Work Text:
I. Prologue
The first time she meets him, she gets stars in her eyes.
In retrospect, that makes little sense—when she meets him, he is scruffy and sort of unkempt. She can see the bags under his eyes from across the room, can tell by the way that he carries himself that this is a man that never sleeps.
She didn’t choose him for any of that, though; in fact, she didn’t choose him, really, at all—and maybe there’s something there about fate, maybe the stars aren’t in her eyes so much as they are busy spelling out their names, intertwined, in the sky—but she was drawn by a ringing phone, and the next thing she knows, she turns around, and there he is.
The stars appear all at once, the first time she looks at him, and at the time, she chalks it up to what he is doing more than who he is. Because it is clear, even from that very first moment, if not from the phone ringing off the hook, that this man is someone.
(Which is maybe why it comes as a surprise that he’s sort of scruffy and soft and a little pliable, if the way he readily agreed to her hiring herself is any indication.)
She almost doesn’t notice that everything has shifted, sitting there, on the phone, while he watches from the doorway. She looks down for a second to jot down a note, and when she looks up again, he’s taking off his lanyard and handing it to her, and she almost doesn’t even see it, with the stars in the way, brighter than ever.
(The stars never go away. Sometimes they dim slightly; other times they’re unfathomably bright, but they never go away. Even later, even when the distance between them feels as wide as the open sky on a cloudy night, they never disappear, not completely.)
II.
It’s been too long a day. Every day is too long, these days, because the campaign is running them ragged, but they’re in New Hampshire now, and New Hampshire is a chance to take a breath, according to the Governor.
Not that he’d let them take a breath; they may be on his property, but this moment, now, after eleven at night, is the first time Donna’s gotten any fresh air. She’d dragged Josh out with her, insisting he needed to spend a moment outdoors as well, but the second they’d dropped on to the porch swing she’d found, her eyes were closed. She was outdoors, but she was taking none of it in.
Josh, of course, has his eyes wide open, because when Donna is exhausted, she closes her eyes, but when Josh is exhausted, he ramps his energy up, way up, overcompensating in a way only Joshua Lyman can. Even with her eyes closed, Donna can feel the energy coming off him in waves.
(She can tell from his voice that he’s not looking at her, which is good, because Donna is a moment away from falling asleep, and she wanted Josh to take a breath outside, because she can’t remember the last time that he did, and if she, the keeper of his schedule, can’t remember, that does not bode well for Josh.)
“Did you see the stars, Donna?” He asks, like a little kid. “Did you see the stars?”
She cracks one eye open to look at him, just to catch his giddiness, and then closes it again.
“How,” Donna asks, “do you have the presence of mind to be talking about stars right now?”
“Well, look at them! We don’t have stars like that in Connecticut. Not where I’m from, anyway.”
“You’re too close to the city,” Donna comments, and he looks at her, next to him on the porch swing, her head tilted back, her eyes closed. Without opening them, she adds, “we have plenty of stars in Wisconsin.”
“Of course you do, it’s all the methane gas.”
Donna snorts. “You know what, that might just be the first original Wisconsin dairy joke you’ve ever made.”
Josh smiles, and it’s only then that he realizes that he’s still watching Donna, not the stars. “Well, stars are made of gas,” he comments sheepishly.
“Hydrogen or helium or something,” she mumbles. “Not methane.”
“How do you even know something like that? Was one of your ninety-eight majors…?”
“Astronomy, yeah,” she says. “But only for a day. Happened to be star day.”
“Probably a lot of days in the astronomy major are star days.”
“I wouldn’t know. After that was drama, and every day in drama is star day,” she mumbles, her voice even fainter than before.
Josh chuckles, and Donna almost opens her eyes, tempted as ever by the prospect of the way his face looks when he chuckles. He looks impossibly young when he’s laughing, his dimples appearing all at once, impossible to miss, the way a falling star streaks across the sky.
But Donna is too tired to wrench her eyes open, and before she can say anything else, she’s out, asleep on the swing next to where Josh is pretending to be interested in the night sky.
When she wakes up, only moments later, he isn’t pretending anymore; her head has fallen onto her shoulder, and she meets his eyes, looking at her, when she opens hers.
“Still stargazing?” she asks, groggily, smiling and pulling away from him to stretch.
His eyes follow her, eventually landing on hers once again.
“Yeah.”
III.
Donna can’t remember the last time she’d prayed before tonight. Maybe during the election, two years ago, but even then, it had probably been a half-hearted, “please let him pull this off,” directed into the void, directed at no one, more than anything else.
Before tonight, she hadn’t prayed much in many years. It wasn’t deliberate, it was just that time moved so fast, an endless blur of one night turning into another, and then another, and then another, and there wasn’t much time to sit around and wonder about whoever it was up there that was calling the shots.
But tonight, or for the last four hours or so, all she seemed to have done was pray. Pray and pray and pray and pray. Because Josh had been hit, and Josh was in surgery, and Josh might not make it out, and Josh was her whole world. Josh, Josh, Josh.
And so Donna had gripped Mrs. Landingham’s hand, and she had prayed.
(She was certain that Mrs. Landingham had been praying too; she could see her lips moving silently, an inaudible plea to someone, somewhere, but whether it was for Josh or the President or the country, Donna had no way of knowing.)
But it’s been four hours, and Josh is still in surgery (and will be in surgery for much longer, too), and if God is listening, He’s remaining silent, and Donna can’t take the silence anymore. She feels like she’s drowning in it, the silence, and she’d have never expected the hospital to be as silent as it is, with all the machines going and people passing, and doors opening and shutting all the time.
But here, in the little waiting room, in the hard, uncomfortable hospital chair, the world is quiet. And Donna can’t breathe.
So, she lets go of Mrs. Landingham’s hand, suddenly uncertain of how long she’d been holding it, and how tight her grip had been, and she stands up. “I’m going to go get some air,” she says.
Mrs. Landingham looks up. “Okay, dear,” she says. “Do you want me to come with you?”
Donna shakes her head. “I’ll be back soon,” she says, and feeling suddenly guilty for the silent support Mrs. Landingham has given her for the last four hours, she asks, “do you want me to get you anything?”
Mrs. Landingham smiles. “No, thank you, dear. But I’ll be here when you get back.”
Donna leaves the room and moves down the hallway like a zombie. For all their signage, hospitals are annoyingly difficult to navigate—all the sterile, white walls feel like a maze, and she can’t remember, suddenly, how she came in, so she looks for the soft green glow of an exit sign, a beacon in the sterility, and she follows it, emerging finally into the cool night, and sitting down on the sidewalk to take a breath.
She sits there for a moment, pulling air into her lungs, and wonders if Josh, only hours earlier, had been sitting on a sidewalk, trying desperately to do the same thing. (Toby hadn’t told her how she’d found him, only that he had, and Donna wasn’t ready to hear it, anyway.)
Feeling suddenly lightheaded, despite having her head hanging down between her knees as she tries to breathe, tries to stop feeling so dizzy, she looks around, looking for something to distract her while she catches her breath.
When she looks up, she sees it—a star, just one (you’re too close to the city), very faint, but there, nonetheless, and she remembers, all at once, being a little girl, and picking out a favorite star to make a wish on.
If it’s been many years since Donna prayed, it’s been even longer since she made a wish on a star, and she almost forgets how to do it (wasn’t there a rhyme or something?), but God has been silent, so it’s worth a shot.
(She winces when that expression comes to mind, feeling it pierce right through her in a wave of white-hot pain, like an electrical current passing through her body.)
She stands up, which feels reverent, even though the need for reverence feels silly, and leans back against a waist-high wall enclosing a planter, closing her eyes.
After a moment, she opens them, because she can’t remember the procedure—is she supposed to close her eyes when wishing, or does she have to be looking at the star for it to count?
She rolls her eyes at herself, because, of course, it doesn’t matter.
(But in another way, it matters more than anything she’s ever done.)
Taking a deep breath, she tilts her head, looking up at the star, and remembering the blanket of them across the sky in New Hampshire, that night that she’d fallen asleep on Josh’s shoulder, and woken up to find him looking at her.
“Health and strength,” she says, out loud, because there’s no one to hear her but her wishing star, no one to judge her for the emotion or ache or desperation in her voice. “Give him health and strength.”
After a long moment, she closes her eyes again, because if she can’t remember the procedure, maybe she ought to give both methods a try.
“And bring him back to me.”
IV.
When Josh wakes up on Christmas morning, it’s to the sound of someone moving around in his living room, and, curiously, the smell of French toast coming from the kitchen.
It takes him a long moment to remember that it’s Christmas, which isn’t surprising, since he’s Jewish, and the day has never held much meaning for him.
It takes him another moment to realize that the person moving around in the kitchen is probably Donna, who had taken him to the hospital the night before, and then taken him back to his apartment and stayed.
The night before had ended in a blur. He remembers walking into the apartment with Donna, remembers that she was murmuring something to him, something comforting, probably, something to keep his mind off the sirens and the carolers and everything he had learned about the state of his own mind.
He remembers her handing him clean sweatpants and a t-shirt, her getting him some pain medicine and a glass of water while he changed, her turning down his covers for him and telling him to get some sleep.
He remembers asking her to stay.
What he doesn’t remember is what came after that, anything that happened once she crawled into the bed beside him, staying on top of the sheets, but holding on to his good hand, her palm warm and soft against his. He thinks maybe he thanked her, maybe he told her what had happened. He thinks he told her what Stanley had told him, but it all feels a little fuzzy—from the pain medicine, probably—and it might’ve been a dream.
But Donna knows, anyway. Donna was the one who had figured it all out.
Donna was the one who was still here, out in his kitchen or living room somewhere, making breakfast.
When he remembers that, he swings his legs out of bed, trying to ignore the dull throb in his hand, and pads gingerly towards the kitchen. But she’s not in front of the stove, like he’d expected, though a stack of French toast waits for him on the counter.
No, instead, Donna is in the living room, which looks, suddenly, like a Christmas tree exploded in it, with garland and lights covering nearly every surface. Donna is crouched over a box on the floor, holding on to what looks like a children’s toy, a barn or a stable or something.
“Uh…hi,” he says, carefully. “What happened in here?”
(His memories of the night before might feel a little fuzzy, but he’s certain that the room didn’t look anything like this before he went to sleep.)
Donna looks up, blowing a chunk of hair that had slipped out of her ponytail out of her eyes. “Well, I had to make it look festive. I snuck out this morning and grabbed a bunch of stuff from my place.”
“And the…,” he pauses to take another look at the stable in Donna’s hands. “The manger scene?”
“Festive,” she says, again, which she seems to think clarifies the issue.
Josh just looks at her.
“Look,” she says, “I know this isn’t your thing. It’s not really my thing, either. But it was in the Christmas box, and everything in the Christmas box is going up, that’s the rule.”
“The rule?”
“Yes, Joshua, the rule of Christmas. You get French toast, and you get garland, and you get lights, and you get whatever else is in the Christmas box, because it’s Christmas. That’s how it goes.”
“Including the Nativity scene?”
“Was the Nativity scene in the Christmas box?”
“I guess so,” he admits, “But this feels like the right time to remind you, once again, that I’m Jewish.”
“Hush,” Donna says, holding up the Mary and Joseph figurines. “I literally just brought an entire family of Jewish refugees into your home. Now, come help me set it up.”
Josh rolls his eyes, but he crouches on the floor next to her as she places the stable on the coffee table. She hands him two shepherds, an angel, and a sheep, while she gets Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus situated. Josh almost makes a comment about only getting to put out the side characters, but thinks better of it when he remembers that this—Christmas—is her holiday, not his. When he’s done, she hands him the magi, and then she goes digging back through the box.
“Isn’t this everything?” He asks, when the magi are in their place, as he scans through his mind for his knowledge of the Nativity story. “What are you looking for?”
“Found it,” Donna says, emerging from the box with a tiny plastic star, a little hoop on the top so it can be hung from a hook on the roof of the stable.
“It comes with a star?”
“The star is important,” she says. “I’ll have you know that I once played the star in my Sunday School Christmas play. It’s a leading role.”
Josh almost laughs, but the idea of tiny, young Donna playing a star in a Christmas play is so endearing that he thinks better of it. “Of course you did.”
“The star is how everyone found their way to the stable,” Donna continues, indignantly. “Without the star, they would’ve been lost.”
Josh is silent for a moment, but when she looks up at him, he’s not looking at the star anymore, he’s looking at her. “Yeah,” he says, and just for a second, his eyes look a little glassy. “I guess they would.”
V.
They’re outside the Hawk and Dove, and Donna is a little drunk, but not too drunk. Josh, of course, is much worse off—he always is, because, for all the times he’s been called Bartlet’s Bulldog, he’s surprisingly delicate.
(Well, when it comes to this, anyway.)
Josh is drunk, very drunk, almost at the worst of all drunk-Josh stages, which is beyond-help-Josh, but for now, he’s steady enough to be pulled along by Donna, but drunk enough that…well, he’s not Bartlet’s Bulldog. Not at a time like this. Not unless Bartlet is comfortable with his Bulldog being temporarily unable to access any basic communication skills.
Donna is a little drunk, but only a little, and she’s certainly not too drunk to recognize that she is, in some sense, still at work, since caring for drunk Josh should almost certainly count as overtime.
(Except for the fact that she doesn’t really mind it.)
(Except for the fact that it doesn’t feel like work, it never really feels like work, not here, not now, not with him.)
(And, except for the fact that overtime doesn’t exist, not in the West Wing, not where it’s an expectation rather than an exception.)
Anyway, it doesn’t feel like working overtime, even though Josh is leaning heavily against her, her arm around his waist, close enough that if she pulled him just a little closer, in just exactly the right way, his cheek—or his lips--might brush against hers.
But Donna is only a little drunk, and a little drunk doesn’t excuse that maneuver, although Josh’s unsteady steps don’t exactly dissuade her from holding on just a little tighter.
(The look in his eyes doesn’t dissuade her, either.)
His face is turned to look at her, and all at once, he stops moving, and his eyes are on hers, and they’re glowing, almost, in a way that Donna wants to believe is for her, but instead dismisses as an accident, a phenomenon produced by the dim glow of the streetlight above them.
But he’d stopped walking, and he was looking at her, and he opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, something that counts, something that Donna will remember always, will whisper to herself as she falls asleep at night. For a second she wonders if she misjudged how drunk he was.
He’s so close to saying something, he’s about to say something.
“Woah,” he breathes.
Donna’s cheeks grow warm. “What?” she asks.
But it’s only then that she realizes that his eyes are out of focus now, that he’s looking beyond her, that the moment, whatever it was, or whatever it almost was, whatever it was going to be, has vanished into the darkness around them.
That he really might be beyond-help-Josh, now, after all, and all at once she remembers one of the only things she learned at college orientation, which is that you can continue growing more intoxicated even after you’ve stopped drinking, if you’ve had a lot in a short period of time, as the alcohol seeps into your bloodstream.
“I just saw a shooting star,” he says.
Donna lets out a breath, and then recovers, pulling on his arm again. “No, you didn’t. Come on, let’s find a cab.”
“I saw it!” he says. “It was right behind your head, Donna. Clear as night.”
“It’s day,” says Donna, directing him towards the curb.
He looks around. “Then why is it so dark?” He doesn’t say it in a dumb way, he says it like a challenge, like he’s trying to hang on to their usual banter, but he’s just missing his mark.
“No, it’s--.” Donna smiles, then sighs. “It’s nighttime right now. The expression is clear as day.”
But Josh has lost interest. “I did see a shooting star, Donnatella. Or, a…what do you call it? You were an astronomer in college. I forget the word. M-something.”
“Meteorite,” she says, softly, because she’s always reeling for a minute when he says Donnatella.
“Meat-a-right,” he echoes, in a sing-song voice. “760 Verbal, Donna.”
“It’s time to find you a cab,” she says.
VI.
Would you be going if she weren’t attractive?
Donna hates that question. She hates it before she asks it, she hates it as it’s coming out, and she hates it afterward, when Josh responds with his usual wit: “we’ll never know”. She hates that that question, right then, right there, is how it begins.
The thing is, Josh is going stargazing, and he’s going stargazing with Alex Moreau.
(Who is, for the record, attractive, so maybe it isn’t his fault. Or, at least, it’s only mostly his fault.)
It’s just that Josh doesn’t think about stars. He doesn’t think about space, he doesn’t think about stars, he doesn’t do things like this.
(Well, he does, if, in the case of Alex Moreau, the woman who asks him to is attractive.)
But the only time that Donna has ever seen Josh take a second for the stars was that day on the porch swing at the Bartlet property, and even then, maybe it wasn’t the stars so much as it was something to say; Donna had been exhausted, half-asleep on the swing that night, and when she thinks about it retrospectively, she thinks maybe Josh was just lonely and unwilling to admit it, as he always is, and telling her to look at the stars was really telling her, “Hey, stay with me, here.”
(The thing is that if he’d said it that way, she would’ve forced herself awake for as long as he needed, even then.)
But Josh is going stargazing, for real now, with a woman that he probably (definitely) finds attractive, and that woman is not Donna, and this is how it always goes. Josh will go home with that woman, maybe (probably), and Donna will go home (definitely) alone, to her roommate’s cats.
And Donna’s not angry about it. No, angry is the wrong word, because this is Josh, and she wants Josh to be happy (God, does she want him to be happy), but she knows, too, that Josh will do what he always does, and tomorrow he’s going to come in with a whole new way of looking at the issue of NASA, and Mars, and space, and it will be purely because Joshua Lyman went stargazing with this woman, and he probably forgot to look at the actual stars for her, too.
But then it doesn’t turn out that way.
Well, it does, sort of.
Because Donna was right; Josh comes in the next day with a new enthusiasm for all of it—for NASA, and for Mars, and for space. But he doesn’t do what Donna thought he might do, which is go out with Alex Moreau again. Because that night, the night after he went stargazing, he calls Donna, and he tells her that he needs her to come to his apartment, he needs her to see something.
And by the time they’re done taking turns looking through the telescope on the roof of his apartment, Donna is into it, too. Because in the end, it was never about NASA, or Mars, or space, or Alex Moreau. It was never about the telescope.
It was never about the stargazing.
It was about Josh, about the way his eyes light up when he gets invested in something like this, about the way his mouth runs a mile a minute, the way he looks younger and softer and impossibly gentle when he’s talking to her like this, with passion in his voice and his eyes like this.
It was about the way she wants him, wants to kiss him right there on the roof of his apartment, right next to a telescope that was a gift from the woman who took him stargazing, who is not the woman he chose to share this with.
It begins and ends with Josh.
It always does.
VII.
She didn’t know what was happening until it had already begun. After the crash, after the explosion, when the seconds stretched out, impossibly slowly, and before her lungs started feeling like she was trying to breathe while swimming through a pool of molasses, or lava maybe—because it’s warm, so warm, and for a second, that’s all that she thinks about. She’s not panicking, not yet; instead, she’s weirdly calm.
And maybe that’s what makes her start to panic, that calm. Because that calm only happens just before you die, doesn’t it?
And the second that hits, the second that she realizes that this is it, this is where she dies, this is how it ends, that’s when she really starts to panic, when she really starts to fight, tries to hold on.
Because that’s when she remembers him.
Maybe it’s the way the flames flash around her and pull her under; maybe it’s the ringing in her ears that disorients her, but as she slips away from it all, she sees his face, all those years ago, looking at her on the swing, rather than the celestial miracle in front of them.
And she hears him.
Did you see the stars, Donna? Did you see the stars?
She did, she had; but they weren’t enough, because now she’s suffocating, and she’s trying to hold onto him, his face, his image, the memory, but she can’t hold on, can’t grasp anything because she’s fading and her lungs are filling up with dust or sand or maybe ash and she’s slipping away like she did that night on the swing but this time she won’t wake to find him looking at her, won’t wake and see him there, watching, not even shy—stargazing, just like he said, just like that night.
She won’t wake; she knows that.
And just for a second, she wonders what that means, but it’s not Sunday School that comes back to her, it’s the night sky, it’s the stars, like that very night, and maybe if she joins them, at least it means she’ll always get to watch him, always get to follow him, silent and endless and unblinking, but always there, lurking enough that he can still feel her, can still sense her, just like she does outside his office.
For a second, it’s not scary, because at least she doesn’t have to believe that she’ll never see him again.
But she does wake.
She does wake, and there he is, and even before she knows where she is, knows what’s happened to her, she knows that he is there.
He’s there, and it’s not like the stars, it’s like the sun (although, as they say, the sun is also a star; even with only one day as an astronomy major under her belt, she knows that), because he’s never looked more exhausted and he’s never looked more terrified and the lines on his face have never been etched any deeper than they are right now, but he’s looking at her the same way he did all those years ago, like she’s the one who hung each star in the sky and even as he’s blinded by them, he can’t look away.
And so she deflects; she says something else, anything else, something that doesn’t really matter, something that will let him know that she’s really here, she’s really okay, something that’s more appropriate than what she wants to say, which is, I didn’t hang the stars in the sky; you did.
“You need to shave,” she says.
VIII.
They’re in New Hampshire again. They’re in New Hampshire again, and it’s just like it was before, except that no, it isn’t, everything is different now.
For one thing, they’re not sitting on the porch on the Bartlet property anymore, they’re not on the swing, not letting their shoulders and arms brush each other and pretending not to notice.
Moreover, they’re not on the same wavelength anymore; they’re not in the little bubble that used to belong to them, where wit and teasing remarks flowed like water, where secret glances and silent communication was currency, always full of fire but never burning, not like now.
Now, words are pointed, but they don’t have to be because Josh is numb, always numb.
To say he’s not doing well would be like saying that Will Bailey isn’t great with social cues—true, but such an understatement that it hardly feels in the same ballpark.
And of course, it’s all tied up in Donna; it’s always tied up in her, like the lanyard on that staff pass he gave her all those years ago actually invisibly lassoed around the both of them, forever tethering them to each other, but in a way that’s so deeply under the surface that they can’t find a way to root it out, can’t help bumping and crashing into each other, leaving devastation in their wake, but never allowing them to force the link to break.
It’s Donna who’s here now, Donna who always seems to be staying at the same little inn as Josh’s people, Donna who seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.
(He looks for her everywhere; when he can’t find her, the absence of her is vast, expansive; yet when she’s right next to him, he feels like he’s suffocating. How is that fair?)
It’s Donna, of course, who’s there, when Josh slips outside to the courtyard of the little inn to try and force a little air into his lungs.
(Of course, that’s impossible once he sees her, her back to him, looking up at the sky.)
The stars are the same, here, as they once were, and that probably makes sense, but Josh doesn’t know enough about how stars work to say for sure. They’re just as beautiful, just as awe-inspiring as they ever were, but he hardly seems them now, because the glow of Donna—here, by herself, like a golden opportunity—is so much brighter.
“Uh, hi,” he says as he approaches, stopping a few feet behind her.
Donna doesn’t turn around. “Are you following me? Feels like you’re following me.”
The words are Donna’s, but the tone isn’t, and all at once, Josh is tongue-tied. He doesn’t know how to respond to her—the campaigns are all following each other feels wrong, but of course I would follow you, I followed you to Germany and I would have followed you anywhere else if I’d known you were leaving is devastatingly worse.
Instead, he shrugs. “I go where they tell me. Suppose you do, too.”
“Well,” she says, facing him at last, and beginning to make her way back towards the inn. “Guess you’d know better than anyone whether I can do as I’m told.”
Josh looks at his shoes, her words hitting him with full force, as though she’d slapped him. In some sense, she hadn’t said anything at all—merely referencing the fact that she had, indeed, worked for him for many years. But the words were a dismissal, a deliberate misunderstanding of her importance to him, and probably his to her.
(Maybe that was how it had all broken, he realizes; maybe Donna had seen her role as Josh’s assistant, even after all that time, while Josh saw it as Josh’s best friend/role model/only person in the world who truly understands him/person whom the sun rises and sets with.)
Donna brushes past him, bumping her shoulder into his as she passes. He can’t see her face; can’t read her anymore, like he always used to, but he feels the burn of his shoulder where she’d touched him.
All at once, she stops, turning back to him, and pulling her eyes up to meet his, where he’s staring after her.
“You see the stars?” she asks.
Josh’s reply catches in his throat; whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that. “Yeah,” he whispers, finally.
She gives him a tiny smile—not her Donna smile, not the smile he falls asleep thinking about every night, even now, even still—and then a curt nod, before she turns away—he’s lost again, and so is she—but he swears he hears her whisper, just before she turns away, “I’m glad.”
IX. Epilogue
They’re not outside a hospital this time; they’re not on a porch swing in New Hampshire; they’re not on the rooftop terrace of his apartment building. In fact, they’re not outside at all.
But the room they’re in is bathed in warm, golden light, and she doesn’t even miss the stars, doesn’t even wish they were outside, watching them, just like they did when it all began.
They don’t need the stars like they once did, don’t need the excuse of the stars to say the things they can’t really find words for, to explain feelings they’re still deciding how to name.
(They can name them, now, see; and what’s more, they’ve found the words—three of them—which they’ve always known, but which took them way too long to actually say.)
None of it matters now, not as it did then, because they used to have to rely on the stars as something to look at, something to pretend to focus on while they snuck looks at each other.
They don’t need that anymore.
Maybe there was something that was always there, something like fate, something written in the stars, that had caused them to be always drawn to the stars, to the sky, to each other.
But maybe that doesn't matter now, either.
Because now he’s looking at her, and they’re dancing a dance that’s called their first but hardly is, and really, that hardly matters; and there’s flowers and soft lighting and music playing and Donna notices none of it, because he’s looking at her, really looking at her, with all the warmth and affection and fondness and love that he always has.
And it looks like stars.