A Good Canary
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: strong R
Word Count: 2034
Summary: 'They like to laugh about how lost Josh would be without her. She laughs too, a false and empty laugh, because she really doesn't find it very funny at all. Actually, when she thinks about it, it's the saddest thing she has ever heard.' ( Post - S2 "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen," AU)
Author's Notes: This is my first stab at West Wing fanfiction, so be gentle. This fic isn't an upper and is a different kind of characterization and a different kind of outlook at the relationship between Josh and Donna and what could have disastrously have been. That said, this isn't pretty and is rather bleak. Fair warning, is all I'm saying. On that cheerful note, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy!
(I learn my name; I write with a number two pencil; I work up to my potential; I earn my meat. I come when called; I jump when you circle the cherry; I sing like a good canary; I come when called; I come, that's all.
Send it up on fire, death before dawn)
Big-budget movies and bad TV melodrama have led her to believe that when the world ends it's a big-scale disaster.
They're wrong.
When the world ends, no one else happens to notice. It's a slow and gradual process and Donna is pretty sure she's getting close to the point where there's nothing left in her life that can erode into something wrong and ruined.
She always manages to be wrong somehow. This really isn't an exception to the rule.
She dropped out of college to support the man she loved. That went to hell and she was left alone, without a degree.
She popped up in politics and now supports a man she might just love.
If it's true what they say about history and how it has the penchant to repeat itself, she really should have some cause for concern.
It's raining and that's not surprising because good weather is a wasted commodity when days and nights are spent indoors.
It's early and for the rest of the working world, the workday has yet to start. It's all commutes and coffees and front page of the New York Times for the next half hour, but Donna is sitting behind her desk, twirling a pencil in the air.
"Did you know," she starts, speaking in the empty office, "that until 1933 Martha's Vineyard was missing the apostrophe on all official US maps?"
"Did you know that I'm not listening?" her boss answers.
She has always respected her boss. She thinks Josh is a good man with good ideas and could make a good woman happy with a good life someday.
She's not quite sure when the objective became the subjective and Josh was no longer a good man who could make a good woman happy, but rather, just a man that could satisfy her.
She knows one of the reasons. And it is moderately embarrassing to think about. The other is just depressing and equally difficult to dwell on, so she doesn't.
She hadn't found him particularly attractive when she first met him, sitting at a desk that wasn't supposed to be hers and being interrogated at a speed she thought was illegal in all 50 states, as well as the nation's capital. His hair was a mess, the hairline receding. His shirt was rumpled and tired and his abs could use a bit of work.
Then just as they are all getting into the swing of things under the Bartlet administration she has to go and dream about him fucking her over his desk.
It's all hell and hand baskets and Armageddon-esque from there.
She realizes she's in love with him in some kind of cheap soap operatic, climatic cliché after he's shot in the chest and the hospital waiting room closes in on her.
Lunchtime rolls around and there's still rain and she's leaning up against the doorjamb of his office, arms folded across her chest and his feet are resting on his desk.
"No fish. I don't want the fish. I hate that fishy smell. Get me a steak."
"You know, really, really fresh fish is almost odorless. It only smells fishy when it's not stored right and it starts oxidizing and doing all kinds of yummy bacterial things."
"That's gross."
"I know, right?"
"Get me a steak."
There's reported flooding in parts of Virginia.
They like to laugh about how lost Josh would be without her. She laughs too, a false and empty laugh, because she really doesn't find it very funny at all.
Actually, when she thinks about it, it's the saddest thing she's ever heard.
Senator So-and-So from Such-and-Such state has been withholding information. It's not a good day.
Josh says that all he wants is the truth and like a bad, overplayed comedy act she tells him, Jack Nicholson style, that he can't handle the truth and he rolls his eyes and starts again.
He says he wants the truth, the naked truth. Instead of answering him, she tells him that the phrase 'the naked truth' dates back to some Roman poet named Harold or Horace or something and he wrote about how Truth and Falsehood went to a river and decided to go swimming and stripped off their clothes. Falsehood left the river first, taking Truth's clothes and Truth chose to go naked rather than to wear the clothing left behind.
"What, have you been reading Mother Goose's cracked out tales for the late night set again?" he asks.
The phone rings and she answers it.
He gets shot and he breaks and she's supposed to help put him back together again because that's her job.
He acts stoic and she acts like this isn't a big deal and somewhere along the line resentment builds up between the two of them: an invisible resentment they both pretend doesn't exist.
If this was the kind of story where happy endings are real and glass slippers fit and all that other maudlin bullshit, their story would have ended in a hospital room with declarations of love and promises of everlasting devotion among the IVs and bland hospital food.
This isn't that kind of story.
The first time they fuck the word 'mistake' is on both their minds, like the proverbial elephant in the corner of the room.
It's short and messy and a strange, awkward tangle of limbs and she bites her lip when she comes because saying anything would be giving him too much.
There are empty beer bottles on her coffee table and her panties are in the hallway.
He is bigger than she expected and it hurts and they don't use a condom and she doesn't think of this until the afternoon of the next day as she swallows more aspirin than is generally recommended.
She calls it a moment of weakness and swears it will never happen again.
This is politics. You're supposed to lie.
The next time they fuck he tries to keep quiet, but it's kind of in vain, because he comes with her name shouted in what sounds like a tragic mix of triumph and terror and trepidation.
He rips her pantyhose and she's vaguely irritated over that fact.
There's nothing romantic about this. And she'd be lying if she said she wasn't disappointed.
If insanity is repeating the same action over and over again hoping for a different outcome, she wonders what they call sabotaging a good thing for no other reason than that she can.
It sounds like madness. And maybe, if she reads between the intentionally blurred lines, she'd call it what it really is: a sad desperation for a change.
She thought sex was supposed to be about intimacy. After the first two times, she gets that it's not, at least not for them. They've been doing the intimacy act since day one: crowding each other's personal space, butting in on personal lives they have no right in entering.
Josh got shot and fell apart. And Donna isn't as good at putting things back together as she thought.
He is as demanding in bed as he is in the office.
Like that, Donna. Right there…don't stop. Fuck, more, Donna, yeah, that's it.
He is as proud and cock-sure as he is in the halls of the West Wing. He's loud like she expected, but when he shouts her name it makes her moan in a different kind of way.
He's as much an overachiever as he has always been in every aspect of his life. It's not surprising.
What is surprising is the idea of necessity and how it's come to define their relationship, working and otherwise.
I need you, he'll say, right before he pushes in. I need you, he'll pant, always strained and kind of tired. I need you.
She wonders if he's aware of what he's saying or if it's just some mindless, pre-orgasmic rambling.
She wants to tell him that need and love aren't the same thing and it's dangerous to confuse the two. Need is only one-sided. And love, she likes and hates to think, can never work that way.
Things change because Josh got shot and Donna is in love and instead of dealing with it they try to fuck it away. It's the clichéd band-aid on the bullet wound and it's all pretty close to hemorrhaging.
The banter quits being banter and becomes barbed insults aimed to hurt and suddenly they're no longer laughing and she throws files on his desk without a hint of humor or hubris.
They all talk about them. They all speculate. She hears herself being called 'Josh's Donna' and she's pretty sure they mean it in the property rights sort of sense.
She's skinny and bony and her legs are too long and get caught in the sheets. Their hipbones meet at a painful angle.
She comes with her legs wrapped around his waist, with the hybrid of his name and the word 'no' gasped in his ear.
He flips her over, on her knees, before she has time to react. He drives in hard and her elbows buckle and her forehead misses the headboard by mere inches.
He comes and collapses next to her.
"CJ knows," he says.
"Of course she does."
"Did you tell her?"
"Yes, Josh. I told the Press Secretary that I'm fucking my boss, who just so happens to be the Deputy Chief of Staff. I figured we could give the whole Bill and Monica thing a run for their money."
"Shut the fuck up, Donna."
He leaves.
The last time they fuck there's nothing romantic or kind about it. She'd call it a punishment but it seems a bit too severe.
He tells her he hates her, over and over again: an angry whisper in her ear, his teeth biting down on the sensitive skin.
It makes her shudder and she wants to cry because as his voice gets more and more desperate she knows he means just the opposite.
The walk through the halls feels longer than usual, charged with a quiet kind of dread that's more foreshadowing than anything else.
She arrives at his office to find cardboard boxes and newspapers and Josh, packing up his office.
"What are you doing?"
"You didn't see the papers." It's not really a question, but really just a statement of the obvious and Donna wonders when the apathy became a mainstay in his voice.
"No. Why?"
He passes her the front page and she reads the headline before she holds the paper between her hands.
The picture is embarrassing. It's not particularly condemning; they're in front of his condo, his hand on the small of her back, gazing into the distance while her own face is turned in towards him.
He looks tired. She looks positively enamored with him. It's humiliating.
Donna doesn't have a job anymore. Donna doesn't have a boss to report to. Donna doesn't even have a lover to call.
Donna is alone.
(Donna got rid of the apostrophe on the back of his name.)
She kind of gets it now. She gets that for awhile there she wasn't even Donna anymore. She was Josh's mistress, Josh's whore. She was Josh's. Nothing more, and it was never really supposed to end up like this. Not between the two of them.
(She's not Josh's Donna anymore. They're no longer Josh&Donna, all in one breath. They're not superiors and subordinates. It's just Donna. And it's just Josh. It's just right.)
She puts down the paper and stares at the phone.
It all has ended. With a wry smile she stares out the window.
It's time to create another world to wreck.
(Send it up on fire, death before dawn)
- "Canary" Liz Phair