-1I remember December
and I wanna hear what you have to say about me
hear if you're gonna live without me
I wanna hear what you want
what the hell do you want? -- Damien Rice "I Remember"

The very last thing she expected was to go to bed with Sam. He was taking her to Iota to get her drunk. That's what friends do. You find the man you love fucking his girlfriend in his office, the man you love's best friend takes you out to get sloshed. You have witty flirtations over fancy drinks and you pretend to have solid conversation over the hard stuff. However, they usually just tuck you into bed after leaving water and aspirin on the nightstand. Or so Donna thought. Oh, she was drunk when she kissed Sam, but sober enough to know what she was doing. She wanted to hurt Josh; she wanted to slowly kill him from the inside out.

Fucking Sam seemed like the best way to do that. It wasn't like he particularly resisted. It was nice to be with a real gentleman. He took care of her; she remembers crying and him kissing away the tears. She remembers thinking that his tongue should be given an award for its dexterity. She remembers how somehow, in a twisted way, it was right. For a second too long, she could have sworn up and down that she was in love with Sam Seaborn. Maybe because it was February twenty-ninth, and everything was topsy-turvy.

Everyday was a new adventure after that night. Josh avoided looking her in the eye, his shame of being caught fucking Amy too great. Sam avoided Donna, afraid that he might say something or do something that would give them away. Donna stayed to herself, frightened that everything would come out into the open. After a few days though, she started to relax. Josh began to banter with her again; his own way of apologizing. Sam started smiling at her, talking to her. Everything was starting to settle down.

That was until she started feeling funny. At first she thought that it was her guilt chewing away at her. That would explain why she kept throwing up. Her stomach always bubbled when she felt guilty about something. God knew every time she saw Josh she wanted to throw up; that much hadn't changed. It didn't matter they were on talking terms. In fact, that almost made it harder than not speaking at all. She had done it to herself, so she wasn't about to complain.

Then there came the other little surprises. She wrote them off as a horrid case of PMS. That was what they simply had to be, so she made them into that. Until the M never came. She knew it once the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth passed. Still, she always found an excuse. She was too stressed. She was working too many late nights. Her diet was wacky. When the twentieth came, she finally admitted it. Her atomic clock precision couldn't be shaken that much by outside forces. That night she slept with her hands over her belly, tears in her eyes.

Sam would never know, she decided. He was too important to have his reputation as Senior Counsel tarnished with an illegitimate child. They all knew that he was going to be President someday, and really, that wouldn't happen if any one were to find out about their child. No, she was going to take every measure to distance herself from Sam Seaborn. There was no reason that he would have to pay the price for that one night of drunken comfort sex. There was no use in romanticizing it.

She figured that she had a good three months or so before she started show. Then she'd have to quit, go back to Madison or something, find a new job, and live her new life. Sure, Josh would be devastated, but better that than him knowing the truth. He couldn't stand it when she went out with other men; she could hardly imagine his reaction to her telling him that she was pregnant, much less that the father was his best friend. Which raised the question of Sam. It wasn't fair that he would have to give everything up because of her stupidity. Then Donna laughed. Really, she could blame this whole thing on Amy. On second thought, she didn't want her child to be attached to that man-eater.

Which lead Donna to consider names. She had always had her favorites of course, what woman didn't? Somehow she had always liked the name Celeste for a girl and Oliver for a boy. Then she laughed, because she had once thought of children with those names for her children with Dr. Freeride. Then she cried because nothing was how she ever thought it would be. She would figure it out later. Right now she needed to go to sleep. Josh needed her in the bullpen at five-thirty. For now, work, Josh, had to come first.

So life went on with some degree of normalcy. If her morning sickness was noticeable, it would be due to bad cream cheese on her bagel or something funny she ate the night before. If she was tired it was because she was there was a dog barking somewhere or she just had to stay up and watch that movie. When she started putting on weight, it was because she was eating more take out than normal, and she hadn't gotten around to renewing her gym membership. It all was too easily explained away. No one suspected anything… she was just being quirky Donna.

…Until she started not being able to fit into her pants. That day, in her elastic waisted skirt, she was quiet, her eyes wide. She blamed it on the Red Bull she never drank. This was it, this was really going to be the end. Two weeks and that was going to be that. Every moment since she had randomly walked into Josh's office, she knew that it was over. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she didn't think that it would end. She wanted desperately to tell herself that everything was just a dream and she'd wake up, in her bed, alone, like nothing ever happened.

Telling Josh she was quitting was one of the hardest things she ever had to do. When he demanded to know why, she wanted to yell that she had fucked his best friend and got knocked up and she was so sorry, so very sorry. Instead she said that she was honored to work in the White House; that she would make sure that everything was taken care of for whoever followed her, and that she'd write him. That was all she could say without bursting into tears. He told her that the two weeks wouldn't be necessary and that she could leave at the end of the day. Donna could never remember his eyes being so cold.

That night, as she tried to sleep, she knew that she had killed Josh. She had gotten her wish. She just didn't think that it would have gone this far. What killed her more was that Sam was oblivious to the fact that he was going to be a father. Her, their child, had become her world now. It wasn't ideal, but it hadn't been ideal for years. That was why she ran to Manchester. That was why she was running back to Madison.

Except she didn't. She couldn't find a decent apartment, and she didn't want to live with her parents. Her doctor was in one of the Maryland suburbs of DC, and she really didn't want to worry about moving and finding a new doctor. A week after she quit, she found a nice little apartment in Maryland. It had a nice kitchen, a decent sized living room, and a spare room that could be converted into a quaint nursery. There was a library right down the street that she could get a job at, so she started renting the apartment and told herself to be content.

From there on out, she existed. She wasn't happy, but she wasn't sad either. She liked her job; it was reminiscent of what she did during her summers in high school. She managed not to run into anyone from the White House, but she wasn't all that surprised. This was not their life. They didn't go to random libraries in Maryland; they didn't go to the small coffee shop down the block for their live music on Thursday nights; they didn't worry about making ends meet when rent was due.

In September, when she was seven months pregnant, she went to buy things for the nursery. She didn't know if she was going to have a boy or girl, so she settled on getting solid cherry furniture and getting bedding in a classic Winnie the Pooh pattern. She found matching prints that she could hang on the wall. She lamented that this child would not be getting the nursery that she had always planned in her mind's eye, but then again she never imagined having to do this alone, or having to do with so little money. They would be fine; there just wouldn't be money for the extra little things that she wanted to give her baby. She always thought of it as exclusively her baby, not Sam's, not theirs, just hers.

On Halloween, she got a phone call in the middle of the night. Not that she was really sleeping, the baby was turning summersaults all night, and she couldn't make herself comfortable no matter what she tried. When the phone rang, she became that much more uncomfortable. She was terrified of late night phone calls, that it was going to be her mother or her brother telling her that her father had died and that she needed to come back as soon as possible. In the past few letters, he had been complaining of feeling under the weather. At first she passed it off as a cold or something, but when she talked to him a couple of days before, she thought that he sounded tired, worn out, old.

It wasn't her mother though, or her brother, but it was the kind of phone call that she had been dreading. It was CJ calling to say, without preamble, that Sam had been in an accident. The road was wet. He took the turn too fast. He hit the pole. Died. On impact. No suffering. Sorry. Tuesday funeral. Please come. It all became disconnected in Donna's brain. Nothing CJ said made any sense. It was all meaningless syllables strung loosely together. Sam was alive.

He had to be alive. The baby was still the rest of the night, as if in mourning.

Donna showed up to the funeral at the National Cathedral early. The President was there, and Leo, and CJ, and Toby, and Charlie, and Will. She went around and hugged all of them, and they all told her congratulations, they had no idea, she looked wonderful, she needed to send them birth announcements. When she asked were Josh was, Toby whispered that he was in the men's room. Without considering the ramifications, she went to check on him. She had taken care of him since that night his father died, she wasn't about to stop now.

When she got into the bathroom, she could hear his dry heaving. Slowly she walked over to the stall he was camped out in, and leaned over him. Gently she rubbed his back in big circles with one hand, the other supporting herself against the wall. The memories of doing that flooded her mind, but she was determined not to cry. She had cried enough in the past eight months for eight lifetimes, and she wasn't going to make Josh feel even worse. At that moment she wanted nothing more than to take away all of his pain, tell him that it would be okay again, and that she wasn't going to leave him, not this time.

The look in his eyes when he saw her was one of complete and utter devastation. He asked when; she answered. He asked who; she didn't say. He told her to go, and she did. She understood, she would be as pissed as hell if he had chosen that moment to announce that Amy was pregnant. Just before the door to the bathroom swung shut, she heard another round of vomiting and wished she could do the same. Instead she felt cold, like she would never be warm again.

The service was nice, the kind of thing that was appropriate, but Donna had a feeling that Sam would have preferred to have had his ashes scattered in the Pacific. He once told her about how he used to swim as a boy, where he grew up on the beaches. Being buried in a mausoleum in suburban DC seemed too cold for him. The lunch out afterward was pleasant, if not strained. Donna couldn't bring herself to look at Josh, and he had no interest in looking at her. So she toyed with her food and made small talk with Will. Donna left the restaurant without saying good-bye to Josh. She left again. It was the only thing that she could really do.

The days were slow and the nights slower after Sam's funeral. She would lay awake trying to figure out how she was going to explain to her child that there would be no daddy. She knew that she could never marry anyone; not now. She was in love with one man who wanted nothing to do with her now, and rightfully so, and was carrying the child of a man who had died. She was convinced that no one would want her after everything that had happened. She regretted that this child would not have the kind of relationship that she had with her father, but perhaps it was for the best. She didn't want some random gomer in this baby's life because she was desperate or horny or whatever drove her into the arms of jackass Republicans.

She knew that she wasn't go into labor on her due date. She had been born five days after and her brother was nearly two weeks early. But on December first, eight days past her due date, she knew that this was the day. She was going to meet her child. And it terrified her. The pain was already unimaginable, and she knew that she couldn't do it alone, she wasn't strong enough in the moment. She had planned on giving birth alone, no one there for her, because she was Donna Moss who had survived years in the White House, and she could damn well give birth without someone holding her hand. When another contraction hit her she cried out for her mother, the one woman who could help her; the woman who was so far away.

Her first phone call was to Josh. He would come and help her. It didn't matter that it was a little past two in the morning. He was her knight in shining armor who would save the day. He would hold her and tell her that everything was forgiven and that he loved her and that he wanted to be the father to this child. He had to. It was the only possibility that Donna could handle in that moment. He had never let her down before, and this hour was much darker than any previous hour she had shared with him.

His reaction wasn't at all what she was expecting. He said that he couldn't. It wasn't his responsibility; not his problem. He was not going to support her and some gomer's bastard. She screamed for him to leave her baby out of it. He demanded to know why she would call him of all people, as Amy talked in the background. She said that she hated him, that she didn't know why she ever cared about him; why she put up with his shit for so long. He said that he should have sent her back to Wisconsin like the little girl she was. She yelled at him to go back to fucking Amy. He told her to go fuck another gomer like the whore she was and only this time have the brains to be on the pill. She then hung up the phone and called for a cab. She was all the more determined to go and do this alone. After all, she thought that she had might as well get used to it. Tears would come later, disguised as a reaction to the pain, her wails of a broken heart under the veil of a much more noble pain.

At four-nineteen in the afternoon Donna gave birth to an eight pound, thirteen ounce baby girl. Donna named her Remember December, partially for a line in the song that Sam would hum every once and a while, and for her birthday. It was obvious to Donna that this child was most definitely her father's daughter. She had his bright blue eyes and his dark hair. Everything about Mem screamed Sam, and Donna thought that it was fitting. What punishment would it be if Mem looked like her? So she held her daughter, their daughter, and marveled at her. Her perfect little mouth, her impossibly long eyelashes, her bitty fingers, everything was prefect, even though the situation was infinitely imperfect.

On Christmas Eve, Donna went to visit the White House. CJ had invited her, and really Donna didn't want to go, but propriety forced her to. When she got past security, she saw Josh talking to some young woman, and the young woman was writing it all down. Donna wanted to throw up: she had been replaced by a voluptuous, brunette who was a co-ed about two seconds ago. She hated how this new girl wore red, and how Josh seemed to be a little too friendly with her.

Josh saw Donna, he made eye contact with her, but kept walking away. Gathering up her pride she made her way to CJ. No one really bothered her, not with the gleaming scarlet letter upon her chest. The exception to that were Ed and Larry who said a shy hello and asked how she and the baby were doing. It was too easy, too harmless… she couldn't let herself be lulled into a false sense of security. The car seat was draped in blankets; no one had any idea of the startling resemblance to a certain former Senior Counselor.

Carol saw her first, practically jumping out of her seat. Before Carol could hug Donna, CJ came out of her office to see what the commotion was. She didn't want them to see Sam's daughter yet, not while they were out in public. Behind closed doors, maybe, but even that prospect scared her to death. She had no idea where to even start explaining, and they would all hate her for not telling Sam about the baby. If he had known, he would have been over the moon, and it wouldn't have taken long at all for everyone to know that Sam Seaborn was going to be a father.

Donna couldn't believe that of all the people who worked in the West Wing, Josh had to be sitting on CJ's couch, obviously worked up over something. The look that he gave her was one of icy rage. If CJ noticed it, she didn't say anything. Instead she asked how the baby was doing and if Donna had plans for Christmas. Josh just looked anywhere but where Donna and the car seat were, especially when CJ invited Donna and Mem to Christmas Dinner at her house. It was going to be a good time, she said, just like the old days and she would love to have the baby there. Josh reluctantly nodded when CJ shot him a look.

When CJ asked to see the baby, Donna responded that she was a fussy sleeper and liked it dark, and they had a rough night last night. So sorry, maybe when she was awake, or when she wasn't so temperamental about sleeping. Donna left soon after, pleading that she was tired, that Mem should be back home, and that she still had a ton of things to do. CJ asked once again if she would come to Christmas dinner, it would be at four, she didn't have to stay long, and it really would mean so much to have everyone together again after everything that had happened this year. Donna agreed, wondering if she could keep Mem's car seat draped, but knowing it was impossible to do so. She had avoided the inevitable for now.

That night, after she put Mem down, Donna got out The Art and Artistry of Alpine Skiing. It had been her tradition, and she wasn't about to give up the last pieces of what normalcy she once had. She didn't want to think about the Christmas Eve she spent in the ER, or when Leo was in front of the committee, or when she was on vacation with Jack Reese. She wanted to remember those first Christmases, when they were transitioning into the White House, and a year later when he gave her that very book with its wonderful note. The words now rang hollow; an echo from a former life.

The next day she stayed up through Mem's nap to make the blonde brownies that she brought to every party she went to; somewhere along the line they had become Josh's favorite. Loyalties ran deep. It didn't matter that she was exhausted, it was what she was supposed to do, what she needed to do in some part of her soul. The irony of the fact that Sam hated nuts didn't escape her. He had always liked her sugar cookies.

She got all dressed up for the first time since Mem was born, deliberately not wearing red or blue. They were colors tied up in memories she wanted to so desperately forget. The girl in the little red dress wasn't her any more than the girl in the midnight blue ball gown. She was now the mom, the quasi-librarian, the outsider. No, she was all business in her black knee length skirt and violet sweater. She didn't see the harm in keeping her toenails covered in raspberry stain. Another one of her little secrets. Funny how she once said she'd never lie to him again.

Donna knew that when Mem woke up half a block from CJ's house that this was going to be it. She wasn't going to be able to hide it anymore. Everyone would want to see her as soon as Donna walked into the door. Not that she blamed them, she would want to see their babies as well. After polite greetings and gentle prodding, Donna removed the blanket from the car seat, introducing Remember December to the world of the White House Senior Staff. The stunned silence was interminable and lasted until Josh asked if the baby's last name was Seaborn. His tone was something that she had never heard before. It was a variation on the voice he would use only with her, but now it was dully bitter, not his own, not their own. Donna answered Moss, and asked where she should put her coat. There was no use breaking down; she was beyond that.

Dinner was civil, if not forced. Everyone was trying to find their role in their shattered world. Donna met Josh's eye for a second and then look away. They had once been able to read each other's eyes. Now all she saw was a murky vastness, not that she blamed him. She picked at her food, her stomach in knots. Toby was darker than usual, but Sam was his younger brother. CJ talked, but her voice was laced in pity; Sam was her Sunshine Man. Will didn't say much, not wanting to get involved in something that was more than he could comprehend. Mem cooed innocently as Charlie made faces at her. In that moment, Donna wanted to strangle Amy with that red lace bra she was wearing the day that everything went to Hell.

When the baby started to fuss, Donna excused herself to feed her. The truth was that she was grateful for the reprieve from the dinner party from Hell. Deftly she unbuttoned her sweater, the irony not escaping her. She had once deftly unbuttoned her shirt, and that led to this moment. It was a blue shirt. With a red bra.

As soon as she thought that, Josh barged into the room. Donna made no move to cover her exposed breast, and he didn't demand that she do so. Tersely she asked him to leave, this was obviously an inopportune time. He screamed how dare she tell him what was opportune and what wasn't. How dare she sleep with Sam, and how dare she treat it like nothing. How dare she not tell him why she left him. Donna looked at him, detached, not really caring what he said. It didn't matter now. Then his voice dropped, and he demanded to know if Sam ever knew. She simply answered no. He called her a selfish bitch and she looked up at him, her jaw set in determination. She asked if it drove him insane that Sam had wanted her, that it was Sam who had kissed her, that it was Sam's clothes that decorated her bedroom, that it was Sam who had made her come over and over again? Obviously he didn't mind mixing business and pleasure, she knew that he had fucked Amy in the office on more than one occasion. He called her a whore again, and she countered that they called Anne Boleyn the great whore and look what her daughter became. The room became awkwardly still as he said one word: why. She didn't know which part of whole situation he meant, so she settled with saying that it was complicated.

Donna didn't see Josh again. It killed her that the last image of him was one of a bitter and worn out rage, one that was too human for the person who she once adored. He didn't say goodbye, and that was the part that hurt the most. Nothing mattered anymore, there was no reason for it to matter. Donna shifted Mem and sighed, and whispered that it would be fine, and not to worry, they were going to be fine. They didn't need Josh Lyman, and he certainly didn't need them. No matter how many times she said it, she couldn't convince herself that it was true.

The day after New Year, Donna got a package in the mail. It was an antique diamond ring with a note in Josh's handwriting saying that this was Sam's grandmother's engagement ring and that Mem, by right, should have it. Donna never threw away the note. Instead she tucked it away with all of the other things she had saved over the years. One day her daughter would have the ring, but never the note. The note would go with all the other things that she saved from the White House, the things that Remember would never know about. The things that could never be explained to someone who didn't live it, the things that made the past the past. Remember was the future.