Thanks as always to my betas, HarmonyLover and chai4anne...

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"Oh yes, Gretchen. I am a firm believer in ethanol as a clean, renewable energy source, and as I pledged to the people of Iowa and to the United States earlier today at the Corn Growers' Expo, when I'm President, my administration will strongly support further investments in ethanol production." Vice President Russell smiled at the middle-aged woman at the town hall who had just asked him what had to have been at least the fifteenth quesion that day about ethanol subsidies.

He sounded sincere. Donna might even have allowed herself to think he was sincere, except that on the bus on the way to the town hall, he'd commented to her that he wasn't a fan of ethanol and had taken the pledge solely for political purposes. He'd seemed to think that would make her think more highly of him, but it had actually done the opposite. Donna didn't think ethanol made much environmental or economic sense, but she could respect someone who had an honest difference of opinion. But it was hard to find a reason to respect blatant pandering.

Except that he was doing what he had to do to win the election, she reminded herself. Will would have flipped out if the Vice President had shown any reluctance to take the pledge. And Donna would have, too. That was her job, to help him win at all costs. She was no longer the naïve, dewy-eyed idealist who'd hopped in her rickety old car to drive from Wisconsin to New Hampshire, cooking up a crazy, half-baked plan to land a job working – most likely, she knew, for no pay – for a minor presidential candidate who had inspired her. That girl had stayed an assistant, unable to move up the career ladder. Now she'd become a hard-edged political operative, and she was proud of it. Her job was to make Bob Russell succeed, because if he succeeded, she succeeded too. That was how Washington worked. If you didn't look out for yourself and put your own interests first, you could be assured that no one else was going to do it for you. It was high time she finally started playing the game. In fact, it was a damn good thing she'd started when she did; otherwise, she could almost guarantee she'd be a part of the exercise in futility that was the Matt Santos campaign. She'd probably have been on that plane and would have fallen out of the sky a few hours ago. And been able to be with Josh, and hold his hand in what might have been the last moments of their lives…

Stop! She screamed at herself. How did every train of thought manage to come back to Josh, anyway? Even from a plane wreck in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa, he was able to make her second-guess her new set of priorities. Damn him. If she'd been on that plane and had died, she'd be an also-dead, she reminded herself firmly. "Also dead: Diane Moss." She tried to summon indignation at that thought, and ignore her strong sentiment that if Josh were among the dead, it wouldn't matter in the least what some fact-checking challenged reporter wrote about her.

Somehow these thoughts led to a memory flashing, uninvited, through her mind.

"There was nothing you could have done."

"It's stupid. I don't even know why…"

"It's not stupid. You met them. They got to you."

"I need to learn how to not be so…how to keep things at arm's length."

"I hope not."

She'd never forgotten that night, when she'd broken down after learning that Donovan had committed suicide after being taken off the pardon list. At the time, she'd found Josh's words incredibly touching. She'd actually thought it was one of the sweetest things he'd ever said to her – partly, she had to admit, because he'd followed it by slipping an arm around her shoulders as they'd walked to the motorcade.

Later, after she'd quit her job, she'd found herself putting a new slant on that moment. Of course he hoped you'd stay like that. Stay as someone who would crumble when faced with the tough decisions people with power in DC have to make. Someone who would therefore decide she was perfectly happy to keep answering phones for the rest of her life.

Now, thinking about it, she just felt sad. The joke was on Josh; she had learned how to keep things at arm's length. She'd gotten very good at it; she'd certainly proven that today. Josh had been in a plane crash, and she was going on like nothing had happened. She should be pleased with herself, she supposed, but she realized she wasn't. She didn't think that was something she wanted to be good at. And all of a sudden, she wasn't sure she liked the person she was turning into.

And oddly enough, at the moment, Arnold Vinick was triggering some second-guessing on Donna's part as well. From her position backstage, she could see a television screen tuned to CNN. Much to the Vice President's chagrin, the network wasn't carrying the town hall live. They were still on continuous coverage of the Santos plane, which had now been missing for nearly five hours. Donna had been trying hard to block out the doctors who were being put on the air to give their best guesses as to how long the plane's occupants could remain out in the elements before life-threatening hypothermia set in – that was, of course, assuming they'd survived the initial crash. Hearing that speculation was a too-stark reminder that the best thing she could hope for was that Josh was in some field in Iowa in the middle of a snowstorm, possibly injured, certainly terrified, his body temperature dropping by the minute.

But something else on the screen had caught her eye. A crawler at the bottom of the screen noted what would under normal circumstances have been the political story of the day: Senator Vinick had rocked the Corn Growers' Expo by going onstage and announcing his opposition to ethanol subsidies.

You have a year to talk me out of voting for him, Donna remembered herself saying about Vinick. She hadn't been kidding. She disagreed with the man on a lot of issues, but not as drastically as she disagreed with most other Republicans; Vinick was indeed a moderate. And he was smart, and he seemed to have integrity. He'd resisted the temptation to use Zoey Bartlet's birthday party to take a cheap shot at the President, and now he'd endangered his own chances in Iowa in order to say what he really thought about ethanol. She glanced back at the Vice President, who had wrapped up the town hall and was now working the rope line. The smile on his face was phony; she knew that as soon as they got on the bus, he'd gripe about all the questions that had annoyed him. She found herself wondering, and not for the first time, what the man she was working for actually believed in – or if he believed in anything at all, other than accumulating power for himself.

Not that she wanted Vinick to win. She didn't want any Republican to win. If Congress actually gave President Vinick the massive tax cuts and balanced budget he was campaigning on, it would unavoidably mean draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and countless other social programs. But between Vinick and Russell? Could Russell really be counted on to take any political risks to fight for the programs and policies that mattered most to Democrats? Donna doubted it. And when it came to intellect, Vinick blew Russell out of the water, that much was undeniable.

But there was no way that Vinick was going to win the Republican nomination. Whatever else Donna could say about Josh, he had a first-class political mind, and he'd explained it to her after Vinick had announced his candidacy: Vinick was too moderate. He wouldn't be able to run away from his long anti-ethanol record, and he'd be wiped out in Iowa. More significantly, his pro-choice position would be a deal-breaker for Republican primary voters. Josh's reasoning had made perfect sense. The only thing that made Donna nervous was that when he'd said it, he'd had that tone of voice that indicated he was trying to convince himself of something he didn't quite believe.

"Ugh. I will be so glad when this damn caucus is over and I can stop talking to hick farmers about corn," the Vice President complained, flanked by Donna and Will as he strode toward the waiting bus after finishing with the rope line.

"Did you hear Arnold Vinick spoke out against ethanol at the Expo?" Donna asked.

Russell stopped walking for a moment. "He did?" Donna nodded, and Russell shook his head. "No kidding. Wow. What an idiot."

"You don't think it's bold and courageous?" Donna eyed him challengingly.

The Vice President laughed. "I don't care what kind of spin you want to put on it, it's political suicide. Not that I'm complaining. If Vinick self-destructs in the primary, it means we don't have to run against him in the general." He turned to Will. "So where to now?"

"Back to Cedar Rapids. We're staying a second night at our hotel there and heading out first thing tomorrow for another town hall."

"Good. Hopefully by then they'll have found that damn plane, and the media can stop obsessing about Matt Santos and start talking about the real presidential candidates, huh?" Russell nodded at Will, who nodded back as they boarded the bus.

Donna found herself visually shooting daggers at the Vice President as she followed him onto the bus.

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Josh cupped his hands over his face and blew into them, trying to warm his painfully cold cheeks and nose as he huddled close to Matt underneath the makeshift shelter they'd constructed out of branches and leaves. With Matt only having the use of his left hand and Josh unable to stand up, the shelter wasn't likely to be featured in any Boy Scout manuals, but it was keeping at least some of the falling snow off of them.

They'd quickly concluded that their drenched clothes were only serving to make them even colder, so they'd changed out of them and instead had wrapped themselves tightly in their still-serviceable coats, along with the emergency blankets they'd brought with them. Overall, it was a much more intimate scenario than Josh would normally feel comfortable sharing with another man, but staying warm was the priority. They didn't have the luxury of squeamishness.

They'd made a valiant effort to build a fire, but even with the survival training Matt had received in the Marines, the heavy snow and wet wood had made it impossible. They'd gone through about half of the matches they'd brought, and then decided to conserve the rest and try again if the weather cleared.

Josh shivered. It seemed to be getting colder with each passing minute. And it was only going to get worse. He didn't know what time it was; he had his BlackBerry with him, but the battery had gone dead about an hour after they'd left the plane. But even with the cloud cover, he could see the sky getting darker. The sun would be going down soon.

"Well, look at it this way," Matt commented, his voice shaking slightly from the cold. "At least this gets me out of having to give the ethanol speech."

"Yeah, quite an elaborate ruse you constructed there," Josh chuckled, grateful for the distraction. They sat quietly for a moment, and then Josh spoke again. "So were you really going to do it? Get up there and diss ethanol right before the Iowa caucus?"

"I have no idea what I was going to do. I was going back and forth about every five minutes." Matt paused. "Lot of speculation that Vinick might decide to hold the line against ethanol in his speech."

"If I were his campaign manager, that's what I'd advise him to do," Josh responded.

Matt gaped slightly at him. "So the high road's okay for Arnold Vinick, but not for me?"

"You guys are in different situations. There's no clear Republican front-runner yet. And besides, Vinick has such a long anti-ethanol record that he couldn't have run away from it convincingly anyway. So he'll get clobbered in Iowa, which was going to happen regardless – forget ethanol, his pro-choice position alone is enough to kill him here – but the national press will fawn over how bold and straight-talking he is."

"They'll be right."

"As for you, you're running against a sitting Vice President and a former Vice President," Josh continued. "You have exactly two chances to stage an upset: Iowa and New Hampshire. You can't afford to…" Josh paused as some of the old intensity crept into his voice, and then sighed. "Anyway, not that it matters now."

"Why did you want me to run, Josh?" Matt asked quietly after a moment.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I can't figure it out. You knew what I thought of all this political gamesmanship. You knew I was so sick of it I was ready to quit Congress and get out of the business altogether. So when you asked me to run, I figured that must be what you wanted – someone who didn't want to play the game, who would be himself and tell people what he really believed, even if it wasn't necessarily good politics."

"It is what I want," Josh insisted.

"Then how come every time I try to be something other than a cardboard cutout of a candidate, we end up yelling at each other?"

Josh sighed. "Because I also want you to get elected, congressman. This isn't a vanity exercise for me; it's not a let's-raise-some-important-issues-and-then-go-home campaign. It's about who's going to be sitting in the Oval Office once Jed Bartlet's term is over. And I don't know…" he paused for a moment. "I don't know how to run the kind of totally pure, ideals-driven campaign you want, one that refuses even the smallest of compromises, and also, you know, wins. I don't know if it's even possible. And I don't want Bob Russell or, worse, a Republican to be our next President because we insisted on going to the mat for some 8-year-old quote about the Mayflower."

"I just want to make sure that by the time this campaign is over, people can still tell the difference between me and Bob Russell. By some means other than the fact that I have a deeper tan and he wears cowboy boots."

"I don't think you need to worry about that," Josh commented with a smirk. He marveled at the fact that they were stranded in woods in the middle of a snowstorm, hypothermia undoubtedly setting in, and still arguing about politics. But it was probably a good thing; the animated conversation seemed to be getting his blood flowing a little bit, and he didn't feel quite as cold.

They sat in silence for a minute. "So why'd you say yes?" Josh asked. "What made you go from being dead set on moving back to Texas to deciding to run for President?"

"Not as good at sustaining cynicism as I thought I was?" Matt offered with a shrug.

"I'm not actually sure what made you so cynical in the first place," Josh commented. "I mean, yeah, God knows the system can be disgusting sometimes. Especially on your end of Pennsylvania Avenue," he added with a sideways glance at Matt.

"Hey, the White House hasn't exactly been above reproach either."

"Jed Bartlet is the best President this country has had in decades," Josh responded defensively.

"I don't disagree." Matt paused for a moment. "In fact, I think that was part of the problem."

"What do you mean?" Josh glanced quizzically at him.

"Well, before, when it was a Republican in power, I could tell myself that was the problem. If we could only get someone good in…not just a Democrat, but a principled Democrat, someone smart, who shares my liberal values…everything would be different. And then we did get a President like that, and…nothing changed."

"I wouldn't say 'nothing,'" Josh argued.

"Not enough changed. Not nearly enough."

"Only so much he can do with a Republican Congress. He was elected President, not dictator."

"Yeah, but Bob Russell for Vice President? I mean, really? There was a reason the Speaker put Bingo Bob on that idiotic list, you know, and it wasn't because it would be good for Democrats. Or for the country."

"The Vice President has to be confirmed by Congress," Josh pointed out in reflexive defense of the President, though privately he agreed with Matt on that point. "The Speaker made it clear they weren't going to confirm the President's first choice."

"…who I assume was Berryhill. Impeccable credentials, unquestionably qualified…"

"Which was exactly why the Republicans wouldn't let the President have him."

"They were bluffing."

"The President didn't think so. Neither did the House Minority Leader."

"You really think they'd have blocked a nominee like that, for what would have been transparently political purposes? At a time when the importance of the vice presidency was more obvious to the American people than since Kennedy was shot? It would have blown up in their faces. They'd have looked like partisan hacks. Worse: unpatriotic partisan hacks."

Josh didn't answer right away. He didn't have a good answer; he knew Matt was right. Josh had been against caving on the vice presidential pick from the start, but he'd seemed to be the only one who felt that way. "It was a hard time for him," he said finally. "Zoey had just been kidnapped…"

"I know. I know," Matt said softly. "I'm a father; I can't begin to imagine what he went through." He was quiet for a moment. "But it wasn't just the President. It seemed like all of you guys kind of lost the will to fight. Leo McGarry especially. Everyone in the West Wing, really, except for you."

Josh looked up in surprise.

Matt continued. "I know you got burned pretty badly by the Carrick incident, Josh, but I have to say I respected the hell out of you for what you did."

"You did?" Josh stared at him, puzzled. "I figured that was probably the kind of hardball politicking you despise."

"No, using our men and women in the military as hostages, holding up their promotions until you get a useless piece of pork for your state – that's the kind of hardball politicking I despise. It was disgraceful what Carrick was doing. His constituents deserved to know about it."

"The Democrats didn't deserve to lose a seat in the Senate, I think was the issue."

"Please. Everyone knew Carrick was already on his way out. He was just looking for an excuse."

"And I gave him one."

"And if you hadn't, he would have found some other excuse."

Josh sighed. "That's not how Leo McGarry saw it."

"I know it wasn't."

They sat quietly for a few moments, and then Matt spoke again. "This isn't a vanity exercise for me, either, Josh. I know what I said in New Hampshire, and I admit I wasn't exactly feeling optimistic about our chances when I said it, but I want you to know I did get in this to win. I mean, you can ask Helen; I think I freaked her out a little back in Houston when I started telling her about your nine-point plan."

"And I don't want to turn you into Bob Russell," Josh answered. "Believe me on that. If I wanted Bingo Bob as President, I'd be running his campaign."

Matt didn't respond. Josh glanced upward at the rapidly darkening sky. It was only going to be getting colder, and the dark would make it infinitely harder for rescuers to find them. He wondered how Ronna and the others were doing. The plane would provide them with at least some insulation and shelter from the storm, but if no one found them and Ronna didn't get medical treatment soon…

He shivered, filled with a new sense of fear.