Title: Angels Among Us
Author: Rogue28
Disclaimer: If I owned it, I wouldn't be publishing here.
Ships: JD
Archive: Sure, just ask first, please, so I know where it's going.
Summary: Post-Gaza/Memorial Day. Josh learns that angels are everywhere.
---
He sat in the waiting room outside the operating room, the nurses finally having ushered him away from the window of the room, staring at the floor. He concentrated on one speckled spot until his head hurt. Anything to keep his mind from this.
His phone rang and he turned it off before shoving it back in his pocket. The last thing he wanted right now was to try to explain what was happening to anyone back in the White House.
He'd thought about going back to Donna's room, but the empty bed was too much of a reminder. Better to just sit here and stare at the floor and try not to think about it.
He wondered if he should get up and meet Donna's mother at the airport. Katherine Moss would be landing in Germany in about an hour. He was going to have to look her in the face and tell her that he was responsible for this. That he was the one who sent Donna to Gaza in the first place. That he was the reason she was there when the bomb went off.
God, what was he doing?
The soft footsteps approached and stopped next to him, and a man sat down. He didn't look up from the floor.
"You look like you could use someone to talk to, son," a kind voice said from next to him, and he finally looked up to see a military uniform with a collar of a priest.
The man stuck his hand out. "I'm Father Alan. I'm one of the chaplains here."
"Joshua Lyman," he managed to croak out, shaking the man's hand. "Deputy White House Chief of Staff."
The chaplain didn't even look surprised. "How come you're here? I would have thought you'd have been in Washington for Admiral Fitzwallace's funeral."
The name caught in his throat. "No, Donna Moss. She's here." Visions of the blood-stained bandages on the floor flooded his memory, his mad dash to the operating room, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat.
"Ah, yes. I stopped into see her this afternoon," Father Alan said. "She's a very resilient young woman. Reminds me of my daughter."
He blinked. "Your daughter? I thought—"
Father Alan laughed, a gentle, easy laugh. "I'm an Episcopalian priest. We're not celibate. Where did you think little Episcopalians came from?"
"Oh," he said, confused, but trying not to show it. "I'm Jewish, so I don't know much about that."
Father Alan shrugged. "We all worship the same God. It doesn't matter. And as chaplain, I do a little bit of everything."
He nodded silently, and he could feel Father Alan's eyes on him. "Joshua, telling you the same platitudes the nurses have been giving you isn't what I think I should be doing."
He looked up at the priest. "They're certainly not helping."
"That's because they aren't mean to help. They're meant to soothe the conscience of whoever's saying them to satisfy themselves that they have provided comfort to the hurt or the grieving," the chaplain said. "I am here to help."
"And exactly how are you going to do that?" he said, his voice harsher than he would have liked, but he was long past caring about that right now.
"I want you to tell me about Donna," Father Alan said. "I'm afraid I've only seen her scratched up. Do you have a picture of her?"
He opened his mouth to say no, but pulled out his wallet instead. He kept this picture here, with him always. "Here. It's a picture of us at the inaugural ball. She wasn't going to come—political stuff that had gotten messed up, so I dragged a bunch of the guys down to her apartment in a taxi, Toby and Danny and Will and Charlie. Charlie, he works for the president, he's to the president what Donna is to me, an assistant, but more than an assistant. Both of them do a lot more than is in their job description. But Charlie kept going on about how he didn't have his coat out of his love for Zoe—Zoe Bartlett—and I was glad when we got there, so we all threw snowballs at the window and yelled until we woke up her neighbors and she came to the window and I pulled her into the taxi. She had to sit on my lap in the front seat the whole way there, because I didn't think when I was leaving that I had too many people, but we got back to the ball. The photographer took the picture, and I got the wallet, and Donna's got the 8X10 framed in her apartment." He had no idea where these words were coming from, but they didn't stop. "The frame is all chewed in one corner where her roommate's cat was trying to eat on it, and Donna got all pissed at it and locked in the closet until her roommate got home."
He ran his fingers over the picture, her face smiling brightly back at him, and he quietly remembered the "Thank you, Josh," she'd whispered in his ear that night, sometime before he'd gotten drunk enough that she'd had to take him home to keep him from blowing up at the next Republican senator to cross his path.
"She wasn't going to come, but I wasn't about to let her stay home after—well, after I found out what we all thought was something she'd done wasn't something she'd done after all." He glanced at the chaplain. "I guess that sounds convoluted at best, but she was covering for someone else. She'd started saving for that dress the moment the president announced he was running for reelection. And she turned down a job offer to become news director for a new company to stay on as my assistant at the White House. It wouldn't have matter if we'd won or not, I'd have hired her as my assistant even if we left the White House. I'd have required when I got hired. Donna runs my life, and I don't mean lightly. Toby sent her an email when she was in Gaza for her to come home, because I was making his life miserable and making all the secretaries miserable while she was gone."
Memories and stories of her flowed from his mouth, good memories intermixed with the bad—getting shot, the Rules, the way she could pop out with the strangest comments at the strangest times, and how her comments could jump-start his thinking, how she directed the President's radio addresses, and how she wanted to do something more. How he shouldn't have let her go.
"What were you going to do?" the chaplain said, his face kind. "Do you think Donna would have been happy being just your assistant?"
"She was never just my assistant," he said. "The word isn't big enough to contain what Donna does for me. She runs my life. She reminds me to eat, to sleep. She keeps me from getting too drunk, most of the time." He continued, how she would drag him home and let him sleep on her couch when he was too drunk, how she'd slept on his couch for weeks, how she'd get up in the middle of the night when he was in pain.
He yawned in the middle of one of his sentences, and the priest smiled at him, gently patting his hand. "Rest, Joshua. You need to rest."
He shook his head. "Her mother is coming any minute now. I should go meet her at the airport—"
"I'll take care of it," Father Alan said. "You rest. I'll make sure to wake you up when she gets here."
---
"Josh. Joshua, wake up."
The voice wasn't the one he expected. He opened his eyes to see two familiar faces. His mother was speaking to him, gently shaking his shoulder to rouse him from his doze in the lobby chair. The other looked startlingly like Donna.
"Mom," he said, rising, giving his mother a hug. "What are you doing here?"
His mother shrugged. "You're here to support Donna. I'm here to support you. And help Donna and Katherine here with any of the girl stuff that you can't."
He turned to the blond woman, her face haggard looking. "Mrs. Moss," he said, shaking her hand, at a loss for words for the first time in his life. "I'm—I'm so sorry."
"There's nothing you could have done," she said.
I could have stopped her from going, I could have told her that I needed her in Washington, I could have kept her from doing more, I could have ignored her need to be something more than my assistant, something more than a White House staffer, I could have sent her someplace else, I could have not hired her back, I could have encouraged her to take the news job, I could have kept her with me, I needed her with me.
He dropped his head. "Where is Donna?" her mother asked.
"She's—" he started.
"She's out of surgery," the doctor said, pushing through the double doors separating the wards from the lobby. The doctor looked tired as he scribbled some on Donna's chart and quickly explained to her mother what had happened. "She's in ICU right now. One visitor at a time."
Katherine Moss barely gave him a look as she brushed past him to burst through the double doors to find her daughter's room, and he sat down, burying his head in his hands.
His mother sat down next to him, rubbing her hand up and down his back. "She'll be all right, Joshua. This is encouraging."
He looked up, his eyes tracking down the rows of linoleum blocks that lined the floor of the lobby. "I never should have let her go."
"And what were you going to do, Joshua? Keep her cooped up in her cubicle?" His mother put an arm around him. "She wanted to go, Josh. And I doubt you could have stopped her even if you really wanted to."
He glanced at her. "That's what the chaplain said."
"See?" his mother said, trying to keep her voice light. "I always told you I had God's ear."
It was hours before Katherine Moss reappeared in the hallway outside the ICU. "Josh, she's asking for you."
She stepped out of Donna's room, and he glanced at his mother, who nodded. "Katherine, you must be starving," she said. "Why don't we see if they've got anything palatable in the cafeteria?"
He shot a look of thanks at his mother as he opened the door.
She looked so frail, so small in the middle of the big bed, wires and tubes coming from under the covers. She looked so fragile.
"Hey," he said, standing beside the bed. "How you feeling?"
She blinked, very slowly. "Like crap." She tried to give him a smile. "You look like crap."
He glanced down at his rumpled clothing. "Well, you know, I had more important things to worry about."
"I still can't believe you're here," she whispered, her voice hoarse. "You should be at work."
"I should be here," he said quietly. "There's nothing there that Toby and Will and C.J. can't handle. And I've got my cell. The White House will pick up the phone bills."
"Good old Josh," she said, reaching for his hand, and he took it, clasping it both of his own.
"You're cold. Want another blanket?"
She nodded, once, and he let go long enough to pull up the blanket folded at the foot of the bed.
"Josh," she whispered. "I saw an angel today."
"An angel?" he said. "What did he look like?"
She shook her head. "I couldn't see his face. But he told me not to be afraid."
He gently pushed a strand of hair out of her face. "You're never afraid."
"Because you're here," she said as she drifted back to sleep.
---
"Excuse me," he said. "I was wondering where I could find Father Alan."
The receptionist looked at him blankly. "Father Alan?"
"The chaplain," he said.
She shook her head. "We've not had a chaplain here for a week. Our new one hasn't arrived from his previous posting yet."
---
"Donna?" he said as her eyes fluttered open.
"Hmm?" she managed, an acknowledgement that she was listening.
"I saw an angel too."