Author's Note: I had no idea I was going to put any more chapters on this one, but it turns out there are some big Bob Russell fans in the audience who wanted more of this little AU story. This one is for Arpad Hrunta and AvengerAssembled, who both wanted another chapter of Achieving Mediocrity. Unfortunately I couldn't work President Bob himself into this chapter without it being pretty weird, but he does get talked about a lot. Hope you enjoy!
…...
Calling it a date might have been a mischaracterization, Donna acknowledged to herself as she stepped out of the cab and into the bitter February wind, but at least it had captured her need to change her outfit twice and spend an hour wondering what the hell she was doing before leaving the house. She knew she looked good tonight; the promotion to press secretary had come not only with a title and salary bump, but with the ability to count clothes and stylists as business expenses. She had to look good every day, so she did. And maybe she was no CJ Cregg, but there was no sense holding herself to impossible standards. The press corps had cut her a lot of slack just for not being Toby Ziegler or Cliff Calley, but she liked to think she'd found her own feet in there. Her hair was shorter now than it had been when she was an assistant, and tonight she had it pinned up in an elegant little twist, the better to show off her neck and shoulders in the sleek designer sweater and skirt she wore. Not a power suit, but powerful. She needed to feel powerful tonight.
She was exactly five minutes late walking into the restaurant, punctually tardy in a way she doubted he'd appreciate. It was a fifty-fifty shot he'd even be there on time, she calculated. Maybe a little less, since he probably didn't even have an assistant right now. Still, he'd taught college classes for a year without getting fired, he had to have managed some kind of timeliness. And there he was; she spotted him immediately from halfway across the room with a skill honed by years of practice. He spotted her at the same time, and she wondered what excuse he gave himself for that. He rose as she approached the table and they stood for a moment, taking each other in for the first time in almost eighteen months.
"Hi Josh," she murmured, because one of them had to break the awkward silence. He'd cleaned up well, she noted. Put back some of the weight he lost in the primary, no bags under the eyes, a suit without wrinkles. He looked really good, actually.
"Donna," he acknowledged with that ironic half-smirk she figured he'd learned straight from Leo. The maitre d' pulled out her chair and Donna took her seat, Josh following suit after a moment. "I guess being a big-name beltway star agrees with you. Or does that outfit still have the tags on it?"
She sighed without revealing it. That was one way to set the tone of the night. "Thank you," she replied as though he'd paid her a compliment. "You're looking well yourself. Did you enjoy teaching?"
"It sucked," he told her plainly, paging through the menu like he was seeking the hidden hamburger section. "I don't know how students can get into an Ivy League school and still be so incredibly stupid about politics. They don't pick up anything."
"Well, there's a lot to learn," she pointed out gently. "It takes a long time to really learn the ins and outs, all the intricate-"
"It didn't for you," Josh interrupted, and Donna wondered why she bothered coming up with ends for her sentences at all. "When you walked into my office you didn't know a political maneuver from a hole in the ground, and three years later you were literally running my office while I was gone."
"That was different," Donna countered, though inwardly she was trying not to be too warmed by the implicit compliment. She'd learned not to trust them. "That was politics in the trenches. It's like learning a language by going to a country where nobody speaks English. You have to adapt."
"Then I guess most of my students are just on the losing end of the political Darwin scale." He snorted as the waiter approached with a bottle of wine. "You should like this one," he told her, "the sommelier assured me it was 'not terrible at all' and only scoffed at me a little for ordering it."
That made her smile, almost in spite of herself. Josh really wasn't much of a judge of wines. She accepted the sip from the waiter and nodded. "It's very nice." They both waited until the waiter finished the little wine-pouring ceremony and took their orders before she spoke again. "You know, if you're tired of teaching..."
"Don't," he told her, raising a hand to stop her from finishing the thought.
"Josh." Her voice was half-frustration, half-resignation.
"I mean it, Donna. Don't ask me to get on board the ship of fools. It'll just ruin our night out."
Donna winced inside at the description, but again didn't let it show. She didn't wear her emotions on the outside anymore. "We're not fools, Josh," she insisted. "And President Russell is a good man, with a good legislative agenda that could use some help."
"It could use some help because he was so busy shaping it from opinion polls and focus groups that he forgot to put wheels on it!" Josh exclaimed. "It's like trying to push a boulder down the interstate. Bingo Bob's Boulders, that's what they were called during the election, right?"
Donna gave up on the idea of asking Josh to show a little respect; that part was all diversion. "There's nothing wrong with focus groups and polling," she reminded him. "It's not like it's anything new. Joey and Kenny are still doing work for the White House. The Congress is intransigent, and we need somebody who can take the fight to them. It's a good agenda, a Democratic agenda," she reminded him again.
"As Democratic as it needs to be, and nothing that it could be," Josh snorted. "Did he send you here tonight with an offer?" he demanded.
"What?" Donna twisted her fingers in her napkin under the table.
"President Russell." Even the honorific sounded like a sneer in that tone of voice. "Did he send you here to get me on the team? Is that why you're here tonight instead of out with some high ranking gomer from Congress or the Pentagon?"
Donna coated her words with ice, and was grateful she'd already anticipated the evening going this way. It was impossible to be disappointed. "I came here tonight because I wanted to see you," she told him. "It's been eighteen months, and we didn't exactly end on a good note. But we were friends for a long time, and I missed that."
"Is that what we were?" Josh asked, his eyes suddenly intense as he leaned across the table.
"Most of the time," she offered, taking a sip of her wine and trying not to reveal that she was suddenly unsure of what he wanted. "I mean, there were some bad times, but I think that's typical for any friendship, especially in such a demanding environment-"
He cut her off again, but this time she suspected it was because she was babbling. "I don't think it was just friendship, Donna. I think there was more and we just didn't want to admit it."
Her fingers tightened around the stem of the wineglass. "It was the White House," she reminded him, "and I was your assistant. Anything more than friendship would've been incredibly inappropriate."
"That doesn't mean it didn't exist," he countered. "I always thought that after we were out of the White House, maybe then we'd finally have a chance to, you know, finally take a look at that." He was slipping out of his political mask now, and that actually made it harder for her to look at him. "But then you up and left to join the opposing team, which pretty much put paid to that idea."
"Technically you joined the opposing team," Donna pointed out, delicately wiping condensation from the tips of her fingers with her napkin. "I joined the Russell campaign before you even convinced Santos to run. If you look at it that way, you built an opposing team just so you could be on it."
He rolled his eyes. "That's really beside the point. If you hadn't bailed, we'd have run Santos together, and everything might have been different. And I admit I was pissed off about that for awhile." That was an incredible understatement, to judge by the meltdown he'd had at the convention. "But it's been a year and a half, and I miss you too." His face softened as he showed off the dimples that she'd once been unable to stop thinking about. "We had some good times," he reminded her. "We could have better ones."
Donna looked into his eyes, deep, warm brown eyes that were easy to get lost in, and asked, "Josh, what do you think of the job I've been doing as press secretary?"
"I think you're great," he said immediately. "I think you need to get the hell out of there right now so you can help me put together a new Democratic coalition. We can't primary Bingo Bob, but he's going to get pasted in the reelection bid if he can't move anything through Congress. We focus on downticket races for the next four years, then I'll find us an actual candidate and you'll help me run him this time. We won't make the same mistakes we did last year."
Donna folded her napkin in her lap. She'd worked in a tablecloth restaurant for awhile in college, she remembered some of the fancy folds. Flip, flip, flip, and there was a little pyramid. A few twists instead, and it was a tower. She looked up. "And what if I told you I love my work and I don't want to quit?"
He laughed. "I'd tell you I can't give you a raise, so stop angling for one. You're working for a dud, Donna, you can't love that! Everything you're doing right now is meaningless, just killing time. You can't be ready to just throw your life away on that comedy show!"
She set her napkin on the table and picked up her purse. "I'm sorry," she said brusquely. "This was a mistake. I shouldn't have come." Opening her wallet, she took out money to cover her meal, and her estimate of what half the wine had probably cost, ignoring Josh's sputtering, and tucked it under her water glass.
"Donna, wait," Josh rose to his feet along with her, catching her by the arm. "Come on. This isn't what we're like, we argue, right? We always argue, it's part of who we are!"
"You're not arguing, Josh," she pointed out evenly, holding her arm perfectly still in his grip and keeping her voice very quiet. They were in public, after all. "You're explaining the way things are going to be. You have no respect for my decisions or the work I do, and the only way you'll have me back is as your assistant, following your lead. President Russell might not be the man President Bartlet was, but he's my president, and I serve at his pleasure, and that means more to me than maybe you're capable of understanding. I've outgrown being your assistant, and until you understand that, I think maybe I've outgrown you, too."
She pulled her arm free of his unresisting fingers and turned away, walking out without hurry, without stumble. She almost forgot her coat, but one quick hit of the air coming from the door reminded her to divert to the coat check. By the time she was in the taxi, she was actually ready to sit back and take stock of her feelings, and was surprised to find herself... well, not okay, but less bad than she'd thought. Only time would tell whether she'd made the right decision there, but she'd made the one that felt right, the one that felt necessary. It didn't matter that she didn't always like her coworkers and didn't always feel listened to. She had a great job, an important job, that she had worked her way into entirely on her own merits, and it meant everything to her. If he didn't understand that, he didn't understand her at all.
Donna picked up her phone and hit the speed dial. "Hey Annabeth, are you busy tonight? I need girl talk and wine. I've got the wine. My place, forty-five minutes? Perfect." Some things were just meant to stay in the past.
