Chapter Text
The President’s love of a rope line was one of the things that made Sam actually like him in the early stages of the campaign. President Bartlet wasn’t the easiest man to warm up to, especially in those first few months in New Hampshire. It wasn’t until their sweeping victory, and until Josh’s father died, that he’d softened.
Still, Sam had always known that the thoughtful, reflective Josiah Bartlet was somewhere under the anxious bravado. He’d always respected that the President was not only willing, but honored, to interact with everyday Americans. That should have been the most basic bar, but so many politicians were fundamentally unwilling to meet it.
They’d had a good night. One of those nights where the product of the last seven nights fell nicely into place and there were no pieces left on the table. Josh would be relieved, Sam knew.
Guilt tugged at him, a gentle protest. Josh was supposed to spend the night at Sam’s place the night before. They’d found, through trial and error, that they were each other’s good luck charms. But when Josh had gotten to his apartment, Sam had been so trapped in the cycle of writing and rewriting that he’d barely even had the presence of mind to tell Josh that they needed a raincheck.
“I think I might just go,” Josh had said.
“‘S probably for the best,” Sam had answered, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yeah. You will.”
He hadn’t realized that Josh had wanted Sam to tell him to stay until he was gone. Now that it was easier to breathe, both because the speech was in his rearview mirror and because he’d loosened his tie, he tried to catch Josh’s eye across the lot. Josh, for one, was a few paces back, being held up by a group of screaming college girls. A minor spark of jealousy flared in Sam, though affection came right along with it. The President wasn’t the only one who loved a rope line. When Josh noticed Sam looking, he gave a short nod of acknowledgment, his boyish grin playing across his lips. It said almost nothing, and yet it said everything. They would work everything out. They always did.
Sam held onto that certainty, that one peaceful moment. He would look back on it often after everything went to hell.
He heard Gina scream, but he wouldn’t be told what she’d actually said until later. One shot reverberated, and then the other. Chaos erupted around him. The fact that they were under attack registered to him in some vague, dreamlike way, but more than anything, Sam was acting on instinct when he grabbed CJ by the shoulders and pulled her down to the ground with him. Shots echoed. Footsteps thundered around him. He found himself thinking, in some ridiculous, illogical sense, that he was glad he’d grabbed CJ in particular, because she was so tall. Being over six-foot in heels would probably make her the easiest member of the senior staff to hit.
This was the kind of fundamentally stupid, unimportant thought that one could only have in a deeply important moment that they were helpless to prevent.
CJ pushed herself back up, cupping her hand over the back of her head and wincing. Sam’s extremities were thrumming with adrenaline, so he barely felt the press of the necklace he’d accidentally torn from her neck, but when he looked down at his own hands, bruised and scraped from his slide across the asphalt, the silver glinted back at him.
It was a warning sign, somehow. Had he just saved CJ’s life? Was he ready to live with the implications of that? Was she? Sam got up the courage to look around. The air around him was thick and burnt. Red and blue lights flashed around his head. Somewhere, someone was crying in a voice he didn’t recognize. Was it a stranger, or did he just not know what his friends sounded like when they cried?
A medical professional found CJ while Sam hovered awkwardly off to the side, and given that she was at least making conversation with him, Sam felt that they could rule out severe brain damage. Someone told him something about the President and Leo, which he somehow regurgitated when CJ asked. Sam approached her where she was sitting, beside the gaping mouth of an empty ambulance. When did the ambulances get to the Newseum? And how many people were going to have to leave the venue in those same ambulances?
Sam didn’t want anything else to change. He put CJ’s necklace in his pocket.
“Gina!”
“Can’t talk right now!”
Of course she couldn’t. Sam was utterly useless in this situation. Seconds passed. Minutes, maybe.
In the moment, Sam couldn’t philosophize about his own internal monologue, or what each disaster meant to him. But in hindsight, he couldn’t help it. There were several moments that night where it felt like the very fabric of his reality was fragile and fraying between his fingers. The first of these many moments was when he processed that there had been shots at all. And the second was when he saw Toby’s face.
He’d never seen Toby desperate before, and while Sam was not a particularly religious man, once the dust settled, he frequently prayed that he never saw Toby desperate again.
“I need a... I need a doctor! I need help!”
A year beforehand, the President had met with the sister of a young fireman who’d died saving a family in Georgetown. She’d recounted that somehow, she knew that her brother was gone before anyone told her. As certainty settled over him like a curtain of ice, Sam could only summon one cohesive thought: this is something that happens to other people.
Sam took off running. He barely noticed the other senior staffers, the medics, some members of the press, behind him. Maybe because they were behind him. He was fastest. He caught up with Toby and bit back a scream.
Josh was slouched against a wall. He looked sickly. Sam stared, dead-eyed, at the space where his hands clasped over his abdomen. The hands that he’d held under so many tables were almost black with blood. His eyes were empty of that telltale twinkle, the light and life that Sam loved so dearly. Replacing it, there was only fear and pain. But when he folded sideways, unable to support his own weight – when his eyes drifted shut – he looked almost the same as he had the last time Sam had had the privilege of coaxing him to sleep.