AUTHOR: witchofnovember
CHARACTERS: Josh/Donna
EPISODE: "Gaza"
CATEGORY: Drama
RATING: G
SUMMARY: Josh sits at Donna's bedside after the Gaza explosion.
DISCLAIMER: Aaron Sorkin is a genus and a linguistic musician – All kudos to him for developing these characters... they are all his.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I tend to like "missing scenes" fic more than anything else and was intrigued by Bradley Whitford's acting in this episode. So much was left unsaid verbally, but expressed beautifully in his face. Other stories will continue where this one ends.
This is probably going to work itself into a prequel for my story "Photographs" which is also a work in progress.
RED LIGHTS
"Donna, I want you to know that I didn't stop for any red lights..."
Josh Lyman looked down at the blonde lying on the bed, so still and quiet, and realized the woman in front of him was so very different from the one who had left him days before.
"I really didn't stop, I swear. I drove straight to Reagan from the White House. I didn't even stop at my apartment. I think I must have broken every land speed record and every traffic law in the District," his jovial tone was an attempt to coax her into consciousness from that deep dark place he knew so well. Maybe if he got her angry enough, she'd wake up and chastize him in that Donna-esque way she had. But there was a serious tenor to his words as they were true - he hadn't stopped until he was by her side, here in a hospital 3,000 miles away from Washington, D.C.
He thought back to the moment CJ told him of the bombing. He hadn't stopped since he saw the terrified look in her eyes. He hadn't stopped since the thought crossed his mind that he had been the one to send Donna to Gaza and it was his fault she might be dying or worse, already dead. He didn't stop scanning the news coverage for a glimpse of her face, calling the authorities and the hospital for news of her status, screaming at the top of his lungs for heads of everyone involved in the attack.
He hadn't stopped when Leo looked him in the eye and told him that if he needed to be "somewhere else" they all would understand. God, that look. Leo knew. He knew something Josh didn't even know until the moment that Toby looked up from his phone call with Andi and said that it had been Donna's car in the Codel motorcade that was the target...that no one knew who was alive and who was dead. But Josh didn't stop. He didn't stop when he made the decision to be a man, rather than a political operative, and that was the most shocking thing of all.
He didn't stop when he got to Reagan and pulled rank at the Luftansa counter, behaving in a way that would have caused Donna to call the florist and order flowers for the entire airline. God knows who got bumped from the completely booked flight, but he was on it, flying over the Atlantic to Germany and still he didn't stop.
He didn't stop while he was sitting on the plane going through every e-mail she had sent him from the Codel trip. Donna's e-mails read the same way she talked - rambling, quirky and completely endearing. As he read them over, he heard her voice in his head, gossipy, wistful and even, momentarily, independent. But her voice was countered by the other voice - his own voice - telling him that he couldn't stop because if he stopped, he might remember that he was the reason she was bleeding and in pain.
He didn't stop when he got to the hospital and terrorized the nurses, pacing in the hallway until the doctor told him the prognosis was good, that the surgery had gone well and she should recover. He didn't stop until he was seated in the chair at her bedside and looking at her, her blonde hair matted and bloody and yet still beautiful, her face scarred and pale and his heart pounding in his chest because Donna was lying unconscious in a bed in front of him. He had spent the last 2 hours alternating between sitting in the chair across from her bed, staring at her silently, and sitting at the edge of her bed rambling on about everything and nothing at the same time. The whole time, he didn't stop thinking that she had almost died, that he was the reason why, and that, by the grace of God, she was still with him.
"I didn't stop, Donatella. I just want you to know that."
When he wasn't babbling on in Donna's ear, Josh wondered if what he was feeling was the same thing Donna had gone through years ago during those hours she sat in George Washington, waiting to see if he would live or die after the shooting in Rosslyn. In all these years, she had never told him about those hours - choosing instead to remember only the fact that he had survived and recovered. But Josh knew better - he knew that she had spent many hours in the waiting room of the hospital, and then by his bedside. Many of those hours had been spent with Sam, and in a night of drunken "bonding", Sam had told him everything Josh couldn't remember about that night and the many nights after. Good old Sam. He knew, too - the same thing Leo knew, the thing that Josh had never been man enough to acknowledge.
Sam told him of Donna's vigil in the waiting room, her position at his bedside, her refusal to eat or sleep or take care of herself unless Josh was taken away for tests and she was physically separated from him by the hospital staff. She hovered over the nurses and even yelled at the First Lady when it was suggested she take some time for herself, to go home and shower and handle her own personal matters. "I've never seen anything like it," Sam admitted, "She was incredible, Josh, just incredible." Sam told him of their late night talks at Josh's bedside when Donna, at the same time vulnerable and stronger than any of the rest of them, refused to give up hope or let the rest of them do so either.
Josh had never really thanked her for those hours. He remembered that in his drug induced stupor he knew she was there and her presence was once of the few things that kept him connected to the conscious world. She would talk to him - hell, Donna couldn't go 5 minutes without talking, normally - and while he couldn't understand her words, her voice was something Josh would never forget. He would try to walk past the pain in his mind and grab onto the sound of her voice, pulling himself out of the dark place that threatened to swallow him whole.
He looked down at her pale face, made even paler by the whiteness of the hospital bed, and wondered how she could have survived such despair. He had barely been able to maintain his composure on the flight to Germany, his heart pounding at the thought of what he would find when he finally got to the base hospital. Contemplating the possibility that she would be... it filled him with terror.
Josh reached out and took her hand in his and swore to himself that just as he hadn't stopped for red lights, he wasn't going to stop holding on to her.
"No red lights, Donna...."