Hi, so here is the sequel to Perhaps Love! I am so excited to get this out and finish Season 5-7.

So...the usual. This will not be episode specific, certain episodes will be skipped. Dialogue will not be the same. If that's something you look for in a story then please don't start because you won't get it here.

Also in my West Wing Universe Sam doesn't leave and Ainsley joins full time. Will is in the story...so far...Mandy is not and never will be. Andy had Toby's babies via embryo's not by sex. Also Jake is bisexual.

Pairings are CJ/Toby (eventually) Josh/Donna, Sam/Ainsley, Jed/Abby.

Disclaimer-Nothing but Jacob is mine.

It is advised that you read Perhaps Love before you read this.

And this is 28 chapters long.

And there will always be swearing in this story. If this offends you then please don't read.

Also I do not do Private Messaging anymore, any questions stick them in a review and I will get back to you next chapter note.

And look...I don't like Amy. I don't like her. Nothing against the actress but as a feminist, pro choice woman (and damn proud of it) she was so annoying. In Season 5 I skip her scenes because she doesn't get it. No disrespect to anyone who likes her but she was wrong for Josh and wrong for the show. Sorry, not sorry. That's just my opinion, you are of course completely entitled to yours.

Also I know that we are heading towards the end of Season 5 and into Israel/Gaza. I ask that you please keep your comments respectful as I will try and be respectful also. That story takes place in the West Wing Universe and has no reflection on today's life.

I wrote this chapter while on a Yellowstone/1883/1923 Binge. Some of the quotes in italic are from that show in case you wonder-none of it is mine though some of the words have changed and adapted. Anything in italics is in Jake's first point of view.

Future Perfect

Chapter 13-Your Kind, My Kind, Humankind.

First of Season 6. Toby and CJ are trying to get to Germany to be with their son who has been airlifted there, Josh goes to be with Donna. Meanwhile it's Sam and Ainsley trying to keep the West Wing running as huge cracks appear in the usually rock solid relationship that is Leo and the President.

I remember the first time that I saw it, tried to find words to describe it. But I couldn't. Nothing had prepared me. No books, no teachers. Not even my parents, I had heard a thousand stories…but none could describe this place. It must be witnessed to be understood. And yet, I've seen it. And I understand it even less than when I first cast eyes on this place.

To know it you must walk it, bleed until it's dark, drown in it's rivers. Then it's name becomes clear. Gaza. Gaza is hell and there are demons everywhere. But if this is hell then I must be here for a reason. And that is because I am already dead.

I'd know death since I was a child. It's everywhere. But it had never touched me like it had touched me today. It had never placed it's finger on my heart, it's brand on my soul. Today my eyes died, my innocence died, ironic that it took this long really. I can now see the world through my mother and father's eyes in a way that a shooting never could. Yes. Freedom has fangs. And it sunk them in me.

Choices have claws. And they had dragged me into pieces.

And bombs…bombs have shrapnel and they have obliterated my world to pieces the same way that they have obliterated…well…you know.

Don't you?

She is aware that her hands are shaking, aware that they are blurred in front of her. Toby is doing a better job than she is of remaining calm. CJ seems to think that he is okay but she's an expert in Zeilger men by this point and so she knows that Toby is far from okay. Even without the added hell that is their son out there she knows Toby also had Andy. She knows that Fitzwallace's death, Donna and Jake in hospital and all the rest that comes with it has taken it's toll. His hands are on his knees and he's reading something on his laptop but he's not spoken a word and twice she's seen him mutter something under his breathe. She doesn't understand it but she thinks from the sharp look that Josh shoots him that it's something in Yiddish. Toby, the man who abhors prayer, who got beat up for refusing to say it in school is praying and Josh more than once nods along his eyes unfocused.

When they land they are prepared for battle but as she turns her attention back to her son and his last…no…not his last…his most recent email she finds that she is reading and re-reading the bits, the good, the bad and the ugly that is so much so the world in Gaza, the Middle East and the outside world they can't control.

After the shit show that was Zoe she remembers Leo coming into the office. He had been half dead on his feet she could see it and he had told her that the world outside they couldn't control, not with bombs, not with guns, not with wars, not even with love. All they had was the next day and hopefully the one after that. It had been oddly insightful for Leo and CJ had not been able to go back to him the next day when she felt sick to her stomach and ask him just why they had assassinated someone and not gone through with a trial.

She had not had the fortitude to look her President in the eye and say that she agreed with the members of the press that called him a hypocrite. That it was a label that had stuck to them all.

Toby had known though. Toby had understood. Toby had always understood when it came to stuff like this. When it came to her.

Right now they were leaving the West Wing in a mess she knew. Josh had come with them which left a power vacuum she was not sure the President even noticed. Kate Harper was an anomaly that if the look on Leo's face was anything to go by was going to get a sharp dose of reality soon. CJ would not dare question the sanity of Nancy—well—not unless you had to consider the Qumar debacle but the point of it was that Kate Harper was going to get under a lot of people's skin and fast. CJ right now didn't care. But someone soon was going to.

She had left Carole to brief the press, left her to find someone who could brief the press anyhow, if worse came to worse Annabeth Scott was still floating around looking for a job and she could damn well dress the part better than CJ. Ainsley was now doing Josh's job as well as her own and Sam was now…everywhere. She felt like she was going to be sick just thinking about it but then again she felt like she was going to be sick all the time now, she was flying for the first time in a long time coach and quite frankly it was not getting her to her son fast enough.

Andy's message had not said much. Jake's emails had not even hinted that something like this was coming. Intelligence had not hinted that something like this was coming and the President one way or the other was going soon to be goaded into something that would have world wide consequences…that was if the Israeli's did not beat him too it.

She turned back to the email. It was messy and written in a hurry but she didn't see the worlds. She had not heard her son's internal monologue but she knew that he'd had one.

Your brain's response to trauma Josh had told her.

And he would know.

The numbing shock of war is behind me now.

Pain has taken it's place. Hurts to move, hurts to breathe, the back of my head throbs. I lost the world through the hazy lens of broken bone and body and it somehow seems to make it clearer.

What is death anyway? What is this thing that all humans and animals regardless of age, race, creed, religion, gender, class share? What is the difference between me the seventeen year old boy dying on the dusty road of Gaza and Simon Donavon dying on the dirty floor of a seven eleven? What's the difference between me and Harrison's father dying in a flat spin heading out to sea? What's the difference between my death, hopefully quick and the long slow one that my grandfather is going through where mind rots quicker than the body.

Even stars die eventually. This one called Earth will die soon enough. And we don't know anything about it.

I asked my father once about dying. He pushed it off as a joke and then when I was older tried to explain it. I didn't know then that it was like this, that death could come for you even here, fathers here in Israel and Gaza tell their children about death before they can even walk, they don't have a choice, death is all around them doesn't matter which side your on it's a fact of life, I have been here for three days trailing Donna and her friend and I have seen enough and heard enough to know that to live here has a degree of risk that nobody can ever understand.

I saw it in the face of that mother who woke up to get her children breakfast and found a bomb in her kitchen. To the young people not much older than me who know in this era of proclaimed peace they could die at any moment. I can see it in the face of the martyr Colin told me about, the one with two small children who thinks that her cause is more important than her life.

I don't understand this place, I don't understand why I am here. But I am and now I am dying. I am not the same person I was when I got on that plane that day excited and thinking that this is school project, I didn't know what was going on then.

To be fair I don't know what is going on now. I just know that things are not the same as they were before.

The world doesn't care that if you die, it won't listen to your screams, if you bleed then the hungry ground will drink it, doesn't matter if it happens here in the dusty road or on a sidewalk in America. It's been that way for centuries, through World Wars and Kings and Queens and battles that have lasted a hundred years and taken out a generation of men. Through rebellions and fallen dynasties and countries being founded and created and ended. Monarchies falling and their countries with them.

The world doesn't care about me. I didn't understand that before today. I didn't understand that before I came here. I am nothing in the grand scheme of things. I Jake Cregg-Zegiler are nothing in the grand scheme of the world. I am not even a tiny pin prick.

I did not understand that before.

I understand that now.

When they got there Toby did the talking and when he couldn't Andy stepped in and did the talking ever the calm congresswoman though her face and hair were still streaked with the aftermath. Someone had found her scrubs which was good because if CJ had seen her wearing her baby's blood then she was not sure she was going to be able to stand and so Toby found her hand and he gripped it and she could feel the strength that he was putting on her and she knew that it was because without her his knees would not stand up. She closed her eyes at the description of Donna's injuries and she felt Josh tremble. Toby reached out and gripped his shoulder as his eyes got wider and wider. Donna the eternal optimistic sweetheart who had come here trying to prove her worth to the President, to Josh. Donna who had once told CJ that before she had gone on Air Force One she had never been on an international flight before. Donna who charmed everyone even the grumpiest of men because she was simply too good to exist.

And then they started on her baby. Her baby.

"Jake has a shattered kneecap which we've gone in and repaired. I don't know if your son was a football player but he's not gonna have a career after this if he is, his right arm was dislocated in several places and then had a compound fracture so were in working on that right now. The good news is that before he went under he had good brain function. According to Congresswoman Wyatt he opened his eyes mid flight which is always good. He's young, he's strong, he's going to need a hell of a lot of PT. But I am optimistic about Jake."

Breathe in Claudia Jean.

Breathe in, breathe out.

"When they are both out of surgery could you put them in the same room?" Josh said suddenly his voice coming a long way off. Everyone turned to stare at him and he gave a little childlike shrug.

"I think it would cheer Donna up to see him and it means we are not running from room to room"

Toby said something that CJ couldn't hear.

"Bathroom?" she asked and then she walked off in the direction that she was pointed to.

She made it to the sink before she threw up. Andy slipped in behind her and held her hair back and then she helped CJ sit down before she collapsed.

"I am so sorry" Andy said her voice wet. "I didn't…CJ if I'd have thought this was going to happen—" she trailed off her voice broken but CJ didn't care. She let herself rest her head on Toby's ex wife's shoulder and the two mothers sat there in the bathroom of the US Military Hospital in Germany and they cried.

Soon they would go and be game face ready.

But that was not right now.

Right now there was no shame in admitting that they both needed a moment.

Germany. Quite a round trip I am making here isn't it? Breaking the fourth wall in two different continents, I had never been to Europe before. I had wanted to go but I didn't do the overseas trips. Not unless I had to. I had wanted to go to Helsinki but there had been a general consensus that I might have plunged the world into a new nuclear winter.

Granted I might have. I had a lot of questions for the ex KGB boss head of the Russian state.

Like seriously…were the rumours true about their toilet paper?

Oh God, this must be the drugs. I can barely see or feel anything. Andy is crying and I am on a plane heading away from that death and destruction to my parents who I imagine will cry in that contradictory way that parents do.

I hope not though. I don't think I would be able to stand it if I woke up to see my parents crying. They are arguably the strongest people in the world. They don't cry.

And then I think of Zoe, of the President and Mrs B keeping it together and then I want to go to sleep again. Everything hurts. I don't even know what happened.

I think I know what happened

And Harrison…oh my God Harrison. I love him, I really do think I love him. I know your not supposed to say that about your high school sweetheart unless you're in some backwoods town on an MTV special but I do love him. I love him so much I don't know what to do with it or where to put it.

Love. Love is a bit like freedom. Freedom and love. Accepting consequences, embracing them. Wrapping them around you like a warm blanket.

Freedom. To most it is an idea. An abstract dirty thing that pertains to control. That's not freedom I think, maybe that's independence. But not freedom. Freedom is a moment where nothing exists beyond what you are living. I have known freedom in the arms of Harrison. I am seventeen years old and I know freedom and I know love. That's no small feet for me as I lay here on this bed and bleed and listen to the beeping, as I am wheeled off and taken straight into surgery where Doctors look at me and determine weather or not I can survive.

I asked my grandfather once about heaven. My father couldn't give me a straight answer so I asked my grandfather, my grandfather who by the time he was my age had seen a thousand men and woman and children die like dogs in the street. My grandfather with numbers on his arm.

"There is no heaven to go to if your good and no hell to go to if your bad" he said quietly looking out over the office to see his son work in the West Wing. "You are very young son but soon you will understand that life is heaven and life is hell and they coexist. Right beside each other. And God…God takes form in the land"

They operate on me and I don't know if I will wake up. I find I don't care. Right now I don't hurt. That has to be something.

There is a moment where your dreams and your memories merge together and form a perfect world. That I think is heaven. I've had time to think about it caught in this half world of limbo while the world outside me falls to shit. I've had time to think about it when the President gives speeches about peace and promises an incredulous Leo McGerry that he can make peace in a land that has been at war for centuries.

I have thought about heaven and hell when I saw the mangled body of the most decorated man in the country next to me. When I saw Donna her blonde hair dyed pink with her blood.

Each heaven I think must be unique, special only too you. The land is filled with all you hold dear and the sky burns down your imagination.

My heaven is filled with untamed land, fresh air and a man that loves me. There are no storms here, no war, no politics and I am the only lightening.

My parents are not here yet.

Harrison is.

I take his hand, I smile.

I don't care what happens to me now. Maybe I will wake from this, maybe I will not.

Either way I have done what many people cannot do.

I have looked death in the eye, I have seen him smile, he had no fangs.

It was beautiful.

My name is Jake Cregg-Zeglier.

This is my heaven. This is my hell. This is my moment, my battle cry, my war and my peace.

And I am signing off.

Maybe one more chapter with these quotes? I have a plan that Season 6 will be the longest of this season so keep that in mind.

Next Chapter-Toby's thoughts as the President changes his speech mid air and refuses to deal with the military. Sam meanwhile is mired deep in a conflict of his own.