OBSERVATIONS ON A DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP

RATING: PG-13

SUMMERY: Though their break-up—not to mention their relationship—was less than amicable, Josh and Mandy love each other. I know this to be true.

SPOILERS: Season One

SHIP: Josh/Mandy

STATUS: Complete

First person POV: Sam Seaborn

Though their break-up—not to mention their relationship—was less than amicable, Josh and Mandy love each other. I know this to be true. I was there the night they met. They immediately started to fight, which I'm pretty sure was foreplay for them, and I lost track of him somewhere along the line and the next morning Josh showed up at headquarters in the same clothes he had worn the night before. He was, to a degree, happy with Mandy. Even though she was ambitious and oftentimes grating, and I think there were times when being with her kept Josh sane.

Then Donna showed up.

Now, I love Donna Moss and I don't think that she meant to come between Josh and Mandy, but I do know that Josh's young, blonde, perky assistant—who slept on the floor in Josh's room for the first two months she was with us, and for a week after she came back from the disastrous Dr. Freeride debacle part two—was a sore point for a long time in the story of Josh and Mandy.

We all lost track of Mandy after we won. I knew she went to Lennox Chase, and I sent her something, a fruit basket, I think, as a little 'congratulations and thank you for your help' thing, but I don't make it a habit to keep in touch with my friend's ex-girlfriend's, even if I did work with her. If that kid hadn't cut that piece in the paper out and given it to Toby none of us would have even known she was working for Lloyd Russell until it was too late for us to take him out of the running.

Leo wanted to send me to talk to Mandy, to find out if Russell was going to run against the President for re-election, but Josh volunteered to go in my place. Maybe because he wanted to see her again, maybe because he wanted to feel like he was still a part of the team even though his job was literally hanging in the balance, or maybe just because he knew her best and would know her 'tells'. I didn't question it when he told me that he would be taking the meeting instead of me, though I did make sure that my radar was on high alert because Josh and Mandy had a tendency to explode in one way or another when around each other for too long.

When he got back from his lunch with Mandy he was distracted by, some might even go as far as to say that he was jealous of, Mandy and Russell. He got back into the swing of things, though, when he made sure that Russell's big ticket battle on SR443 was kept off the floor until after the Midterms.

Of course, then we threw him off balance again by shanghaiing him in that meeting with Leo. Again, Leo wanted me to go hire her, but Josh pointed out that hiring and firing was technically the job of the Deputy Chief of Staff and not the Deputy Communications Director, and once again he headed off to meet with Mandy.

He kept the picture that she gave him—the one with his face scribbled over with a Magic Marker—on his desk with pictures of his mother, his father, his grandfather, and his sister, then when his desk got too cluttered he moved it off to the side. He didn't get rid of it, though.

The night of the State Dinner I noticed that Josh was paying a lot of attention to Mandy. He said that he was worried about her, that she had just made her first real contribution in the Oval Office where the decision came down to life or death and that he was afraid that she wouldn't be able to handle it if things went south. Which they did. The negotiator was shot and later died in surgery, and he wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for her suggestion. The guilt she felt over that, combined with the phone call with the Signalman who was going to die an even worse death than the negotiator, led to Mandy taking solace in Josh's arms. She stood there, shivering slightly despite the fact that the heat was more than adequate, and Josh wrapped his arms around her, pulling Mandy's tiny body back until it was moulded against his.

He would flatly deny it, but it was that night that they got back together.

Again.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

It amazed me that Donna never called Josh on being hypocritical whenever he would lay into her about going back to Dr. Freeride.

To be honest I thought it was just a sex thing; she needed comfort and reassurance that not everything in the world had to crumble to dust at her fingertips, he needed a warm body to fill his bed in place of the woman he lusted after—maybe even loved—but couldn't be with. Josh was familiar to Mandy; Mandy was ready and willing to be with Josh and not care that he'd rather have a leggy blonde with alabaster skin in his arms instead of a petite brunette with freckled skin that she tried daily to mask. Maybe at one time I could have respected their choice to use each other, but the truth was that Josh started to get invested in their… whatever it was… and Mandy was as unemotional as ever. Now, Mandy Hampton is great at her job, she has a top notch political mind, and she is the queen of the artful spin, but when it comes to my best friend's heart she is the last person I want around. Inevitably he'll get hurt and put all his time and energy into making everyone believe that he wasn't even though everyone from the President to the UPS guy that Cathy thinks is hot can tell just how broken Josh really is.

When CJ asked me if I knew anything about 'a piece of paper that's going around, maybe from the campaign' she'd been asked about in the Press Room I didn't think about what it was. For all I knew it was the President's shopping list from May 5, 1984. I never thought it would be what it was and the thought of the opposition memo coming from Mandy was completely unexpected. In retrospect it was a question that we all should have asked Mandy when she started working for us, but hindsight never helps anyone and usually only makes matters worse.

I wasn't there when Josh found out, but I heard what his reaction was, both from CJ and Toby, who were the ones that told him, and from Donna, who had come to me because she was worried about how everything was affecting him. First, of course, was shock. I doubt he had thought about the 'piece of paper' since CJ asked him if he knew what it was. He was so busy dealing with the FEC nominations, something he didn't even think would see the light of day, that he didn't have time for anything else, especially something as vague and trivial as a piece of paper that was mentioned in the gaggle. I had responded similarly, my head too far into the useless meeting I was stuck in about gays in the military for something as potentially innocuous as a piece of paper. Second was betrayal. Josh would battle fire and brimstone for President Bartlet. He couldn't comprehend the thought that someone he had loved, in some way or another, for the better part of five years had not only thought about everything there was to take Bartlet down, but she had put it in writing and allowed it to get out. Third was anger. I'm not sure if he was angrier at Mandy for writing the paper or at himself for not realizing that she would have written the paper, but none of us had seen Josh that furious before. And I mean ever.

There wasn't really a fourth level to his reaction. He didn't have time for one. We were called into a meeting in Leo's office and somehow we ended up changing tactics completely. No more finding the safe way, the middle road. We were going to run into walls full steam ahead and pray that we broke through to the other side instead of ending up looking like a million and one Daffy Duck cartoons.

The President threw his cap over the wall and Al Kiefer and Joey Lucas started doing their polling and Mandy was out of the inner circle, though truth be told she had never been that deeply imbedded in it to begin with. She was always too ambitious, too cold and blunt to really find a home in the tight-knit family of bleeding-heart liberals that made up the senior staff. We never outright rejected her, but everyone made sure that she knew that, because of her actions, she was on the outside looking in.

Josh told me that one night, a few days before Toby called Joey to get her to come to DC, Mandy showed up at his place and tried to invite herself in for whatever it was that they usually did together when one of them was going through a particularly bad patch. He was amazed that Mandy just expected him to open his door and welcome her into his arms and bed like nothing had ever happened; like she hadn't taken the two men he respected the most in the world and hung them out to dry for everyone to read about. I didn't have the heart to tell him that the reason she thought that he would was because he always had before.

Were she anyone else I probably would have said that Mandy was jealous of Joey Lucas when she came to town. But, since it was Mandy, I didn't say that she was jealous. That didn't mean I wasn't thinking it, though. She hadn't been on the California trip when Josh got his heart stomped on by Joey's big high heels, but I'm pretty sure that word got back to her because the only person who seemed more tense about Joey's arrival was Josh and that was mostly because Donna kept teasing him about his 'Joey Lucas suit', among other things. Now, Mandy was always tense around polling windows, this much was true, but she usually just huddled in a corner and yelled at some of the more helpless interns that crossed her path. She never yelled at pollsters, knowing better than to piss off the people who ask the public the questions you need asked in the way they need to be asked to get the right answers. Yet she when Joey and Josh—and Kenny—were debating English as the national language she had gone off on them in frustration. When I told Bonnie and Ginger that I popped her with my tranquilizer gun I was joking, but the truth was that if I had had one handy—though I can't think of a reason I would be carrying around a tranquilizer gun, nor do I suspect the Secret Service would appreciate my doing so—I would have done just that. Even Joey said—signed—that she was tempted to slip some over the counter sleeping pills into Mandy's water to get some peace and quiet. Apparently Mandy Hampton can even give you a headache when you're only reading her lips.

Things got a little less arctic after the President told us to let her off the hook, and by the time we were preparing for the live Town Meeting on MSNBC most of us were comfortable being around her again. We weren't back to the way things were before, but, really, there is no way to go back to the ever elusive 'before', no matter what caused the change from 'before' to 'now'.

A knock on my door causes me to look up from the file that I've been staring at while thinking about Mandy, who just happens to be the person who interrupted my musings. "The busses are loading," she said as she came in and closed the door before sinking down into one of the grey leather chairs across from my desk.

"You need something?" I asked, my eyes flitting from Mandy to my closed office door and then back to Mandy. Office doors weren't closed around the West Wing unless things were serious or secret, though Toby and I both usually close and lock our offices when we're writing.

"I'm leaving," she declared, pulling an envelope out of her pocket. "I can't do my job when the people I work with don't trust me, and no one around here has trusted me since the memo got out."

I had already assumed that she was leaving. It was only a matter of time, really. We couldn't trust her and if she didn't have the kind of access that only came when people had complete faith in you she couldn't do her job. It was that simple. In fact, I was honestly amazed that it took her this long to realize it.

"You can't blame us, Mandy. You took knowledge that you wouldn't have if you hadn't worked for us and you turned it into an instruction manual for beating us. Forgive us if we don't feel like giving you more ammunition to use against us," I said.

"That's the thing. I can't blame you guys," Mandy said. "I screwed up, I admit it. And it's time to move on because it will be easier for you guys to break in a new media director than it will be for me to earn your trust back. So I'm giving you my resignation."

"You don't answer to me," I pointed out.

Josh had Donna stay late—which meant she didn't get to go home at all and only managed to get half an hour of sleep on CJ's couch before she opened the Operations office again—to make up many, many charts outlining who Mandy answers to. She answers to Josh, she answers to Leo, she answers to Toby, and she answers to the President. Everyone else is on her level or below it.

"You owe me, Sam," Mandy reminded me.

"I'm not going to do your dirty work, Mandy. You want to leave, you tell Josh yourself," I said.

Normally Mandy scares me, but this wasn't about Mandy wanting to leave her job. This was about Josh getting closure, something he had never gotten with Mandy before. Maybe if he gets closure this time he won't fall back into his old patterns again.

Josh is my best friend. I'll do anything for him.

Even stand up to Mandy Hampton.

Mandy sighed heavily. "Fine. You're all still planning on coming back here after the Town Meeting, right?" she asked. She wasn't invited along. Partly because there's no need for her to be there—the Media Director is really only needed for the planning of and the post-even spin of a media event like the Town Meeting—and partly because no one really wants her around all that much, even if she has been let off the hook by the President.

"As far as I know," I nodded.

"I'll talk to him when you all get back, then," Mandy said, rising and tucking the envelope back into her pocket. "Have fun tonight," she said before opening the door and leaving.

The End