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The first few weeks on the campaign, the weeks before Sam finishes fighting with Lisa and actually turns up at campaign
HQ, pass mostly in a blur of new faces and towns, swinging between wondering what the hell he was thinking, walking out on
Hoynes, and knowing that he just made the best decision of his life. It helps that Leo’s constantly around, never far
from the rest of the campaign staff – from Josh – and always there to smooth things over after Bartlet’s
been through the room. The man’s clearly brilliant, but that doesn’t stop Josh from wondering how they’ll
ever get him elected when most of the campaign staff can’t stand him.
Leo shakes his head when Josh voices the
thought, late one night in Leo’s hotel room after too much coffee and a very long day. Josh has got to know Leo’s
expressions pretty well since they started working together, and he recognises that nod as meaning, ‘you’ll understand
this eventually.’
He likes that expression, the warm feeling it gives him to know that Leo plans on him being
around, being part of *Leo’s* campaign to make a good man president, for long enough to understand. It makes Josh think
of his father, the same kind of pride and affection in his eyes as in Leo’s, before the fire, then, eventually, after,
with Leo a constant presence in their lives and Mal in the background where his mother wouldn’t see her and things get
worse.
Well, Josh thinks, when Leo runs a finger gently down the side of Josh’s face, maybe not exactly the same
kind of affection as his father’s.
It’s the last thing he expected to come of taking this job, and if Leo
still drank, he’d be tempted to say they must have been drunk. He knows, though, that they were both stone cold sober
that night when he reached for Leo’s hand and Leo smiled. He can’t imagine explaining that to anyone, but then,
he won’t be explaining this to anyone, not even Sam.
Leo presses him back onto the bed, and Josh stops thinking
about it.
***
It seems like there are new people on the campaign every time Josh walks in there, though he’ll
admit that might be more to do with him struggling to remember their faces than with them actually *being* new. Even so, the
faces are finally starting to get familiar: Toby, who sighs an awful lot for someone who managed to keep his job when everyone
else was fired; Bonnie and Ginger, part of the volunteer staff, who Josh can only assume have supernatural abilities, from
the way they always know what someone’s about to ask for; Toby’s friend CJ, who, even if she wasn’t taller
than everyone else in any given room, has a laugh that makes everyone smile, and a way of swatting reporters that’s
even managed to convince Josh that they’ve actually got a hope of winning.
“It’s like having your
freakishly tall big sister working with you,” Sam says one evening, when he’s had too much alcohol and too little
sleep to watch what he says as carefully as he usually does. Josh knows he doesn’t flinch, years of practise even if
he almost never tells anyone what happened.
“What’s your problem with tall women?” he asks Sam instead,
glancing at his watch when Sam sips his drink. Past midnight, which makes drinking in his hotel room a good thing –
he can just shove Sam out and leave him to make his own way. Or at least he could, if he believed Sam could find his way round
the maze-like corridors after only two days. Sam’s sense of direction, like Josh’s own ability to hold his drink,
is largely mythical, though Sam denies it vigorously.
“I don’t have a problem with tall women,” Sam
protests. “But CJ’s freakishly so.”
Josh only rolls his eyes a little at that. Sam is definitely
drunk, and Josh should send him back to his room to sleep it off, but Josh has actually missed Sam more since he agreed to
join the campaign than he has in a long time.
Watching Sam swirl the melting ice in his glass, Josh contemplates, for
one moment, opening his mouth and letting all the words forming there fall out. I’m sleeping with Leo McGarry. The guy
who’s trying to get his best friend elected President. Out married campaign manager, and that’s one thing Josh
does *not* want to think about, that and Mallory. I don’t know how it started, he wants to say. He feels like home to
me.
He takes a large gulp of ice water instead, washing the words back down where they belong. Just because Leo doesn’t
say it, Josh still understands that it’s a secret he has to keep. He’s had plenty of practice.
“We
need her,” he says finally, and watches, amused, as Sam scrambles to find the thread of the conversation.
***
Josh
goes with the advanced team to their next stop, to smooth the feathers of the local council, who have taken offence at a remark
Bartlet made about fly fishing, which turns out to be their main source of tourist income. There’s no reason for the
trip not to go smoothly, except that the first thing Josh sees when he steps out of the hotel is John Hoynes, crossing the
street towards him. He seriously considers ducking back into the hotel, but it’s too late and where’s he going
to hide anyway, behind the dwarf potted shrub?
“Josh,” Hoynes says, stopping.
“Senator Hoynes.”
Josh forces himself not to shuffle his feet or look down, feeling like he’s facing his father when he’s done something
wrong. He’s never thought of Hoynes as a father figure – he’s got enough of those in his life right now
– but there’s something about the way he reacted when Josh said he was leaving to join Bartlet’s campaign,
the same disappointment his father would show when Josh misbehaved. He’d actually rather have faced Sam’s employers
with their anger and disdain for his choices than this disappointment, verging on pity.
“Is Governor Bartlet
with you?” Hoynes asks.
“No, next week. We’re here setting things up. I, er, didn’t know you
had a campaign stop here.”
Hoynes grins and Josh can’t tell if he means it or not. “We broke down
just outside town, we’re staying overnight till they get the part.”
“Ah,” Josh says intelligently.
This is the kind of thing that makes him almost believe in an angry fate, or at least one with a grudge against him.
“Look,
Josh -.” Hoynes takes a step closer, lowering his voice. “I follow the same news broadcasts you do, I see the
same polling numbers. It’s not too late for –“
“Good luck with your campaign.” Josh cuts
him off before Hoynes can make the offer he was waiting to hear. It’s not that he isn’t loyal to Bartlet, or that
he’d ever take Hoynes up on any offer, but he doesn’t want to go back to the campaign knowing he considered it.
If Hoynes never asks, he never has to.
“Good luck to you,” Hoynes says, not pursing it.
As they
shake hands and part, Josh is pretty sure Hoynes is thinking the same thing he is: you’re going to need it.
***
Whatever
they think about needing good luck, it’s Bartlet’s campaign that gets it, and suddenly they’ve won the Illinois
primary, Josh’s father is gone, and sleeping with Leo feels more like guilt than it does like safety. He thought leaving
Hoynes for Bartlet was his whirlwind change for the year, but this is faster and more frightening by far, like being spun
by a tornado until he wakes up one morning on the very edge of Leo’s bed and wonders what the hell he’s doing
there, in bed, with Leo, with Bartlet, all of it.
Two days later, when they roll into Washington, he’s no closer
to answers on any of it, just wishing he could tell someone, hear them say that it’s just the shock of his father’s
death, and things will get easier, but the only person he can tell is Leo and he can’t tell Leo that even just working
with him feels like betrayal.
Bartlet’s speech that night is a disaster that leaves Toby fuming and Sam pale,
a combination of teleprompter errors and a hostile Q and A session. He steers clear of Leo, or tries to, but Leo still find
him in the hotel bar, holed up in a corner with CJ and Sam, trying to drown the memory of Bartlet’s anger.
Leo’s
is worse, because it’s all true, and if Sam’s too morose to look up from his glass, CJ makes up for it in the
assessing look she gives him after Leo leaves. He wants to tell her it’s not what she thinks, whatever that is, or confess
everything and ask her what he should do. Instead, he swallows the last of his lukewarm beer and takes himself off to bed,
alone, to dreams of CJ and Leo, flames and his father, that throw him awake, sweating and gasping, half an hour before his
alarm goes off.
***
CJ grabs his arm as he’s about to follow Leo onto the campaign bus out of Washington,
tells Leo that they’ll get a train and catch up, and drags Josh down the street, ignoring his protests and demands to
know where they’re going. In his head, he hears Sam saying, ‘it’s like having your freakishly tall big sister
working with you,’ and thinks that Sam had no idea how right he was. CJ’s what Josh could imagine Joanie growing
up into, if she’d wanted to become a political press secretary instead of a conductor.
It becomes obvious where
they’re going after a few minutes, so Josh just links his arm through CJ’s and allows himself to be led. There’s
really no point arguing with her, even if he didn’t want to be off the campaign bus more than anything else right now.
They’re
too late to get onto a tour, so they stand and peer through the railings instead, like a couple of little kids. They pick
out the rooms that face onto the street, and the Oval Office. “Can you imagine walking in there every day?” Josh
asks.
CJ doesn’t answer, but her eyes sparkle when she looks over at him, and he knows she already is. Looking
up at the building, thinking of President Bartlet in the Oval Office, working for Leo, with Toby and CJ and Sam, and maybe
even Donna if she doesn’t go back to her loser boyfriend, is like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future
form through the mist; like the moment when everything comes together and the audience sways in their favour, and he can’t
imagine, right then, why he ever wondered if he should be somewhere else. There’s nowhere else he can be.
Waiting
for their train, CJ says, casually, “Leo?” and Josh says, “yeah,” just as casually, and they go back
to discussing Bartlet’s taste in ties.
That night, his hand on CJ’s naked breast as she presses her fingers
into his hair and brings their lips together, he wonders if he’s just doing this because it’s something he won’t
have to feel guilty and lie about. It’s no good reason to be sleeping with anyone, though, so he concentrates on CJ’s
body instead, and forces himself not to think about Leo the whole time, not even when he comes.
He dreams of kind eyes
and the way it felt to be hugged by his hero at his sister’s funeral.
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