way to showing respect and earning a small amount of trust in the first few seconds of a meeting when first impressions were made. Now, though, he was using his talent to gather information, even though he wasn't sure what, if anything, he could do with it once he had it. He knew enough of their language to get the gist of the clipped conversations the ten men he could see and hear were having.

And for the first time in his life, John Hoynes wished he was wrong about something.

It seemed to Donna that she was the only assistant who had been able to make a speedy return to the White House, though she knew that, logically, she wasn't the only one. No one would be able to tell, however, by the amount of work she was doing.

It had started off normally.

She pulled files and organized the interns, set up multiple phone lines in the Roosevelt Room, made sure that the guards sent up the food she had ordered as soon as it arrived, got interns to deliver the pizzas and sodas, and then she made a few calls to cancel the next day's appointments because she knew that the situation would not end well and that it would not end quickly so the only thing left was for everyone to be ready to do damage control once it did end.

She made sure that the Vice President's wife was taken care of, a task that was more because she had gotten to know Susanna Hoynes on the campaign trail and wanted to make sure she was alright and kept up to date and not so much because it was her job, and she made all the phone calls that Josh wanted her to make.

She rounded up the Communications staff since Cathy and Ginger had gotten stuck in traffic and Bonnie was had her hands full with Toby's schedule and a very confused speechwriting staff, most of whom didn't have clearance to know what was happening.

She checked with Charlie and Mrs. Landingham to see if there was anything that the President needed and she found the file that Margaret had 'hidden' from Leo—in the filing cabinet under it's proper heading in the Moss filing system that had become the White House filing system not long after the assistant pool realized how efficient it was—and delivered it to the Chief of Staff in the Oval Office.

She pretended not to notice that she had noticed that Sam wasn't in the room and she politely asked if there was anything she could do since they were so short staffed at the moment and Josh had already told her what was going on and she wanted to help however she could. The President smiled warmly at her and said that he would call if he needed anything but that, for the moment, the pizza was appreciated, especially since his youngest daughter seemed to be channelling her mother of late when it came to his dietary habits. Leo thanked her for the file and asked her to help Toby out because he was afraid that he would be too much for Carol to handle alone with everything else she had on her plate. Donna briefly wondered if anyone ever thought that something was too much for her to handle with everything else she had on her proverbial plate, but she doubted that anyone did because no one ever sent in reinforcements for her when dealing with Josh—she had never needed them and doubted she ever would—and the only time things were taken off her To-Do list were when Josh declared that she could delegate to the staff because there were other things he needed her focused on.

She found Toby as he was leaving the Press Room. He was muttering something about how all reporters were idiots and how he wanted to blow up the press room. It occurred to Donna that she hadn't turned on the TVs in Operations and that the rest of the screens she had passed had been dark as well, something that she wasn't sure she had ever been witness to before since 'moving in' to the White House.

"Where the hell is everybody?" Toby demanded as Donna fell into step beside him. She could see that he was holding it together by a very fine thread and she really didn't want to witness Toby Ziegler losing control. She had seen it only twice before, after his divorce papers came and the night he had told her that Josh had been shot, and she was terrified that her 'big brother' would become something similar to that broken shell of a man once again.

Donna quickly outlined where the people she knew of were and assured him that Ginger and Cathy would arrive shortly—she wasn't sure if that was the truth but it seemed to calm Toby down slightly. "Do you need anything? Leo wanted me to make sure you're covered," Donna said, glad that Toby had never and would never get angry at her. It seemed that he was physically incapable of doing so, and, while it was strange, given Toby's general disposition, Donna wasn't about to complain.

"I need someone to start working on the Statements," Toby said, the capitol 'S' clear in his voice. The two press releases that were drafted at the beginning of every crisis. Good news, bad news reports, Josh had called them once. CJ called them Answer A and Answer B. Donna could already see the general outline for both.

It is with great joy and relief that I announce that…

It is with a heavy heart that I must report…

"I'll track down Sam," Donna offered.

"No, he's with the Joint Chiefs working on strategy," Toby said, stopping and leaning against the wall, his eyes closed. Donna wondered why Sam was doing that instead of Leo or Josh, but it seemed that it was a perfectly logical thing to Toby so she didn't question it. Toby sighed heavily. "I'll write them," he said reluctantly. "Just… try to get as much information as you can. The more I have to work with the better."

Donna nodded and began to head off towards Operations again but something made her stop and turn around. "Toby?"

"Yeah?" the Communications Director said, his eyes meeting hers.

"Which one do you think you're going to need?" Donna asked softly.

Toby's sigh was answer enough.

It's been a while since I updated this and, honestly, I have no excuse other than the fact that I didn't want to post this chapter until I knew how to at least start the next one.

Manic Penguin