IV.

"What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken."

― Virginia Woolf


"It was the music," Toby said, and this, at least, he felt sure about. Why and how, he couldn't have guessed at. What was all he had. "Josh was going out of his mind about the music."

"What music?"

"The Christmas music in the lobby. I've been hiring people to play there all month. Anything the musicians collect goes to whatever charity they pick, they play joyously on throughout the mornings and evenings, and in this way, I manage to keep the locals happy. You wouldn't believe the things I was accused of when there was no music last year. They called me the Grinch."

"I didn't hear any music today," Stanley Keyworth said.

"Yes, well, I canceled it." Toby pinched the bridge of his nose. "In light of, you know. Certain events."

"You canceled the music because of Josh?"

"Because he was clearly distraught at the Christmas party while Yo-Yo Ma was playing, yes."

"Distraught how?"

"How the hell should I know?" Toby demanded. Before Stanley could respond, Toby took a breath, adding: "I just mean that he was...I can't describe it. Shaking. Clearly in a great amount of pain. The song ended, and he stumbled out of there about as quickly as he could without actually sprinting."

"I see." Stanley glanced at his trainee, and she nodded, almost imperceptibly. "This was Friday, the same day that Josh had a meeting in the Oval Office?"

"I wasn't there," Toby said, "but yes."

"Okay. Now, to back up—when was the first time you remember Josh seeming angry about the music?"

"The very first day it was there. I'd hired a brass quintet," Toby answered, rubbing his forehead. "He was visibly uncomfortable and quite audibly irritated. I thought it was just a, I don't know, a Josh thing. He spends a decent chunk of time navigating his own neuroses. I assumed it would pass."

"This would have been about two, three weeks ago?" Stanley asked, rustling through a pile of paper sitting beside a folder. He had a notebook, too.

"Three weeks ago, yes."

"Before or after the pilot?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Before or after Captain Robert Cano committed suicide?" Stanley said, with an urgency that made Toby's stomach twist. He tried to think.

"Before," Toby decided, after several moments. "It was that same day, I think, but it was definitely before. It was morning, and Josh wasn't dealing with that background stuff until midday."

"Okay," Stanley said, exhaling softly. "Okay, Toby. That's important. Thank you."

"You're welcome," Toby said, although he wasn't sure for what. "I hope it's helpful."

"Very much so," Stanley said, checking his notes again. "Now, there was an incident in the bullpen on the nineteenth, I believe. C.J. Cregg says Josh yelled at everyone to keep the noise down. She also says you were there."

"I was. That was the first time I became truly concerned."

"Why was that?"

"There were bagpipes," Toby began, and Stanley winced. "Yes, I know, but they were cheap, and not half-bad, if you want to know my opinion, which I'm certain you don't. At any rate, Josh was riled up, yelling at me that they couldn't play in the lobby. He said he could hear the sirens all over the damn building."

"The sirens," Stanley said slowly.

"The sirens. He realized what he'd said and tried to cover himself. He said he meant the music."

"I'm sure he thought he did."

"He went to his office, and about thirty seconds later, he stuck his head back out and started shouting at everyone to shut up."

"That's not like Josh?"

"Nothing's like Josh," Toby muttered. "Josh moves at about five hundred miles per hour. The whole point of him is that you don't know what he's going to do next."

"So...it was like Josh, then? To randomly scream at his employees?"

Toby chewed on that one for a minute.

"Fine," he said, waving a hand. "It wasn't like Josh. He can be unpredictable—obnoxious, even—but he's not...he's doesn't snap that way. I've seen him unhinged. I've seen him fuck up on national television, more than once, simply because he couldn't quit running his mouth. I've seen him whine, and I've seen him sad, and I've seen him righteously pissed. I'd never seen him lose it before, though, if that's what you'd call it."

"Let me ask you this," Stanley said, regarding Toby with some interest. "What did you think was happening to Josh?"

"What do you mean?"

"You've been concerned for a little while now. Your deputy says you've mentioned Josh's behavior. You saw him shout in the bullpen, and you saw him deteriorating at this party, and I want to know what you thought about it."

"What I thought," Toby said, working to keep his voice from crescendoing, "is that this guy had a bullet in his chest six months ago, and we're all trying to carry on as if he's fine. Of course he's not fine. How could he be fine? I'm certainly not fine. I almost took a leave of absence, and I was just there, just sitting there with him, shouting for the ambulance. It's not like I got hit. It's not like these racist monsters tried to lynch me. And yet, Josh Lyman and the President and Charlie Young show up for work every day, and not for nothing, but maybe we shouldn't keep acting like that was the very best of ideas. If sometimes I can't—if I can't bear it, if it feels like this for me, what do you suppose it takes to get Josh through a day? How about the President of the United States? How about Charlie, this kid who just, what, fell in love with the wrong guy's daughter? How does he put on his tie and walk into this building every morning without wanting to burn it the hell down? That's what I wonder, every day. And when I saw Josh going through whatever that was at the Christmas party, all I could think then was it's about goddamn time."

The words seemed to ring throughout the quiet room, and as usual, Toby had started yelling before he'd consciously decided to. He knew what it sounded like, knew that maybe Stanley Keyworth would go back to Leo and report that the entirety of the White House senior staff needed immediate ATVA sessions of their own.

"Toby," Stanley said, leaning back in his chair, "I think you just might be right about that."

Toby nodded.

"You were with Josh when he got shot?"

"No, I just—I found him."

"And you called for help?"

"Yes."

"How long did you stay with him?"

"We rode with him to the hospital, the three of us. Sam, C.J., me. They let us cram into the ambulance rather than waste time trying to tell us it was against the rules."

"That must have been terrifying."

"I honestly don't remember most of it. I just remember all the blood," Toby said. It was true. There'd been so much of it, soaking Josh's clothes, and dripping on the floor, and running down C.J.'s temple, and smudged across Sam's neck, and staining the cuffs of Toby's shirt. Sometimes, he would still wake up choking on the smell, the viscous memory of it sticky against his palms.

"You said that you often feel it's too much to bear," Stanley said, staring directly at Toby. "It is too much, what Josh and the President and Charlie went through. What you all went through, Toby. It's not nothing. And it wasn't wrong of you to want a leave of absence."

"I didn't say it was wrong of me," Toby said, and looked away.

"No." Stanley's voice was still laced with that same calm intensity. "I guess you didn't."

They moved on. Toby answered five more questions about Josh and his slow unraveling over the past several weeks, including whether or not he'd known Josh and the suicidal pilot shared a birthday (no), and if he'd asked Josh how he cut his hand (also no, as Toby wasn't in the business of asking questions he didn't want the answers to). It could have been fifteen minutes or it could have been sixty: the time crawled by like it had something to prove, and when it was finally over, when Stanley Keyworth and Kaytha Trask had shaken his hand and sent him on his way, Toby felt as though he'd been wrung out like a sponge.

Going to retrieve Donna Moss was the worst part, though. Toby walked slowly, his hands in his pockets, watching his feet, dodging around the few staffers who were lucky enough to be at work on the Sunday before a holiday. He tried to concentrate on counting his steps.

Step, step, step. Four, five six. Step, step, step. Ten, eleven, twelve.

If he did that, if he did only that, he wouldn't have to think about Donna's wide-eyed face, cut clearly apart from the rest of that endless, bloody night. Toby had never seen someone shatter before. He'd never been responsible for that kind of devastation, so he didn't know, couldn't have known, what it would be like.

If Toby had known, he wouldn't have done it.

He hadn't been kind enough. Toby had been disconcertingly angry that there was a person left in the world who didn't know what it felt like to watch Josh Lyman dying. Donna had just been standing there in that waiting room, so breathlessly ignorant. Toby had almost hated her for it. He told her quickly, without fuss, because C.J. would have danced around it, because Sam still couldn't speak, because it needed to come from one of them, and as so often seemed to be the case, Toby could find the words.

So: Josh was hit.

Step, step, step. Step. Toby was losing count.

Hit with what?

Step, step step, step, step. Goddammit.

Donna Moss, from Madison, Wisconsin, with her sensible shoes and her earnest, bright charm, and her quick mouth. Quicker even than Josh's, sometimes. Toby had liked her, grudgingly, from the start. Something about the way Josh didn't impress her, not even when he puffed himself up and whipped out all of his best vocabulary words. Something about her good intentions and random trivia. Something about how Josh seemed to run smoother when she was around, how a quelling glare or hand on the elbow from her could bring his rapid boil back down to a simmer.

Yes, Toby had always liked Josh's assistant, who missed nothing and took very little shit, who could be flexible, ready to laugh, until a situation demanded more. And if Donna sometimes tripped right over her own naivete, if she was nervous, awkward, clumsy, unsure—she was also grounded, even endearing, in her way. Only two things really wrong with her, Toby had often thought.

One: she was oblivious to her own potential.

Two: she was badly disguising her ridiculous schoolgirl crush.

Toby didn't like to be made to notice another person's feelings. He didn't like that old cliché, the secretary trotting adoringly after her jackass of a boss. He didn't like all the coy banter, and he especially didn't like the idea of a woman as capable as Donna doodling little hearts around Josh's name. A woman like that—who deserved her? Certainly not an idiot like Josh Lyman.

He was shot, in the chest.

Toby had thought he understood all about Donna's feelings. He'd found them uncomplicated and silly. Inconvenient. Frustrating. Incomprehensible, especially on days when Josh was particularly, infuriatingly Josh-like.

And God, that night, with the blood itching against his fingernails, the shock of Josh falling forward on the sidewalk, the whine of the sirens, the bursting of glass, the pop-pop-pop of gunfire (why did it never sound like the world ending—why, always, did Toby first think of fireworks?), the bitter exhaustion of waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting: Toby hadn't understood anything, least of all that things could get worse.

I don't understand. Is…is it serious?

Serious, Toby had thought, blinking at Donna in the waiting room. Is it serious? He'd been too tired to move. Too tired to breathe. His mind had been fuzzy, skipping back again and again to Josh, hands clasped to his chest, staring up at Toby with wordless fear. That same fear had seemed to be spreading through Toby; he could taste it, could feel it pumping through his veins.

Yes. It's critical.

Of course he'd had to tell her. Of course she'd had to know. But he could have been kinder, Toby thought to himself now, eyes fixed on his scuffed shoes. Why hadn't he gotten up and just put a hand on the poor girl's shoulder, the way C.J. had done (so tentatively, as though with the slightest pressure, Donna might crack)? Why had nobody been able to really look at her?

It was because they all knew, Toby realized. In that moment, all of them knew Donna's heart, and none of them could bear the weight of it.

Toby had just been so tired, and the night was already fizzling into a bleary dawn, and he'd seen—when Donna brought her hand to her mouth, when she collapsed into that chair, when she sat there for hours, unblinking, until an eerie calm descended over her—that there were many things about perky, uncomplicated, doe-eyed Donna Moss Toby had yet to learn. He'd watched her later as she stood at the window of the operating theater. A crush, Toby had assumed for nearly two years. Something easy to shrug off, roll your eyes at, ignore, find pitiable. So obvious.

Except Donna Moss, until that very moment, had been fooling them all. She was more clever than Toby would ever have given her credit for, hiding behind the gigging, hiding behind all the back-and-forth and straightening of ties and arching of eyebrows. A crush, they'd all thought. Just a little crush. Nothing to get excited about. No alarm bells sounding; no transferring her to a new department. A little crush like that, anyone could forget, and Donna, after all, was young. She had a date every other weekend and she never let her gaze linger on Josh for even a few seconds longer than was appropriate. A crush, Sam and C.J. and Toby had all agreed: harmless, reallyjust wait until she meets another guy who can keep up with her, someone her own ageshe could have her pickJosh is utterly oblivious, anyway, as usualof course she'll get over itthis is nothing, nothing at all.

Toby had paused there in the doorway, watching Donna's reflection in the glass as she pulled at her White House ID, watching the way she couldn't stop watching the surgery. It looked like she was holding her breath.

Donna, Toby had known with abrupt and painful clarity, did not have a crush on Josh. That was the wrong word altogether.

Toby should have been kinder, in that waiting room. He should have gotten out of his chair.

Back in the present, on an unbearably sunny December day, Toby finally found himself in the policy bullpen. The door to Josh's office was closed, and Donna was sitting at her desk, staring at her computer with her arms folded tightly across her chest. Toby took a breath and went to stand beside her.

"Hi," he said, clasping his hands behind his back. "They're ready for you." Donna looked up at him without flinching, and rose to her feet.

"Which room?" Donna asked, squaring her shoulders and smoothing her sweater. Toby recognized this part, the gearing up. He'd seen her do it before, when Josh was sending her off to the Hill with some impossible task, when there was a pile of work and exactly zero time in which to do it, when there were Republicans wandering through the West Wing, when Josh had been recovering and Donna had seen fit to write (and enforce) an actual list of rules. That look on her face meant only one thing. Donna was spoiling for a fight, and she was damn well going to win.

So many things Toby didn't understand. He didn't understand about guns, or that pervasive fear, or how to help shoulder Sam's guilt, or how to ease C.J.'s numb fury, or how to support Charlie, or how to possibly communicate to Josh even a fraction of the fierce respect and loyalty Toby held for him. Toby didn't understand how to stop hating himself for how much everything hurt. He didn't understand why the sadness wouldn't go away. He didn't understand why, period.

But Toby thought he was beginning to understand a lot about love—namely, that it could be found in the most unusual places. In a gruff handshake. In music. In silence. In pointless rules. In grand, sweeping gestures, and forgotten, dusty corners. In worry. In the flash of a too-wide, too-quick smile. In guilt, and fury, and sorrow.

In Donna Moss and all the things she had to hide. She was the one who had guessed, Leo had told Toby the other day. Donna says there's something seriously wrong with Josh.

A crush. Harmless. Nothing, nothing at all.

"Toby?" Donna asked. Toby had just been staring at her, hands still clasped behind his back, jaw clenched far too tight. "Which room?"

"I'm sorry," he said, shifting from foot to foot. And then, because somebody needed to say it: "Donna, we're all lucky to have you. Especially Josh." Donna stared at him with those wide, guarded eyes. For an instant, her determination flickered.

"Thanks," she whispered, and hugged him. Toby meant to put his arms around her, but she pulled back before he could, turned away, and asked, for the third time, "Which room?"

"Come on," Toby said, with as much kindness as he could muster. "I'll walk you."

They set off together down the hall, Donna trailing just a few steps behind. They didn't speak, but that was all right. There was nothing left to say.