The West Wing Fic: No One Will Hit You (And You'll Never Learn)
I haven't posted for a long time. I'm sorry about that. I've been very busy. I need to catch up with you all, and how.
Title: No One Will Hit You (And You'll Never Learn)
Summary: Leo and Jed are both the children of cowards. Bartlet's relationship with Leo, his father and Mrs. Landingham. Set pre-series and during Two Cathedrals.
Disclaimer: Not mine. No infringement intended.
Notes: Unbetaed, so any mistakes are my own. This is my first West Wing fic, so any and all comments will cherished. Also, I'm not exactly sure where I can post this, so any recommendations of TWW fic communities on DW and elsewhere would be welcomed. 4,239 words. AO3 DW
Jed doesn’t remember much about meeting Mrs. Landingham, just a snapshot-memory of the usual Sunday crowd of teachers and boarders milling around the grey stone archways and the entrance to the chapel, the sky pale blue above.
He probably had homework, but on such a fine spring day he would have blown it off to drive somewhere, a paperback and a pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat next to him. He and his buddies were planning an editorial in the school newspaper. He had just discovered Ray Bradbury.
So many of his memories are like that. When Abbey asks him how old he was when his father became headmaster, he replies that it was just after he first read The Hound of the Baskervilles (still a pre-teen).
He remembers nothing of a summer he spent with an aunt and his mother in California except for a book on Lincoln that he took down from her shelf. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. He whispered these words to himself, pleased by the shape they made on the page. He imagined them being spoken for the first time, rising just audibly above the shared exhalation of the crowd. Lincoln’s voice faint perhaps, before the age of public address systems and the Autocue. Like dry leaves in the cool air.
Once, his father knocked him to the floor of his study, after school had let out and the corridors were silent. He doesn’t remember why his father did it, but he remembers letting himself out of that room into the outer office with its smell of mimeo ink, the school-corridor smell of smoke and shoe polish. When he passed by Mrs. Landingham’s desk she nodded, mentioned as if in passing that his collar was torn. Not like you to be roughhousing, Jed, and he realised that she was telling him, in her own shrewd, matter-of-fact way, that she knew.
He doesn’t realise until years later what a gift she gave him when she turned to him in the parking lot, his broken-down car engine ticking between them. Self-awareness. A boy king, she’d called him. She placed him in a world bigger than this school and his teachers, his father. She asked him what he was afraid of, but of course she already knew that, as well. The sting of a blow across his cheek, his father's anger.
His English teacher answered his questions dismissively, his voice curt. He made it clear to Jed that questioning why some books should be banned from the library was an impertinence. Jed quoted the first amendment in the editorial he and his friends wrote questioning Professor Loomis (condemning, his father had said), and signed it along with his friends, and he really knew for the first time what an inheritance his name was.
“You stuck your hands in your pockets, you looked away and smiled.”
She knew him so well, not only knew that his mind was made up but knew that there was a part of him that hungered to do something but didn’t know how.
No other woman apart from Abbey has known him so well, his vulnerabilities and fears, the way the words and the ambition and the still small voice of inspiration mingle in him and spur him on.
...
When Jed parks the car he can see Leo there, sitting on the curb by the passenger door of his Lincoln. It’s a parking lot behind a motel, one of those beside-the-freeway boxes you can pass by a thousand times without ever noticing.
Jed remembers when Leo bought that car. Impeccable safety record, he’d said. Jed had nodded, put on his wise old professor voice, said something about safety mattering more when you had kids. With a family, you wanted the seatbelts, wanted the clunker. Leo had smiled so his eyes went crinkly at the corners, said what do you know, New Hampshire’s the only state without a damned adult seat belt law. That was the year Jed became governor, on a crisp fall afternoon at the Manchester house.
Leo doesn’t appreciate New England winters. Jed loves the cold, loves the way it’ll take your breath away if you don’t expect it, loves the shock of a new snowfall, Robert Frost nights when the world seems so real, so close.
The car is parked sloppily, diagonally. The front wheel mounts the curb. The essential wrongness of this, the car askew, Leo sitting on the ground, makes something clench in the bottom of Jed’s stomach.
Leo has his head in his hands, and when Jed approaches he lifts it up, slow, heavy. There's a strange, hunted look on his face, one Jed hasn't seen before. He's sitting there on the curb in his two-hundred-dollar shoes and a made-to-measure suit. There is a bruise down one cheekbone, and a brown smear of dried blood on the side of one of his knuckles.
"Jed," Leo says, then stops as if he doesn't know what to say. There's no upward inflection to his words, no tone.
Jed can smell the sweet-sour smell of whisky. There’s a small puddle of vomit off to one side. There are little white things in it, pill fragments perhaps. He can’t look at it for long without tasting bile at the back of his throat. Leo rubs his hands against each other slowly as if they’re itching for a cigarette, and the gesture looks too much like prayer to Jed. None of this is right. This man is his oldest friend.
The smell of the whisky and the vomit reminds him getting drunk with his brother Jon and his buddles one weekend when their parents were away. Jon passed him the bottle with a teasing smirk on his face, and he drank too fast and too much. He’d never felt so wretched as when he stumbled to his knees and retched in the back garden, and now he remembers that, barfing in his mother’s flower garden with his brother’s throaty cackling behind him.
“Leo,” Jed says, and it’s an effort to keep his voice steady, but he's very good at that. “What’s going on?”
Leo rises and stumbles back a little, and Jed puts a hand on his upper arm. Leo doesn't try to explain, just leads him into the hotel room and shows him the pill bottle in the pocket of his blazer.
“What were you thinking?” Jed realises that his voice is raised, just a little bit, and the nagging politician’s voice starts to go off in the back of his mind. Leo is the Secretary of Labor, he’s drunk here in a hotel room with the Valium. Does anybody know he’s here? Has he been indiscreet? Has he called anybody? Does he have papers? He hates himself for thinking these things, at a time when his friend needs help.
“I don’t know,” Leo says. His voice is small and lost.
“Come with me now,” Jed says. He puts his right hand on Leo’s upper arm, tries to lead him out the door.
“Can you remember if you paid or not?”
There’s probably more accusation in that sentence then there needs to be, and of course Leo can remember, he’s not that far gone. He wants to help Leo, but he can’t help being angry at him for doing this. Jed doesn’t think he’ll ever understand it, why Leo drinks.
“Give me your car keys.” Jed reaches into Leo’s blazer pocket for the keys, closes his hand around cold metal before Leo puts his fingers hard and steady around his forearm and pushes it away.
“Shut up.” Leo turns then, the words hissing between his teeth, and almost like an afterthought his left hand comes up and slaps Jed across the face.
It is the same way Jed’s father did it, the same casual strike coming out of nowhere, the same stinging impact across his cheek. Anger rises within him like a physical thing, and even though Leo is taller and heavier than he is, he puts his hand on Leo’s shoulders and pushes him back. A bright numb spot spreads across his cheek. He wonders if Leo’s father hit him in the same way. It’s such an uncharacteristic gesture. They both live their lives in words. We’re both sons of cowards, he thinks out of nowhere.
“You didn’t mean that,” he says, smelling the sick coming off Leo. And that’s all they say until the motel is miles behind them, Jed driving Leo’s car. He’ll have to send someone back to pick up his car. This is wrong.
Later, Jed drives Leo to the airport. It feels a little bit like penance. He has never been a good driver. He obeys all the rules, sure, but he’s never patient enough to sit there and let the miles pile up. He needs to adjust the radio, calculate routes. He can’t be patient.
Leo will drive for hours. Jed really learns this later when it’s just the two of them out in New Hampshire and Michigan, the staff he barely knows following behind. Jed naps in the passenger seat to grab fifteen minutes of precious rest and every time he wakes he sees Leo sitting there driving, his lined face active, as if he’s turning over strategies, and Jed can see the depth of the experience that they share.
When he wakes to the lines of speeches and press releases rattling through his head he wants to turn to Leo and let other words fall from his mouth, tell him about the blurred vision and the tingling in his fingers, tell him that he has multiple sclerosis.
But he wants to be in this to make things happen, and he knows that Leo will tell him that what he’s making a mistake. He also knows that Leo will lie for him, and then they’ll be held together in the embrace of some future scandal, and there will be questions, questions about right and wrong, about the pills and the booze. Jed doesn’t know that what he’s doing is wrong(that certainty comes later), he just knows it isn’t right, so he swallows down on his lie of omission like something bitter and asks Leo about the rubber-chicken dinner they’re driving to, about polls and speeches, asks him if he knows how many national parks there are in Michigan.
For Sierra Tucson, Leo has a small overnight bag at his feet, another full of hastily-chosen clothes in the trunk. There are some papers in the bag at his feet, books. He takes a hardback off the top of the pile. Jed turns, sees that it’s The Sun Also Rises. His father loved Hemingway, probably for the misogynistic, half-bitterness of it. Jed has never really enjoyed reading him for that reason, because whenever he does so he feels as if his father is near, a hardback held closed on his finger, ready to throw his hand up into his son’s face, vindicated by the mid-century maleness of it.
“Hemingway,” he says.
“Yeah,” Leo says, glancing down at the paperback. “I’m gonna re-read them. There won’t be much else to do there.”
“There’ll be time devoted to sitting around in a circle and crying,” Jed says, and he turns in time to catch a brief smile flitting across Leo’s face. He looks so old. Leo looked old the first time they met, though.
“Read much Hemingway?”
“My father liked him. A lot.”
Leo grunts, opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something, then closes it again. There’s a brief silence.
“I don’t remember my father reading much apart from the newspapers and the Harvard Law Review.”
Jed doesn’t quite know what to say, there, so he stays quiet.
“My father committed suicide.” That last word, sharp and heavy like bottle-glass, brings the hair up on the back of Jed’s neck. And then, automatically, a line from the catechism: we should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives.
“I’m sorry,” he says, because what else can you say? His father's anger has always been mystifying to him. A backhand to the cheek, maybe a fist to the midsection, all in the privacy of the study: that’s nothing. Nothing compared to that sort of violence, public shame. And it’s not why Leo drinks, he knows that. Leo drinks when he’s happy, and he drinks when he’s not.
“Don’t be,” Leo says, “It happened a long time ago.” Then he puts his hands to his face and breathes in quickly, wetly, and Jed just drives.
When he gets back to New Hampshire, Mrs. Landingham has papers for him to sign and appointments to reschedule and a press photographer from the Union-Leader who needs to be placated and all that shit is annoying enough to him on a normal day, but today he feels so edgy and tired that he’s snapping at her before he’s even had his morning coffee.
“There’s no need for that, Governor,” she says, with a razor-thin hint of irony in her use of his title. He can hear high school in her tone, and he immediately feels guilty for what an ass he’s been. It’s not her fault he’s been away, and she’s held the office together while he was gone.
He goes home late. Zoey is reading The Road Not Taken for an English assignment. He gets a cloth-bound book of Frost’s poems down from the bookshelf in his study. It has his father’s name in the front.
“My English teacher says it’s about regret,” she says, and he can hear her questioning it, turning it over in her mind.
“Your English teacher’s a doofus,” he says, and Abbey tuts. He sits beside his daughter and they read the poem together. He wants her to be independent, and so he tells himself that he doesn’t care if she likes English or hates it, whether she realises how useful math is. He thinks now, as a parent, that his own father was jealous of his intellect, and so all he wants to do is love them. But maybe that’s ego: he certainly has a lot of that, as Abbey says.
Ellie is the quiet one, focussed on biology and medicine, but he is infinitely careful not to overshadow her, steer her. But when Zoey reads the last line of the poem and smiles to herself, he’s glad: she understands, as he does, the power that these words can have over us.
Leo goes back to Washington after a month at the facility. When Jed speaks to him on the phone, he can hear the same scrubbed-clean weariness that his voice had in the car.
The next time Jed gets down to Washington, Leo wraps him in a bear hug that takes him by surprise. He can smell Leo’s cologne, and something vaguely like cigarettes, and he can’t smell whisky on him at all. He’s lost weight, and the dark bags are gone from beneath his eyes. His voice is his own again.
...
Then so much happens, Leo telling him they’re going to lift the roofs of houses, pride for his friend shining in his voice like something bright. Leo comes down to see him in New Hampshire without telling him why he’s coming, his eyes shining, almost feverish. He scrawls Bartlet for President on a napkin, and that phrase rings through Leo's mind long before Jed's. Leo has nothing, no party money, no Democratic support. All he has is his unflagging confidence and a series of AA chips in his pocket.
Jed feels ambition inside himself, and part of him wants to ignore it, the part that wants to be content with what he has. The small dark fragment of self-pity that he turns over and over in his mind like water worrying at a pebble. But he locks these things away deep within himself, the lies he doesn’t really tell to the doctor who examines him, the injections that Abbey gives him that none of his entourage actually see, and he goes with Leo, because he wants to win. This is the time of Jed Bartlet, Leo says with a smile. You’re gonna open your mouth and lift houses off the ground. It’s Leo’s time too. Jed loves him too much to take it off him. Then the campaign is his.
Leo comes to him a few days before the final debate, closes the hotel door carefully behind him, and quietly presses his five-year chip into the palm of Jed's hand.
"Josh knows as well," he says. He looks hungover and contrite. Jed feels terrible, laid low with what they tell the press is a middle ear infection. He knows he has to bounce back quickly, so they can spin it to make him seem eager and young. But he still feels terrible.
"It's okay," Jed says. "Don't worry about it, Leo. It's okay. You gonna drink tomorrow?"
"No," Leo says, his voice raw again.
"Okay," Jed says, "Let's go win."
He raises his right had and says I, Josiah Edward Bartlet, the words mingling with the held breath of the crowd before him, the January air as fine and delicate as spun glass.
Link to the last bit.
Title: No One Will Hit You (And You'll Never Learn)
Summary: Leo and Jed are both the children of cowards. Bartlet's relationship with Leo, his father and Mrs. Landingham. Set pre-series and during Two Cathedrals.
Disclaimer: Not mine. No infringement intended.
Notes: Unbetaed, so any mistakes are my own. This is my first West Wing fic, so any and all comments will cherished. Also, I'm not exactly sure where I can post this, so any recommendations of TWW fic communities on DW and elsewhere would be welcomed. 4,239 words. AO3 DW
Jed doesn’t remember much about meeting Mrs. Landingham, just a snapshot-memory of the usual Sunday crowd of teachers and boarders milling around the grey stone archways and the entrance to the chapel, the sky pale blue above.
He probably had homework, but on such a fine spring day he would have blown it off to drive somewhere, a paperback and a pack of cigarettes on the passenger seat next to him. He and his buddies were planning an editorial in the school newspaper. He had just discovered Ray Bradbury.
So many of his memories are like that. When Abbey asks him how old he was when his father became headmaster, he replies that it was just after he first read The Hound of the Baskervilles (still a pre-teen).
He remembers nothing of a summer he spent with an aunt and his mother in California except for a book on Lincoln that he took down from her shelf. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. He whispered these words to himself, pleased by the shape they made on the page. He imagined them being spoken for the first time, rising just audibly above the shared exhalation of the crowd. Lincoln’s voice faint perhaps, before the age of public address systems and the Autocue. Like dry leaves in the cool air.
Once, his father knocked him to the floor of his study, after school had let out and the corridors were silent. He doesn’t remember why his father did it, but he remembers letting himself out of that room into the outer office with its smell of mimeo ink, the school-corridor smell of smoke and shoe polish. When he passed by Mrs. Landingham’s desk she nodded, mentioned as if in passing that his collar was torn. Not like you to be roughhousing, Jed, and he realised that she was telling him, in her own shrewd, matter-of-fact way, that she knew.
He doesn’t realise until years later what a gift she gave him when she turned to him in the parking lot, his broken-down car engine ticking between them. Self-awareness. A boy king, she’d called him. She placed him in a world bigger than this school and his teachers, his father. She asked him what he was afraid of, but of course she already knew that, as well. The sting of a blow across his cheek, his father's anger.
His English teacher answered his questions dismissively, his voice curt. He made it clear to Jed that questioning why some books should be banned from the library was an impertinence. Jed quoted the first amendment in the editorial he and his friends wrote questioning Professor Loomis (condemning, his father had said), and signed it along with his friends, and he really knew for the first time what an inheritance his name was.
“You stuck your hands in your pockets, you looked away and smiled.”
She knew him so well, not only knew that his mind was made up but knew that there was a part of him that hungered to do something but didn’t know how.
No other woman apart from Abbey has known him so well, his vulnerabilities and fears, the way the words and the ambition and the still small voice of inspiration mingle in him and spur him on.
...
When Jed parks the car he can see Leo there, sitting on the curb by the passenger door of his Lincoln. It’s a parking lot behind a motel, one of those beside-the-freeway boxes you can pass by a thousand times without ever noticing.
Jed remembers when Leo bought that car. Impeccable safety record, he’d said. Jed had nodded, put on his wise old professor voice, said something about safety mattering more when you had kids. With a family, you wanted the seatbelts, wanted the clunker. Leo had smiled so his eyes went crinkly at the corners, said what do you know, New Hampshire’s the only state without a damned adult seat belt law. That was the year Jed became governor, on a crisp fall afternoon at the Manchester house.
Leo doesn’t appreciate New England winters. Jed loves the cold, loves the way it’ll take your breath away if you don’t expect it, loves the shock of a new snowfall, Robert Frost nights when the world seems so real, so close.
The car is parked sloppily, diagonally. The front wheel mounts the curb. The essential wrongness of this, the car askew, Leo sitting on the ground, makes something clench in the bottom of Jed’s stomach.
Leo has his head in his hands, and when Jed approaches he lifts it up, slow, heavy. There's a strange, hunted look on his face, one Jed hasn't seen before. He's sitting there on the curb in his two-hundred-dollar shoes and a made-to-measure suit. There is a bruise down one cheekbone, and a brown smear of dried blood on the side of one of his knuckles.
"Jed," Leo says, then stops as if he doesn't know what to say. There's no upward inflection to his words, no tone.
Jed can smell the sweet-sour smell of whisky. There’s a small puddle of vomit off to one side. There are little white things in it, pill fragments perhaps. He can’t look at it for long without tasting bile at the back of his throat. Leo rubs his hands against each other slowly as if they’re itching for a cigarette, and the gesture looks too much like prayer to Jed. None of this is right. This man is his oldest friend.
The smell of the whisky and the vomit reminds him getting drunk with his brother Jon and his buddles one weekend when their parents were away. Jon passed him the bottle with a teasing smirk on his face, and he drank too fast and too much. He’d never felt so wretched as when he stumbled to his knees and retched in the back garden, and now he remembers that, barfing in his mother’s flower garden with his brother’s throaty cackling behind him.
“Leo,” Jed says, and it’s an effort to keep his voice steady, but he's very good at that. “What’s going on?”
Leo rises and stumbles back a little, and Jed puts a hand on his upper arm. Leo doesn't try to explain, just leads him into the hotel room and shows him the pill bottle in the pocket of his blazer.
“What were you thinking?” Jed realises that his voice is raised, just a little bit, and the nagging politician’s voice starts to go off in the back of his mind. Leo is the Secretary of Labor, he’s drunk here in a hotel room with the Valium. Does anybody know he’s here? Has he been indiscreet? Has he called anybody? Does he have papers? He hates himself for thinking these things, at a time when his friend needs help.
“I don’t know,” Leo says. His voice is small and lost.
“Come with me now,” Jed says. He puts his right hand on Leo’s upper arm, tries to lead him out the door.
“Can you remember if you paid or not?”
There’s probably more accusation in that sentence then there needs to be, and of course Leo can remember, he’s not that far gone. He wants to help Leo, but he can’t help being angry at him for doing this. Jed doesn’t think he’ll ever understand it, why Leo drinks.
“Give me your car keys.” Jed reaches into Leo’s blazer pocket for the keys, closes his hand around cold metal before Leo puts his fingers hard and steady around his forearm and pushes it away.
“Shut up.” Leo turns then, the words hissing between his teeth, and almost like an afterthought his left hand comes up and slaps Jed across the face.
It is the same way Jed’s father did it, the same casual strike coming out of nowhere, the same stinging impact across his cheek. Anger rises within him like a physical thing, and even though Leo is taller and heavier than he is, he puts his hand on Leo’s shoulders and pushes him back. A bright numb spot spreads across his cheek. He wonders if Leo’s father hit him in the same way. It’s such an uncharacteristic gesture. They both live their lives in words. We’re both sons of cowards, he thinks out of nowhere.
“You didn’t mean that,” he says, smelling the sick coming off Leo. And that’s all they say until the motel is miles behind them, Jed driving Leo’s car. He’ll have to send someone back to pick up his car. This is wrong.
Later, Jed drives Leo to the airport. It feels a little bit like penance. He has never been a good driver. He obeys all the rules, sure, but he’s never patient enough to sit there and let the miles pile up. He needs to adjust the radio, calculate routes. He can’t be patient.
Leo will drive for hours. Jed really learns this later when it’s just the two of them out in New Hampshire and Michigan, the staff he barely knows following behind. Jed naps in the passenger seat to grab fifteen minutes of precious rest and every time he wakes he sees Leo sitting there driving, his lined face active, as if he’s turning over strategies, and Jed can see the depth of the experience that they share.
When he wakes to the lines of speeches and press releases rattling through his head he wants to turn to Leo and let other words fall from his mouth, tell him about the blurred vision and the tingling in his fingers, tell him that he has multiple sclerosis.
But he wants to be in this to make things happen, and he knows that Leo will tell him that what he’s making a mistake. He also knows that Leo will lie for him, and then they’ll be held together in the embrace of some future scandal, and there will be questions, questions about right and wrong, about the pills and the booze. Jed doesn’t know that what he’s doing is wrong(that certainty comes later), he just knows it isn’t right, so he swallows down on his lie of omission like something bitter and asks Leo about the rubber-chicken dinner they’re driving to, about polls and speeches, asks him if he knows how many national parks there are in Michigan.
For Sierra Tucson, Leo has a small overnight bag at his feet, another full of hastily-chosen clothes in the trunk. There are some papers in the bag at his feet, books. He takes a hardback off the top of the pile. Jed turns, sees that it’s The Sun Also Rises. His father loved Hemingway, probably for the misogynistic, half-bitterness of it. Jed has never really enjoyed reading him for that reason, because whenever he does so he feels as if his father is near, a hardback held closed on his finger, ready to throw his hand up into his son’s face, vindicated by the mid-century maleness of it.
“Hemingway,” he says.
“Yeah,” Leo says, glancing down at the paperback. “I’m gonna re-read them. There won’t be much else to do there.”
“There’ll be time devoted to sitting around in a circle and crying,” Jed says, and he turns in time to catch a brief smile flitting across Leo’s face. He looks so old. Leo looked old the first time they met, though.
“Read much Hemingway?”
“My father liked him. A lot.”
Leo grunts, opens his mouth as if he’s about to say something, then closes it again. There’s a brief silence.
“I don’t remember my father reading much apart from the newspapers and the Harvard Law Review.”
Jed doesn’t quite know what to say, there, so he stays quiet.
“My father committed suicide.” That last word, sharp and heavy like bottle-glass, brings the hair up on the back of Jed’s neck. And then, automatically, a line from the catechism: we should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives.
“I’m sorry,” he says, because what else can you say? His father's anger has always been mystifying to him. A backhand to the cheek, maybe a fist to the midsection, all in the privacy of the study: that’s nothing. Nothing compared to that sort of violence, public shame. And it’s not why Leo drinks, he knows that. Leo drinks when he’s happy, and he drinks when he’s not.
“Don’t be,” Leo says, “It happened a long time ago.” Then he puts his hands to his face and breathes in quickly, wetly, and Jed just drives.
When he gets back to New Hampshire, Mrs. Landingham has papers for him to sign and appointments to reschedule and a press photographer from the Union-Leader who needs to be placated and all that shit is annoying enough to him on a normal day, but today he feels so edgy and tired that he’s snapping at her before he’s even had his morning coffee.
“There’s no need for that, Governor,” she says, with a razor-thin hint of irony in her use of his title. He can hear high school in her tone, and he immediately feels guilty for what an ass he’s been. It’s not her fault he’s been away, and she’s held the office together while he was gone.
He goes home late. Zoey is reading The Road Not Taken for an English assignment. He gets a cloth-bound book of Frost’s poems down from the bookshelf in his study. It has his father’s name in the front.
“My English teacher says it’s about regret,” she says, and he can hear her questioning it, turning it over in her mind.
“Your English teacher’s a doofus,” he says, and Abbey tuts. He sits beside his daughter and they read the poem together. He wants her to be independent, and so he tells himself that he doesn’t care if she likes English or hates it, whether she realises how useful math is. He thinks now, as a parent, that his own father was jealous of his intellect, and so all he wants to do is love them. But maybe that’s ego: he certainly has a lot of that, as Abbey says.
Ellie is the quiet one, focussed on biology and medicine, but he is infinitely careful not to overshadow her, steer her. But when Zoey reads the last line of the poem and smiles to herself, he’s glad: she understands, as he does, the power that these words can have over us.
Leo goes back to Washington after a month at the facility. When Jed speaks to him on the phone, he can hear the same scrubbed-clean weariness that his voice had in the car.
The next time Jed gets down to Washington, Leo wraps him in a bear hug that takes him by surprise. He can smell Leo’s cologne, and something vaguely like cigarettes, and he can’t smell whisky on him at all. He’s lost weight, and the dark bags are gone from beneath his eyes. His voice is his own again.
...
Then so much happens, Leo telling him they’re going to lift the roofs of houses, pride for his friend shining in his voice like something bright. Leo comes down to see him in New Hampshire without telling him why he’s coming, his eyes shining, almost feverish. He scrawls Bartlet for President on a napkin, and that phrase rings through Leo's mind long before Jed's. Leo has nothing, no party money, no Democratic support. All he has is his unflagging confidence and a series of AA chips in his pocket.
Jed feels ambition inside himself, and part of him wants to ignore it, the part that wants to be content with what he has. The small dark fragment of self-pity that he turns over and over in his mind like water worrying at a pebble. But he locks these things away deep within himself, the lies he doesn’t really tell to the doctor who examines him, the injections that Abbey gives him that none of his entourage actually see, and he goes with Leo, because he wants to win. This is the time of Jed Bartlet, Leo says with a smile. You’re gonna open your mouth and lift houses off the ground. It’s Leo’s time too. Jed loves him too much to take it off him. Then the campaign is his.
Leo comes to him a few days before the final debate, closes the hotel door carefully behind him, and quietly presses his five-year chip into the palm of Jed's hand.
"Josh knows as well," he says. He looks hungover and contrite. Jed feels terrible, laid low with what they tell the press is a middle ear infection. He knows he has to bounce back quickly, so they can spin it to make him seem eager and young. But he still feels terrible.
"It's okay," Jed says. "Don't worry about it, Leo. It's okay. You gonna drink tomorrow?"
"No," Leo says, his voice raw again.
"Okay," Jed says, "Let's go win."
He raises his right had and says I, Josiah Edward Bartlet, the words mingling with the held breath of the crowd before him, the January air as fine and delicate as spun glass.
Link to the last bit.