Not A Fairytale
By Misha
Disclaimer- These characters are the property of NBC, Aaron Sorkin, or whoever. I'm not writing this for profit in any way, shape, or form, but because I have a lot of spare time on my hands.
Author's Notes- This is an angsty Donna story that popped into my head over the summer and is just now gettign finished. Who's to say that if Josh and Donna got together, they'd live happily ever after? That's where this came from. The truth behind the fairy tale. This is very angsty and kind of bittersweet if you're a Josh/Donna fan, which I am. I can't really explain why I wrote this. I just kind of felt like I had to. Well, that's all for now, enjoy!
Spoilers- None really, but anything from the end of the third season and back, I guess.
Rating- PG-13
Sometimes she was recognized from her old life. A life that now seemed like it was a thousand years ago.
Sometimes people came up to her and asked if she was Donna Lyman.
She always smiled politely with the instincts ingrained during her years as a politician's wife and told them that she no longer goes by that name. That she was Donna Clarke now and had been for over ten years.
Still, people insisted on dredging out the past.
It seemed that people just weren't able to forget the life that Donna once led.
But then, they weren't the ones who had to live it.
Donna knew that she couldn't forget it, that she couldn't wipe that time from her life, and really, she didn't want to.
It was her life and the reality of it could never go away, besides there was a lot of good along with the bad, especially at the beginning.
She just wanted to be able to live the rest of her life without constantly being brought back to those few years.
But, the rest of the world wouldn't abide by that wish.
To them, she would always be the woman that she was for that short period of time a lifetime ago.
She didn't blame them.
On the surface, her life back then seemed to be right out of a fairy tale.
She had even had the beautiful rose garden wedding; in fact, the President of the United States gave her away. More than that, she married Joshua Lyman, one of Washington's most sought after bachelors.
She thought about those days in disbelief sometimes, her days as the wife of first the White Hose Deputy Chief of Staff and then the Junior Senator from Connecticut.
She had been twenty-eight when she married Josh and she had been in love with him for five years.
She had assumed that their marriage would be everything she had dreamed of. But dreams and reality rarely coincide.
Her life with Josh had not been a fairy tale, though it had certainly not been Hell on Earth, either.
It was just the meeting of two people who loved each other very much, but who could not really live with one another.
It was strange, she and Josh had spent eighteen hours a day together for five years before they married, but it hadn't prepared them for spending their entire lives together.
A close working relationship was very different from a marriage. And what worked with one, didn't really help the other.
Sometimes, Donna found herself sitting up late at night, thinking about about those days.
In the dark night, she would end up thinking about all that had gone wrong.
Her mind would wander back to the the screaming matches, the constant disagreements, the cruel words exchanged on both sides, and the times when one or the other would leave and not come back for a few days.
Certainly not what she had expected. certainly not the image that the rest of the world had of her marriage.
Sometimes, she was tempted to mention those things when strangers who only saw the image approached her and pretended they understood. When really they never could.
But she didn't. Couldn't.
Instead, Donna always smiled politely when they spoke to her, when they told her that they named their son Joshua after her husband, that they had modeled their wedding gown after hers, or that they mourned when Josh ahd been been killed.
She always walked away as soon as possible, determined not to let anyone see the wounds that those words always opened.
It was strange.
She loved William so much; he was a good man and a good husband. But, no matter how happy he made her, he could never fill the place in her life that had been left empty by Josh's death.
Nor was he able to stop the thoughts that plagued her late at night.
The memories that she just couldn't forget. And not just the bad memories either.
Sometimes, she was overwhelmed by the other memories. The wonderful moments that she and Josh shared.
Sometimes, it was almost as if she could still taste his kiss, as if she could still feel the warmth of his body as it was cradled close to hers, could still hear him whispering "I love you".
No one else ever made her feel quite the way Josh had.
Whenever she found herself dwelling on those oh-so-sweet, but oh-so-painful memories, she would end up feeling disloyal to William.
He was her husband now, Josh was just someone she had once loved.
But that wasn't exactly true. Josh was the father of her two eldest children. He had been her best friend for many years. The first man she had ever really, truly loved.
He was Josh and always would be.
Noah is so much like him, it often brought tears to her eyes.
Joanie was all hers, but whenever Donna looked at her, she remembered how much Josh had adored his baby girl.
Their children had been the best thing that came out of their marriage and made everything else seem less significant.
She knew that her son and daughter were the reason that she and Josh would have made it work. No matter how difficult things were at time, she honestly believed that they would have made it work for their children. And because of love that had always been there between.
Still, that was a long time ago, and it wasn't fair to William for her to dwell on the past.
So, she tried hard to be Donna Clarke and leave Donna Lyman in the past.
But it was hard to do. Especially when people came up to her and recognized her.
She knew that really, she'd never escape who she was. After all, it was hard to become anonymous when your face was once plastered all over the newsstands.
So, in the end, she accepted that she would always be who she was.
She smiled when people talk to her about it. She answered their questions politely.
But she tried to live her life as the person she was now.
She tried to think about those days as another life. It was easier that way.
Easier to be a normal person and forget who she was once was. Easier to forget the fairy tale that had gone wrong.
But, she would never truly escape who she had been back then.
It just wasn't possible.
The End