Chapter 2: Regret
Disclaimer: If I owned this show, it wouldn't have taken seven seasons for Josh and Donna to kiss.
It is hard for him to remember that there is nothing hindering them anymore, aside from himself. For so long he has had to worry about policies and public perceptions, now all he has to worry over is whether she still wants him.
When she first came to him, he was smitten. It was embarrassing at the time, how utterly enraptured he was by this young, beautiful college dropout. Sam and C.J. had teased him mercilessly for weeks, until they realized that Donna was someone special. After that, he thought that they had felt badly for him.
His mother had grown sick of her son's constant ramblings about Donna only one month after she had joined the campaign. She had demanded that he bring Donna to the house when they stopped in Connecticut. He doesn't have many good memories of the last few months of his father's life, but the night he took Donna to the house for dinner is certainly one of them. His father had loved her, thought that she was beautiful and smart and willful enough to handle his son. Before they had left that evening, his father had pulled him aside and reminded him that you only get so many chances to do things right 'before the powers that be get sick of dealing with your gross incompetence.' He is embarrassed now to think that, if there is an afterlife, his father knows exactly how many chances Josh has let pass him by.
She left him; he doesn't think he's recovered from the shock of that yet. He'd spent an entire flight to Germany, followed by several days at her bedside, thinking that he had finally lost her and, with her, his chance at happiness. But then she came back, back to him, and he was finally smiling and laughing again. And then, when he least expected it, she quit. She quit him.
But now, a year later, she's back with him. She looks like the same Donna he worked with for eight years, she smiles like her, sounds like her, laughs like her, but she doesn't relate to him like she used to. All the things that made their relationship special: the banter, the almost-psychic link between them, that incredible tension, all of that is gone now. And he still loves her but he's too tired to build everything back up again. So he keeps asking himself, over and over again, can they still be Josh and Donna, without everything that made them so?
He's terrified that the answer is no, that this is where it ends, that from now on Donna will be just another familiar face on the beltway. Another Lou, another Angela Blake, another Amy. He shudders at the thought.
He wants the girl with endless enthusiasm, with such spirit and passion that it transferred to him, kept him going through the darkest hours of the Bartlett administration. He can still see that in her, in the new-and-improved Donna, but it's dulled by her new 'business' persona. He's proud of her, for proving herself, and he loathes her at the same time for changing. But, the more time he spends with her, the more he realizes that he can love this new Donna too. He just doesn't know if he wants to.
Does he even have the time to learn her again? This campaign is unlike any he's ever worked on before, perhaps because, for the first time, he's in charge. He's terrified that someone will realize that he knows nothing, that he's doing everything wrong and that everyone is going to hate him by Election Day. He's afraid of losing Leo's approval, or having Donna be disappointed with him.
He can't even feel anymore. He has bruises all over his body, but he can't remember bumping into anything. He has almost completely stopped sleeping. Whenever he tries to rest, he is plagued by nightmares. Visions of shooters gunning down the campaign staff as they leave headquarters. Of the black secret service SUVs exploding. So, he doesn't sleep, instead he obsesses over the election. He's useless now, even he knows it. He doesn't know why they haven't locked him in a broom closet yet; he certainly would have if it had been someone else had been behaving this way. But no one does or says anything, so he continues running himself into the ground. Every waking moment he feels ready to fall apart.
Thoughts of Donna hound him, but he lacks both the energy and the courage to attempt to change anything between them. After, he tells himself, after the election he'll do something, but he's not sure if he believes himself even as he says it.
Things have to change; he just doesn't know how to change them anymore.