Author's Note: 15 years ago - nearly 16 actually - I completed a piece of fanfiction called Bear His Burdens. Burdens was the first piece of fiction, fan or otherwise, that I'd ever finished, save for a few short stories I wrote during high school English classes. At that time The West Wing was in it's last seasons and I was feeling pre-emptively bereft because I was away from home for the first time at college, not really sure what I was doing and The West Wing was my comfort show. I was 21 and had been watching since I was 14 and if it seems like that was a weird comfort show for a 14-21 year old to have, it probably was, but that's besides the point.
The point is, as a direct response to...well...literally everything... I started re-watching my comfort show a couple weeks ago (and wow does that 15 year interval between viewings really make a difference in viewer comprehension) and also a couple of weeks ago, I started to have the urge to write something like this. Something about pain, and helplessness, and healing and hope. Something about friendship. Something about love. And here we are. I haven't written fanfiction period in nearly a decade, but somehow this seemed like the natural course of things, to return, if briefly, to my roots. This fic is "of a type" with Burdens (which is to say it features a traumatized Josh and Donna being awesome) but with a decade and a half of life experience, and hopefully some writing improvement.
I hope you like it.
Disclaimer: Do we still do disclaimers in 2020 or do people generally assume we know better than to claim ownership over this stuff?
"You may not remember the time you let me go first.
Or the time you dropped back to tell me it wasn't that far to go.
Or the time you waited at the crossroads for me to catch up.
You may not remember any of those, but I do and this is what I have to say to you:
Today, no matter what it takes,
we ride home together."
― Brian Andreas, Traveling Light: Stories & Drawings for a Quiet Mind
The digital clock on the far bookshelf reads 3:37am. Josh is still getting used to waking up and being able to see a clock. At the hospital there was a wall clock but it was on such an awkward angle to the bed that he couldn't see it without twisting a bit, and twisting even the smallest of bits was seven kinds of agony, so he'd learned to settle for asking what time it was. Hospital time seemed to work differently than normal time and he'd either lose whole chunks of days, or else be asking the nurses every five minutes until finally Donna brought his wristwatch and left it on the bedside table. Checking the watch became something of a fixation, a way to confirm he'd survived the next minute, hour, day. A way to prove that the world was still turning and this hospital room was not purgatory, not some alternate dimension, not forever.
Now when Josh opens his eyes the clock is the first thing he sees, green LED display casting a sickly glow over that corner of the room. It should ground him, this immediate reminder that he is back home and not in intensive care, but as always Josh knows a moment of complete confusion before he registers where he is. It's the bed he thinks. They've brought a hospital bed into the spare bedroom because his own bed – a solid oak, queen-sized monster that will probably have to be sold with the apartment – is too big to keep him from flailing around in his sleep and hurting himself, plus he needs to sleep partially elevated to keep the pressure off of his lungs.
Well. Lung. Singular. Just the one the bullet put a hole in.
Josh presses a hand there now. Fifth intercostal space, just below his heart. It aches, furiously. He wonders if that will ever go away, or if this is his life now; waking up in pain, not precisely sure where he is.
The clock switches to 3:38am.
He has to pee, badly, and that's not great because it's late and the bathroom is across the hall, and Josh still isn't supposed to be walking around on his own. In fact, he can't walk around on his own, not for anything longer than the short bursts the nurse makes him do for physio when she visits. The truth is, Josh was sent home more for his mental health than because his physical health was improving in such spectacular leaps and bounds. His doctors were concerned that he was becoming too listless trapped in the hospital room, too prone to fits of either intense melancholy or anxiety that wound him up so tight he kept going tachycardic and alarming everyone. Being at home might put him at ease. That was the thought, and honestly it was a good thought, except Josh can't afford a nurse to live with him, just one that visits for a few hours twice a day, for physio and to check the readings on the heart monitor he's still wearing, and to make sure he's managing his pain all right – neither abusing nor underutilizing his meds, though honestly there's way more risk of the former than the latter.
So, there's no nurse there currently, this moment, when Josh badly needs to use the washroom across the hall that he is absolutely, under no circumstances, supposed to attempt to walk to on his own.
Who there is, is Donna.
Josh sighs, carefully, because sometimes sighing also hurts, rubs his hand over a bullet wound he imagines he can feel through the material of his Whalers t-shirt, and then props himself up a bit higher. His chest twinges. Actually, not just his chest, his whole upper body, and not just a twinge, but more a strident TWANG of pain that radiates through him like someone just reached into his chest cavity and plucked at something vital. Josh grits his teeth, avoids making a sound.
Donna was something of a bargaining chip, one of the key reasons Josh was allowed out of the hospital despite not being able to afford the around the clock care he probably still needs. There had been a lot of discussion, his friends and his psychiatric specialist insisting that Josh being chained to the sterile, unyielding, uncompromising sameness of his room in the hospital was hindering his ability to improve, while his surgeon insisted that he was still too frail to be left unattended for any length of time.
That was the word the doctor used. Frail. Like Josh was an elderly, tottering old man who might fall and break a hip. Josh had hated the doctor for saying it, had especially hated him for saying it in front of Sam, then Toby, then Leo who had all taken turns making the case for sending Josh home. Frail. Like he might smash into pieces if they looked at him wrong.
There had been offers to pay for a live-in nurse. So many offers from nearly everyone. Josh wouldn't hear of it. Not a chance. Not a chance in hell.
It was Donna who had finally asked how many times Josh needed – really needed – to be looked in on daily by a medical professional, and did Josh's insurance cover home visits two or three times a day? And if it did, would the doctor be satisfied if someone else stayed with Josh the rest of the time? Someone who could learn the routines from the nurse, and keep Josh comfortable and call the hospital right away if something went wrong? Would that be enough?
It had been, barely. So Josh had been sent home. And Donna, despite never once having specified that by "someone" she meant herself, packed a bag, grabbed a pillow and blanket from her apartment and moved into his living room.
The others have visited over the five days he's been back in his own place. Sam brings coffee in the morning on his way into the White House, CJ has stopped by twice during her lunch and Toby was here yesterday evening, but Donna doesn't leave except for a couple brief hours during one of the nursing visits to grab new clothes or take a shower. Josh suspects that Sam, at least, has tried to convince her to share the baby-sitting duties, but she's clearly having none of it because she has remained firmly entrenched at the make shift desk she's set up on his dining room table, taking phone calls from work and maintaining his medication schedule with equal steadfastness.
It's been a rough stretch of days, one that started with Donna supporting nearly all his weight as she somehow managed to heave him up the woefully wheelchair inaccessible front steps of his building and ended, yesterday evening, with Josh nearly taking her head off when she refused to give him his pain meds earlier than the schedule called for. In between those two events, she's changed his bedclothes, made food that won't make him nauseated, and watched with intense focus as the nurse explained how to work the controls on the bed, check his heart rate on the monitor, measure out correct doses of Percocet for pain, and Clopidogrel to prevent clots and Amoxicillin for the mild infection he's developed at the incision site. Donna has memorized his physio exercises, has every one of his doctors on speed dial. She's emptied his bedpan, more than once. And she deals with Josh. Josh and his boredom and his restlessness, and his fury at how helpless he still is, and his frustration at not being able to go back to work, and his pain, and his pain, and his pain.
But Donna doesn't complain, and she doesn't balk, not at anything, ever, and she doesn't leave.
And that is why now, at 3:40am, Josh is trying to figure out how he can get himself to the washroom without waking her up.
There's the bedpan. That's an option. But it was one thing to suffer that indignity at the hospital and another entirely to do so in his own home. That first day he was in so much pain from the move and subsequent Donna-assisted scaling of the front steps he'd had no choice – getting out of bed for anything had seemed pretty unthinkable at that point. But with four days space between then and now, it seems even more unthinkable to drag the pan out from its hiding spot beneath the bed and force Donna to empty it in the morning.
So no. Not actually an option then.
Carefully, carefully, Josh sits himself up. He's got controls for the bed handy, but the mechanisms make an ungodly amount of noise and the terrible twanging pain in his core has subsided, so he feels confident he can sit up under his own manpower, and he does, after a fashion. It's a little more of a challenge to get the side rail of the bed lowered so he can swing his legs – or slowly and gingerly move his legs as the case may be – over but Josh manages this too. He sits there feeling proud of himself, realizes it's pathetic to be proud of himself for accomplishing something so basic, and switches to scowling at the distance between where he is and the door to the room.
To get around the apartment Josh has a walker. Josh despises the walker with every fiber of his being, almost irrationally so. There are days when he feels like he could direct every ounce of his helpless rage at that condemnatory assemblage of metal spokes. Donna had joked about fitting tennis balls onto the feet and even though some part of his brain had recognized that this was funny, the larger part had simply wanted to put the walker straight through the nearest window and Donna must have read this on his face because she stopped joking about pretty much anything for a day or two.
But despite his abject hatred for the mobility device it remains the means by which Josh has been instructed to move around. Until his strength comes back, the nurse tells him, every day when she has him walking careful laps around the apartment. A great trauma and a month bedridden wreak havoc on even a young, fit body, and he can't just expect to go galivanting about unassisted.
Josh really, really misses galivanting.
But anyway.
The walker, folded into its compact form and standing in the corner of the room, really doesn't feel like any more of an option then the bedpan does. The walker feels like giving up. Like admitting that he's weak. Frail. Josh is aware, dimly, that this is a ridiculous notion. He was shot, for god's sake. Shot and then in surgery for thirteen hours with who knows how many hands inside his body trying to stop him from bleeding his life out on the floor of the George Washington University Hospital, trying to keep his heart beating and his lungs drawing breath. It's not like any of this is his fault.
But he is also Joshua Lyman, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, political advisor to the President of the United States. Graduate of Harvard and Yale, 760 verbal. He has a fanclub. And it's been a month. It's been a whole damn month.
Using the bed, then the wall, as leverage, Josh inches his way towards the door. How weak he is, still is, would frighten him if he was letting himself be frightened these days but instead, he grinds his teeth together and converts all his emotions to anger. It's a trick he's getting pretty good at honestly, defaulting to anger, or at least one of anger's younger cousins: frustration, annoyance, impatience. Fear isn't useful, and despair certainly isn't, but anger can be. In fact, it's mostly anger – at his shaky legs, the renewed pain in his chest, at the fact that he knows even the smallest noise will bring Donna running, at that stupid God-forsaken walker mocking him from the stupid God-forsaken corner – that propels him to the door of the bedroom.
Josh clutches the door frame and takes a few deep breaths, careful, careful, trying not to get too winded or the heart monitor will start chirping. It's the portable sort, in a pouch strapped to his waist, but it makes a surprising amount of noise when it needs to. His chest aches – nothing new to report there – and he hates how badly even this short trip has tired him out, but Josh thinks he's probably got a handle on this whole 'getting himself to the bathroom thing'. He just has to get across the hall, take a piss, and get himself back into bed. Piece of cake.
Hand on the wall, Josh eases his way towards the bathroom door, which is across the hall and down a bit. It's the guest bathroom, and they've added some accessibility hardware, handles beside the toilet and in the shower, a raised seat in the tub so he doesn't slip and knock his brains out, that sort of thing. The White House health benefits are relatively robust, but he's still a little afraid of how much all this is going to cost him. But now is not the time to dwell on that bottomless well of anxiety; he has to focus. One foot in front of the other and all that.
Crossing the hall means all of three or four steps without hanging onto something. Totally doable, Josh thinks, grimly, just engage your core or whatever. Granted his core was literally cut wide open to accommodate a surgical team not so very long ago, but there's that well of anxiety again and Josh has already told the well of anxiety where it can go, which is to say, away.
He takes one step away from the wall. And then another. And everything is fine; he feels more-or-less steady on his feet, and only a little bit like he can't inflate his chest all the way but he's doing fine, completely fine, except… Except.
There's a carpet in the hallway. One of those long skinny patterned rugs that goes up the center of a corridor without touching the walls on either side. A runner, he thinks they're called. Josh's mom gave it to him as a Chanukah gift a few years back. Said he needed more carpet in his entirely hardwood apartment to 'keep the heating bill down' or something like that, so she bought this one, which is sort of red and cream paisley with fringe on the ends. It's a nice carpet. A nice carpet that Josh, in his focus, has completely forgotten that he owns. A nice carpet that he catches his toe on as he carefully lifts his right foot to take the next step.
Here's the thing about being grievously injured, even grievously injured and recovering: there is a reason they keep you in the hospital for a month. There is a reason your doctor fights sending you home without constant supervision, a reason you can't sleep in your big queen bed or walk without a walker. A reason your assistant is camped out in the living room with a 9 and a 1 pre-dialed on the phone just in case.
It's because the smallest mistake can be a disaster. And Josh finds that out right then as he trips over the edge of the carpet in the hallway, instinctively throws out both arms to stop himself from falling, and feels his entire chest light up in a blaze of agony so intense that it rips the ground out from under him.
He's pretty sure he blacks out. He must black out for at least a second because one instant he's up and the next Josh is on the floor, heart monitor shrieking and both knees and elbows howling almost as loud from the impact and no memory of going from one place to the other. And really it's amazing he registers the pain in his knees and elbows at all, because the rest of him, oh God, the rest of him is on fire. Josh swears that the bullet, the one that put him in this mess in the first place, didn't hurt as much as this does now. This feels like someone's sandpapered every one of his nerve endings, doused them in lighter fluid, set them ablaze.
He retches and whatever's left of dinner comes up, followed by a flood of acrid bile that tastes so terrible he retches again, a full body spasm which is really doing absolutely nothing for the pain, it really is not, and Josh is vaguely aware that he's making some sort of awful, wounded animal keening noise that he can't seem to stop. And he doesn't understand how it can be this bad, how it can hurt this much when it's been a month. It's been a month, and he's home and he's in so much pain and Josh wonders if he might just up and die after all, thanks for all your trouble everyone but I'm out.
And while he's having this thought, this not-very-nice thought, while he sits with his hands in his own vomit trying not to black out again, Josh becomes aware that he's no longer alone in the hallway, that someone has dropped to the floor beside him, heedless of the mess and put her hands on his shoulders, bracing him.
"Josh, Jesus," Donna says, breathless, then reverses it, "Jesus Josh!" her voice is a million variations of dismay and confusion and straight up fear, "What the hell happened?!"
It takes Josh several moments, gulping like a fish, trying to draw in enough oxygen to expel word-sounds instead of just mindless pain-sounds, before he manages to gasp, "I fell,"
"I can see that! I just don't understand how you fell out here," Donna's voice sounds about six octaves too high, but also sounds a little like it's on the other side of a wall, which makes Josh worry he's not quite as conscious as is perhaps ideal. Donna seems to think the same thing because she's suddenly about three inches from his face, checking how dilated his pupils are, pressing three fingers beneath his jaw to check his pulse. Judging by how wide her eyes go, Josh figures his pulse is doing about as well as the rest of him is, "Don't move," Donna says, as if there is even the remotest possibility of him doing so, "I'm calling the hospital,"
"Wait," Josh says, but not at all loud enough because Donna is already up and running. He gathers himself and out of sheer force of will -and also fear, yes there's definitely that too - manages to struggle up off his elbows, "Wait, Donna, stop. Stop!"
Donna stops. It would almost be comical the way she skids to a halt at the far end of the hall, socked feet slipping on the hardwood like a cartoon character, except the look on her face is awful, "Josh… don't, don't try to get up,"
He can't get up, can't get anymore upright then he is currently, but that's not the point, "Don't call the hospital,"
"Josh. Josh you're…" Donna takes two steps towards him, stops and gestures with both hands at his prone form, unable to find words that fully encompass just what Josh is currently, "You need help,"
"I don't,"
"I need to call someone to…"
"Donna," He says her name too loud, coughs, gives a whine of pain that does more to make his assistant be quiet than the actual shouting did. Josh winces, tries to suppress the sound, "If you call them they'll send me back,"
There's a beat of silence broken only by the insistent beeping of the heart monitor. Donna looks down at him, glances back over her shoulder in the presumed direction of the phone, "Josh…"
"They'll send me back," Josh repeats, a little more urgently. He's struggling to get upright enough to look her in the eyes and can't entirely manage it which he knows is not helping him plead his case, "They'll take this as proof I'm not safe at home, they'll say I'm still too… they'll say… Donna, I can't go back to the hospital," Josh finally has to admit defeat and sinks back against the floor, "Please. Donna please, I can't,"
There is another stretch of quiet, then the soft padding of socks on floor and Donna is back down on the ground beside him. She fumbles briefly at the monitor strapped to his hip, presses something to make it stop sounding the alarm. "Okay," she says into the sudden stillness, and Josh feels like she's saying it more to herself than to him, feels like she's stamping something down deep, deep inside herself and shutting the door on it. She reaches out, wraps a hand around his wrist, and nods, "Okay," and this one is for him this time.
Josh looks up at her. Her face is pale but calm and her eyes are gentle. It steadies him, "Yeah?"
Donna nods again, "Yeah," she smiles, squeezes his wrist, then sits back on her heels and tilts her head slightly, "So you're on the floor here," she says, absurdly off-hand, as though the last five minutes didn't happen and she's just stumbled across him now.
He should make a joke, some kind of witty rejoinder so this doesn't feel so terrible, but all he can manage is, "I am, yeah,"
"That's less than ideal," Donna frowns a bit and seems to measure the space between his bedroom and where they are currently, "Josh. What happened?" she asks again, decidedly less hysterical this time.
Josh is suddenly painfully aware of the fact that he is sprawled on the floor in a puddle of his own puke and unable to move himself, suddenly aware of how bad it smells, and how pathetic he must look. And he is also painfully, mortifyingly aware that he does not have to go to the washroom anymore. "I had to…" but he can't finish the sentence, because finishing the sentence is also an admission and he can't look at Donna now, can't look anywhere but the floor when he says, "I thought I could get there,"
But even now Donna doesn't flinch, because somehow, in the hell scape he's trapped in, his high-strung, zero-poker face assistant has become a person who doesn't flinch. "Okay," she says a third time, and then cups one hand around his cheek and makes him look at her, "So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna run you a shower, we'll get you cleaned up and back in bed, and no one will ever know that any of this happened but us. Sound good?"
If he could have gotten up off the damn floor, he would have put his arms around her and never let go. But since he can't, Josh simply nods, "Yeah," and his chest hurts again, but maybe not because of the bullet this time.
"Not super crazy about leaving you here in the middle of the floor though," Donna says, back to offhand, like she's discussing the weather, "Can you move yourself at all?"
Josh winces, tests the theory, but find he's barely got the strength to keep himself leveraged out of the vomit, "Not so much," he admits, "I'm all… seized up it feels like,"
"Well yeah, from the noise you made you hit the ground like a box of rocks," There is the tiniest, barely there warble in her voice; the only remaining sign of how badly he must have scared her, "You probably pulled, like, everything," she purses her lips, thinks for a second and says, "Okay. We can do this. Put your arm around my shoulders,"
"Donna," Josh blanches, "I'm covered in… I mean, I'm kind of a mess,"
"So, what, I'm supposed to move you with my mind?" Donna quips, gets a look at his face and then softens, "Josh, I don't care. I promise I don't care. It's all right. Now c'mon, arm around the shoulders, let's go,"
Donna maneuvers him as gently as she can so he's sitting upright against the wall, apologizing every time he yelps involuntarily, pausing as many times as he needs to catch his breath. He's panting a bit by the time he gets there, but the relief at not being face down in the hallway is enormous, "Thanks," he breathes.
"Don't thank me yet, I still have to get you standing," Donna puffs a chunk of hair that's come loose from her ponytail out of her eyes, "But in the meantime, hang out there while I get the shower going, kay?"
"Literally no chance of doing anything but," Josh tells her, finally managing a small rueful smile. It makes Donna beam at him, and that makes him feel a bit better.
It takes her no time to turn the shower on and come back, "So I'll need to take the heart monitor off you before you get in the water," she says, crouching down beside him, "And honestly I should take a reading anyway and make sure you're not gonna stroke out or something,"
Her tone is light, but Josh can read the worry in it and he knows he must still look too close to the wrong side of death's door for her liking, "If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna stroke out,"
"You were also pretty sure you could walk yourself to the bathroom but here we are," She fires back at him. Josh blinks and she grimaces, "Sorry,"
"No, no, that was fair," Josh sighs, he gestures weakly at the monitor still strapped to his waist, "Do the thing,"
Donna gives him a tight-lipped smile and carefully removes the monitor from its pouch. Josh has no idea how to read it, but Donna studies it for a second, presses a couple of buttons, frowning hard enough that a line appears between her eyebrows, then twists her mouth to one side, "Well, your heart's beating like you just ran up a flight of stairs, but you don't appear to be in danger of imminent death, so I'll call it win," She deadpans finally.
"Huzzah," Josh deadpans back at her, managing a weak finger twirl.
Something in Donna's steady facial expression wavers for a moment, then is gone just as quickly, "Gotta get your t-shirt off so I can remove the monitor," she says, "But I'm thinking we just put you in the shower with your pants on because we probably don't need that sort of scandal on top of, you know, everything,"
"Probably not," Josh agrees.
"Plus, ew, weird,"
"Wow, thanks,"
Donna smirks, and for a second everything is normal. Then Josh twists a little too far towards her, making the already over-taxed muscles in his shoulders go back into spasm and the return smirk he was trying to give turns into a grimace of pain, "Ow,"
"You really did a number on yourself, huh?" Donna asks when the wave passes. She's maintaining that gentle teasing tone to her voice, but her eyes are narrowed in concern.
Josh bares his teeth, half in discomfort, half in annoyance, "Well, I think the bullet to the chest is really what did a number on me," he grumbles, "But I'm sure this didn't help,"
"Not really, no," Donna sighs, "D'you think you can get your arms out of the shirt, or…?" when Josh just rolls his eyes towards her and says nothing she presses her lips together and gives a brisk nod, "Right. Okay then,"
Somehow, Donna manages to get the soiled t-shirt off of Josh without hurting him further. She is gentle and at least a thousand times more patient than she has any right to be given the ridiculous hour of the night and how long it takes just to carefully feed each of his arms through the sleeves without wrenching his injuries. Once he's free of the garment, Donna tosses it out of the way and just as carefully removes the heart monitor pads from his chest and back. She's so business like about it, Josh would think that this was a task she performed every day.
"How are you doing that?" He searches her face for some sign that this distresses her, for some signal that this is too much to ask.
"What? Ripping these babies off without taking your skin with it?" Donna tucks the wires around the little machine and sets it aside, "You don't wax legs fair as mine without picking up some skills Josh,"
It's not at all what he means, and Josh knows that Donna knows that, but she's trying to make him laugh, so he drops it and favours her with a small smile. There's a lump in his throat he can't quite swallow away, "So what now Florence Nightingale?"
Donna gestures towards the bathroom door, "Shower," she stands, brushes her hands on the front of her sweatpants then looks down at him, "Getting you on your feet is going to hurt Josh. I don't know how to keep it from hurting,"
"Yeah," Josh nods, "I know. It's okay,"
"It's not really," Donna says so quietly he's not sure he heard correctly. She crouches back down, wraps his right arm around her shoulders and her left arm around his waist and says in her regular voice, "Lean on me hard as you have to, I'm not gonna let you fall,"
Josh feels his mouth twitch into a half-smile. He shakes his head, "You never do,"
Donna leaves Josh in the shower for a good half hour. The hot water beating down on him helps soothe the knotted muscles in his shoulders and neck, and the deep ache of internal trauma subsides somewhat as well. By the time the knock at the door heralds Donna's re-entry to the bathroom, he feels halfway to human again.
"So remember how we established that I should keep my pants on?" Josh asks, carefully kicking the soaked-through ball of his pajama bottoms away from his feet.
He hears Donna give a small huff of laughter, "Yeah well I didn't expect you keep them on once I'd left the room," the edge of the shower curtain closest to the faucet rustles and Donna's slender arm appears, swats at the diverter valve to stop the shower and turns off the water, "So, luckily, I came prepared,"
The curtain closer to his head moves now and Josh gives it a startled look, but again, Donna doesn't open it all the way, just drops a towel in the general direction of his lap, then, more carefully, hands him a folded pile of clean clothes, "Are these the pajamas CJ gave me?"
"No, I think these were from your mom," From the proximity of her voice, Donna is leaning with her back against the wall next to the tub, "CJ's are… well… you'd probably trip over the pant legs, let's say that,"
Josh shrugs, finishes toweling himself off, then unfolds the pile. There's a clean pair of boxer shorts folded in with the pants, and the thought of Donna retrieving this item is frankly something he'd rather not dwell on, but at this point he figures all bets are off insofar as personal boundaries are concerned. Carefully he gets the pants and underwear on, a process made awkward by the fact that he has to stay mostly seated, "What is it about being injured that compels people to buy you pajamas anyway?"
He can practically hear Donna's bland facial expression when she replies, "Don't know. Guess they thought the mountain climbing gear might go underutilized,"
"Yeah," Josh gets his right arm into the shirt, but can't manage to twist in the way that will allow him to do the same for the left. It's the first moment in an hour that his left side isn't screaming at him and he'd like it to stay that way, "Shit. Don?"
"Need help with the shirt?"
"How did you - ?"
"I'm clever that way," Donna's voice is starting to sound tired, and Josh feels a sudden twinge of guilt, "You otherwise decent?"
Josh nods, realizes she can't see him and then gives an affirmative, "It's just the left side…"
The shower curtain slides open. She looks tired too, her eyes a bit puffy, and Josh is pretty sure that Donna has also changed her clothes, a fact that makes him wince inwardly, "I thought the button up shirt might be easier to manage. No dice, huh?"
"It's not your fault," Josh says quickly, "I'm just…"
"Didn't think it was my fault," Donna pulls the shirt around his shoulders, takes his elbow and gently, gently, guides his arm back through the sleeve, "Didn't think it was your fault either," she gives him an odd inscrutable look, then straightens up, "Leave it unbuttoned, I have to put the heart thingy back on once you're in bed,"
The journey back to the spare bedroom is not nearly as harrowing as the one that got him away from it. The hot shower has made Josh less stiff, plus he's not starting out face down on the floor, which is a considerable bonus. In the hall he sees that Donna has rolled up the carpet and taken it away.
"I'll have to send it somewhere for cleaning I think," She says, off his unspoken question, "Plus I figured having one less thing to trip over might help you out if you ever decide to go for another three a.m. jaunt,"
Josh makes a rueful noise in the back of his throat, "Good plan,"
"I thought so,"
Once Josh is settled in the bed, Donna adjusts the incline so he's a little more upright and retrieves the heart monitor from where she stowed it on the side table, "Can I turn the overhead light on?"
Josh nods and glances at the digital clock display as he does. 4:55am. He can feel the last hour catching up to him; suddenly his body feels leaden, his eyes gritty and hot. Donna flicks on the light and the sudden brightness is almost overwhelming, enough so that he squeezes his eyes shut until he feels Donna perch on the edge of the bed. He watches her untangle the wires, a studious look on her face, then she cleans each of the sticky pads with a static-free cloth and carefully moves his shirt out of the way.
Though Josh has been bare chested for the better part of the hour, this is the first moment he feels self-conscious. It's ludicrous of course, but under the glare of the lightbulb above their heads Josh feels exposed. Certainly this is the clearest view Donna has ever had of his scars, and though Josh tries to keep his face neutral, he can't help watching her for signs of revulsion, or at least discomfort. He gets none of that, just a quick downturn at the corners of her mouth, a line between her eyebrows. Then Donna blinks rapidly and shakes her head and the expression is gone before Josh has any hope of reading it.
"It occurs to me," Josh says, as Donna locates some landmark on his chest and gently but firmly applies the first electrode, "That this is way beyond your paygrade,"
Donna fishes up the next wire, "What, did you miss the chapter on heart monitors in the back of the personal assistant handbook?"
"There's a handbook?"
"Obviously," Donna presses the next electrode into place, looks up at him and grins. Then she seems to notice that she's left her hand resting on his bare chest, coughs and moves onto the next spot. Josh smiles in spite of himself.
Electrode three, he knows from experience, is supposed to go just below his left pectoral muscle, above the where the bullet entered his ribcage, alongside the incision scar that runs from mid-sternum to mid-abdomen. The scar from the bullet – a slightly puckered indentation just smaller than a quarter – could be nothing but a scar from a bullet. And though Donna's face remains carefully in check, there is the smallest waver in her lower lip that wasn't there before as she finds the correct spot and places the little round pad over it.
There is an electric sting of pain, so unexpected that Josh yelps before he can even think of stifling it. Donna recoils like she just accidently stabbed him, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, did I hurt you?"
"No," Josh says a bit too fast, then off her look amends himself, "Well, yes, but it's not anything you did, it just... hurts," he winces and shifts a bit against the pillow. The sensation is already fading, "Most of the time the area around the scar is just sort of numb. Until it's, you know, not,"
Donna looks at him for a long time, then gingerly pulls his shirt closed and begins buttoning it up. She's two buttons from the top when she asks, very softly, "Josh, why didn't you call me? If you needed to get up, why didn't you call me to come help?"
Josh looks down at the top of her head then up at the ceiling, "I didn't want to wake you up," he says on an exhalation.
Donna snorts, "Bold of you to assume I was sleeping,"
"Donna…"
"Josh," She snaps back at him with a raised eyebrow, then immediately softens, "I'm serious. I know you hate the walker, but you could've called me,"
"I know that," Josh says, annoyance creeping into his voice, "But it was nearly four in the morning and I didn't want…"
"It's literally my function here, you know that right?" Donna cuts him off. Her voice also has a new edge to it now, less annoyed than exasperated, "If you don't want to get yourself stuck back in the hospital you have to let me do what I'm here to do. I'm sleeping in your living room so this doesn't happen Josh!"
He wants to get mad at her, wishes he could, but he's too tired and she's right so he just grinds his teeth together hard enough that his jaw creaks and says, "Donna, this is not fair to you. Like, there is going above and beyond and then there's this," he gestures between her, the bed, the heart monitor blinking in her lap, "You're my administrative assistant. Nowhere in that job description does it say, 'sleep in your boss' apartment and nurse him back to health',"
Donna gives him a look like she can't believe he's this stupid and then says, to emphasize the point, "I can't believe you're this stupid," He makes an indignant sound but she just glowers at him, "I'm not here because you're my boss you idiot, I'm here because you're my best…" her voice falters and she has to stop and swallow hard, "You're my friend,"
Josh stares at her for a moment. His shoulders droop and he sinks back against the pillows, "I know. I know that. But Donna…"
"I wasn't there," Donna says.
"What?"
Donna presses her hands together in front of her mouth and holds them there for a moment like she's about to pray. Finally she says through her fingers, "I found out that the President had been shot because I saw it on the television and then I called you. I called you because all I could think was, oh God Josh is going to be losing his mind and when you didn't answer I grabbed my ID and I went down to the hospital and the whole time I had no idea…" she pauses and closes her eyes for a second, then, with some effort, lowers her hands from her face and looks at him, "By the time I got to the hospital you'd been in surgery for an hour. An hour. And I had no idea you were even hurt. You could have… No one called me, Josh. No one thought to. You were shot and maybe gonna die and no one even thought to call and tell me," The words all come out in a rush like a dam released, like she's been swallowing them back for weeks, "And I'm not mad at them, I'm not blaming them, God not even a little, you should have seen their faces when I…" Donna clears her throat, hard, gives her hands a shake, drives the warble out of her voice, "But I wasn't there. Not in Rosslyn, not at the hospital. You were hurt and you could have died and I wasn't there. So…" she makes a small helpless gesture with one hand, "now I'm here,"
What Josh wants to say is that he thanks God every single day that Donna hadn't come to Rosslyn with him. He wants to say that he thanks God every single day that she wasn't there because the only thing worse than what happened to him was the thought of what might have happened to her. Instead what he does is the most mortifying thing he could possibly do on a night already chock full of mortifying things; he says her name, and then he starts to cry.
It's not dramatic. He doesn't break down and weep, he doesn't wail and rend his clothes. But his voice breaks over the second syllable and when he hitches his breath in to try to catch himself, there is no mistaking the sob that erupts after.
Donna sits up so straight, so fast that she nearly falls off of the bed, "Oh no," she says, in a voice that makes it sound like she herself is five seconds from cracking right in half, "Oh no, no, no, no, please don't, " she makes a move like she's thinking of taking his face in both hands, then thinks better of it and just sort of waves them in the space between their bodies, "Oh Josh, please don't, please stop. I'm sorry,"
Josh laughs. It's a weird, watery, too-thick laugh but it helps him get a grip on himself, "Why are you apologizing you lunatic?"
"I don't know!" Donna wails, "I don't know anything, there's no precedent for this Josh!"
"I know," Josh takes her hands, which are still fluttering around his face and covers them with both of his, "I know," he looks at her. She looks back. He says, "I didn't call you to come help because I wanted to do something on my own. I wanted to feel like… it's been a month Donna. It's been a month and I wanted to feel like maybe I was getting better,"
"Only a month," Donna says quietly, then repeats herself, more firmly, "Only a month Josh," When he goes to protest she cuts him off, "The first five days you couldn't turn your head or string three words together without it knocking you flat for hours. A week and a half ago you couldn't sit up on your own or eat solid food. You just got yourself out of bed and made it halfway across the hall, and to be frank, if you hadn't tripped and fallen on your head, I'm pretty sure you'd have made it the whole way,"
"No chance I was making it back though," Josh puts in, but he's smiling as he says it.
Donna bobs her head in agreement, "Yeah, I mean I was probably gonna have to come haul your ass off the toilet, which honestly I'm not super sad about missing out on," When he grins at her, she gives him a look like he's handed her a piece of the sky, "I'm just saying, you are getting better. You are,"
Josh gives a short huff of laughter. He can't argue with her logic, but that doesn't mean he's pleased about it, "Slowly,"
"Yes, slowly, you got shot Josh!" Donna exclaims. Her tone is exasperated, but her eyes are kind, "They had to re-inflate your lung and sew your heart back together. I know you think you can solve every problem by running straight at it full speed and hoping it moves first, but you're gonna have to be patient about something for once in your life, okay? And you're gonna have to let me help you. You're gonna have to let all of us help you,"
Josh blinks at her, "You've really got your inspirational speech pants on tonight, huh?"
"I've been practicing," Donna snaps, then laughs, properly, for the first time he can remember in the last few days, and buries her face in both hands, "Jesus Christ," she adds, to no one in particular.
"Pretty much," Josh closes his eyes and sinks backwards. He's bone weary and every part of him hurts in some way, but he thinks maybe he feels all right despite all that. He opens one eye, "Donna? Thanks,"
Donna draws in a deep breath, then lets it out slowly, like she's releasing something she's been holding tight in the center of her chest, "Yeah, well. I'm just glad you're still here,"
She says it almost grudgingly, like she hates to admit it, like there's nothing deeper behind the words, but Josh can read the full meaning in her eyes and the tremulous line of her mouth. He touches her cheek with the back of one knuckle, "Me too,"
Donna looks, for a moment, like she might say more, like there's something else, something extremely important she hasn't told him yet and Josh feels of flutter of – what, nerves? Anticipation? – in his belly. But then the moment passes and Donna pushes herself off the bed, goes to the cabinet where she's stowing his medication and shakes a single pill onto the palm of her hand, "Here, take this,"
Josh squints at the Percocet dubiously, then raises an eyebrow, "I feel like that's not on the schedule,"
"It's not," Donna confirms, "But you're clearly in pain and you're exhausted and the nurse is gonna be here in like four and half hours, so I figure what the hell," she hands him a half-full cup of water from the bedside table, watches him swallow the painkiller, then flicks off the overhead light, "Good. Get some sleep, okay?"
"'Kay," Josh watches her to the doorway, eyelids already drooping, "Hey Donna," She turns. The backlighting from the hallway makes her hair glow like a candle, "This won't be the last time this happens. We're going to have more bad days,"
Donna nods, "I know," but she's smiling, not worried, and she lifts her shoulders in a shrug that tells him that this thought occurred to her ages ago, thanks Josh for finally catching up, and she says, "And I'll be right here for those too,"
"Yeah?" Josh asks
"Long as you need me," Donna says like it's the easiest, most obvious thing in the world.
And maybe it is, Josh thinks, as she presses the palm of her right hand quickly to the spot over her heart, turns and vanishes down the hallway.
Maybe it is.
END