Title: Of Campaigns, Mistakes, and Love
Author: Claire
Rating: K
Summary: For Donna, this campaign is about more than an election.
Disclaimer: While I have always wanted to be a millionaire, I am not one yet. Therefore, you may deduce that I do not own The West Wing or anything related to it. Warner Brothers has that privilege.
Author's Note: This fits somewhere in the Seventh Season, before "The Cold". I haven't quite decided where yet.
She wants to laugh with him again, but it's been a long time since they were able to laugh together. She thinks maybe this was all her fault. Her fault for leaving him, going to Gaza. For ever talking to CJ that night. For sleeping with Colin. For not letting him know in Germany that his presence was more precious than any of Colin's flowers or kisses. For leaving him before he had the chance to leave her.
But, she reminds herself, she was the one who came back. Such is their history: she runs away, only to run back just as quickly.
Every so often, on the campaign bus or dozing on the plane, she takes mental stock of her decisions over the last year. Was leaving Josh a year ago worth the distance that has grown between them? Was losing his trust worth proving herself as a political operative? Was, dare she say it, breaking his heart worth proving that she could be valuable to others? She wants to add all the variables and prove to herself that she made the right decision, but her arithmetic must be off because she only comes out feeling guilty.
She is back with him again, working at his side instead of in his wake, but nothing is right between them. The banter is gone, completely. She hates that, and in her more maudlin moments she cries over its loss.
The tension is still there, but it is not exciting any more. It is ugly and painful and bitter, another chasm separating them from one another. She watches him fall apart, every single day, and yet she cannot do anything. She does not know if she even remembers how to put him back together any more. That used to be something she knew how to do in her sleep; she knew which ragged edges matched which in the puzzle that was Josh's psyche. But now, either she's forgotten what it took her eight years to learn or he has shattered into more pieces, transforming those that she remembers so well.
She feels old now, far older than she has a right to. She watches the young campaign staff whirl around her, excited by anything and everything they encounter, and she can't help but envy them. But, at the same time, she pities them. This campaign, this isn't what an election should be like. Elections should be like the first Bartlett campaign, where the entire staff ran off of idealism and sheer audacity. They were young and flying in the face of a party, of a world, that told them they had no chance. But they knew what they had. They had the famed 'real thing' and they had enough nerve to tell the rest of the DNC, the rest of the nation that Bartlett was it. There had been stress, but there had also been laughter and more energy than Leo had known what to do with. And when they had won, they had known that they could change the world.
The Santos campaign lacks the dream quality that she lusts after. He's too solid, too normal. Before, Bartlett had been too short, too smart, and too forward for his own good. But they had adored him. And, more importantly, they had made him President, despite all those things.
She's proud of Matt Santos, and sure she is that he'll make a wonderful president, but he's not someone she'll ever idolize. Matt Santos is a good man. Josiah Bartlett is a great man. But, to her, Joshua Lyman is better than either of them. And that, of course, is why she's here. Despite the long hours, despite the pathetic pay (worse even than her White House salary), despite the candidate she only moderately prefers to the alternative, despite everything else, she's here because of him. Because what she discovered about herself during her traitorous stint with the Russell campaign is that she's a better person when she's with him.
That scares her, especially now when it seems like they'll never readjust to one another. The thought of continuing on like this, working with Josh as an associate, no longer his right hand, destroys her.
Things have to change; she just doesn't know how to change them anymore.
I'm a Uni student. I live only for the weekend and your reviews.