Fandom:

The West Wing AU

Pairing:

C.J./Danny

Rating:

PG-13 for topic

Distribution:

How much do I owe you for hauling it off?

Spoilers:

Up to and including Full Disclosure, from which the series follows on

Email:

exfilia at livejournal dot com

Disclaimer:

if I owned them, they'd have a lot more fun

Warning:

mentions nonconsensual sex

Note:

Hoynes lovers should probably be hitting delete right about now.

"John?"

"Who is this?"

"Bob Russell."

"Mr. Vice President. What can I do for you?"

"You can get the hell out of the presidential race right now."

"What?"

"Nobody without enough self-control to stay out of the position you're in needs to be anywhere near a briefcase full of codes that can start a nuclear war. Get out and stay out, or I swear I'll name every name and date and time and place on the platform at the first debate."

"Which you will get from where?"

"I have a fairly comprehensive list. For starters, three members of the president's senior staff."

"You do this, and you'll gut the party. These people are the makers and doers that actually put people in office. If you discredit any great number of them all at once, the Republicans will have a field day."

"I have this image in my mind of you going through the makers and doers at the heart of our party and deciding which one to use like a piece of plumbing tonight."

"I have this image of you fantasizing about doing what I've actually done. Does it get you hot, Bob?"

The only answer was a click and a dial tone.

"You chickened out."

"Come in, Katie."

"You should probably know that Lyman denies any right of unborn poultry...."

"You got him to make a statement about eggs?"

"Check the tape. You'll laugh until you cry."

"Yeah. Katie, the president is concerned that we're going to screw up a possible criminal case against Hoynes."

"There isn't going to be a criminal case against Hoynes."

"Yeah, that's what they tell me. You could sue him, though."

"I don't want his money. I want his blood. I want him to feel what I felt. Don't you?"

"Katie, I'm so busy swatting the butterflies in my stomach that I don't know what I feel."

"If somebody doesn't take him down, C.J., he's going to be president."

"Do you think I can stop him? Do you have any memory of a recent president re-elected primarily on account of the notoriety of such accusations? All of us together chanting gory details wouldn't slow him down."

"You're not even going to try to fight him?"

"Show me a way, Katie. Show me anything I can do to keep him out of the Oval Office. In the meantime, though, back off on this. Back off, and I'll get you personal comments from the president and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs on the bomb off Tybee Island."

"What bomb off Tybee Island?"

"How long have you worked for the Atlanta paper?"

"I'm a White House correspondent. I've been to Atlanta like twice. Where's Tybee Island? In the river? And what bomb?"

"Do me a favor, and go research that. Maybe by the time you're done I'll have something on the other thing."

"Okay," said Leo as his people settled on the Oval Office sofas, "what are we going to do when John Hoynes goes down?"

"Well," said the president, "I think we should hold up little cards, 8.6, 8.8, whoops, only a 7.6 from the East Germans...."

"There aren't any East Germans any more, Mr. President."

"This is my fantasy, and I can have East Germans in it if I want."

"Mr. President," said Josh, "I think we have to consider the damage we're doing to the party. It's going to look like we were either unwilling to stop Hoynes, or unable."

"If we let it go at that, we *are* unable. C.J., you're more deeply involved in this than most of the rest of us. What do you think we should do?"

"I think we should make some show of reexamining the warhead that's been sitting in Savannah harbor since 1958."

"There's a warhead... a live one?"

"Yes, sir," said Leo. "It was live when they lost it, anyway. I met the fighter pilot in Florida during the first campaign."

"Fighter?" said Josh.

Leo held up his hands.

"Short version: during a training exercise in February of 1958 an Air Force B-47 out of Homestead was hit by an F-86 36,000 feet above Tybee Roads at the mouth of the Savannah River. The fighter pilot bailed. The bomber made it in, but they had to jettison a hydrogen bomb, complete with trigger and payload. We looked, but we never found it."

"And it's just been sitting there all this time?"

"The Air Force says it would be more dangerous to recover it than to leave it."

"The thing is," said C.J., "I promised Katie Witt some time with you on the warhead, and with the Chairman, if she'd leave the Hoynes thing long enough for us to get a grip on it."

"She has the name?"

"She's on the victim list," said Josh. "The last thing she said when I interviewed her was 'what are they going to do to him?'"

"She's ready to fillet him," C.J. said.

"Well, good for Katie," said the president. "Leo? You have an opinion?"

"It wouldn't kill us to reevaluate recovering the warhead in light of present-day technology," he said.

"You're telling me we should mount a major recovery operation to shut up a reporter about something I think we should be plastering on billboards?"

"I'm saying we should go get the bomb, and never mind Katie. What if someone else recovers it first?"

"Right," said the president. "Get me a new report on the bomb, then, and please stop telling me what we can't do to Hoynes and find something that we can do!"