Disclaimers:
Inspired by characters and situations created by Aaron Sorkin,Thomas Schlamme, John Wells, NBC, Warner Brothers Television Production Inc., and who knows what others. Do not distribute for profit or without notification please. As good as I can make it and not as good as I'd like.
Author's note: a friend tonight was buzzed on a glass of wine and mention allergies. So here we are. Includes quotes from episodes "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Part II," "Seventeen People," and "Drought Conditions." Use of these quotes is governed by fair use provisions of the copyright code. "Ave Maria" English lyrics and Hebrew proverbs courtesy of Google search and the World Wide Web.
What She Waited For
by ReverendKilljoy
Sunday morning.
"Donna," Josh said, softly. He wanted to shout, to call to her as he had so many times when they were working together. He wanted to feel the need and the passion well up from his toes and rush through him, bursting forth as it had before, "Donna!"
But this was a tender moment, a moment too long overdue. He could no more shout now than he could fly. He reached his hand towards her, but stopped short, admiring even now how amazing she looked. He wanted this moment to last forever.
She lay, quiet, waiting for him. His world stopped. Her hair was exquisite. Her lips were glossed a rosy hue. She waited, lying there for him, and all he could think was how perfect she was in every detail, how long he had waited to say these words, how much it meant to be saying them now...
The day they met
"Hi." He looked at her expectantly.
"Hi." She was friendly but slightly guarded, hiding insecurity behind charm.
"Who are you?" He'd meant to say something flippant, something charming. She might be a contributor, or someone's niece, someone's daughter. Instead, for the first of oh so many times, he'd popped off with the first thing to pop into his thinking brain from the reptilian brainstem.
"I'm Donna Moss. Who are you?" She was so matter of fact. So economical, and yet slightly askew.
"I'm Josh Lyman." Did he imagine the moment of panic behind her smiling eyes?
"Ah."
If he'd been honest, he could say he'd been attracted to her right then. He wasn't that honest with himself for years to come, but that's where it had started. Not love at first sight, but interest. Attraction. Even compulsion. But not yet love.
Sunday morning
Alabaster skin. She joked with him about it, but it was true. A fine spray of freckles over her nose, across her shoulders, but otherwise, huge expanses of amazing pale skin, radiant, translucent. Luminous. He could feel the cool heat of her skin flowing towards him, raising the hairs on his arms.
"I'm sorry," he said softly, with a half grin that said he was really sorry and not just trying to get on her good side, "I'm sorry it took us so long to get here, to get to where I could say this. I know it's not easy for you to lie there and listen to me talk, but I need to tell you this. It's not… easy, for me to talk to you, you know. Not about anything important."
He reached out a hand and moved an errant wisp of hair off her forehead.
"It means a lot to me that I'm getting the chance to say it now."
Six years previously
"Does this make you feel superior? Yes… you are better than my old boyfriend." She continued to sort papers, and her face gave nothing away. Her words, however, slipped under all his defenses, all the banter, all the posturing. They stunned, they almost hurt they were so pure and powerful.
"I'm- I'm just saying," he said, unable to conceal his incredulousness, "if you were in an accident I wouldn't stop for a beer." He wondered for a split second if he had just crossed a line, if the part of his brain that did the thinking was taking a backseat to the part that just was, the "reptilian brainstem" which he liked to blame for all primal behavior.
"If you were in an accident I wouldn't stop for red lights." She stood. What? She would what? She stepped towards him, her face set in an unreadable expression. "thanks for taking me back."
She passed him and the smell and sight and taste of her hung in the air and burned his throat like whiskey as he tried to breathe.
"Oh, and the flowers are beautiful."
Sunday morning.
"I know we have a lot to do today, and it seems like I've been talking your ear off. I promise I won't keep you much longer. I just wanted to tell you, I wasn't ready before, and then so much happened… I just want to say I'm glad I'm finally getting a chance to tell you this."
He took a breath, and the words poured out from him like rain over desert sands.
"I love you. I'm sorry for ever letting anyone think I didn't, most of all you. I'm sorry for fighting this and for thinking that it mattered what anyone thought but you. I love you. I've loved you so long it hurts, and so much it's made me more than a little crazy and deeply that my heart won't keep beating if I don't hear that you love me too."
The previous Thursday night at the party
"Hey Donna, thank you." He looked at her and wanted to say more, but he didn't know where to start. Around them the DNC fundraiser was finally winding down.
"It was nothing. Rafferty was bad for Russell too. Plus I got to drag you into a closet."
He blinked. Was she smiling or smirking?
"I've been nursing that little fantasy for years," he admitted with a grin. "But usually without a draft of the healthcare initiative."
She took another quick drink of her champagne and looked hard at him.
"Really?" It wasn't a complex question, but it was a complex question.
He thought about how to spin it, how to put that twist everything had with them. He didn't.
"Yes."
"I sublet my place during the campaign. I'm with the staff, over at the St. Regis."
There was no subtext. There was no fugue. She was just… talking to him. He looked at her with what he feared was not his brightest expression. "Are you?"
She nodded, and looking a little nervous, she jotted something down on one of her ubiquitous note cards and handed it to him along with her empty glass. "I have to pick up my allergy prescription at the 24-hour, but after that I'm going back to the hotel. Good night, Josh."
"Yeah. Good night." He watched silently as she nervously took his nearly full champagne glass out of his hand and drained it quickly. He was still puzzled as she left, nodding to Will and Kate on the way out.
He looked at the note card in his hands. Despite her distinctive penmanship, he could easily make out her note.
"Rm. 413. Big closet. Give me an hour. – D"
"Is our... relationship about to change?" he remembered asking an hour earlier, after she dragged him into the closet to discuss Rafferty's plan. Apparently, he thought.
Sunday morning
"You don't have to say it, you know," he said at last. "I know. I wish I could say that I'd always known, but I didn't. Now I do. I'm glad, at least, that I figured it out."
He looked at her, the light lifting the golden gleams from her hair, her lashes soft against her cheeks, her lips taunting him with their full softness.
"Thank you. Always."
He sat down, and listened.
Friday early morning after the party
"Sir, I'm very sorry but there really was nothing we could do." The manager wrung his hands and watched as Josh stood, his face a blank slate, before him. "Miss Moss had a do not disturb, sir."
"Yeah," Josh said. His eyes would not fix, but stared into the middle distance.
"Mr. Lyman?" Josh turned, a marionette in the hands of a novice. It was the police detective. "We won't be sure till they get everything to the lab, but it looks like she had a reaction to some medication, or possibly a mixture of medications and alcohol. It wouldn't have made any difference if you'd arrived earlier."
"She has allergies." That seemed very important to Josh. He struggled to concentrate, and the detective swam into focus. "She had to get her pills tonight, from the 24-hour."
"Yes, sir." The detective looked at him, and put a hand on his arm. "Mr. Lyman, is there someone who can come and get you, sir? I don't think you should drive tonight. Can we call anyone for you?"
"Toby. Uh, Toby is… Oh." He stopped, remembering Toby, bleeding and ruffled, shouting at him to get out. "I don't know what to do."
"Don't worry, Mr. Lyman, we'll get everything settled for you, sir."
Josh didn't fight as they sat him in a chair and worked out what to do with him. He did not see the ambulance being loaded, but he saw it pull away. There were no sirens, there were no flashing lights. It just rolled away. It just rolled away.
"I don't know what to do," he repeated. No one was listening to him.
Sunday morning.
He sat, and listened.
"Ave Maria, gratia plena
Dominus tecum
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta maria, Mater Dei
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus
Nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen."
"Today we do one of the most difficult things of all to do, we gather to mourn the passing of a young woman, a sister, a daughter, a friend, taken before her time to the embrace of the Almighty…"
There was more. In his ears and in his heart, the song played on:
"Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee
Blessed are thee among women
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God
Pray for us sinners
Now, and at the hour of our death.
Amen."
In his jacket pocket, over his scar, over his heart, Josh's hand found two pieces of paper. One of course, a bright index card, still bore the graceful chaos of distinctive penmanship. Someday it would be worn smooth, its lines visible only to memory from constant carrying and the course of many tears. The other paper contained a neatly penned proverb in Hebrew, with a translation on the other side by Tobias Ziegler:
"God did not create woman from man's head,
that he should command her,
Nor from his feet,
that she should be his slave,
But rather from his side,
that she should be near his heart."
"Goodbye, Donnatella Moss." Josh closed his eyes. "Oh, and the flowers are beautiful."
The day they met.
Josh shook his head slightly. "Donna, this is a campaign for the Presidency, and there's nothing I take more seriously than that. This can't be a place where people come to find their confidence and start over."
"Why not?" Was she too naïve to see the brush-off or was she too stubborn to admit it?
"I'm sorry?" He bet he'd never say that to her again.
"Why can't it be those things?" Was this how it was going to be, her constantly challenging him?
He tried to keep from grinning. Just let her wait and see.
end-