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“You know, Donna got hold of this fax that was sent to the Press Office from the OSF at NASA.”
“What, is something falling out of the sky?”
“Yeah.”
“We get that fax once a week.”
“Yeah, but Donna doesn’t know that. She thinks it’s an emergency.”
“And you didn’t wanna tell her?”
“No, ‘cause the other way you get a day’s worth of entertainment without leaving the office. She doesn’t know that these things fall out of the sky all the time. Once every ten days, as a matter of fact.”
*
Josh walks back into the White House with a clear mind, almost instantly forgetting his conversation with CJ out on the sidewalk. It’s getting late, and most of the building has gone home by now, which leads Josh to believe that it might be time to finally start wrapping a few things up.
One of the things on his list probably should be telling Donna about how unimportant that fax is, but somehow it slips his mind.
He’s back at his desk, twenty minutes later, scribbling out a memo for CJ to read tomorrow when he hears the door to his office shut.
“So, it was all a hoax?”
Josh’s head snaps up. “What?”
“The fax from the guys at NASA,” she explains.
“Oh,” he relaxes. “No, there really is a satellite falling back to earth.”
“Yeah, but letting me stress out about it for the entire day was a joke.”
He smirks. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she moves towards one of his visitor’s chairs. “All your doing, I presume?”
“I get my kicks where I can,” he offers her a small smile. “Sorry.”
She waves him off as she sits down.
“How’d you finally figure it out?” he asks.
“Carol told me she gets that fax once a week.”
“Carol’s still here?” he raises his eyebrows. “CJ went home a little while ago.”
“She knows,” Donna starts, leaning back in the chair. “She’s always here for a while after CJ leaves.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Donna shrugs. “We try to get some of the annoying stuff dealt with after you guys go home on the semi-normal days. The bullpens are quiet, and we can get through a lot of it and start prepping for the next day.”
Josh smirks. “We?”
“Yes, we, as in the assistants” she shoots back.
“But you’re never here after I leave.”
“That’s because you leave at midnight when everyone else has already gone home.”
Josh leans back in his chair. “Fair point.”
They sit quietly for a minute, just relaxing in the silence. It’s been a long day – and an even longer week – and soon enough it’ll feel like the sky is actually falling down on them, so Josh is content to sit in the silence for a while and enjoy it.
“Where would you be?”
Apparently, Donna is not.
“Sorry?”
“If a satellite really was going to hit someone tonight, and there was a good chance it was going to be you, where would you wanna be?”
“Well…” he starts, pausing to think about the question. “That doesn’t really give me a lot of time to work with.”
“Nope.”
“So I guess traveling in my final hours is out.”
“Most likely.”
“There goes half of my bucket list.”
“You have a bucket list?” Donna tilts her head.
Josh shrugs. “Not really.”
“I’d probably try to do something on my bucket list too,” she muses.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” he smirks.
“What?”
“You having a bucket list.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” he grins, “it’s just very… you.”
Donna smiles softly at his comment. She wants to know what else he thinks is very her, because she has a whole list of things she deems as very Josh. Including, but not limited to, not really having a bucket lost.
“So, what’s on it?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugs, “dumb stuff, I guess. See the Grand Canyon, go skydiving – stuff like that.”
Josh laughs. “I can’t picture you jumping out of a plane.”
“No, you can’t picture you jumping out of a plane.”
“Yeah, because I would never do it.”
“You’re not gonna go sky diving with me?”
“Not a chance.”
“What if I asked nicely?”
“Doubtful.”
He tries to hold firm in his denial, knowing full well that given an hour with nothing to do, Donna could absolutely convince him to jump out of a plane as long as she was going to be right there next to him.
She smirks, possibly reading his mind. “I’ll drag you along one of these days.”
“This is your bucket list, Donna,” he shakes his head, “not mine.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have one so I’m graciously sharing mine.”
“How kind of you.”
She leans her head back against the chair and closes her eyes. “You’ll thank me for it one day.”
There’s another stretch of silence floating between them, but instead of a clear mind, Josh can’t stop thinking. Images of him and Donna doing all the things on her list keep flashing through his mind. Them at the Grand Canyon, them seeing all the sights on his list too – he even got a glimpse of them free falling through the air with parachutes strapped to their backs.
He’s not sure if he wants it to be his future, or a figment of his overactive and sleep deprived imagination.
“None of those things you could do tonight, though,” he steers the conversation back on topic, realizing she never actually answered the question.
“Nope.”
“So, we’re back to square one.”
“I don’t know, there are other things I’d like to do before I die,” she turns to look at him. “Smaller things – things I’ve always wanted to do but just haven’t had the chance or the courage to do… I could probably do one of those before I get crushed by a spy satellite.”
“Yeah?” he perks up.
“Then I’d probably end up here, in this office,” she shrugs, “with you, like I always am.”
“Like what?”
“Hm?”
“The smaller things, what’s one you would do tonight?”
Something flashes across her eyes as they lock on to his, and for a moment he thinks he knows what it is. It’s a split second where this unspoken thing they have balances delicately in the air between them. He wonders if any of the things on her list line up with the ones on his (#1: Tell Donna how you feel) even though he knows they’ll never actually talk about it (#2: Skip the talking and just kiss Donna at least once before you die). It’s times like these where he wishes that Donna actually could read minds, because it would be so easy to tell her all the little things he wants to do before he dies too. If only he didn’t have to open his mouth.
There’s a knock on his office door followed by maybe Toby’s voice, and the moment is gone as quick as it came. They’re both looking anywhere but each other, trying to regain their composure and ignore that split second ever happened. Donna recovers first.
“I don’t know, Josh,” she says quietly as she moves to get the door. She pauses just before turning the handle, staring at the ground instead of him. “I just hope that one day I’ll actually do them.”
“Yeah,” he says just before she leaves, and then quietly “me too.”
*
It’s an hour later when Toby finally leaves his office and the bullpen is completely empty by now. Josh is about to start falling asleep at his desk, and the only thing stopping him from resting his head on arms and passing out is knowing that Donna’s still here too.
He grabs his coat and his bag, throwing them both on before striding out of his office. He finds Donna hunched over at her desk, highlighting something in the low light of her lamp.
“I’d probably end up here too, you know.”
He says it before he knows what he’s doing, and immediately regrets it when she jumps at his words. It probably wasn’t the best idea to start mid conversation in the near silent hum of the west wing at midnight.
“What are you talking about?” she turns around in her chair.
“Earlier,” he leans against the wall of her cubicle, “you said that if you were gonna die-by-satellite-impact tonight, you’d probably spend your last hours here.”
“Here?” she smirks, remembering her words. “With you?”
“Yup.”
“Doesn’t sound like me,” she teases.
“Not at all,” he jokes back. “But if I was dying tonight…” he stops, trying not to lose his edge before he gets to what he really wants to say. “I don’t know… I’d probably want to be here too. With you.”
She tilts her head slightly and smiles. “Really?”
“Yeah…” he shrugs, pausing for a second. “You’d be running around here like a lunatic, just like today – it’s be fun to watch.”
“Josh!”
“I can’t help it if I wanna go out laughing, Donna,” he grabs her coat off the rack and holds it up for her.
She slips her arms through the sleeves. “Oh, and you think I’m the girl to help you with that.”
“I find you hysterical,” he holds out her scarf.
She grabs it from him. “In every sense of the word.”
“You betcha,” he grins.
She throws her bag over her shoulder and breezes past him on her way out of the bullpen. He catches up to her easily, still smiling from his own joke.
“Yeah, well,” she starts, “next time we get a fax about something falling from space…”
“Yeah?” he smirks.
“…I’m telling Sam instead.”
His face falls. “Oh come on.’
“And he and I will run far, far away from this place and watch you all get squished.”
“That’s not fair.”
“This is what you get for making me stress out all day,” she tells him.
“You really wouldn’t take me with you?”
He’s giving her his best puppy dog eyes and it’s taking everything in her not to cave immediately.
“Maybe if you hadn’t mocked my bucket list…”
“I’m sorry,” he holds up his hands in defense, “it was a nice list.”
“It is a nice list,” she agrees, “and I’ve already crossed quite a few things off of it.
“Yeah? Like what?” he asks as they turn the last corner into the lobby
“I think the first thing on the list was ‘graduate high school’.”
“You can cross that off.”
“Then there was ‘move out of Madison’.”
“That one too.”
“I even had ‘meet the President’ on there for a little while.”
He stops just before the front doors. “You did not.”
“Swear to God,” she tells him with a smile. “I think it was in my top five.”
“And how’s that working out for you now?”
“Let’s just say that Donna from ten years ago would be ecstatic with where we’re standing right now.”
“And present-day Donna,” he grins, “how does she feel about all this?”
She pauses for a minute, looking around at the paintings and the architecture, pretending to think about the question.
“She’s pretty ecstatic about it too.”
“Okay,” he shakes his head with a smile and his hand finds its usual spot on her back as they push through the front doors.
They head their separate ways in the parking lot, and they both fall asleep that night with a smile on their faces, ready to get up and do it all again in the morning.