Author's Note: Hi everyone! I had originally planned to hold off another day or two on this chapter, but I got a call today about a foster-or-euthanize case on four kittens and their mama, so I'm going to be pretty busy for the next few days! Don't worry, I've got another chapter almost in the bag for the next update, but things may be a little bit slower. Thanks again for all your feedback and support!
This chapter is noticeably different from all the ones before it, in style, tense and POV. I've labeled it as an Interlude because it's almost more a companion piece than part of the story itself, but it speaks to everything that's come before. Expect a return to form for next chapter, but I'm interested to see what people think about this little divergence.
Contrary to popular opinion, Josh Lyman was neither clueless nor even particularly obtuse when it came to the emotions of others. Nobody got to the top in backroom politics without an innate ability to size up another person and understand what they needed, what was most important to them, what they would sacrifice for and what they would never give up. Sure, a lot of times he simply didn't care what his opponents were feeling, but that didn't make him unaware. When it came to the people he was closest to, he'd always understood more than they'd thought. It just hadn't been enough to let him keep them from slipping away.
Sam, god, Sam. He'd known Sam forever, it seemed, back in a time when they were barely politicians, barely adults at all, finding their way around Washington DC for the first time and trying to figure out the people they wanted to be for the rest of their lives. Sam had been just as beautiful then as now, dark hair and sculpted face and impossible blue eyes that lit up with every new challenge. They'd made friends at the office and would go out together to blow off steam, pick up women, get irresponsibly drunk and talk about how someday they would cut through all the bullshit and change the face of politics forever. Sometimes they'd find women to take home, sometimes they'd bring along whoever they were dating at the time. Twice, just twice in three years, they'd gotten drunk enough to take each other home and wound up in Sam's bed together. But it was the eighties, and people could experiment, and they'd nervously laughed off both those times and never really talked about it afterwards. It didn't mean Josh didn't remember.
But then Josh had gone to the whip's office and Sam had gone to New York, and though they called each other after important votes or Mets games, it wasn't the same anymore. That was how it happened, Josh had figured, and ignored the pang in his chest that might have been lost chances. Sam had dated, mostly upwardly-mobile professional women looking for suitable marriage partners. Josh had dated, mostly Washington insiders with sharp smiles and quick minds who were looking for a power husband who would one day sit in important rooms. There had been Lisa, and there had been Mandy, and then there had been a day when Leo McGarry asked a favor from the son of an old friend, and then there was Sam, looking ridiculously polished in his thousand dollar suit but with the same impossibly blue eyes and goofy grin. He'd left Sam behind and gotten on the train to Nashua, but "Josh, what are you doing?" echoed in his head the entire time. When he'd watched Jed Bartlet speak and realized what kind of president he could be, he was back on the train to New York before the rubber chicken was fully coagulated in the pans.
Working with his best friend again had been amazing, infusing Josh with the energy to run a no-money, no-sleep campaign for a candidate who couldn't even remember the names of his closest advisors from day to day. With Sam around, he had a partner in crime, someone to bounce ideas off, someone to take his own pragmatic make-the-sausage politics and turn it into something beautiful and full of the ideals Josh was a little afraid to even say aloud. And sometimes he'd meet Sam's eyes across the room, but there was Lisa (for awhile) and Mandy (until there wasn't), and neither of them were naive or reckless anymore. They'd won the election, gotten the chance to change the world that they'd always talked about. Josh knew that doing anything to risk that chance would've been crazy, but sometimes when he would watch Sam get worked up and start making passionate speeches to anybody who'd listen, he had wondered if maybe a political genius could figure out a way.
During the celebration after the first State of the Union, Leo had clapped Josh on the shoulder while they watched Sam and Toby celebrate their own speechwriting. "You'll have my job one day," he'd told Josh conversationally. "You'll have to kick Sam's ass around the block a few times until he's ready, but it'll happen. That'll be the day, won't it?" He'd given his hoarse bark of a laugh and wandered away then, leaving Josh with his jaw on the floor and such an overwhelming feeling of pressure in his chest that for a moment he'd wondered if he was having a heart attack at thirty-eight. Pride, there was incredible pride in knowing that Leo was right, that this could really happen. Anxiety, plenty of that, over the fifty million things that Josh would have to do in order to make that happen. And loss, amorphous, nebulous, not to be examined, over something that had never really existed in the first place.
Josh had still felt the weight of Sam's gaze on him from time to time, sometimes from halfway across the West Wing, sometimes from inches away, but he didn't look up to meet it anymore. Sam was going to be president someday, but not if Josh let the things they didn't talk about turn into a noose around Sam's neck. If Josh could just ignore those looks and those thoughts, then it would be just like they didn't exist, and he and Sam could be best friends like they'd always been. Except it didn't work out that way. Not meeting Sam's long looks had slowly turned into not going out alone with Sam for drinks, turned into not talking to Sam the way he used to because he kept choking on all the things he couldn't say. He'd send Donna to talk to Sam instead, then close himself off alone in his office, an unlikely figure for a Jewish martyr.
And Donna, of course there was Donna too. Josh had still been finding his feet on the campaign trail, stumbling around with Mandy, tiptoeing around Sam, when he'd walked into his office one day and run straight into another pair of impossible blue eyes. Donna was fresh off the farm and fresh out of a bad relationship, achingly vulnerable but at the same time so brave it had made his heart clench. He'd thought it had taken courage to leave Hoynes and join the Bartlet campaign, but he'd never in a million years have had the guts to pack his whole life in an old car and drive halfway across the country for the possibility of a job that paid nothing but might change his life. Technically he'd been doing her a favor, taking her on and giving her his staff badge, but in the moment it had felt like giving her nothing more than a deserved acknowledgment. Then she'd given him her sun-bright smile for the first time, making his heart clench even harder, and he'd wondered what he was getting himself into here.
From almost the first day, he'd fallen into a synchronicity with Donna that bordered on the eerie. Her office skills were basic and her political knowledge all but nonexistent, but she had a quick mind and such strong intuition that she usually seemed to know what he meant before he even finished saying it. There were whispers on the campaign because she was beautiful and so young, but he'd deliberately chosen not to notice those things about her. Didn't he have enough problems already? In any case, the fact that she'd managed to whip his disastrous office into shape had quieted any naysayers, especially after the way he'd fallen to pieces during her brief failure of resolve back in Wisconsin. By the time they'd stepped into the Operations bullpen for the first time, he'd had no idea how he'd ever coped without her.
No matter what crisis he'd gone through, national, professional, or personal, Donna had always been there, a step or two behind him, guarding his flank as they'd waged the political battles he'd been born to fight. She'd researched for him on a thousand topics, networked all over Washington to keep him informed of disasters hiding in the weeds, taken up deliberately contrarian positions on every stance he'd chosen, just to hone his arguments to perfection before he unleashed them. For all practical purposes she'd been his deputy and protege, but in reality, on paper, she was always his assistant, subordinate to him, subject to his evaluations and criticism. He'd seen the looks she gave him from across his desk, heard the undertone to her playful banter. How could he not? Just the heat of her body when she'd sit next to him on buses or in meetings was sometimes enough to drive him to distraction. And he was no saint. He'd flirted back, bought her presents, let her tie his bow ties as she watched him from below her lashes. But he'd never touched her back, not like that. It would've been inappropriate.
Three years of detente in all directions, and it might have gone on forever if it hadn't been for a handful of skinhead assholes and a single wild bullet. Josh had no memories from the night of the shooting or the next three days, but he'd been told how it happened, how Donna had waited like a statue, dry-eyed, barely moving, through fourteen hours of surgery. He'd seen the videos of Sam on Today and Good Morning America, answering questions as though he barely heard them, swallowing two or three times whenever Josh's name was mentioned. Toby had told him once, when they were both very drunk and he was feeling lyrical, how when the word had come down that Josh would live, Donna had collapsed into Sam's arms and Sam had held onto her like his last anchor to the earth, her face against his neck, his face in her hair. Josh's first memory of the hospital was of them both, sitting on either side of his bed. Sam had been asleep with his head resting very uncomfortably on the raised bedrail, while Donna read quietly aloud from Newsweek. He couldn't remember the article, but she'd assured him that all the magazines that week were about him. He did remember how relieved he'd felt, how grateful, to wake up and realize they were both with him.
Things had been different after the shooting, in ways both subtle and profound. He'd missed three months of work while trying to piece himself back together, and Donna and Sam had both been there for that as well. Donna had run his office for him, using her own light touch to keep the assistant deputies in line and on task, freely invoking his name even when he was really too drugged to be making cogent decisions on his own. Sam had stepped in as liaison to the Hill, taking Donna's thoroughly-researched positions and turning them into an actual legislative agenda with which to prod the Congress. When they weren't working, they'd taken it in turns to look after Josh, Donna mostly in the days, Sam in the nights. They'd come to some kind of understanding during that time, one that Josh had never been a party to, but he could see it easily enough in the tight-knit alliance between them after the midterms. Maybe it was fatuous, but it had reminded him a little bit of two people who'd gone to war and seen things nobody else could comprehend.
He hadn't thought about it much at first, just grateful that the two people who comforted and confused him most could get along with each other. After he'd returned to work, though, he'd found himself swamped by inexplicable anger at times, and at other times by suffocating isolation and loneliness. How did Sam and Donna understand each other, how were they war buddies, when Donna hadn't even been there that night? When Sam's worst injuries were scraped hands and skinned knees, not a bullet through the thoracic region? (That's what it was in the hospital and in CJ's briefings, not his chest, not his heart, "the thoracic region," like he'd gotten shot in the demilitarized zone of some unpronounceable ex-Soviet state.) How were they getting on with their lives and going on dates with unsuitable people and god, still watching him with unbearably heavy gazes from impossible blue eyes? He couldn't reach out, so he'd pushed instead, taking verbal swipes at Donna, ignoring Sam, burying himself in the work that was always his refuge from things he couldn't think about. And even after all that, after the concert and the window and Stanley, Donna had taken him home to her apartment because his was too cold, and on Christmas Day she and Sam had boarded up his window frame and then rehung the curtains so he wouldn't have to look at it till it was fixed. They'd watched black and white slapstick comedies and eaten Chinese food (Jewish Christmas, Sam had quipped,) and Josh had finally started believing that maybe people really could get better.
Things had gone almost back to normal, but then there had been the MS debacle and the hearings, and Josh had seen Sam's deep disillusionment but hadn't been able to say anything about it. It was his fault, after all. He'd dragged Sam into this, promised him the real thing and delivered a frightened, lying man with feet of clay. He'd dragged Donna into it too, deeper than the other assistants, by relying on her for so much, for being closer to her than was proper even if he'd never crossed the line. If either of them had broken, it would've been his fault. But they'd each rallied in their own way, and they'd kept his head above the water at the same time. That lasted barely long enough to catch a breath, and then it was reelection and Bruno, midnight in America and a kind of campaign none of them had hoped for. Sam got louder and louder as his voice was heard less and less, and Donna had all but disappeared, shrunk small by the incident with her diary, made invisible by the radiating presence of Amy Gardner. Josh had seen all that too, but he'd been exhausted by Sam's stubborn idealism and angry about Donna's nebulous act of betrayal and he'd pushed all of it aside to focus on the thing he could actually affect. And sure, he hadn't been entirely absent, he'd tried to comfort Sam after Kevin Cahn and the return of Lisa, and he'd actually accomplished something nice for Donna when he'd gotten her teacher a Presidential phone call. But in hindsight it had been so little, not nearly as much as he should've done, not nearly what he owed.
He'd thought things would be different in the second term. Maybe he could've sorted some things out in his own head if he'd just been given a little time to think without having to think of polling numbers and the values voters of America's Heartland. Instead the election had come and Sam had gone, and with Amy and everyone else pushing him to run in the special election, what could Josh have said to make him stay? Sam had claimed he'd be back after the vote, but Josh could see in those impossible eyes that something in Sam was desperate to escape from what had become of them. So he'd let Sam run to California, run for Congress, run screaming away from the White House and from Josh himself. Josh tried not to think about it very much, and luckily there was always work. There had also been Amy again, and he hadn't been entirely sure she was anything he wanted, but once Donna had started seeing Jack Reese, at least Amy had given him something to counter with. He couldn't say aloud why having a counter had been so important, but even with Jack and Amy gone by Inauguration, he and Donna had both been bruised by the experience.
There had been a moment on the night of the Inauguration Balls, when he'd looked into Donna's eyes and seen everything in her that was waiting for him, all the love and trust in the world, that he'd thought seriously for the first time about reaching out and taking it. Taking her and keeping her and damning the consequences for both of them. He'd already lost Sam, and something inside Josh had known that Donna wouldn't look at him this way forever if he kept looking away. But it was wrong, he'd reminded himself. It was inappropriate and wrong and it would cause a scandal that would see both of them crucified by the right wing press. That might have been nothing new for him, but Donna, beautiful, smart, intuitive Donna with her quirky filing system and no college education, she'd never have worked in Washington again. So he'd made her call him "Wild Thing," and had put her in a cab alone at the end of the night with money to get home and his key to her place, then had buried himself in the business of the government for weeks so he wouldn't have to see the love in her eyes fading into confusion and disappointment. Sam's election had ended the way everyone predicted, and Sam had decided to take a job at a law firm in Los Angeles instead of returning to DC. Then there way Hoynes, and Zoey, and Glen-Allen Walken, and Josh didn't even have time to miss anybody.
It wasn't as though he hadn't seen something coming with Donna, obviously. He wasn't that obtuse. But he'd had no idea how he could get by without her, and he had no viable plan that would let him keep her, so the only solution was to ignore the problem and not acknowledge it at all. They'd still worked together as well as always. She'd kept him in one piece through the hell that was Carrick and Angela Blake, she'd kept his office running via cell phone during the shutdown, she'd held her own with the pardon attorney and in the Oval Office (even if she'd wept on his shoulder after learning about Donovan Morrisey.) After the State of the Union, Angela Blake had come to him to ask for Donna in Legislative Affairs, where they needed someone with an endless well of tenacity to coordinate the policy shops. It would've meant more money and more responsibility for Donna, but it would've meant her leaving Operations, reporting to his office and Communications equally and usually through his assistant deputies. It would've meant her leaving him. He'd put Angela off with some muttering about big projects in the pipeline and maybe after the midterm elections. Later he'd wondered a thousand times if he'd moved her, or if he hadn't blown her off on that damned Brussels trip, maybe things wouldn't have happened the way they did.
Josh had enough regrets to keep him in therapy well into the afterlife, but giving Donna that diplomatic passport was easily in the top three. It hadn't been the career advancement she'd wanted and there'd been no real need for the Deputy Chief of Staff and the Communications Director to have eyes on the ground in Gaza, but Toby had wanted someone keeping an eye on Andy and Josh had wanted Donna not to leave him, and somehow that translated to him sending her to the most dangerous place on Earth, armed only with a little brown book and a laptop. When CJ had stopped him in the hallway and told him about the CODEL, he'd felt the familiar crushing chest pain he associated with love and bullets. His first, sudden impulse was to call Sam, make sure he was safe, ask what he was supposed to do now. The urge passed in seconds, but hours later he did call Sam from the plane, even if all he could do was worry along with Josh. Most of that trip was a blur in his memory, till he'd gotten to that hospital room and she wasn't gone and his heart could beat normally again, even with the new Irish boyfriend there to remind him of the lines he'd drawn and couldn't cross. Then Josh had gone and done his job, and come back and this time she wasn't there or okay and words like pulmonary embolism and brain damage erased all thoughts of lines entirely. He'd stayed at her bedside for hours, thinking pleas too disorganized to be prayers, until she'd opened her impossible blue eyes and murmured his name, and in that moment there was nothing in the world he wouldn't have given her if she'd asked. But she'd been exhausted and drugged, and she'd smiled at him instead and gone back to sleep.
He'd planned on keeping an eye on her when she got back to the States. Everything had been so hard for her at first, even just dressing and feeding herself, much less navigating the hectic pace of her life. She'd come back before she had probably really been ready, but the whole world had been going to hell and he'd needed her so badly that he didn't tell her no. He'd meant to help her do things, and make sure she went home when she was too tired and took her medicine when the pain got bad. And sometimes he had, but sometimes he'd left her sitting in the middle of the hall in her wheelchair, or asked her to stay just one more hour so she could finish something vital, or avoided looking at her face because seeing her in pain made him hurt too, made him remember that he was hurting her and there was no way to fix it. He'd noticed her tension and her bursts of sullen anger, but there'd been nothing he could do, not with Leo sick and CJ struggling and the country seeming ready to fly apart at the seams, not when he didn't even know if he still wanted the career he'd sacrificed everything for. He hadn't known if he was ready to leave the White House and start all over again, hadn't known if he was strong and smart enough to do it on his own, hadn't known what it would mean for him and Donna.
She'd started scheduling meetings with him, like she were some rogue Congressman he was supposed to talk back into line, but he didn't know what to say to her, so he'd found a reason to cancel, first once, then again and again. Eight times, he'd realized later, too late. Eight times he'd blown her off, made her feel worthless instead of invaluable, until she'd stopped him in the middle of the bullpen and told him she was leaving and his mind had gone entirely blank and he'd done what he'd been doing for a year and a half: deny the problem entirely until he could think of some way to fix it. When he'd looked into her cubicle the next day and a stranger was at her empty desk, all he could see was Donna's eyes as he'd turned and walked away, still impossibly blue, but shattered and sad and alone.
It hadn't taken long to figure out where she'd gone. Donna was methodical to a fault, even when she was packing her whole life into an old car and driving all the way across the country for a chance at a job that was entirely unknown but might change her life. It turned out she'd given two weeks notice to HR, sixteen days and eight broken lunch meetings ago, had provided them with a Los Angeles post office box as a forwarding address, and the law firm of Carrington, Schuster and Hawthorne as a work contact. Josh hadn't known whether to laugh or throw something when he'd realized that she'd run away to Sam, because of course she had. He'd noted the number, knowing as he did that he'd never call, because what could he possibly say? He'd given her everything he had available to give and it hadn't been enough and she was gone and it was over. He'd flown to Houston the next day. Leaving the White House had seemed less like a gamble by then. Somehow it seemed more like an escape.