Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Santos campaign, meager as it is, has a few things going for it.

The Santos campaign has a young, attractive, energetic candidate, who even Donna has to grudgingly admit is a much more inspiring choice than Bob Russell or John Hoynes. Practical? Probably not, but he looks good on TV and he’ll look good giving the keynote speech at the DNC before Russell gets the nomination.

The Santos campaign has minority support. Or they will, once they manage to raise enough money to catch the attention of minority groups in the party. Not a whole lot of that in New Hampshire or Iowa, however, and New Hampshire and Iowa are the places to buy attention.

The Santos campaign has an actual message. It’s an insane one, certainly—there’s no way he goes anywhere without the teachers, without the farmers, without the insurance companies—but it’s at least much more interesting to listen to than Russell’s bland promises to continue doing whatever Bartlet was doing, but with more subsidies for mining companies.

But most importantly, the Santos campaign has Josh Lyman. Sure, Washington insiders say he’s been on the outs since the before the government shutdown. She’s seen the editorials about how, passed over for Chief of Staff and laboring under delusions of grandeur, Josh Lyman started running Matt Santos’ campaign as a vanity project. They don’t know the truth. They don’t know that Josh was asked to run both the Russell and Hoynes campaigns, and turned them both down. They don’t know how much Josh has given up, will still give up, for what they call a pipe dream. For anyone else, it might be a pipe dream.

For Josh, she knows it’s not. For Josh, it’s real. Josh won’t give up until he puts his guy into the Oval Office, or until he dies trying.

Donna is afraid it might be the latter.

See, there are a few things that Santos campaign has going for it, but there are many, many things that the Santos campaign lacks. One of those things, Donna comes to find out, is health insurance.

It’s a month after she quits when she first sees him. She would have liked to say she hadn’t thought of him in that month, but the truth is, he never was far from her mind. The thought of him somehow made itself a bed in there, occupied entirely too much space, and happened to be a very stubborn tenant, disinclined to leave.

She’s busy, for sure, but it’s a different kind of busy. It’s interesting work—media targeting—and she’s pretty good at it, but it’s not quite like working at the White House. Nothing could be. It’s not enough to keep her mind off of him. Every so often, she picks up her phone, about to call him, and then she remembers how he didn’t even give her the respect of believing her when she said she was quitting. He had been so ignorant of her and her struggles and her feelings that he hadn’t even taken her seriously?

Did he ever take her seriously?

This is better, she thinks. Will… Will takes her seriously. He gave her a job that uses her skills. She’s happy.

Or so she thinks until she sees him one day in New Hampshire.

She walks into Will’s meeting, unsure what it’s about but just happy to be invited to a serious, high-level meeting, and then she sees him. He’s staring at her, mouth agape, his cheeks ruddy from the cold, and all she can think is that he doesn’t look happy.

She expects to feel a sense of smug satisfaction about that. He quit because she did, she thinks, and now he’s trying to run a long-shot candidate, which can’t be good for the infamous Lyman ego, and he looks cold and miserable.

It’s painful, though, because she feels cold and miserable too. So maybe things aren’t that much better.

She can’t help but wonder how he’s really doing. She spent so many years of her life forcing him to take care of himself that she can’t imagine he’s doing it on his own. He doesn’t look like he is, anyway; he’s pale and thin and his hair looks like it’s falling out (although that might be the truly hideous haircut he recently got—perhaps even he didn’t remember what barber he usually went to without her to schedule her appointments). She wonders if he’s still taking his medications, or going to see his therapist, or eating a salad once in a while, or sleeping… ever.

Probably not, she thinks, taking him in.

She watches from the upstairs window as he leaves the campaign office, blowing his cheeks out as the New Hampshire January cold hits him.

“Donna!” Will calls, and she remembers that she needs to put Josh Lyman out of her mind. She has a new job, a new life now, and that job is not to worry about him. It’s to worry about his candidate, and the new polling numbers Will is putting in front of her.

Then again, his candidate isn’t anything to worry about, she notes, consider he’s not even within the margin of error of being relevant. So Josh isn’t anything to worry about either.

She’s seen him a few more times since then—at silly New Hampshire campaign events, in the most awkward elevator ride of her life, at Iowan conventions celebrating corn—and each time, he looks worse and worse. She tries not to notice, very aware that she’s probably doing the same thing. Perhaps it’s the harsh lighting of her hotel room, but when she looks in the mirror, after a long day prepping for tomorrow’s caucus, she looks much older than she’s ever been. She feels it, too. Hotel beds make her bad leg ache, and she hasn’t slept more than five hours in god knows how long, and she can’t remember the last time she had a haircut. She’s certain if she searched hard enough, she could find a few gray hairs.

She wishes that she could cover up the mirror, to not be confronted with the specter of exhaustion she’s become. That’s how campaigns are, isn’t it? Everyone looks like a zombie by the end.

Although this isn’t the end. It’s barely the beginning.

Donna tries not to think about the first Bartlet campaign, about how young and energetic and excited she was. They all were back then, most of all Josh.

She flops back on her bed. She can’t think about Josh. She absolutely cannot spend tonight thinking about Josh.

The walls of the hotel are thin, however, and much to her dismay, as soon as she turns off the TV, she hears some coughing. Not just coughing, awful, disgusting hacking. The hotel walls are thin, sure, but the fact that anyone might be producing that much sound with a cough is frankly disturbing. She pulls her pillow over her ears, hoping to drown out the noise, but it seems that nothing can quiet it.

Something deep inside her knows who is capable of producing that sound. Who that cough is coming from.

She remembers months spent cringing at horribly painful coughs in a Georgetown apartment. They said it was normal, that coughing helped clear the damaged lung, that although it was painful, he needed to do it. Still, every time she would hear him hack upon waking up, she would worry that he might get started and then never stop. She knows that sound intimately, and she knows just how long she needs to wait before she can worry.

It’s not nearly long enough.

She gets up before she can even really think about it, taking a few deep breaths to push back the anxiety that seems to try to travel up her stomach to her throat. She never felt things like this before, not even when he was first hurt, but ever since she got blown up, it seems like she feels everything. She’s tired of feeling, frankly, but not even the ice-cold of Iowa can freeze her heart enough.

Her feet take her out the door, and across to his room, where sure enough, the coughing grows louder and more intense the closer she gets. It’s, without a doubt, him. And no wonder she could hear it so well in her own room; there’s a package of some sort that got lodged in the door preventing it from closing fully. Naturally, Josh didn’t notice—he never seems to—but it means Donna doesn’t even have to knock.

She does, of course. He used to barge in without knocking, but she’s never quite been able to get over that particular barrier. He doesn’t stop coughing long enough to answer, though, so Donna opens the door.

His room is in disarray. He’s been in Iowa only five days, but the contents of his suitcase seem to be strewn everywhere, across the floor, on the desk, a shirt hanging off the corner of the TV. He’s a mess, sure, but she’s never known it to be this bad, and the thought to her is more chilling than a wind chill of twenty below.

But worse than the messy state of the room is the state of him. His face is red, there’s a pile of used tissues next to him, and he can barely even look up to acknowledge her presence before launching into another coughing fit. He looks sweaty and exhausted and his shirt is hanging open, exposing the t-shirt underneath.

It’s awful to watch this, and she would be more worried if she hadn’t dealt with it before. His lung is damaged, half filled with scar tissue, making it more difficult to fight whatever respiratory viruses come his way. She knows this well, and it’s even more familiar to her ever since her pulmonologist explained this to her after her pulmonary embolism surgery. She hasn’t gotten sick since then, and she’s certainly not anticipating the new experience with any sort of excitement. In fact, if she were smart, she’d leave right now to avoid catching whatever he’s got, but she’s not smart. Not when it comes to Josh Lyman.

He’s been easily knocked down by colds ever since Rosslyn, and once or twice it’s devolved into pneumonia. Coincidentally, those instances were the times that he ignored her suggestion to go to the doctor until it was completely unavoidable, resulting in several forced days of rest, and in one case, a night spend in the emergency room. Donna gets the sense that if he doesn’t do anything about this soon, it’s going to be one of those instances.

She’ll have to force him to go to the doctor, she thinks, the thought almost automatic. But first he needs to stop coughing. She grabs a glass off of his bedside table, fills it with water, and holds it out to him. Usually, this is enough to at least stop the coughing for a bit, but what he really needs is his inhaler, if he has it, which it seems he rarely does.

He takes the glass and swallows it, and she sits beside him on the bed, a hand on his back to still him. It’s not even something she thinks about, but once his takes a sip and his heaving stills, she pulls her hand away before he can notice.

“I’m fine,” he mutters raspily, putting down the glass on the bedside table, very conspicuously not looking at her. “I’m fine.”

“You’re clearly not,” Donna says, scooting away from him. “Where’s your inhaler?”

“My…” he trails off, starting to cough again, although he’s able to stop after a few seconds. Donna picks up the glass of water and puts it back in his hand.

“Your inhaler? Do you even have it with you?”

He rolls his eyes, holding a hand to his forehead. “Donna, I don’t…”

“Don’t you dare tell me you don’t need it,” she says, “because I can clearly see otherwise.”

“What… what are you doing here, anyway?”

Donna pulls back, unsure how to answer that question. What is she doing here? What is she doing at all? Here in his room, here in Iowa, here on the Russell campaign… the truth is, she doesn’t really know. She might have once said she was getting away from him, and yet here she is, sitting on his bed, and she’s not sure why.

“I could hear you coughing all the way across the hall, and then your door was open and I…”

Josh rolls his eyes. “Donna, I’m fine.”

“Are you sick?”

He shrugs and take a slow, measured sip of the water. “Peter and Miranda must have given me whatever little thing they had…”

“Peter and Miranda?”

“The Congressman’s kids. But they had this a few days ago, and they’re fine now, so I’m not too worried that…”

“They may be fine,” Donna chides, “but you’re clearly not. You have a little more to be worried about, and I’m sure you don’t want to end up in the hospital with pneumonia, especially not when the caucus is tomorrow and the New Hampshire primary is a week away.”

He rolls his eyes again, pushing up from the bed, but falling back down when he starts coughing again. “I’m fine,” he says insistently, but it’s punctuated by more coughs.

Instinctively, Donna reaches out to touch his forehead. “You feel warm. Josh, can I at least take you to an urgent care or something? You need to get a refill for your inhaler if you don’t have it, and maybe they can get you started on something to make sure you don’t get pneumonia.”

“Donna…”

“Look, I know you don’t want to, but if you collapse on the floor of a high school gym at the caucus tomorrow, how’s that going to look? Your candidate is practically dead on his feet in the polls, how’s going to look if the campaign manager is actually dead?”

He pales at that, an impressive color change considering how red his face is from the fever and the coughing. “I’ll be fine. I was just about to take some Nyquil and knock out for a few hours.”

“I’m taking you to urgent care,” Donna says, “or we can go to an ER but of the two…”

“I can’t,” Josh says quietly.

“I know you’re stubborn about this but I’m not just going to sit across the hall and listen to you die, Joshua!” Donna says. “Even if that might make my campaign life easier, I almost… Josh, I’m not going to let you succumb to your own stubbornness.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not stubbornness.”

“What, do you not want to be seen as weak? Because believe me, if you faint on the caucus floor tomorrow I don’t think…”

“It’s not that, either,” he interrupts, wiping away the beads of sweat that are forming on his forehead. “I can’t afford it, Donna.”

Donna frowns. Josh doesn’t make a whole lot of money, or certainly not as much as he could be making in practically any other job, but he’s not irresponsible with money. Having dealt with his finances for a time, she knows that he has a decent amount of savings and that he certainly spends less than he makes. “What, you can’t afford a $100 copay?”

“Copay?” Josh chuckles, although it is without humor. “Donna, the Santos campaign consists of me, a couple people from his congressional office, and a lot of volunteers who aren’t even old enough to vote. You think I’m getting benefits on top of my nominal salary? I’m paying more in travel costs than I’m making!”

Donna blinks a few times as his statement sinks in. “You don’t have health insurance?”

He shakes his head and clears his throat, mercifully not coughing any more this time. “No,” he says. God, his voice sounds awful, painful and scratchy.

“Josh, you can’t just… you of all people need health insurance, what with all the…”

He gives her a slight smile. “What with all the preexisting conditions I have? Insurance companies are really going to all be jumping at the chance to cover me, considering that I’m on several medications, have an incurable psychological disorder, and oh yeah, a completely fucked up body from that time I got shot in the chest.” He probably would have gotten louder, but his voice sounds too raw to be anything but a low growl.

“Josh…”

He sighs. “I tried, Donna. I did apply. But it’s so hard to get approved if you’re not under an employer-funded group plan, especially when you’ve got a medical history as complicated as mine. And it’s not like I have time to fight anyone to get a plan.”

“I know,” Donna says, and she thinks of how many time she’s been thankful that, as part of a government delegation, she was able to be treated at military medical centers. Still, she’s on her own fair share of pills, and not all of the physical therapy she needed was covered. She had insurance at the White House, and she has insurance on the Russell campaign, but even then she’s worried about something else happening that bankrupts her completely. “Josh… please tell me you’re not… you’ve got your meds, right?”

He nods, clearing his throat again. “I’m not entirely stupid, I thought this through. I figure by the time I’m through the refills I got recently, I’ll either be out of the race and back into a job with benefits, or we’ll have DNC funding and maybe then we’ll actually be able to offer insurance because we’ll actually have paid campaign workers.”

“Josh, the convention isn’t until July,” she points out, and she doesn’t try to think too hard about the boldness of suggesting he’ll still be in the race come July.

He shrugs. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Josh…”

“What’s the worst that can happen?” he asks flippantly. “I can probably pay out of pocket for another refill, it’s not like I’m struggling for cash…”

Donna frowns. “They really rejected you?”

“Think about it, Donna. You’re an insurance adjustor. From a financial standpoint, what would be the benefit of insuring the guy whose monthly pharmacy run alone costs about what you would expect to get from him in premiums? If he, I don’t know, bursts an artery again or has a stroke or ends up in the hospital for pneumonia, you’re losing money on him, not making money. Why would you insure that guy?”

She frowns. It makes a lot of sense, she guesses, but it still makes her blood boil. It’s just anger she’s feeling, not fear, because she can’t bear the thought of any of that happening to Josh. She can’t even allow that thought to cross her mind, so instead she just has to be angry. “That should be illegal.”

“I agree,” Josh says, “but it’s not like we haven’t been trying to make it illegal for the last eight years. Too bad Republicans are in the pocket of the insurance companies.”

At least, Donna thinks, his anger hasn’t resulted in more coughing, even if his voice seems to be growing more strained by the minute. She doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t really know what to say. She could complain about the mess that is the healthcare system, and he’d probably agree, but that doesn’t help him get the healthcare he really needs. Because she’s still convinced he needs to go to an urgent care before he coughs too much to get any more oxygen into his lungs.

“It’s not like insurance helps that much even when you have it,” Josh continues, staring at the wall ahead of him. “I had to sue them to get them to pay my hospital bills when I was shot. If that happens to someone else who doesn’t have the funds or the knowledge of how to sue their provider, they’re pretty much bankrupt, because who has an extra $50,000 lying around?” He leans back on his forearms. “I figure I’ll be fine for the next few months,” he says, although the movement seems to make him start coughing again.

Donna cringes. “You are not fine,” she says. “You sound terrible, and I’m certain that if you ignore this you’re going to end up in the hospital, and then you’re going to need to pay even more medical bills. How much do you think you’d get billed for a visit to urgent care and some antibiotics and maybe another emergency inhaler since obviously…” she trails off as his coughs get more harsh. When he finally reaches for the almost empty glass of water and manages to get it down, she continues, “…obviously you need it.”

Josh groans and clears his throat again, sitting up. Usually, she knows, that helps with the coughing. He spent most of his months in recovery propped up to keep pressure off his damaged lung. “Donna, it’s not about… I mean, I’m sure I could afford a visit but it’s…”

“Don’t tell me this is about principle,” Donna says, rolling her eyes. “Josh, I admire your principles but frankly I’m more worried about your health and wellbeing.”

“Why?” he asks suddenly.

Donna is stunned by the simple question, but she doesn’t look at him. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why are you so worried?”

“Considering your track record with worrying, I don’t know that you have any right to ask me that question,” Donna shoots back, and immediately regrets it. To pick on Josh’s anxiety and neuroticism, things she knows he’s worked hard to cope with, seems like a bridge too far.

Apparently Josh doesn’t though, because he nods with understanding. “Yeah, but you don’t have a qualifying diagnosis.”

“Who’s to say that?” Donna asks, and once again, she regrets it. She should leave before saying anything more, considering what a disaster this conversation has been so far. She’s not even sure why she is so combative about that—certainly, it hasn’t been easy to recover from the aftermath of Gaza, and she has talked to someone a few times—but by comparison, her mental recovery has been far easier than his ever was or continues to be.

Josh catches onto this and frowns at her, seemingly hit with a realization. “Donna, you can’t… did you go see someone or get…”

“I’m fine,” Donna says, wincing. “I don’t know why I said that. Point is, I’m concerned about all the Americans who don’t have health insurance because they work for an employer that is too small to be required to provide it, or they work too many part-time jobs, or they’re practically volunteering their entire life to put a man in office.”

“But you’re worried about me,” he says.

She is. She’s worried about him on a personal level. She’s pretty sure from the moment she saw him in the hospital with a bullet in his chest, from the months of horribly painful recovery, from the moments when it was excessively clear that despite his physical recovery he was still not okay, she’s been worried about him. But that doesn’t mean anything, not really. She can’t let it.

So she reasserts herself.

“Josh,” she says softly. “You need health insurance.”

He leans back again, which only leads to more coughing. “And where do you propose I get that?”

Where do you propose I get that? Donna turns the words over in her head, over and over again. 

And then she has an idea.

It’s a stupid idea, really. He’s sure to say no. He’s sure to laugh her out of the room, laugh her out of Iowa if it comes to that. Things are fragile enough between them, so the concept of doing this is ridiculous. He’ll never go along with it, and even if he did, how would it work? How could they possibly do it, what with being on different campaigns, with being in a kind of media spotlight, with being them.

And yet he’s right. Donna has seen his medical records; at one point, she had them memorized, filling out forms when his right arm was still too weak to do any kind of writing. She’s picked up white bag after white bag of little orange bottles from the pharmacy. She’s been the one to set up all of his many doctor’s appointments; they’ve gotten to be fewer and fewer over the years, but they’re still more frequent than probably anyone but the President. She probably knows the health issues he’s at risk for better than he does. There’s no way he’d get approved by an insurance company, not without paying a premium unaffordable even to him. The Santos campaign is too small to provide insurance, and he won’t quit just because of that. So there isn’t any other solution.

“Propose,” she whispers again, the word sticking into her brain.

It’s crazy, she thinks, but it just might work.

“Josh…” she says quietly. “Josh, I think we need to get married.”

Chapter Text

“Josh… Josh, I think we need to get married.”

Josh knows he has a sensitive system, but the last time he took his cold medication was six hours ago, and he only took the recommended dose, and surely that’s not enough to make him hallucinate the absolute insanity of what Donna just said. So either he’s absolutely losing his mind, or Donna’s losing hers.

Still, her face is serious. Donna can keep a straight face pretty well—much to CJ’s frustration—but Josh, oblivious as he can be, has been the only person able to see through her faux-straight face. She's dead serious.

He has to make himself laugh, though, or else he will never be able to process this. Unfortunately, laughing irritates his already sore throat and sensitive chest, and he begins to cough again, and time seems to slow as it does when he has a really bad coughing fit.

There’s a glass of water in his hand again, although he doesn’t remember picking it up, and he takes a drink of it, swallowing sharply and coughing a few more times before he finally catches his breath again. God, his chest hurts; it has hurt worse, but that’s not something he likes to dwell on.

Donna was there then, and she’s here now. For whatever strange reason, she's here.

Finally, once his pulse has settled and his eyes have stopped watering, he braves a small chuckle. “You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? Finish me off so you don’t have to worry about the Santos campaign nipping at your heels.”

She frowns. “You’re doing an awfully good job of that yourself, if you keep this up,” she notes. “Josh, I’m serious.”

“You just… you just proposed to me? Donna, I’m flattered, but I…”

Donna rolls her eyes and pushes his shoulder, although he notes and appreciates just how gentle she is, because she must know how much everything hurts already. “Not like that.”

“You don’t want to get married… like that?”

“No.”

Josh raises his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware there were other ways we might get married.”

She throws her hands up in the air and stands up from the side of the bed, beginning to pace towards the TV and back. He’s got it on CNN, the background noise a low drone. “Josh,” she says, letting out an exasperated breath, “I have health insurance. Through the campaign.”

He blinks a few times. “Okay. I don’t see what this has to do with marriage.”

“Spousal benefits are part of my insurance package,” she continues. “I didn’t think I’d need that, of course, but I did choose the more extensive package because I’ve still got my fair share of bills and meds and physical therapy to be worried about, and spousal coverage was just a part of that package. Didn’t think I’d use it, but…"

Josh is tempted to laugh again, but he doesn’t want to start coughing. This is already embarrassing enough, really. This whole night, this whole trip, this whole campaign, really, has been an exercise in humiliation. Josh isn’t sure he’s been able to feel pride in himself since the Carrick incident, and especially not since he got passed over for Chief of Staff, but this is a new low. “You’d marry me so I can have health insurance.”

"Just for the next year or so,” Donna says. “We could quietly separate after that—no one needs to know we got married in the first place, actually—and you’d… you’d have coverage, which you clearly need.”

It’s an absurd idea, really. He can’t just go and marry Donna. And yet… there’s a certain logic to what she’s saying. Because the truth is, much as he prefers to be cavalier about his own health, the idea of being uninsured does frighten him a little bit. He knows, better than most, just how catastrophic an unexpected health crisis can be; even after the lawsuit got his insurance to pay most of his hospital bill, there was still a fair amount to pay for out of pocket, which put a significant dent into his savings. He’s certainly not expecting to go out and get shot again, but with his luck, it's entirely possible that something could happen. It would be one less thing to stress about, and anything to reduce his stress is appreciated.

It’s a kind offer, really. Too kind, especially after how they separated. So he frowns. “What’s in this for you?”

“I’d like to stop worrying about you for five seconds, if I'm honest. And we all know Bob Russell’s bound to win anyway, but someone should give him a run for his money. Shape the debate.”

Josh wants to get defensive about this, but he doesn’t quite have the energy, and considering the magnitude of what Donna just offered, he doesn’t exactly have the latitude to get on her about anything. “You’re really willing to do this?”

“No skin off my back,” Donna says, “as long as you pay your own premiums and copays.”

“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Josh says cautiously. No, it certainly wouldn’t look good if the manager of the Santos campaign was dating… not even dating, married to someone on the Russell campaign (and he doesn’t even want to think about the implications of her being his former assistant).

“That’s a given,” Donna says. She shakes her head. “Look, don’t read anything into this, I just…” She shrugs, looking away from him. “I have this… intense fear of seeing you in a hospital bed again, you know?”

Josh closes his eyes, trying everything he can to block the image of her, pale and battered in a hospital bed in Germany, out of his mind. It’s not very effective; that image has haunted his dreams for the past several months, more than fire or sirens lately. "Yeah, I get it,” he says softly. There’s nothing else he can say, because the way he gets it is so viscerally painful.

“So?”

He manages to snap out of it, seeing Donna right next to him. The living, breathing, unblemished (aside from the little scar above her eyebrow— no one else would take notice of it, but he constantly finds his eye drawn to it) Donna Moss.

He’s never been able to say no to her.

“Okay,” he says flatly. “Okay, I’ll marry you.”

“Don’t sound so thrilled about it.”

He shrugs. “Not that kind of marriage, right?”

“Not that kind of marriage,” she confirms with a sly smile. “Look, Josh, we don’t have to make this weird.”

Josh chuckles, grimacing as his throat tightens. “Well, it’s pretty damn weird without me trying to make it that way,” he replies vehemently. This, of course, triggers the coughing again, and his chest feels like it’s going to tear itself apart, and now his stomach wants to get on the action, bile rising in his throat. Josh ignores Donna’s concerned look and stumbles toward the bathroom, making his way to the toilet just in time to empty what little he has managed to eat today.

This cold hadn’t seemed nearly so bad when Petter and Miranda had it, but Josh is miserable. Then again, he’s been miserable for a while now, ever since there was an empty desk in his bullpen.

Donna knocks on the half-closed door behind him as Josh flushes the toilet and wipes his mouth off with a wad of toilet paper. “Everything alright?” she asks, any sarcasm from earlier gone in her concerned voice. It reminds him of the days when he was recovering from the shooting, where she'd wait outside his bathroom for any sign of distress, breaking down a boundary between them that had hardly been there in the first place.

There are so many more walls between them now, some of them impossible to scale.

“I'm fine,” he says, turning around and leaning his head back against the cabinet below the sink. He doesn’t quite have the energy to get off the floor yet.

He thinks she’s going to get on him about going to urgent care again. He’s still not convinced; he’s worried that, while he could probably pay for a visit to urgent care, costs could easily balloon if the doctor there decided he needed something else done urgently. That, he thinks, is probably not worth the risk. Plus he has to be there for the caucuses tomorrow. Santos has to get third, or they’re through. He can muddle through with over-the-counter meds and catch up on sleep on the flight back to New Hampshire.

He’s sure she’s going to drag him off the floor to go to urgent care, but to his surprise, she sits down next to him, stretching out her legs with a heavy sigh. “So,” she says softly. “I think we should plan our wedding.”

“Our wedding,” Josh repeats, the words rolling unfamiliarly off of his tongue.

“Yeah. It should happen as soon as possible, I think, so I can get you on my policy.”

Josh frowns. “It’s not going to be tomorrow. We’ve both got caucuses to be at.”

“You're going back to New Hampshire next, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be there for a week,” she says quietly. “Do you know if there’s a waiting period for a marriage license there?”

Josh picks a piece of fuzz off of his outstretched pant leg. “I don’t know. This is New Hampshire though, but seems unlikely. Worst comes to worst, we’ll wait until the Nevada primary.”

“Josh, we really should look this up.”

He leans back again, squeezing his eyes shut against the obnoxiously bright light of the hotel bathroom. He’d never really thought about getting married, but he certainly didn’t think he’d be planning his wedding like this, on the cold tile of a hotel bathroom in Iowa, still tasting bile on his tongue and next to Donna.

Well, maybe he had thought about being next to Donna, somewhere deep in his mind.

“My laptop is in the conference room,” he mumbles, “and god knows I don’t have the energy to go get it.” At her concerned look—he hates that look of concern and yet he’s so grateful for it at the same time—he changes the subject. “I know who we can call to ask, though. He’ll know all the obscure laws in New Hampshire.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think I would call to ask about New Hampshire legal statutes?” Josh mutters, pulling his cell phone out of his pocket and dialing the number.

Donna turns to give him an incredulous look. “Josh, if you’re calling who I think you’re calling, it’s one in the morning in DC, not to mention, I think the President of the United States has more important things to do than lecture you on New Hampshire legal statutes.”

“He said I could call him anytime,” Josh replies, and smiles when he hears Charlie on the other side of the line. “Hey Charlie, I know it’s late, but I really need to speak to the President. Any chance you could… thank you, I’ll stay on hold.”

Donna raises an eyebrow. “He’s letting you through?”

“Charlie will do just about anything for me,” Josh says. It’s something Josh usually feels bad exploiting, because he knows that it's a manifestation of Charlie’s still intense guilt about Josh getting shot with a bullet meant for him, but tonight he’s just grateful to be able to get through. He hears the hold sound, before the phone is picked up in, he assumes, the Residence.

Over the phone, he hears a groggy but familiar voice. “What is it?”

“Mr. President, I’m so sorry to call at this time of night, but you said I could call at any time, and I was wondering…”

“Josh?”

“Yes sir,” he says, rubbing his eye, just now realizing how watery it is.

“Your voice sounds terrible,” the President says. Josh realizes that he’s got the phone on speaker when he hears Donna snicker ever so slightly at that.

“Just a little cold, sir. Stuff you pick up along the campaign trail. Nothing you need to tell your wife about,” he says, the pace of his words picking up.

“You think that you’re the topic of conversation between my wife and I?”

Josh flushes, and not because of the fever he’s trying to ignore he has. “Not at all, sir, I just… how is Dr. Bartlet, by the way?”

“She's up in New Hampshire,” the President replies. “But you didn’t call me at one in the morning to talk about my wife. Spit it out.”

Josh bites his lip. “Sir… well, actually it’s about New Hampshire. Do you know if there’s a residency requirement or a waiting period to get a New Hampshire marriage license?”

“Do you need this information for a particular reason?”

Josh winces. “No?”

“But you called me at one in the morning to get it?”

“To uh… prove a point,” he says, pressing his lips together and staring at Donna, who seems to be giggling at this interaction. “I figured you’d know off the top of your head, since it’s the kind of random trivia you know, and as the former governor of New Hampshire…”

“Yeah, yeah,” the President says, giving off that sarcastic annoyance he’s so well known for. “No waiting period, no residency requirement, no blood test… I don’t think you even need witnesses. We don’t like regulations in New Hampshire.”

“Ironic to hear that coming from a Democrat,” Josh says. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re not planning on getting married anytime soon, are you, Joshua? Because if you are and I don’t know…"

“No sir,” Josh says, and while he feels bad about lying, it’s not like they’re ever going to share about this arrangement. It’s just that—an arrangement. Not a marriage, not really. “Just... for trivia.”

The President’s sigh is audible on the other side of the line. “Josh, I know I said you could call me anytime but…"

“I'm sorry sir, I’ll try not to do this again,” Josh says with a grimace. “I just… thank you. This was very helpful.”

“Iowa caucuses tomorrow, huh?” the President continues. “Think your guy’s gonna get anywhere?”

Josh bits his lip. “We’re gunning for third, anything more is a pleasant surprise.”

“I’m not allowed to do this, technically—I shouldn’t even be speaking to you, really—but good luck tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“How’s Donna, by the way?”

Josh pales considerably at this, hedging a glance towards Donna, who is staring straight ahead, barely moving a muscle. “I don’t… I don’t see a lot of her these days, but I’ve heard she’s invaluable to the Russell campaign.”

“Ah," the President says, sounding slightly disappointed. “Well, if you run into her, let her know we miss her here. We miss you, too, but Donna actually likes hearing my trivia.”

Josh can’t really suppress a smile at that. “Yes sir, I’ll be sure to…” he sends another sideways glance towards Donna, who is trying to hide her own soft smile, “let her know that. Well, I should let you get to sleep, it’s late and I really shouldn't have disturbed you in the first place.”

“Go get some rest, Josh, you sound like hell,” the President says in response.

“Always good to hear,” Josh retorts, although he’s very aware that he’s lost half his voice and that the coughing will start again at any little trigger. “Thank you sir, I’ll talk to you soon.”

The President hangs up and Josh leans his head back agains the cabinet, letting out another heavy sigh, which, of course, triggers another round of coughing. His stupid, damaged, ineffective left lung is trying to clear itself out, but no amount of coughing is going to fix what’s already damaged.

He’s not sure any amount of talking can fix what’s broken between him and Donna, either. Marriage certainly won’t fix anything, not when it’s like this.

But marriage it is.

“So, New Hampshire, huh?” Donna says quietly.

“Get our marriage license and have a justice of the peace do it that day,” Josh confirms. “No waiting period, no witnesses, no…”

“Sounds like quite the wedding. ”

“Not that kind of marriage.”

Donna sighs and grasps her left ring finger in her other hand, and as Josh watches this, he briefly wonders what it might be like to see an engagement ring on that ringer. His grandmother’s ring, which was supposed to go his sister, but everything that was going to go to his sister is to be his now, a painful doubling of possessions that he figured he’d probably never use. Still, he almost wishes he had that ring on him.

Which is stupid. No one is even supposed to know about this. It’s just an arrangement.

“We're leaving tomorrow night, after the caucus,” Donna says. “Going to Nashua. You?”

Josh nods. “Yeah, we’re headed there too. I don’t think… I think we should make sure we get out of town. Go up to Manchester or something where we can be a bit more anonymous. If someone from any of the campaigns saw us…”

“Yeah, you’re right,” she says. “Look, your name is going to have to go on some paperwork, so someone in HR is going to know, but they’re legally prevented from disclosing that so I would hope that maybe…”

“There’s a risk it’ll come out,” Josh says. “But that will be worse for me than it is for you, so…”

Donna nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay? Is that… do we need more wedding planning, or are we…”

She tilts her head to the side, finally pulling back her hand from its position wrapped around her ring finger. “My sister spent thousands of dollars and months of planning on her wedding. Who knew it was actually this easy?”

“Yeah,” he says, although it’s not easy. Really, it’s the hardest thing in the world, to think of marrying her and yet not marrying her. “Incredibly easy, really.” He swallows thickly, praying that it won’t start his cough again.

Donna shifts on the floor uncomfortably, and Josh realizes just how cold the tile is, and how uncomfortable sitting here is, and reaches for the edge of the counter to help himself get on his feet. It’s much harder to stand up than it should be, and it occurs to him that he really is pretty sick, and he really shouldn’t be trying to push through. Donna is probably right that he should go to urgent care, but he’s wiling to roll the dice that he can manage with out. Worst comes to worst, he’ll have insurance in a matter of days.

“Josh, I really think you should consider…”

He shakes his head. “Caucuses start in… oh, seven hours,” he says, glancing at his watch. “I either have time to go to urgent care or to sleep. I’m going to take some Nyquil, pass out, and hope that tomorrow I can manage to stay on my feet.”

Donna looks like she’s about to argue with him, but she stands up, almost looking as unsteady as him, and sighs. “You’re incredibly stubborn, you know.”

“Yeah, I always thought that was part of my charm,” Josh says, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror. God, he really does look awful. He remembers looking at himself in a mirror for the first time after Rosslyn and being shocked by what he saw, but he’s not even sure he looked that bad then. He’s not sure what he’s gotten himself into, and he’s not sure how he’s going to manage to make it through the whole brutal campaign, but he’s not someone who quits.

“If you keep me up all night with your coughing, I will drag you by the ear to the nearest emergency room and subject the underpaid nurses of Iowa to you, and frankly I’m not sure I have it in me to be that cruel,” Donna says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “But if you’re sure you’re going to be alive in the morning, I'm going to go get some sleep.”

Josh smiles at her weakly. “Sleep well,” he says, looking her over like he hasn’t allowed himself to do since she left. It's been weeks of avoided eye contact, of an inability to really take her in, of a fear of contact because he cannot allow himself to be hurt by her again.

He's definitely going to be hurt by her again, he thinks, by allowing her into his life like this. But the thought of being hurt by losing her again pales in comparison to the thought of never having her as part of his life again. The pain of being with her like this is one he can live with; the pain of being without her, he’s not so sure he’d survive.

“You too,” she replies, opening the door to the bathroom. “I’m right across the hall if you need…”

“I’ll be fine,” Josh brushes off quickly, swallowing. “But… thank you. For offering, and for… you know, all of this. I owe you… pretty much everything.”

And that’s true. Josh isn’t sure if he’ll ever stop feeling indebted to her. Not after the way she's saved his ass professionally time and time again, not after she literally kept him alive for the months in which lifting his arms or walking to the couch exhausted him, let alone functioning in the capacity he was used to, not after he let her almost get killed. And especially not now, when she’s offering so much to make sure that he can get healthcare.

Donna doesn’t respond to this, which is alright with Josh. He doesn’t expect her to. Instead, she opens the door to his hotel room, kicking the package which had propped it open inside the room fully, and gives him a last glance. “Good night. And good luck at the caucus tomorrow. If I don’t see you then, I’ll see you in New Hampshire.”

“Yeah…” Josh says softly. “Good night.”

She closes the door behind her and Josh manages to stagger back to the bed, letting the exhaustion he has been avoiding feeling all day wash over him. It’s too much for his tired brain to process, that he’s going to marry Donna. Even like this.

He digs into his bag of medications and manages to find the Nyquil. He pours a dose into the cup and swallows in down in one gulp, then puts the cup down and rubs his hands through his hair as the medication burns on the way down.

He has a caucus to get through tomorrow. And then he’s going to marry Donna.

He’s asleep before he can consider anything else.

Chapter Text

Josh makes it through the Iowa caucus, barely.

They place third, but miles behind Russell, and more embarrassingly, miles behind Hoynes, noted opponent of ethanol subsidies. The Santos campaign is still in it, but they’re clutching onto the cliffside with their fingertips, and any wind could blow them completely off the face of the earth.

Still, Josh manages to make it through an endless day of standing in high school gyms and trying not to faint. Donna doesn’t go to the same caucuses that he does, and that’s a relief, because he’s not sure she wouldn’t grab him by his neck and take him to the nearest urgent care if she had seen just how many times he’d needed to grab onto a chair to stay upright.

This is the worst of it, he knows; his head is spinning, and he’s incredibly nauseous, and the coughs seem to rattle him more and more, but this is usually the worst day of a cold for him. If Peter and Miranda could get over whatever this was in all of two days, certainly Josh, even with his damaged lung and disadvantage of age, can manage to get over it in a week.

He wants nothing more than to go back to the hotel and flop down on his bed and sleep for eighteen hours, but they have to get to New Hampshire tonight.

They didn’t buy commercial airline tickets, not when Santos can fly them back to New Hampshire, so any hopes Josh had of sleeping on the plane are dashed. It’s not that Santos is a bad pilot, necessarily, but the small plane is much more susceptible to turbulence and Josh’s stomach is already highly sensitive. There’s no bathroom on the small plane, either, so he spends the entire two and a half hour flight to New Hampshire trying to resist the urge to vomit.

“You don’t look so good,” Ronna notes, as the plane begins its decent. One of the few mercies of the small plane is that it’s too loud to easily hold a conversation, although Ronna seems determined to try.

Josh is honestly surprised people haven’t been bothering him more about this. He knows he’s looked terrible all day, and he’s barely stopped coughing, and he's almost definitely losing his voice. Back when he had gotten sick while working at the White House, nobody would let him get away with it. Sam would give him that concerned look all throughout the day, Toby would tell him to keep his germs away and then would come check on him every hour or so, CJ would tease him about sounding terrible but wouldn’t be able to hide the sad concern in her eyes. Leo would notice, and then he’d tell the President, and then the President would bring in the big guns: his wife. And of course Donna would coordinate this whole response, sharing her concerns, and, as always, being the first one to notice that something was wrong.

He’d gotten annoyed at their worry then, brushing it off. He knows why they had worried so much; they’d all had to watch as he tried, painfully to recover from his surgery, as a bout of hospital acquired pneumonia had put him back in the ICU for a few days, as his life and all of theirs got turned upside down by a little piece of metal.

The Santos team is nice enough, if inexperienced, but they also don’t have that kind of connection to him. They know him as Bartlet’s bulldog, the invincible and irrepressible force of legislative power. Even on the campaign, he’s the leader, and they look to him for guidance. They have no reason to be concerned about him. Even Santos is depending on him to manage the campaign. Who would be there to worry about the boss?

Apparently, Josh thinks with disdain, that’s still Donna’s job. She didn’t want that job, and yet she’s still doing it.

“Josh?” Ronna repeats, and he blinks a few times before making eye contact with her.

“I think I picked up whatever Peter and Miranda had,” Josh says with a shrug. “Should blow over in the next few days.”

Ronna accepts this with a frown. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Your voice sounds pretty bad.”

It feels pretty bad too, but Josh doesn’t share that. He leans back and rubs his eyes, looking out the window as the sparse lights of southern New Hampshire greet them.

There’s a volunteer at the airport with a minivan ready to drive them to the hotel, and Josh takes the front seat, hoping that sitting there will be enough to prevent the nausea in his still churning stomach from getting any worse. He makes it through the short drive, and pulls out his bag from the trunk with a heavy sigh.

Josh hasn’t willingly taken a sick day in years—they’ve always been forced on him by the President or Dr. Bartlet—but he supposes now is as good a time as any. Especially when he needs tomorrow off anyway.

Once they’ve checked into the hotel and gotten their room keys, Josh pinches the bridge of his nose and approaches Santos, swallowing thickly. “Sir,” he says.

“Josh! Don’t tell me you’ve got more things to talk over today; we’ve made it through Iowa and we’re still hanging on? Isn’t that enough before we have to move forward?”

Josh shrugs and tries to force a smile. “Certainly, but I actually… well. We've got six days until the primary, and while you’ve got a full schedule tomorrow, if I’m not there for all of it, it’s not the end of the world and I guess… what I’m asking is, would it be alright if I took tomorrow off?”

Santos raises an eyebrow. “That’s not something I ever expected to hear coming out of you mouth? I don’t know that I can deny you that, but what do you need…”

Josh presses his lips together tightly. “Well sir, I’ve managed to pick up whatever cold your children brought and it’s been hitting me pretty hard, so in effect I need…”

“A sick day,” Santos completes. “You know, you do look pretty bad.”

“Hence the request.”

"I'll try and make sure no one disturbs you,” Santos says, “although I can’t promise.”

“Thank you sir,” Josh says, rubbing his eyes again. God, he almost wishes it were just a sick day, and that he didn’t have something else to be doing. “Before I go, is there anything… I should know or…”

Santos shrugged. “Helen and the kids were going to fly in tonight, but the kids are going to go back to Texas for the week, so they’re going down there to stay with her mom and Helen is catching a flight back up tomorrow morning.”

Josh nods. “Good, good. I'm sure the kids have... school and other things children do.”

Santos gives him a strange look. “Yes,” he says. “Okay, Josh, you really ought to go to bed. You look like you’re going to fall asleep standing up.”

Josh nods. He feels like it too. “Yeah, okay. If you need to contact me tomorrow, just call me. I’m trying not to, you know, spread my germs.”

“Much appreciated,” Santos says. “You know, I think that by the time I've shaken every single hand in this country, my immune system will be unstoppable.”

Josh forces a chuckle before picking up his bag and heading towards the elevator.

When he gets to the room, he immediately flops backwards on the bed. It’s not particularly comfortable—the Santos campaign doesn't have the funds to pay for hotels surpassing the quality of a Comfort Inn—but at least it’s a bed, and Josh doesn't have to attempt to stay upright anymore.

He checks the clock. It’s late, but he has changed time zones so he supposes he’s not as tired as he could be. Easily as he could just fall asleep right now, he has one more task to take care of.

She's the first number on his speed dial—has been since he got this phone—but he hasn’t touched her number since December. It used to be so easy, often one of the first things he did upon waking up, but not calling her feels so fraught. He loosens his tie and unbuttons his shirt, still not quite finding the energy to sit up.

Before he can press the button, however, his phone starts ringing and he almost drops it out of his hand. He picks it up, accepts the call, and holds it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Josh?” It’s not some campaign intern, or one of the few staffers who have his number. No, it’s the very person he was trying to call. Her voice is so familiar to him, and yet it stuns him to hear it.

“Donna,” he says, searching for confirmation.

“Yeah. I just wanted to… well, I just checked into the hotel in Nashua and I wanted to see if we were still on for tomorrow.”

If we were still on for tomorrow. She makes it sound so casual, like they’re going to get coffee, or going out for a lunch that keeps getting canceled. Josh’s chest starts to hurt, and he’s not sure it’s because of the coughing. “I'm off tomorrow, so yes.”

“Off as in…”

Josh chuckles. “Off as in the whole campaign thinks I’m dying so I'm taking a sick day.”

“Ah,” Donna says. “Well, you do sound like you’re dying. Perhaps you should actually be taking a sick day.”

“Don’t start.”

“Do you feel any better?”

“Marginally.”

He can practically hear Donna’s eye roll over the phone. “You know, Josh, if you’re on my health insurance and I tell you to go to the doctor, you’re going to actually go to the doctor, right? Otherwise this whole exercise is…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Josh says. “Yes, Donna. But I’m fine. I didn’t collapse at one of the caucuses, if that’s what you’re trying to insinuate.”

“That’s a pretty high bar to set for yourself, there,” Donna says, and Josh almost laughs at that. “Seriously though, if you’re not feeling well enough to…”

“Donna,” Josh grumbles, “this is going to be the only day off I have until August at the very least. We have to do it tomorrow.”

She is very quiet for a moment. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” Donna says. “I’ve got a rental car so we can…”

“Good," Josh says. “I think we should go up to Manchester. Or even Concord. We don’t want to run into anyone involved with any campaigns.”

“The entire political world is in New Hampshire right now,” Donna points out.

“If they’re not, they’re on their way,” Josh agrees. “Let’s see, do you have your documents? ID, all that?”

“Yes, plus my birth certificate, just in case.”

Josh stops short. Of course he doesn’t have his birth certificate with him, not on the campaign trail. But if he allows himself to think too hard about it, he’ll remember that he doesn’t have an original birth certificate anymore, not since it burned along with his house and his sister. But he won't mention that to Donna. “Okay,” he says. “And rings.”

“Do we need rings?” she asks.

“I mean, we’re not really going to wear them but during the ceremony we might… exchange them, I don’t know.”

Donna is quiet again for a moment. “Maybe. We can stop somewhere on the way, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound terrible,” she notes. “Worse than the other day. Are you losing your voice?”

“Probably,” Josh says with a sigh, staring up at a water stain on the ceiling. “Let’s hope I get it back soon.”

“Okay,” she says quietly. And really, what else is there to say to that? “I should let you stop talking and get to sleep since we’ve got a big day tomorrow. What time were you thinking?”

“Nine,” Josh says. “Everyone should be out of the hotel by then, which means I can get out easily. And as long as we’re back before five, according to the schedule, no one will be here to see me come back when I’m technically still supposed to be in bed.”

He hears a light laugh on the other end. “You have some experience with that kind of sneaking around, don’t you?”

Josh frowns. “Donna, I don't know what you…”

“Don’t think I don’t know about that time you and Sam snuck out of the house when that was clearly against the rules,” she says. “And worse, you went to go get cheesesteaks, which were definitely not on your diet plan.”

He thinks back to those awful few months now more than five years ago, and one of the bright spots. Yes, Sam had snuck him out of his apartment when he wasn’t supposed to leave, and yes he had gotten food he wasn’t supposed to eat, but everything was fine and he had one of the nicest afternoons he’d had in a long time. And he was so sure he’d gotten away with it, too. “How did you know about that?”

"I have my ways,” Donna says.

For a moment, it feels like them again, and Josh revels in the warmth of the image of her smile that his mind conjures up. “You’re not actually mad about this, are you?”

He can’t see her, but he can immediately feel a shift in the conversation, like ice surrounding the phone lines that connect them. “I think I have bigger things to be mad about,” she says, her voice even. Too even, really.

Josh swallows. It still feels like knives down his throat. “Yeah.”

“I’ll pick you up at nine?” she says, after a long pause.

“Yeah,” Josh replies.

“Wear something nice," Donna says, and hangs up the phone.

Josh groans and flops back onto the pillows, rubbing his eyes so vigorously he’s afraid he’ll take the skin off. 

He’s getting married tomorrow, and he’s not sure he’ll sleep tonight, even if every cell in his tired body is begging for rest.

He manages to doze until the winter light peeks through his curtains at seven. He’s not rested, and his chest still feels like there’s an elephant sitting on it, but between the cold he’s still getting over and the anxiety he’ll probably never get over, that’s not an unfamiliar feeling.

He gets up, turns on the coffee maker, contemplates going downstairs to eat breakfast before remembering that he doesn’t want to see anyone today. His stomach is turning at the thought of food anyway.

The coffee doesn't taste like anything, but it helps wake him up ever so slightly. He showers, making sure the hot water runs for long enough that the mirror steams up and he doesn’t have to look at his reflection, and pulls on his least wrinkled suit. There’s a tie in his suitcase that Donna bought him, dark blue with silver stripes. "You wear too many boring ties,” she had told him when she gave it to him. “This is a little more interesting.”

Josh had teased her then, saying his personality more than made up for his ties being boring, but the truth is, the tie is one of his favorites. It seems appropriate to wear today. He stares at himself in the mirror as he methodically ties it, pulling just enough for it to feel constrictive.

At nine, Josh slips out the back door of the hotel to where Donna is waiting in a rental car. He sit down in the front seat and looks over at her; she’s not any more made up than usual, but this morning he’s blown away by how beautiful she is. “Hi,” he says, and god he wishes his voice wasn’t so croaky.

“Hi,” she replies. “Manchester City Hall?”

Josh nods. “Do we need to stop? Get… I don’t know, rings or something?”

“I did a little research last night, we don’t need rings,” Donna says. She’s not looking at him at all; Josh supposes that’s because she is trying to keep her eyes on the road, but it seems seems like she’s consciously trying to avoid meeting his eyes.

“Yeah, but how’s it going to look if we don’t have them? We have to convince them on some level that we actually… you know, want to get married.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “Yeah, some overworked city employee is really going to care whether we look like we’re in love.”

“I’m just saying, we definitely don’t want to arouse any suspicion,” Josh says. “We should at least look like we, you know, actually like each other.”

“We like each other,” Donna replies flatly.

“Really? Because that’s news to me lately.”

“Josh…”

He rubs his temple and then leans his head against the window of the car. “Look, it’s all of ten minutes. We can pretend to be in love for ten minutes. It can’t be that difficult to imagine being in love with me, right?”

Donna laughs at that, and the hearing the sound makes Josh feel as if he’s being stabbed in the heart. Is it really that hard, he wonders? For him, it seems like the easiest thing in the world to pretend that he’s in love with her.

Finally she shrugs and says, “I have a couple of rings in my suitcase.”

“Will one of them fit my fingers?” Josh asks pointedly.

“Well, I got it from Walmart yesterday and I made sure I got something close to your size, so hopefully,” she says.

“You went shopping for rings? You know my ring size?”

“Eight-dollar rings from Walmart,” Donna says dully. “Look, I get it. We’ve got to be careful. We don’t want to look out of place.”

Josh nods, trying to sound casual. “Yeah.”

“I can do that for ten minutes, if you can too.”

It seems like the easiest thing in the world, he thinks, to look at her with love and longing. “Ten minutes,” he echoes. “I think this is our exit.”

The courthouse is not particularly busy, considering that it’s a Wednesday morning, so Josh and Donna are able to go straight to the desk and pick up a marriage license after showing their IDs. The moment they step into the building, Donna has her arm wrapped around his, and she’s wearing a bright grin on her face that Josh isn’t sure he’s seen in years. Not since Gaza, anyway.

“We were also wondering if we could… uh, get married today? Here?" she asks once they have the license in hand. She giggles a little bit, and Josh is reminded that Donna really is a very good actress when she wants to be.

He, on the other hand, realizes that he’s frowning again, and quickly adjusts his features. The easiest way to do this is by focusing on her, how she instantly looks younger as she works out the details of a courthouse wedding with the clerk. He thinks about how he first met her here in this state; how appropriate, then, that their marriage is taking place here.

Not that kind of marriage, he has to remind himself.

“We have a room downstairs that we use for marriages,” the clerk says. “The judge will meet you down there. Do you have witnesses?”

Donna looks at Josh, and he clears his throat. “We were um… told that New Hampshire doesn’t require witnesses.”

“You were… told?” the clerk questions, a look of bemusement on her face.

“By a very reliable source,” Josh says, thinking back to his conversation with the President. He’s not going to bring that up—he’s sure the clerk wouldn’t even believe him—but he shrugs. “We don’t need them, right?”

“You don’t,” the clerk confirms, "but usually people have them.”

“We’re from out of town,” Donna says. “We don’t know anyone here. But we absolutely couldn’t wait.” She’s plastered on a sickeningly sweet smile, and her eyes are wide and Josh can feel them focus on him. “Now, where are we going?”

The clerk smiles. “Take the stairs down, and it should be the third door on your right. It’ll be open. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Josh says, and he feels Donna tug on his hand and lead him towards the stairs. “You’re really laying it on thick, aren’t you?” he whispers as they descend.

“You could manage to do a little more of it,” Donna replies.

Josh rolls his eyes. “I’m trying to be subtle.”

“Subtlety is not in your vocabulary, Joshua,” she mumbles. They’ve reached the bottom of the stairs and are approaching the room designated for marriages. “I’m just saying, acting like you want to be here goes a long way.”

He does want to be here, but his response to that ends up being a horrible, hacking cough. He stops and puts his hand against the wall, leaning on it for support as he tries to stop. To his surprise, Donna puts her hand on his back, rubbing it gently, just like she used to do when he was recovering and coughing constantly. He’s not sure why it helps so much, but it does, and it only takes a minute for him to catch his breath and let his face return to a normal color.

“You alright?” Donna asks softly, and this, he knows, is genuine.

He nods. “Yeah, just… this cold has been a bitch to get rid of, you know?”

“If you’d gone to get your inhaler prescription refilled,” she murmurs.

“Okay, but… you know that’s why we’re here, right?”

Donna smiles softly. “Yeah. Come on. Let’s get married.”

Josh allows himself to look her over fully for the first time. She’s wearing a cream-colored dress, and when she pulls off her gray cardigan, she really does look like she’s ready for a wedding. Even in the terrible lighting of the city hall basement, she looks almost ethereal. No, it won’t be too hard to pretend that he enjoys looking at her.

They enter the room and greet the judge. “Do you have vows written to exchange?” the judge asks. “It’s alright if you don’t, I just…”

“No,” Donna says regretfully. “But I’m not sure I could even find the words to express how much I love him, you know? I prefer to show it through actions.”

The judge chuckles. “Well, if you’re ready to begin….”

“More than ready,” Donna says, clutching Josh’s arm. “Aren’t we, baby?”

Josh smiles as widely as he can. “Absolutely.”

The ceremony takes all of five minutes, the most basic legal language exchanged. Donna plasters a wide grin on her face the whole time, while Josh allows himself to look at her, really look at her, and react the way he’s always wanted to.

He takes his time putting the cheap ring on Donna’s finger; it’s for show, of course, but he never has the opportunity to take her hand in his like this, to study the long, delicate fingers, to touch her reverently. She takes her time too, and he can’t help but wonder why.

“By the power vested in me by the State of New Hampshire,” the judge says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

Shit.

Josh hadn't thought about this at all. Well, he’s thought about kissing Donna, although he’d never admit that. But he certainly hadn’t thought about kissing her today. Much as she’s been acting like she’s in love with him, he's not sure she’s willing to be kissed by him. Not to mention, he’s still feeling half-dead from this cold and he certainly doesn’t want to give it to Donna.

But she looks at him expectantly, and he hopes he can read her eyes the way she can read his. He leans forward to give her a quick peck on the lips, pulling back quickly. Feeling suddenly very awkward about doing this in front of the judge, he adds a fast, “There's more where that came from later,” with a raise of his eyebrow.

Donna forces a giggle, and the judge looks sufficiently awkward.

“Congratulations,” the judge says. “I've signed the license, so if you go upstairs, you’ll be able to get your official marriage certificate.”

“Thank you so much,” Donna says, and she picks up the license, tugs on Josh’s arm, and leads him back up the stairs. “You couldn’t have kissed me a little more convincingly?” she whispers.

“I don’t want to get you sick,” he whispers back. “If you hadn’t noticed, I kind of sound like I’m dying.”

“Don’t joke about that,” Donna hisses. “Let’s go get the certificate; I’ve got to turn it in to get you on my health plan.”

He stops short on the stairs as a realization hits him. “You’re my wife now.”

“Yes, that was what this whole thing was all about,” Donna replies absently.

“But you’re like… actually my wife,” he repeats. “Did you ever think this would…”

“No,” Donna says. “But here we are. It’s done. Let’s go get our certificate.”

Josh blinks a few times, still trying to absorb this, but follows Donna up the stairs slowly, until they reach the front desk again. Donna begins to speak to the clerk, and Josh stands behind her, his hand lightly resting on her lower back. “Here’s the official marriage certificate. Congratulations again,” says the clerk. She picks up the marriage certificate and Josh turns to leave, but he stops short when he makes eye contact with the person waiting in line behind him.

Helen Santos, who is definitely supposed to be in Texas, is standing right behind him.

She raises an eyebrow and locks eyes with Josh, and then moves her gaze to Donna. “Well, this is interesting.”

Josh swallows thickly. “I can explain.”

Chapter Text

Donna only vaguely recognizes the woman standing behind them, but then she remembers what she saw of one of the Santos campaign events on TV, and puts two and two together. They’ve just been caught by Josh's candidate’s wife.

Not exactly an auspicious start to their marriage.

Josh shifts on his feet uncomfortably. “I can explain,” he says, staring at the floor. Donna tries not to make eye contact with her, unsure of how to respond.

“I gotta say, Josh, I didn’t take you for the marriage type,” the woman says, “and certainly not the ‘courthouse wedding in the middle of a campaign’ type.” She scrunches up her face. “Is that a type? Well, you made it one.” She holds out her hand to Donna. “Helen Santos, of ‘I’m Matt Santos, I’m running for President’ fame.”

Donna shakes her hand tensely, biting her lip the whole time. “Donna Moss.”

Helen tilts her head to the side. “Nice to meet you, Donna. You have a very familiar face, have I…”

“Yes, you’ve seen her before,” Josh says dully, tapping his foot. Donna is tempted to reach out a hand to still him, but it’s not that kind of marriage.

“On TV!” Helen makes the connection. “Oh my god, you didn’t just go get married, you married someone from the Russell Campaign.”

Josh cringes and takes a few steps away, clearly not wanting to have this discussion in the middle of Manchester City Hall. “Mrs. Santos, like I said, there’s an explanation but I…”

“I would think!” Helen says.

“You can’t… this isn’t supposed to be public knowledge,” Josh says, lowering his voice. It’s raspy and hardly audible. “It’s bad for the campaign.”

Helen raises an eyebrow. “Well, let me pick up this permit for the campaign event here tomorrow, and then you can take me out and explain this all,” she says. “Josh Lyman, of all the people.”

He looks down, shuffling his feet slightly. “Yeah…” He coughs slightly, although thankfully it doesn’t turn into any sort of fit, before clearing his throat enough to say, “Yes, we should… go get lunch?”

When they’re settled into a corner booth at a diner in Manchester, Donna can’t help but think that this is it. This is their wedding reception. She’d never really been the type to plan out every single detail of her dream wedding, but she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about it. She certainly expected it to be different than this. It definitely wasn’t supposed to be in the basement of a city hall in New Hampshire in January.

Josh runs to the bathroom in the midst of a coughing fit right before the waitress comes over to take their orders, and Donna has to suppress her instinct to follow him and make sure that he’s okay. He is a grown man, and he’s somehow managed to make it this far. But this means that Donna is alone with Helen Santos, who she’s never met, and Helen is becoming increasingly more impatient without the situation being explained.

“So,” Helen says, taking a sip of water out of a red plastic cup after ordering her chicken Caesar salad, “Josh is married.”

Donna bites her lip. “I suppose so.”

“To you.”

“Hopefully only to me,” Donna retorts.

“And you work on the Russell campaign.”

Donna nods, not quite looking Helen in the eye. “Yes.”

Helen leans back, raising an eyebrow and taking Donna in completely. “I don't know Josh all that well, but I know him well enough to be surprised. He always struck me as the kind of guy who is married to the job.”

“Well, yes.”

“And yet he took a day off from the breakneck pace of the campaign to marry someone on the opposing campaign.”

Donna looks down at the table, marked by years of children scraping it with butter knives. “Well, it’s not quite like…”

“I’m curious,” Helen interrupts, “where this star-crossed lovers thing came from. My husband might not be so thrilled about this setup, but I have more of a curiosity. This goes against everything I know about Josh Lyman, which, granted, isn’t much, but I…”

“It’s not like that at all,” Donna says. “We’re not…” her voice catches in her throat. “We’re not actually in love.”

Helen stops short. “You’re not.”

Donna shrugs. “It’s a… your campaign, you’re not providing benefits. You’re barely providing a salary.”

“If I recall, the low salary was Josh’s choice so we might have a fighting chance.”

"No, it’s not just that,” Donna says. “Josh doesn’t have health insurance right now, and he’s got too many preexisting conditions to be approved on his own, and I have…”

Helen closes her eyes and nods. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” Donna says quietly. “We’ve been friends for a long time. I worked for him for a very long time. I care about him deeply. So now he can be on my health insurance. But… that’s it. That’s all there is.”

At that moment, Donna turns to the sound of shoes squeaking on the floor near her. Josh is red faced and still looks like death warmed over, but at least he isn’t coughing and he is walking up to her under his own power, which practically seems like a miracle at this point.

“I explained things,” Donna says.

Josh blinks a few times and nods before sliding into the booth next to her. “Okay.” He bites his lip before placing his elbows on the table and leaning forward. “Mrs. Santos, I’m sure you understand, it really is best if we keep this a secret.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of it so far,” Helen remarks.

Josh sighs. “No, but I… if this gets out, it’ll be bad. It’ll be a whole process story on how the Santos campaign can’t provide for its workers, and a whole thing about the state of healthcare in this country, which I’m not ready to…”

“Aren't we concerned about the state of healthcare in this country?” Helen asks. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s one of the tenets of this campaign.”

Josh rubs his temple and groans. “Yes, but I…”

“Don’t worry, Josh,” Helen says, trying to put Josh out of his misery. “I’m not going to say a word. Not even to my husband. I never saw anything.”

“Thank you,” Josh says. His voice really is nearly gone, Donna notices.

The waitress comes back with their food. “I ordered for you,” Donna explains when Josh looks at the bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of him with some disdain. “It's good sick food.”

“You always tell me it’s too high in sodium,” Josh says.

“Usually you need to cut down your sodium,” Donna agrees, “but right now you’re sick and you need to replace your electrolytes.”

Josh sighs and takes a bite of the soup before making a face. “I’m not really hungry,” he says.

Donna shrugs. “Eat it all,” she instructs, unfazed by his complaint. “You look like you’ve lost some weight that you couldn’t afford to lose in the first place.” While the cold is certainly making him look much worse, he’s been looking bad for a while now, and Donna can never quite push down the worry that tugs at her that maybe he’s just stopped caring about his own well-being entirely. That maybe when she left, his motivation to take care of himself left too. That shouldn’t be—-that isn’t her responsibility, and yet she feels the weight of it anyway.

Helen observes this and smiles wryly. “Perhaps you two do seem married after all,” she says.

Josh swallows down another spoonful of soup before looking up at Helen. “Ma’am, we’re trying to keep this a secret, I think you should…”

“You’re not doing a great job of it so far,” Helen notes. At Josh’s fearful expression, her face softens slightly. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone. Not even my husband. The two of you should just be a little bit more careful.”

Donna nods. “Yes, of course. We probably should have driven further out of the way but…”

“You know what though?" Helen says through a bite of salad, “I kind of like knowing this. Knowing that Josh Lyman isn’t just the political automaton the world believes him to be.”

Donna knows this too, better than anyone, but she simply gives Helen’s comment a delicate smile before peering into Josh’s bowl of half eaten soup. “You need to eat the celery too,” Donna says. “All of it. I’m not going through all of this just to watch you kill yourself with your diet.”

Josh groans but takes another bite.

Helen offers to drive Josh back to the campaign hotel, but Josh refuses. It’ll look suspicious, he says, if he’s seen to be out when he’s allegedly taking a sick day.

Allegedly, because once Donna is driving them back towards Nashua, his phone begins to ring incessantly. It’s Ronna, having a million questions about debate prep, and then it’s Ned trying to figure out the lawn sign distribution mixup, and then it’s the Congressman himself with five hundred other questions even though he promised not to call Josh.

Donna bites her tongue as she watches all of this go down, but in a way, it hurts to see. Josh is so brilliant, so talented, and yet here he is trying to wrestle with lawn sign deliveries and all the other minute details of a campaign, without having the people he needs to really run it. He’s taking all of this on himself, and Donna isn’t sure how much more he can lift.

“You should tell them to stop calling you,” Donna notes when Josh finally closes his phone. “You’re taking a sick day, you shouldn’t have to…”

“The campaign doesn’t stop working just because my lungs decided to,” Josh shoots back, leaning his head against the cold window. He must have a fever again, Donna thinks.

“Okay, but most of that is stuff they can figure out on their own, isn’t it?”

Josh shrugs. “No one here has any experience with national campaigns except for me. They're good people but they just…”

“You’re not sure that they have what it takes.”

He bites his lip. “Yeah.”

“Do you have what it takes?” Donna asks. It’s rhetorical, of course. She knows that he does, or at the very least he’ll put everything he has into the campaign, but she wonders if he’s ever stopped to think about what that might mean for him. What all this might take from him. She’s thought about it far too much.

These jobs come with immeasurable sacrifices sometimes, she thinks, and one of her hand drifts to the scar on her chest, not as large as his, but newer and redder and angrier.

Josh doesn’t respond to the question, instead continuing to press his face against the glass.

Donna doesn’t mind silence—there have been so many times in her life where she just wanted Josh to shut up—but today it bothers her.

The drive is slow. Snow had fallen the night before, and while Donna has plenty of experience driving through the snow, even the main road that she's taking back is bad. Donna doesn’t say anything, and Josh doesn’t say anything either, only coughing every so often before gulping down more water and going back to press his face against the window.

When they finally reach Nashua, Donna looks over to see that Josh is asleep. She looks at her watch—it’s early in the afternoon—and thinks for a moment. She hates to disturb him as she pulls towards the street that his hotel is on, and she makes a split second decision to drive to her hotel room on the other side of town. It should still be quiet there, she thinks, with most of the campaign staffers out. She can get through the back door with her key card, and Josh can rest without the threat of one of his on staffers knocking on the door to beg for an answer to a question they should have known the answer to.

She pulls into a parking spot around the back of the hotel, and nudges Josh gently. “Hey,” she says softly. “Wake up.”

He never has woken up easily, especially not from naps, and she’s relatively certain that if she just guides him up to her room, he’ll pass out immediately on the bed like he really needs to. He’ll be mad at her, for sure, but she doesn’t feel too bad about it.

“Donna,” he mumbles, as she opens his car door and puts her arm around his waist, pulling him up to a standing position with more of her strength than his. It bothers her, how thin he is, how weak he feels, how much he’s leaning on her, and she knows it’s mostly that he’s sick, but the fear takes its usual spot right beneath her solar plexus, where it will rest and poke at her until he does something to make her mad enough to forget it.

Except it won’t go away, not even then, because when he makes her mad, she usually has something new to worry about.

He almost trips over the snow covered curb but they make it to the back door of the hotel. Donna swipes her keycard and guides him towards the elevator, up to the third floor, and down the hall. He’s awake, but not really all that lucid, and it reminds Donna of days in the past on the campaign trail where he’d drink a beer too many and she'd have to guide him back to his hotel room, except then he’d have forgotten his key and so she’d take him to hers, let him pass out on her bed, and then flop down on the other side, just out of arm’s reach, just this side of appropriate.

He’s not drunk though, just running a fever that would send any reasonable person to the hospital. She opens the door to her room—she’s gotten to the point where she gets her own, which is a nice change of pace—and manages to get Josh as far as the bed before pushing him down onto it. She digs through her purse and pulls out a couple of Advil, picks up the water bottle in the hotel room (surely it costs far more than is reasonable but the campaign is paying her hotel expenses anyway) and makes him take it. He takes the pills before lying down on the pillows, throwing his arm over his forehead.

“My head hurts,” he mumbles.

“That’s because you’re sick, Josh,” Donna says. “Take a nap.”

He closes his eyes compliantly, and Donna realizes he hasn’t even taken his coat or shoes off yet.

She stands against the wall, biting her lip, trying to decide what to do. He’s going to get too hot, she’s sure, once his fever goes down and he no longer feels chills, and she definitely doesn’t want the snow on his shoes to melt all over the white comforter on the bed any more than it already has.

It is strange, she thinks, to try and do this. To undress him while he sleeps. It feels like an inappropriate crossing of boundaries. It's not even tearing down those boundaries they’ve put up between each other over the years, it’s walking around them entirely.

And yet… she glances at the piece of paper she set down on the TV stand in her haste to get Josh into bed. The piece of paper that certifies the marriage of Donnatella Moss and Joshua Lyman, on this day, January 20th, 2006. The piece of paper that says that, somehow, in the eyes of the State of New Hampshire, this man is her husband.

And this is, after all, her wedding night. It’s her right as a bride.

The actual reasons for their marriage notwithstanding, of course,

Still, he’s going to ruin the bedspread if the dirty, slushy snow stuck to his shoes melts any more, and so Donna takes one last look at the marriage certificate and takes a few steps towards the end of the bed, gently working one foot out of his shoe, and then the other. She does it slowly—she’s certain that he’ll wake up but he doesn’t, which is equal parts reassuring and worrying. She notices as she pulls off the second shoe that one of his socks has a hole in it, his big toe peeking out from between the stripes. The other, she can see, is very nearly worn through on the bottom, threadbare and white, barely holding together. Much like Josh himself. She wonders if she should have given him socks for Christmas, as he always joked he would give her.

She arranges his shoes (unpolished and also clearly wearing out) by the side of the bed. Josh doesn’t stir, and she wonders at his stillness. Even in sleep, he is rarely still. In fact, she has never known him not to move in his sleep except when his injured body physically couldn’t, and even then, they’d had to arrange pillows to make sure he didn’t move too much and hurt himself in his sleep. The stillness, much like his earlier quiet, scares her.

Donna thinks she scares much too easily lately.

She puts a hand to his forehead, feeling the heat emanating off of him. She's spent so much time around him, she’s kissed him, so she's almost certainly going to get whatever bug he has, and she isn’t looking forward to it, but she can’t begrudge herself the closeness when it’s the only thing that can even begin to alleviate her fear.

He’s going to get hot. She knows this from experience, and she knows that if he keeps wearing his heavy coat, he's going to overheat and wake up a sweaty mess. Taking off his shoes was one thing, but Donna has to steel herself to touch the zipper of his coat, to pull it down. He doesn’t move, not at all. She leans over to take his left arm out of the coat, working it through, and then reaches closer to herself to grab his right one, although her gaze is caught by the site of white scars crisscrossing the back of his hand and his palm. They’re not particularly noticeable, not if one isn’t looking for them (much to Josh’s relief) but Donna knows exactly where they are, which makes them impossible to ignore. She traces the line of one of them before pinching the edge of his sleeve, before gently guiding his arm out of the sleeve. Satisfied, she slowly pulls the coat out from under him and shakes it out, before putting it on a hanger in the little closet by the door.

That’s all she can do for now. That’s all she should do for now. But she turns back to Josh and looks him over, and she almost can’t help but move her hands to his neck, gently loosening up his tie. It’s a tie she bought for him, one he almost never wore to work. He packed it, though. He wore it to their wedding.

She doesn’t untie it all the way—that feels like going too far, feels too intimate—but if it makes it even just a little bit easier for him to breathe, then it's worth doing.

For a moment, she wishes she could ignore their actual circumstances. He’s still mad at her for leaving, and she’s, of course, still mad at him for making it so much harder than it needed to be. It’s so different than it used to be, so far removed from the days where they were best friends, where they could confide in each other for everything, where the walls between them were constructed by society and not by themselves.

She’s married to him, and he’s right here in her hotel room, and yet she’s never felt more distant from him.

He looks so much younger in sleep, the lines of his face smoothing out in repose. He almost looks like the Josh she knew eight years ago, before the overwhelming, crushing weight of his job in the White House, before Rosslyn and Gaza, before everything began to fall apart. She misses that Josh, the one with the easy smile and the casual swagger and the way of making her feel at ease in a world where she was underqualified and in over her head. These years in the White House have taken so much from everyone—they’ve certainly taken a chunk of her—but none so much as Josh. And yet here he is, trying to do it again. Signing up for another four or eight years of this.

He begins to stir, and Donna swallows, worried that he’s about to have another nightmare. She’s seen more than a few of these, especially in the months she stayed with him after Rosslyn, and he’s called her in the middle of the night before after waking up in a panic. Before she can even think about it, as soon as she sees him start to move, start to shake, she leans over and presses a gentle kiss to his forehead.

She lets out a little gasp and pulls back quickly—she can’t be doing that, not now, not with everything between them—but somehow Josh stills, the lines of his face smoothing out once again. He seems at peace.

Donna lets out a heavy sigh and finally allows herself to take off her own coat, hanging it up next to his. She really should do some work—god knows there’s plenty of it to do—but she feels almost as exhausted as Josh clearly is. There are two beds in the hotel room, but Donna finds herself on the other side of the one that Josh is sleeping on. He’s just out of arm’s reach, but there’s something comforting about curling up on her side and watching the rise and fall of his chest, to assure here that he’s somehow still breathing.

She just watches him for a little while, listening to his labored breaths and trying not to think too hard of what she did today. This is her wedding night, she thinks, and then she tries not to think about that again. She feels exhaustion wash over her, and her eyes begin to drift shut.

Donna doesn’t realize she fell asleep until she opens her eyes again and daylight is no longer peeking through the open curtains. She rubs her eyes and blinks sleepily and almost jumps when she realizes that Josh is no longer beside her.

She rubs her temples and frowns, wondering if he left entirely, but then hears the sound of coughing coming from the bathroom. He's still here.

She takes the few steps towards the bathroom and knocks on the frame of the opened door. “Hey,” she says.

He turns around, red-faced but looking more alive than he had been a few hours ago, and frowns. “Why am I here?” he asks. “I know we left the restaurant but then I…”

“You kind of passed out,” Donna says, “and so I took you back to my hotel room.”

He frowns more deeply. “Why?”

Donna leans against the doorframe. “Because you were barely awake enough for me to get you up here, and I didn’t think you could make it to your hotel room, not to mention open your own door, on your own.”

“Donna, I don’t need…”

“You don't need me to take care of you? Because your history begs to differ.”

“That’s not what I was going to say!”

She crosses her arms. “What were you going to say?”

“Just because of what… what we did this morning, it doesn't mean things have to be different,” Josh says, running a hand through what is left of his hair. “You don’t have to pretend that you actually care that…”

“It’s too bad I do care!” Donna shouts, and she can feel red hot anger rising within her.

Josh groans and turns around making fists on the countertop and leaning against it. “That’s not what I…” He looks down and shakes his head. “I’m not saying this well, I think that maybe I should…”

“You want to go,” Donna fills in.

He presses his lips together. “I think that might be best,” he says seriously.

Donna realizes that, if he can’t remember anything past lunch, that he might be afraid that something between them happened. “Josh, I basically dragged you up to my room while you were delirious from your fever or from exhaustion or whatever and then you passed out on the bed. You slept for…” she takes a look at her watch, “six hours. Oh my god, I’m so late to the evening staff meeting.”

“You should go, then,” Josh says.

“I need to drive you back to your hotel," she says. “It’s on the other side of town.”

He shrugs. “I don’t want to stop you from… doing your job.”

“I missed half of it anyway.”

Josh groans and stumbles towards her, out of the bathroom, and takes a seat on the edge of the bed again. “Donna, we have to talk about how this affects the campaign. We can’t… we’re on opposing campaigns, there has to be a protocol here. I mean, we could just not talk to each other but I think…”

“There’s going to be paperwork to complete, and things to take care of, and we’re going to be at so many of the same events,” Donna points out. “Conspicuous ignorance is untenable.”

“Then… we can’t talk about the campaign.”

“What, are you scared I'm going to betray your brilliant campaign strategies to our team?” Donna teases.

Josh groans. “No, Donna, I’m just… this is weird enough for both of us, and the less we talk about work, the better it will be, right? Let’s make it a rule.”

Bringing up rules brings up thoughts of a summer five years gone, with Josh in utter physical misery but in close proximity. Hard as those months were (and the following months, after he went back to work, were an even more difficult emotional strain), she finds herself nostalgic for them sometimes. Nostalgic for the days where their interactions were guided by a laminated list, at least in theory, but really where they skirted the bounds of appropriateness, where they were able to really be themselves outside of the workplace. In a way, the rules had been freeing back then, and when Josh came back to work there were new rules, less formal but stricter, that put up new walls between them.

“A rule,” Donna says. “No campaign talk.”

“It’ll be a nice break,” Josh says with a chuckle, although he lacks sincerity. “Since otherwise I rarely get the chance to talk about anything else.”

Donna doesn’t really believe this, but she nods in agreement. “No campaign talk. Also, this is probably a given, but no one gets to know. Mrs. Santos knows already, but we have to be more careful.”

Josh bites his lip. “Yeah.”

“And one more rule,” Donna says.

“For an even three?”

“Well, two rules just doesn’t sound quite right, does it?”

Josh almost chuckles at this. “No, it doesn’t.”

“Well, as long as you’re on my healthcare plan, you actually have to take care of yourself,” Donna says. “That’s why I took you back here. Because if you had gone back to your hotel room, people would have been knocking on your door, or calling you, and then you wouldn’t have rested. You slept for six hours straight, and I know you needed that.”

Josh pinches the bridge of his nose. “I probably did.”

“Are you feeling any better?” she asks, her voice a little bit softer.

He nods. “I don’t think I have a fever anymore.”

Donna, without hesitation, puts her hand to his forehead. “Yeah, you feel a bit cooler.”

“Thank you,” he says, “for… you know, looking out for me. Even when you don’t have to.”

Donna shrugs. “In sickness and in health, right?”

“We didn’t say that in our vows.”

“Not that kind of marriage,” Donna replies, tilting her head to the side. “You should take a sick day tomorrow.”

“Too much going on,” Josh says. “I’ve already lost enough ground with today.”

“But at least you’re not going to keel over anymore,” Donna says. “I'm going to drive you back to your hotel, and you’re going to sneak in, and if anyone asks, you went to urgent care, which is really what you should have done.”

Josh approximates something that might be a smile. “Gotta get insurance first, right?”

“Right,” Donna says. “I’m going to get the paperwork started tomorrow. Come on, let’s get you home. And if you stay up all night to work, I will know about it.”

Josh frowns. “How?”

“I have my ways,” Donna says with a smirk. “Let’s go. There’s another meeting at nine and if I don’t show up, Will might actually notice I’m not there.”

“I’d notice if you weren’t there right away,” Josh says.

Donna can’t help but smile at this. “Well, the strength of your powers of observation are unmatched.” She stands up and pulls on her coat, and watches as Josh tugs on his shoes. It’s a quick drive to Josh’s hotel, with the roads being mostly empty, and as she watches him go through the side door to his room, she can’t help but feel a lump in her throat.

Her life has changed, massively, in the last twelve hours. That’s her husband now.

She can’t think too hard about it, though. It’s not that kind of marriage, and tomorrow, she has a campaign to focus on.

Chapter Text

Josh feels slightly less like death warmed over when he wakes up the next morning; after Donna drops him off at the hotel, he manages to get some work done and sleep for another eight hours. His fever seems to have broken for good, and while he still has a cough that he knows from experience will rattle him for another week or do (stupid useless lungs), he at least feels like a functional human.

Which is good, because he’s running a practically nonfunctional campaign.

“Josh!” Santos says, knocking on his door. Josh glances over at the clock; it’s already eight in the morning. “I’m about ready to head out and get some coffee, meet with a few people,” he continues.

Josh opens the door, his tie still hanging loose around his shoulders. It’s the same one he wore yesterday, he realizes, but he can’t bring himself to mind. He likes it, and anyway, if it was good enough to wear to his wedding, no reason not to wear it twice. “Morning," he says, almost tripping over his own feet but trying to lean casually against the doorframe to catch himself.

“You feeling any better?” Santos asks, looking him over with concern.

Josh clears his throat, which is frankly an awful sound, and is enough to make Santos cringe. “Yes, much better,” he says, “although I guess I don’t sound like it.”

“No you don’t,” Santos says, raising an eyebrow. “You ready to go?”

“Go get some coffee,” Josh says. “The place on Pearl might have a pretty good crowd, I think there’s going to be a primary-themed event there later.”

“It's almost like the entire personality of this town is voting,” Santos remarks, stepping back and tugging on his scarf.

Josh bites his lip. “You remember you should be careful…”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m not going to criticize the New Hampshire primary this time. Not to their faces anyway, although you know what I think?”

“I do know what you think, but I also know that saying what you think about New Hampshire when we’re already on life support here, and therefore barely clinging onto the entire campaign is not a good idea,” Josh says. Sometimes he wonders what his life might have been like if he had a candidate who wasn't quite so stubborn. If he had taken up Russell’s offer, or Hoynes’. If he had a candidate with any kind of PR instinct or one who simply didn’t have the kind of opinions that were controversial in a Presidential primary.

Then again, if he had a candidate like that, he wouldn’t be a candidate worthy of being President.

Santos chuckles, as if this argument they’ve had what feels like a million times over the course of a few weeks is hilarious rather than tiring. “Don’t worry about me, Josh.”

“It’s my job to worry about you,” Josh says. “You pay me…”

“Barely.”

“Well, yes, but you pay me to worry about you.”

“And you do a great job of it,” Santos says. “But I think I can talk to a couple of New Hampshireans on the street this morning on my own.”

“New Hampshirites,” Josh corrects.

Santos takes a few more steps back and holds up his hands. “Do you think calling them the wrong demonym will lose me their vote?”

“I think we’re in enough trouble to not want to take our chances,” Josh says. “Let me finish getting dressed, I’ll meet you down there in a few.”

“Debate rules come out today,” Santos says.

Josh nods. “You’ll hear about them the second I do.”

“We’re gonna have a real debate, Josh.”

“Wouldn’t hold my breath,” Josh replies, but he manages to smile. The guy’s likable, if nothing else. Affability goes a long way in politics, but Josh isn’t certain it will be enough.

Santos is about to walk away but he takes one more look over Josh. “Since when did you wear a ring?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.

Josh looks down at his left hand. Sure enough, he never took off the cheap ring that Donna had put on his finger in the wedding. He swallows, which naturally starts a coughing fit, which takes a good few minutes to resolve, Santos looking at him with concern the entire time. The one good thing, however, about this coughing fit is that it gives Josh the time to think of an excuse.

“Uh…” he says as he clears his throat, “Miranda gave it to me.” He holds up his other arm, on which there is still a beaded bracelet that Miranda actually had given to him, one she insisted on tying onto his wrist herself; he’s not sure why he’s still wearing it, if he’s honest, but lately he’s found himself fidgeting with the beads if only to give his restless body something to do. That’s probably how he got her cold, he thinks, but he can’t think too hard about that. “She seems to think I need to accessorize more.”

Santos raising an eyebrow, not seeming entirely convinced. “Alright,” he says with a smile. “I’m heading down. Find me when you hear about the debate rules.”

“Don't forget we’ve got…”

“The thing at the library today, I know,” Santos said. “We're gonna talk about education!” He raises an arm and walks down the hallway.

Josh goes back into his room and ties his tie, but he can’t keep his mind from wondering if Donna noticed that he wore a tie she got him to their wedding.

His day doesn’t get off to a promising start, between the news that Russell and Hoynes have bought up half the airtime out of Boston and the even worse news that Santos hasn’t made it into the debate. Josh’s head is spinning with trying to think of an ad and trying to write an entire legal brief in his mind and trying to think of how he can convince Bob Russell to insist that the full field gets into the debate.

His first thought, of course, is Donna. If he can get through to Donna, he might have a shot.

Of course, he can’t actually do that, he knows, because that’s against the rules. Donna would be pissed if he tried to leverage their relationship for political gain, not to mention Josh would feel guilty. He’s been accused of being a dirty politician, but the truth is Josh has a high sense of morality when it comes to political maneuvering. He and Sam used to jokingly refer to themselves as power daters, but Josh has never been in a relationship to leverage political power. When he was with Amy, her attempts at it always made him uncomfortable. Josh has learned that relationships and politics do not mix well; his personal life and his political life need to stay separate if he has any chance of being in a steady relationship.

Then again, this thing he has with Donna isn’t really a relationship. More of an arrangement. And he needs to stop thinking about it.

Thankfully, he’s able to get through to Will, who suggests they take a meeting with the Dover Herald to try and change the debate. It almost works, too, and the Vice President is willing to go along with it, until Santos starts running his mouth.

Why did Josh have to pick such a stubborn, independent-minded candidate?

Donna isn’t there for the meeting, but she is waiting outside when he leaves. She makes brief eye contact with him, maybe even offers a smile, but he’s sure she can see the stormy look on his face after the disaster of a meeting, and so she says nothing.

It’s for the better, Josh thinks, although the temptation to try and talk her into helping him out is nearly overwhelming. Or perhaps it’s just the temptation to talk to her; Josh can never quite tell.

As the day goes on, he begins to feel worse and worse. If he were a normal person, he’d probably have taken a sick day, but he’s not. He’s Josh Lyman! He doesn’t take sick days unless the First Lady personally escorts him out of the building. Still, as he walks with Ronna and Ned, trying to figure out this ad, all he can think is that he needs to get out of the cold. He needs the warmth of the building before he coughs up a frozen lung.

He’s ready to present his ideas about poultry themed campaign ads to the Congressman—he’s not particularly proud of them but then again he was never the marketing guy—when he sees a face he really wishes he didn’t have to see.

Amy Gardner is sitting on the edge of the chair, licking an ice cream cone. She’s doing it in her way, which is to say, attempting to be seductive but in a way in which no one could accuse her of attempting to be seductive. It’s not working, at least not for Josh. He knows Amy too well for that.

“Hi,” he says flatly.

Amy looks up at him, but doesn’t even manage to smile. She just is as neutral as always, which drives Josh crazy. Even if both of their breakups had been messy and awkward, Josh at least tries to look pleased when he sees her. Amy can’t even be bothered to extend the same courtesy. “Hi,” she replies.

He shivers, despite the warmth of the room, and for a second fears that his fever is coming back. He has too much to do to be sick, he thinks. “Little cold for ice cream, isn’t it?”

Amy looks at him blankly. “I embrace the cold.”

“Okay,” Josh replies, unsure what else to say to that.

“I luxuriate in the cold.”

Once upon a time, Josh might have found Amy’s quirkiness endearing, but since then he’s been hit by a water balloon from an upstairs window (which, although he’s never admitted it to anyone but Donna, was enough to induce a panic attack since he hasn’t had much luck with projectiles from upstairs windows) and had his cell phone thrown in stew, and what he once thought was a sweet quirkiness is really getting on his nerves now. It’s not like Donna with her name sewn into her underwear or almost getting arrested because of her candles; there’s something insidious about the way Amy disarms by being just a little bit offbeat, and Josh doesn’t have the energy to deal with it today. “Can I ask you…”

“I fight cold with more cold,” Amy interrupts, taking another lick of her ice cream cone.

Josh blinks a few times before finally asking, “What are you doing here?”

Amy shrugs. “I could ask the same, but in your case it’s more of an existential question.”

And this is exactly what he doesn’t need. Josh has wrestled with plenty of existential questions, and while he and Amy never really got into the depths of them (mostly because Amy had no interest in it), she knows enough to know how much of himself Josh puts into his work, that politics is his very existence. In their five months of dating, she knew that he struggled with his mental health—she saw his antidepressants, knew that he saw a therapist—if not the details of what exactly was going on. She didn’t seem to care, and at that point, Josh had been relieved that she didn’t. Amy was the first person he had dated after Rosslyn, and somehow her utter lack of interest in what had happened to him made a refreshing contrast from everyone who had been there when it happened. For a while, Amy was the only person in his life who didn’t wonder whether he was going to put his hand through another window, and much as he appreciated the concern of his friends, he also desperately wanted to feel normal. Amy was that normalcy.

But Amy also knows enough to know how to make digs at him. She knows enough to know that he struggles when he can’t find his sense of purpose, to know that his ability to be good at his job is the hallmark of his self-worth. She also dated him when things were bad at work, when everything was falling apart after Zoey’s kidnapping, and she was there to see him fall apart again (and fall away from her in the process). Amy knows more than Josh would maybe like her to know, and she also knows how to exploit that to her advantage.

Maybe she’s not actually trying that today. Maybe Josh is just paranoid. Certainly a possibility, he thinks, considering his track record. But if it’s not, then he can’t let her know how much this is bothering him. This idea of his very existence being tied to his candidate who is, right now, pretty much on the verge of falling off the face of the political earth entirely.

So he deflects. He doesn’t manage to smile, or even sound like he’s joking—he doesn’t have the energy for that—but he mumurs, “When I want dark, depressing thoughts about alienation and nothingness, I watch cable news.” Not that he needs the news to think depressing thoughts—his fucked up brain manages to do that all on its own—but it’s quippy enough to put Amy on the defense, which is enough for him.

Amy doesn’t seem fazed, and it drives him crazy. He tries to get her to listen, tries to get her to understand that she cannot, cannot make things harder for the entire Democratic field by criticizing them all, but of course, he knows better than anyone that this is Amy’s M.O. Still, it’s bothering him, she’s bothering him, and he’s not entirely sure why it’s this bad.

She's here, apparently, to prep Matt Santos for the debate. The debate that Josh hasn’t managed to get him into. Josh tries to bury his fury at his candidate going behind his back to hire someone for debate prep. The only consolation is that it really isn’t a bad idea. Santos is articulate and intelligent but he doesn’t have the experience that John Hoynes does. But the fact that he wasn’t involved in the decision, and the fact that it was Amy who Santos has called up is making his head spin.

At least, at least she didn’t flirt with him. He’s not sure how he could have responded to that. Tell her he’s a married man? He sincerely hopes that Amy Gardner is the last person in the world to find out that information. Of course they’re going to run into each other now and then, that’s the nature of DC, but of course it would have to be today, and now Josh has to use what little energy he has on trying to figure out how to process Amy Gardner’s (hopefully) brief reappearance in his miserable life.

The rest of the day is equally exhausting, especially when he finds out that Amy has been distributing memos without discrimination to the entire field of Democratic candidates, and worse, that Santos knew. Josh hasn’t been cheated on his life (at least, that he knows of), but he imagines this might be kind of what it feels like. He promptly fires Amy, but it’s not enough to ease the unsettled feeling in his stomach that seems to reside there more and more. Santos gets pissed at him because he fires Amy, because he wants to sue to get him into the debate, because there are chickens on CNN.

The chickens made it to CNN?

Josh has been so up to his ears in everything that he hasn’t even heard about the how the chicken stunt went, but if they made it onto CNN, then that’s at least a little bit of media coverage that they desperately need. Stirring up talk about the debate, about the injustice laid on Matt Santos is essential, and so anything being on the news is good news at this point.

“Congressman,” Josh says, after Santos once again refuses to file the brief, “I’m gonna… if we’re not going to go to the courthouse…”

“We’re not,” Santos confirms. “I told you Josh, I’m not suing my way into this debate.”

“There may be no other way in.”

“Then we won’t be in.”

“Then we won't have any chance of getting anywhere,” Josh says, throwing up his hands. “Look, if we’re not going to the courthouse, then I’m going to go back to the hotel, because there’s a million things to do.”

“Go ahead,” Santos says. “Ad coming in tonight?”

Josh nods. “Yeah, we’ve got… I’ve got a guy working on a script. Should be able to pull it all together tonight.”

“Make it a good one, huh?”

“I’ll do my best," Josh says, swallowing, although he’s not convinced of the quality of his ad idea. He’s not convinced of anything right now, if he’s honest.

He’s still exhausted, and it’s all he can do to drag himself up to his hotel room and sit back on the bed. Part of him wants to be entirely alone, but part of him feels so desperately lonely. Alienation and nothingness indeed.

He turns on the TV, and to his surprise, the first thing he sees is Donna.

Donna, in an ice rink or something of the sort, finger pointed at one of the chickens that he sent.

Josh almost has to laugh. It's a little embarrassing, in a national campaign, but it's so Donna that he can hardly resist smiling at it. It’s one of those silly stories he would tell to the guys she wanted to be set up with, the kind of stories that she hated but he secretly loved. She’s a little quirky and chaotic, but that’s part of what makes her Donna, and he wouldn’t trade that for the world.

She’s going to feel mortified, though, he knows. Perhaps it’s not the best look for the Santos campaign either. But any press is good press, when all he needs right now is for people to listen.

In years past, this is the sort of thing he would laugh with Donna about. Not that he really should be laughing at this. He’s not, but it’s still the sort of thing that can’t really be appreciated alone. But he can’t laugh with Donna about Donna, and Sam’s off in California and Toby’s pissed at him for leaving, so Josh really has one choice of who to call; the White House Chief of Staff.

Margaret picks up, and to his surprise, puts him instantly through. He supposes he still has a little bit of pull in the White House. CJ had told him when he left that he could always get through to her, and while Josh isn't sure he fully believes that—he knows just how crazy the life of the White House Chief of Staff can be—he appreciates the sentiment.

“Mi amor,” CJ says as she picks up the phone. She used to nickname him that as a joke, but she’s been using it more and more lately, and Josh wonders if she misses his as much as he misses her. “How’s it going up there in the frozen north?”

Josh sighs and flops backward on the bed. “Well, we’ve been kicked out of the debate.”

“I heard.”

“You heard?”

“I know things.”

“Aren't you a little busy… running a country?”

He can practically hear CJ’s eye roll over the phone. “Believe it or not, I’m keeping tabs on who our next President is going to be.”

“Well, unless he cooperates with me, it’s not gonna be Matthew Santos.”

“An uncooperative congressman. Too bad you don’t have any experience dealing with those,” CJ says sarcastically.

Josh sighs. “An uncooperative candidate now.”

“Yeah, because Jed Bartlet really was the model of listening to his staff and not being stubborn about it.”

He can’t help but laughs at this; it’s true. Bartlet really was just as uncooperative sometimes, but back then, he hadn't been alone. Leo had been in charge of everything, and he had CJ to make the PR argument, he had Sam to bring in his skill at arguing, honed over years of law practice, and if all else failed, he had Toby who was not afraid to say exactly what he thought. Now, he’s alone, and he has to do all of that by himself, and Josh isn’t sure he has it in him to wrestle with his uncooperative candidate without a team behind him. “With the illegal contribution thing in the debate,” he says, “he wouldn’t let me go to the court. I had the brief. We were ready to go.”

“If you end up canceling your alternative debate due to a lack of interest, the field just shrank to six dwarves and a porcelain donkey,” CJ quips.

“Collectible,” Josh shoots back, although he doesn’t find much humor in it.

CJ sighs, and he knows that it’s on his behalf. She's probably wondering why he got himself into this—he's wondering why he got himself into this—but she says, “You should have told him a case kicks up a media storm.”

Josh rubs his temple furiously. “I tried! He had the PR instincts of Idi Amin. Now we’re shut out of the debate, I fired my ex-girlfriend from a job she never had… Santos practically had me battered, dipped, and seasoned when he saw Donna fighting a giant chicken on CNN.” He looks up at the TV again and there it is, the clip of Donna chiding Chicken Bob. It’s funny, he can’t help but think. It’s sweet, actually, the way she’s getting all worked up about it. For the briefest moment, Josh wonders if this is what she might be like as a mother, before he pushes that thought away.

“Talk about dignifying a weak opponent,” CJ says with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” Josh says, although he can’t stop staring at the clip on the screen.

“You don’t engage a chicken. Didn’t you teach that girl not to engage a chicken? Though, I swear, watching the footage it looks like she’s gonna pluck the feathers right off that thing.”

Josh smiles a little bit, although whether it’s from CJ’s joke or the vicious glare Donna is sending the chicken on the TV screen is unknown even to him. “It’s the best press we've had all week,” he says, and he’s really not entirely wrong.

“Gotta go,” CJ says. “Talk to you later, alright?”

“Thanks Ceej,” Josh says. He’s about to turn off the TV but then they replay the clip from the beginning and Josh watches it happen again, and he can’t help but smile.

His stomach growls, and Josh realizes that perhaps the way it’s been churning all day is not just related to his stress (although it definitely still is related to his stress) but also to the fact that he hasn’t eaten anything. He hasn’t really been hungry, but he supposes he probably should get something in him. If this had been the Bartlet campaign trail, he’d have been yelled at several times today by CJ or Donna or Sam or even Mrs. Bartlet to eat something, but Josh is all on his own, and no one is looking out for him, which means he needs to remind his own damn self to eat something nutritious once in a while.

There’s a diner across the street from the hotel, and Josh hopes they have takeout, because he’s not sure he has the energy to talk to anyone today. He heads down the stairs and into the diner, which is pretty full of people. They do have takeout, and Josh orders a burger (burnt, of course) and lingers by the bar to wait for his food.

Getting takeout doesn't solve all his problems, though, because sitting at the bar are two people he’s not really ready to see today: Will Bailey is one of them, and the other is Josh’s wife.

Donna sees him first, and she bites her lips. “Josh,” she says. “Need a place to sit?”

Why would she offer that? “No, I’m getting takeout," he says. “Just waiting for my stuff.”

“Ah,” she says. “What did you order? Fried chicken?” The sharpness in her tone surprises Josh; he’s always know she’s had a sarcastic side, but it lacks any of its usual warmth.

“Donna…” he trails off. He really doesn’t want to get into this argument, not here, not in a public place, and certainly not in front of Will Bailey.

“Do you really think your poultry pranks are going to grab you votes?” Donna asks.

Josh winces. “You never know, it’s a big industry up here.”

“That was juvenile, it was ridiculous, and it…”

He shrugs. “It got people’s attention. Any coverage is good coverage right now, and if CNN wants to replay your chicken altercation over and over again, that's fine by me, as long as they make sure to mention that Matt Santos sent them.”

Donna takes a sip of her drink and turns her stool so that she’s facing him. “I didn’t think you’d sink this low. I guess I was wrong.”

“Look, Donna, I’m running a one-man show here. I’m all alone, and I have to do what I can. If that means sending out a volunteer in a chicken suit, that’s what it is. Now if Bob Russell wants us to play nice, it would help if he were willing to debate us but then…”

“He was,” Will pipes up, “until your guy went around trying to change the rules again.”

Josh rubs his forehead. “Yeah, that was… it wasn’t part of the plan, but all I’m saying is, if the world were a little more fair then maybe we’d have a few less chickens, but this is a campaign where we’re slipping badly and I’ve got to grab any foothold I can get. Even if it is poultry.”

Donna looks at him, her expression somewhere between a glare and concern. She looks like she’s about to criticize him again, but she looks away, lets out a heavy sigh, and turns back to him. “How are you feeling?” she asks, much to his surprise.

“I’m alive,” Josh says, “and I’ve felt much worse before.”

She presses her lips together. “Yeah,” is all she says.

The waiter hands Josh a paper bag over the bar. “Here you go,” he says.

Josh looks inside to make sure his whole meal is in there, and looks up at Donna. “I got a burger, actually. Not chicken.”

“Healthy,” Donna remarks sarcastically. “You know, healthcare costs are usually lower when you take care of yourself.”

He’s surprised she would actually bring this up in front of Will, although obviously Will has no clue what is actually going on, and he just observes Donna with a slightly confused look. Josh closes up the bag and gives Donna a tight smile. “Well, it’s the first thing I’ve managed to eat today, so it’s better than nothing.”

“You didn’t go get ice cream with Amy Gardner?” Donna asks, raising an eyebrow.

Josh blinks a few times. “You know Amy’s in town?”

Donna shrugs. “Yeah, I ran into her.”

Josh narrows his eyes. Is she jealous? Donna doesn’t get jealous, not really, but she’s never liked Amy and maybe she thinks… he’s not sure what she thinks, actually. He misses being able to know what she’s thinking; it’s gotten harder and harder over the years. He’s about to turn around to leave but then he notices Will’s hand drifting awfully close to Donna’s back and can't prevent himself from grimacing.

Donna notices, apparently. “Everything okay?” she asks, suddenly much softer again.

“Yeah,” Josh says, because he absolutely cannot admit to any sort of jealousy on his part. He's not jealous; even though they’re technically married, he certainly wouldn’t begrudge her any sort of relationship (as long as she can go through the awkward process of explaining her marriage). But Will Bailey of all people? The very thought makes him want to gag. “I'm gonna… I’ve got some work to do. If your guy changes his mind about the debate—because believe me, you do not want to be debating Hoynes one-on-one—let me know and you’re more than welcome to come to ours.”

Donna gives him a tight smile. “Don’t count on it,” she says.

Josh isn’t sure how to respond to that, so he clutches his food a little bit tighter and walks away.

As he heads back into the hotel, he gets pulled aside by the staffer who is working on the ad script, and then he has to call the post-production shop, and then he has to track down a volunteer to drive the script across town and wait for the ad to be made, and it’s another hour before he manages to get back to his room and eat his now ice-cold burger and sad, soggy fries. He almost manages to fall asleep, but then gets a call from the post-production shop after they run into an issue with an ad, and after another hour solving that, Josh finds that his cough has come back and it’s almost impossible for him to get to sleep.

He spends the night staring at the ceiling of his hotel room, his brain spinning with debate thoughts and ad ideas and Donna yelling at a chicken and Will’s hand near Donna’s back and the backfiring of a car that had almost scared him out of his skin while he walked from the hotel and Amy and Donna and Donna and Donna.

It’s too late for him to take a sleeping pill and still wake up at a reasonable time in the morning, but he still checks his medications only to realize that he’s completely out of sleeping pills, that he forgot to refill them before he was off of his insurance. Good thing that Donna’s going to get him on hers in the next couple days, because he’s not sure how many of these sleepless nights he can survive.

By five in the morning, Josh knows that he’s not going to get any sleep, so he gets up, takes a shower to try and feel a little bit less dead, and heads down to the empty campaign storefront to get some work done.

The day is a blur, and Josh can feel his head pound as he drinks cup after cup of coffee until Ronna informs him that the coffee maker is broken. Whether or not that’s actually true is unknown to him, but he probably should be cut off anyway. He’s jittery and filled with an unidentifiable anxiety which he doesn’t quite care to examine for the moment. Finally, the post-production shop calls about an hour before their airtime slot with the completed ad, and while Josh can admit it’s not the most groundbreaking ad in the history of campaigning, it's certainly not a bad once.

Santos, however, doesn't like it.

Josh is beginning to wonder what, if anything, Santos actually likes about politics. To be fair, he’s not finding a whole lot to enjoy in it lately either.

They argue about the ad, and it’s not even the worst argument they’ve had in the last week. Josh is beginning to feel a sense of despair. This is never going to work. He’s going to have to drop out after New Hampshire, he’s going to end this campaign in a matter of days and Josh is already in so deep. Hell, he just made what is, supposedly, a lifelong commitment just to get health insurance so he could run this campaign.

Donna was pretty stupid to even suggest this, he thinks. He was even stupider to go along with it, but she offered with the assumption that he’d be in the race for more than another week. They’re barely going to get off the ground before it’s all over, and there was almost no point to this arrangement in the first place.

But Donna isn’t stupid, and she’s developed a pretty keen political sense. If Donna really thought he needed to do this, that he couldn’t just wait out a few months, a few weeks even, then she must think that there’s more than a passing chance that Matt Santos stays in the race.

Is that an assumption that Josh can really make? No, but it provides him enough of a boon to follow his candidate to the television studio eagerly, to take his coat and scarf and watch, with the wide-eyed political wonder he’s lacked since the days of the first Bartlet campaign, Santos speak live on television. It’s a simple statement, not bold policy or exciting drama or even poultry, but it’s effective and genuine in a way that no other candidate in the field could be.

Will it be enough? Josh, even with his years of experience and his natural sense for this kind of thing, has no clue. But it has to be, doesn’t? Because this is how it has to go. They may be holding on by the skin of their teeth, but if there’s anything his scrappy insurgency can do, it’s hold on.

If Josh doesn't continue believing that, there will be very little to keep him together.

It is enough, or at least it’s something, because when Josh and Santos get back to headquarters, the phones are ringing off the hook, and the donation thermometer (drawn at Ned’s insistence, against Josh’s objection that it makes it look more like a high school bake sale than a campaign for the presidency) is suddenly completely filled, and Josh can’t stop his heart from beating a little faster when it hits him that they’re still in this. He’s still in this, and he has to keep fighting a little while longer.

He’s surprised how composed he’s able to be when the press hound him. He’s smiling, laughing, passing it off as something that was always planned; he’s not lying about it being a Matt Santos original, that’s for sure. Maybe they don’t believe him, but Josh has bigger fish to fry than a couple of skeptical reporters. Skepticism and speculation sell in the media, anyway, and they’re still at the point of the campaign where any media is good media.

He closes the door behind him, lets out a heavy breath to let the warm air of the inside soothe his aching lungs (it’s a good thing, he thinks, that he didn’t start coughing at the TV station, or this whole thing might have been very different), and steels himself to find who he’s looking for.

Amy Gardner is watching the TV, her face still unreadable. She looks up at him, but her expression doesn’t change. The news is playing the ad again, commenting on political process, and Josh really could not have asked for a better outcome, but his mind is spinning about how to capitalize on it. Amy’s advice to him, to stop, to let this spin itself, is probably good advice. Amy knows what she’s doing, after all, even if Josh doesn’t like it. Still, it’s hard for Josh to just sit there and not do anything, because sitting in silence, slowing down, it all makes him feel like the world is going to come crashing down upon him.

It becomes more than just advice when Amy literally pulls out a roll of duct tape (one of the many things she keeps in her purse, apparently) and wraps it around him, a physical reminder to be still. And it’s not malicious, he knows. Amy isn’t working against him, and her advice might even be good. She just isn’t for him, either.

He’s really not sure if anyone is for him.

He leans back in the chair, exhaustion beginning to overwhelm him. Amy leaves, but he doesn’t make any effort to move. He could easily pull the tape off of him, but that sounds like too much, and Josh is already barely holding on. He closes his eyes, wondering if it might be here and now that he actually gets a moment of sleep.

It’s not, because he hears footsteps behind him. High heels clicking on the hard floor. He’s almost sure it’s Amy coming back, and he really doesn’t have the energy to deal with her, but he takes a deep breath. “Amy, I know seeing me all tied up like this turns you on, but if you’re looking to…”

“Josh?”

Shit. His face immediately turns bright red, because that’s definitely not Amy.

No, it’s Donna, and now he immediately wishes he hadn’t said that.

It’s not so bad, maybe, because she is technically his wife, but then again it feels a million times worse than any of the times he has made jokes like that to her.

He clears his throat. “Hi.”

Donna frowns as she comes around to face him. “You’re taped to a chair," she says bluntly.

“Yeah.”

“Have you been kidnapped or something? Did you finally drive your whole staff to a life of crime?”

He chuckles without much humor. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” Donna says, raising an eyebrow. “You thought I was Amy?”

Josh shrugs as much as he can with the tape around his shoulders. “I…”

“She did this to you?”

“It was a metaphor. Trying to... you know, get me to sit still.”

Donna reaches for the end of the tape and begins to unravel it around him. He winces as the bit that was stuck to his jaw comes off, pulling on the stubble that has developed there since he definitely forgot to shave this morning. “If I had thought of that back when I worked for you, I would have bought stock in duct tape,” she says, although she’s giving him an odd look. He almost wonders if it might be jealousy. He knows better than to hope for that to be the truth. He shouldn’t be thinking about that all; of course Donna’s not jealous. Donna has been the one who has tried to make him go out with women before. Why would Donna be jealous?

As long as you forget about the marriage thing, of course.

“Thank you,” he murmurs as the rest of the tape comes off.

“Amy was here?” she asks.

“Debate prep,” Josh says. “For the debate that’s not even happening but…”

Donna pulls up a chair and sits down next to him. “I hope it’s happening,” she says, “because otherwise the Vice President will look pretty stupid.”

“Well he does a good enough job of that himself…” Josh starts to retort, and then his eyes widen. The Vice President and Santos were not at all in the same debate. “What do you mean?”

“He’s in,” Donna says, raising an eyebrow.

“He… he’s in?” Josh sputters.

She shrugs. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell anyone yet, but Matt Santos should be getting a call in a few minutes that the Vice President has accepted his invitation to debate.”

“He… he wants to do it?”

“The Vice President doesn’t have to do a whole lot of things he doesn’t want to do,” Donna says. “Especially not on the campaign trail. Yes, he wants to do it.”

“Why?”

“Would you believe me if I said it was because I told him to?”

Josh blinks a few times. “You were in that meeting?”

“Josh!”

He realizes just how derogatory that sounds, and remembers about Donna, and how she’s wanted to do more. He can’t help the little swell of pride he feels, even if it’s moderated by a bitterness that she had to leave him to feel like she was doing more. “No, it’s not that I don’t believe you, I’m just… trying to get a sense of how they’re running things.”

“Well, I feel like I’m one of the only adults on the campaign but…”

Josh thinks about his campaign staff, only a few of whom are paid at all, and some of whom were running around in chicken suits all day. “I can relate.”

“I told him to do the debate,” Donna says.

Josh raises an eyebrow. “Why? Donna, if it was for me, I know this whole marriage thing is throwing me off but I…"

She huffs a little bit. “Why does it have to be for you?”

“It doesn’t, I was just thinking…”

“I told him it looked Machiavellian if he didn't go, if he tried to be above the herd,” Donna says. “I know a thing or two about politics and perception.”

And she’s right, Josh thinks. Somehow, even inadvertently, his campaign has put Hoynes and Russell into a difficult position. They can’t really ignore the debate, not now that Santos’ ad has put them on the spot. Perhaps he should have trusted Santos the whole time. Perhaps he’s not doing well as a campaign manager. Maybe he’s not the right man to run this campaign. Before these depressing existential thoughts can overwhelm him though, he manages to force a smile. “Yeah, you’re pretty good at that.” He blinks a few times before really taking her in. Donna looks tired, too. He’s sure he looks worse, but it would be comforting to know that he’s not the only one if it weren’t Donna who looks so exhausted. “How are you doing?”

She seems surprised at the question. “I’m fine,” she says. “How about you? Feeling any better after…”

“I’ve been worse,” Josh says. “Fever hasn’t come back and my cough is starting to go away. And all without going to urgent care.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “Actually, that’s what I came to see you about. I’m going to HR to submit the forms to get you on my insurance, and I need you to sign a thing.”

“You didn’t come to tell me about the debate?” he asks.

“I don’t think I was even supposed to,” Donna remarks, “but... don’t say anything until you get the call. Anyway, you're going to need to sign this one.” She pulls a form out of her tote bag and sets it on the table with a pen. Josh gets up and barely glances at it before signing it.

“You don’t want to read it?” she asks with surprise.

Josh shrugs. “It'll be fine.”

“You went to law school!” Donna exclaims. “You should know better than anyone that you need to read things before signing them.”

“Do you know how many things I’ve signed without reading first?” Josh asks. “Do you know how many things the President has signed without reading first?”

Donna winces. “Now that’s not something I like to hear.”

“I trust you,” he says, “and believe it or not, I’ve signed enough medical forms to have a decent idea at a glance.”

She blinks a few times and looks down at her feet. “I know you have." She picks up the form and puts it back in her purse. “I might have a few more things you’ll need to sign, but they might not be until I'm able to go to the office in DC next week. You’ll be in DC, right?”

“Yeah, just for the one day. There’s the… the DNC thing at the White House,” Josh says. “You’ll be there that day?”

Donna nods. “Well, I’d better get back, Will and I are going to go get dinner,” she says.

It’s almost difficult to hide his wince at this. Is he jealous? He shouldn’t be jealous. So he has to make it clear to her that, no matter the way the very thought of Will Bailey touching Donna anywhere makes him feel, he’s not jealous. “Donna, I know that we’re… you know, married, but I just wanted you to know that if you’re going out with anyone, that’s okay. It’s not… it’s not that kind of marriage.”

Donna stares at him blankly for a moment before bursting into laughter. “Going out? With Will?”

“I just thought… you're eating together an awful lot.”

“Will’s the only person I know and/or like on the campaign at all,” Donna says. “I'm not at all interested in him.”

Josh hates how much relief courses through him at this, even as he feels pretty damn stupid. “Okay,” he says.

“Why, is this because you’re trying to rekindle your thing with Amy for a third time? It’ll inevitably end up in misery for you and a shocking indifference for her,” Donna says bluntly.

He blinks a few times. “Donna, I…”

“It’s fine, I just want to stay clear of the implosion this time.”

Josh bites his lip and takes in a deep breath, trying to calm himself but it doesn’t do that. Instead, it causes him to cough violently, making Donna’s glare into more of a worried look again, and there’s a part of him that hates that, and a part of him that, lonely as he has been, longs for it. “I’m not going to get into anything with Amy," Josh says once he has recovered. “Believe me, I don’t want to.”

“Okay,” Donna says flatly. “I mean, it doesn't really matter to me.”

She’s right about that, and it shouldn’t matter. So why does he wish it did matter? He tries to swallow that down before standing up. “Do you need anything else from me yet?”

“Well, since it’s clear you’re too stubborn to drop out of the race…” Donna says, although her grin lets him know that she’s really not serious.

He smiles back. “Gotta make things interesting, right?”

“See you at the debate tomorrow?” she asks.

“We probably shouldn’t talk there,” he says, “but yeah, I’ll see you.”

And the next night, looking at her standing in the wings on the other side of the debate stage is enough for him.

Chapter Text

Josh is in a bad mood.

He shouldn’t be, not really. Not when his scrappy insurgency has won a shocking nineteen percent of the vote in New Hampshire, not when the newspapers are praising the Santos debate performance as something of ‘shrewd certitude’, not when editorial after editorial is putting his name out there. They’re still in this, more than Josh thought, more than he can believe. He’s feeling almost fully recovered from whatever sickness he had last week, nobody was in the seat next to him on his flight from South Carolina, where he had been to set up a kind of makeshift headquarters for the next week, and he’s going to go see his friends in the White House today.

Still, he’s in a terrible mood. He’s frustrated about the media covering Rafferty, frustrated that the South Carolina polling isn’t looking great (not shockingly—this is, after all, the kind of place that’s likely to be right in Hoynes’ pocket), frustrated that he has to go to this DNC gala today and spend all day on the hill trying to get reluctant senators to support Santos when obviously endorsing Hoynes or Russell in the primary probably holds more personal benefit for them.

It only gets worse.

He’s supposed to have lunch with CJ when he gets in, and he’s been looking forward to it—he really misses her. When he gets to the White House, however, not only does he find out that his lunch has been cancelled, but also that he doesn’t even has a pass to the White House. Toby doesn’t even look at him when he calls out, and Margaret is not very helpful. He knows the security guy is just doing his job, but he worked here for seven damn years. He poured his heart and soul into this job here, he literally almost died for it, and he would think he could go say hello to his friends without having to put up with this nonsense. While he is finally able to get in, he’s first blocked from seeing the President (he wasn’t about to ask a favor, he swears, he just wanted to check in) and then Margaret almost stops him from seeing CJ, and that’s just about the last straw, and he explodes in a kind of tirade that almost feels like a long ago December. He can feel CJ’s judgment on him, and Leo's too, and he suddenly feels very small. Then Senator Stackhouse tries to reschedule his meeting, and he’s one of the only senators Josh thinks he can finagle an endorsement out of, so he snaps yet again, promising a violence that is uncharacteristic of him and unable to keep his voice from raising. He’s starting to feel out of control again, and maybe it’s a good thing he was denied entry to the Oval Office, because he’s not sure he’d be able to keep himself in check.

He manages to check in on people, because he can only hope that they’re doing better than he is; Margaret, who is apparently pregnant, the President, who is apparently still struggling, and then Toby.

When CJ tells him that Toby’s brother died, it almost takes his breath away. His stomach suddenly feels tight and like a bottomless pit simultaneously, and a small part of him wants nothing more than to run and throw up to get rid of this feeling that he knows isn’t physical. Josh knew about David, at least a little bit. He knew that, of Toby's siblings, he and David were the closest (although close was, of course, relative for Toby), and he knew that David had recently been diagnosed with cancer, but he hadn’t thought… He closes his eyes and thinks back to his father, how it hadn’t seemed so bad, how it seemed to be getting better, how it hadn’t really been the cancer that killed him in the end, and the sick feeling only grows. Too many things rush through his head, but worst of all is the thought that Toby is experiencing this, Toby is going through all this and Josh hasn’t been there for him. “I talked to Toby last week,” he says, neglecting to mention that it had been tense and Toby had been mostly trying to chew his head off about the ethanol pledge. “Why wouldn’t he say anything? I feel awful. I would have gone,” he says heavily. What is the point of his own tragedies and suffering if he can’t at least use that experience to comfort his friends through it?

“None of us did. They didn’t want a whole to-do,” Leo says, sounding grieved as well.

Josh presses his lips together; he’s suddenly extremely uncomfortable being in this room, suddenly uncomfortable with the concept that he hasn't been enough for the people around him lately. “I’m gonna go..." he says, pointing to the door.

“Yeah,” Leo says with understanding. CJ gives him a tight smile as he leaves, then asks him some question about a water deal; Josh throws positions of various groups out there, but without really thinking. His brain is focused on Toby, and what Toby must be suffering right now.

He’s not sure what he expects when he goes to Toby’s office; he thinks that it will probably be kind of awkward, as things like this with Toby often are, but he figures that Toby will at least be able to open up a little bit. He had, Josh remembers, been much more open after Rosslyn for a little while, before the Toby shell grew again. He knocks on the door and peeks his head in, his face looking like the picture of sympathy.

“How go the wars?” Toby asks flatly, and much to Josh’s relief, that still sounds like Toby, in his own way.

Josh, however, doesn't want to talk about his floundering campaign. “I just heard about David,” he says. “Man, I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.” It’s tight, and it’s clear Toby doesn’t want to talk about it, but he has to. Josh knows from experience that bottling it all up helps no one.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“The Energy Trust Fund," Toby starts with, much to Josh’s surprise. What does that have to do with David? Would he really put a project that isn’t even going to get passed in this administration ahead of his own family? “It just got dropped.”

“Screw the Energy Trust Fund,” Josh says, stepping forward. He’s not going to let Toby go down the same path of unhealthy grief Josh has been down a few times before, not if he can help it. “I wish I could have been at the…”

“The Mental Health commission,” Toby says more pointedly, not breaking eye contact with Josh. He knows why Toby’s bringing that up; that had been a project that was important to Josh. He had fought to keep it as a part of his portfolio, even if it was additional work he didn’t really have time to do, just because the mission was so important to him. “You dropped a lot and walked away.”

Before Josh can say anything, he gets a phone call. Another cancellation. He wonders if he’s actually going to get to have any of the meetings he’s been telling people he’ll have. “I’ve got a 12:00 conference call and a 2:00 on the Hill, you want to get some food in between?”

But Toby just looks down at his desk and frowns. “Can’t today,” he says, and Josh isn’t entirely convinced he’d see that time blocked out if he checked closely. It’s not that he doesn’t want to let Toby grieve the way he needs to, but he also has to be there for him, or the guilt will eat him up inside, and Josh already has enough things eating at him.

Like when he finds out that Santos is getting bumped from Meet the Press in favor of Rafferty. Josh likes Senator Rafferty, he really does. She was a reliable vote on some of Bartlet’s more liberal policies and she was always amenable to a good debate. He likes her a lot, but he wishes, more than anything, that she wasn’t trying to run for President right now.

She’s not running for President anyway, not really. She’s running to talk about her healthcare plan, and honestly between the campaign and his personal life, Josh has had to think way too much about healthcare to ever hear another word about it. Especially out of Ricky Rafferty’s mouth on Meet the Press when Santos was supposed to be on there.

He’s in the midst of arguing with the producer who called him when he feels a rough tug on his arm. “Hang up,” he hears whispered into his ear. He tries to continue his argument but it’s difficult when it’s Donna who is holding on to his arm, who keeps telling him to hang up the phone.

“Call me back,” he says before shutting his phone and groaning. “I’m gonna put a hit out on Ricky Rafferty,” he mumbles as Donna pulls him along.

“I need to talk to you, not with a million people around,” Donna whispers, and she opens a door to a closet that Josh didn’t even know existed.

It’s dark and claustrophobic and being this close to Donna almost takes his breath away, so he has to deflect. “Is our relationship about to change?” he asks with mock seriousness. “Because Donna, if you want to consummate our marriage, I’m not sure this is the…”

The light flickers on to reveal Donna giving him an icy glare that could freeze fire. He promptly shuts up. “Rafferty put out the text of the health plan,” she says, handing him a file. “Annabeth has a copy. Look at page three.”

Josh looks at it and frowns. “‘Obliterate the money-laundering middle man between you and your doctor’—why didn’t every article lead with this?” He blinks and looks over the plan, skimming quickly.

“It wasn't in the first speech,” Donna explains. "They released it today. It guarantees more coverage, look at its structure.”

He reads a little closer, although he doesn’t have to read too closely because it looks very familiar. Eerily familiar. He remembers late nights pouring over text like this, making notes as to why Bartlet couldn’t possibly campaign on a healthcare plan like this. Why this country would never be willing to vote for that, why even if the people wanted it, the Senate would never, in a million years, even let it come to vote, why the insurance companies would pay millions of dollars to PACs so that the government wouldn’t put them out of business for something like this. It had been a long argument, drawn out over weeks. Bartlet had insisted that he had no chance of winning the nomination, so he might as well talk about healthcare in a way that made sense. Josh, however, had not hopped off of the Hoynes campaign with an almost guaranteed spot in the White House to run a one-note campaign about an unrealistic healthcare plan, and so he had fought, hard, to take it off the table.

And he had won. Bartlet talked about expanding Medicare and Medicaid, about making sure insurance companies didn’t exploit the unemployed, about banning denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, and that had been the right move. He had gotten elected. Except none of his healthcare improvements had actually happened, and now it seems like any chance of a healthcare plan like Bartlet’s or Rafferty’s is a pipe dream.

It’s funny to think how hard he fought against it—not that he didn’t believe that Bartlet’s healthcare plan was good conceptually, but he knew it was politically dead on arrival—because had that somehow managed to be passed, he certainly wouldn’t be in the situation he is now.

Josh swallows and looks up at Donna. “It’s structured like Bartlet had it before we had him cut it out of his plan,” he says, wide-eyed.

“Rafferty has someone from the President’s first healthcare initiative. You, Toby, Sam, Melanie, Ken…”

Josh frowns. Melanie is on the Hoynes campaign now and Ken is on Russell’s, as far he knows, so neither of them would have any interest in leaking that to Rafferty. Sam is in California and not involved in politics at all, and anyway, Sam would never betray him like that. Neither would Toby. Josh knows Toby is pissed about him leaving, but he certainly wouldn’t screw him over like that. “You missed one,” he says, biting his lip.

“No, who’d I miss?” Donna asks.

He rubs his forehead forcefully. “The President.” It wouldn’t be like Jed Bartlet to do that to him either, not really, but perhaps he still harbors a little bit of resentment that his healthcare plan never made it out there. Perhaps he desperately wanted someone to be talking about single payer healthcare, and Rafferty was the only one willing to do it. Perhaps… perhaps he feels like he’s running out of time to build a legacy, and this is his way of doing it.

“Josh, you know he wouldn’t…”

“I need to talk to CJ,” he says, feeling almost breathless.

Donna bites her lip. “Yeah. Hey, find me after the DNC thing, okay? I'm going to the HR office today and I think there are going to be more papers for you to sign.”

Josh nods. “Come over to my apartment? Probably the most subtle way to do it.”

“Yeah,” Donna says. “Yeah, I can do that. I’ll call you when I’m on my way.”

“Okay,” Josh says, letting out a heavy breath. “Is it… will it look strange when we come out of this closet?”

Donna rolls her eyes. “As long as you stop making stupid jokes about consummation.”

He winces, but there’s really no way to respond to that. He shouldn’t have made the joke, and he’s now uncomfortable thinking about it. He slowly opens the door, making sure that there’s no one right outside, before stepping out and making his way to CJ’s office. It seems like everyone walks a little more slowly here now, looks a little sadder, seems to have a little less energy. He’s not sure if it's just his perception, compared to the campaign, or if the weight of the last seven years has really pulled everyone down so much.

Margaret looks a little bit scared of him after his tirade this morning, and so she lets him through to CJ without any hesitation. He probably should feel bad about that, but his head is already buzzing with too many other things today to add that guilt on top of it.

“You got a second?” he asks CJ, and then, without waiting for an answer, asks, “Has the President sat down with Senator Rafferty?”

CJ sighs heavily. “Josh.”

“Lunch, casual.”

“Absolutely not,” she shuts down.

This doesn’t stop Josh’s spiral of theory, however. “He’s not sure Russell’s representing Democratic values, thinks a spoiler may move the debate in an interesting direction…”

“The President plans to endorse his party’s nomination,” CJ says calmly, with just a little bit of irritation sneaking through into her voice. “We assume it will be the Vice President. Sorry he’s not backing your candidate, but he’s most certainly not backing Ricky Rafferty.”

Josh runs a hand through his hair. “I can see where this is heading,” he groans. “Four weeks of articles about single-payer healthcare and it all reads like vintage Bartlet.” And really, it wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t trying to get a guy elected. Santos is not opposed to the idea of single-payer healthcare, not theoretically, but he was at least realistic to know that he couldn’t run a viable campaign on it. 

“The President’s not the first guy to try and phase out insurance companies,” CJ reminds him. “Although he was a bit obsessed with it.” She chuckles a little bit. “I thought you’d burst a blood vessel trying to talk him off of it.” Josh is about to make a joke about how he’s done the burst (or lacerated, he supposes) blood vessel thing before and isn’t looking to repeat the experience, but thinks better of it. Before he can say anything, CJ sighs and pushes back her chair. “Gotta be nice with lobbyists from over-subsidized agribusiness conglomerates,” she says mournfully. “Focus on South Carolina. Rafferty will flame out.”

Josh knows this, but it’s not a whole lot of comfort.

And if the President hasn’t met with Rafferty at all, that only leaves one person who could have given her the text of the healthcare plan, and it’s somebody that Josh doesn’t want to have to confront.

Ginger gives him a strange look when he goes to Toby’s office again, but Josh shrugs her off and knocks on the door, trying to stop himself from seething when he doesn’t know the whole story. He’s awfully good at flying off the handle, but today he needs to stay calm.

Toby doesn’t seem fazed at all to see him, which maybe should strike Josh as a relief. “Immigration bill’s getting gutted in committee,” he says, barely even looking up from his desk.

“You see Rafferty’s healthcare plan?” Josh asks, trying to sound innocuous. It might have been better to greet Toby, but in all fairness, Toby didn’t greet him first, and Josh’s patience, which has never been high to begin with, is a thin thread just on the edge of snapping.

“Yeah,” Toby says, sounding uninterested. “Who was your point person on immigration?”

“‘Obliterate the middleman between you and your doctor,’” Josh quotes, reading off the paper Donna gave him. “Does it bother you that someone’s stealing your stuff? Does that trouble you at all.”

Toby shrugs. “It doesn’t.”

Josh narrows his eyes. “It would,” he says, trying not to let too much of an accusatory tone creep in. He’s not very successful. “You’re not a good sharer.” When Toby doesn’t reply, the thin thread of Josh’s patience, fraying to begin with, snaps, and the realization hits him. He doesn’t want to think it was Toby, but there’s no way it isn’t. “Only way it doesn’t bother you is if you handed it to her yourself.”

Toby’s eyes narrow. “Shut the door.”

“Ricky Rafferty? Are you crazy?” Josh exclaims, and there’s no keeping his voice down any more. He’s felt betrayed before, but this, coming from Toby, hurts worse than almost anything. “I’ve just eked out a lead, my guys the freaking little engine that could! What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know, I thought maybe there should be someone in the field who talks like a Democrat!” Now Toby’s voice matches Josh’s, and he’s certain that everyone outside can hear them, but blood is pounding in his ears, and there’s that ever familiar tightness in his chest. Toby lowers his voice again. “You wasted the opportunity, you and your garage-sale find.”

“My… what?”

“Ethanol pledge,” Toby says.

Josh sucks in a breath but it doesn’t do anything for that feeling that’s gripping and pulling at him from the inside. “I’m trying to win a race,” he defends.

“You got a chance to shape the debate, strengthen the party, and you blew it! You ran to the center for a stinking nineteen percent in New Hampshire!” Toby steps back a little bit, looking like he wants to end this, and god, Josh wants it to be over too, but this is his life, and it’s hard to stand here and be accused of giving it up for something worthless. “You shouldn’t try to win,” Toby says. “You don’t have the man.”

And this feels like a knife to the heart, but Josh an’t yet let it show how much it hurts him. “You think I left to shape the debate?”

Toby shrugs. “Somebody’s got to.”

He can’t let Toby know how deeply hurt he is by this. He has to keep it together. He has to. But Toby is getting him riled up, like he does, and Josh resents the accusation that he’d leave his job at the White House for such an abstract goal. Toby might be all pie-in-the-sky ideals, but Josh gets things done. He always has, and he has to continue to. “This is your contribution to the party?” Josh shoots back. “The world needed another going-nowhere healthcare plan? Now every viable candidate has to waste airtime on why they do or don’t support socialized medicine!”

Toby barely lets him finish before he shouts, “There is a profiting industry leeching the life out of this country’s healthcare! Got something better to discuss?”

And Josh, if he’d had a little more time to think, would have recognized that this was personal to him, that this might have been personal to Toby too. But he is so wrapped up in his own anger and frustration that he doesn’t even take the time to think about the policy. It’s not about the policy. This is Toby telling him he’s wrong, that he shouldn’t be doing this campaign, and frankly, Josh has thought about that too much himself to bear it coming from Toby. So instead, he reverts to policy, because talking about policy means he doesn’t have to talk about his feelings. “You’re dragging the whole field left!” This isn’t really what he’s mad about—it’s not that he necessarily disagrees with Toby politically, although Toby has always tended to be a little further left—he’s more angry that Toby wants to try and put the Democrats in an untenable position, especially against a moderate like Arnold Vinick who is nearly impossible to beat anyway. 

“Good!” Toby shouts, and Josh knows this isn’t an argument he can make.

Instead, he thinks about how grumpy, how unhelpful Toby has been on their phone calls. They’ve called a little bit, but Toby always seems to act like he’d rather be doing anything else, and while Josh hasn’t had time to be too hurt by this, he’s getting more and more worked up thinking about it. “You could have fed me ideas, if you don’t like how I’m running this!

“How?”

This almost makes Josh stop short. “...How? Telephone!”

“How?” Toby asks again.

Josh taps his foot impatiently, furrowing his brow in confusion. “What are we discussing?”

“You didn’t ask!” Toby says, and Josh sucks in a breath. “Why the hell didn’t you come to me before you picked Santos! Do you have any idea how strong a force we would have been if we had taken on a candidate together!”

Josh blinks a few times. He could swear he asked, he could swear he talked to Toby about all of this, he knows he talked to Toby about all of this. He just can’t remember when. Of course he knows how strong of a force they could have been; they got Bartlet elected together against pretty narrow odds. But he had just assumed that Toby wanted nothing to do with any of it. “I’m asking you now,” Josh says, practically begging Toby to settle down, to understand.

“Yeah, well, no.”

The rejection stings like nothing else. This was something Toby said he wanted, and yet now he’s saying no? “That’s it? That’s your answer?”

“That’s my answer,” Toby says, cooly. Almost too cooly, compared to the fire that is rising within Josh. 

If he thought it had been hard to breathe before, if he thought his stomach was twisted in knots before, if he thought this had been miserable before, nothing compares to how awful he feels now. And perhaps, looking back, he wouldn’t have done this. He would have remembered that Toby was grieving. He would have remembered how much of an asshole he himself had been in the past because of grief or pain or his struggles with his mental health. But Josh doesn’t have the patience for that today, because after barely a month of campaigning, he’s already at the end of his rope. So instead, he turns aggressive. “You are a selfish, petty…”

“Get out,” Toby interrupts him.

Josh wants nothing more that to leave, but his anger keeps his feet planted. “Waste of the oxygen in the air useful people could be breathing!

“Get out!”

“You get out, you selfish son of a bitch!”

Josh doesn’t really know what happens after that; his memories of it are as blurry as the ones of yelling at the President in the Oval Office, of putting his hand through a window. There are papers thrown, and he charges at Toby, and he doesn’t think any punches get thrown but his fist is really rather sore afterwards, and Toby has a cut on his cheek somehow, and Josh staggers out, slamming the door open and leaving the bullpen in a fury.

He doesn’t know where to go; it’s like his feet take him on their most familiar path, which ends up leading to his old office. There’s no one in there—they still haven’t hired a new Deputy Chief of Staff, and Josh isn’t sure whether he should find that comforting or concerning—and he slams the door behind him and sinks back against the wall, bringing his knees to the chest and trying to reach back to the days when he actually went to therapy consistently to remember some of the calming tricks he used to know.

Josh rubs his face with his hands, takes a deep breath in and finally feels the tightness in his chest release a bit, if not the nausea. He checks his watch. It’s almost noon. He’s supposed to be on a conference call with Santos’ whole congressional office in fifteen minutes, and he has to be okay enough to do that, but the truth is, he’s not sure his head will be in it. Josh has almost always been able to keep it together, even when feeling like this, but he thinks today might be one of those days where it’s too much. He’s starting to lose it, and he hurt one of the people who he loves most (even if Toby hurt him too) and maybe Toby is right and he should just give up and go home and try not to cause any more damage to the party and the country. It’s not Santos who isn’t good enough, although it might not be his time yet. But Josh Lyman certainly isn't good enough, and pretty soon the whole world will realize that too.

He’s not going to be able to do the conference call, he recognizes, not like this, and he’s pretty sure it’s going to be a while before he can manage to get himself off the ground. It’s not usually this bad. Usually, he’ll walk around in misery, but he can always manage to push through. Today, it’s like all the energy has been zapped from him, like he’s frozen in place but also one wrong move and he’ll implode entirely.

He manages to type out a quick text to Ronna on his Blackberry, telling her that he got tied up and won’t be able to be in the call, although he'll jump in later if he can. He’s thankful at least for this new phone, that he doesn’t actually have to talk to her, doesn't have to think about the way she definitely knows he’s lying. But then, just as he’s starting to get his breathing in control, his phone rings again, and he’s sure it’s Ronna, ready to argue about his absence. He picks it up—there’s really no avoiding it, even if he's completely out of sorts—but to his surprise, on the other side of the line is a different, but no less familiar voice.

"Josh," CJ breathes, and he can’t tell if it’s anger or sadness that colors her voice. “Where are you?”

“CJ…”

“Where. Are. You?” she asks sharply.

“CJ, if this is about Toby…”

“Look, either you’re going to tell me where you are or I'm going to get the FBI on the case, and let me tell you, they’ll figure it out pretty fast but unless you want to waste my time, their time, and taxpayer dollars, tell me where you are.”

Josh closes his eyes and rubs his forehead. “I’m in my old office,” he says. “No one was in there and I needed…”

“Stay right where you are,” she says. “Do not leave this building before I talk to you.”

Josh doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there, although he thinks it might have been a long time, before there’s a knock on the door. CJ doesn’t wait for a response, instead, stepping inside and closing the door behind her gently. She sees where he is, his back pressed against the wall, curled up and hugging his knees to himself, and her face falls a little bit. “Josh,” she says softly, and he doesn't make eye contact with her. “What happened?”

“You talked to Toby, didn’t you?”

CJ nods. “I did talk to Toby, because I heard reports from staffers outside that there had been some kind of altercation…”

“They heard it?” Josh whines.

“Sounds like it was pretty hard to miss,” CJ says. She looks like she is tired of the crouching position, and instead shifts so that she’s sitting next to Josh, her legs sticking straight out. “I talked to Toby, and he sat there, and he cried. Toby cried, Josh, and I was going to stay with him but then he got a call from his sister-in-law and…”

Josh bites his lip. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty? Because I already do a good enough job of that by myself.”

“No. God, no, I just…” CJ shifts a little bit so that she is facing him, and finally locks eyes with him. “Why did you fight with him?”

“I got worked up. He betrayed me,” Josh says with a shrug. “He’s doing all he can to make my job even harder, and then he gets mad at me for trying to run a campaign I can win, and he kept playing on all these insecurities that I can’t stop thinking about anyway and I guess… I guess I just snapped.”

“He betrayed you?” CJ asks softly. “Because it sounds an awful lot like he thinks you betrayed him.”

“I never… I just… I had to do it! I had to leave, and if he thinks that was easy for me…”

CJ reaches out and rubs his knee. “I know,” she whispers. "I know it wasn’t easy. And Toby doesn't mean it, not really.”

“His behavior says otherwise. I just… I can’t get over him sharing the health plan. Ruining the maybe one good week that I’m gonna get in this campaign.” Josh groans. “I know that sounds shallow, but it’s this whole mess and I don’t know that I have the capacity anymore to run this thing and I’m all alone and I…"

She looks away from him, down at the carpet, before turning back again. “You know how Toby’s brother died?”

Josh frowns. “Cancer, right?”

“That’s the line, anyway,” CJ says. She sighs heavily, twisting her hands together. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. They didn’t really want people to know this, and you have to swear to never repeat it to a soul.”

He sucks in a harsh breath. “Yeah.”

“After getting the diagnosis,” CJ says seriously, “he locked the garage and turned on the car.”

Josh closes his eyes and title his head back against the wall. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” CJ says. “His brother… things weren’t going so well, and then he just decided to leave. I’m not sure it’s really you that he’s angry with, you know?”

CJ doesn’t need to say anything more. “You’re talking to the guy who mistook Bach for sirens,” Josh murmurs. “I get it.”

“Yeah,” CJ says. “I’m not sure he does.”

Josh shrugs. “I can’t… I think I need to let him be for a little while. Let him grieve. If I'm too much of a reminder then…”

“Yeah,” CJ says softly. She reaches out and rubs his knee again, and there’s something about CJ’s touch that calms him down and helps him feel like he’s not about to get swept up in this tidal wave of grief.

He knows it’s not him, but the very thought of how Toby is suffering makes Josh feel sick to his stomach. “I didn’t want to leave him, you know. I didn’t want to leave any of you.”

CJ nods. “I know,” she whispers.

“And the healthcare plan… it wasn’t that I was against it. In fact, in an ideal world I think it sounds great. But this is the real world, and I'm fighting for my life in a campaign that’s going nowhere and I’m supposed to be on a conference call with my whole team right now and instead I’m here on the floor of my old office because I can’t stop myself from fucking panicking and I…”

She shifts closer to him on the floor and wraps her arm around him, pulling him closer to her. “Josh. The healthcare thing wasn’t about you, either. He’s…” She blinks a few times, and Josh thinks she might be close to tears too. It’s only now that he notices that he’s been crying. “Toby told me that he thought if we’d passed Bartlet’s healthcare plan, his brother would still be alive. His cancer really needed an experimental treatment that had a lot of good evidence but insurance wouldn’t cover it, and Toby thinks he was afraid he’d bankrupt his family, that his kids wouldn’t be able to go to college because…"

Josh lets out a heavy breath. “Because healthcare in this country is fucked up,” he whispers. “Tell me about it.”

CJ presses her lips together. “Anyway, Toby doesn’t know you know that. He really shouldn’t know you know that, unless he wants to tell you himself.”

“I won’t say anything.”

“Don’t hold it against him.”

Josh smiles ever so slightly. “He hasn’t held what I went through against me. When a lesser person could easily just have been pissed, he tried to get me help. It’s about time I return the favor.”

CJ stands up and dusts off her skirt, and looks him over. “Are you doing okay? I'm sorry, I was so worried about Toby, I couldn’t….”

Josh pushes himself up off the floor and holds a hand up. “I had a bit of a panic moment, but that’s nothing new, right? Toby’s the one you should be worried about.”

CJ doesn’t look convinced, but she nods. “Look, I canceled my meeting to sit with Toby, but his family needs him, so if you want to go get lunch with me if you’re not busy…”

“I’d love to,” Josh says, following her out of his old office.

They have a nice lunch together, and Josh almost manages to keep from exploding when CJ tells him she’s trying to hire Cliff Calley for his old position (he has to remind himself that she doesn’t know about the diary, and she should never know about the diary, and therefore the biggest reason Cliff Calley should never work in the White House, besides of course the Republicanism, is not at all on her radar). Toby calls again before the bill arrives, and CJ apologetically heads back; Josh understands, and he pays the bill before heading up to the Hill to take some meetings.

He doesn’t stay long at the DNC gala that night; it requires a lot of emotional energy that he doesn’t have, and today is one of those days where the music is hard for him to take. It’s a nice, calm jazz band playing, but it’s still beginning to get to Josh. It's much better than it once was, of course, but Josh isn't sure he’ll ever feel fully safe at an event like this.

Still, Santos gets his shot with the President, and Josh manages to find a few more donors among a very divided pool, so he heads home still feeling on edge, but also satisfied with his work, which seems to be a rarity these days.

Josh hasn’t spent much time at his apartment in the last month, and paying rent on it really makes very little sense, especially considering that his salary is hardly even minimum wage with all the hours he’s putting in, but there is something that’s nice about being able to go back to his own place on the rare days he’s in DC, aware from the chaos of a campaign hotel, away from everything else that has pushed and pulled at him until he feels like he can’t be stretched any further. He flops back on the couch, ready to relax, when he hears his cell phone ring again.

He almost considers not answering it, which is unlike him; that would be incredibly irresponsible as the campaign manager and Josh always answers his phone. When he picks up, however, it’s not anyone on his staff but instead Donna. "Hi Josh,” she says, “I’m on my way over.”

Oh, right, he thinks. Donna was going to come over to have him sign some paperwork. “Okay,” he says. “You still have a key?”

“Why would I…” Donna asks, before there’s a pause. “Yeah, I still have a key.”

Josh isn’t sure whether this is a good or bad thing, but he supposes it at least means that she didn’t entirely want to cut him out of her life. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you in a few then.” He lies back down and closes his eyes, and it seems like almost instantly, he’s hearing the key in the lock. Perhaps he really is tired.

“Hello,” he hears, as Donna slips inside. “You alright?”

“Fine, just tired,” he says, getting up off the couch and stretching. He can hear his back pop alarmingly loudly. He had gotten a new mattress a few years ago after the back pain he’d had since the shooting seemed to worsen, but it doesn’t do him much good when he's been at low-budget hotels every night of the month. “You? I didn’t give you my cold, did I?”

“Somehow, you didn’t,” Donna says. “A miracle, really.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Josh says, moving towards her and pulling out a chair at his kitchen table. “Even a little cold can be a bitch after you’ve had lung damage.”

Donna presses her lips together, and Josh wonders with horror if maybe it wasn’t a good idea to bring it up. He’s constantly joking about what happened to him because it’s really the only way he knows how to talk about it, but maybe for Donna, that isn’t what she wants to do. “Yeah, I wasn’t exactly envious of you,” she says cooly, and Josh still can’t quite tell if she’s alright.

“I’m better now,” he says, because he cannot think of anything else to fill the silence.

“Good.” She digs through her bag and pulls out some forms for him to sign, placing them down on the table and tossing a pen at him. “I filled out most of your medical history but I’m not sure if the prescription list is current, take a look at that and…”

“You filled out my medical history?”

Donna shrugs. “Yeah.”

“How did you know…”

“Oh, I only did it about a million times when I took you to all those appointments after the shooting,” Donna replies. “And also when I made every single one of your doctor’s appointments since. I probably know it better than I know my own at this point.”

“You know it better than I do,” Josh says, looking over the sheet. “In fairness, I was unconscious or very drugged for a lot of this.”

“Yeah,” Donna says, “I know the feeling.”

Josh blinks a few times before looking back a the forms, making a few changes to the medication list, before pushing it back to Donna. Donna doesn’t say anything when she takes the forms back, just begins to stuff the back into her bag.

The silence is beginning to kill Josh, and while he thought he wanted it after the day he had, he's realizing that what he really wants is to talk to Donna, to share what he’s been going through, to see if maybe Donna can help make things better. So as she picks her bag up off the floor, he open his mouth. “Why did you tell me about the Rafferty thing?”

Donna pauses. “What?”

“Why did you tell me about the Rafferty thing? You didn’t have to… I mean, it wasn’t going to help the Russell campaign. It’s much more of a problem for us than for you.”

She bites her lip. “I figured it out. I wasn’t really looking into it, but… you know, I’ve got a really good memory and so when I read the healthcare plan it rang a bell.”

“And yet you pulled me into a closet to tell me about it as soon as you figured it out. Why?”

“I don’t know!” Donna says, raising her arms. “No one was really going to care on the Russell campaign, but I thought someone should know!”

“So you told me.”

She blinks a few times. “Yeah. Look, I know we said we weren’t going to talk about the campaigns but it was a peace offering, okay?”

“I found out who the leak was,” Josh says, looking down at the floor. “It was… Toby. He and I had a fight over it.”

“Ginger told me,” Donna says. “Did you get hurt?”

“Not physically.”

Donna takes a few steps towards him. “I’m sorry. I know how you and Toby…”

“He’s grieving,” Josh says softly, “and I know how that goes. Just going to cool off a bit.”

She looks like she has something else to add, but she just stares at him for several minutes before sighing. “Okay. I’m sorry if what I told you screwed things up.“

“You told me with good intentions,” Josh says. “I believe that much.”

Another pause. “Okay.” And then another pause. Things never were this awkward between them, and it kills Josh how much they’ve changed from who they used to be. “Thanks for signing the things, I’m gonna…”

“Yeah, go,” Josh says. “Thank you.”

“You sure you’re alright after today?”

This would be so much easier if she didn’t still act like she cared. Josh swallows thickly. “I’m fine.”

Donna doesn’t look like she believes him, but she opens the door to his apartment. “Okay,” she says one more time. “See you in South Carolina.”

If he cries a little bit after she leaves, whether for Toby, or for how strained his relationships with everybody he loves are, or for his own misery and desperation on the hardest, loneliest campaign he’s ever endured, then no one really needs to know about it.

Chapter Text

The hotel in Charleston has a nice pool, but it’s not like Donna has time to swim in it.

She was here a couple of weeks ago for a fundraiser right before Iowa, but now she’s back again, and somehow in the same hotel room. There’s no sign of the Santos campaign in this hotel; in fact, she hasn’t seen anything from the campaign at in the city, and she wonders if they might have gone to a different part of South Carolina. It's one of those states that Donna just doesn’t quite know; aside from campaign stops, she’s never really spent any time here, and it almost seems like a waste for them to be here. Hoynes is going to win the primary—that’s a given—so why is she running from place to place all over Charleston?

She knows why, and maybe the odds aren’t as bad as they seem, but she’s tired. It’s only the third primary out of god knows how many (she knows how many, of course, but there are too many days with multiple primaries, and too many states with both primaries and caucuses) and she’s almost regretting taking this position. The White House was exhausting too, but at least she returned to the same bed every night, at least she knew when she had to be awake, if not when she would get to leave, at least she wasn’t on a plane every three days.

At least then, she wasn’t walking twenty thousand steps every day.

She’s had a little pedometer from her physical therapist, who wanted her to keep track of how much she had been walking. She hasn’t gone to physical therapy since she quit (probably not a good idea, but she doesn’t have the time), but she noticed one day that she still had the pedometer on her. Curiosity prevailed, and as it turns out, Donna is taking twice as many steps every day as is reasonable.

“That’s great,” her mother had said when Donna mentioned it on one of their infrequent phone calls. “It will keep you in good shape.”

Donna has never really had a problem with being in shape, and it’s almost definitely not great when she had a compound fracture of the femur just seven months ago, but she didn’t mention this to her mother. She wouldn’t mind all the walking so much if she didn’t have to do it in heels.

When she was doing physical therapy back in DC, there had been days where her physical therapist had taken her into the pool. She had been skeptical at first—there was no swimsuit that could hide all the scarring on her leg, and she had never really enjoyed swimming all that much to begin with—but it had quickly become her favorite part of PT. When she was in the warm pool, all the pain seemed to dissipate, washed away by the water. Bearing weight became more bearable, and for the first time, in the water, she started to feel a little bit like herself again.

She’s come to terms with the fact that her leg is simply going to ache until July at the very least, that the nagging pain will never quite go away, but still, on days like today, it looks awfully nice to just get into the pool and forget about the campaign and try to let everything fade away.

“Donna?" Will asks, and Donna directs her attention away from the pool. “You’re coming to the meeting at ten? For media targeting?”

She presses her lips together. “Yeah.”

“Great!”

She shifts her tote bag—it’s a little bit and unwieldy but she needed something big enough for all of her forms—and looks behind her. “You said HR had set up shop in the which room?”

“The Wragg Room,” Will says. “What do you need them for?”

“An issue with my health insurance forms,” Donna says flatly. “I went to them in DC, but they said the person who deals with the healthcare companies was down here for some of the immediate onboarding.”

Will smiles tightly (although Donna’s not certain she’s ever seen a real smile out of Will). “We’re hiring new people every day,” he says with a hint of pride.

“Yeah,” Donna says. “By the way, I know you said that you were trying to hire someone so that I could just focus on the Northeast and not the Pacific Northwest but I was wondering…”

“Oh, yes,” Will says, and maybe this is a little bit of a smile from him. “You know what, Donna? I’m gonna do you one better. That’s not your job anymore.”

Donna blinks a few times. “You’re… you’re firing me?”

“You’ve been great on camera the few times we’ve sent you out there,” Will says. “We want you in front of the camera, not behind it. How does Press Liaison sound? It’s a promotion, a big one, but I think you’re the exact right person for the job.”

She covers her mouth with her hand. “You’re… you want me to be a spokesperson?”

“Oh, absolutely. You’re exactly the kind of person we want to be visible on this campaign,” Will says. “You’re young, you’re charming, and if I may say, you’re quite pretty, and while that shouldn’t matter in politics, let me tell you from my experience of not being attractive, it really does.”

Donna doesn’t even know how to respond to that, but she tightens her grip on the tote around her shoulder. “You're promoting me. Is this because…”

“Arielle quit, yes, but you’re a great fit for the role.”

“Why did she quit?” Donna asks, frowning. She should be excited about a promotion, but it all seems rather sudden and even a little bit sketchy.

“She wanted to go work for Vinick,” Will says.

Donna narrows her eyes. “For Vinick? But he’s…”

“A Republican?”

It hits her for just a moment how much she sounded like Josh in that; she really has spent far too much time around him. “She didn’t strike me as much of a…”

“Well, she may have just submitted her taxes and had to pay a little more than she was expecting to," Will says as a joke. “I don’t know why she did that, Donna. I’d only known her for like three weeks.”

“She’s not going to be in a… visible capacity over there, is she?”

Will shrugs. “Not sure.”

“Aren’t there like… non-compete clauses?”

“You’d never be able to hire anyone if we had that in politics,” Will said. “If someone’s too much of a PR risk, they won’t get hired but otherwise…”

“Otherwise people bounce around from campaign to campaign,” Donna fills in.

“Yeah. You know, I had to explain that to Josh Lyman the other day. Smart guy, but you’d think he’d know by now that once his quixotic vanity campaign disintegrates, he won’t be able to come back to us. But he didn’t leave that door open for himself.”

Donna tries not to wince as she hears his name; it’s hard enough to talk about Josh without Will starting to question what exactly the nature of her relationship with him is. “Josh didn’t want this campaign.”

“I know that," Will says, “because I was the one who asked him to run it. He didn’t want Hoynes, either. I figured he was done with the campaigning lifestyle, and I get it. It’s taxing, and he’s done a lot. But then this…” He shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”

You have to get Josh, Donna thinks, but no one really does. She doesn’t have time to explain Josh Lyman to someone who isn't actually going to care, who is never going to understand why Josh does what he does.

Then again, Donna isn’t sure she gets Josh so well anymore either. Not since he pulled away after Gaza. That’s been something she’s been puzzling over for the last six months. He flew all the way to Germany with nothing but the clothes on his back, and yet once she came back, it was like that had never happened. No, it was worse than that; he had seemed to care so much more for her before it happened than after.

She tries not to think about it too much anymore. She’s spent too many years of her life being hung up on Josh Lyman, and she’s tired of thinking about him. She's different now; stronger, smarter, and with a huge new job opportunity for the almost guaranteed Democratic nominee. Josh Lyman is going to be coming to her for a job in a few months.

She just wishes Will wouldn’t try to talk about Josh as if he knows anything at all.

“Anyway,” she says, “I’m very flattered by the promotion.”

“Flattered makes it sound like you’re not going to take it.”

Donna shrugs. “Do I have a choice?”

“You really don’t want this job?”

“No,” she says quickly. “No, of course I want it.” She’d be stupid to turn down anything that’s more money, that’s better on her resume. Of course she’s not going to turn it down.

“Good,” Will says, “because we were going to make you do the interviews anyway. You might as well have the fancy title and pay bump that comes with it. See you at ten?”

Donna holds a folder to her chest and watches him walk away, biting her lip before turning around and heading back to the wing of conference rooms.

HR is set up in the Wragg room. Donna remembers this room, because the second Bartlet campaign had stayed here one night, and they’d had a meeting in the smallest conference room. The meeting, which was supposed to be about Democratic strategies to win back formerly reliable voters in the South, had devolved into Josh and Toby and CJ all ranting about the fact that the conference room had been named after a man who was most well known for being a slave trader. They had tried to argue about it, but it was not much of an argument considering that they all were on the same side. It ended with the conclusion that perhaps Southern voters were completely unreachable, a conclusion Donna disagreed with strongly, but it was not her place at the time to try and argue that point. Would she argue that today? She thinks about it; she might. She feels bolder than she used to be, and she knows that she's right, that places like South Carolina are within reach, even if they do need to do some renaming.

But that had been four years ago, and the room looks very different today. There are some tables set up, pile upon pile of forms, and a couple of bored looking campaign HR workers. Donna wonders how one ends up working in a position like this on a campaign; it must be a lot of work to hire so many new people for jobs that are, by their very nature, temporary. She’s done plenty of administrative work, and she’s definitely had to help Josh with hiring, but nothing on this scale and nothing that feels quite this… fruitless. She doesn’t envy them at all.

She goes up to the woman at the first table on her right and smiles. “Hi,” she says. “I was wondering who I was supposed to talk to about benefits? I’m adding my husband onto my health insurance.

The woman, probably in her fifties and somehow looking like she got eight hours of sleep last night (how anyone on the campaign does that is beyond Donna), smiles up at her. “That’d be me, dear. I’m Lucille.”

“Great, thanks Lucille,” Donna says, pulling out her forms. “Donna Moss. Look, I have some questions about it but they’re of a rather… sensitive nature.”

The knowing look that she gets from Lucille makes her uncomfortable, because there’s no way the sensitive nature of her questions has anything to do with what Lucille thinks they have to do with, but she swallows it down. “There’s a small room right next door, if you’d come in with me?”

“Yeah, great,” Donna says. She’s about to have to reveal a massive secret to this woman, and while she knows that there’s a legal expectation of confidentiality, she’s afraid that it might not be enough.

Sure enough, there’s a little room next door with just a table covered in a white tablecloth and a few hard plastic chairs. Lucille sits down and Donna nearly collapses into the chair next to her; she hadn’t realized how badly her leg ached, and it’s not even ten. It’s going to be an unbearable day, she thinks.

“Okay, show me what you’ve got,” Lucille says.

Donna pulls out the forms. “The application, my own form, his medical history, the marriage certificate…” she says, beginning to list off everything she has. Lucille takes them all, but raises her eyebrows when she sees the marriage certificate.

“This is your husband? Josh Lyman?”

She presses her lips together. “You can see why it was… sensitive. You can’t tell anyone.”

“I'm certainly not going to tell anyone,” Lucille says, with a hint of amusement. “But… that could be an issue for this campaign and his if it got out.”

Donna looks down at her lap. She wasn’t hoping to have to confront this so soon, but she supposes it is inevitable. “Yeah. Which is why…”

“I’m not going to say anything," Lucille repeats. “Still, you know this leaves a paper trail.”

“I know,” Donna says. “But I have to do it.” She doesn’t want to tell anyone that the marriage was solely for the purpose of health insurance; that could be legitimate grounds for denial from the insurance company and there’s no way she wants to deal with that.

Lucille raises an eyebrow as she looks over the medical history form. She’s probably not allowed to say anything, although Donna’s sure the situation with her choice of husband was just too good to resist. “And your questions?”

“How soon will he be covered?”

“If I can get this in today, it’ll start on the first of the month,” Lucille says.

“And my premium?”

“Will go up, certainly, but it’ll be deducted from your paycheck.”

Donna nods. She’ll tell Josh about that, but she’s really not too worried. She’s sure he’ll insist on paying it. “Does this change the deductible amount at all?”

"Not unless you want to change your plan, and you’re on the…” Lucille looks through a few more forms. “You’re already on a pretty high coverage, low deductible plan so I wouldn’t be too worried about that.”

She and Josh have both been through enough, especially Josh with his lawsuit against the insurance company, that she really feels she has no choice but to worry, but she doesn’t say anything on that. “Okay, well… if that’s all I need to do for the benefits…”

“I’ll get this all turned in. Come by the main office next time you’re in DC and I’ll get his insurance card to you. Of course, he could come but I’m not sure…”

Donna frowns. “Could you mail it instead?” She thinks of the possibility of someone, anyone, seeing an insurance card with the name Josh Lyman on it in the Russell campaign headquarters and shudders.

Lucille stands up. “I could, but you’re going to need to fill out another form that I’ve got out here.” She stuffs the rest of the papers into a manila folder and leads Donna back into the original room, before looking over something and handing a form to her. “You don’t seem to have an address on file for mailing.”

“Yeah, I’ve just been picking up my paychecks…” Donna says slowly. The truth is, she’s been subletting her apartment since the first of the year, and so she doesn’t really have an address to put down. She’s just been staying in hotel room after hotel room. It’s been fine so far—she hasn’t needed to be mailed anything—but in a moment of panic, she scribbles down Josh’s address.

The card is going to him, anyway, she thinks. And if they’re married, it’s probably useful to pretend that they live together.

“Great, thank you Donna,” Lucille says, picking up the form and putting it in a different pile than the others. “I think that’s all we need to…”

“Wait!” says someone on the other side of the room. It’s another woman, although this one looks like she’s barely out of high school, and she’s typing away at a computer. “Just got an email from Will Bailey, he said to catch you before you leave. Apparently you’ve got some promotion paperwork to sign?”

Donna bites her lip. “Yeah, I think that might be true,” she says. She walks over to the other side of the room, and looks at the paperwork containing her new title as well as indicating that she will be receiving a significant raise. It’s the most money Donna’s ever made in her life, and even if this job only lasts for a few months, there’s no way she can turn that down.

She should be proud of herself, and yet all she’s feeling right now is a deep and pressing emptiness. She’d just as soon assume that this is how all campaigns are if she didn’t actually know any better, if she didn’t remember how joyful the first campaign was. Even the second, though far more exhausting, had felt far more fulfilling than this.

She signs the paperwork, accepting her new title and new responsibilities, before heading over to the meeting. Will is talking about the media targeting strategies for the day, and she's giving her input on which shows are more important to do (it’s important to do at least one local show, she says—make sure the voters of South Carolina know the candidate is talking to them specifically) and she’s good at this. She loves it, she really does. So why does it feel almost empty?

They take the bus to Columbia later that afternoon; the Vice President is doing a live, televised press conference in front of the state capitol building that evening. The governor is a Republican, she knows, but he and Russell had been good friends back when he had been in the House.

“You’re going to answer follow-ups when the President is off,” Will says to her, sitting in the seat beside her. “You up for that?”

Donna blinks a few times. She’s never done an actual press conference before, and this seems like a big one. “At the microphone? In front of people.”

“Nah,” Will says. “We don’t want to dilute the President’s authority. That whole thing Santos said about speaking directly to the people has us on the defense. But afterward, I’m going to need you to talk to reporters and spin it for all it’s worth.”

She swallows. She’s talked to reporters plenty of times, although usually it’s just been “The office of the Deputy Chief of Staff does not wish to comment”. She supposes she should have expected this responsibility, but it feels as if it's been thrust upon her awfully fast.

“Okay,” Donna says. She looks at her watch. “We’re going to be late, aren’t we?”

Will shrugs. “Everyone will wait for the Vice President of the United States, but I did schedule a final briefing before the press conference that we might have to skip.”

She frowns. “A briefing about what?”

“Just whatever news has happened during the day. You know, just so he’s not caught off guard.”

“Would he be caught off guard by anything today?”

Will frowns. “Not that I know of. So we’re probably fine to skip it. He’s pretty good on his feet.”

Donna doesn't agree with that statement at all, having seen the Vice President stumble through questions where he hadn’t practiced the answers one too many times, but she doesn’t say anything.

When the bus pulls up next to the capitol building, everything is set up and the crowd is quite a bit bigger than Donna expected. There are plenty of reporters, of course, but also quite a large crew of supporters. Perhaps Hoynes doesn’t have this state in the bag the way he thinks he does.

A big cheer erupts as Bob Russell emerges from the front of the bus, followed by his secret service detail. He stalks up toward the temporary stage, gets behind the podium, and launches into a shortened version of his stump speech that Donna could probably recite in her sleep. It includes more than a few bad jokes (no one understood President Bartlet’s humor, she thinks, but at least he was funny if you had the context) and a few statements that Donna wasn’t sure were vetted by the communications department, but the crowd seems to be having a good time. She leans back against the bus, trying to take some weight off of her aching leg. She has some stronger painkillers in her purse, but she has to stay sharp to talk to reporters, so she’ll deal with the pain rather than risk the brain fog.

The reporters begin to ask questions, and most of them are pretty standard-issue. Some region-specific questions which Russell had been prepped on by a staffer who was a South Carolina native, some questions about domestic policy, something about the mining connections which Russell tried very hard to get out of answering, and of course, the inevitable question about the emergence of Matt Santos as a viable presidential candidate.

“Matt Santos is a great guy, don’t get me wrong,” Russell says. “We worked together in the House, and I have a lot of admiration for him. But he jumps in two weeks before the primaries begin and thinks he’s got a shot? This, after he said he was going to retire from Congress. I’m not sure he really wants to be here, are you?”

Will smiles at the crowd's reaction, but Donna frowns. “Don’t you think he should be more focused on policy than process?”

“People complain when politicians talk about process, but that’s also what they’re interested in,” Will whispers back. “Do you think they’d be reacting so strongly if he had just condemned that new bill about stock market reforms?”

Donna thinks the voters are a lot smarter than Will or Russell give them credit for, but she says nothing.

She’s beginning to tune out the rest of the speech when she hears a question that makes her blood run cold. “Mr. Vice President,” a reporter asks. “Do you agree with the President’s decision to reverse the withdrawal process of peacekeepers in Gaza following the second bombing targeting American forces?”

She doesn’t hear the answer.

Donna is kept pretty well informed on pretty much all newsworthy developments worldwide—she has to be for her job—but she has consciously avoided any talk of Gaza.

It's funny, she thinks, because she spent so much time researching the symptoms of PTSD  when Josh had first been diagnosed. She had spent much of what little free time she had on websites or looking through psychology textbooks in the hope that she could find something, anything that might help. She knew that it would really be about therapy and time for Josh, and as someone lacking knowledge and training, her utility was limited, but she still wanted to do anything she could to be the best possible support for him to help him get better.

So Donna knows that avoidance symptoms are a big part of stress disorders. She knew exactly what to look for in herself when she came back, and she had tried to see a therapist a couple of times to stave off the worst of it. And it had worked, she things. She hadn’t yelled at anyone, she hadn’t put her hand through a window, she had managed to get through every day the best she could, and no one ever suspected a thing.

Not even Josh, who should have been the first one to notice, both with his close proximity to her and the fact that he had been through the same thing. If Josh hadn’t noticed, she had thought, things were fine.

Things are fine, she tells herself. The avoidance is natural. She doesn’t hit all the boxes, she hasn’t experienced significant distress or impairment of functioning from her trauma… she’s fine. She really is. She went through the motions with a few therapy sessions, processed it, and now though she has some scars on her body and pain that she’s just going to have to learn to live with, she doesn’t have those same scars on her mind.

So if the very thought of Gaza sends a shiver down her spine, if she doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to hear about it, doesn't want to think about it... then that’s just how it is.

She leans back against the bus, telling herself it’s for her leg. It’s to take the weight off. It’s not to do what Josh always used to do to try and avoid a panic attack, to stand with his back against the wall and breathe slowly and deeply and try to weight it out. Donna’s not at that point yet. Donna is fine.

It’s not until the end of the press conference, when there’s more clapping and cheering and Will grabs her arm to bring her towards the gathering press pool, that Donna realizes she kind of blacked out of the entirety of the rest of the press conference.

“Will,” she says, as she follows him along, “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You’ll be great,” Will says. “I know you’re a little nervous, but there’s a first time for everything, right? You’ll be fantastic.”

Donna doesn’t know how to tell him that she wasn’t fully there, that she didn’t hear the Vice President’s answers, that she has no desire to talk about his answer on Gaza, that she doesn’t even know what his answer on Gaza was because she can't listen to anyone talk about Gaza. Will won’t understand that, and Donna doesn’t want it to be an excuse for not doing her job. She has to do her job.

So she goes out to meet the press, and smiles, and manages to say enough on subjects she knows enough about that she’s not making any gaffes. She’s fine. She knows what she’s doing, and the crowd doesn’t bother her, and she’s going to be okay.

Except then it’s Jason Fowler, of ABC News, who ruins it all.

“Ms. Moss,” he says, coming up to her. “The Vice President gave a comment tonight on the reversal of the White House’s position on withdrawing groups from Gaza. Do you also have a comment on that?”

Donna blinks a few times, then takes in a deep breath. She can do this. “The Vice President is in line with the position of the White House. The Vice President is a very important part of the White House, and any decision the President makes would not be made against the Vice President’s wishes.”

“We all heard his position,” Fowler says, putting his microphone closer to her face. It’s just now that Donna notices that he also has a camera man behind him. She’s on camera. She cannot break down on camera. “What I want to hear is yours, personally. Not as a representative of the campaign, but as a victim, the only surviving victim, of the bombing that necessitated the peacekeeping mission in the first place.”

She closes her eyes, which is a mistake because she’s quickly overwhelmed. It’s not that she’s seeing images. It’s not that she feels like she’s back there. She doesn’t smell things burning, or hear explosions, or anything like that. In truth, there’s nothing to remember; the most traumatic memories she would have would be of pain and hospital rooms and the smell of antiseptic and the thought of Josh forgetting that she exists. Donna has never remembered things visually, and especially not now when there really is nothing to remember. Instead, she feels the searing pain in her leg and chest, combined with an intense nausea, and her head begins to spin, and she would be surprised that so many parts of her body could feel so terrible if she hadn’t experienced this before. Right after the explosion, of course, she had been miserable, but once in a while, it’s as if her body remembers all of the pain and decides to make her feel everything she’s felt since.

And right now, in front of Jason Fowler, is apparently one of those moments.

She manages to squeak out a “No comment,” before stepping back, but Fowler is determined.

“Ms. Moss, we really wanted to know.”

“And she really can’t comment,” comes a voice from behind her. For a brief moment, she thinks that it’s Josh, but perhaps that’s just an indication of how addled her brain is. It isn’t Josh of course—it’s Will—but she’s grateful for the rescue. “Campaign policies don’t allow us to make statements outside of those specifically representing the campaign.”

Donna grips onto Will’s arm, because it feels like her leg might give out at any moment, or perhaps her lungs might collapse again entirely, and he manages to guide her back onto the bus, where she collapses down into a seat and buries her head in her hands.

It takes a minute for everything to feel like it’s not just in shades of black and red.

“Are you okay?” Will asks.

She bites her lip so hard she’s afraid she might draw blood. “Yeah,” she says, her voice strained. “I’m fine.” She pounds on her leg, the one that doesn’t hurt, although right now it feels like her whole body might just go ahead and burn up.

Maybe this is how she remembers.

Will doesn’t look convinced, but he hands her a glass of water, which Donna accepts gratefully. The cool water running down her throat makes the burning less intense. “I’m fine,” she says again, putting the glass aside. “I’m sorry, I handled that badly.”

“It was an inappropriate question to ask.”

“But I should have been able to handle it better,” Donna says tightly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have this position.”

Will shakes his head. “This was just a one-off thing, and the question shouldn’t even have been asked. It was inappropriate and wrong.”

Donna isn’t sure how she’s going to go out there again, how she’s going to face the press, when she knows she might react like this. She’s not even sure what really happened, except the overwhelming pain. It’s starting to dissipate, thankfully, but she feels exhausted. “I can’t do any more tonight,” she says softly.

“I understand,” Will says. “Hey, there’s a car going back to Charleston early, do you want to ride with them instead of on the bus? Go lay down for a bit?”

Donna doesn’t really want to accept this, but at the moment, nothing sounds better than lying down in the her bed at the hotel and sleeping for a solid twelve hours, so she follows Will out to the car, which is filled with a couple of staffers who have late evening meetings back in Charleston. She leans her head against the cool window as the dark road passes by and the pain slowly fades.

She’s fine, she tells herself. She really is. She’s been saying that to herself for six months, and it’s never failed her yet.

When they reach the hotel, she almost feels like herself again, except for the sinking pit in her stomach that seems to want to tell her that she’ll never be herself again. She has to ignore that, because she knows it’s not true. Even Josh, going through all that he has, is still himself. He might be a little more anxious, a little more tired, a little more easily self-destructive, but he’s still Josh. So even if she doesn’t feel like herself now, she’s sure she’ll find her old self eventually. It’s time, she thinks. For Josh it had been time and therapy, but she tried the therapy thing once or twice and it didn't do a whole lot.

The pool at the hotel in Charleston in kind of the focal point. The ceiling stretches above it, and ringed around it are floors and floors of balcony-like hallways that lead to most of the rooms. The railings are high, but not so high, Donna thinks, that a very determined person couldn’t do a high dive into the shallow pool. She’s not that person, of course, but she wonders how the architect could have completely ignored that danger

She pushes the thought away, and then takes one more longing look at the pool. Perhaps a swim will take her pain away, the way it used to when she was in physical therapy. Perhaps she’ll  feel better, freer in the water.

She doesn’t have a swimsuit with her. Of course she doesn’t; there was no way she’s have the time to swim. And yet, the water seems to be the only thing that might let her feel better tonight.

Back in her room, she digs through her tightly packed suitcase and finds an oversized Bartlet for America t-shirt (she’s almost convinced this was one she stole from Josh) and a pair of bike shorts. Not a swimsuit, but close enough, and as a bonus no one will be able to see her scars. Donna really doesn’t want to look at them right now, and she certainly doesn't want anyone else to look at them.

She takes the elevator down, since she can’t bear the thought of having to take more stairs today. Thank goodness the pool is empty. It’s full of a whole lot of campaign staffers, none of whom have time to swim ever. She thinks, briefly, about the fact that the whole hotel could see her, but she smells the chlorine as she gets closer. It’s only fifty degrees outside, but Donna is from the Midwest; she swam in the lake near her home at this temperature, so a heated pool is nothing.

Blue light dances around her, and the shades of red she keeps seeing seem to fade.

She steps in, holding on tightly to the rail as she lets the water come up to her waist, consume her, touch the scars on her leg, touch the bottom of her shirt. It weighs her down as she lets the water come to her shoulders, and she’s near the deep end of the pool. It’s hardly deep, just six feet, but enough to just cover her head if she wanted it to.

Part of Donna doesn’t want to get chlorine in her hair, but part of her wants nothing more than to sink into the depths of the warm pool, so that the cold air is no longer touching her. She lets herself go under for a moment, opening her eyes. The chlorination stings, and she’s sure she’ll look red-eyed tomorrow, but better from this than from crying.

She stays under longer than she should, almost relishing the heavy pressure on her chest. It's not painful like it was earlier, and here, she knows there’s a reason. There’s an explanation. Reason and logic explain her feelings, which was not true of what happened earlier.

When she can bear it no longer, she comes up for air, and oxygen rushes into her lungs.

You can breathe, she tells herself. 

A tiredness washes over her, and she pulls herself out of the pool, wraps herself in a towel, and takes the elevator back up to her room. She looks across to the balcony on the other side, and swears she could see Josh over there, but perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. It’s done plenty of that tonight.

Donna closes the door behind her and collapses on the bed, and the pain pales in comparison to her exhaustion, and she thinks that might be the only way she’ll be able to live anymore.

Chapter Text

Tonight is going to be his night. It has to be, or he won’t get another chance.

Josh had known, going in, that of any primary Santos had the best shot at winning Arizona. The Democratic population of Arizona is largely Latino, and Santos’s issues are aligned with the local party’s issues, and neither Hoynes nor Russell are especially appealing to the state’s Democrats. They’ve been here for almost a week now, ever since Hoynes won South Carolina. Santos had come in third again, still hanging on by the skin of his teeth, and Josh knows that Arizona (and New Mexico) have to be the places where they get their first delegates, or they’ll be out of the race entirely.

The polling is looking favorable. All of the campaigning had been about viability, about making sure that people in Arizona and New Mexico know that there’s a third option, one who understands their concerns, who understands them. If they remember his name when they’re at the ballot box, Josh feels fairly confident that they’ll vote for the right candidate.

Still, he’s pacing around the suite in the hotel looking like he’s about to throw up. He feels like he’s about to throw up, although, since he can't remember the last time he ate, he’s not sure what would even come out. The room is pretty quiet, since many of the staffers are still out at various sites around Phoenix, but Josh hears the door open behind him. He braces his straight arms against the table, stretching himself out and trying to relieve some of the tension that is gripping his body. “Are there exit polls yet?” he asks to whoever has come in behind him.

“They do exit polls for this kind of thing?”

It’s not any of his staffers, but Helen Santos who has entered the room. She stands in the doorway, arms crossed.

Josh straightens himself up and turns around. “It is a Presidential race, of course they're going to poll on anything and everything,” he says. “It may not be accurate, but it’s the best we’ve got until the polls close.”

“Which is in…”

He looks at his watch. “Three more hours.”

Helen takes a seat on the couch. She’s very nicely put together, hardly a hair out of place after a full day of campaigning all around Phoenix (as well as a quick early morning stop in Albuquerque) and Josh thinks, just for a moment, that she really looks like a First Lady. “You know you can’t do anything right now, right?” she remarks, picking up a glass of water from the side table and taking a long sip.

Josh bites his lip and takes a seat across from Helen. “Yeah, I’m not such a fan of sitting still.”

“I noticed,” Helen says, looking him over. “How are you feeling?"
He furrows his brow and rubs at his forehead. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve recovered from your cold?”

“That was like… three weeks ago,” Josh says. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Good,” Helen says, “because I know you probably picked it up from the kids and I feel bad, especially since you were being so great with them.”

“I’m… I’m fine.” He’s not sure what Helen is trying to get at, except that he knows Helen doesn't really understand him. That’s fine—it’s not her job to understand him—but for some reason she likes to probe him anyway, and Josh isn’t sure how to feel about it.

“I just… I probably shouldn’t know this but Donna said you had preexisting conditions and if those made it dangerous for you to…”

Josh closes his eyes and sighs. That's right. Helen Santos knows about his marriage, and she knows the reason for his marriage. No wonder she’s curious. No wonder she’s prying. “I’m fine,” he says firmly. He really doesn’t want to get into his medical history with Helen Santos, especially not tonight.

“I know, I just… I guess it’s a natural inclination to worry.”

He does know all about having a natural inclination to worry, but that’s obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain. “Ma’am, leave the worrying to me,” he says, trying his best to smile at her. “That’s what I get paid to do.”

“They pay you to pace around with that stormy look on your face and yell at people?” Helen says, and while Josh knows it’s a joke, it’s the sort of thing that puts him on edge. His job is so much more than that.

“They pay me because I know what I’m doing,” he says. “And if you'd like to imply that I don’t…”

Helen holds her hands up. “I’m not implying anything of the sort,” she says. “I don’t know how this devolved so much. I just wanted to check in and make sure you were okay. I was surprised, you know, about the whole marriage thing.”

“You made that very clear,” Josh mutters. This is probably the kind of banal, irritating conversation that he needs to keep him out of his head as he waits for election results, but he’d rather be taring his hair out staring at the TV than try and talk about this with Helen.

Helen smiles slightly. “She seems very sweet, your Donna.”

“She's not my Donna.”

“And she was willing to marry you, which implies…”

How long will it take for Helen to get the message that he doesn’t want to talk about this? Josh puts his head in his hands, scrubbing at his hair a bit before looking up. “How was New Mexico this morning.”

“Not very different from any of the other rallies I’ve been to in the last month,” Helen says with a shrug. "I go stand up on a stage, people are clapping, there’s music, Matt gives the same speech he’s given a hundred times…"

“How many people?” Josh asks.

Helen frowns. “How am I supposed to…”

“You were there, how many people? Estimate.”

“Don't you have people for this? People that do this for a living?”

Josh narrows his eyes. “Yes, but I want to hear it from you.” He doesn’t feel any shame about pushing Helen like this, not when she was pushing him on much more personal subjects. “You need to know what’s happening on your own campaign.”

She leans onto the arm of the couch and gives him a short, stilted laugh. “This is not my campaign, this is Matt’s campaign.”

“Mrs. Santos, I know this is a big change for you, but these are things you have to know. These are things you have to do. And if you’re not willing to pay attention to these things, the things that really matter if we have any shot of getting past the primaries, then you’ll understand why I have no interest in talking about my personal life with you,” Josh says sharply.

Helen presses her lips together and looks down at her lap. “You've figured out, I suppose, that I didn’t want this.”

“I can usually tell,” Josh says casually. “I’m pretty good at this, after all.” He rubs his forehead. “You know, if we manage to get past the primaries, you’re going to need a staff. In fact, I’d get you a staff right now if we had any breathing room financially, but…”

“A staff?”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “People who know the ropes. Some First Ladies have been the wives of governors, and so they know what they’re doing on a smaller scale, but the wives of senators and congressmen and mayors usually have their own lives, so in those cases a staff is even more important.”

Helen gives him that laugh again, that sarcastic chuckle. “You really think we’re going to get that far?”

Josh has been resisting the urge to turn on the TV all evening, knowing it won’t tell him anything, but his hand finally inches towards the remote and he points it at the large TV in the suite, landing on the local news. They’re doing a traffic segment, of course. “It’s my job to think we’re getting that far,” Josh says, “even if I’m the only one who does.”

There’s a kind of tension between them in the room, but Helen says nothing else, so neither does Josh, and it’s soon enough broken by Ronna and Ned coming back in with piles of exit polls. They’re not the Arizona and New Mexico polls yet, but early returns from some of the other states that also have primaries today. Delaware hardly matters and it's not going their way anyway, and North Dakota is certainly going to be picked up by Russell, but Josh is holding out a little bit of hope that Oklahoma and Missouri might swing more towards Hoynes. The more split other delegates are between Russell and Hoynes, the greater the chance they might stay in the race.

“How goes it?” Santos asks as he comes in, probably an hour or two later. He’s been out all day, meeting with voters, but he still manages to grin and pat Josh on the back. Josh doesn’t know how he still has the energy to keep that grin plastered on his face after his busy day, but that’s why he’s never going to run for office.

Josh frowns. “Polls closed in Delaware maybe 30 minutes ago and they already called it for Russell,” he says.

Santos shrugs. “Well, we didn’t put any money there, did we?”

“No sir,” Ned says.

“Then I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised,” Santos says. “That’s alright. How’s everything else looking? Josh.”

He snaps his head up to look at the candidate, and realizes that he startled pretty significantly. “Yeah?”

“You good?”

He turns back to the papers, highlighting another discrepancy. “Yeah.”

Santos doesn't let him off with just this, though. “The exit polls aren’t going to do you any good,” he says, “and you know that.”

“My job is to analyze the exit polls, see where we’re popular, see where we need to put in more time and money, see what…”

Santos squeezes Josh's shoulder. “The way I see it, you’ve got yourself an hour before you can actually know anything. You can kill yourself trying to figure out the information before it exists, or you can enjoy the one chance you’ll have to take a breather for the next while.”

Josh groans and rubs his head. “Yeah? Well, no offense Congressman, but I’ve been doing this a little longer than you have.”

“And no offense, Josh, but when has your analysis of exit polls ever changed the election outcome?”

It doesn’t, he knows, but he’s done this enough times to know that he has to do something while he waits for the election information to come. Otherwise, the anxiety of anticipation will crush him. “It keeps me busy, sir.”

“Well, how about you go talk to the reporters outside the suite instead?” Santos says, gesturing to the door.

“There are reporters outside the suite?” Josh asks, frowning.

“A couple of them. Apparently we’re starting to get interesting.”

Josh raises an eyebrow and stands up, chewing on the end of his pen without noticing it. “Apparently,” he repeats. “You didn’t… you didn’t talk to them, did you?”

“I said hi, flashed them a smile, told them I was confident we were going to win here tonight. Nothing substantial.”

“And they’re still there?”

Santos nods to Ronna, who looks through the peephole of the door. “Four of them,” she declares.

“They want to be first to get the story if we do win,” Josh says, rubbing his forehead. “Let’s… let’s allow them to wait out there. It’s only, what…” he checks his watch and groans. “45 minutes until the polls close.”

“They just called Missouri,” Ned says. “Russell.”

Josh frowns. “Russell? Not Hoynes?”

“He’s up 15% right now,” Ned informs him.

Josh leans against the back part of the couch and groans. “It’ll get closer as the rural votes come in.”

“We never had a shot in the dark at winning Missouri,” Santos assures him.

“I know!” Josh snaps, before cupping his hands over his face and trying to relax himself. He wonders how he ever did this before, how he dealt with the anxiety and anticipation of election nights, and then remembers he always had someone there. He always had CJ or Sam or Toby... or Donna.

He considers calling Donna, congratulating her on winning the big prize of the night. Missouri has more delegates and more money than any of the other states up for grabs tonight, so she's got to be feeling good. A part of him just wants to hear her voice too, to see if maybe that can magically calm him while he feels like his head is about to explode.

But then he wonders if that might make her mad, if congratulating her might seem disrespectful or rude or cruel. He doesn't mean any of that, of course, but considering the kind of awkward rivalry that exists between them right now, Josh isn’t sure how to make her take anything the right way.

“Do we have any numbers for us in Missouri yet?” he asks, collapsing back onto the couch again and pinching the bridge of his nose.

“17%,” Ned says.

Santos yawns and sits down next to his wife, putting his arm around her. “That’s not too bad.”

“It’s not great, either,” Josh mutters.

“Josh, Josh, Josh,” Santos says, “are you ever going to be happy?”

“I’ll be happy if we win something tonight,” Josh says. “Any results from Oklahoma yet?”

“You do realize we’re probably not going to win in states where we haven’t put any money in, right?" Santos says. “We’ve been in Arizona for a week. We’ve put all our eggs in one basket.”

“And that basket isn’t getting revealed until the end of the night,” Josh groans.

Santos shakes his head. “You know what, Josh? Go do something else for a little bit. Go call your parents.”

Josh doesn’t feel up to correcting Santos, to telling him that he could only call his mother, but he looks at the sheet of Oklahoma numbers that Ned hands to him. “Hoynes got Oklahoma, although…” Josh squints at the information, almost in surprise. “I think… unless things change, we’re going to come in second,” he says with surprise.

Santos lets himself smile. “Well, it’s not everything, but it’s something!”

“Yeah…” Josh says, looking over the top sheet again.

“I’m surprised, considering how Oklahomans feel about Texans,” Helen says, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder. “I guess they’re just smart enough to get over it for you.”

“Or I haven’t done a good enough job of letting them know I’m from Texas,” Santos replies, before capturing his wife’s lips in a light kiss.

It might be the longest half hour of Josh’s life, but finally, the time hits eight and the polls close and the whole staff (which is not a huge number) is gathered around the television waiting to see whether their efforts over the past week have been enough.

It’s do or die right now. If they lose this, they might as well go home.

Josh squeezes his hands together, trying to get out some stress, when he realizes that he still can feel a ring around his finger. His wedding ring. Josh can’t remember taking it off, and he can’t remember putting it on, so he wonders just how long he’s been walking around wearing a wedding ring, whether people have wondered if he’s married. He needs to take it off, he knows, so that people don’t notice and get suspicious, but he doesn’t want to lose it. He’ll wait until he gets back to his room tonight.

It’s kind of silly that he doesn’t want to lose it. It’s an eight dollar ring from Walmart. Still, he can’t bear the thought of telling Donna that it got lost somewhere on the campaign trail. She deserves better than that, even in their fake marriage.

The TV plays the breaking news sound. “With 80% of caucus results in," the announcer says, "we're ready to call New Mexico for Congressman Matthew Santos.”

The minute the picture flashes up on the screen, a cheer rises through the room. Josh jumps up from the couch, pumps a fist in the air, and goes to hug Santos, and then Helen, and Ronna, and Ned, and everyone else. He lets out a whoop, before collapsing back on the couch and surveying the rest of the celebration.

And then he can’t help but swallow bitterly, because the high was so short. When they’d win back in the Bartlet administration, he'd barely stop to breathe before he’d hugged every single person, given several cheek kisses, and lifted CJ up off the ground despite her height advantage over him,

Here, however, the feeling goes away quickly, and Josh wonders what is missing.

Still, he thinks, he can breathe a sigh of relief. New Mexico isn’t big, nor is it important, but it's a win. It’s proof that they’re still in this thing. “Congratulations, sir,” Josh says, after the celebration has died down.

“Congratulations to you too!” Santos says. “Couldn’t have made it here without you, Josh.”

And he feels warmed inside, a little bit, but there’s still something missing.

When they call Arizona for Santos, it feels much the same. A rush of joy, of cheering, of celebration, and then the letdown that the people he really wants to share this with aren't here to share it with him.

Tonight is his night though. Santos won two states. Santos is still a viable candidate, more so now than ever. Josh has won these battles.

So why does he feel like he’s lost himself?

What happened to the man who would beat his chest in victory, who would gloat in joy, who was obnoxious about winning for show, but who really fought for what he believed in? Josh misses that part of himself, and he misses the people he was with when he was himself.

This is his night. This is his biggest victory as campaign manager so far, and he hopes there will be more to come. He hopes so, but he’s not sure how much hope he has left in him.

“Josh,” Santos says, “have a drink!” 

He holds out a glass, but Josh shakes his head. “I’ve got to talk to the reporters out there,” Josh says. “Ronna, are you up to doing a few interviews too? Just saying how pleased you are that the Congressman won in these states which represent the up-and-coming America, the country that we’ll be in twenty years, that sort of thing?”

Ronna smiles and nods. “Yeah, I can,” she says, and then she can’t help bursting into giggles. “We really won!”

“Yeah, I would avoid doing that,” Josh says flatly, although he does manage to smile a little bit. If he can't feel the joy he used to feel, at least Ronna’s got enough for the both of them. He opens the door out to the hallway, and instead of the three or four reporters camped outside before, it seems like practically every journalist in the state of Arizona is outside the hotel suite.

Josh takes in a deep breath to keep himself from being overwhelmed by the vast amount of people who all want to talk to him.

“Is the Congressman coming out?!” one of the reporters yells.

“The Congressman is refining a speech he's going to give to the people of Arizona and New Mexico tonight,” Josh answers. “In about an hour, in the ballroom of the hotel.” He turns to Ronna, who is right behind him and looking rather like a deer in headlights, and whispers, “Go tell the Congressman he needs to write a speech, if he forgot to do it, and then go make sure we have a crowd down in the ballroom in an hour.”

Ronna nods and ducks back into the suite, and Josh is forced to face the onslaught alone. None of the rest of them know how to deal with reporters. Josh is not necessarily good at it, as his secret plan to fight inflation will confirm, but he’s better than anyone else in the room, and so the job falls to him.

“Listen up, everyone. Here’s your statement,” Josh says, because he does not have the time or energy to answer the same question over and over. “The Congressman is very pleased for the support that the people of Arizona and New Mexico have placed in him as a representative of the Democratic Party, and is looking forward to continuing with campaign with renewed energy as we move on to the upcoming primaries.”

Josh answers a few more questions from the mobbing reporters, thinking on his feet, before he can feel his phone buzz in his pocket. He’s never been more relieved to have an excuse to get out of a crowd of reporters before, and while he’s sure it’s Santos, he holds up a hand. “I’m sorry, I have to take this,” he says, and goes down the hallway to where there’s a room with vending machines.

Why he goes there, instead of back into the suite, instead of back into his own room, he’ll never quite understand. It’s a way to escape, he supposes; the closest place where he is guaranteed to not have to talk to anyone.

“Hello,” he says, as he closes the door behind him and leans against it. The only sound he can hear is the faint buzzing of vending and ice machines. It’s a strange little room, with the machines line up in such a way that, from the doorway, it’s hard to see much but a small strip of the room in the shadows of two large metal boxes.

“Please hold for the President of the United States.”

Josh rubs his hand over his face. “Excuse me?” he says, but of course there’s no rejecting a call with the President.

“Josh!” he hears on the other side of line.

“Hello sir. I wasn’t… I wasn’t expecting your call tonight.”

The President laughs. “I just wanted to congratulate you. Arizona and New Mexico, huh? Seems like your guy has only just gotten started.”

“Sir, you can’t really talk about this like…”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” the President says, “I’m not endorsing your candidate. There’s no one else in the room, and if you tell a reporter about this conversation, my communications department will take you down so fast that you…”

“I would never, sir.”

“I know.” The President pauses for a moment. “Anyway, congratulations. It’s a big accomplishment.”

“A little harder when you don't have a guaranteed win in New Hampshire to get the momentum going,” Josh acknowledgers. “Thank you. I should… I should let you get back to governing.”

“Now Josh, I imagine you know I have quite a few personal friends back in New Hampshire.”

Josh licks his lips and frowns. Where is the President going with this? “I would imagine so, sir, considering you lived there for most of your life.”

“Yes, well, a dear friend of mine, since back in high school, really… he’s a magistrate in Manchester. Now, he and I don’t talk much, because I’m very busy, but he’s the guy to ask about New Hampshire primary news. So, imagine my surprise when I call him, curious about how things are on the ground, and he tells me that he officiated the marriage of a guy whose name I might be familiar with.”

Josh pales immediately. “Sir, I don’t know if you…”

“Joshua, are you married?”

He lets out a sharp exhale. There’s no way he can lie about this.“Technically.”

“Technically? Well, I imagine your wife wouldn’t be very happy to hear you say that.”

They should have gone somewhere else. They should have driven to the very northernmost part of New Hampshire. They should have gone to Hartsfield’s Landing with its 63 people. They should have been so much more subtle about this, because if this has gotten to the President, then who knows where else it could have spread. “It’s… it's very complicated sir.”

“You got married? And you didn’t tell me?”

“Sir…”

“Josh, if you would have told me, I would have officiated your wedding. I can do that, you know. As President of the United States, I do hold that power.”

“I’m sure you do sir but…”

“You’re married?” Jed still can’t hide the surprise creeping into his voice apparently.

Josh sighs. “Yes. I’m married.”

“To whom?”

“Sir…”

The President frowns. “Josh, you know I can get records.”

“To Donna,” he says, trying to keep himself from choking on his own voice.

“Donna Moss? Our Donna?”

“Well, she’s Russell’s Donna now but…” And the way that stings him to say.

Jed chuckles. “I can’t say I'm surprised, really. Except that it’s taken this long.”

“It’s not like that at all, sir,” Josh mumurs. “Look, I can’t explain it, not really. It’s… it has to do with benefits. It was a financial arrangement, and I probably shouldn’t even be telling you this because next thing I know you’ll have an audit done and…”

“Josh,” Jed says, his voice low.

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to be in DC this next week, yeah?”

Josh nods. “Yeah, there’s a couple of votes in the next few days.”

“Come see me. Discretely, of course. And bring Donna with you.”

He furrows his brow. “I’m not sure if that’s a good…”

“I have plenty of agencies at my disposal to bend you to come,” Jed threatens, “but I know I won’t need that.”

Josh presses his lips together. “No sir. I'll see you then.”

“Good, I’ll have Charlie give you a call. And congratulations again. On Arizona, and New Mexico, and on your marriage.”

He lets out a deep breath and pushes himself up from his leaning place against the door. “Thank you sir,” he says, and snaps the phone shut.

He heads back down the hallway, and the anxious chorus of the president knows, people know, soon everyone will know plays in his head so loudly that he doesn’t notice the door of the vending machine room open behind him a few seconds later.

Chapter Text

It was a mistake, Donna realizes, to put Josh’s address on her insurance form. Sure, it meant that his insurance card got to him without any trouble. He’s now on her plan, which is good because it’s one worry off her chest. Unfortunately, there was a mixup with the paperwork. Donna hadn’t given a DC address because of her sublease—she doesn’t have one. She’s been living out of hotel rooms since December. She put down her parent’s address out of necessity, but she’s technically homeless.

The problem is, she put Josh’s address down on her forms. And now the campaign seems to think she has a DC address. It was quite an unpleasant surprise when she showed up at the hotel with about half of the campaign staffers and found out they hadn’t gotten her a room since she had an address in the city. She’d covered quickly, although she’s sure others thought it was a little bit strange that she showed up at the hotel when she had a residence within DC.

So, she’s homeless. Which she knew already, but it's more acute when it’s the city that she now regards as her home and yet she doesn’t have a place to stay.

She could go stay with Josh, go stay at the address where she’s supposed to be living, but that seems like too much. If he wasn’t in DC, she might consider it—she has a key—but she knows he’s here and she can’t possibly face that kind of one on one time with him right now, now when things are so awkward between them.

(She can’t help thinking about how he smiled at her earlier though, when he saw her outside the House chambers. He had seemed happy to see her, which was nice. She’s not sure if it was for show or if he was actually happy, but it hadn’t actually been awkward, which was a nice change. She wonders if it can last.)

So, when she's sent to the Vice President’s offices in the Capitol building to sort out a press release after the failed vote, she decides she might as well stay put. There are couches in here, and she’s tucked her unhoused suitcase in a corner. It’s as good a place to sleep as any. There’s a roof, and it's warm, and it’s quiet, and no one will really care if she’s here; she’ll just say she fell asleep working.

It seems like the perfect solution to her homelessness problem.

It seemed like the perfect solution, at least until she’s woken in the middle of the night by someone sitting on top of her.

The first thing that wakes her is a shooting pain in her leg. Of course he settled on her leg; she’d rather him sit on her head, really, instead of her sensitive limb. She screams, and flails, and turns on the light and manages to notice that of all people in front of her, it’s Matt Santos.

It’s Josh’s guy. Of course it is. Donna knows what she’s looking at, although she can’t remember having seen him up close aside from at the debates. It’s odd, she thinks, that she’s met his wife and not him, but this thought flashes through her brain while she stumbles over words, not processing what he’s saying to her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, backing up against the other end of the couch. “I didn’t mean…”

Donna rubs her eyes. “I… I crashed here,” she has the presence of mind to say, because she probably doesn’t want to be saying that she doesn’t have a residence in the city. That’s too complicated of a subject to get into, and Josh probably doesn't want his boss to know about all of this.

“You’re Russell’s chicken fighter!” Santos says with recognition lighting up his eyes.

Donna blushes. Is that how Josh has been talking about her? Has Josh been talking about her? She doesn’t want to think too hard about it. Instead, she smiles, in an attempt to make her cheeks feel less red. “Donna Moss," she says. “You’re Matt Santos.”

“Running for President,” he says wryly. “And I haven’t shaken your hand yet.” He holds out his hand and Donna shakes it, and she can’t help but smile. There is something about Matt Santos that is masterful at putting people at ease, which Donna supposes is a good quality in a Presidential candidate. It’s funny to think of the way he contrasts with the tightly wound ball of stress that is his campaign manager.

She blinks a few times—now is not the time to be thinking about Josh—and shakes her head. “Okay, assuming I’m not in some deep state of… deep REM hallucination…” and honestly, she wouldn’t put that past her brain. At least it’s not a nightmare, but every day she feels like she trusts her mind less and less.

“I’m hiding out," Santos assures her. “We’re trying to outsmart the speaker. Have him think we’ve all left town before he calls the vote."
Donna narrows her eyes. “Now when you say we…”

“There are some others that are coming,” Santos admits.

And then Donna thinks she might be frustrated, because if there are others coming, her space to sleep is not going to be so peaceful.“Does the Vice President know you’re…”

“This is not for the Santos campaign,” he assures her. “It’s for the President.” He raises an eyebrow and looks her over. “I bet you’re a fan.”

She wonders if Josh has told Santos anything about her, about them. If he knows that she and Josh worked together, if he knows that she’s from the White House, if he knows how close they once were. The less Santos knows, the better, because the chances that he’ll guess anything about her and Josh are lower. She decides to deflect, rather than try and dig into what Santos actually knows about her. “You’re not going to try ‘it’s for stem cells everywhere’, are you?” she asks pointedly.

“That was going in next,” Santos replies. He rubs his eyes tiredly. “I’m not sure any of us will be getting any sleep tonight,” he admits, “so I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“Just a typical night on the campaign trail,” Donna says with a shrug. “You know, I happen to know the Vice President has an industrial sized coffee maker in the closet in here, I think we should pull that out.”

Santos frowns. “Is the Vice President much of a coffee drinker?”

“Not necessarily, but no matter who the Vice President is, the staffers usually drink copious amounts of coffee,” Donna replies, pushing herself up from the couch. She winces a little bit as she puts weight on her leg, but she’s gotten good at hiding that, and Santos certainly doesn’t know enough about her to catch it.

She can’t help but wonder if Josh would.

She quickly pushes the thought out of her mind, finding the coffee maker as well as a large container of Costco-brand coffee in the supply closet. She pulls it out and starts it. She might have thought it bothersome that she was here, making coffee for a bunch of congressmen, as if she hasn’t moved on at all in her life, but she really doesn’t mind. This is something she’s doing out of her own will, out of the kindness of her heart, and desire for this plan to work (as long the Vice President gets to put his stamp on it).

A few more representatives have shown up by the time the coffee is done brewing, and Donna finally gets a chance to ask Santos the question that’s been on her mind ever since he woke her up. “Is Josh coming tonight?”

“You know Josh?" Santos asks, with a bit of surprise.

Donna smiles ever so softy. Does she know Josh? She never thought anyone would actually ask her that, because the answer had always been so obvious. “Yeah,” she says. “We used to work together.” And it’s so much more than that, but the less Santos knows for the moment, the better.

Still, it stings to think that maybe Josh didn’t talk about her at all.

“He’s making calls, but he’s staying away from the Capitol building. If he’s here, it may be easier to figure out the scheme,” Santos says.

“He’s the mastermind behind this?”

“Well,” Santos says, "it was my idea. But he’s coordinating remotely and Cliff Calley is here working the building, flushing out anyone who is still around.

Donna nods, biting her lip. She had run into Cliff Calley earlier, had a brief, pleasant conversation with him, but she hopes he forgets that she was ever pretending to be interested in his offer of dinner. She’s a married woman.

On the other hand, if she needs to cast off some suspicion about the marriage, perhaps a date with Cliff Calley could be the ticket.

Anyway, she can’t think too much about him. She has no interest in dating him again, not after what happened with the diary. It all worked out in the end, but she knows Cliff has read her diary. She knows they’re on uneven ground; he knows everything about her but she knows very little about him. And, she thinks, he knows more about Josh than she wishes he did.

So nothing will ever happen there, she knows. And even if it’s not that kind of marriage, she is married, Perhaps it was a bad idea to lead Cliff on. Perhaps she should make it clear to him that she’s not at a place in her life where she can pursue a relationship.

Not until she divorces.

Donna hasn’t thought about that at all, but the thought strikes her that she’s going to have to divorce Josh at some point. Obviously this arrangement won’t last forever, obviously she has to free him to do other things. It won’t be painful or full of conflict, because they’ve still kept their lives separate, but they still will have to go through the process. Maybe this is something they should have discussed before they got married.

It’s too late now. She just has to remind herself that it’s not that kind of marriage.

Donna resigns herself to not getting any more sleep and pours herself a cup of coffee, swallowing it down and barely even noticing as it burns her tongue. The office is full of representatives, chatting and drinking coffee. Donna knows most of them at least by face, having had to arrange meetings and consult the congressional facebook several times back when she was working for Josh.

She doesn't get into conversation with many of them; she doesn't feel like she can. She’s not on their level. These people are all smart and highly educated and well established in the world of politics and she’s just… Donna from Wisconsin who has a high school diploma and conned her way into a White House job.

She’s surprised, then, when Matt Santos keeps talking to her.

She watches him throughout the night, watches as he assuages the moral fears of a Democrat on the fence, watches as he starts a lively policy debate on prescription drug prices, watches as he makes everyone in the room feel simultaneously at ease and fired up about policy.

More and more, Donna can see why Josh likes this guy. The thought enters her mind that maybe she'd like to work for him too, and she pushes it away. She’s never going to work for Josh again, that she knows. She knows the Santos campaign pays nothing, and she needs to stay on the Russell campaign to keep her benefits. It’s ridiculous to even consider.

Still, there’s a part of her that thinks she’d much rather have Matt Santos as President, before she manages to push it away. She’s not Josh, and she doesn’t have the luxury of deciding who she works for based on her convictions, not when she has bills to pay and bad credit and a frankly pathetic savings account. If the Vice President will pay her, and if the Vice President’s campaign is the most likely path to a steady job, then she’ll stay where she is.

Donna spends the night in admiration. Matt Santos may not have a shot in hell of winning the nomination this time around, but in four years, eight years, he might be the exact person the country needs. Maybe Josh is just ahead of his time.

She doesn’t get any more sleep, and neither does half of Congress, but the scheme is a success. The stem cell vote passes, and the President has a much needed win. A good day. Donna goes back to the Vice President’s office after the vote; she has a late flight to Atlanta for a few days there before she’s sent out to Washington state for the primary there. Until then, she supposes, she’ll wait in the Vice President’s office and try to take a nap.

Just as she’s about to lay down on the couch, though, her phone buzzes. It’s probably Will, needing her to do an interview about the vote. Which would be fine, but Donna hasn’t changed her clothes or showered in two days, and she’s really not sure that they want to present that image to the world.

She picks it up, ready to try and beg out of doing an interview, but to her surprise, it’s not Will on the other side of the line.

It’s Josh.

“Hey Donna,” he says. He sounds like he’s out of breath, trying to walk somewhere quickly. Josh doesn’t know how to walk slowly, instead always moving with urgency.

She frowns. “You got the card, right? It got delivered with your mail.”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “Listen, this isn’t about that.”

"It's not?” What other reason does he have to talk to her?

“Well… kind of. What time are you leaving? President Bartlet wants to see us.”

Donna’s jaw drops, and it takes her a moment to pick it up enough to ask, “He wants to see us?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re… you're talking to him?”

“Not officially. It’s on the schedule as a meeting with CJ. But… listen Donna,” Josh says, lowering his voice. “He knows.”

Donna swallows. Josh doesn’t have to elaborate on what he means by this. “He knows?”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “I guess we haven’t been as careful… anyway, can you come at 7 tonight?”

"I have a flight at 10,” she says.

“That’s fine, you should have enough time to meet and get to the airport,” Josh says. “We probably… we probably shouldn’t be seen together going in.”

Donna's head is spinning. “Why does he want to see us?”

“Probably to shame us for getting married without letting him know? I don’t know, I don’t think the non-explanation I gave him over the phone was compelling enough for him,” Josh says.

“You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t tell him!” Josh shouts, and then he lowers his voice again. “Donna, I’m as committed to keeping this quiet as you are. I promise, he found out about it another way.”

“I don’t know if that makes me feel better,” Donna says quietly.

“Worse for me than it is for you,” Josh repeats.

She presses her lips together. “I’m not so… I’m not sure anymore. I got a promotion, you know?”

“Donna, that’s… that’s great!” He sounds completely genuine, completely happy for her, and Donna isn’t sure what to make of that.

“Yes, well, it means that I’m on TV a lot more. I’m a lot more visible. So any press we have might be a problem.”

“This isn’t going anywhere,” Josh says. “So, can you come see the President with me tonight?”

Donna has a million things to do before her flight, but it’s hard to say no when the President of the United States specifically requests a meeting with you. “Yeah. Seven.”

“Your pass is gonna say you’re meeting with CJ,” Josh says. “I’ll see you in there.” He pauses for a moment, and then adds, “the Congressman told me how you helped out with the vote. He says you were invaluable.” He chuckles slightly. “He called you chicken fighter.”

“I'm not sure how I feel about that being my nickname,” Donna says with a sigh.

Josh sounds like he’s stopped walking, and says very sweetly, “You know what? I like it. Listen, I need to go, but I’ll see you later.” He hangs up, and Donna shuts her phone.

The President knows. Donna is wracking her brain to try and understand how he knows, but it hardly matters. He knows. He’s not going to use this information against them, but if the President knows, then he’s probably not the only one.

She doesn’t tell anyone about the meeting, just says she has to take care of something personal and that she’ll meet the rest of the staffers on her flight at the airport. The Vice President is already in Atlanta, so she has to fly commercial. She’d gotten used to the luxury of Air Force One and even the relative downgrade that is Air Force Two, so the idea of having to battle an airport today sounds terrible.

She really has been spoiled by her years in the White House.

It’s strange to have to go through a full security check when she gets there. She used to just be able to scan her badge and get in, but because she doesn’t work there anymore, it’s a full examination of her and any security threat she proposes. Donna wants to laugh at the idea that she could possibly be a threat, but she knows that even if the security guys know her, they take everything seriously.

Soon enough, she manages to get through, and she treads the familiar path to CJ’s office (that she’ll never quite stop thinking of as Leo’s office). She gives Margaret a hug before she enters CJ’s office.

“Donna!” CJ says with a broad smile. They saw each other a few weeks ago, at the DNC gala, but it’s always nice to see CJ. “You look good!”

“It’s the lack of sleep and constant travel,” Donna quips, but she gives CJ a tight hug.

CJ steps back and chuckles. “Oh, I know all about that,” she murmurs. “Where to next?”

“Atlanta,” she says, “and then Seattle for a few days. Then Michigan I think? I don’t know, the schedule keeps changing and I just get on the planes they tell me to get on.”

“Ah, yes, those were the days,” CJ says.

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, fine. Feeling a bit like a chicken with my head cut off, but that’s how I’ve felt since I got this promotion, and we’re still standing as a country.”

Donna grins. “You’re doing great. Look at the win you got today!” she says. At CJ’s frown, she adds, “Seriously, it’s a tough job.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” CJ says, but before she can say anything else, the door opens to her office and Josh comes in. He has an overstuffed backpack around his shoulder and he immediately drops on the floor.

If Donna and CJ look tired, Josh looks exhausted, but Donna knows better than to comment on that. “Joshua,” CJ greets him, pulling him into a hug. “You look terrible.”

“You still haven’t come up with a better way to say hello?” Josh whines, but he steps back and gives Donna a smile. He doesn’t reach out to hug her, which on the one hand makes sense, but on the other seems to put a distance between them that wasn’t always there. How can they be married and yet farther apart than ever?

Then again, CJ presumably doesn’t know.

“Okay, I’m going to bring you into the Oval, and you’re going to have to leave through my entrance too,” she says. “The President was very clear on that. I have no idea why he wants to see the both of you, but I figured it was better not to argue.”

Okay, CJ definitely doesn't know.

She opens the door, and gestures for Josh and Donna to go in. “Mr. President,” she says, “Josh and Donna are here to see you.”

The President looks up from whatever he’s reading on his desk. “Yes, yes, come in. Come have a seat. Thank you CJ.”

CJ closes the door behind her, and Donna suddenly feels very small. It’s not that she hasn’t been in the Oval before. She’s been here plenty of times. She’s talked to the President plenty of times. Something about this, however, is different, and she can feel her heart beat a little faster.

The President stands up, slowly, and grabs his cane to make his way over to the chair in the middle of the room. Josh and Donna take places on couches opposite each other. Donna can feel her spine pull and straighten at the very atmosphere of the room.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what you’re doing here,” the President says.

Josh stares at the seal in the center of the carpet as if it is the most interesting thing in the world. “I presume it has to do with the fact that you know.”

“Well, I suppose Harvard and Yale weren’t a total waste,” he quips. “Yes, my dear friend James Witten did happen to let me know that he officiated the marriage of one of my former staffers. Of course, he didn’t do it to break confidentiality. Those records are public, you know, and he fully believed I already knew about it. Which is why I wanted to ask… why didn’t I already know about it?”

Donna and Josh share a look. “We’re… it’s supposed to be a secret,” Donna explains.

“It’s not going very well so far,” Josh adds.

“Why did you get married in the first place? I understand that there are some concerns about this becoming public knowledge, but would it not have been easier to not get married in the first place?” Bartlet asks. “Or wait until the primaries are over?”

Josh swallows. “Sir, you’re mistaking our reasons for this arrangement,” he says.

“Am I?”

Donna nods, clearing her throat. “It’s not that we wanted to get married, really. It’s… I have benefits. Josh doesn’t. He needed to be on a healthcare plan, and the easiest way for him to do that was to get married.”

The President raises his eyebrows. “That’s the reason you got married?”

“Yes,” Josh says. “I couldn’t get a plan otherwise—too many preexisting conditions.”

Donna pretends not to notice how Josh’s hand goes to touch his scar, or how Bartlet’s face falls ever so slightly at that admission. She has to wonder, if only briefly, if the President blames himself for Josh’s struggles. She can’t dwell on this too long though, so she decides to clarify. “Sir, if you’re upset we didn’t tell you, we didn’t tell anyone at all. The only people who know found out on accident.”

The President does not seem to know what to say to this, and Donna wonders if this was too bold an admission, if she overstepped the line. Then again, the President did call her into the Oval Office to talk about her personal life, about her marriage, so there are no clearly marked boundaries here.

Bartlet seems to spend a moment taking this in, before he opens his mouth. “Well this here is a prime example of the failures of our healthcare system,” he comments. “A guy can get shot serving his country and then get refused healthcare because of it.”

Josh almost chuckles at this. “Yes, ironic, isn’t it?”

“And the Santos campaign doesn’t provide benefits?”

“Most of the staffers are on Congressional payroll,” he says. “Almost everyone else is a volunteer. I just kind of got caught in limbo.”

The President frowns. “We have to fix this country’s healthcare.”

“We’ve tried,” Josh points out.

“Yes, I seem to recall you trying to stop me from doing that so I’d be more palatable to conservative Democrats who think universal healthcare is a curse word,” Bartlet comments wryly.

“Sir…”

“To think, we could have fixed this six years ago.”

Josh sighs and rubs at the corner of his eye aggressively. “And now I’m trying again. I don’t know if you’ve read the Santos healthcare plan but I…”

“Josh,” Bartlet stops him, “you’re not here to campaign for your guy.”

“Why am I here?” Josh asks bluntly.

Donna has been wondering the same thing. The President is of course curious, but it seems strange for him to call them both in for this.

“Because I wanted to congratulate you both in person,” he says. “Marriage is a precious thing, and I’ve always thought the two of you…”

Josh and Donna share a puzzled glance before Josh interrupts. “Sir, all due respect, but this isn’t that kind of marriage.”

“No,” The President says. “No it’s not, but it could be.”

Before Donna can say or ask anything else, he looks at his watch. “Oh, Donna,” he says, “you’d better get going, so you don’t miss your flight.”

Donna isn’t sure how or why he knows about this, but she checks her own watch and realizes that yes, she needs to get to the airport very soon. “Thank you sir,” she says, standing up. She locks eyes with him for just one moment, and he looks at her with softness. Donna never would have anticipated that the President of the United States would look at her like that, but she returns his smile before heading out the door.

Josh is still in there, and Donna can’t help but wonder what they speak about, but she tries to push the thought out of her mind. She has a flight to catch.

Chapter Text

It’s funny, Josh thinks, how frequently the Russell and Santos campaigns end up in the same hotel. He wonders, briefly, if maybe it would be better for the Santos campaign to downgrade hotel classes to save money, but then again, there are so few people on this campaign that something as little as that would hardly make a dent.

So here they are, at the DoubleTree by the Seattle airport. It’s a fine hotel, no different from the other hundreds of hotels Josh has spent his life, but he curses the fact that advance set them up in this one for one very good reason; he’s somehow on the same floor as his wife.

He really needs to stop thinking about her like that. He finally found a place to keep the wedding ring where he wouldn’t lose it, where he didn’t have to wear it, but whenever he thinks about her, he still finds himself touching his left ring finger whenever he thinks about her, trying to twist a cheap metal ring that isn’t there anymore. But if he keeps calling her his wife in his mind, pretty soon he won’t be able to stop himself from thinking it when it’s not true anymore. And pretty soon, he’ll accidentally say it out loud, and then even more people will know than already do know.

It’s the first night he’s there that he finds her; it’s still quite early by west coast standards, but Josh came straight from DC, which is three hours ahead, and so he’s yawning at 9:30 as he tries to make sense of how to campaign on election day in a state that literally only does voting by mail. Perhaps he should pull Santos back to Michigan in the few days before this primary, since people will have already filled out their ballots here.

He’s struggling to wrap his brain around this when he gives up and decides that he’s starving. The hotel has a little bar downstairs, and he hopes the kitchen is still open. He doesn’t have any food, and the cookie that they gave him at check in a couple of hours ago is the only thing he’s eaten since breakfast. He can almost hear Donna chiding him for not eating, but in fairness, he’s spent most of the day on a plane and the rest of it trying to get work done while Santos is at a fundraiser over in Bellevue. Josh had been planning on going, but too many things had come up, and four conference calls in his hotel room later, he’s ready to go to bed at all of 9:30.

He steps out into the hallway and heads towards the elevator, but before he manages to make it there, he hears the ice maker out in the hallway. He turns his head to look, and sure enough, she’s here, on the same floor as him, in the same hotel. Three thousand miles from home and in the wrong Washington.

Josh can’t help but stop and look at her, biting his lip to stop himself from making any other expression. She's standing strangely, leaning to one side, as she fills up the ice bucket. Her leg must hurt, he realizes. He used to try not to notice these things, because seeing her in pain stings him. It had been easier to ignore, easier to deflect, when she’d gotten back and they’d worked together again. But he supposes that not noticing was one of the reasons she left him in the first place, which just compounds the guilt he’s been carrying since he saw her blow up on the television in the bullpen.

“Hi,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

She turns sharply, wincing as she does so. “Hi.”

“You’re staying here?” he asks, rather stupidly.

“No, Josh, I just broke in to use the icemaker,” she replies sharply.

“Yeah,” he mutters, shaking his head. “We’re on the same floor again.”

She raises an eyebrow before turning back to the ice maker to fill her bucket more. “It seems so. They probably put all the political operatives on a single floor so we don’t have to mingle with the general public.”

“Can't open the cages in the zoo,” Josh remarks. “Perhaps they’re wise.”

“Perhaps they want to see something interesting. Like primary fist fights.”

Josh raises an eyebrow. “You think that would be interesting? A bunch of out of shape political operatives going at it?”

"Hey, I’m averaging 20,000 steps a day, who are you calling out of shape?” Donna asks, but as she takes a step towards him, she can’t hide her wince, and Josh can’t stop the concern that overwhelms him.

He frowns. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“20,000 steps a day has to be hard on your leg,” he says critically, looking her over.

“I'm fine,” she reiterates. She tries to take a few steps past him, but Josh stretches out one arm to touch the other edge of the wall at the inset, so that she can’t pass him. “I’m just going back to my room.”

“What’s the ice for?” Josh asks, raising an eyebrow in challenge.

She gives him a glare. “My beauty routine. The fridge in my room doesn’t work Or maybe the cooler with beers I carry around to celebrate ever time we kick your campaign’s ass. Doesn’t matter.”

“I think you’re lying to me.”

“What does that mean?”

Josh removes his hand from the wall to sputter, “What does that mean? Donna, I… you do know how hold an intelligent conversation, don’t you?”

“I don’t, actually,” Donna mutters, taking a few steps past him, her face coming close to his. “Unlike you, I don’t have degrees from Harvard and Yale.”

He rubs his forehead as she walks past, before sprinting down the hallway to catch up with her. It’s not hard, because he can see that she’s limping pretty badly. “Donna, I didn’t mean…”

“I know,” she says, turning to face him. “You're not trying to be cruel, you’re just…”

“I want to check in on you,” he says, and he means it. He genuinely means it. “That's why I’m asking about the ice.”

She presses her lips together and suddenly seems very interested in the moulding between the carpet and the wall.

“Your leg hurts,” he observes, after a long pause.

Donna still won’t look at him. “When doesn’t it?”

He closes his eyes, because he understands this on some level. “Yeah. What’s got it so bad now?”

“A six hour flight,” Donna says, “even on Air Force Two, if it’s too turbulent to get up and stretch. And also…”

“The rain,” Josh finishes. It’s February in Seattle, so the forecast for the week is a damp, cold drizzle which is not particularly pleasant. His back has been aching a bit, and he’s sure it’ll be worse in the morning when the cold really settles in, but Donna has been here for a day already, and she definitely has it worse.

She sighs and leans back against the wall, stretching out her leg in front of her, the ice balanced between her fingers. “Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to go ice it, see if that helps, because the heating pad isn’t doing much tonight.”

“Do you need anything? Ibuprofen, anything like… There’s got to be a drug store of some sort around here, if you needed…”

Donna takes a few more steps down the hall and laughs a little bit. “Josh, in your wildest dreams, did you ever imagine I would have come here without anything like that?”

He thinks back and remembers her purse, stocked with every kind of first aid, medication, stain remover, snack, and anything else she could ever need. “No,” he says sheepishly. “I just wanted to help if I could.

She closes her eyes and he wonders if he’s said the wrong thing, but instead she gives him a soft smile. “I know. I’m fine. Big day tomorrow, though, so I’m going to go sleep.”

“Okay,” Josh says. “I’m gonna… I haven’t eaten today, so I’m gonna get some food.”

He expects her to chide him for that, but she doesn’t. It’s not her job anymore, not really, so he’s not sure why he expects it of her. But instead she opens her door and gives him one last look. “Have a good night, Josh.”

“You too,” he says, watching the door slam shut behind her.

The kitchen is still open, thankfully, so Josh has a chicken salad and a beer and can’t help but wonder if Donna would be happy with him for ordering something healthy relative to what he normally eats. Donna doesn’t care, he has to remind himself.

And yet, if she didn’t care, she wouldn’t have offered to marry him.

He decides against a second beer, feeling the exhaustion of the day overtake him, and heads to bed. He, unlike Donna, doesn’t have a stash of ibuprofen, and so when his back starts to ache in the middle of the night (damn hotel beds have done a number on it), he almost thinks about going to her room and asking for some.

Almost. But he won’t bother her, because it’s not his place.

The next day is a whirlwind; they’re down at the state capitol an hour away in Olympia to meet with some state legislators who have given Santos their endorsement in the morning, and somehow Josh sees Donna there, meeting with the state senator in the office across the hallway. In the afternoon, there are four rallies, and they’re late to the last two because of traffic. In the evening, it’s another fundraiser dinner, this time with the mayor of Seattle who is giving his Santos his endorsement. When Josh gets back to the hotel, he’s exhausted again, but tomorrow is an even longer day.

Why they’re campaigning in a rural and difficult to access part of the state is beyond Josh, except that Russell is also participating in some kind of ceremony at Olympic National Park, and Santos is pretty much obligated to go as well or risk looking like he doesn’t care about the environment. Josh doesn’t mention that, of the three candidates left for the Democratic nomination, Santos is the only one who isn’t funded by mining or oil, making him the default choice of the environmentalists. That kind of logic tends to fall on deaf ears.

They somehow load up the campaign bus on a ferry; most of the staffers go up to the top deck to watch the city skyline shrink behind them, but Josh stays on the bus, watching as the gray waves splash on the front of the car deck in a rather threatening way.

Despite his claims, Josh has never really been friends with the outdoors, but he has to think that no one could possibly find a good reason to go to a national park in the Pacific Northwest in February. Especially when said national park is well known for being the rainiest place in the continental United States. Sure enough, it’s raining as both Santos and Russell make speeches on the importance of protecting the environment. It’s a fairly impressive crowd, considering they’re at least two hours and a ferry away from any place with an actual population and that it’s 40 degrees and pouring rain.

Josh is miserable, pulling his umbrella as close to his head as possible, shifting in his soaked shoes, but he can’t remember feeling anything but miserable since this whole campaign started.

He glances across the crowd, catching a familiar red umbrella. Donna always loved that umbrella, saying it was something that was good at brightening her day even when outside was so dull. It makes her stand out in a crowd, he thinks. Against his will, he smiles as he catches her eye. He thinks she smiles back, but he can’t quite tell because the rain gets in his eyes.

The other big event for the day is visiting Naval Base Kitsap for the commissioning of a new submarine. It’s a good opportunity, Josh thinks, to show Santos' military background, but Russell and Hoynes are both there too. Josh wonders if it might to more harm than good to have all three at the commissioning ceremony, because with each giving a speech, it quickly turns into a very blatant campaign event. Still, Josh is impressed with Santos’ speech; it’s filled with anecdotes of his time at the Naval Academy and, Josh notices, is being recorded to be televised. Probably just public access, but if he makes a few calls, perhaps the local news will pick up the event and show Santos at the top of his game. It really is neck and neck in Washington, a tight three-way race, and they need all the advantages they can get.

They have a band here, playing patriotic interludes between every speech, and sound waves from trumpets bounce off the metal ceiling, mixing with the sound of raindrops on the roof. It’s certainly very loud in the room, and while Josh can deal with crowds now, can deal with music, can deal with loud noises, he feels his senses getting overwhelmed. 

“I’m going to give a call to KING 5,” Josh whispers to Ronna, as Santos leaves the stage to the cheers of the crowd gathered. “See if we can get a soundbite of that on the evening news. It’s good stuff.”

Ronna nods excitedly, clearly feeling the energy of the large crowd.

Josh makes his way to the edge and then finds himself outside. It’s still cold and raining, but he leans back against the wall under an overhang and figures that’s enough to keep him sufficiently dry. It’s a relief to be away from the noise; he doesn’t realize how tense his muscles were until he tries to relax them in the relative quiet. He dials the number for the station, talks to a producer, points them toward the public access footage, and makes another few calls before he looks to the side and sees a familiar figure sitting on a stone bench further down the side of the building.

He pockets his phone and takes a few steps toward her, frowning. “Donna?” he asks.

Donna looks up and he can see her shoulders drop just a little bit when she sets eyes on him. He isn’t sure if that’s good or bad. “Hi,” she says dully. She used to be so easy to read, he thinks, and he’s not sure if he’s gotten worse at it or if she’s gotten better at hiding things.

“You’re not going to watch your guy give a speech?” Josh asks.

She shrugs. “Same stump speech as always, with a few more lines about how great our Navy is.”

Josh is about to point out how Santos spent the entire bus ride writing something new specifically for the occasion, but he doesn’t. They’re not supposed to talk about the campaigns anyway. That’s the rule. Still, his curiosity is overwhelming him. “What are you doing out here?” he asks.

She stretches her legs out in front of her. “Needed to get off my feet,” she admits, “and there was nowhere to sit in there.”

Josh frowns, looking her over. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she murmurs. “I’m completely fine, I just… I chose the wrong shoes today, and then when we were out at Olympic I stepped on some mud that kind of sank below me and I…” She shakes her head. “Josh, you don’t need to do this.”

He takes a seat next to her on the bench. “Do what?”

“Worry about things like this.”

“Donna, if telling me I didn’t need to worry stopped me from worrying, I'd have spent a lot less time in therapy.”

She almost laughs at this. Almost. The rain drips from the overhang and a drop lands on the top of her shoe. “I’m completely fine. Anyway, we really don’t want people to see us talking together, do we?”

“The exit is on the other side of the building,” Josh remarks. “Who’s going to come out here?”
“You, apparently,” Donna mutters.

Josh shrugs. “I had to make a few calls. Too loud in there to talk.”

“Too loud in there to think,” Donna shoots back, and of course Josh has to agree with that.

He leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs and clasping his hands together. “This sort of thing used to be a lot more fun.”

Donna shrugs, the material of her raincoat crackling as she does. “I used to be a lot more fun.”

“Me too,” Josh says softly. “Remember on the first Bartlet campaign, the nights we’d stay up late playing truth or dare or never would I ever or stupid games like that which teenagers play at summer camp. We really were like teenagers at summer camp.” No, the first Bartlet campaign wasn’t easy. In fact, it was anything but easy, and Josh remembers spending a good month of it, that month after his dad died and Donna left again, in utter misery. But when he thinks about it, he mostly remembers long nights on the campaign bus, or helping CJ prank Toby, or laughing good-naturedly at Sam’s agonized attempts to write anything worth reading. He thinks back and remembers the good. Will there be any good to remember when he looks back on this campaign?

“You all acted like teenagers,” Donna says, “and then you were kind enough to let me join you.”

“Not really,” Josh says. “You kind of didn’t give us a choice.”

The corners of her lips perk up just a little bit. “You all couldn’t resist my charming personality.”

“No, we couldn’t,” he says, and it’s the truth. There was no denying Donna Moss, not ever.

She doesn’t look convinced of this, but she leans back against the wall. “Are we just too old to enjoy life anymore?”

“I’ve got a good decade on you,” Josh says, “but I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like it. Or maybe we’ve been through too much to get back to where we were.”

There’s a heaviness in that sentence, and Donna doesn’t respond. She just lets it linger in the air, biting her lip with a fierceness that Josh worries might draw blood. He tilts his head back and listens to the drip of rain off of the overhang. The rain is getting heavier, and wind is beginning to blow, whipping wetness underneath to Josh and Donna.

His phone rings again; it’s the station calling back asking for more details and perhaps an interview tomorrow morning. It’s a good sign, he thinks, but the conversation takes far longer than it needs to. He notices that his phone is almost out of battery, and ends the call politely right before it dies on him. Typical.

When he is finally done, he pockets the phone and turns to Donna. “We should probably go inside,” he says, realizing he has no clue how long they’ve been out here. His calls took a little while, and he knows he sat in silence with Donna for quite some time, but his watch isn’t working right now. If Donna had still been working for him, she would have taken it in to get the battery changed a month ago, but he won’t mention that.

“Yeah,” Donna says, pushing herself off the bench. She isn’t limping too badly, to Josh’s relief, but it still looks like every step is just a little bit painful.

Josh frowns when he realizes that the side door they came out of has locked behind him. He turns to Donna. “We've got to go around.”

She groans. “We’re going to get soaked.”

“You have an umbrella,” Josh points out.

She digs into her bag. “Okay, you’re going to get soaked,” she says, opening up the umbrella.

“This from the woman who was so worried I’d get pneumonia last month that she offered to marry me,” Josh teases, and for one second, the banter feels just right. But then Donna gives him a little bit of a glare and he swallows it down.

“You don’t get pneumonia from the rain,” Donna says. “Unless you’ve got a virus or bacteria…”

“Yes, I did in fact take high school biology,” Josh retorts. He takes a few steps towards the side of the building and notices a fence. They’ll have to go around the other way, so he turns and rests his hand on the small of Donna’s back, guiding her away.

“Why did you know I had an umbrella with me?” Donna asks, as they cling close to the side of the building, trying to stay out of the rain. It’s blowing too much, too hard, for it to really do any good.

Josh frowns. “Huh?”

“Why did you know I had an umbrella.”

He thinks back to earlier, at the national park, and smiles. “I’d know that red umbrella anywhere,” he says. “I saw you using it earlier.”

As the reach the other end of the building, she pulls out said red umbrella and brings it closer to her head, trying to protect herself from the elements. They make it around to the front of the building, but strangely enough, the campaign buses that had been right there were absent. Josh looks around and frowns. The crowd seems to have dissipated entirely. He’s starting to feel a very strange sense of deja vu.

“Where are the buses?” he asks Donna.

She presses her lips together, worry appearing in her eyes. “I’m not sure,” she says, glancing at her watch. “I think we were schedule to leave at 4, but I…” she looks at her watch and frowns. “My watch is saying 3:30. How about yours?”

Josh shrugs. “My watch isn’t working.”

“Did you forget to change the battery again?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever actually remembered to,” Josh admits.

Donna sighs. “You’re hopeless.”

Josh doesn’t say anything in response; he's not sure what he would say. Obviously he’s not entirely hopeless without her, as he’s made it this far, but he figures he should let her get her dig in. Perhaps it will make her feel better.

Donna catches the eye of someone working on the base. “Excuse me!” she says. “Have the campaigns left?”

“They’re cancelling the Bainbridge and Bremerton ferries for the rest of the day because of the tides and the weather,” the man says. “They cut the event short so that they all could make the last ferry.”

Donna puts her hands on her hips and twists her mouth to one side before asks, “When is the ferry supposed to leave?”

The man looks at his watch. “In five minutes.”

“In five…” Donna sputters. “Do you think we can make it to the ferry terminal?”

The man frowns. “No. It’s on the other side of the base, and anyway, they load walk-ons before the cars.

Josh swallows. “We missed the last ferry? It’s only 3:30, what the hell kind of operation are they running where there aren’t any ferries in the evening? You’re just gonna strand people here on this island?”

“It’s a Saturday, so the commuters aren’t…” The man looks at Josh and Donna and frowns. “You’re not on an island,” he says flatly. “You're not stranded, you can drive around.”

“We don’t… we came on the campaign buses,” Josh says.

“Go rent a car,” he says. “There’s a Hertz a couple blocks from the northwest entrance of the base.”

“And we can get back to Seattle that way?”

“Sure can,” the man says. “Look, if you don’t mind, I’ve got…”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “Thank you.” Once they are relatively alone, Josh turns to Donna and lets his jaw drop. “They cancelled the ferries?”

“Josh…”
“They cancelled the rest of the ferries?”

“It’s a two hour drive, it’s not the end of the world,” Donna says. “But let’s go rent a car before everyone else who got stuck here gets the same idea.” She starts to head towards the northwest entrance of the base, where they came in. Thankfully it isn’t far, because Josh can see that Donna isn’t well prepared to walk much of any distance. 

“You want to… drive together?” Josh asks, frowning.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to rent two separate cars, does it? We’re going to the same hotel.”

The thought of being in a car with Donna for two hours isn’t such a bad thing, he supposes, except that things are still awkward between them. Even with a bit of the newfound levity he tried to establish today, there’s still a gulf between them he’s not sure he can cross. “Yeah, I guess so,” he says, as they leave through the front gate of the base.

Donna turns to look at him as they wait for the light to change so that they can cross the street. “You’re soaking,” she comments.

“Brilliant observation,” Josh remarks. “You refused to share your umbrella.”

“I stand by that. There’s only enough room for me under here,” Donna replies. “Okay, I see it up there on the left.”

Josh nods and begins to walk more quickly, eager to get out of the rain, but he slows down when he realizes that Donna is struggling to keep up. “You alright?” he asks.

“I really wish you would stop asking me that, to be honest," Donna says.

“Force of habit, I suppose,” Josh replies offhandedly.

“No it’s not,” Donna remarks. There’s some vitriol in her tone that bothers Josh.

“What do you…”

Donna blinks a few times. “You know what, we’re here. We can talk about this later.”

“Donna…”

“Do you want to stand out here and argue in the rain or do you want to get a car so that we can get back to Seattle?" Donna asks pointedly.

Josh presses his lips together and grudgingly opens the door for her.

The rental agency is, thankfully, not too busy. They manage to get a one-way rental, and Donna puts it on her card for the much more well-funded Russell campaign (“Consider it a campaign contribution,” she remarks sarcastically). Josh climbs into the driver’s seat of a mid-range Nissan SUV and Donna looks over the printed map directions she requested from the rental agent.

“You want me to drive?” Josh asks.

Donna nods. “My leg… I need to stretch it out, I think.”

Josh feels the concern showing up on his face, but Donna hasn’t responded well to that the last couple of times, so he tries to stay neutral. He takes off his soaked raincoat and throws it onto the backseat. The bottom of his pants and his shoes are still wet, but at least he is mostly dry on top. He turns on the car and turns on the heated seat, letting it warm up the chill that seems to have settled into his bones.

He starts the car and they begin to drive. Donna guides him out of Bremerton and onto the highway, and then says nothing else to him. He thinks about turning on the radio, but he doesn’t want to try and work it while he’s driving, and in truth, he’s more than used to driving his car in silence after months of not being able to listen to anything without risking a panic.

The only things he can hear are the raindrops falling on the roof of the car and Donna’s quiet breathing and intermittent groans. She has pushed her seat back as far as it will go, and had tried to prop her leg up on the dashboard, but found that it was too high and only hurt her more. Josh hadn’t commented on any of this, and she’d seemed grateful for that at least. Perhaps she really does want to be left alone, he thinks.

He comes up to the toll booth at the Narrows bridge and pays the toll, and this is when Donna finally begins to speak. “Did you know,” she says, “that this bridge collapsed once? They called it Galloping Gertie because of how much it would move in the wind, but one windstorm was too much and it just collapsed entirely. Four months after it was built.”

“That’s reassuring as I drive over it,” Josh murmurs. “How do you know that?”

“High school physics class,” Donna replies flatly. “It’s a new bridge, though. It got replaced entirely.”

“You never told me you took physics! You told me you didn't know anything about physics," Josh whines, thinking back to the days where he had nothing to do but read about theoretical physics.

“Well, it wasn't really a physics class so much as it was one of those general science classes. Physics, chemistry, engineering, we did a bit of all of it. They have video of the bridge collapsing, so they showed it to us. Couldn’t tell you why it collapsed, though, because I wasn't lying to you. I don’t actually know anything about physics.”

"Do you want to learn?” Josh asks. “Because if we want to talk the theory of everything…”

Donna groans. “I don’t want to talk about the theory of everything!”

Josh squints at the road ahead of him. The windshield wipers on the car are moving quickly, but it’s still hardly enough to keep the windshield clear. “Okay,” he says. “That’s fine.”

“Good.”

He sighs heavily, before taking a quick glance over at Donna. “What did you mean before? When you said it wasn’t a force of habit?”

She doesn’t look at him at all, instead stubbornly staring out the other window at trees shrouded in gray mist. “You checking in on me?”

“Yeah.”

Donna sighs heavily, and it seems like hours before she finally opens her mouth to give an answer “It’s not a force of habit for you, because you didn’t do it.”

"I..." Josh begins, ready to get defensive. “You’ve gotten mad at me every time I’ve asked you how you’re doing!”

“Do you actually care?”

“Of course I do!” Josh yells, suddenly seeing red. “Why would you ever think I…”

“Josh!” Donna shouts back, and he’s about to yell again when he suddenly notices the sea of brake lights ahead of him. He slams on the brakes, barely avoiding rear-ending the car in front of him.

He tilts his head back, breathing heavily. “Sorry,” he murmurs.

“About that?”

“Yes, about that! What else do I have to be sorry for?”

Donna finally turns to look at him, and in the stopped traffic, Josh can look back at her too. “You didn’t seem to care. After I came back from Gaza.”

Josh clenches the steering wheel tighter. “Of course I cared, Donna.”

“The moment I came back, you just dropped me at my desk acted like everything was the same. You dropped everything and flew to Germany for me and then when I was back at work you acted like nothing had ever changed,” Donna says. It’s clear that she's been holding onto this grievance for a while.

Josh tries to think back of those early days after she came back to work. They seem fuzzy in his mind; between what happened to her in Gaza and Leo’s heart attack and all the chaos at the time, he’s not sure he really knows what he was doing then. “It was so busy as I…”

“You know how hard that transition back is,” Donna says, her fists clenched in her lap. “You know you can’t just go… and pretend it never happened.”

“I wanted to,” Josh says. “That’s what I wanted after Rosslyn, too, and it was okay.”

“You put your hand through a window after Rosslyn,” Donna shoots back. “You were definitely not okay.”

Josh almost wishes he hadn’t brought the subject up. “I really didn’t check in on you then?”

“No,” Donna says. “You almost never did. I spent three months practically living at your place, and you could barely be bothered to ask me how I was holding up.”

“When I did, you said you were fine! I figured you didn’t want me to ask!” He can feel his voice rising too much again, but he can’t stop it.

“I really wanted you to,” Donna says, her quiet voice a contrast to his. “But you didn’t push as hard as I needed you to.”

A wave of guilt seems to settle over Josh, that familiar, sickening feeling. He hasn’t felt without guilt since he was eight years old, but it’s rising up in him, too much to be ignored. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I figured… I remember wanting things to be normal as soon as possible, I figured you did too.”

“How are things supposed to ever be normal again?” Donna asks rhetorically.

“They won’t be.” He speaks from experience.

“Then why do we try to make them normal again?”

“Because it's what we have to do in order to redefine what normal is,” Josh says. “You're finding a new normal, and it’ll be different and you'll always mourn a little for the life you lost, but you’ll find it.”

She gives him an odd look, one that he can’t really read out of his peripheral vision, before she says, “I wish you would have told me that then.”

“I don’t know that I knew how to articulate that then,” Josh admits. “I’m not sure I knew how to articulate that until just now.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s something I try not to think about.”

The windows are fogging up inside, so Donna wipes away a little bit of it with her sleeve. “How did that work out for you?”

“Not so great,” he says. “But sometimes it’s the only way to make it through the day.” He sighs, and changes lanes as he grows closer to the exit. “Donna, I’m sorry I didn’t… I can’t even explain what was going through my head at that time, but that’s no excuse. I should have… is that why you left?”

Donna’s eyes widen. “Not the only reason," she says quickly.

“But part of the reason?”

“A little bit,” she admits. “There were a lot of reasons.”

“Explain them to me sometime,” Josh says. He doesn't expect her to want to do this. He doesn’t even expect her to want to continue this kind of conversation ever again.

To his surprise, however, she nods. “Sometime. When we’re not a mile from the rental agency.”

“Do you mind… do you mind if I check in on you? You didn’t seem too happy when I asked.”

She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I hope you do. I think I need someone to do it.”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “It really does help, even if you don’t appreciate it at the time.”

Before Donna can say anything else, he pulls into the airport Hertz and drops the car off. “Do you mind if I use your phone to call Ronna? See if I can get a ride back to the hotel?”

“I’ve already got a staffer coming to pick me up, you can come with,” Donna says. “It doesn’t make sense to go separately, you know?”

“Isn’t that aiding and abetting the enemy?”

She tilts her head to the side to stretch her neck and gives him a devious smile. “You think yourself so much more threatening than you actually are,” she says. “We'll toss you in the trunk if you feel like we need the secrecy.”

“Nah,” Josh says. “As long as you don’t go around telling everyone you’re my wife, I think we’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, let’s avoid sharing that,” Donna says. “Thank you. For driving.”

“Much easier than when we got stranded in Indiana, huh?”

“We still ended up soaking wet,” Donna points out. “Or you did.”

He shrugs. “You wouldn’t share your umbrella.”

“I kind of like you soaking wet,” Donna teases. “Makes that awful haircut look a little better.” It’s a brave step, because they haven’t been able to banter like this in ages.

Josh doesn’t know how to respond—he’s rarely lost for words, but this feels unfamiliar again—but he can’t help but smile. He lets his hand hover behind the small of her back as they wait for a car to come pick them up, listening only to the sound of the pouring rain falling around them.

Chapter Text

It’s strange to be home.

Donna hasn’t lived in Wisconsin for nearly a decade, but Wisconsin is always going to be home. She’s never going to tell people that she’s from DC, because she’s not. She a Wisconsinite, born and raised, even if she never ends up living here again.

And that's something she can’t think about yet, because she has no clue what she’ll do once election season is over. She hasn’t thought that far ahead. It feels like tempting fate to think that far ahead.

Tonight is as much of a night off as she’s had on the campaign; Russell has an event, of course, but it’s not one Donna is invited to. Instead, she’s being taken out to dinner by her family, who insisted on seeing her here. It hasn’t been that long since she’s seen them, because she was back here for Christmas for a few days, but her mom insisted that they had to see her while she was here in Wisconsin again.

She brushes out her hair, looks herself over in the mirror, and takes the elevator down to the lobby of her hotel. Seated on the couches in front of the front desk are four very familiar heads, all talking to someone who likes, frighteningly, even more familiar.

Donna almost stops short when it clicks, and she considers just turning around and heading back to her hotel room. It'll be easier than having to deal with this interaction. Because standing there, talking to her parents, is none other than her husband.

Unfortunately, it's her sister who sees her first, and any thought of escape becomes a pipe dream. “Donna!” Isabella shouts from across the room, standing up. Her sister is seven years older, and yet is her closest sibling in age; her brothers are nine and eleven years older than her. Isabella managed to graduate from college, unlike Donna, but then got married at twenty-three, had four kids, and ended up living in a house two streets down from where she grew up.

Donna takes a few steps forward, but Isabella is much quicker and comes over to envelop her in a hug. “It’s so good to see you!” she says, looking her over.

“It’s good to see you too! I thought it was just Mom and Dad coming tonight,” Donna says.

"We got a babysitter,” Isabella says, shrugging her shoulders. “Jamie’s here too. Did you know he majored in political science? He’s so interested in hearing all about the campaign.”

Donna does know that her brother-in-law majored in political science, because Isabella has brought it up in every single conversation they’ve had since she started working in the White House. She also knows that her brother-in-law works in sales now, and she knows more about politics than Jamie ever will. But she doesn’t say that. “Oh good,” she says instead. “I’ll be glad to see him.”

She takes a few more steps forward to approach the couch, where her parents are sitting, and sure enough, what she saw earlier wasn’t a hallucination. Josh is here.

“Oh, Donna!” her mom says, standing up to hug her. “You look tired.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Donna replies, trying to not sound too sarcastic. “I am tired.”

Fran Moss shakes her head. “I’m so glad you’re going to get a break tonight, then,” she says. It’s hardly a break, Donna thinks, not when she has to plaster on a smile and use up her limited social energy to show to her family that she’s not making a mistake by choosing this career path, but she doesn’t say that. “And look who we found here!” her mom continues. She gestures to Josh, who looks rather like a deer in headlights.

“Josh…” Donna says, her voice trailing off.

“He’s going to come out to dinner with us!” Fran says cheerfully.

Donna never really talked about what actually happened when she quit, but her mom has been firmly on Josh’s side, believing he can do no wrong. In fairness, all of her interactions with him were in Germany, where he had been attentive and self-sacrificing and doing everything he could to make her comfortable.

It’s frustrating to Donna to know that Josh existed and then seemingly disappeared, but her mom only sees the Josh who showed up. "He flew to Germany for you, Donna,” her mom had said after she quit. Donna hadn’t shared what happened after.

“You have tonight off?” Donna asks Josh. She is genuinely wondering, but it’s also the only thing she can really ask with her family all here.

Josh grimaces a bit. “Well, your mother invited me while the Congressman was here, and he thought it sounded like a good idea, so now I do.”

“That Matt Santos seems like such a great guy,” Fran says. “He was so kind to me. I mean, I haven’t seen your candidate yet, Donna, but I’m sure he’s equally…”

“Santos talked to you?” She looks to Josh, who looks painfully awkward standing there, and then back to her mom again.

“He asked about the grandkids,” Fran said. “I don’t know how he knew how many grandkids I have, but he did!”

Donna knows exactly how he would know, because Josh knows, and apparently even now, Josh is willing to talk to people about her personal life. But she doesn’t say that either. “If you meet the Vice President, it’s not going to be quite like that," she says. “He has a security detail, so the access is not quite so…”

She’s interrupted by her father wrapping her in a hug. “We weren’t sure you’d actually be able to show up tonight,” he says.

“I wasn’t sure either,” Donna replies. “Sometimes there’s a national crisis and we can’t…”

“No national crises tonight,” Joseph Moss says, patting his daughter on the back. “Where did we want to go? That Italian place? It's just down the street from here.”

“Oh yes! Donna, I know you love that place,” her mom says.

Donna nods, trying not to feel entirely overwhelmed by this. “Sure. Yeah. Let’s walk there,” she says, turning to Josh. “If you’re busy tonight, you really don’t have to…”

“The Congressman told me to go,” Josh says. “And I figured if I listen to him, he’ll have no choice but to listen to me.”

“That still a problem?”

“You have no idea.”

“So Josh,” Jamie says, running to catch up with Josh and Donna, “you worked for President Bartlet?”

Josh nods. “I did. So did Donna.”

“Well, Donna worked for you,” Jamie brushes off.

“She worked for President Bartlet too. In fact, I think he likes her better than he likes me.”

Donna shakes her head at this. “President Bartlet just liked me because I’d listen to his trivia.”

“President Bartlet likes you because you’re you,” Josh shoots back.

“You know, I majored in political science in college,” Jamie jumps in. “I’m very interested to hear what it’s like to work in the White House.”

“You haven’t talked to Donna about this?” Josh asks.

Jamie shrugs. “I don’t know, Donna was just… filing or whatever, I’m not sure what she could…”

Josh frowns, furrowing his brow. “I don’t know what Donna told you, but she was not just filing. She was practically my chief of staff. She was out there chasing down senators and congressmen, she was in on budget negotiations, she vetted presidential pardon candidates, she was getting involved in foreign policy…” His voice trails off at the last one, the implications of Donna’s involvement in foreign policy unspoken. “She was more than just an assistant," Josh adds at the end. “You should ask her.”

Donna wants to pretend she didn’t hear that, because she’s not sure how to process it. She’d never felt like Josh thought this when she worked there. She’d always felt like she was just an assistant, but she supposes she really did a lot of work outside of the scope of an assistant. Still, it’s strange to hear this out of Josh’s mouth, and Donna isn’t sure how to respond.

“Here we are,” Joseph says, opening the door to the Italian restaurant that frankly, Donna feels very neutral towards, but she was not about to argue about it. “Table for six, please?”

“Right this way,” the hostess says, leading them to a six person booth. Donna is relieved that Josh is at the opposite corner of the table from her.

What if her family figures it out? She's not sure they could, because there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that she and Josh are married, but she's still worried. What if one of them chokes on the cheese in the lasagna and the insurance cards have to come out? What if she drinks a few too many glasses of wine and lets it slip? She can’t do that. If her family knows, it’s only a matter of time before the entire world knows. Besides, her family would be so angry with her if they found out that she got married without telling any of them. They’ve been implying to her for years that she should married soon, and here she is, married, and no one knows.

“You know,” Fran says, “if I were voting in the primary, it would be awfully hard to choose. Of course I support you, Donna, and I want you to… stay employed, but that Matt Santos…”

“Why aren't you voting in the primary?” Donna asks.

Fran frowns. “I’m not a registered Democrat, Donna, you know this.”

“It’s an open primary,” Donna says. “You don’t have to be registered with a party to vote in it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Fran says. “I’m working that day, so getting to a voting booth is… Anyway, it hardly matters. I admire both your candidates, but it’s hard to imagine anyone could beat Vinick.”

Josh and Donna share a look. “Voting is important,” Donna says. “Especially in primaries. That’s what we’re here for. If it didn’t matter, then why are we working twenty hour days and traveling all over the country? Why am I putting myself through this if it doesn’t matter?”

There’s a bit of an awkward silence at the table after that, interrupted by the waiter coming by to take their orders. Donna gratefully orders a glass of white wine; she’s going to need it to get through the absolute hell that this situation is.

“Josh,” Fran says, “what was it you saw in Santos? What made you leave the White House?”

Donna watches him from behind a sip of her wine glass, as his mouth works to try and form the idea. “I… I don’t know, really. I just knew that I didn’t feel connected to any of the other candidates, and I wanted to have someone I was proud of in the field. And honestly, after you work at the White House for seven years, it’s time to move on.”

“And so it was Matt Santos?” Joseph asks. Donna has never known her dad to be interested in politics—he’s nominally a Republican but he doesn’t really seem to care much.

“I don’t know how much you follow the House, but the Congressman has sponsored many important bills. He has grand plans for education and healthcare, and he has the bipartisan credentials to get them through,” Josh says. “Plus, he’s a great guy. I mean, I don’t know about you, but after what John Hoynes put his wife through…”

“And Josh knows, because he used to work for Hoynes,” Donna interjects.

“I never knew about the affairs, though,” Josh defends. “And while sometimes we expect absolute moral purity from politicians to an unrealistic degree, I don’t think John Hoynes has the character to be President.”

Fran smiles over at Josh. “I wouldn’t think you’d knowingly work for a man like that.”

“Uh... thank you,” Josh says awkwardly.

“Jamie, Isabella, did I ever tell you about how I met Josh?” Fran asks, changing the subject. “He flew all the way to Germany with just the clothes on his back when Donna was hurt, so he was already there when I made it there. I’m not sure what we would have done without him. He helped arrange the flight for me…”

“Leo did that, actually,” Josh interjects. He stares at his plate, conspicuously avoiding Donna’s gaze.

Fran nods. “But Josh was just so good to us there. He hardly left Donna’s room. I had to practically blackmail him to go eat some food or get some sleep.”

“I had to do that as his assistant every day anyway,” Donna interjects. It’s strange though, how vague the memories of this are. She supposes that she had been on a lot of medication, that she probably had some kind of head injury, that the anesthesia has messed with her brain. She remembers Josh spending a lot of time sitting on the edge of her bed, and she remembers him teasing her and trying to steal her jello (“You don’t even like jello,” she had chided him, remembering his complaints when he had been the one in the hospital). But a lot of the tougher emotional lifting of those days escapes her mind.

Josh must have gone through so much, she realizes, being there. It was hard enough for her to be at GW with him after Rosslyn, but he had flown thousands of miles away just to be with her. He had watched her almost die from the same thing his dad did die from. He already had preexisting anxieties about hospitals and blood, and she shudders to think of all the sirens he might have been hearing, imagined or otherwise. She hadn’t really considered it. She doesn’t really blame herself—she had been wrapped up in her own pain and trauma—but what had she done to make sure he was okay too?

That wasn’t her job, she knows. It never has been her job, even though she’s done it for the past nine years. She feels guilty for not doing it, though.

No wonder Josh pushed her away. No wonder she pushed him away.

The conversation has moved on, but Donna hasn’t, her mind still squarely in a hospital room in Germany, seeing him exhausted, unshaven, and doing everything he can to make her miserable life a little bit better in those awful first few days.

She’s only interrupted by Isabella nudging her. “Donna?”

“Huh?” she asks, suddenly brought back to reality by the touch.

“I was asking what state you’re going to be in next,” her father says. “It’s so hard to keep track of you, usually we have to watch the news to figure out where you are.”

Donna looks down at the table and shrugs. “Well, Super Tuesday is coming up very soon, so we’re kind of all over the place. A lot of states to campaign in, you know?”

“You’ve seen so much of the country,” Isabella says, sounding just a little jealous. “You know, Jamie, we should take the kids out to DC to visit Donna sometime. They’ve never been out of the Midwest.”

Donna certainly isn’t going to be hosting her sister and brother-in-law and their four kids in her tiny apartment, but she smiles and nods. “That would be fun, once I’m back there. Still going to be bouncing around from state to state for a little while. Until about November.” She doesn’t miss Josh’s frown at that; somehow he’s still got it in his head that Santos can win.

It’s unlikely, Donna knows. It seems nearly impossible. Santos doesn’t have the funds, or the connections, or really any shot. He hasn’t won a race since New Mexico and Arizona. But Josh still is clinging to a stubborn belief that Santos is going to be the Democratic nominee.

This would be easy to dismiss, Donna knows, if she didn’t know Josh that well. When Josh is determined to win, he will do anything he can to win.

The food arrives and Donna finds her eye drawn to Josh over and over again. He isn’t eating much of it. Then again, she thinks, as she looks down at her half touched salad, she hasn’t been eating much either. They’re a matched pair in failure to take care of themselves.

“Josh Lyman!” she hears, and it’s not someone at the table. In fact, it’s not anyone she thinks she knows. It’s a reporter, notepad in hand, apparently thinking that this restaurant is going to be the place to catch unsuspecting political operatives to get a comment.

Sure enough, the reporter hurries towards the table. “Mr. Lyman, do you have a few minutes to talk about you campaign strategy in Wisconsin?”

Josh’s mouth is full, and he chews for a minute, staring blankly at the reporter as he does, until he swallows. “I don’t have a minute, sorry,” he says.

“I work for the Wisconsin State Journal,” the reporter says. “We’re the second largest newspaper in the state and our reporting does have an impact on primary outcomes.”

Josh looks over at Donna’s family apologetically before turning back to the reporter. “And that’s great, and it’s why we have a specific phone number for press inquiries. We even hired someone to liaise with the press. Maybe think about giving that a call instead. I’m a little busy.”

The reporter’s cheeks redden, but he looks over the table. Donna sinks lower in her seat, hoping against hope that maybe he won’t recognize her. Maybe her face hasn’t been on TV enough to for him to make the connection.

But hope is not enough, and neither is changing her posture. The reporter looks over at her and almost laughs. “You work for the Russell campaign!” he shouts, an accusatory tone in his voice.

Donna rubs her forehead. “Excuse me, but…”

“Sometimes personal friendship means more than political opposition,” Josh says. “It's possible to be on opposing campaigns and still be friends, and while you can quote me on that, it’s the only quote you’re going to get tonight. I would hope that Northwestern Journalism school taught you some manners along with how to report.”

“I… I didn’t go to Northwestern,” the reporter stutters.

“Figures,” Josh says. “Look, go back to the hotel. You’ll find plenty of press-hungry staffers back there. For now, I’m just hungry.”

The reporter frowns and scurries away, and Josh takes another bite of his pasta.

“Wow,” Fran says. “Does that happen often?”

Josh shrugs. “I’m a popular guy.”

“I have to talk to the press all the time for my job,” Donna says, casting a look across the table at Jamie. “I also shape policy, but…”

"He really had no respect,” Isabella says, sounding a little bit shocked.

Josh shrugs. “There's a lot less respect in politics than you’d expect. Sometimes dealing with a reporter is like dealing with a toddler; you have to firmly but kindly tell them no.”

“And how many toddlers have you dealt with, Josh?” Donna quips, before she can even think about the words coming out of her mouth. This is getting a little too close to revealing the very idea that there’s something between them.

Josh shrugs. “Haven’t had the opportunity yet.”

“You’re like Donna,” Fran says. “Not in any rush to get married, right?”

Only Donna notices how sharply Josh sucks in a breath. “Yeah," he says tightly. “Always been too… busy, you know.”

“I bet your mother wants grandchildren through,” Fran continues.

Josh laughs at this, generously smiling. “Yeah,” he says. “She won’t stop bugging me about it. I’m their only… I’m the only one left, you know, so she’s a little desperate for me to carry on the Lyman family name.”

“I guess that’s where Donna gets lucky being the youngest; we have eight grandchildren already, so she’s not under as much pressure,” Fran says. “But we’re still hopeful that in the future she'll get to experience that joy too.”

Donna can’t think about this. Can’t think too hard about little children with curly hair and dimples who are the smartest in class but also the biggest goofballs known to man. Can’t imagine Josh picking them up, can’t imagine sharing a life like that. Well, she can think about this. In fact, it’s easy. But if she does, she might slip. “I have a campaign to worry about first,” she says finally, not looking at Josh.

“Oh yes,” Fran says. “I understand, and of course that’s your priority. I just look forward to when you find the man you’re going to spend your life with. You’re going to be the last of my babies to get married. I can’t believe it, Donna.”

Donna swallows. Yeah, there’s no way her parents can ever find out she’s already married. Especially not to the man sitting across the table from her.

Much to her relief, the waiter comes with the bill, handing it to Joseph.

“How much do I owe you?” Josh asks, opening up his wallet and digging in for some cash.

“Oh, no, no, our treat,” Joseph says.

“I insist,” Josh argues, looking steely eyed.

Donna shakes her head. “Don’t let him pay you,” she says. “His campaign isn’t paying him any money as it is.”

“They’re not paying you?” Isabella asks incredulously.

Josh shrugs. “They’re paying me, just not much. I’m donating a lot of my time to the campaign. It’s alright, it's for a good cause, and I’ve got savings.”

Joseph pushes his hand and the cash away, however. “This is our treat,” he says. “Thank you for joining us tonight, Josh. I’ve heard Fran talk so much about you since Germany, but it’s been wonderful to get to know you better.”

Donna can’t help but smile at this; her father doesn’t often say things like this. He’s usually pretty quiet about his affection or enjoyment of time with others.

“Thank you, sir,” Josh says, reaching out to shake his hand as they stand up from the table. “And thank you for the dinner.”

“It doesn’t look like you eat enough,” Fran says. “Donna, you should be making sure this guy eats more.”

“That’s not her job,” Josh says quickly. “She has a very important job, and she’s doing amazing. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

Fran smiles. “Her life is always going to have something to do with you,” she says, glancing over at Donna, expecting an argument.

Donna only hears these words drift into her mind, and she doesn’t fully process them, but she doesn’t disagree. And her mom isn’t wrong, considering that right now they’re legally bound to each other. So she lets it go, and follows the rest of her family and Josh out of the restaurant, where they drop them back at the hotel and head out.

Josh and Donna walk towards the elevator together. “I’m sorry,” Josh says.

“For what?”

“I didn't mean to ruin your dinner,” Josh says. “Your mom insisted and I couldn’t…”

“You didn’t ruin anything,” Donna replies adamantly. "Sure it was a little weird, but it was going to be weird regardless. And honestly, it’s nice that my family likes you.”

Josh shrugs. “It was weird in Germany but your mom was very kind to me and she…”

“It sounds like you were kind to her too,” Donna says. “Although I don't really remember.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he replies, smiling tightly at her. “It’s okay.”

“Sometimes I forget that you came all the way there for me. I shouldn’t forget that. It was a huge sacrifice on your part and I…”

Josh swallows. “It was the least I could do. It was the only thing I could do, really. And Donna…”

“Yeah?”

Before he can say anything, the elevator stops on his floor. “Good night,” he says, about to step out.

“Wait!” Donna shouts. She can’t let him not say what he was going to say. She won’t be able to sleep tonight if she doesn’t know. She hits the open door button on the elevator. “What were you going to say?”

He looks at her with sad eyes, and she wonders if she looked closer, if she might be able to find tears in them. “It wasn’t a sacrifice. I was told to go. Leo ordered me to go, really, because if I had lost you… I don’t know that I ever would have recovered.”

The elevator door closes before Donna can say anything else, but she is so struck she forgets to get off at her floor.

Chapter Text

Donna isn't really the type to drink alone. She always enjoyed going out with friends, and while on the Bartlet campaign trail, she almost always would go out with Josh and CJ and Sam and Toby. But not alone.

This campaign trail is different, though. Some nights, it seems like her best option really is to head to the hotel bar, order a whiskey sour or three, and enjoy an hour of staring at the wall in front of her, watching the bartenders pour while she tries not to think.

It’s a dangerous game, though, because some nights, things come up. Just when Donna thinks the day is over, that she’ll be able to catch a couple hours of sleep before something happens, the governor of California endorses John Hoynes and suddenly they have to change their entire campaign strategy for Super Tuesday yet again. While she’s not exactly in charge of scheduling, somehow she's worked her way up to being involved in these decisions.

This is what she wanted, isn’t it? She has really achieved quite a lot for someone without a college degree, and she’s influencing the primary campaign of the most likely Democratic candidate.

Except with Hoynes getting the endorsement in California, their foothold for the nomination looks a little less secure.

After she gets the text, she comes into the hotel lobby, where the press pool is waiting for a statement, it seems, on the Hoynes endorsement. That’ll be her job, but first she has to actually get the statement from Will, who is juggling two different cell phones and trying to talk to two reporters in front of him all at the same time.

“We’re not going to California,” Will says when he sees her approach.

Donna frowns. “Not at all? Not sure you’ve heard, but there’s a primary there on Tuesday.”

“Hoynes has the governor and the state party behind him,” Will says. “He won in Washington somehow, he’s gonna get the whole West Coast. Not much we can do about that now.”

“Is Hoynes going to California?”

Will nods. “He’s spending the weekend there. We’re going to focus on New York and Ohio—places we can win.”

“And what about Santos?” Donna asks.

"I don’t know,” Will says, “and I'm not really all that worried about it. Santos is probably just bouncing around trying to get second somewhere so he can justify staying in the race. Hoynes is our concern, not Santos. To that end…”

“You have a statement about the endorsement for me," Donna finishes.

Will holds out a piece of printed paper. “Not so much about the endorsement. What does it matter to us?”

“California’s the biggest state in the union, so it matters a hell of a lot,” Donna whispers back, hoping that none of the press is close enough to hear.

Will shrugs. “Ohio and New York. That’s what we’re going for on Tuesday. Ohio and New York. And if it means we have to camp here until 8pm on Tuesday, that’s what it’ll be.” He looks past Donna and raises up a hand. “Hey, could I get the press pool over here? Donna Moss has a statement!”

The statement, as it turns out, is not about the endorsement at all. It’s about Hoynes’ education plan and obsession with values. She reads it and begins to answer a few questions from the press. It's hard to speak about Russell’s plan for education, because he doesn’t seem to have one aside from criticizing the Santos and Hoynes education plans. Still, nobody asks her questions that are too tough. She almost wishes they would, because it would make for a better campaign.

That’s almost definitely something she learned from Josh.

She was looking forward to California, partially because she’s tired of it being winter, and partially because she really does need to talk to Josh. She’s been trying to do her taxes on the rare occasions that she has a break, but she’s honestly not sure how she’s supposed to do them now that she’s married. She has to coordinate with Josh on them, and that’s not really something that’s easy to do over the phone. Even if it was easy to get Josh on the phone, which it very much is not.

So it’s a little concerning to her that they’re not going to be in the same state soon, unless Santos comes to New York. Josh might not even tell her that, if he doesn’t want the Russell campaign knowing about his plans for campaigning.

Another question probes her a little further, and Donna repeats the same line she’s been using about education for the past month. “I’m saying we trailed almost every comparable country in every area tested last year,” she argues. “Geometry, computation…”

“Will that argument blunt Hoynes’ surge in California?” a reporter questions.

Donna frowns. “This isn’t about blunting, this is about curing polio.”

“We already cured polio.”

Okay, perhaps not the best argument. In her own (admittedly weak) defense, her brain is still a little fuzzy from the whiskey sours. Her metaphors could use a little more work, but the fact of the matter is, education in this country needs to be improved, and Hoynes certainly isn’t going to do it. “Let’s not be complacent about it,” she replies to the reporter. “Our education system once taught the man who cured polio. Do you think our high schools are educating the people who are going to cure cancer right now if 50% of students have subpar biology grades compared to almost every other Western country? Really, no one wants to ask about science education instead of ‘values education’?”

“I do,” she hears someone say. She looks at the man who is talking to her and frowns a little bit, because she knows that face, and it sure isn’t the face of a reporter.

“You’re Bill Brewer,” she says tightly. She’s seen him around quite a bit, watched him argue on TV, watched him coach Hoynes at the debates.

“I am.”

She frowns. “I’m not taking questions from Hoynes advisors.”

He tilts his head and smiles at her. “Too bad,” he says. “I was gonna ask how Bob Russell can turn up his nose at character education with parents trying to pass values onto their kids.”

Donna shrugs. She shouldn’t take the bait. She should just leave and stick to her guns, but she can’t help but argue. Maybe she learned that from Josh too. “We’re focusing on things like AP Physics,” she says.

Brewer shrugs. “See, this is why Russell couldn’t beat Vinick in the fall. He has no appreciation of middle-class values.”

Donna’s about to argue that middle-class values hardly matter since Vinick’s economic plans would destroy the middle class, but her brain is just a little too fuzzy to actually talk policy. So she deflects. “You rupture an appendix, do you want a model citizen or a trained surgeon who passed their high school biology class?”

“I never said I had a single-issue appendix,” Brewer shoots back, and Donna doesn’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean.

She gives the reporters her best ‘we’re done here’ smile. “Thanks guys.”

Brewer, however, doesn’t get the message. “Honestly, your education plan is closer to my tastes,” he says, approaching her. “Hoynes is kind of on a values kick lately.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “Who wants the government legislating their kids’ values? What happened to my right to raise spoiled, selfish little jerks?”

Brewer chuckles. “So I take it you’re single?”

Well, that’s an interesting question. Donna could just say no and leave it at that. She’s got tax return papers spread out all over her hotel room bed with the ‘married' box checked. She’s definitely not legally single. And even if Josh said he didn’t mind her going out with other guys, she’s not sure she’s comfortable even considering it. She should just say no and leave it at that, but instead, she raises an eyebrow. “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”

“Have a drink with me tonight. We’ll get into specifics.”

There’s no way in hell that’s happening. “No,” she says. “You work for Hoynes. It would be like sleeping with the enemy. Not that we’d… actually sleep together.” She blinks a few times. “I just… you know what I mean.”

It’s ironic for her to say this, because in some ways, she’s already doing this. It’s worse than sleeping with the enemy; she’s married to the enemy. She’s married to the enemy as a favor, to give him an advantage. Still, there’s absolutely no way that Bill Brewer can know about that.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind,” Brewer says with a shrug. “Clearly you do have some values, even if your candidate doesn’t.”

Donna lets out a heavy sigh. “Yeah, you know what? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Brewer smiles. “I’ll try my luck again tomorrow.”

She heads towards the elevator without looking back at him.

When she gets up to her room, the tax papers are still spread over the bed. Sure, she has another month before she has to get them in, but Donna has always been one to get her taxes done early. After all, she wants to maximize her refund. But the campaign trail has made that difficult, and she has someone to coordinate with now.

She’s not sure he'll pick up, but she dials Josh’s number. It’s only seven in California, so she’s surprised when he does pick up.

“Hello?” she hears.

“Hi,” she says. “Is this a bad time?”

“Donna?”

“Yeah.”

She hears him chuckle slightly on the other side of the line. “I’m not sure there ever is a good time.”

“I’m sorry, I can talk later, I just…”

“No, it’s alright. What do you need?”

“Have you done your taxes yet?”

Another laugh on the other side of the line. “No,” he says.

“Okay, good, because we need to coordinate how we’re filing.”

“I figured we would file separately.”

“So did I, but we still need to make sure it all… we don’t want an IRS audit is all I’m saying.”

“I got the commissioner of the IRS confirmed!” Josh shouts, and Donna can’t help but wonder where he is. “And that was not an easy confirmation after the thing with his wife.”

Donna rubs her forehead, thinking back to that battle. “Yeah,” she says, “but that… isn’t really relevant. Or it shouldn’t be. Ethically speaking.”

He sighs heavily. “It shouldn’t be too complicated. I’ve got a guy in DC who does my taxes but I…”

“That would be one more person we have to tell about the marriage.”

“The President did Charlie’s taxes once. Said he liked doing them. Perhaps we could ask him,” Josh says. “Since he already knows, you know.”

“You’re going to ask the President of the United States to do our taxes?” Sometimes, Donna can’t believe just how weird her life is.

“Maybe,” Josh says. “I’m not… Donna, Super Tuesday is in three days. I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

She flops back on her bed. “Yeah. I just wanted to… I was hoping to go over it with you when I was in California, but we’re not going to California.”

“You’re not?” There’s a note of surprise in his voice.

“Well, Hoynes got the endorsement, so we’re… you know, focusing on things we can win. Are you coming out here at all? 

Josh clears his throat. “Um… we’re staying in California.”

“Even with the endorsement not going your way?” Donna asks with surprise.

“Donna… it’s complicated. I don’t really want to talk about it. Remember the rules?”

She sits up and picks up the scattered tax papers, her eyes lingering on the ‘married’ box that she checked with a black checkmark. “Yeah,” she says. “I remember.”

“Okay. Look, Do you think it can wait until we’re both back in DC? You know, after Illinois?”

It's definitely not her style, but she understands why. “Yeah,” she says. “It can probably wait. But if we find a time to do it earlier, I…”

“Yeah," Josh says. “Okay. Look, I have to go, but I’ll talk to you later.”

Donna isn’t sure about what, but she likes the sound of that promise. “Okay,” she whispers, and hangs up the phone.

It’s really very early for her to go to sleep, but she figures she'll pass out as soon as her head hits the pillow. Her exhaustion is so all-encompassing, her body so weary.

But she doesn’t sleep.

Since Gaza, she’s dealt with her fair share of insomnia. Sometimes it's a racing mind, sometimes it’s the nightmares that wake her, and some nights, she just doesn’t fall asleep and she couldn’t say why. Tonight, it’s at least not Gaza-induced insomnia. Her mind is certainly racing, but it’s racing with campaign thoughts.

Hoynes is supposed to be on a flight to California tonight.

But his issues director said he was going to ask her out for a drink tomorrow night.

Something, she realizes, is up. Her mind works overtime, trying to piece it together. Trying to understand.

She wishes, desperately, that she could talk to Josh about this. This is just the sort of thing that he’s good at piecing together. She remembers nights where he’d come into her room, wildly gesticulating as he explains his middle of the night thoughts.

She doesn’t have Josh to do that with now, but someone has to know. They have to do something.

So she goes to Will’s room. It’s not like talking things out with Josh, but he’ll certainly like to have this information. This will influence his next move. Will doesn’t wake up when she speaks to him, and her sleep-deprived brain doesn’t even think twice about grabbing the cup of water on the bedside table and pouring it on his face.

Will sputters and glares at her before glancing at the clock. “It’s 3 am,” he remarks with annoyance. “What are you pouring on my head?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Donna explains. “Hoynes' issues director invited me for a drink.”

“And you poured it on my head,” Will quips. 

Donna doesn’t respond to this. “I told him no. I said it was sleeping with the enemy which I didn’t mean literally because I didn’t…”

“If you’re asking me whether or not you should have slept with Hoynes’ issues director, do what you want,” Will groans. Donna can’t help but wonder if he’s be so accommodating if he knew about her marriage. Would that sort of sleeping with the enemy be acceptable?

She doesn’t say anything about that, though. Hopefully Will won't even know. “Hoynes was supposed to fly to California for two policy speeches in San Diego,” she says. “Why would his issues director be in New York, inviting me for a drink. Why would he say he’ll be here tomorrow night? A headfake so we won’t campaign there.”

Will sits up and sighs. “He could have left staff. He could have a sore throat.”

“For Super Tuesday?” Donna shakes her head. “You campaign from a gurney if you have to.”

He reaches across the bed to grab his phone and dial a number. “Hi Susan, sorry to wake you. No, I’m calling from a fishing trawler. Yes, I know it’s 3 in the morning. I need to know if there have been any middle of the night changes to Hoynes’ schedule, silly as that sounds.” Will sighs and turns to Donna. “Hoynes cancelled his San Diego fundraiser. He’s spending a few more hours in New York. Apparently, it’s a sore throat.”

Donna tries not to feel a smug satisfaction.

“Wake up the staff,” Will instructs her. “If Hoynes isn’t going to California, what the hell are we doing in New York?”

Once again, it’s a sleepless night for Donna. She’s had a few too many of those. Her hotel room is fairly well packed up, but she wants to make sure she fully organizes in case she has to very suddenly get on a plane. She picks up the tax papers and throws them in her tote bag, not bothering to put them back in their folder. It’s six in the morning, she notices. Hoynes’ plane, according to the scheduler, is going to take off at ten. His staffers are definitely awake, and she wants to talk to one of them.

She practically flies out of the room, the door slamming behind her. Her tote bag is hanging off of one shoulder. Unfortunately, the slamming of the door creates a wind tunnel, which causes the tax papers she had loosely shoved into the tote to scatter everywhere across the floor of the hallway.

Donna groans and drops down to the carpet, beginning to gather them up. Unfortunately, a few have flown beyond her reach, and before she can pick them up, somebody else is there, grabbing the papers.

“Sorry," she says sheepishly, reaching for the papers from the young man—really, he hardly looks old enough to have graduated college—with sandy blond curls ahead of her.

He meets her eyes, but looks down again as he picks up a few more papers, his eyes lingering just a little bit too long on the first page, where the ‘married’ box is filled with a heavy black check, and while Donna isn’t sure if he recognizes or reads the name on the spouse line, if he does, that’s another person who knows.

She reaches to take the papers from him, pulling them back a little more harshly than she normally would. “Thanks,” she says harshly, almost daring him to ask about the papers.

He pushes himself up off the ground, and Donna tries to do the same, but her leg isn’t having any of it, and her first attempt is unsuccessful. To make things worse, he notices and holds out a hand, which Donna grudgingly takes.

“Alex Haverman,” he says with a smile. “I’m with the New York Times.”

Of course he’s a reporter. And now he probably knows. But Donna can’t let any of that show, in case he doesn’t actually know anything and decides to start looking. “Donna Moss,” she says.

“I know,” he replies. “You’re a spokeswoman for the Russell campaign.”

If he knows who she is, then he definitely knows who Josh is. And if he knows who Josh is, he could easily put two and two together. So Donna has to think quickly on her feet. “Yeah," she says. “And actually, you’re just the kind of person I was looking for. Something is going on with the Hoynes campaign, and I think it might be a story.” She needs someone investigating the Hoynes thing, and even more than that, she needs this guy distracted from what he just saw about her.

“That may be… above my paygrade,” Alex says, blinking quickly.

“Not at all," Donna replies. “This could be nothing, but it could also be a big story. One that you won’t want to miss out on. Look, I’ve got a thing going with the issue director on the Hoynes campaign,” and then she pales when she realizes what he must thing, if he saw that she was married, which she’s not sure he did. “It’s not a thing, but I'm gonna go… he’s supposed to be gone, but I’m pretty certain he’s still here, and I’m going to check and make sure. If Hoynes is staying in New York, don’t the people deserve to know why?”

“It could be nothing,” he says, although there’s a hint of skepticism in his voice.

“It could be everything, though,” Donna retorts. “And since you were so kind to help me pick up my things, you could get first shot at the story. Be hours ahead of everyone.”

He considers this before nodding. “Okay,” he says. “You’re going to talk to him now?”

"Yes," Donna says.

“I’ll wait at the end of the hall. Tell me what you know.”

She flashes him a grin and heads toward Brewer’s room, knocking on the door assertively.

“Who is it?” she hears from the other side.

“Donna, from the Russell campaign. You know, the ‘character doesn’t count’ people?” She offers a self-deprecating smile to the closed door. “Can I interest you in a drink? They say Manhattan has the champagne of tap waters.”

Brewer opens the door, half dressed. “I’m not decent,” he grumbles.

“I could have told you that yesterday.” Years of working with Josh have made her an expert at the casual put-down.

“I’m busy cooking up ways to legislate your spoiled kids into submission.”

Donna raises an eyebrow. “I’d have to have the kids first.” And that, of course, is something very far down the line. It’s so far off her radar she hasn’t even thought about it except in an abstract sense. It certainly isn’t going to happen in this marriage, and it’s hard to think beyond the days of the campaign.

“Is that a pickup line?” Brewer asks. “It needs a lot of work.”

Good thing it isn’t, Donna thinks, as she pushes her way into his room. She wouldn’t normally do this (well, not to anyone besides Josh) but she needs a story. She has to get a story to distract the journalists. And, as she looks around the messy room, it seems like she has one. “You’re not packed for California,” she remarks.

“There’s some kind of delay,” he tries to deflect. “I’m not sure what.”

Donna doesn’t believe him. If there was an unspecified delay, he’s be packed and ready to go the instant he was called. Things change on campaigns all the time, and there’s no way his room would be this unpacked unless he wasn’t planning on leaving at all for the next day or two. That, coupled with the fact that he seems confident he’ll be around tonight to grab a drink with her, reinforces her certainty that something is going on. “Okay,” she says. “I gotta go.”

He frowns at her. “How about that drink?”

But Donna is already gone down the hall, where she finds Alex, and to her surprise, Will. “Hoynes just cancelled his policy speech, and Brewer isn’t packed,” she says to both of them. Will tries to pull her aside, but Donna shakes her head, staying stubbornly put. “The press needs to hear this.”

“Slow down,” Will says.

Donna takes a deep breath and turns to Will. “Hoynes is still here. I don’t think he’s going to California at all. We should.”

“We can’t take this to the VP unless we're 100% sure.”

“The press should call him on it,” she says, turning to Alex. “You’re buying this sore throat nonsense? If you’re not going to write about our education plan, how about this?”

Will chuckles. "I've created a monster.”

Donna frowns. “Bad idea?” She is so sure of this story, so sure that this is going to be a twist in the campaign. And she’s not so sure that it’s Will who inspired her determination and tenacity in politics.

"Good idea. That’s what worries me,” he says. He turns to Alex. “Who do you work for?”

“The New York Times,” Alex says.

Will nods. “Good. I’m sure you heard that, but I’ve got a little tip for the paper of record.”

Donna things she’s just made a successful distraction, but it doesn’t take long for the story to begin to spiral. In the end, it’s not at all the story she expected. Instead, a tabloid breaks an interview about Hoynes making sexual advances towards a senate staffer.

While she wasn’t expecting that kind of story to break, she wishes she could say she was shocked. She’d heard rumors—gossip travels between assistants in the White House and OEOB and Senate and House—of other women feeling deeply uncomfortable with Hoynes. She’d never heard of anything actually happening, but she knew that he sometimes could make the work environment uncomfortable. The very concept of female staffers like her being sexually harassed like that makes her sick to her stomach. It happens, she knows, and it happens with disturbing frequency, but she thinks of the women she knows who worked in the OEOB and what they could have gone through.

She didn’t interact with Hoynes much, but he’s certainly made comments towards her in passing on Air Force One that were just this side of appropriate, and it’s not hard to imagine him going much further.

She feels sick at the thought.

She doesn’t have too much time to ponder it, though, because suddenly, she’s being chased down by reporters. It’s like she’s the face of the story, since she kept pushing the press to look for Hoynes; she didn’t think it was going to come to this. 

“Donna!” reporters call as she comes out of her room to head towards the airport. Air Force Two is waiting to take them to California.

“I had no idea about the Senate staffers!” she shouts back. And while she probably could have suspected that something went on, it was not her story to tell. She’s certain more stories will be emerging in the next couple weeks, but she won’t be the one breaking them.

“You’ve been pushing this,” one of the reporters shouts back. “You know something!”

Donna shrugs. “He locks himself in a hotel room, he could be shaving his legs! How am I supposed to know what he’s doing? Do I look like an investigative reporter?” She lets the elevator close behind her and heads down to the car.

There’s a press pool on the plane, of course, and much to her surprise, Alex Haverman is there. Impressive, she thinks, that he has press credentials to travel with the Vice President for as young as he is. He locks eyes with her as she boards, before quickly looking back down at his notes.

Before she can approach him, however, Will comes up to her and taps her on the shoulder. “You’re here,” he says. “Good. The Vice President wants to see you.”

Donna looks at him with surprise. She's talked to the VP several times, but she’s not sure he’s ever asked specifically to see her. “Alright,” she says, heading towards his cabin. She drops her tote bag on a seat, briefly wondering if someone might pick it up and try to look at her tax papers again. But all the reporters have other things to be doing, she thinks, and so she leaves it there before stepping into the Vice President’s cabin.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

Bob Russell looks up at her. “I’m sorry your name is in these stories,” he says. “You had no idea what this was actually about.”

“No," she says sheepishly. “I was just trying to sniff out why Hoynes was…”

“They’re just filling column inches,” he says, cutting her off. “If I believed everything they wrote about me, I’d be voting for Pat Paulsen again.” At Donna’s blank look, he shakes his head. “That was a joke. I never voted for Pat Paulsen.”

Donna bites her lip, unsure how to respond to that. Instead, she tells him, “Will’s talking to California’s governor.”

“I wouldn’t call him myself,” Russell explains. “Not until we can be confident we have an endorsement.” He looks up at Donna and for perhaps the first time, sees just how shaky she is. “The allegations are nobody’s business.” 

Donna bites her lip; there’s no need to argue this right now. She thinks that people should know what kind of person they’re voting for, although these allegations should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. “Yes sir,” she says.

Russell seems to sense her hesitation. “You don’t agree?”

Donna thinks about all the women she knows and what Hoynes may have put them through, and what other terrible things might have happened to some of them. Worse stories are not uncommon either. And then there’s the hypocrisy. “For it to be none of our business, he shouldn’t have talked about character education," she says, reverting to the lines she’s been using as a spokesperson for the last few weeks. “Set a standard, you have to meet it.”

Before Russell can say anything, Will comes in with a frown. “The governor won’t take endorsement meetings.”

Donna listens as they go through the particulars of trying to get the governor of California’s endorsement, but her head is spinning. She leaves the cabin quietly, heading towards the front of the plane to grab some coffee, but she feels a hand on her wrist.

Alex Haverman. She sincerely hopes this kid journalist isn’t about to become the bane of her existence.

“Thanks for the tip,” he says, giving her a bit of a smile. “You know, I don’t think I’m going to have time to write about the personal lives of campaign staffers,” he says. “Not unless it’s relevant to the campaigns.”

Donna swallows. He definitely knows. “Gotta stay focused on the issues,” she says in agreement. “And any time you need something from the campaign…” she can’t really make any promises, and of course she’s not going to do anything illegal, but she also would very much like to keep this reporter happy.

“Thanks,” Alex says. “I need to finish writing this.”

“Yeah. Write something good,” she replies awkwardly, watching him head back to the press cabin.

She pours herself a cup of coffee and rubs her forehead. This is not good, but it’s not reportable. Not yet. He can’t just use a brief glance at her tax papers as a source.

Still, she and Josh have to be careful.

While she’s thinking about Josh, her cell phone rings. She picks it up, surprised to hear the voice on the other end of the line. 

“Josh?”

Chapter Text

One of the perks of winning a primary (two primaries, actually, and Josh is absolutely counting) is the fact that there’s more money in the budget. One of the perks of having more money in the budget is being able to get an actual 737 for the campaign and the press who have finally decided they’re worth writing about, instead of the candidate flying a plane small enough to drive on the highway. It’s definitely a perk, not having to hold back his nausea every time they’re in the air, but Josh is also starting to feel the pressure of the campaign. Not that he wasn’t before, but this is a real campaign. He suddenly has a press pool. He suddenly has to navigate the press asking him questions about polls that he really doesn’t want to answer.

Josh has spent a lot of time looking at polls in his life—he’s certain he’s spent more time than any of the reporters hounding him about the polls currently—and he still can’t see what the normal public finds so fascinating. The only poll that matters is on Super Tuesday. Which is just what he tells one of the reporters when they tell him that Hoynes is up nine points in California.

What do the people of California see in Hoynes? Josh worked for the guy, helped plan his campaign strategy back in the day, and he doesn’t even know. So he lets his guard down a bit. “Off the record,” he tells the reporter, “no way is Hoynes up nine in California.”

He fends off a few more questions about polls before heading to the front of the plane again. He doesn’t want to look at another poll for the rest of his life. (If Tuesday goes badly enough, maybe he won’t even have to. No one will hire him once he’s flopped this badly on a campaign.) He gives a smile to Santos that he thinks probably looks more like a grimace, but it’s the best he can manage.

(Helen had asked him, last week, if his face was just permanently frozen into that scowl of concern. She had been teasing, of course, but Josh hadn’t had the energy to actually smile, and he wondered if she might be right.)

He finds out that the California legislature has screwed him over—have screwed the whole Democratic field over, really, but this feels like a personal affront—with a bill banning driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. As the pilot (who is thankfully not the Congressman) makes the announcement about landing, Josh buckles in next to Santos and explains the situation with regret. “I know you’re gonna want to speak out…” he starts, after Santos has absorbed the information.

Before he can say anything else, however, his candidate shakes his head. “I don’t want to speak out.”

“You don’t?” Josh was certain that this would be as much a part of Santos’ campaign for progressive values and equal justice, just as much as criticizing the setup of the New Hampshire primaries.

“No,” Santos says, leaving it at that.

Josh is surprised, but he’s not going to argue. “When we're on the ground in California, what are we talking about?” he quizzes.

“Whatever I want to talk about,” Santos challenges, with a bit of a mischievous glint in his eye. “It’s my campaign, isn’t it?”

Josh bites his lip. He knows it’s a joke, but there are other things to worry about here. “It is, but what are we…”

“Healthcare,” Santos says firmly. “It's all going to be about healthcare.”

Josh closes his eyes and leans his head back against the seat. He's starting to feel the week’s worth of two-hour nights of sleep, and he certainly won’t get a rest from them until after Tuesday, if not longer.

Once they’re at the hotel, there’s a barrage of things to take care of; Santos has phone calls to make to thank donors, he has to meet with the editor of La Palabra, and then there are meetings with lobbyists all afternoon before a fundraiser tonight. Josh remembers loving this chaos before, living for the adrenaline rush of trying to talk to five different people at once, but now the chatter around him seems to translate only to white noise in his brain. He thinks he’s losing his touch.

He follows Santos out of the hotel suite and down the hall, gripping a schedule in his hand. “You’re with the herbal healthcare lobby in five minutes,” he tells his candidate.

“I was doing a home healthcare hit," Santos says in confusion. “What does herbal…”

“This is the pre-hit,” Josh explains.

“Herbal medicine?”

Josh shrugs. “They’re upset our healthcare plan doesn’t cover… acoustic guitar playing. We said we’d do a meeting before the speech.” It’s not a group to be taken seriously, of course, but Josh can’t help but wonder how someone could care so much about coverage for these alternative, unproven healthcare strategies when so many people don’t even have access to the basic care that they need. He's not necessarily opposed to researching alternative forms of healthcare—hell, if they can find natural remedies without the side effects of some of his medications, he’d be all for it—but he can hardly have much sympathy when he can’t even get coverage for the evidence-based treatments that have saved his life.

Well, he has coverage now. He taps his wallet in his pocket, where he knows his insurance card is. His insurance card that has Donna’s name on it. It’s funny, he thinks, how their marriage is really hiding in plain sight. Sooner or later, someone is going to find out, but he doesn’t even have time to worry about that. Even in his sea of fears, he only has so much capacity for anxiety.

It’s hit after hit of bad news for Josh that afternoon. Their campaign finance director very bluntly tells him that if they don’t place second in California, they won’t have enough money to continue the race. He finds out that the endorsement of La Palabra is off. New polls come in—outside pols, not internal—and things still look bad, with Hoynes up 7 and Santos and Russell neck and neck. How can Hoynes be up so much in California when he’s faced with a candidate from the western half of the country and a Latino candidate?

And not only does Josh have to absorb and deal with all of this bad news, he also has to present it to the candidate. He calls in the campaign finance director to give the bad news, but Santos doesn’t take it like he thought he would. Instead, he offers to mortgage his own house to fund a Texas primary, offers to go back to Congress, offers to give up pretty much everything to try to get to Texas, to try to stay in the race.

This, to Josh, is frightening. Just two months ago, Santos was planning to make a few speeches and then drop out. It had been Josh who was willing to give up everything to run the campaign. Now Josh sees that the end is in sight, but Santos has been blinded to that. He thinks he’s going to get the nomination, and Josh knows that he’s not.

But, for as much bad news as he’s had to break today, that’s the one thing he can’t quite bear to share. Perhaps it would be gentler to let him down now, but Josh can’t quite bear to do that.

Donna calls him that evening, asking him about taxes of all things. Taxes are the furthest thing from his mind, so he tries to put it off until they’re in DC next, not fully absorbing the fact that because they’re married, they’ll have to coordinate their taxes together. The only thing he really hears is that Russell isn’t planning to come out to California. That’s not a shocker, but he feels a little bit bad about finding out about it this way. As much as he wants every advantage possible in the hell that is this primary race, he also doesn’t want to take advantage of his relationship with Donna to get ahead.

He tosses and turns all night, trying to thing of how to convince his candidate that the tide won’t turn unless a miracle happens. And frankly, Josh thinks as his hand runs over the rough ride on his sternum, as he thinks of Donna on the other side of the country, to the best of his knowledge breathing and alive… well, he thinks he might have used up all of his miracles.

He’s getting dressed in the morning, looking out the window at the sunny California day, when he hears a knock on his door. He’s pulled his pants on but he has his arm in one shirt sleeve. “Come in,” he says, as he pulls his other arm in. He turns his head to see his candidate’s wife. “Mrs. Santos,” he says.

“Call me Helen,” she corrects. “You make me sound like a grandmother, or a shop teacher.”

Josh pulls his other arm into the shirt. “He’s doing TV interviews if you’re looking for him.”

“No, I’m looking for you.” She sighs heavily and takes a few more steps into the room, although she still seems out of place. “I want to talk about…”

“Don’t sign the loan papers,” Josh interrupts her. He can’t bear the thought of the Santos family giving up everything for a dream he knows won’t happen. He’s not going to ruin a family’s future for his own egotistical pipe dream of putting a man in the Oval Office. He swallows. “There are bad tradeoffs in this business.”

Helen raises an eyebrow. “Are those bad tradeoffs for the staff? Those long hours must be dreadful, and the fast food…”

Josh doesn’t mean to do it. He really doesn’t. He understands Helen’s frustration, if only because Abbey Bartlet had articulately expressed the same to him on multiple occasions, practically daring him to fail to see her point of view. So he understands Helen’s hesitations, but he also doesn’t appreciate her sarcasm. Not when he has made so many bad tradeoffs.

So he turns around, with his shirt still unbuttoned, and takes a few steps closer to her. “I feel terrible about that meeting,” he tells her, and his eyes are on her as she tries very hard, and then fails to avoid looking at him.

She doesn’t say anything, not at first, but her eyes fix on his chest, on the long line down his sternum, on the puckered indentation to the side. He can practically see her mind working, and he can see the moment it clicks and she looks up at him. There’s a kind of embarrassed horror in her eyes. “Josh, I want you to know, I didn’t mean you haven’t made sacrifices, I just…”

He shrugs. “I didn’t take it that way,” he says calmly, almost daring her to ask the question.

She bites her lip and tears her eyes away from his bared body to meet his. “You were with the President when the assassination attempt happened,” she says.

Josh blinks a couple times, but nods. He’s been asked this question more than a few times at this point in his life. “Yeah,” he says, his hand drifting up to rub at the bullet scar just a little bit. “Yeah, I was.”

“And you got shot,” she concludes.

Josh nods, and begins to button up the shirt. “I did.”

“Does Matt know about this?” Helen asks.

“I don’t know,” Josh says. “I mean, it was pretty major news, but we’ve never talked about it so I’m not certain he’s put two and two together.”

Helen crosses her arms over herself. “I hadn’t,” she admits. “I remember watching the news but I guess I never made the connection that…”

“Not a lot of people do,” he says, and that’s perfectly alright with him. It’s not what he wants to be remembered for.

“Are you… are you okay now? Oh god, is that why you and Donna…”

He stares at his feet, realizing that he put his shoes on before putting his shirt on. Why did he do that? If he had put his shirt on first, he wouldn’t have to have this uncomfortable conversation. “It's a hell of a preexisting condition. I’ve got a lung full of scar tissue and one of the arteries coming out of my heart is holding together by sheer force of will and a few stitches and my blood pressure is through the roof at any given moment so no insurer is interested in me. But you know, other than that, I’m fine.”

“That... that explains things,” Helen says. “Josh, I’m so sorry, I really didn’t mean to imply you hadn’t made sacrifices. I was just…”

“You thought you were getting out of it altogether and then you were forced to give up everything you’d planned in order to fund a few more weeks of a campaign that was a pipe dream to begin with,” Josh concludes. “I get it.”

She swallows and looks him in the eye. “What chance do we have of coming in second, Josh?”

“We have a chance,” he says, not quite meeting her eyes. He remembers asking something like that after Gaza, after he wasn’t sure if Donna would come through the surgery without brain damage. He had asked what chance there was that she would be okay, and no doctor would give him specifics. He supposes that there are ethical reasons for that, but he remembers the way it made his already poorly-controlled anxiety spike.

“What chance?”

He lets out a heavy breath. “Pretty small one,” he admits, his voice catching on the words. The laws of probability are not on his side, even if they miraculously benefitted him in Donna’s case. Or in his own. No one would give him specifics, but somehow he found out that the chance of someone surviving a gunshot wound like his was something like 1 in 4. With every hour, he’s increasingly more convinced that he’s used up his miracles.

Helen doesn’t react very strongly to this. “Well,” she says, “thanks for talking shop.”

Josh flops backward on his bed and rubs his forehead, trying to summon the energy to head out and try to finagle this endorsement that seems to be slipping further and further from his fingers.

His meeting with the editor of La Palabra doesn’t go well, and he calls Leo to complain about it, as well as all the other things that haven’t been going his way. He feels a little bit bad bothering Leo, but he also knows that Leo is probably itching to be involved, to do something useful. While he’s been in on things at the White House, it’s not the same as actually governing. Josh remembers well those long months of inactivity when all he wanted to do was get back to work. So if he feels bad about calling Leo constantly, he also knows that Leo appreciates it, and more than that, knows that he himself needs it to keep whatever small bit of sanity he still has.

It’s another long day; Santos does interview after interview about the importance of healthcare and Josh tries not to think too much about what might happen if it’s found out that his campaign can't even provide healthcare to its employees, Santos visits an elementary school, and every single question is about either the driver’s license bill or the less than ideal polls. Josh keeps hearing whispers about something going on back east with Hoynes and Russell, but he’s too wrapped up in everything here to learn about it until Ronna comes rushing up to him with a full report of everything she’s heard out of New York.

“Are we doing enough free media in Los Angeles?” Santos asks as he boards the plane to LA.

Josh was wondering the same thing half an hour ago, but now he has bigger fish to fry. “There’s a story coming out of New York,” he says. “Hoynes might not be coming to California.”

“Not at all?” Santos questions.

Josh shrugs. “That’s the rumor. His whole itinerary was a fakeout so that Russell wouldn’t campaign here. Hoynes puts his California lead in the bank, dukes it out with Russell back east.”

Santos reaches up to put his bag in the overhead compartment. “If Hoynes doesn’t come here at all…”

“Then he doesn’t have to take a stand on the driver’s license bill. Doesn’t have to keep his promise to Garcia,” Josh finishes. “We’ve got about five of our reporters working on it. They think he may be trying to draw us out.”

“Latino comes out for Latinos and Hoynes attacks us for being weak on immigration and terrorism,” Santos concludes.

Josh knows John Hoynes pretty well, and that sounds exactly like the kind of political maneuver he would use. It had been easy enough for Jed Bartlet to get around those, but Bartlet had a lot of privileges that Santos does not. “Maybe,” he says.

Helen frowns. “So Matt’s the only candidate from either party who’s here in California, and yet he’s in third place?”

Santos ignores this because he knows just as well as Josh that it isn’t that simple, and instead tosses Josh an orange with a question on it—where is Hoynes?—telling him to get more reporters on the story. Josh isn’t sure it’ll amount to anything, but still, two months into this campaign, they’re in a place where any free media is an advantage for them.

It’s probably not enough, but Matt Santos has a kind of political adrenaline that is boosted by how close they are to complete and utter failure. Josh had that once.

Josh calls Leo again and every conversation he has makes it more and more clear that this is the end of the line and there’s nothing he can do about it. While Leo says that he’s done a remarkable job, all Josh can think of are his failures on this campaign.

When the fall’s all that’s left, he remembers President Bartlet quoting once, it matters a great deal.

So he has to let Santos down gently. Has to make sure the consequences of this campaign don’t hurt his future. Has to make sure he doesn’t have this on his conscience along with everything else.

When Josh comes back to the hotel suite, Santos and his wife are in their bedroom, about to sign the mortgage papers. But it’s not Matt Santos who asked for them, it’s Helen. When he enters the room, she looks up at him and raises an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose in addition to your many skills, you’re a notary public?”

“Don’t sign those,” he says with a heavy sigh.

“We’re not sending them to the bank unless we have to.” Santos puts his signature down and adds, “just want to make sure we’re covered for Texas.”

“It’s your financial future.” Josh can feel the weight of this, and it’s on him. It’s heavily on him.

“Which is why we're going to come in second,” Santos declares.

Josh closes the door behind him. “We can’t,” he whispers, hoping the candidate doesn’t hear the distress in his voice. “There’s no chance. I’m sorry.”

“We’ve got Hoynes staying in New York…"

“We’re not going to win the nomination. I made myself believe it. You too, but… you can’t risk everything for this.” He can’t risk another person’s life being ruined or lost because of him. “You should go to La Palabra, make a strong statement against the driver’s license bill. You should remember who your friends are, not some names on an index card, but the people you’re going back to.” He sighs, not wanting to have to put this into words. “And then you should take a bow and you should step off the stage.”

Helen doesn’t seem to react much. She wordlessly squeezes her husband’s shoulder and exits the room, and Santos looks up at Josh.

To Josh's surprise, he tells a story, about how the kids in his neighborhood tried to hide him from the FBI. About how he needs to run in the Texas primary to show the people of his neighborhood where he came from, and where he is now, and what they can become. Josh doesn’t say anything—it’s a lot to process—but Bram interrupts with more calls for Santos to make.

It’s the candidate’s decision, he has to remind himself. It’s up to Matt Santos and Matt Santos only, and if he’ll risk his financial future for this, then there’s nothing Josh can do to stop him.

It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have Matt Santos back in Congress either, if not in the White House.

He looks up at the TV and his eyes widen when he sees someone familiar faced with many reporters right outside of Air Force Two. He squints a little—it’s Donna. Of course it’s Donna. And she’s answering questions about something that he can’t quite make out. “Turn up the TV!” he says, practically bouncing across the room.

They cut away from Donna, but it only takes Josh a few minutes to piece together what’s going on. There are sexual assault allegations against Hoynes. They’re serious enough that he’s suspending his campaign. And suddenly, the whole dynamic is changed.

Somehow, however, Josh’s first thought is Donna. If Donna was the one answering questions, was she the one making the allegations?

It’s stupid, of course. There are a hundred other reasons Donna might be answering questions, not least of which is her job as spokeswoman for the Russell campaign. There absolutely no reason he should be concerned for her, and yet he can’t get her face out of his mind.

He manages to push the thought of Donna away from the superficial reaches of his mind, although that’s about as far down as he’ll ever be able to get his fear for her to go. It will always linger there, momentarily ignored, perhaps, but never fully absent. Still, he finds Santos, explains what’s going on, and completely rearranges the press schedule so that Santos can talk about healthcare and education and not about Hoynes.

It’s a whirlwind again, and Josh doesn’t allow himself to hope that this might be another miracle for him, one he doesn’t feel deserving of. It might be too late to help them in California, but he has to work with what he can.

While the press coordination team is busy taking requests and scheduling the candidate, Josh manages to head out into a corner of the hotel and dial the number he’s been waiting to call ever since the news broke. He doesn’t have much hope she’ll pick up—she’s just as swamped as he is—but he presses number one on his speed dial anyway and listens to the tone.

He almost jumps when he hears her voice on the other side of the line. “Josh?"

“Donna, hi,” he says, taping his foot with unprecedented speed. “Where are you?”
“I’m on the plane,” she says. “Good thing it’s not a commercial flight or they’d be pretty upset with me right now.”

“On the plane? To where?”

"Take a wild guess.”

He sighs heavily. “You’re coming to California,” he says. He should have seen that coming, but his planning had kind of relied on having California all to himself.

“Don’t tell me you're shocked.”

“I’m not! I just… I’m sorry, my head is kind of all over the place. There’s a lot going on and I…”

“And yet you’re calling me,” he hears on the other side of the line. There’s a softness to her voice, even if it is mixed with disbelief.

Josh shuffles uncomfortably before deciding to put his back against the wall. He hasn’t done this much lately, and he really should be doing it more. “Yeah.” He scrubs his forehead before moving down to rubbing his eye furiously. “Look, I just needed to check in with you after the Hoynes thing. I’m seeing your name in some of this stuff and I don’t think I’ve gotten the whole story but were you… did you know the accuser?”

“No,” Donna says, and he’s almost relieved. While he knew it almost certainly couldn’t have been Donna (if it were, John Hoynes would be a dead man right this minute), there was still a nagging fear in the back of his mind that something terrible could have happened to Donna that he didn’t know about. “I mean, it’s anonymous, so I don’t know who it is, but she didn’t come to me with the allegations. I wasn’t… I kind of stumbled across it.”

Josh swallows. “But you were involved?”

“I was trying to track down the reason Hoynes wasn’t coming to California,” Donna explains. “It was… well, let’s just say a guy from the Hoynes campaign asked me out for a drink and the timing didn’t add up.”

“He asked you out?” Josh asks with incredulity.

“It's almost like I'm an attractive woman who appears, at least at the moment, to be single,” Donna shoots back, and it almost stings him to think about. “It’s not like I’m wearing a ring or anything.”

Josh runs his hand through his hair again. It’s already practically standing up on end, but it’s still short enough that it just seems to stick out like tufts on his head rather than really getting messy. “Yeah, sorry. I just…”

He can hear a soft laugh on the other side of the line. “I didn’t go out with him, Josh. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t…”

“I didn’t go out with him,” Donna reiterates. She pauses for a moment, and Josh is about to say something when she launches again. “Actually… Josh, I should tell you something. I was filling out some of the tax forms, and then I had to leave and the papers kind of all flew out over the floor and a reporter saw them when he helped me pick them up and anyway he… he saw that I was married to you.”

Josh frowns. “A reporter?”

“Kid from the New York Times. He just told me he’s not going to do anything with it, because seeing the edge of a tax form on the floor of the hotel is not exactly what we’d call a reliable source, but I just thought you should know. That there’s someone else out there who knows, you know?”

Josh frowns, trying to think about the discussion of taxes he and Donna had earlier. He hadn't really been paying attention, having been far too distracted by everything else that was going on. But it hits him, suddenly, that none of this is necessary. “Donna, we got…” he looks around surreptitiously, in case anyone might be listening, before lowering his voice to whisper, “married in January.”

“Yes,” Donna agrees. “I remember pretty well. Actually, probably better than you, since you were so out of it.”

“Donna…”

“What do that have to do with anything?”

He sighs and pushes himself off the wall, beginning to pace. The back against the wall only works for so long, he supposes, before he just needs to move. “The tax year only goes until December. You and I were not married at any point in the last year. So there’s no way we’re going to be filing our taxes as married. You know that, right?”

There’s a silence for a moment, and Josh can just imagine her mouth going slightly agape at the realization. He smiles a little bit at the thought. It’s a rather sweet image of Donna. “I’m so stupid!” he hears her say. “Oh my god, you’re right. I’m so stupid.”

“No, that's just campaign brain for you,” Josh says. “Do you remember on the second campaign when you were trying to schedule a meeting for me with a senator from Washington and I kept insisting there was no such person?”

Donna chuckles. “Yeah. The President gave you some shit for that once he found out, didn’t he?”

He smiles softly at the memory. He’d been so convinced she was talking about the senator from DC that he had blankly refused to even consider setting up a meeting with a person who didn’t exist. “Not as much as Charlie when he found out.”

“Campaign brain, huh?” Donna repeats. “Well, anyway, be nice to Alex Haverman from the New York Times, because he’s seen my now clearly incorrect tax papers and knows that we're married.”

Josh swallows. A reporter knowing is far from ideal, but it’s not like it’s something he can report on. Not yet. “Okay,” he says. He looks across the hallway. There’s a lot going on, and he definitely needs to get back in there, but before he can, he has to ask Donna the question that has been tugging at him since he saw the news. “Donna, when you worked for me, did Hoynes ever…”

“He didn’t do anything to me,” Donna says firmly.

He lets out a sigh of relief. “Okay, I’m glad, because I was the one who pushed him as VP and if he had…”

“He made a few comments that made me uncomfortable, but honestly, so have half the senators I’ve met with,” Donna says. “And you didn't know any of this about him. Don’t feel bad about what you couldn’t have possibly known.”

He finds himself leaning against the wall again. “I just… I almost made this man President. We made him Vice President. And if I hadn’t left his…”

“The voters made him Vice President," Donna corrects, “and if you don’t have respect for the voters, you should get out of this business.”

Josh chuckles at that. “All those years of elitism have ruined my respect, I’m afraid.”
“Well,” Donna replies, “you better get it back soon. It's a two man race now, and you have a lot of catching up to do.”

“We were... we were going to drop out after Texas. We should have dropped out after California but… god, I shouldn’t tell you this. That's breaking the rule.”

Donna shakes her head. “You know what? I’m not going to say anything. Look, I have a lot of reporters to talk to, so if you…”

“Yeah, no, you can go. I’m just… I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad it wasn’t you that Hoynes…”

“I’m fine, Josh,” Donna says firmly. “You have a presidential campaign to run, and a fighting chance. Go take it.”

Josh smiles slightly. A fighting chance. That might be all he needs. “Yeah. Okay. And Donna?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t realize about the tax thing until we talked about it again. I was ready to have the President do our taxes so no one else would have to know. Campaign brain, right?”

Donna laughs on the other side of the line. “Go use that campaign brain of yours,” she says. “I’ll see you later.”

A little bit of the ache that has been squeezing his heart lately relaxes as he pockets his phone and heads back into the suite, renewed with the energy to keep the campaign running.

And run it does. Santos stands with the governor of California on the driver’s license bill, and does media until his voice is hoarse, and does everything he possibly can to reach the voters. It’s a long couple of days, but it’s worth it in the end.

Russell carries the East Coast, to no one’s surprise. New York and Rhode Island were never really in their reach. But close as California is, they call it. They call it for Matt Santos.

They win California.

It’s a whole new race suddenly, and Josh can’t help but think that he’s received yet another miracle.

Even more miraculously, Donna calls afterward to congratulate him, without a hint of sarcasm or vitriol. They may be on opposite sides of this thing, but they’re not enemies, not anymore.

Josh finds the time to do his taxes on a flight back across the country, and can’t help but think about how next year, he will have to check that ‘married’ box

Chapter Text

The exit polls are bad.

Will had explained to her, after Hoynes dropped out, that it should be a fairly easy rest of the primaries. Russell is miles ahead, almost guaranteed to have the most delegates if not enough to win it all outright. Santos, despite winning California, should not be a serious challenger, and would drop out in a matter of weeks once Josh Lyman got his head out of his ass and did some electoral math.

Donna might have been annoyed with the way Will explained it to her and the concision with which he spoke, but she really could not be bothered to care all that much, because she’s not sure she believes him at all. For one, math has never been Josh’s strong suit, so she wouldn’t count on that to convince him to end the race. For another, she doesn’t know if a Santos dropout is imminent; maybe he can’t get enough delegates to win the nomination outright, but Josh won’t let the concept of a contested convention stop his mission.

Will doesn’t get Josh, and she supposes that’s just as well, but if anything will be the downfall of the Russell campaign, it will be underestimating Josh Lyman.

Both the Texas and Florida primaries are held on the same day, which means that there are a lot of delegates up for grabs today. As soon as Santos won California, the Russell team had decided that Texas was a lost cause. It's hard to beat a native son who has a lot of momentum and popularity. So, while the Santos team has been back and forth between Texas and Florida this week, the Russell campaign has spent almost the whole week in Florida, working their way down from the outer reaches of the panhandle to where they’re spending the day of the primary in Miami.

It’s a terrible time to be in Miami, Donna thinks, because so many universities are on spring break and the streets are packed with sorority girls in tiny bikinis showing fake IDs that bouncers don’t check too closely. While Donna was never really that type of girl in college anyway, she looks on with envy and wonders what it might be like to be that carefree. She’s never going to wear a bikini again, not with the scar on her chest that seems to stubbornly refuses to fair, and jury is out if she’ll even wear a swimsuit that show she scars on her leg.

Still, Donna thinks it would be nice to go back in time for a night and wear something that barely counts as clothes and drink too many vodka cranberries and stumble back home as the sun rises.

Instead, she’s here in the air-conditioned conference room of a hotel in Miami, looking over exit polls that are simply put, bad.

The polls haven’t closed in Texas yet, but it’s already obvious that they’re going to lose and they’re going to lose badly. That didn’t come as a surprise. But the Florida polls are even more painful to look at; they’re splitting almost 65% for Santos. After a whole week touching almost every county in the state, they still don’t have a chance of winning.

“So, I guess the party tonight is probably off,” Donna says with a sigh. That’s alright, in some ways, since she hadn’t planned on going. She has dinner plans with Rachel Lyman, of all people.

She’s kept in touch with Josh’s mother even after leaving; she hadn’t been planning to, but Rachel kept calling to check in, and while Donna thinks Josh might be upset about it, she also misses talking to Rachel.

Rachel had been upset that Josh wasn’t going to be spending much time in Florida, but she tracked down Donna and found out that she was going to be in Florida all week, and practically insisted that she take Donna out for dinner. Donna hadn’t had a free moment to join her, but she promised that on the night of the election, she’s be able to escape the party and go out for the evening.

Of course, there probably won’t be any party, but Illinois is a week away and she can certainly take one night off of campaigning to visit with Rachel.

Rachel lives in Palm Beach, but she insists on driving the hour and a half down to Miami. Josh has secretly confessed to her that he doesn’t like how much his mother still drives at her age, but Rachel is very young for her age and honestly probably in better physical condition than her son.

“Donna!” Rachel says as she enters the lobby of the hotel. “You look good.”

“I’m tired,” Donna says with a shrug, “but I’ve been worse.”

“Yes, well, that’s life in politics, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve seen Josh not tired for the last eight years. Longer, really.”

Donna sighs. “Yeah, probably not.”

Rachel reaches out to hug Donna warmly. “My goodness, I’m so glad to see you. I can’t believe Joshua hasn’t bothered to make it out to here but…”

“Well, they were a little busy in Texas,” Donna says with a shrug. “They’re gonna win Texas. Don't tell any reporters I said this, but they’re gonna win Florida too.”

Rachel smiles slightly as she pulls back. “Well, I don’t want to offend you or the work you’ve done for your guy, but I did vote for Santos today.”

“Completely understandable,” Donna says. “I mean, Josh is your son and…”

“Oh, no, I didn't just vote for him because of Josh,” Rachel says. “Really, back in ’98 do you think I would have voted for Hoynes because Josh worked for him? Over Bartlet?”

Donna shrugs. “I don’t know, but I… well, I’m glad you voted anyway. Even if we're going to lose Florida by an embarrassing margin,” she says in a slightly lowered voice.

“Come on,” Rachel says, taking Donna’s arm. “I bet you’ve never had real good Cuban food.”

She and Donna are settled over cocktails and have just ordered their food when Rachel asks the question that Donna had been hoping she didn’t ask. “Have you seen Josh lately?” she asks.

Donna blanches, and even though she’s been mentally preparing herself for this, she stumbles over her words. “What do you mean?” she asks, before grabbing her drink to swallow again so that Rachel doesn’t look too closely into it.

“What do I mean?” Rachel asks with a frown. “I mean, have you seen my son lately? I don’t think there were additional layers to that question.”

“I mean, I see him around,” Donna says. “You know, we’re at the same campaign stops and everything sometimes.”

“Hmm,” Rachel says, taking a sip of her own drink. “Are you talking to each other again?”

“What?”

“Last time I asked Josh about you, he seemed pretty cut up that you weren’t talking to each other.”

This makes Donna’s heart ache. Of course Josh would be cut up about that, although their ‘breakup’ of sorts was just as much his fault as hers. Still, she had assumed that he wouldn’t really care, that he was too busy to be bothered. Apparently not. “Yeah, well, we’ve talked a bit now.”

“What changed?” Rachel asks.

Donna's eyes widen as she realizes that Rachel might have figured this out already. Rachel might know. “What do you mean, what changed?” she tries to deflect.

“What do I mean…” Rachel shakes her head in exasperation. “Well you two weren’t talking, and now you are, so clearly something happened, and while I don’t expect that you two got married or anything…”

Donna can't contain the sharp exhale she lets out, and has to fight the sudden urge to duck under the table.

Rachel frowns. “Everything alright, Donna?”

She swallows. “Yeah.”

“Really, because…”

She’s not sure why she says it. Maybe it’s the drink—she realizes she didn’t really eat anything today, so of course it’s going to her head quickly—or maybe it’s her exhaustion, or maybe there’s something about the look in Rachel’s eyes that compels her to be honest. Whatever it is, she says it. “We’re married,” she blurts out before she can stop herself. Her voice is small and she’s sure no one else can hear it, but there’s no taking it back in front of Rachel.

Rachel takes a sip of her drink, looking remarkably composed. “You’re married?”

Could she pass it off as a joke right now? Probably, but her brain is not agile enough to do that at the moment, not with how tired she is, not with how she reacted to saying that. No, it’s pretty obvious that she is telling the truth, and there’s no taking it back.

There really shouldn’t be, though, not with Josh’s mom. If anyone should know, it should be her. Josh will be furious, of course, that his mother found out this way, but what’s done is done.

“Sort of,” Donna says.

“Well, I’m even more confused now,” Rachel says. “How long have you been married?”

“Since January,” she admits, looking down at the checkered tablecloth in front of her. She can’t meet Rachel’s eyes; they’re too much like Josh’s eyes.

Rachel squints in confusion. “I seem to remember Josh calling me in January and being upset that you weren’t talking to each other.”

Donna picks at the edge of the tablecloth, pulling it up ever so slightly and making her mostly empty drink shake. “It’s a little complicated.”

“We have time for you to explain,” Rachel says.

“I uh… I found out he didn’t have health insurance when we were in Iowa for the caucus.”

“He doesn’t have health insurance?” Rachel asks, letting her jaw drop slightly. “That boy, I swear, he’s…”

Donna shakes her head, still looking down. “He didn’t, because the campaign didn’t have the funds to provide it and they weren’t legally required to. He tried to get it on his own but got turned down because of his preexisting conditions. So, I found out about this and figured that if we got married, I could get him on my plan. So... we did. That’s it.”

She finally looks up at Rachel, who is smiling, although in such a sad way. She reaches out and squeezes Donna’s hand. “That’s very generous of you. Thank you for loving my son so well.”

“Rachel…”

“I don’t mean that it’s necessarily romantic love,” Rachel corrects quickly, “but it’s clear how deeply you care about him.”

That’s it, Donna thinks. She cares about him, and it’s nothing more than that. It can’t be anything more than that. “You spend seven years working that closely with someone and it’s hard not to.”

“I’m not so sure that’s it,” Rachel says, “but you and him have a pretty special connection.

Donna rubs her forehead. “It's not… it's actually been quite awkward between us since I quit. We’re just… we talk because we need to figure things out legally, and that’s about it. It’s… I think we’ve broken something between us irreparably.” She glances around the restaurant shiftily before straightening up. “But you don’t need to hear about all that. How have you been? I know you’ve been doing some volunteering, tell me about that!”

Rachel looks like she wants to say something else, wants to continue the conversation with Donna, but she presses her lips together before beginning to launch into a discussion of her many volunteer activities. Donna can certainly see where Josh got his workaholic tendencies from, between Rachel’s constant motion and the stories she’s heard about Noah’s intense focus on cases at all hours of the day.

Much to her annoyance, however, she can feel her cell phone buzzing in her pocket. She’s almost certain it’s someone from the campaign calling to let her know they officially lost Florida, but if she doesn’t pick up, she knows from experience that she won’t be left alone until she answers. “I’m so sorry,” she says to Rachel as she pulls her phone out, “but I have to take this.”

“I understand,” Rachel says with a smile. “My son has been doing this to me for the last two decades.”

Donna offers a gentle smile at this before picking up the phone. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end of the line is unfamiliar. “Are you Donna Moss?”

“I am…” she says, her voice wavering a little bit. “Who is this?”

“I’m calling from Houston Methodist Hospital,” the voice on the other side of the line says, and Donna’s stomach drops. It’s Josh, she knows it’s Josh. She doesn’t even have to wait for the caller to say, “You’re listed as an emergency contact for Joshua Lyman?”

She swallows. “Yes,” she replies, and she’s honestly shocked that she’s able to get anything out.

“I can't legally give you details over the phone, but he’s here in the ER. He’s stable, but they’re taking him in for surgery in a few minutes. Are you able to come here?”

Donna winces. “I’m kind of… I’m in Florida right now but…” she looks at her watch. It’s 7pm. Surely there will be a few more flights tonight. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Is he… is he going to be okay? What’s going on?”

“I’m not allowed to release that information, ma’am,” the voice says. “But he’s stable.”

Donna wants to scream, wants to beg for more information, wants to tell them that she's his wife, goddammit, and they better let her know if her husband is going to be okay. Because it’s Josh, and because the idea of him being in a hospital again, or him being sick or injured, terrifies her more than anything she’s been through, including being blown up. She manages to compose herself, though. “I'm his wife,” she says quietly. “Are you sure there’s nothing more you can tell me?”

She can hear a heavy sigh over the phone, knows that whoever is on the other side really does want to share more, really does want to help. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“You have a full medical history for him there? All the medications he’s on and…”

“Yes, ma’am, we were able to obtain that from the person who brought him in.”

Who would have brought him in, Donna wonders? And what would they have known? Her mind is spiraling in a thousand different directions, but she manages to pull herself together. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Rachel, having witnessed this whole conversation, shows deep concern on her face. “What’s going on?”

Donna swallows. “We need to go to the airport. Right now.” She stands up and grabs her purse, pulling out two twenty dollar bills and placing them on the table. She doesn’t want to dine and dash, of course, but they have to go now if she wants to have any hope of getting on a flight.

Rachel stands up too and pulls out a couple of bills. “Is it Josh?”

“I’m his… I'm his emergency contact,” Donna stutters, “and they called and said he’s at the hospital. That he has to have surgery, but they wouldn’t tell me… they wouldn’t tell me what for.”

Rachel’s hand goes to her mouth as she tries to process this, and Donna suddenly remembers that this is a woman who has lost both her husband and her daughter in horrible, sudden ways, and very nearly lost her son in the a similar manner. “Oh my god,” she whispers. “Is he…”

“They said he’s stable, but that could mean anything,” Donna says. After all, she was stable, technically, when they evacuated her from Germany, but she still very nearly died after that.

Rachel leads the way out of the restaurant and to her parked car, before pulling out and driving, probably much faster than is legal, to the airport. “Let's hope there’s still space on a flight,” she says.

Donna is grateful that she’s not the one driving because her mind is elsewhere, full of thoughts of what could possibly be wrong. There are plenty of options she can think of, each worse than the next. Her first thought, as always, is complications from his gunshot wound; while the doctors seemed fairly confident that he wouldn’t need to worry about any further surgical repairs, Donna wonders if maybe his pulmonary artery is weak, if maybe it just wouldn’t be able to hold with all the pressure he's been put under. Or maybe it's a blood clot, a pulmonary embolism, just like what his father had, just like what she had. She touches her chest gently, praying like she hasn’t in years that he doesn’t have to go through that. It could be something like a heart attack or a stroke, which she’s always been worried that he’s at risk for, considering his preexisting health issues, his terrible diet, and his high stress life. Or, she thinks, maybe it’s none of those. Maybe there was a car accident. Maybe there was another shooting. Maybe he’s terrified and alone and thinking he’s going to die without anyone there beside him.

No, Donna thinks, someone from the Santos campaign is with him. She doesn’t know who, and she curses herself for not having any of their contact information. She could try to call the main campaign switchboard, but she knows from Josh that it's pretty unreliable that anyone will actually be there to operate it at any given time, especially right now when they’re probably trying to frantically rewrite victory speeches and cope with all the new donations coming in on this night of triumph.

Poor Josh, she thinks, having something happen when he’s finally achieved a victory he’s worked so hard for. She doesn’t even know what is happening, but her heart aches for him.

It’s a good thing she’s not driving, she thinks, because unlike Rachel, she’s not sure she’d even stop for the red lights.

Rachel parks in the closest lot at the Miami airport, and she and Donna run to the ticket desk of the airline that has the last flight out to Houston. “Hi,” Donna says, breathlessly. “Do you have any tickets for the 9pm to Houston?”

The agent types away at his computer, and to Donna, it seems embarrassingly slow. She’s worked enough customer service jobs to restrain herself from yelling at him, but it’s almost physically painful to have to wait like this when she has to leave, when she has to get to Josh. “We have one,” the agent says finally. “Last seat on the plane.”

Donna looks to Rachel with worried eyes. She was hoping Rachel could come with her—she’s not sure how she’ll stay on this flight with her sanity intact without her. “You should go,” Rachel says, squeezing her arm. “But I’m going to pay.”

“Rachel…” Donna hesitates.

“No, my son needs you. I’ll go home, pack some things, and get a plane tomorrow. Call me when you see him, okay?”

Donna bites her lip. “I don't know what to…”

“You’re making a campaign salary. This is just going to come out of Josh’s inheritance, and then he’ll be upset that he worried us so much,” Rachel says, trying to smile, although Donna can see tears forming in her eyes. She must be so scared too—Josh is her whole world now, the only family she has left—and so Donna hugs her tightly. “He’s gonna be fine,” Rachel says, her voice quivering as she says it.

“I better… I guess I should go through security,” Donna says as the agent hands her the ticket. “We’re boarding in half an hour.”

“Good, good,” Rachel says. "Look, Donna… I know this marriage is one of convenience, but… I’m so glad Josh has you. And especially glad now that he has health insurance.”

Donna gives a watery chuckle at this and wraps her arms around Rachel; Josh’s mother is a whole head shorter than her, but her embrace is comforting and warm. “Thank you,” Donna whispers. “I’m so glad… I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Call me when you land,” Rachel says, and Donna knows that neither of them will be getting any sleep tonight.

Security is not too busy because of the late hour, so Donna makes it through and finds her gate quickly. While she waits to board, she tries to call Josh’s cell phone, but there’s no answer. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised—he probably would have tried to call her if his cellphone was on him—but that doesn’t assuage her worry.

The problem with getting the very last seat on the last flight of the night is that she’s stuck in the middle seat in the very back row. At least she doesn’t have any luggage to bring with her—Rachel has her hotel key and is going to stop by her room to grab her things. But having no luggage means that there is absolutely nothing to distract her.

Three hours of nothing. No cell service at all, no one to talk to, nothing but her and her anxieties flying across the Gulf of Mexico to hope that he’s alive when she gets there. He’s stable, she remembers, and while she doesn’t know what the surgery could be for, she's sure he’s in good hands. He has to be. He has to be okay, he couldn’t have survived everything he’s been through just for it to all end like this.

They would have sounded a lot more urgent on the phone if it had been that bad.

Still, Donna is terrified that she’ll get off the plane and see a breaking news alert about the Santos campaign manager being dead. About her husband being dead. And here she is, having to wait three hours while flying through the air, squished between a manspreader and a snorer until she can finally know what’s wrong.

The flight may have been all of three hours, but to Donna, it feels like an eternity. When the captain finally says that they’re approaching Houston, that they'll land in half an hour or so, a sentence that should bring her relief simply brings her more anxiety, greater anticipation of what she’ll find out upon landing.

She’s never felt this much fear, except for that one hot night in August where she stood in a operating room observation gallery and watched the surgeons desperately try to save Josh. But at leas then she had known, and she had been able to rationalize that things were okay even when they absolutely were not, because she could at least see him. She could at least see the monitors, see that he was still alive, in a manner of speaking.

Now, she has no clue.

She clutches her purse as the plane finally lands, pulling out her phone the second she feels the wheels touch down. She turns it on and doesn’t have any missed calls, which is probably a good thing; at least the hospital hasn’t tried to contact her again.

She calls Josh first, just in case, although based on the information she has, there’s a high chance he’s unconscious right now. Sure enough, he doesn’t pick up, so while she’s waiting, anxiously, for the rest of the plane to clear out, she calls Rachel. “Have you heard anything?” she asks her, although she’s certain she hasn’t.

“Well, they won the Texas primary,” Rachel says. “I haven’t heard about anything else in Houston, and I’ve been checking the news sites, so I’d be surprised if it was a crash or anything.”

Donna’s heart aches to think about the huge victory that Josh is missing now, but at least no one has reported him dead yet. As far as she knows, he’s still alive, and she'll have to cling to that. “Okay,” she says. “I’ve landed, and I’m going to get a cab to take me straight there. Let me know if you hear anything else. And try to get a little sleep.”

“I have a flight at 6am tomorrow from Palm Beach,” Rachel says, “so I'll have to head to the airport in a few hours anyway.”

“Okay, but try and at least take a nap," Donna requests, although she knows that what she’s asking is nearly impossible. She’s tried before, but there’s almost no way to sleep when the life of someone you love hangs in the balance.

“I’ll try,” Rachel promises.

“I’m just about to get off the plane, but I'll let you know when I find anything out,” Donna says, standing up and following the slow, steady stream of people down the aisle. She hangs up and breaks into a nearly full sprint trying to get past everyone else and grab a cab outside of the airport.

Thankfully, there are a few lined up when she breathlessly reaches the exit, and she hops into one. “I need to get to Houston Methodist,” she says, hoping she doesn’t sound as terrified as she sounds.

The driver nods. “Urgently?”

“I mean, legally,” Donna manages to have the composure to say. “But yeah, it’s urgent.”

The driver takes off and Donna leans her head against the back seat, watching the lights of Houston fly by and resisting the very strong urge to simply scream at everything around her to release some of the tension she’s felt. Her stomach twists with intense force as she thinks of everything that could be wrong.

It’s a little easier being in the car because she knows if someone finds something out, they’ll call her, but it’s almost worse because she is so close to finding out information and yet she still has no clue what she’s going to walk into.

Donna hasn’t prayed much in the last decade or so, not since that night in GW, but she figures it worked last time, so she bows her head, pressing it against the seat in front of her as if that might relieve some tension, and begins to pray for health and strength again. Because he needs it. Because she needs it.

The traffic is surprisingly light, so the cab manages to drop her off in 30 minutes. Donna pays the driver and slips out, running into the emergency room and coming up to the desk. “Hi,” she says, trying to compose herself. “I’m here for Josh Lyman. I got a call about…" she checks her watch, “four hours ago that said he was here?” God, has it really been that short of a time since she got the call? It has seemed like an eternity of waiting.

“Yes,” the nurse at the desk says. “Yes, okay. You’re his…”

“I’m his wife,” Donna says, glancing around the emergency room. “Donna Moss. I’m his wife.”

"Okay," the nurse says. “He's... okay, he’s out of recovery and is in room 324 now.”

He's alive. He’s alive. That’s good. "Do you know… can you tell me what happened?”

“I'm going to get the doctor and ask him to speak to you. Are you the one in charge of his medical decision making?”

Donna frowns. “Am I going to need to make any decisions?” she asks.

“Hopefully not. He’ll still be waking up from the anesthesia, but…”

“Oh, that will take a while,” Donna says, remembering how groggy Josh was after surgery before. 

The nurse nods. “I’m going to go get the doctor for you, if you’ll have a seat.”

Donna complies, taking the closest seat to the desk and tapping her leg. He’s alive. He’s alive and it sounds like he’s okay, although she won’t fully believe it until she sees it. She watches as the second hand on the clock ticks by, seeming to drag and drag and drag slower and slower. 

Finally, after what seems like hours (but what she actually calculated to be about ten minutes), a doctor comes into the waiting room. “Donna Moss?" he asks.

Donna stands up and gives him a tight smile. “Hi,” she says.

“Dr. Carter. You’re Joshua’s wife?”

“Yes," she says.

The doctor raises an eyebrow. “The woman who came in with him—Ronna, I think her name was—wasn’t aware that he had a wife.”

Donna chuckles. “Yeah, it’s… that’s a long story, but she wouldn’t have been. Um, he’s on my insurance though, so if…”

“We have all that covered already,” the doctor reassures her. “I'm about to head up to his room to do a post-op check-in, if you’d like to join me.”

Donna nods and follows him. She’s always had long legs, but the doctor is very tall, having at least six inches on her, and she struggles to keep up. “I still don’t know what happened," she says. “Was it is heart? Or his lungs?”

“No,” Dr. Carter, “although I must say, he had quite the medical history.”

She presses her lips together. “Yeah.”

“No, he came in with severe abdominal pain, although he had apparently been ignoring it and did not mention it to anyone until he kind of keeled over and couldn’t hide it any more. They took him to the ER and it was a pretty clear-cut case of appendicitis, but we didn’t want to risk it bursting so we took him in for an appendectomy right away. The appendix did not burst and we were able to remove it with minimal complications. He’s going to be fine.”

Donna lets out a sigh of relief. All of this for a case of appendicitis? She has to remind himself that this is something that could have been very dangerous, but at the moment, all she wants to do is yell at Josh for putting her through all of that stress when he was going to be perfectly fine. It wasn’t his fault, she knows, and he wouldn’t have wanted to stress her like that, but she still can’t help but feel a little bit of anger boil up within her for the absolute misery of the last four hours.

“Thank you,” Donna says. “What do you think caused…”

“This is one of those things that we don’t really know the cause for,” the surgeon admits, “but it sounds like he’s been on a steady diet of stress lately.”

She smirks at that. “For the last eight years or so,” she says.

“Well, that never helps,” Dr. Carter explains. “He’s going to be alright though. He’s going to have to take it easy for two weeks or so…”

“Next week is the Illinois primary,” Donna says with a frown. “He’s not going to want to sit that out.”

“Well, you can break that news to him if you’d like, but he’s certainly not going to feel up to that,” Dr. Carter says, as he presses the button for an elevator. “I’ve never run a political campaign, but based on his blood pressure when he came in, it seems like it might be high stress.”

“Is anyone with him right now?” Donna asks, as the elevator reaches the floor and they step off.

“I think whoever was with him went back to go get some things for him. They came here in a rush, which is a good thing. If his appendix had burst we may have been looking at a very different situation.”

“But it didn’t?”

“No. We have him on antibiotics just in case, but I’m not too worried about infection from that. Surgical site infection, maybe, but we’ll do our best to avoid it.”

Donna nods, remembering the infection he got at his incision site from the surgery on his chest. “How long will he have to be here, then?”

“We’ll keep him tonight, of course, and probably one more night just to watch out for infection and because of his medical history, but then he’ll probably be okay to go. He’s not from here, I assume?”

Donna nods. “His place is in DC.”

“Well, it’s not ideal to fly so soon, so he’ll probably have to spend the week in Houston, but I think by the weekend he should be good to go.”

Donna immediately starts thinking about all the ramifications. The campaign is going to move on to Illinois soon, probably tonight, but if Josh has to stay behind in Houston, who will be able to stay behind with him? She’s not sure that she can, because she’s also supposed to be in Illinois tomorrow, but she really doesn’t want him to be alone. She desperately doesn’t want to leave him alone.

“This is his room here,” Dr. Carter says, opening the door.

Josh doesn’t look too bad, all things considered. There’s some oxygen tubing in his nose and he’s hooked up to a couple monitors, but compared to the last time she walked in on him like this, it feels very minimal. She lets out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in as she lays eyes on him.

“Hello Mr. Lyman,” Dr. Carter says, taking a glance at the chart on the end of his bed and then looking at the monitors. “Are you feeling a bit less groggy?”

Josh blinks and opens his eyes, looking a little dazed, before turning his head ever so slightly and locking eyes with her. “Donna?” he mumbles. “Donna’s here. Am I dreaming?”

“No sir,” Dr. Carter says with a smile.

“Flew here all the way from Florida,” Donna says, “and no one would tell me what was going on, only to find out that you had minor surgery and you’re going to be totally fine.”

Josh gives her a goofy smile. He must be really high on painkillers. She saw plenty of this after Rosslyn; Josh’s sensitive system extended to painkillers as well as alcohol. “You look pretty,” he says groggily.

“I’m a mess, Josh,” Donna insists, her hand flying to smooth down her hair. Her clothes are rumpled from the long plane ride and even if she claims she’s never had a bad hair day, it’s awfully frizzy right now.

He holds out his free hand for her to take and smiles lazily at the doctor. “Did you know that’s my wife?” he asks the doctor.

Donna rolls her eyes and turns away from him to put her purse down on the chair when she sees someone standing in the doorway. Someone she’s seen before.

It’s a Santos staffer—Ronna, she thinks her name is—and she definitely heard what Josh just said.

“Hi,” Ronna says sheepishly. “I’m just… we’re checking out of the hotel tonight and I came by to bring Josh his stuff. He left his phone there, and his suitcase, and I…”

Donna smiles. “Hi. I’m Donna Moss, I think we’ve met.”

“Yeah,” Ronna says, looking between Josh and Donna. “You’re his… you’re his wife?”

“He’s making that up," Donna tries to joke, before thinking better of it. “But yeah, we’re… we’re married. It’s a long story, really, and we’d prefer that no one else know.”

Ronna frowns. “You work for Russell.”

“Yes,” Donna says. “Look, Josh can explain it to you later when he’s not high, but for now… please keep quiet about it.” She doesn’t mean to sound so harsh, but she’s tired, and the release of stress leaves it all leaching from her body, tension oozing into places where she doesn’t want it to come out of.

Ronna, thankfully, nods and puts the suitcase down. “I have to… the plane is leaving soon.”

“Thank you for coming with him,” Donna says. “What happened?”

“We were looking over some exit polls when he just kind of doubled over. He wouldn’t get up and he kept groaning, but he didn’t want an ambulance because he thought it would look bad. Didn’t want the reporters catching onto it.”

Donna rubs her forehead. That sounds just like Josh.

“The Congressman practically had to force him to go to the hospital, and so I drove him, and I’ve kind of been back and forth since,” Ronna says. “But we’re flying to Illinois tonight, and the Congressman feels terrible leaving him here but Josh made him swear to go straight to Illinois anyway and I…”

“Thank you for taking him,” Donna interrupts. “He'll be okay now, but I’m glad he had someone with him. Was he scared?”

Ronna bites her lip. “He mostly just… didn't seem quite all there. I'm sure he would have called you but he left his phone at the hotel. Which is probably for the best.” Her eyes are wide, and Donna wonders what went on.

Josh may have said he didn’t want an ambulance to avoid reporters, and that may have been true, but she also knows that another ambulance ride might have been unnecessarily traumatic for him. “Can I… can I have your number?” Donna asks. “I’d like to be able to have a contact on the campaign just in case something like this happens again, you know?”

Ronna nods and reaches into her purse to pull out a card to hand to Donna. “Yeah,”  she says. “You’re going to stay with him?”

“For as long as I can,” Donna says, “although I’m going to have to head to Illinois too. But his mother is going to be here in the morning. Oh, speaking of which, I’d better call her and let her know her son is fine and gave us a scare for no reason.” She looks over to Josh. “You really put us through this again, didn't you?”

Josh raises an eyebrow. “What did I do?” he mumbles, not quite bothering to open his eyes all the way.

Donna takes the few steps back toward the bed to ruffle his messy hair, matted from being underneath a surgical cap. She notices, belatedly, that the doctor has left and the oxygen tubing is gone. She can’t believed she didn’t even take notice of what was happening; was she really more worried about saving her own ass than about noticing Josh?

“Bye Josh,” Ronna says. “I’ll give him a call in the morning,” she tells Donna. “Or, probably the Congressman will. He’s very worried.”

“He’s going to be fine," Donna whispers, more for her own sake than Ronna’s. As Ronna gives her a tight smile and heads out the door, Donna finds her hand drifting down from his hair towards his shoulder, then lingering on his arm until she's touching his forearm, and then gently tracing the scar on the back of his right hand. “You’re going to be fine, right?”

It’s meant to be rhetorical, but he’s still awake, if very out of it. “I’m fine,” he murmurs back. “Did we win Texas?”

Donna’s heart clenches. He was probably under anesthesia when the race was called. One of the biggest victories of his life, and he wasn’t able to be awake for it. “Yeah,” she says softly. “You won Texas. And you won Florida.”

She sees the edges of his mouth twitch up at that. “I didn’t think we’d do it.” 

He still doesn’t open his eyes, and she’s sure he’ll pass out any minute now, but she squeezes his hand. “Yeah, you did it. You should go to sleep. I’m gonna go call your mom, and I’ll be here when you wake up? Okay?”

“Why are you here?” he asks. “Thought you were in Florida.”

Donna bites her lip. “Yeah, I was. They called me though. I’m here because I’m your emergency contact.”

“Because you’re my wife?”

She swallows. “Yeah,” she admits. “Because I’m your wife.”

Unable to linger on that anymore, she steps out into the hallway to call Rachel, who demonstrates immense relief upon hearing the news. Donna, too, feels like she has a chance to absorb it finally and reassure her still racing heart that Josh isn’t in any danger. Rachel assures her she’ll still be coming in the morning, and Donna makes one more phone call telling Will she’ll make it to Illinois by Thursday at the latest. Will isn’t thrilled, especially when she won’t provide any details of why she so suddenly left Florida, but he accepts her explanation of an emergency and doesn’t ask any more questions.

With all that taken care of, Donna heads back into the room. Josh is sleeping, and appears to be doing so fairly peacefully. She can't tear her eyes away from him, even if he looks relatively put together under his hospital gown. She knows there’s a covered-up incision on his abdomen that will add another scar to his already sizable collection, but otherwise he seems relatively unscatched.

Still, she thinks, she never wanted to see him in a hospital bed again, and this image is far too familiar, even if she knows (and she does know) that he’s okay.

She pulls up the vinyl armchair to the side of the bed and sits in it; she’s not sure she’ll sleep tonight, not with all the adrenaline coursing through her veins. And anyway, the nurses will probably be in sometime in the next hour or two to check his vitals, so she’ll get woken up anyway.

Donna kicks her shoes off—god, how she hates wearing heels like that—and curls her legs underneath her, and lays her head on the side of his bed. She’s slept like this many times before, although it’s been years, and it’s not nearly as comfortable as she remembers it being. Before she knows it, though, she drifts off. She doesn’t wake when the nurse comes in the first time, or the second.

She only wakes when she hears Josh’s plaintive voice. “Donna?”

She pulls her head off of the bed, instantly awake, pushing back a curtain of messy blonde hair. “Hi,” she says. He’s fully awake now, the anesthesia and stronger painkillers having worn off. Donna would bet anything that this is more sleep than he’s gotten for months, even though the clock on the wall informs her that it is barely five in the morning.

“Hi," he replies. “How long have I been out?”

Donna bites her lip. “Well, you got out of surgery at about… 9:30 last night, and you were awake but still a little out of it. Actually, really out of it. You have a sensitive system. And then you just slept through the night. Or… well, until now.”

He groans. “I’m sore,” he says.

“Well, you did have an organ taken out of your body, so it’s to be expected.”

“Of all the things,” he mumbles. “I thought this was the sort of thing that happened to high schoolers. How long am I going to be stuck here this time?”

Donna uncurls her legs and groans as she stands up. “Hopefully just until tomorrow,” she says, “although they’re not going to let you fly until Saturday.”

“I’m stuck in Texas?” Josh groans. “Donna, I have to get to Illinois.”

“You’re not going anywhere, Josh,” she says. “The doctor said it’s going to be a couple of weeks before you’re really back at it.”

“I don’t suppose they’re planning to move the primary in Illinois for my sake,” Josh groans.

She takes off the coat that she realizes she never took off last night and drapes it over the back of the chair. God, she wishes she had asked Rachel to bring her bag so that she'd have a change of clothes. “No, I don’t think so. But there’s no way you’re going to Illinois. Staying here until Sunday and then back to your apartment for probably another week until you’re up to campaigning again.”

“Or what?”

Donna frowns. “What do you mean?”

“How are you going to stop me from campaigning?”

“How would you feel if I invoked the rules again?” At Josh's immediate frown, she chuckles. “I thought so. Anyway, apparently everything looks good and they’re going to try to get you to eat something today. Your mother is on a flight here right now so hopefully she’ll be up here by mid-morning.”

“She’s coming all the way out here for this?”

“She didn’t know what it was until she had already bought the flight,” Donna says with a shrug. “And anyway, you’re going to need someone to stay with you when you’re stuck in a hotel for the next few days.”

He’s silent for a few moments, and Donna wanders around the room a little bit, peeking out the window into the still-dark morning and giving him space.

“Why are you here?” he hears, and she immediately turns to face him.

“What?”

“Why are you here? How did you… who even told you to come?”

Donna looks at the tiled floor. “I’m your emergency contact, Josh. They called me.” She tries to decide how much to spare him from, how much he shouldn’t hear right now, but she has to tell him. “They couldn’t give me details, not over the phone, so all I knew was that you were in the hospital and you needed surgery. I was in Florida twelve hours ago, and I… I was with your mother. We were having dinner. Um, by the way, she knows. About the marriage thing, and I’m sorry. But I spent three hours on a flight from Miami last night not knowing if something really terrible had happened to you, not knowing what kind of condition you were in, not knowing if I'd never see you again and I… god, Josh, you know what? I’m pissed at you! You had a freaking minor surgery and made me think you might be dead. It was the worst flight of my life and I’m not…”

Josh’s face is blank, impassive, as she says all this, but he finally interrupts her. “I know how you feel.”

“How could you possibly…” Donna starts, but as she paces the floor and feels a white-hot sting run up her leg, the pieces fall into place. “Oh…”

He pushes himself up in the bed, wincing slightly. “Yeah, I’ve had one of those flights too.”

She sighs heavily. “I’m sorry Josh, I don’t mean to yell at you, I just…”

“No, I probably deserve it. Not for, you know, having another organ almost fall apart entirely, but I’m sure I deserve to have you yell at me for something.”

Donna lets out a puff of air that might indicate humor if one is listening closely enough. “Are you feeling okay?” she asks.

“Compared to the last time I was in a hospital bed, I’m peachy,” he replies. “Sore but I’m sure I could go… you know, run a campaign.”

“Not a chance,” Donna says with a chuckle. “Your guy won Texas and Florida last night, and I'm sure you’ll be on the phone with him twenty thousand times a day, but I will keep you out of the state of Illinois with my bare hands.”

“I see what this is. A Russell campaign ploy to weaken the competition,” Josh jokes.

Donna gives him a grin over her shoulder. “You think we’re scared of you?”

“After last night, you should be.”

Instead of heading back towards the chair, she perches herself on the side of his bed, reaching for his hand. “Aren’t you glad you have health insurance? Imagine what all this would have cost if you had been uninsured?”

“You’re going to be holding that over me forever,” Josh groans, but he reaches for her hand and squeezes it. “Yes, I’m glad you married me. For this reason, of course.”

Donna doesn’t wrestle her hand away from his grip. “I am too. But you know what?”

“What?”

“You’re not allowed to do that to me again.”

Josh rolls his eyes. “Donna, I’m fine, I just…”

“I’m serious,” she says. “I do not want to have to go through this with you again.”

He looks like he’s about to make a joke, but he takes in the seriousness of her expression and sighs. “I won’t do this to you again," he says, even if it’s a promise Donna knows he might not be able to keep.

Chapter Text

It’s nice, Josh thinks, to have a little bit more of an actual staff on the campaign. Their victories in California and Illinois got the donations pouring in, as Matt Santos looks like a real candidate, a real possibility. It’s looking more and more like the Democratic convention will be contested, which is not how Josh saw it going, but he also didn’t really believe this campaign could go anywhere until a few weeks ago, so by that metric, they are far ahead of where they should be.

Still, even with an actual staff, a lot of the work is being done by volunteer interns for resume credits. Most of them are local and don’t travel with the campaign, so Josh feels like he’s constantly meeting brand new bright eyed twenty-somethings who are terrified of him.

One of the internship positions is a media position, and that intern’s job is simply to be on Google and watching the news all day and look up anything that might be campaign-relevant and alert the rest of the staff to anything important. It’s the kind of job that never existed when Josh was doing this kind of campaign grunt work, the kind of task he never even would have imagined, and it makes him feel his age even more.

But as he walks into the campaign war room from a strategy meeting, he hears from behind him, “Josh, Lily wants to see you.”

He turns around to see Ronna, standing with a stack of files and pointing to a girl sitting at a computer behind her, toying anxiously with her intern badge, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. “Lily?” he asks.

“Media intern,” Ronna explains.

“She should be going to Taylor on this, not me,” Josh says. “Doesn’t our training talk about…”

“She says it has to do with you specifically,” Ronna says. “It seems pretty important.”

Josh sighs and glances at his watch. He has to meet with the mayor of Philadelphia in 15 minutes for an important potential endorsement meeting, and city hall is nowhere near here. He really should be in a car already. But against his better instincts, he sighs and approaches the intern. “This better be good,” he mumbles to Ronna, before coming over to the girl and looking over her shoulder. “What’s up?”

She makes eye contact with him and shakes a little bit. “I know I wasn’t supposed to just… directly show things to you, sir, but…”

“We can dispense with the sir thing,” Josh says. “That’s for the Congressman. What’s going on?”

Lily turns her eyes back to the computer. “I found something on a blog, it was published a couple hours ago. Someone’s been digging through old lawsuits and they found one that you initiated against your insurance provider?”

Josh swallows as he squints to read the text over her shoulder. His eyes really are not as good as they used to be, just another reminder that he’s getting old. “Yeah, okay,” he says.

“It’s true?” Lily asks.

“Yeah.” Josh bites his lip. “My insurance refused to pay some hospital bills on a technicality, so I sued them, and settled when they agreed to pay the bills. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

“Well, this blog is trying to make it a big deal,” Lily says.

“Is it just some right-wing fringe thing? Because those don't pick up steam,” Josh dismisses, although the truth is, this isn’t something he wants to talk about publicly. This isn’t something he wants out there at all.

Lily sighs. “It’s not,” she says. “The blogger is also a contributor to MSNBC.”

“You’re joking. Not Fox News at least?”

She shakes her head. “He's trying to make it into a ‘Santos hates insurance companies’…”

“He does,” Josh points out.

“And I found out… he’s scheduled to go on MSNBC tonight,” Lily says. “I think he’s going to talk about the healthcare plan, and I think he’s going to bring you up.”

Josh rubs his forehead. “Oh god.”

“Yeah,” she says sympathetically. “I’m sorry, I know I’m supposed to go through Taylor with these things, but I wanted to…”

“You did the right thing,” Josh says. “Print that post out for me, will you? I have to go but I…” He presses his hands together in thanks before heading towards the waiting car outside the hotel, grabbing the printed webpage from the downstairs printer as he runs to meet Santos in the car.

“You're running late today,” Santos notes as Josh climbs into the car. “I was about to head to this meeting without my master negotiator.”

Josh rolls his eyes fondly. “You probably would have done better without me.”

“Never,” Santos says, as the car takes off.

“Unfortunately,” Josh says, “you’d probably be better off without me tonight.” He hands Santos the piece of paper he grabbed from the printer.

Santos looks at it and frowns. “Why?”

“Because I’m about to be the story. This guy’s an MSNBC contributor, he’s going on tonight to talk about healthcare plans, and we're pretty sure that he’s going to discuss this lawsuit that he dug up.”

“Your lawsuit?”

Josh swallows. “Yeah.”

“You sued your insurance company?” Santos asks, skimming over the article. “You know I hate the very concept of insurance companies, but…”

"I had $50,000 worth of hospital bills that they refused to pay on a technicality,” Josh says with a shrug. “I couldn’t afford that, and I figured they’d settle. I didn’t want anything except the bills to be paid, and they settled and paid the bills, and that’s the end of it.”

Santos puts down the piece of paper. “Why did you have $50,000 worth of hospital bills? That seems…” and at the way Josh’s face pales, he shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “You don’t need to tell me.”

“No,” Josh says, his hand unconsciously drifting to his chest. “It’s fine, I just… when white supremacists tried to kill Charlie Young for dating the President’s daughter, I got caught in the crossfire.”

It's the congressman’s turn to to pale at that. “You were the…”

“I was the staffer who got shot,” Josh says with a shrug. “Fourteen hours of life-saving surgery and a month in the hospital meant a lot of bills, but because the hospital was out of network and I didn’t get preauthorization while I was, you know, unconscious and almost dying, the insurance company wouldn't pay until I sued them.”

Santos lets his jaw drop a little bit. “I knew healthcare in this country was a mess, but…”

Josh sighs and gives him a slight smile. “It’s a particularly egregious example, I know.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t put two and two together, I didn’t know, I just…” Santos looks at the paper again. “I’m sorry, Josh.”

“It’s alright,” Josh says. “I’m fine now.” Which is, perhaps, not entirely true. At some point, Santos might have to know about all the ways in which he is still not fine. All the ways in which his body still fails him, and more egregiously than that, all the ways his mind still fails him. But for now, Josh doesn’t have the energy to get into that.

“Why are you so worried about this, though?” Santos asks, looking over the blog. “You have a pretty defensible case there.”

Josh sighs. “He doesn't provide the context that makes it defensible. He’s painting me as someone using a White House position to sue an industry he doesn’t like, which in turn makes you someone who wants to leverage political power for personal vendettas. Now, I know that’s not true, and anyone who looks at your congressional record will know that’s not true, but when he makes an accusation like that, it can be hard to refute. Besides that, it makes me the story. That was an issue in New Hampshire, when all we could get the media to do is write about the high-flying White House staffer who left to run your campaign. This is your campaign, not mine, and I don’t ever want it to be about me.”
Santos nods. “I respect your humility, Josh, but I also don’t think this is going to be as bad as you think it will be. I think you might be taking this a little personally.”

“It’s about me, of course I’m taking it personally!” Josh protests, before looking down at his feet. His shoes are terribly scuffed, and he briefly wonders what Arnie Vinick would say to that, remembers shining his shoes in his office. “Besides that, if you look like you hate insurance companies too much, you’re going to look like a loony leftie liberal.”

“Compared to Russell, any common sense is going to make me look like a loony leftie liberal,” Santos groans, rubbing his forehead. “And I do hate insurance companies. In an ideal world, they would not exist.”

“I agree,” Josh says. “I have been with you on that from the beginning. But you can’t say that. Not yet. Not here. Pennsylvania has a lot of blue dog Democrats and if we start talking universal healthcare, we’re going to scare them away, make them think we’re going to tax the life out of them. Never mind that it would prevent insurance companies from sucking the life out of them, but that kind of talk scares people. In Pennsylvania, we have to talk about jobs. That's the message.”

“Don’t you think the message calendar is a little… inflexible? We were so heavy on healthcare in California, but don’t you think people in California care about jobs too? Why shouldn’t people in Pennsylvania care about healthcare?”

“They do, but…” Josh rubs his forehead. “Mixing messages creates an information overload for people. There is more unemployment in Pennsylvania than in California. The economy of Pennsylvania is transitioning, and they’re losing blue-collar jobs. They want to be assured that their President is looking out for them, and making sure that people have work they can do and work that pays them well enough to support their families in a changing economy. That’s the prize.”

“And healthcare isn’t a part of that?”

Josh sighs. “It is, but… your average person who is decently healthy is probably more worried about their salary than their healthcare plan. It’s only when something catastrophic happens that people realize just how important it is, and it’s often too late at that point. Anyway, I agree, it’s not conceptually ideal, but it’s how we get through. It’s a little different than campaigning to your district in Houston.”

“It really is,” Santos says. “Well, I still think that if healthcare comes up, we should talk about healthcare. It’s important. I believe strongly in it. Let’s see what this guy says on MSNBC tonight, and if it’s a total misrepresentation of who we are, then we’ll get you on there too and you can talk about the lawsuit, about why it was ridiculous that you, as a federal employee, were on the hook for fifty grand after being shot in service of your country. You can talk about how we should let patients sue their insurance providers and combat legislation being introduced and bankrolled by the insurance companies to make it harder. I want you to go talk about it.”

“I don’t want to be the story,” Josh says, biting his lip. And he doesn’t, but there’s also a part of him that absolutely does not want to go on TV and then have to talk about Rosslyn. He’s gotten to the point where he can talk about it without feeling the deep and pressing anxiety that tortured him every time he mentioned it for a few years, but he still runs the risk of not being okay on national television.

“You’ll do great,” Santos says. “Anyway, who knows. Maybe this guy is coming on to talk about how dumb Russell’s plan is.”

Josh chuckles a little bit. “Seems unlikely.” He looks out the window, and sees the city hall approaching. "So, in this endorsement meeting, you’re going to talk about education and justice. That’s what the mayor wants to hear about.”

The meeting goes well, although the mayor doesn’t yet promise his endorsement, saying that he also has to meet with Russell first. Josh tries to hide his sigh at that, but it is at least progress. They really are neck and neck in Pennsylvania, but Santos is the one with all the momentum, and Josh is hoping that’ll pull them through.

As they head back through the lobby, Josh sees a familiar face waiting on a bench outside, typing furiously on a laptop. He probably should just ignore her, especially with Santos around, but he can’t stop himself from exclaiming “Donna!” as he approaches her.

Donna looks up from her computer and smiles when she sees him. That’s good, he thinks. A smile, not a frown. Progress.

“Hi,” she says.

Josh looks back at Santos, realizing he should introduce him. “Have you met Matt Santos officially?” he asks.

“Yes,” Donna says with a little bit of a grin.

“Chicken fighter,” Santos responds with equal humor. “We met during the stem cell vote. Donna was a great help there. She knew where the coffee maker was, which pretty much made the whole thing possible.”

Josh raises an eyebrow. “Donna never brought me coffee when she was my assistant.”

“I didn’t bring anyone coffee,” she says with a shrug. “I just found the coffee maker.”

“She did much more than that, too,” Santos continues. “It’s good to see you again, Donna.”

“Good to see you too, Congressman,” Donna says with a smile. “Listen, I…”

“I need to get going,” Santos says, and Josh wonders if he can see the tension between himself and Donna, or if it's just in his head. “Josh, don’t you have another…”

“Yeah, I’m meeting with labor leaders at the union headquarters,” Josh says. He glances at his watch. “It’s a couple blocks away, so I’ll head over there in a couple of minutes and take a cab back. You have the…”

“Press conference,” Santos fills in. “Four pm. Talking about jobs.”

“You got it,” Josh says. “I’ll see you when I get back,” he says, and Santos heads off. Josh looks down at the ground, before finally willing himself to look up at Donna.

“How are you feeling?” Donna asks. She puts the laptop back into her tote bag.

“I’m fine,” he replies, rubbing his forehead. “The surgery was three weeks ago, you don’t need to…”

“Full recovery takes four to six weeks,” Donna points out. “You took a week off when you were supposed to take two, and you didn’t even really take that off, because I know for the fact you were running the campaign by phone.”

Josh sighs. “You did your research, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Well, you’ll be glad to know that I really do feel okay. Taking a week off was restful. Rejuvenating, even.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “You sat in your apartment poised to dial your phone for a week straight, and your TV was tuned to CNN the whole time. I hardly think that sounds restful.”

“You weren’t there to enforce the rules,” Josh say with a shrug. “How am I supposed to rest when you’re not breathing down my neck to tell me to take a nap?”

“I figured out how to do it on my own,” Donna says sharply, and that stings Josh. He can’t help but think of the myriad of ways that she helped him after Rosslyn, and how he hardly did anything for her after Gaza.

“I’m sorry, Donna, I…”

She shakes her head. “No, I shouldn’t have started that. I’m just… I’m tired.”

“Have you been getting any sleep?” he asks.

“Have you?” she retorts. At his look she shakes her head. “This is a stupid argument for two sleep-deprived people to be having.”

“Yeah,” Josh says, “although you might argue that the sleep deprivation puts us at greater risk of having stupid arguments.”
“You certainly could argue that, and I wouldn’t actually argue against it.”

He chuckles, and then pauses slightly. “What are we talking about? Why are we having this conversation?”

“We used to have lots of time for conversations like this.”

Josh tries not to think back with too much nostalgia, because of course she needed to move on, but there’s so much that he misses about working with her every day. “Yeah,” he says. “If the taxpayers knew the kinds of conversations we were having on their payroll.”

Donna shrugs. “They weren’t paying me that much anyway.”

"And look at you now,” Josh says. “You’re the one providing health insurance for the both of us.”

“Speaking of which,” Donna says, “I got a bill. It’s yours, from the hospital in Texas.”

“Please don’t tell me I have to sue them again,” Josh mumbles.

Donna gives him an odd look. “No…” she starts. “It’s …about $500 I think. So not cheap, but just the stuff that insurance wouldn’t pay. They’re still pretty stingy I guess, but it's at least not $50,000, right?”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “Don’t worry, I'll pay it, just get me the info of how to do it. But that reminds me… someone found out about the lawsuit. Against my insurance company, after Rosslyn. They’re a contributor on MSNBC, they’re going to do a whole thing about it tonight I’m sure.”

“Why is that relevant?”

“Well, it’s not really, but anything that can drag the campaign through the mud is something reporters are going to take advantage of,” Josh says with a sigh. He blinks a few times. “You know, you’re on an entirely different campaign, I’m not sure why I even told you that.”

“Perhaps because I’m trustworthy,” Donna retorts. “And you’re bad at following the rules.”

“You’ll never let me live that down, will you?” Josh replies,

Donna shrugs. “It did take up a significant portion of my life for a while.”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you think the insurance lawsuit will make you look bad?”

Josh rubs his forehead. “For all the same reasons that I didn’t want to sure the KKK. As a high level White House staffer there’s a different standard. I didn’t want it to look like I was using my position to make a political statement through a lawsuit.”

“You weren’t,” Donna says. “If you wanted to make a political statement, you would have taken the insurance company to court instead of settling. You can say that in your defense.”

“"Yeah," Josh says, running a hand through his hair. “Donna, I’m just worried about the spotlight this… what if I have to go interview about it? What if they ask me who provides my insurance now?”

Donna frowns. “Literally no one is going to care about that.”

“But if people start digging into it…”

“Into your private health information?”

Josh shrugs. “I don’t know, there’s… it’s not so much the health stuff—that’s all theoretically HIPAA protected—but it makes me feel vulnerable to be in the spotlight like this. Especially when whoever does a little digging could probably find public marriage records in New Hampshire and…” He stares down at his scuffed shoes. “There’s a reason I didn’t want to be the face in politics. There’s a reason I like being the guy behind the guy. I value my privacy, and… much as it sounds arrogant to say this, I value my image, because I need that to stay in place in order for me to get anything done. People have to remember me as Bartlet’s bulldog, or I lose my effectiveness. Even if I’m not on the Hill anymore, I still have to leverage that.”

Donna bites her lip and nods. “Yeah, I get that," she says. “And being the face of things that are bad is not such a cushy gig.” She checks her watch before catching his eye. “Did you know I got an offer to make a movie?”

Josh blinks a couple times. “A movie? About what?”

“About me. Gaza. Wholesome Midwestern girl goes to the barbaric Middle East and gets blown up, is the sole survivor when two Congressmen couldn’t make it?” She chuckles a little bit. “That’s not how they pitched it to me, but I watched enough of those made-for-TV movies when I was recovering to know how it would go.”

“I don’t… you never told me about this,” Josh stammers, trying to search his recollection of that hazy time after Donna came back and before she left.

“Yeah, because you would have gotten on the phone to yell at the producers and tell them I wasn’t interested and shut down any chance of making a fortune off of low-budget Lifetime movies,” she points out.

He’s about to argue, but she isn’t wrong. If she had told him about it, he would have been adamantly against it. He’d never been approached with a movie deal after Rosslyn, but he had turned down several offers to appear in documentaries or give interviews. Now that he thinks about it, he probably would be much more comfortable with talking about Rosslyn than he was back then—as it turns out, years of therapy are good for something—but he still wouldn’t want a movie made of his life. “Why didn’t you let me?”

“Do you ever think that maybe I wanted to make that decision myself?” Donna asks. “You’d hung up on guys for me several times without my asking, and I know you thought you were being chivalrous, but I was not in the mood to be a damsel in distress! I was hurting, for real, and the only times you ever tried to help were the opposite of what I needed.”

Josh's face falls. “Donna…”

She suddenly takes in a deep breath, realizing what she’s said. “I don’t want to have this argument here,” she says. “We don’t even need to have it at all. I said no, all on my own, and that was that.”

A part of Josh wants to experience her anger, wants to feel her heat of derision directed towards him, because he probably deserves it, but he knows this isn’t the place or the time. Perhaps there never needs to be a place or time; after all, the only reason they even interact anymore is because of their arrangement, and soon enough that will be over.

And in order for that to be over, Josh has to win Pennsylvania.

“It was good to see you, Donna,” he says, checking his own watch, knowing full well that the time on it has no resemblance to the actual time. “Send me the bill and I’ll get it paid. Was any of it from your deductible? Because if you need I can…”

“No,” Donna says. “My deductible was used already.”

Josh wants to ask her how, but he doesn’t, catching a glance at the clock behind him and realizing that he needs to make it over to the union building quickly before his meeting starts. “I really do have to go,” he says, “but I’ll see you later.”

Before Donna can say anything, he pushes through the rotating doors and finds himself out in the still cold April air, on his way to yet another meeting where he feels like he’s begging for his political life.

He gets through the meeting, manages to get a labor endorsement for Santos, and finds his way back to headquarters. There is plenty to do, but he finds himself throwing surreptitious glances at the TV playing MSNBC every so often, wondering how soon he is going to be the topic of the discussion.

The answer, it turns out, is very soon.

No sooner has the show finished its coverage of Santos’ jobs press conference (in glowing terms that Josh is very grateful for—a bad showing might have been the end of him) then they invite on a name that seems rather familiar to him.

“Dr. James Bowery,” the anchor introduces, “is a professor of economics and healthcare policy at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his academic expertise, Dr. Bowery also has a popular blog where he discusses current political issues through an economic lens. Today, as the Pennsylvania primary approaches, we’re discussing the Russell campaign and the Santos campaign and their disparate approaches to healthcare. Dr. Bowery, welcome.”

The man is not much to look at; balding, wearing rimless glasses, and with dark circles under his eyes that almost appear to be painted on. “Good evening. Thank you for having me on.”

“Now, you have written a fair amount about the differences between these two campaigns and their approach to healthcare. Would you care to sum it up for us? What are these two different health plans in two sentences each.”

“I see we’re going for nuance here,” Josh mumbles. He turns around to look at the rest of the room. “Is somebody recording this?” he yells to the rest of the room. “It’s going to be something we need a record of!”

At that moment, Santos comes back in, looking red-cheeked and bright-eyed from his press conference. “What's going on?” he asks, upon seeing the frantic rush around the room.

Josh turns around and sighs. “Sir, I’m afraid that this program is going to…” he closes his eyes. “This is him. This is the guy who wrote the blog post about my lawsuit. And if he makes it through this interview without bringing it up, it’ll be…"

Before Josh can say anything, the anchor asks the question he’s been dreading. “Dr. Bowery, today you published a blog post discussing the patient’s bill of rights, and specifically, a patient’s right to sue their healthcare provider as well as their insurance company. What made you bring up that concept.”

“Well, I’ve been compiling some work about civilian lawsuits to their insurance companies,” Dr. Bowery says, “and while I was doing this research, I found something very interesting. Congressman Santos has sponsored various iterations of the Patient’s Bill of Rights during his time in Congress, and all of them have involved provision to allow patients to sue their insurance companies for more than they are currently allowed to. That’s now a major tenet of the Santos campaign’s healthcare plan.”

The anchor looks a little bit puzzled, seemingly not knowing what shoe is about to drop. “So his healthcare plan is consistent with his previous Congressional votes.”

“Well, it is, but that’s not all there is to it. I’ve been looking at examples of patient lawsuits against insurance companies, and there was one case that looked familiar. It turns out that the Santos’s campaign manager, Josh Lyman, initiated a lawsuit against his own insurance company back in 2000. At this time, he was the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Now, ethics rules are a little fuzzy in this area, but it seems to me like this lawsuit was borne out of a personal vendetta against insurance companies; I'm always suspicious of legal actions coming from government staffers. For Lyman and Santos to team up, I think this amendment to the Patient’s Bill of Rights is only the beginning. I think, if we let Matthew Santos anywhere near the Oval Office, we’re going to start talking about abolishing insurance companies entirely. We’re going to start talking about universal healthcare.”

"No! No, no no!” Josh shouts at the TV. “Why would you say that? That's not even close to… god.” He runs a frantic hand through what’s left of his hair.

“Josh,” Santos says. “It’s alright.”

“No, it’s not, because now we’re on the defensive! We can’t say we’re for universal healthcare right now because that scares off half our voters, but we can’t say we’re against it entirely because for one, we’re not, and for another, that will induce apathy in the other half of our potential voters!” Josh takes an overly fast swallow from his water bottle and tries not to choke on it as he slams it down. “This throws off our whole message. We have two days until the primary, and we’re going to have to deal with this shit, and it’s because of me.”

Santos sighs. “Maybe we turn this into a good thing. Get our base riled up, excited to vote.”

“See, you don’t understand that it’s a numbers game. There are only so many voters who might vote for us, and we need to get as many of them as possible. Either way we go on this, we’re going to alienate people. It’s a lose-lose for us. Russell came out against any sort of significant change; he’s just talking about expanding Medicare, lowering premiums, that sort of thing. We’re the ones who are talking about change, but people are scared of too much too fast. Even Democrats.” Josh sits down in a chair and scrubs furiously at his forehead, as if he might think of a way to solve this by stimulating the muscles in his face. “You’re going to have to… we're going to have to dedicate time to healthcare, but it can’t be detailed. We’ll find a story of someone in the hospital right now without health insurance, talk about the insane bills they have to pay, and then not get into specifics of how we’re going to punish the insurance companies.”

Santos nods. “We could do that. Or… maybe you need to do what I was talking about earlier. Go on, do an interview, talk about the lawsuit and how it was not a vendetta thing, how it was literally just you trying to get the insurance company to pay your hospital bills.” At Josh’s hesitation, he holds up a hand. “I know you don’t want this to be about you, but they’re going to make it about you. Hit them back. Do the interview. It’s free media, humanizes the campaign.”

“The only thing people hate more than politicians is political operatives,” Josh protests. “Politicians can be forgiven, but not the man behind the curtain.”

“I promise you the average American spares no thoughts for political operatives,” Santos shoots back.

Josh leans forward and sighs. It’s certainly not ideal. In fact, doing an interview like that sounds like the most miserable solution possible for him. He’s still not entirely sure he’ll be able to talk that much about Rosslyn without risking some kind of public breakdown. But Josh is nothing if not loyal to the campaign, and if this is his mess that only he can get them out of, then he supposes he’ll have to try anyway. “Taylor,” he says. “Book me on the same show, tomorrow night. I’m going to set the record straight about the lawsuits.”

He doesn’t sleep much that night, although that’s really nothing new, since he has barely been sleeping on the campaign trail. Still, his mind keeps racing thinking about what could go wrong. He’s done plenty of news show interviews before, and usually they go okay (jokes about tax fraud notwithstanding). But they’re never about him specifically.

CJ could do this, he thinks, and he’s tempted to call her, but she’s the White House Chief of Staff and she certainly doesn’t have time to talk him down from a ledge of his own creation. Instead, he tosses and turns and tries to remember all the details of the lawsuit—maybe he should call Sam, because Sam helped him with it a lot, but Sam is busy in California and anyway if it’s early in Pennsylvania then it’s the middle of the night in California. And while Josh used to be able to count on Toby to tell him that his anxieties were stupid and that he’d be fine (especially when Josh already knows that but has a hard time believing it), he still hasn’t really made up with Toby after their fight. Perhaps he should, he thinks, but the campaign trail is long and Toby hasn’t made himself known along the way.

He pulls up the case; it’s pretty cut and dried, and was easily settled, but he suppose that someone who isn’t a lawyer would see it as a much bigger thing than it actually was. That’s his job, he thinks. To explain why it was a legal correction for a clerical injustice.

Honestly, he can’t believe he actually managed to do it. Somehow, in the six weeks between coming back to work and the end of the year, he had managed to sue and settle with his insurance company over his medical bills. He hardly remembers that time—no surprise there, considered he had a mental breakdown very soon thereafter—but at least the stress of medical bills he couldn’t pay was off his chest.

He’s reminded of this when someone comes and hands his an envelope that just got delivered; he opens it and finds his bill from the hospital in Texas. It’s not much—well, it’s still a decent amount of money for the fact that he literally had to get married to try and avoid hospital bills like this—but he can afford it.

Josh doesn’t ask who it’s from, but he tries to hide his disappointment at the fact that Donna didn’t come by to give it to him herself.

He pays the bill right before he gets driven over to the studio for the news show. Something about the mirrors in green rooms make you look older, he thinks, as the production assistants put on TV makeup. Maybe it’s the lighting, or maybe it’s just that this campaign has aged him.

The anchor greets him during the commercial break with a smile. “Hi Mr. Lyman,” he says. “This is going to be easy. We’re going to talk a little bit about the lawsuit brought up last night, and then discuss how it relates to the Santos healthcare plan.”
“That’s easy,” Josh says. “It doesn’t.”

The anchor doesn’t answer, since the producer is counting down the time back from commercial. “Good evening, and welcome back,” he says. “Tonight with us we have Josh Lyman, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and current campaign manager for Congressman Matthew Santos. Mr. Lyman, thank you for coming tonight.”

“Thank you for having me,” Josh says, and he is thankful to be sitting behind the desk because he can feel his hand clenching, fingernails digging into his skin, in an effort to slow down his racing heartbeat.

“Now, we learned something very interesting on the show last night. You’ve been in politics for quite some time now, and I think your record is pretty clear on your dislike of health insurance providers in the US.”

“I’m a political operative, not a politician,” Josh says. “I don't have a record. But yes, from my own personal beliefs, I think it’s an industry that has done far more harm than good to the health of this nation.”

The anchor nods. “Back in 2000, there are records of you suing your own health insurance provider while you worked in the White House. There are concerns that this may have been an ethical violation, to induce legal action when in a high-ranking government position.”

Josh bites his lip. “I didn’t sue because I thought it would be fun or that I could bring down the whole industry,” he says. He takes a deep breath. “When white supremacists tried to kill the President’s body man at Rosslyn, I was caught in the crossfire and was shot. I had to have significant lifesaving surgery and I was in the hospital for about a month afterward. Unfortunately, that kind of thing is expensive. Now, considering that I was brought to the same hospital as the President, the hospital that specifically prepares for these kind of scenarios, you’d think it would be in network with my employer-provided health insurance. You would think, but according to my insurance provider, it wasn’t, and because I didn’t call them up and get preauthorization when I had a bullet in my lung, I was on the hook for $50,000 in medical bills. Now, I don’t know what they tell you around here, but government work does not pay that well, and I definitely didn’t have an extra $50,000 lying around. I tried other avenues to protest the decision because it was in violation of some specific codes, but it was not until I initiated a lawsuit that they settled and paid the bills. I didn’t want anything else out of the lawsuit; I just wanted the bills to be paid, considering I was forking over a significant portion of my paycheck to have the insurance anyway. I didn’t sue my insurance company because I wanted to use my White House position to punish them. All I wanted was for them to pay the bills they were already supposed to pay.”

The anchor nods. “Do you think that makes a statement in and of itself?”

“I think that I’m not the only one who has experienced a catastrophic illness or injury and then watched an insurance company that I’ve been paying into for years suddenly refuse to do anything about it on a technicality. Now, I was in a privileged position. I’ve been to law school, so I had a good idea of what my options were, and I also work surrounded by lawyers, so it was easy enough to find someone to help resolve this case. Not everyone has that, and if you’re already on the hook to pay a year’s income, you’re probably not going to have the money to go to a lawyer who bills $300 an hour. I didn’t sue to make a point, but I think it does make a point of how messed up this system really is.”

The anchor nods. “It certainly is a jarring example of people falling through the cracks.”

“The cracks are so wide they’re basically canyons, and unless you’ve got the resources to get a plane to fly over them, you’re out of luck," Josh says, and then remembers why he never did well in his creative writing classes in high school. “Look, with the way things are, we have to take it all one step at a time, but Congressman Santos can see the way this industry has been hurting the American people, and wants to take steps to correct it. Starting with, as Dr. Bowery pointed out last night, the Patient’s Bill of Rights, and making it easier to patients to sue their insurance providers in the case of injustice. This will not fix everything—let me tell you from experience that a lawsuit is not an easy thing to take on, especially for people who are still recovering from whatever they’re having to pay for in the first place—but it’s a step in the right direction, and just one of the many plans Matt Santos has to make healthcare in this country work for everybody.”

The anchor nods. “Well, we’re out of time, but thank you for speaking with us today, Mr. Lyman.”

“My pleasure,” Josh says, and he nods as the producer cuts to commercial.

“I had a few more questions to ask you about the specifics of your plan, but I’m afraid we ran out of time," the anchor apologizes.

“That’s alright,” Josh says. He’s almost relieved that there wasn’t more to talk about, because there are too many questions related to this topic that he doesn’t want to answer. “Thanks for having me on; I’m glad to clarify my position.”

When Josh gets back to headquarters, he receives a firm pat on the back from Santos. “That was great,” he says. “Told the truth, didn’t alienate anyone, hopefully drummed up support for our healthcare plan… we should put you on TV more often.”

Josh shakes his head but smiles. “Glad it didn’t ruin everything.”

“Josh,” he hears, and he turns around to see Ronna. “We've gotten a pretty major press request for a feature in the New York Times. It’s not… it’s not going to be published until after Pennsylvania, but it's a major journalist doing a feature about the state of healthcare in this country, and they want to interview you.”

This is the sort of thing he’d usually say no to, but he’s feeling good about his performance tonight, and buoyed by that, he smiles. “Okay,” he says. “You know what? Let’s do it. Maybe people will finally listen to some sense when it comes to healthcare.”

He forgets, it seems, why he is usually so hesitant to talk to journalists.

Chapter Text

She’s homeless, technically.

Well, she still has a lease on an apartment. But since she’s subleasing, she can’t live there. The homelessness hasn’t mattered so much when primary season was in full swing; she had been able to get by living at hotels, all her possessions aside from what she kept in her suitcase packed away in a storage unit, which she’s paying for because her the woman living in her apartment is paying an extra hundred dollars a month.

She could have managed, living in hotels all this time, is she hadn’t put down Josh's address on the wrong form when figuring out the insurance stuff. They would have put her up in a hotel in DC like they did with all the other campaign staffers who didn’t have DC residences. But instead, they think that she has an apartment in DC, a very nice apartment in Georgetown that she never could have afforded. Frankly, she’s not sure how Josh is affording it right now, with his salary as low as it is.

She could correct her mistake, tell them that she put down the wrong address, that she didn’t realize it was a home address instead of a mailing address, but that would require an explanation. That would require her to discuss why she put the address down in the first place, and why she doesn’t live with her husband. Which would require her to explain why she married him in the first place. Which, frankly, wouldn’t be good for anybody involved.

So instead, she finds herself at an extended stay hotel out in Fairfax. It’s the cheapest one she could find that isn’t entirely sketchy, and she figures that in two weeks she’ll be back on the road for the last three primaries to take place. It’s just a lull, and if she has to pay for a hotel here or there once in a while, she’ll eat it.

Better than anyone finding out.

Most nights, it’s fine, but sometimes, there are DNC events while she’s in DC. Some nights, those DNC events also have the White House Chief of Staff in attendance. And this would be fine, if the White House Chief of Staff weren’t a friend of hers, and didn’t offer a ride back to her apartment with her Secret Service detail so that she didn’t have to take the metro back late at night on two glasses of champagne.

“I appreciate the offer,” Donna says, putting her half-finished glass down and smiling at CJ. She tries not to appear like she’s leaning on the chair next to her too much, but it’s a difficult illusion to pull off, because the only pair of heels she had that matched her dress are hell on her leg, and she’s been standing far too much today. “But I'm afraid I’m going to have to turn you down.”

“Why?” CJ asks. “Donna, your apartment is right on the way back to mine. It’s not an inconvenience at all, it’s late, and clearly walking more tonight is not going to do you any good.”

And she could lie, make up an excuse that she has to go back to headquarters to finish something, or that she’s actually sleeping with a guy on the campaign and is about to go over to stay with him (and maybe that would be a good idea, except that she’s married), or say that she likes the night air. But her brain isn’t working fast enough to come up with even a feeble excuse, and so she stammers and winces. “I… I don’t live there anymore,” she finally admits.

CJ frowns. “You moved?”

“No, I’m… subleasing,” she says slowly. “Didn’t make sense to keep paying rent when I’m out of the area 90% of the time.

“So where are you staying, then?”

“A hotel in Fairfax,” Donna admits with a sigh.

CJ frowns. “Aren’t the campaign staff staying at the place down the street?” she asks slowly. “Why aren’t you with the rest of…”

Donna rubs her forehead. “It’s… complicated,” she says with a sigh, and prays that CJ won’t ask any more questions.

But this is CJ, and so of course she’s going to ask more questions. She’s not just going to let it go like that. “Donna, are you… not working on the campaign anymore?”

“No, no, of course not,” she sputters. “I’m still… did you know I got promoted, actually? Big promotion, I’m working as a spokesperson for the campaign now. It’s a big role but I’m…” She leans on the chair beside her a little more, fighting the urge to sit down. “I’m doing great.”

“But you don’t have a hotel here?”

Donna grimaces. “Paperwork mixup. I don’t think I submitting my address information right.”

“And you haven’t fixed it?” CJ asks doubtfully.

“Well, you know how HR is. And campaign bureaucracy is twice as bad as when you’re staying put. So it hasn’t gotten through yet. It’s fine, I’ll submit reimbursement forms when I get the chance. Now that I’m actually making a salary…” And suddenly, the lie is coming more easily, and Donna supposes that’s what she gets for working as a campaign spokesperson. She’s not going to submit reimbursement requests, because that, of course, requires an explanation of the marriage, but maybe CJ will buy it.

Unfortunately, CJ, also a seasoned political spokesperson, doesn’t seem to believe her. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me?" CJ asks.

And for a second, Donna considers it. The person in the room next door seems to have nothing to do but smoke noxious amounts of weed, and the couple across the hall are alternately blasting music on a massive subwoofer or having equally loud sex. Maybe her annoying neighbors will be gone tonight, but Donna doesn’t have much hope.

“I’m not sure… with the secret service clearance and everything,” she tries. Honestly, she doesn’t know enough to know if that’s a valid reason or not, but CJ’s face falls.

“Yeah,” CJ says. “That’s true. There’s a lot of paperwork for overnight guests. It’s why I don't do a whole lot of dating anymore.”

Donna raises an eyebrow. “Are you asking me on a date?” she teases.

CJ laughs. “Honestly, you’d be a better date than the last four guys I went out with. Actually, you’d probably be a better date than any of the guys I’ve gone out with.”

“Too bad I’m…” she starts, and then shuts her mouth quickly, because the next word she’s about to use is married, and CJ doesn’t know that. CJ can’t know that. “Emotionally and geographically unavailable.”

“What has you emotionally unavailable?” CJ asks, in a teasing tone, although her eyes have narrowed a little.

“Trying to get Bob Russell elected president,” Donna says.

CJ doesn’t look entirely convinced, but lets the subject drop. “I really… I don’t like the idea of you going all the way back alone. Take a cab, at least. Don’t take the metro.”

Donna frowns. “I’ll be fine. I take the metro almost all the time.”

“Donna,” CJ chides, and Donna sighs heavily.

“Fine.” She looks at her watch. “I should probably get going, actually. Looks like the thing is about to wrap up.”

“Yeah,” CJ says. “Look, Donna… call me when you get home, okay?”

“CJ, you have a million things to…”

“Yeah, but someone needs to be looking out for you,” CJ says. “You used to always call Josh when you made it home after nights like tonight.”

Donna tries to hide her wince as another searing pain shoots through her leg. “How do you know that?”

“Because whenever you forgot to, and didn’t answer your phone, Josh would call me freaking out and thinking you didn't make it, and made me check the wires to see if anything had happened on your route back from work.”

She blinks a couple times. “I never knew…”

“Yeah, I spent a couple sleepless nights with him and every time it turns out your phone had just died and you had fallen asleep. But that's Josh for you, always needing reassurance that the people he cares about are okay.”

And CJ isn’t wrong, not at all, but Donna still finds this surprising. “God, CJ, if I had known, I would have done a better job of making sure I called.”

CJ shrugs. “Josh never wanted you to know how anxious it sometimes made him. He said it was embarrassing. I didn’t think it was embarrassing, I thought it was sweet, but he never liked it when I called him that. Anyway, please call me when you get back.”

“Sure thing,” Donna says, and she swallows. “Have a nice evening, talk to you later,” she says to CJ as she tries her hardest to avoid limping as she walks away.

She finds herself outside the hotel, where there is a line of people waiting for cabs, the actual vehicles being few and far between. Donna gets in the line, between other people in glistening ball gowns. Her off-the-rack silver dress from Nordstrom feels very out of place, although it had cost her $200. She’d had it for the last five years, practically a relic in terms of Washington fashion, but she’s never had the funds to replace it.

Her one other formal dress has a slit out the leg, and would show off her scars, and Donna isn’t sure she wants to do that.

There’s only one person standing on the curb who looks as disheveled as she does, with a half askew bowtie and a frizzy ball of hair atop his head.

That’s right, somehow Josh Lyman is coming up right behind her in the cab line.

“Donna?” she hears him ask, and she knows she wasn’t going to be able to ignore him, but a part of her wishes she could. Her hearing isn’t as good as it used to be before the explosion, so maybe she could have pretended that she never heard him. Except that there are six people in front of her waiting for cabs and there’s no way she could ignore him for that long.

She turns around and gives him a tight smile. “Hi,” she says. “Funny that we keep running into each other.”

“Funny how that is,” Josh agrees. “You were at the event?”

“No, I just wore this ball gown and these torture devices known as high heels for fun,” Donna remarks. Josh is brilliant, he really is, but he also can be exceedingly dense.

“I just didn’t see you there,” he says.

She shrugs. “I was busy. You know, finagling donations, explaining policy…”

“Explain Russell’s policy’s to me,” Josh says. “Because I worked in the White House for two years when the man was Vice President and I never saw a single hint of any kind of policy development.”

Donna rubs her forehead. She can feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. “Can we not do this here?”

“Fine,” Josh says. “Listen, where are you staying? I was thinking maybe with the wait being the way that it is, we could split a cab.”

She’s surprised that he’s willing to do this, with how awkward things have been between them lately. Then again, he probably still feels guilty about what she told him in Seattle, about not looking out for her after Gaza. Josh really does guilt like no other, and she should really be more careful before giving him more things to feel guilty about.

But why is everyone asking where she's staying tonight? Why is everyone taking care of her when the best way to take care of her would be to leave her alone so she can somehow manage to keep this massive secret that’s been eating at her for months?

This is Josh, though, and she has to tell him the truth.

Even if he’s going to blame himself for her less than ideal current living situation. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, actually. Maybe Josh will figure out an alternative.

“At a hotel out in Fairfax, actually.”

Josh frowns. “That’s not where the campaign is right now, is it?”

“No,” Donna says, looking around to see if anyone might be listening. The other people waiting for cabs are a few feet ahead of them and also quite tipsy, so she feels okay to talk about this. “But because of the insurance forms, they think I live with you.”

Josh’s eyes widen. “Donna, I… you’re not paying for this, are you?”

She shrugs. “It’s $60 a night. It’s for two weeks, I figured I could swing it. Anyway, if I start trying to protest, they’ll ask me why I don’t live with my husband, and that just gets into all sorts of issues I don’t want to deal with.”

He taps his foot on the ground. “I can't believe you’re just going to… pay out of pocket for that? I know you got promoted, but that’s going to eat away at anything you put into savings. Not to mention it’s so far out of the way, and the cab fares, and the…”

She sighs. “It kind of sucks, but what do you want me to do about it? Go tell the whole campaign I married you so that your health insurance, which you have used quite a bit of already, came out of the Russell campaign’s pocket? You think that’s going to go over well for you or for me?”

Josh bites his lip. “You could… stay with me?”

She furrows her brow, looking around quickly once again just to make sure that no one is listening. Perhaps her paranoia is unjustified, but frankly, there is a lot to be concerned about. “Stay with you?”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “You’ve done it before, right? It wasn’t too awful of an existence, except for the fact that I was probably miserable to be around, but you could... I mean, Donna, half the time I’m not even there. I’m going to Oregon for a few days tomorrow but I know your campaign is staying here, so why would I let it stay empty and let you pay tons of money for a shitty hotel way out of the area?”

He has a point, Donna thinks, but a part of her cannot even fathom the idea of moving in with him, even if it’s just a temporary and informal living situation. “Won’t that make people talk?”

“Believe it or not, I don’t usually have paparazzi hanging out around my apartment. I don’t think people are too interested in who I’m sleeping with or whatever.”

“Are you sleeping with anybody?” She shakes her head. “I never asked that, it doesn’t matter.”

Josh chuckles. “Well, it’s not exactly… you know, eventually I’d have to explain that I’m married and it would be a whole thing and honestly it’s much easier to just focus on work, you know?”

“I didn’t really want to know, but thanks,” she murmurs. Although, in whatever strange way, it’s almost a comfort to know how seriously Josh takes even this sham of a marriage. She knows him, knows how loyal he is, but she still finds herself surprised by how even in a setup like this, he takes his loyalty so seriously.

That’s not it, of course. It’s not because of her. But she’ll allow herself to enjoy the illusion while it lasts.

“Seriously, though,” Josh says. “You still have a key, right?”

Yes, she still has a key. She never even bothered to take it off her keychain. She has used it countless times, but not once in the last year. When she thinks back, maybe not since Gaza. For a while, she simply had not been able to use his stairs because of her injuries, and then things seemed to fall apart so quickly that there was no reason for her to be at his apartment. “Yeah,” she says. “I think I do.”

“Good,” Josh replies. “Then feel free to use it. I don’t have an extra bedroom, but… I can at least offer my couch?” He chuckles. “Actually, now that I say that, the hotel might be a better option.”

“No!” Donna corrects quickly, and she’s not sure why she’s so adamant he not retract his offer, especially since it was an offer she had been afraid of just minutes ago. “No,” she repeats. “You know, my neighbors suck. I think living with you—staying with you, I mean—would suck a little less.”

She tries not to take in the way that makes him smile. “Okay,” Josh says. “You want to come right now or…”

“My stuff is in the hotel," Donna says with a sigh. “I should go back and… I mean, I already paid for the night.”

“That’s a long way to go and it’s late,” Josh says. “You… I know you have a lot of stuff at my place.”

“Do I?” Donna asks, as if she doesn’t already know it. She has a habit of leaving things, not necessarily unintentionally, at Josh’s so she’d always have an excuse to go back and get something. Well, maybe she had that habit, but she had kind of just figured the stuff she left there was lost forever.

Josh bites his lip. “Yeah. Quite a bit actually. Definitely enough for the night, and then I could get you out to Virginia in the morning to get your stuff.”

“I can take the metro in the morning,” Donna says, and she can’t believe she’s actually going to accept Josh’s offer, but then again, she did marry him just so he could be on her health insurance plan, so she supposes it’s the least he can do.

“Okay,” Josh says, and the climb into the next taxi that arrives. Josh gives the address and  slides in the backseat next to Donna. “I’m sorry I didn’t know that…”

Donna chuckles. “You know what? I didn’t want you to know. In fact, CJ found out my situation and I had to beg her not to tell you.”

“Well, I don't think she would anyway,” Josh says. “CJ hasn’t been… you know, friendly as of late.”

“What do you mean?” Donna asks, because it pains her to hear about any kind of discord between Josh and the woman he considers a sister.

Josh sighs. “She’s… I mean, I'm sure it’s just because of the campaign and the White House has to be neutral and she’s busy and everything but… I don’t know, she just kind of shuts me down every time we get the chance to talk. I’ll call her once in aw while when I need her advice but… I haven’t actually seen her since we met with the President. I just miss her I think.”

“You didn’t see her tonight?” Donna asks.

“I saw her, didn't get a chance to talk to her.”

Donna presses her lips together. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you think she’s mad at me because of what happened with Toby?”

Donna blinks, trying to remember back to the Toby situation and how it had resolved for Josh. In truth, she hadn’t heard about much resolution at all. “I don’t know,” she says.

“Because Toby still… I don’t know, I was going to leave him alone because I didn’t think I was helping his grieving but I... I miss him, you know? I miss all of them. And I’m definitely assembling a staff on this campaign and they’re learning but I feel so alone in it sometimes.” He blinks a couple times, before rubbing at his eyes. “You know, I probably didn’t need to dump all that on you, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Donna says, reaching out and squeezing his hand. “Honestly? I hate the campaign life too.”

“See, I didn’t before,” Josh says. “This is how I used to thrive. But now all I feel is tired and lonely and burnt out and I wonder if it almost might be a mercy when Santos loses this thing and I can go hide in disgrace.” He stares at the head of the taxi driver in front of him, very still, but Donna can feel him wrench his hand out of her grip, can feel it shake as he does so.

She doesn’t know what to say to him.

“God, I don’t know why I… I invite you to come stay with me and then dump all of this on you. I’m sorry Donna, I’ve had a few drinks and I…”

Her heart clenches for him. “You haven’t had someone you trust to do this with for so long,” Donna says. “That’s why.”

Half of her expects him to deny that he still trusts her. After all, she did betray him. She left him without notice, without giving him cause, and while she knows she was justified in what she did, she can’t help but regret the way it went down after how clearly damaging it was to him. She wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t trust her anymore.

But he doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything either, but she supposes she shouldn’t expect that of him anyway; he's put himself in an exceedingly vulnerable position already and she knows how much it costs him to trust her again after she left him twice.

The cab pulls up in front of his apartment, and they both get out, his hand ghosting over the small of her back. It feels almost like old times.

He doesn’t say anything to her as they enter his apartment, instead letting her statement linger in the air between them while he unlocks the door. Finally, as she looks around and sees it as clean and as spartan as it’s ever been, he opens his mouth.

“Got it cleaned professional right before the campaign started,” he tells her. “Haven’t really… used it much since.”

“It looks nice,” Donna says.

“It’s got no personality without a million briefing books all over the tables,” Josh retorts, turning on the kitchen light. “You need something to eat? I’m gonna have a piece of toast. Try to sober up before I make any more embarrassing statements.”

Donna deposits her purse on its usual hook; how strange it is to call something usual when she hasn’t been here in almost a year, but it really does feel like a second home to her. “It wasn’t embarrassing,” she tells him, although of course she can’t look him in the eye as she says it. And before she can really think about it, the next words come tumbling out of her mouth. “Josh? Have you seen your therapist recently?”

She doesn’t look up, but she can sense the energy in the room changing, knows that the simple question makes him stiffen.

“Haven’t had time,” she hears him mutter, accompanied by the opening of the fridge.

“I just thought maybe you’d… it would be good for you to have someone to talk about some of these things,” she says.

Donna knows full well how hypocritical this is. Although she saw a counselor a few times after coming back from Germany, courtesy of the US military, the man she had seen was not particularly helpful. It wasn’t that he was problematic, or anything like that, but just that he was trained to work with veterans, not with unsuspecting White House assistants who got caught up in a major world event and happened to be the only survivor.

Donna’s really not sure anyone is trained to help with that.

Still, she rationalizes, it’s not like she’s ever been on the edge like Josh was. She’s never lost her cool (that one time in South Carolina notwithstanding, but that almost felt more like a physical breakdown than a mental one), she’s certainly never been close to yelling at the President (or the Vice President as it were), and she’s never even thought about putting her hand through a window.

(Although, the way Josh described the incident to her, shaking hands holding a mug of hot chocolate on the couch of his freezing cold apartment as Christmas Eve turned to Christmas Day, he never really thought about it either).

But she’s better off than he had been, and perhaps she’s still better off than she is now. After all, Josh had multiple, compounding traumas, and had a whole host of other issues. Sure, Donna got blown up once, and that was pretty traumatic, but she has had a far easier life than he has. There's no reason for her to struggle as much as he has.

Besides, he found therapy helpful (or at least, he seemed to, until he kind of dropped off going about a year and a half later, claiming that the reelection campaign took up too much of his time, and then never picked it up again). Donna had seen the progress in him within weeks, even if it took him about a year to really feel confident that he was going to be able to make it through his life with minimal symptoms. That hadn’t happened for her, but she thinks it might go away on its own. It’s not that bad, really. Not as bad as he had been.

But Josh isn’t impressed by her suggestion. She can hear it in the heaviness of his gait, and when she finally looks around the corner, willing to face him again, she can see it in the way he is angrily putting the toast in the toaster. She’d never known that someone could toast bread angrily, but if anyone could, it would be Josh Lyman.

“I’ve been fine,” he says evenly. “I haven’t had anything in… I don’t even remember, that’s how long it’s been.”

“Yeah, because you haven’t slept enough to have a nightmare,” Donna retorts, and while she really doesn’t want to mean it, she wonders if that’s close to the truth. It’s been true for her; the two-hour stretches of sleep she’s been catching have kept her out of REM sleep enough to avoid any lingering memories crawling their way through her slumber.

“Donna…”

She takes in his face, sees the bags under his eyes. She’s always been good at seeing the pain in his expression, and she’s not going to let it go now. “Have you been taking the stuff the psychiatrist prescribed?”

“What business of yours is it?” he shoots back.

“Well, you’re on my health insurance, so I think it is my business!” And she doesn’t mean to raise her voice, she really doesn’t, but something about the way he’s fighting her on this is hurting her.

(And later, she’ll realize that maybe it’s because he's not doing what she also needs to do. She’ll realize that they’re a matched pair, that they both need help, but they’re both too stubborn to reach out. She’ll realize that she wishes he would push her the same way. But she doesn’t know that now).

He rubs his forehead. “Yeah, I’m still on something,” he says. “Why are we talking about this Donna? I’m fine. I had a few drinks, I’m kind of in a bad mood, what about it?”

“I just wanted to… make sure you get all the help you need,” Donna says. “You know, there’s a benefit in my package for mental healthcare. You might have to switch providers but…”

“You think I have the time or energy to find a therapist?”

Donna knows he doesn’t, because she certainly doesn’t either. “No, I just…”

“Can we drop this?”

It occurs to her that she’s come into his home and started interrogating him on a subject he clearly doesn’t want to talk about, with her only claim to this discussion being his name on her health insurance. It’s not fair to him, and the more she thinks about it, the less energy she has to carry it on.

“Yeah," she says. “We can drop it.” A pause, and then, “You'd tell me if anything was wrong, right?”

She wants to hit herself in the head. Why on earth would he tell her anything? What claim does she have to that any more, after leaving him twice? What claim does she have, except being his wife?

Luckily for her, Josh doesn’t answer.

The toaster pops up, and he starts to butter it, and without a word, he comes over and holds a plate out to her. “Cinnamon sugar,” he says softly. “Like you taught me to make.”

Sure enough, the toast is buttered and covered in a generous dusting of cinnamon and sugar. It was a treat Donna had made for him while he had been recovering and still was having trouble keeping food down due to his meds. “Good sick food,” she told him, because her mom has always made it for her when she was sick as a kid, and it turned out that Josh could manage to keep it down despite the nausea, and they had counted it as a victory.

Some days, Donna misses those little victories they used to have.

“Thank you,” she tells him gratefully, and to her surprise, he sits down on the couch next to her and takes a bite of his own toast.

“Look, Josh…” she starts, her head spinning in the uncomfortable silence. “I really think I haven’t been very good to you tonight, for all the kindness you’ve showed me.”

He shrugs. “I probably couldn’t have stopped you sleeping at my apartment if I had tried. You have the key.”

Donna can’t help but stop herself from smiling. “I thought about it, actually. I spent a few nights in the Vice President’s office on the Hill the last time we were back in DC and it definitely got me considering breaking and entering.”

“I wouldn’t have been mad,” Josh replies.

“Sometimes it’s hard to know.”

The statement lingers there, and neither of them say anything else, eating sweet toast in silence. Finally, Josh clears his throat. “You can keep staying here when I’m out of town,” he says. “In fact, if I’m gone, you can probably sleep in my bed. I’d never know.”

“Is this a ploy to get me to do your sheets?” she volleys, before she can really ponder just how kind and generous his offer is.

He gives her that cocky, obnoxious grin that she both hates and loves. Really, no one has ever made her feel that way like Josh has. “Well, I wasn’t planning on getting shot again, so this was plan B.”

Donna can feel all the blood drain from her face as he says it. She understands why he makes those kind of jokes. She understands now, better than she ever has, because she too has faced death. She too has gone through extreme pain. She has to joke about it sometimes too, because it’s the only alternative to screaming. But when Josh says things like that, her mind takes her back to a hot, sticky August night, and watching his stilled heart sit inside of his chest as surgeons desperately tried to save him. That’s the kind of image she’ll never forget; she doesn’t have images of Gaza, not really, but sometimes it’s hard to look at Josh and not see what is inside of him, what he came though. And it’s especially hard when he says stuff like that.

Clearly, he sees the way he pales, because he ducks his head and mumbles a little, “Sorry,” probably remembering all the conversations they’d had where she requested that he not joke about Rosslyn for her sake.

“It’s alright,” she says. “I’m just… I think I’m about ready to pass out.”

“I have to be up early tomorrow, so I’m going to head to bed I think,” Josh says with a shrug. “Um… you know your way around, you’re welcome to whatever. Blankets and pillows are in the closet. Oh, uh…" He stands up and opens the hallway closet, reaching in to grab something. As it turns out, it’s a big cardboard box, her name written in his typical large block letters on the side. “This is your stuff.”

She remembers where she left her things at Josh’s. The hoodie on the third hook from the door. Her toothpaste and toothbrush in the bottom drawer of his bathroom cabinet. Her shampoo and conditioner resided on the sill of the frosted window in his shower. But they're all in the box now.

He must have been trying to get rid of her, she thinks, and while she doesn’t blame him, it makes her heart ache with a vengeance. 

She rifles through the stuff, finding a pair of sleep shorts (Josh always keeps his apartment unreasonably warm, so she's always slept in shorts and not pajama bottoms) and, to her surprise, one of his oversized Harvard sweatshirts. He had accused her of stealing it (with good humor) multiple times, and she must have left it here on accident once. She wonders if it was too strongly associated with her, if he was planning to burn it or something equally dramatic in retribution for her leaving him.

Donna is justified for leaving. She is, and yet she can’t help but feel guilty because she knew how it would affect him. Because she knew that he would never leave her.

“Thanks,” she tells him, as she picks up the sweatshirt and the shorts and heads to his bathroom to change. He gives her a tight smile and disappears into his bedroom.

Donna changes into the sweatshirt and shorts, finds the blanket that she likes the most in the closet (it’s gray and somehow after the many times she’s washed it for him, or he’s washed it for her, it’s still soft. 

Josh's couch is pretty comfortable. It’s long enough that Donna can stretch all nearly six feet of her height out without touching the other end, and she sinks down into the cushions just enough but not too much. She managed to survive sleeping nearly three months on this couch, and honestly found it more comfortable than her bed (because who knows how old and awful that mattress is).

It’s not as comfortable as she remembers, though. Her leg is aching (although when isn't it) and she left her stronger meds back at the hotel, so she takes another ibuprofen and hopes it’ll be enough to get her through the night.

She stays still, closes her eyes, opens them again, tries not to make a sound as she tosses and turns to find a comfortable position. This insomnia, Gaza-induced, has made it so much more difficult to work in a field where opportunities for sleep are few and far between. She doesn’t know how Josh, who has had difficulty sleeping for as long as she has known him, has managed to survive this long in politics.

Eventually, she manages to keep her eyes closed for ten minutes at a time, and dozes off into a fitful sleep until the morning light peeks through the front windows of Josh’s apartment. She leaves once she’s awake, walks the long distance from Josh’s apartment to the nearest metro stop (damn him for living in transit-less Georgetown of all places) and takes the metro out to the hotel she’d been staying at.

She checks out of the hotel and faces the uncomfortable ride back, hanging on to her suitcase and bag tightly. She debates dropping her stuff off at Josh’s apartment, but she doesn’t have time to walk all the way back, and she doesn't see a cab outside the station, so instead she makes her way to campaign headquarters and finds a quiet hiding spot for her things.

“Donna!” she hears, and it’s Will. “You look… tired.”

She winces. She hasn’t had a chance to look at herself in the mirror, but she obviously didn’t have her makeup at Josh’s (Well, there is some in the box but it is probably all expired, and Donna has sensitive alabaster skin). “Sorry, let me get ready. Any interviews on the schedule today?”

“A couple local satellite programs on the West Coast at 11, and NBC wants someone from the campaign on their news program at 9,” Will tells her. “You good for that?”

“Yeah, I'll go…”

“Bad hair day?” Will jokes.

Donna fixes him with a look. “I never have a bad hair day.”

It’s a line that always got Josh somehow, whether it be through laughter or amusement, but Will blinks at her, not knowing how to react. “Okay.”

“Don’t worry,” Donna says. “I’ll look presentable.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Will replies. “Hey, uh… staff meeting in half an hour. The Vice President wants to infuse more energy into his campaign staff, so we’re doing some kind of bonding activity?”

“If he wants to infuse me with energy, he should give me an IV with caffeine,” Donna mumbles. “Or cocaine.” Will again stares at her blankly, and while Donna recognizes that her humor has changed recently, she doesn’t think that is so far out of the box as to be unfunny. But she bites her lip and looks down at the floor. “I’ll… see you there,” she tells him, grabbing her makeup bag and hairbrush from their hidden alcove and rushing to the bathroom to try and make herself a little bit more presentable.

It’s a long day, and she walks back to Josh’s. She should have taken a cab, but she can’t really expense a cab to her own apartment (or at least, what is her own apartment in official campaign documentation). She’s sore, of course, but at least she has her stronger meds in her bag.

Josh isn’t there when she gets back; she remembers he was going to Oregon. The primary there isn’t for another week, but she supposes there is groundwork to be laid by a presidential candidate who has probably never been to the state before.

It’s strange, she thinks, to be in his apartment on her own.

She’s been in his apartment plenty of times, but always when he had been there. Except for those last few days before he came home from the hospital, where she and his mother were frantically trying to get his apartment prepared for his much less mobile self, she has always been here with him in it. This apartment is Josh, and he is this apartment.

But she uses her key and lets herself in.

She notices, as she turns on the lights, that he left a note on the coffee table.

Donna,

Sorry I didn’t get to see you this morning. Heading to Oregon until Thursday, Eat whatever you like, although there is not much there. You can sleep in my bed if you want, it’s more comfortable. Don’t burn the place down.

Josh

She can’t help but smile at the way the note was quickly scribbled, an afterthought perhaps, but a sweet one. She knew that Josh was leaving, and even if she hadn’t, she might have called him just to make sure, but it was nice of him nonetheless.

She peeks into his bedroom, just to ensure that he actually is gone. Sure enough, he’s absent, and more shockingly, the bed is actually made. In her years of knowing him, she’s rarely known him to make his bed. He had always cited the pointlessness of it, especially as it would just make it harder for him to get in bed the next night, and Donna had shaken her head fondly. She considered calling him lazy, but no one in their right mind could really accuse Josh Lyman of being lazy.

It’s ten already, and Donna is surprised, because she hadn’t thought it was that late on her walk back. Still an early night, by her standards, and a luxury she certainly won’t get when the campaign swings through New Jersey this weekend and then straight onto Oregon. While they’re approaching the end of primary season, there is still much to do, and it’s looking more and more like the question of the Democratic nominee will not be resolved until the convention.

She pulls on her same shorts and sweatshirt, and goes to lie down on the couch, but remembers the empty bed. She's slept in Josh's bed a couple times, not that they’ve discussed any of them, on some of his (and her) hardest nights. She knows that his bed is old but certainly more adequately comfortable than the couch. So without much hesitation, without considering how strange it might be, she opens the door to his bedroom, closes it behind her, and turns out the light before snuggling under the covers.

It smells like Josh.

That’s no shocker, of course, but the scent hits her so strongly, makes her remember all those moments they held each other through tears, and Donna starts to feel tears prick at the corner of her eyes again.

That’s no good. She can’t stain his duvet, hideous though it is.

Donna would like to say that sleeping in Josh’s bed is the best sleep she’s ever had. She really would, even if the implications of that statement are more than she would care to discuss. At this point, Donna would give anything for a full night’s sleep.

Instead, she sleeps restlessly, able to snap herself awake again right before she knows a nightmare is about to begin. In some ways, maybe it’s better to get them out before Josh is here and has the chance to ask any questions, but she’s somehow developed this response to wake up right before her heart starts beating too fast and her body starts to tense up in response to an imagined threat that her body thinks is really there due to the real threats it once suffered.

Donna maybe gets two, three hours of sleep, before her phone’s alarm goes off at six in the morning and she has to make the trek back to headquarters. Perhaps she should have stayed at the hotel, since at least there was a metro connection that didn’t involve a mile long walk. Not that she’d ever say anything about that to Josh.

She goes through the motions, and it's a minor miracle she’s doing this well at her job when sleep is eluding her so, but she comes back and gets into Josh’s bed again, facing another restless night. At least the bed still smells like him.

It's ironic, the way she is exhausted and yet the way she tries to fight off sleep, tries to keep herself from drifting off into a dreamscape that looks more like hell. She fights to keep her eyes open, but even though Josh’s mattress is lumpy and a hundred years old (which can’t be good for him), she can’t help but fall into a deep slumber.

The next thing she hears is the sound of her own voice, screaming, and the next thing she feels is a pair of strong arms wrapped around her, holding her tight.

Chapter Text

Josh told Donna he’d be back from Oregon on Thursday, and he suppose that still holds true. However, when he said he’d be back on Thursday, he figured it would be more like Thursday afternoon, not 1 AM on Thursday.

It had been a good fundraising trip, and even though Hoynes somehow won Washington, with him out of the running, the remainder of the Pacific Northwest is leaning Santos. Josh knows not to count his chickens before they hatch (and frankly, he’s a little afraid of chickens anyway) but he’s starting to feel good about their chances to hold off Russell. They’re not going to get enough nominees to win the convention outright, but they still have a fight left in them.

Josh hopes he can still, personally, have a fight left in him. A vote had been scheduled for Thursday in the House, and Santos wanted to be there, so instead of spending the night in Portland, they had taken a late flight back across the country. While Josh had been able to get a fair amount of work done, he’s starting to feel droopy-eyed. He takes a cab back to his apartment, surprised to see the light still on, until he remembers that Donna is staying there. Then, when he notices her conspicuous absence from his couch, he felt his chest clench a little bit. Did Donna make it back alive? Did she stupidly refuse to take a cab again and get kidnapped somewhere on the streets of Georgetown? Did he come back too late?

He hears something coming from behind his bedroom door, and nearly feels his heart stop again. God, he’s jumpy. He’s nearly jumping out of his skin; he needs more sleep, and probably forty hours of therapy and maybe even a lobotomy at this point. It might be amusing to him, except he’s still not quite managing to keep it together. He had to keep it together if he’s going to run a presidential campaign.

If he’s hallucinating things, he’s not keeping it together very well.

Still, he listens again, and he could swear it’s Donna. He could explain that away by his probably unfounded anxiety for her—of course if his brain is going to hallucinate, it’s going to be about the woman who is. making his heart beat so much faster by her absence—but he could swear it’s her shouting or screaming. Not loudly. It’s fairly weak, in fact, but Josh wonders if maybe that’s worse.

He needs to open the door to his goddamn bedroom is what he needs to do. That feels like giving in to the hallucination, but he also knows he’s not going to settle down until he does. Anyway, he does need to go into his bedroom, does need to take off his travel-worn clothes, does need to try and sleep for three or four hours before he has to be on the go again.

Josh takes a deep breath and opens the door, and turns on the light.

He wasn’t imagining things. Donna is curled up in the middle of his bed, and while the sounds she is making lean more toward whimper than bloodcurdling scream as far as these things go, she seems pretty distressed. And she’s in his bed.

Well, he told her she could use it, so he supposes that one is on him. He doesn’t mind, not really. It seems inconsequential when she seems to be falling apart entirely.

Seeing her is almost like an out-of-body experience, because Josh instantly knows what’s happening in her mind; he’s never really seen it from the outside. He’s always been the one captured in a nightmare, terrified he’d never wake up, terrified that he was arrested in this new reality, forever to stay. He’s never watched someone else go through it.

He’d go through it a thousand times more if it meant he’d never have to witness this, never have to feel his heart break like this again.

Despite knowing this better than nearly anyone else, Josh freezes for a moment. He doesn’t know what to do. He knows Donna would be mortified if she knew he saw her like this, but he also doesn’t want her to suffer. He doesn’t want her to wake up alone, trying to catch her breath, trying to reassociate herself with the darkness of visual reality rather than the darkness of her dreams. Josh knows how that goes.

The light doesn’t wake her up, and he flickers it once more, wondering if that might be enough of a jolt to get her out of her own mind. It isn’t, and he remembers the next best thing.

He remembers those months after Rosslyn, when he had felt so fragile physically but had managed to put up a pretty good front for Donna and everyone else about his mental state. It was only in those long nights, his body on fire with pain and his mind ablaze with fear, that he could not hide just how devastated he was by what had happened to him. Donna had come in during the middle of the night, probably awakened by as much of a sound as his damaged lungs could produce, and wrapped herself around his back, careful not to touch any of the places that might still be sensitive on his chest. The memories are hazy, but he’s certain she ran her hands through his hair in an effort to get him to calm down, sure she gently massaged his neck and forehead to relieve the tension that he was unconsciously creating. He’s not so certain that she kissed his forehead on one of those nights where none of the above worked—he had been so distressed that night that maybe he was hallucinating things—but he feels like he remembers it, feels like he can conjure up in his mind the way her lips felt when they ghosted across his sweaty brow.

They have never discussed any of this, and Josh isn’t even sure Donna knows he remembers.

But Josh remembers everything, and he has a blueprint.

When the lights don’t do anything, he says her name. After all, the blueprint is a risky design, and their relationship is different now. It’s closer, more concrete on paper, but far more nebulous and strange within reality.

Donna doesn’t respond to his name, and the whimpering seems to be growing louder, shifting up the scale towards bloodcurdling scream. It’s not there, not yet, but Josh fears what will happen if he lets her go on like this.

She’s on his side of the bed, he thinks, and tries not to read anything into that. Instead, he kicks off his shoes and climbs up onto the bed, shifting close to her, grabbing her arm gently but firmly to cease any involuntary movement.

It isn’t enough to wake her, because Donna continues to wriggle under his grasp. Her eyes open for a moment, and Josh thinks he’s done enough, but then they close again, and it’s not enough. He’s not sure he’s ever going to be able to be enough to fix her again after he destroyed her unthinkingly and regretfully.

He touches her hair softly; even in chaotic repose, it remains silky and soft and untangled, and Josh can’t imagine how she does it. It’s still not enough. He hesitates and looks at her forehead, the perfect alabaster skin of her forehead, and can feel her lips on his own forehead and how that brought him back to a reality he had been so forcefully removed from.

Josh leans forward and kisses the forehead of his wife, before laying down fully, wrapping his arms around her completely, grounding her to reality. “Donna, he whispers, and she blinks again, although he’s not sure if it’s a response to her name or to the touch he’s giving to her.

In an instant, he sees the change in her; from fear to confusion to frustration to mortification. Her mouth moves like it's trying to produce words, but nothing comes out, and instead she stares at him. Josh is usually pretty good at reading Donna—although he suspects he’s gotten worse at it—but he’s not sure that he can say anything that will resolve the awkwardness of this moment.

He's still wrapped around her, practically pinning her down, and he’s not confident that there is a nice way to extricate himself from the awkwardness of this embrace. Frankly, he’s not certain he wants to; being this close to Donna has calmed his racing heart from earlier in a way he wasn’t sure was possible. He can feel her lungs expand and contract against his own chest, and it’s a reminder that, for all the ways he may have ruined her life and screwed her up, she survived all of them. She’s breathing heavily, which is he isn’t surprised by, but she’s breathing.

Josh and Donna usually speak a lot of words—much of what they are is built upon fast-paced banter, upon a love of talking to one another, upon an ability to keep the conversation going at a rapid pace—but tonight, it seems that neither of them have any words to say. Neither of them can think of what to do, where to move, how to explain this away. So they don’t., and it’s a long several minutes as Donna’s heart rate calms and Josh finds himself beginning to relax too. He’s almost relaxed enough to fall asleep, even if the way Donna is on top of his arm is going to make it feel like pins and needles any moment now. He could fall asleep like this for the rest of his life, but he doesn’t let himself think that.

Eventually, Donna pushes against the embrace, and rolls off the bed. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she mumbles, not looking him in the eye, although the way her face shines in Josh’s harsh bedroom lighting, he thinks she might have been crying.

He doesn’t want to let her go, but he does. The clock comes into view as she leaves his room. It’s 1:39 AM.

Josh watches the numbers on the clock change with the speed of a turtle, his worries for her increasing every moment. He knows this trick. He’s escaped to the bathroom numerous times when he’s felt panic coming on. At practically every event lately where the music has been a little too loud, or the stimulation has been a little too much, he has run off to escape to the bathroom and hide for half an hour to calm himself down. There’s probably some rumor flying around Washington that he has severe digestive problems—even little things like this seem to be a subject of speculation—but regardless, Josh knows that move, and he’d bet anything that Donna does not actually need twenty minutes in the bathroom.

When the clock hits two, he sighs and pushes himself off the bed. He’s sure Donna doesn’t want him there, but he feels useless. He had to help her. He has to make her better somehow. He paces down his hallway, hesitates for a moment at the bathroom door, before stalking back to the kitchen. He needs to give her another moment.

He turns on the pot of water, almost without thinking. Donna used to make him tea or hot chocolate to drink on nights like these, and while maybe he had simply conditioned himself to calm down with a hot drink because he associated it with Donna being there, he’s gotten a lot of use out of the tea bags in hotel rooms on the campaign trail.

Josh doesn’t have any tea because he hasn’t been grocery shopping in months, but there are a couple packets of Swiss Miss lying around. Hot chocolate with milk is usually better, but he doesn’t have any milk that is still good. He checks in his fridge and finds half a bottle of Irish cream he has lying around—he never drinks it and it’s mostly here because Donna likes it—so he pours a little bit into the mug, hoping that might help to relax her just a little, and heads to the bathroom, knocking on the door.

“Donna,” he says softly. “You okay in there?”

He hears a sniffle.

“Can I come in? Yell at me if I can’t, because otherwise, I’m coming in.”

No response.

He pushes the door open with his back, and finds her not on the toilet but instead sitting in his empty bathtub, still fully clothed in her pajamas, with a red-streaked face and teary eyes. Her knees are pulled up to her chin, and she seems smaller and more fragile than Josh has ever seen her.

Josh swallows and takes a couple steps inside. “I brought you hot chocolate,” he says, handing it to her. Donna hesitates for a moment, but lets her arms go from her knees and cradles the warm cup with both hands. She takes a sip, but doesn’t say anything.

Josh hesitates to move any closer, but he puts the lid of the toilet seat down and sits on it, elbows on his knees to reduce the shaking of his legs, leaning forward. “Are you doing alright? Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Do I look alright?" Donna mutters, and his heart clenches at the sound of the bitterness in her voice.

And Josh doesn’t know what to say, because he knows how this goes. He knows she’s never going to be quite alright again, just like he is perpetually screwed up from everything that has happened in his life. He doesn’t know how to assure her that things will be okay, because they’re not and he doesn’t have much hope that they ever will be. But he understands, better than probably anyone else, and yet he didn't know. He didn't realize just how badly Donna was doing, and he was the one who saw her day in and day out after Gaza. He should have been the one who guessed, like she had been for him. He should have realized the hell that Donna had gone through, should have seen the hell she was still living in.

But she didn’t show him any signs.

Josh can be oblivious at the best of times—he’s brilliant, but sometimes so bogged down in details that he cannot see a clear picture—but this should have been obvious, something to look out for. Unless Donna was trying to hide things from him.

So instead of saying something comforting, instead of helping her out, Josh bites his lips and looks at the bath tile above her head. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks plaintively.

“Do you think I owed you something?” Donna responds sharply, and Josh almost jumps back in surprise. He was not expecting the vitriol in her tone. “Why should I have had to tell you?”

“Because I could have helped you,” Josh says. “Because I’ve been there! Because…"

“Because you didn’t notice!” Donna shoots back. “You never even bothered to look. You let me sit there, you let me come back to work earlier than I should have, you ignored my pain, ignored me. Out of anyone else, you should have understood! I thought you understood, but you never listened!”
Josh blinks a few times. Her words might as well have been a punch to his stomach for the way it twists and turns and contracts violently at the thought of how he’s let Donna down. The most important person in his life, and he couldn’t be there when she needed him to be. “I never heard,” Josh says quietly. “I wish you had told me.”

He could justify it, in a way, the not noticing. The same day Donna had come back was the day of Leo’s heart attack. He had already been out of his mind with stress from Gaza and Camp David, but then almost losing Leo very nearly sent him over the edge. Then he’d been passed over for a promotion, and had felt increasingly pushed out of life in the White House. He had been hanging on for dear life to his career in a white knuckled grip, watching all the people he loved nearly leave him, and he didn’t have the capacity to even think about how they might be feeling, let alone to ponder on how he could hep them.

Josh could justify it, but that feels wrong. His own flaws, his own incapabilities should not have hurt Donna. He could have handled a little more if it meant that Donna felt supported. And if she asked him, he would have. He would have dropped everything for her, just like he dropped everything to fly to Germany at a moment’s notice. If he had been able to help her, if she had stayed, if he hadn’t dropped everything to go on this wild goose chase of an improbable presidential run… maybe things would be different. “I’m sorry,” he says, and while he knows those simple words are not nearly enough to heal the wounds that have been inflicted on her, they’re all he has to say for the time being. He drops to his knees next to the tub, brushes an overgrown bang out of her face, and meets her solemn, teary eyes. “It’s not enough, but I’m sorry.”

“Josh…” She swallows. “I don’t want to be bitter.”

“You have every right to be, I mean…”

“I know you were stressed, and you hadn’t seen anyone and maybe that was…”

The reference to his own therapist makes Josh stop short. “Have you seen anyone about this?”

“Josh…”

“I’m serious! Have you… Donna, that was not just a normal nightmare. I think you might need…”

The moment had felt like a crack in her shell, a soft spot with room to grow, but the mere mention of a therapist seems to make Donna clam up again. “I’m fine,” she tells him, staring ahead at the wall of the tub resolutely. “I don’t… I've been fine.”

“Really? Because you don’t seem fine to me,” Josh says.

“What do you want?” she shouts. “Me to put my hand through a window to show you how far gone I am?”

Josh’s hand stings, and he has to check to make sure there isn’t fresh blood on it. Even a visual inspection doesn’t relieve the pain he’s reliving in a moment, which pales in comparison to the way his stomach is twisting again, to the way his heart seems to be determined to thump against the wall of his chest with painful intensity. “Donna, I…” And he glances out through the bathroom door, unable to visually turn the corner and ensure that his own windows are intact.

To his mortification, he realizes that he’s starting to cry without even realizing it. He wipes at his eyes, hoping that Donna won’t notice.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she whispers. “Josh, I didn’t…”

“No, I knew what you meant,” he says, steeling his own voice as if it’ll prevent the tears from falling. “I definitely wasn’t at my sanest then. I probably deserve that.”

She buries her face in her knees, but he can see her whole body shake. It takes everything in his power to prevent himself from reaching out to her to still her. “You don’t,” she mumbles into her knees. Josh shifts himself closer to the bathtub, still fighting against every fiber of his being to avoid touching her. He can’t do that, not right now. Not when she’s this fragile and the slightest touch might shatter her entirely.

“Donna,” he says again, although the words seem to be eluding him. He picks at the dusty grout of the bathroom floor studiously. “Donna, you should go see somebody. Does this happen often?”

She pulls her head up from between her knees, her lips pressed in a tight line, a white ring around the outside signifying the pressure. “I don’t sleep enough for that,” she tells him.

Josh sure knows that feeling, and he hates that she understands it too. “Yeah,” he whispers. “Campaign life, huh?”

“I saw someone afterwards,” she tells him, much to his surprise. “Two sessions, I think. Military psychologist. But he was used to working with soldiers who had war zone trauma. It’s different, when you choose it. To some extent, they chose to fight. They heroically chose to put themselves there, knowing the risks. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I don't think he understood that.”

Josh bites his lip. He hadn’t taken a job at the White House expecting any of what had happened to him either. He hadn’t signed up for this either. And he’s probably one of the only people in the world who could understand what she’s going through, and he wasn’t here for her. He wasn’t enough for her. “Yeah,” Josh says. “It wasn’t helpful at all?”

Donna shrugs. “Maybe a little, but I had to talk through what I remembered, and I didn’t remember anything really, and that just made it worse. The not knowing.”

Josh nods, placing a flat hand on top of the edge of the bathtub, trying to ignore the compulsion to touch her like he desperately wants to. “It’s almost harder to not remember,” he says.

“Do you… do you ever see it?” Donna asks, squeezing her eyes shut. “I don’t… I don’t see the scene, I don’t hear it, I don’t remember it. I can’t consciously bring a single detail of what happened that afternoon to my mind.  I don’t remember it. I just feel it. Like… there’s sometime this wave of pain that overwhelms me, and that's the only thing that tells me I’m back there again, but it feels so real for just that moment. That doesn’t… I mean, I don’t know, that doesn’t sound anything like what you had.”

Josh bites his lip. “We all process this kind of stuff differently,” he says, and he feels his stomach contract even more.

She takes another sip of the hot chocolate, which Josh is certain is probably cold by now. “Yeah,” she says. “But I just… it doesn’t happen often. It’s only happened a few times, actually. And I don’t get the nightmares often either.”

“But you’re not sleeping because you’re scared you’re going to have a nightmare,” Josh points out.

“I’m not sleeping because I’m trying to help run a damn presidential campaign and you’re making it hard,” she shoots back. It could have been bitter sounding, could have been cruel, but there’s a sense of humor to it, and Josh feels warmed by that. She’s starting to sound like Donna again. 

“I’d set my alarm to go off every two hours,” Josh tells Donna. “For a couple months after I got my diagnosis, because I didn’t want to sleep deeply enough to have a nightmare. Of course, it didn’t work, and it actually made things worse, and once my therapist found out about it he explained to me how stupid I was being, but I thought it would make things better. I thought if I just never let myself be in a situation to be hurt, I’d get through it fine and get back to normal. Instead I was sleep deprived, and when I did sleep long enough to have a nightmare, they were really bad. Worse than they had been before.”

Donna bites her lip. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, you were already doing enough to try and keep me sane. I wanted you to feel like it was working,” Josh tells her. “It was working, I was just… I thought there would be shortcuts, you know? But it turns out that getting better is a lot of work, and hard work, and I wasn’t very good at it a lot of the time.”

“That’s not reassuring,” Donna whispers, seeming achingly vulnerable before she takes another sip of the hot chocolate and seems to steel herself again. “Josh, I’m not really sure it was as bad as you think it is.”

His back aches from the way he’s seated on the hard bathroom floor, and he shifts slightly, trying to get ever closer to her without breaching the boundary between them. “I said that once,” he says. “I said that yelling at the President in the Oval wasn't nearly as bad as everyone seemed to think it was, that I would never do that, that I was just being passionate about something. I was in denial. I couldn’t see past my own pain to recognize just how much I was hurting myself and everyone around me. It took a while before I could see that clearly.”

To his surprise, Donna’s face, which had been as steely as she could manage considering the events of the night, crumbles at that, and stored up tears, held back, roll down her cheeks. “Was I hurting you?” she asks, and that was not the question he expected her to ask. “Is that why… is that why I don’t have anyone anymore?”

And Josh doesn’t know how to answer that. She did hurt him, badly. She hurt him by leaving, again. Leaving without a goodbye, without an explanation. Then again, he didn’t allow her to give that explanation, so perhaps it is his fault. She’s been hurting him ever since. Every glance they’re shared, every moment; it’s been agony to be around her and not be with her. It’s been agony to be so close and yet so far, and every moment of their marriage has stung more and more. She has hurt him, but that is because he put her in the position to hurt him. He let her be close to his most sensitive parts, to the cracks in his shell, and let her poke at them. Every interaction has rubbed at the open wounds that he has only allowed her to touch. She hasn’t been trying to hurt him, but she has. The way she has hurt him is more painful than recovering from a gunshot wound, more painful than a hand through the window. It’s a kind of existential agony that she’s caused him, and he’s not sure how to recover. Being close to her after everything is awful, but it's so much easier than never seeing her again.

Even if every time he sees her, his chest clenches painfully.

It’s not her fault though, that she hurt him. He ignored her, ignored her pain, and she somehow didn’t cast a path of destruction in the wake of her trauma the way that he did, the way he would have continued to if she didn’t step in to help him.

It’s so clear to him now that he fucked up, and Donna is suffering the consequences, and she is blaming herself for it.

She hurt him, that’s true. But she hurt him because she needed someone to listen to her, and no one did. And now she’s lonely, and still doesn’t have anyone to listen to her, and he wants to be that person, but he’s still stinging from the way she poured salt on his wounds knowing how much it would sting.

He doesn’t want to make her feel worse. But he doesn’t want to lie to her, either.

So he gets up and lifts one foot over the edge of the tub, and then the other, sitting on the rim before sinking in, pulling his knees to his chest, and looking her right in the eye. Their feet are not quite touching, but it's taking significant restraint on both of their parts to pull back enough to avoid that contact. He looks her in the eye and sighs heavily. “Donna, I’m sorry,” he says, and he really is.

She wipes at one of her eyes, and Josh notices that she never quite managed to get off all of her makeup from the day before. He’s always known Donna to have a strict, although relatively simple, face washing routine; even when she'd come home drunk, she would still manage to take off all her makeup. “It’s bad for your skin to leave it on,” she had told him, and Josh, having never worn makeup, accepted this without argument. So this Donna, with black smears under her eyes and the ghost of a fake pink on her cheeks, is not the Donna he once knew. “Is that your answer?”

“Well, I’m sure that’s what you want to hear, since you blame me for everything that happened to you!” Josh says, his voice rising somewhere beyond his control. His knees shake under his chin, and he is willing his body not to collapse on him. It’s true, and of course she blames him! Of course she blames him, because he sent her into a war zone, he let her get blown up. Because everything he touches turns to dust, because everyone he loves leaves him eventually, and he’s the one common thread between all of it.

Donna’s eyes widen, and before either of them know what is happening, she reaches out and stills his knee with her hand. “I don’t blame you,” she says.

“How can you not?” he asks, his voice thick. It buzzes in his throat as he speaks, making him aware of every single word. Making him awake of every single way he’s screwed her up, screwed this up.

“Josh, was it… did you not…” she rubs at her forehead aggressively, and the way she presses on it makes a small scar visible in the harsh bathroom right. “Did you feel guilty? Was that why you brushed me off when I came back?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers. “Donna, what happened to you… god, this is going to sound awful, I’m not even so sure I want to say this. But what happened to you, watching it happen on TV, having to fly across the ocean without knowing whether you would be alive or dead when I landed… that was worse for me than the shooting.”

She doesn't look at him; the grout on the wall of the shower is once again very interesting to her. “That was worse for me,” she says. “I waited for so long, and then afterwards everyone wanted to help you, to help me, but I decided I had to take it all on by myself. I decided that no one else could do it, and so I made it harder on myself, and probably on you too.”

“You didn’t make it harder,” he corrects quickly. “Donna, don’t you ever…”

“I suppose that’s why I felt like I could handle this on my own,” she says. “Why I didn’t tell you. I wanted you to help me so badly but I also… didn’t want you to think I was weak. Because the shooting felt so much worse. I couldn’t even remember the explosion! I just woke up and sure there was physical pain, but I didn’t really have to emotionally process, and then I… I was angry. I didn’t have a reason to be, but I was so angry. I still am, I think, and I know that I’ve hurt you because.”

“You hurt me,” Josh says, “but not because you were angry. You hurt me because I couldn’t help you. I couldn’t make it better, especially not when I didn't even know. I wish you had told me.”

“Would you have done anything?” she asks. She doesn’t say it harshly, or with any vitriol. It’s a genuine question, and Josh has to ponder it for a second.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “I did a pretty good job of having my head up my ass in all honesty. But I wish I would have, if that helps.”

Donna shrugs. “I guess it does.”

He puts his hand, his scarred one, on top of hers, still resting on his knee. “Is there anything I can do now?”

“Is there anything you want me to do now?” 

She blinks. “You want to do something for me?”
“I mean, you’re my wife,” he says, and while he’s said it as a joke before, this time, he loves the way it sounds. He doesn’t have the chance to think too much about that, because suddenly he’s scooting forward in the tub, stretching his legs out to surround her and wrap her in his arms, because he can see that she's on the verge of sobbing again. “Donna, you’ve done so much for me, and I didn’t even realize…”

“It’s alright,” she whispers, her head buried into his shoulder. He hasn’t hugged her like this in so long, hasn’t held her this close to him in years it seems, and it’s as if her touch can relax him instantly, even after how emotionally drained he feels, how emotionally drained she must be.

“What can I do?” he asks.

“I don’t want to cross any lines,” she says. “I know... things are weird between us.”

Josh grimaces a little bit; even in all the pain of the evening, he’d managed to forget. “Whatever you need,” he says.

She pulls back from him and blinks a little bit. “Can I… stay in your bed tonight?” she asks.

“You were there first,” he points out, chuckling a little bit.

"Can you stay in there for me?”

And Josh remembers all those late nights in that same bed, where she was the only thing tethering him to reality. Where she was his lifeline, his savior. He’s not sure he can do that in the same way, but he’ll certainly try.

He stands up, holds out his hand to help her up, and leads her to his bed.

She doesn’t hold him as they fall asleep, and he doesn’t reach out for her either. It’s simply that having someone else next to you makes the darkness a little less frightening. It works, because neither of them wake up in the short night.

They don’t talk about any of it in the morning.

Chapter Text

Donna isn’t sure how the desk she’s had for all of twelve hours in the new campaign office in Portland is already a mess; she’s hardly had a chance to sit down at it, but it is already covered with files and all sorts of things that she’s going to have to deal with before she goes home today. She’s been up since five in the morning in DC, which is two in the morning here in Oregon, and it’s not even evening yet on the west coast. It’s been one of the longest days she can remember, and she’s had plenty of long days.

But there are only three primaries left; this one, Alabama, and New Jersey, and unless Russell sweeps all three, there is no chance for them to win the nomination outright. And the poll numbers here in Oregon are looking pretty bad for that prospect.

She had figured by March, they’d have the primary thing wrapped up, in the bag, and then would be able to move onto campaigning to the whole country. Russell seems to already want to be doing that, moving to the right on issue after issue, but Donna doesn’t think this is good strategy, especially not in liberal Oregon.

Too bad people don’t listen to her. Josh would have listened to her. President Bartlet would have listened to her. But she has basically given up on speaking in meetings on this campaign because her opinion is so rarely taken into account.

It’s fine, she thinks, but she isn’t holding out much hope that the primary will be any good.

She takes one last lingering look at the stack of papers on her desk that she has to get through before she goes to bed today before her arm is grabbed by one of the people on the media team, and she’s swept off to do yet another TV interview.

It's funny how easy they’ve become, how she can practically sleep through it, batting off questions with ease, but never saying anything of any depth. It’s hard to admit it, but she thinks that’s starting to get to her. It’s starting to get harder to parrot off the same answers that she might not actually believe, harder to present Bob Russell as the ideal candidate for America when she has her own doubts that it’s true.

But she does the interview, and she’s good at it, and as soon as the host thanks her, she hurries as fast as she can back to her desk, almost running straight into a man with a familiar face.

“Donna Moss?” She has to pause for a moment and take him in, squinting a bit, but it’s not until he says her name that she remembers where he knows him from.

It’s Bill Brewer, the former Hoynes advisor who had flirted with her back in New York. She isn't sure what to say—they’d had such an awkward ending, especially when she figured out his plan—and she certainly doesn’t want to start flirting with him again. “What are you doing here?” she asks him.

“Looking for a job,” he says with a shrug. “I’ve got an interview in a few minutes. Old campaign isn’t running anymore, so I had to find something new.”

“After smearing us in the press for our lack of values?”

“Well, I never said that I personally cared about the values,” he shoots back. “Hey, how about you show me around the place while I wait?”

Donna would rather jump into the Columbia River fully clothed than do that, but she plasters on a smile and begins to walk towards her desk. “I only just got here this morning,” she says. “So I don’t know it well.”

“This is your desk?” Brewer asks, pointing to the messy workspace where her bag has been unceremoniously dropped in a chair.

Donna presses her lips together. “Yeah, it’s…” Before she can finish her sentence, she hears her name called, and she gets pulled away to go give a quick line putting out a minor fire that occurred because Bob Russell apparently thought Tillamook was a mythical creature rather than a cheese company. It’s worth an eye-roll at best, but these are the kinds of things that screw up campaigns for good.

When she gets back to her desk, Brewer is still there, and he’s looking too closely at some of the papers. Donna sweeps them up quickly and insistently, giving him a frown, but he just smiles back. “Nice flowers,” he says, although Donna doesn’t remember having any flowers. Her back is to the desk, and she doesn’t turn to look.

He glances at his watch. “Would you guide me to Will Bailey’s office, please? I have an interview in five minutes.”

“He is very busy,” Donna points out, “so I can’t guarantee that he’ll be able to see you right now.”

“I’d like to go check, though,” Brewer says with a smile. She hates his smile. It’s creepy, and dripping with contempt for her through a veneer of civility, and maybe she’s reading too much into this but this guy puts her on edge and she doesn’t want to have to deal with him.

Besides that, he worked for Hoynes, and if she remembers correctly, he was one of the Hoynes advisors who Josh had worked with prior to the Bartlet campaign, one of the guys he had strongly disliked. She trusts Josh’s judgment about people, so she likes this man even less. “Let me go in and check for you,” Donna says. “You might get in faster that way.” Before he can answer, she heads down the hallway to Will’s office.

She knocks on the door, and doesn't wait for an answer before opening it and then closing it behind her. He looks up from his desk, and while Will has never looked all that good, the exhaustion of these last weeks seems to have done even more of a number on him. “What do you need?” he asks.

“There’s a guy here who says he’s interviewing for a campaign position? His name is Bill Brewer?”

Will frowns. “Oh, yeah. Okay, send him in."
She puts her hand on the doorknob and hesitates, before turning around. “Look, this is just my two cents, but you shouldn’t hire this guy.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he worked for Hoynes for a very long time,” Donna says, “so I don’t know if I would trust him. And I’ve just… I’ve had some experiences with this guy, and I think he’s bad news.”

“If I couldn’t hire anyone else who worked on any other Presidential campaign, there would be no one left to work for me,” Will points out. “Look, Donna, I…”

“Please just… I mean, you can interview him, but I really don’t think you should hire him. He was… we had some interactions in New York.”

Will sighs. “Let me interview him. Not like I have time for this, anyway, but…”

Donna presses her lips together. “Well, hopefully you’ll take my advice and make it quick. But I’ll go get him for you.” She leaves the office and nods her head towards the door when she makes eye contact with Brewer, and he gives her that same smile as he heads in.

Donna walks back towards her desk, finally able to drop her bag on the floor, sit down, and begin to go through the thousand memos that have piled up since she arrived. Except on top of half the papers that she needs is a giant bouquet of flowers.

For a moment, Donna wonders if this was Brewer trying to flirt with her again, but they’re far too fancy for a simple flirtation. The only other person who has sent her flowers, well… she’s not going to think about him, because of course he wouldn’t send her flowers. She observes them, turning them around, and then finds a card attached to them.

He did send her flowers.

Donnatella, the card reads. Happy not-anniversary! I know I’m a few weeks late, but I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me for letting the occasion go unnoticed. I know we have a real anniversary to celebrate now, but I couldn’t break with tradition and not get you these. Yours, Joshua.

Donna doesn’t know what to say, certainly does know what to think. She stares at the card, blinking a few times. He didn’t actually do this. He couldn’t have actually done this. And yet, clearly, he did. He went and sent her flowers for the anniversary of her coming back to him after she left him again. He sent her flowers, and he talked about their other anniversary, a concept Donna hadn’t even considered, and he called himself ‘yours', and that’s not even the half of it.

Part of Donna wants to throw the flowers in the trash, because how dare he make these assumptions? How dare he think that he could still tease her about their not anniversary? How dare he do this to her so publicly and without any warning, so that if anyone asked about it, she would have to come up with an explanation quickly. She has no explanation for the flowers, no reason to receive them, and certainly people will ask. They really are quite terrible at hiding their marriage, and sooner or later, it's going to bite them in the ass.

Another part of Donna, though, can’t help but admire the flowers, can’t help but think about how Josh took time out of his insane schedule to order them to be delivered (because there’s no way that’s a task he would delegate), can’t help but smile when she sees them. It’s rather sweet of him, really, and even though things are still weird between them, something is back to normal-ish.

It’s past their not-anniversary by a couple weeks, which is unlike Josh, but she hadn't expected to get flowers at all. She’s still going to yell at him about it the next time she sees him, though, because frankly, this is an unprecedented step over boundary lines that are hard to cross. It seems like a bigger step than her being in his apartment, than that night in the bathtub, even than her sleeping in his bed. That had all been for a reason. This… there’s no excuse for this. Josh just sent her flowers.

Everyone is too busy to notice them, but she takes them back to her hotel room, not wanting to arouse any suspicion about a secret admirer. He’d be a better admirer if he managed to stay more secret, but Josh has never been good about hiding his feelings.

Donna has to remind herself that these are not feelings. He does’t feel anything for her. In fact, he probably sent the flowers to be mean to her. He has a tendency to do that. He didn’t send them as a declaration of affection, just as she didn’t sleep in his bed as a declaration of affection.

She needs to stop thinking about his goddamn bed, with the ugly duvet and the mattress as hard as a rock and the flat pillows and Josh’s loud but comforting breathing as she tried to still her heart rate enough to go to sleep. Every night, as she goes to sleep, she thinks about that stupid bed, and it’s ridiculous, because she’s slept in many nicer beds on the campaign trail. She didn’t even sleep well at his apartment—she’s been sleeping better this week, although there still have been a couple nights she’s woken up sweaty and with a racing heart and can’t fall asleep again. She didn’t even sleep well at his apartment, but she can’t stop thinking about it.

It’s the last thing in the world she should be thinking about, because everything else is so much more important. They’re in the final stretch of this presidential race, and it’s still anyone’s game, and she has an important role to play. She should keep working, keep thinking about electoral math and how many delegates they need to get to 2162 and whether an education speech will buy them enough teacher votes in rural areas to offset the impact of the environmental policies Russell had to announce to offset the recent expose about his mining connections. Complicated stuff, yes, but so much more simple than anything involving Joshua Lyman.

And yet Donna falls asleep thinking about that stupid brown duvet and the way she had to throw it off in the middle of the night when Josh wasn’t there to hold onto her.

The next day seems like a blur, but there’s a big event hosted by the Oregon Democrats in the evening. Donna managed to steal away on her lunch break (the only one she’s had this week) to a thrift store, because she forgot to pack her nice dress that doesn’t require ironing. She only has two dresses that really are appropriate for an event like this, and the only one she brought is hopelessly wrinkled, and the hotel apparently does not provide ironing boards. She had tried to hang it in her shower this morning, hoping the steam would save her, but even that was not enough.

Thankfully, thrift shops in Portland are quite a bit more eclectic than the ones she grew up going too, which were usually all varieties of worn-out overalls and t-shirts from high schools she had never heard of. She manages to find a silver dress in her size; it’s not too low-cut, and while there’s a slit up the side (the right side, she notes with a sigh), it doesn't seem inappropriately high, and as long as she doesn’t walk too fast, she can probably manage to keep the scars on her leg hidden enough to keep people from asking questions.

It’ll do for the event, she thinks, and she buys it. At least she’ll have something to add to her rotation besides the two dresses she’s worn to every single event so far, since Bartlet’s first inauguration. She had worn the borrowed dressed (the ones Josh called stolen) for dates, but she had never quite felt right about wearing them to work events, considering the possibility of paparazzi pictures.

After many TV interviews (and correcting another Bob Russell classic gaffe) and a very long day, Donna gets all of twenty minutes to go put on makeup and do her hair for the event. She’s pretty good at doing it in a rush—after all, years of getting ready for dates in ten minutes in the bathroom off the mess (the only one with decent enough lighting to do her makeup)—has prepared her well to get ready with almost no time at all.

"You look good,” Will tells her with a smile as she joins him in a car over to the convention center where the event is being held.

If Donna were a little more self-aware, she’d suspect that Will had a crush on her. If Donna were a little more friendly with him, she might have made some sort of remark referring to how she always looks good. If Donna were a little less tired, she’d probably stiffen at the idea of someone hitting on her. But she just pulls together the slit over the leg of her dress, trying not to reveal anything above the knee, and shuffles into the car. “Thanks,” she mumbles, and Will launches into a whole thing about their priorities for the event tonight. Donna doesn’t really listen.

She’s still thinking about the flowers on top of the dresser in her hotel room, and what they might mean.

There are so many events that Donna attends that she can hardly keep straight who will be at what. This, however, is not a Russell campaign event but an Oregon Democratic Party event, which means that they are not the only campaign there.

The seating chart has the Santos and Russell campaigns on opposite sides of the room, presumably so that nothing comes to blows with rivaling campaigns in the same room. There’s an honored guest who Donna thinks might be the former governor of Oregon, although because he was governor prior to 1998, prior to her entire political education courtesy of Josh Lyman, she doesn’t know for sure.

She just picks at her food, watching several people, including Santos and Russell, give speeches while others are milling about in attempts to curry political favor. She probably should be doing that too—seeking donations, working the room—but she can’t manage to get up the energy.

In fact, once the speeches are over, the din of voices and the heat of the room and the pain shooting up her leg from wearing the only shoes she had that would go with this new dress become almost unbearable, and Donna makes for the courtyard on the side of the building, following twisting hallways to find her way to the outside.

It’s less crowded in the courtyard, but there are still people there. Mostly, it seems, people are out there for a smoke break. Donna tries not to cough when she smells cigarette smoke; she’s never particularly liked it, and after her collapsed lung and pulmonary embolism, she had been warned very strictly not to take up smoking. It’s something she might have been able to laugh over with Josh, because she remembers him being told the same thing after his surgery, but it’s never come up in conversation. It probably never will, given the shallowness of their relationship now.

Unless… unless she thinks about that night in the bathtub, that night she spent in his bed. Afterwards, he had been unable to convince her to stay again, and she had been unable to convince herself it was okay to stay again, instead tethering herself to his couch and waking herself up at intervals to ensure that she did not sleep deeply enough to have another nightmare around him.

But that night was a fluke, was one she can hardly remember. Much as she could consider it some big breakthrough between them, it simply isn’t that.

She looks around for a corner to go hide in, sit down, take off her shoes perhaps, but before she can escape it, Bill Brewer comes up to her, a frown on his face. “Donna Moss,” he says, although there is no levity or humor in it.

“How can I help you?” she asks, putting on the smile she’s learned how to fake so well.

"Did Will Bailey say anything to you about me?”

“Why would Will Bailey say anything to me about you?” she asks, and then she remembers the interview.

Brewer frowns. “Well, he rejected me on the spot,” he says, “after talking to me for about three minutes.”
Donna tries not to let her relief show, although from the way Brewer’s eyes narrow, she’s not so certain she was successful at it. “He didn’t say anything to me. I didn’t even know. I’m not… involved with hiring.”

“Did you say anything to him?” Brewer asks. “I mean, you were the only one who knew me before, and I wondered…”

She shrugs. “I told him you were issues director on the Hoynes campaign when I was giving him some context. I noticed you didn’t put that on your resume.”

He blinks a few times. “You told him that?”

“Well, yes,” Donna says. “He was wondering where you came from, what you were up to. I told him what I knew. Look, it’s not like he couldn’t have looked you up on the internet? It’s not like he couldn’t have recognized you, right?”

“And that’s why he didn’t hire me?”

“You were in fact a recognizable person on a rival campaign,” Donna says with a shrug. “I’m not sure that’s the best look for our campaign at the moment, considering.”

“That hardly matters now,” Brewer protests.

“Maybe once we’re past the convention, but if you hadn’t noticed, this campaign is still fighting in the primaries,” Donna says. It’s not like what she’s saying is wrong; it is awfully soon to be hiring a prominent staffer from another campaign. It would be too soon to hire Josh, if he were to decide to switch sides. He never would, of course, but sometimes Donna wonders.

Brewer takes a cigarette out of a pack in his pocket and lights it up. Donna tries. Not to cough on the smoke from the first puff. “You’re trouble, Donna Moss,” he says. “You were the one who brought down Hoynes, you prevented me from getting this job here…”

“Who's to say either of those were my fault?” Donna challenges, although she has to clear her throat halfway through, which kind of hurts the defiance she was going for.

Brewer rolls his eyes. “Who taught you to be so much trouble?”
“My boss,” she shoots out, forgetting who she was with. If this had been with the staff at the White House, it would have been funny. Making fun of Josh is practically a pastime with them. But Bill Brewer doesn’t know that, doesn’t understand that.

“Will Bailey?”

She could let it go there, but she shakes her head. “My old boss,” she corrects. “He’s not… it’s been a long time.”

Brewer blinks a few times. “Oh my god, you worked for Josh Lyman, didn’t you? I worked in the Vice President’s office—Hoynes, of course, not Russell—for a year and…”

Donna really wishes she hadn’t said that, but she can hardly deny it. “Yeah.”

“He’s a dick, isn’t he? Massive asshole. He and I worked for Hoynes at the same time when he was a senator, and god, Josh would always be shooting his mouth off about something or another, complaining about the way we did things, insisting we should change our position on something or shut up about whatever else, and I just think that…”

Donna is prepared to launch into a tirade on Josh’s behalf about his good qualities, about his brilliance, about how his job is literally to make noise about the problems he sees within his employer’s political strategies, but she doesn’t, because she feels someone come up behind her.

“Bill!” she hears, and it’s a very familiar voice.

Josh Lyman, for all his social flaws, is quite good at putting on a show when he needs to. He can grip and grin like the best of them, and while he’s always protested that he would not do well in public office, Donna really does think he could pull it off. “Speak of the devil!” Bill Brewer responds, although his tone has become jovial. “We were just chatting about you.”

“Oh, were you?” Josh asks, coming around between them and wearing the fakest smile Donna has seen him put on. It manages to eliminate some of the lines on his face that she’s noticed lately; the last year has certainly aged him.

“Donna here was telling me about how she used to work for you,” Brewer says.

“She’s moved on to bigger and better things,” Josh says with a shrug, and while Donna knows that’s not what he actually thinks about her moving on, it's kind of sweet to hear him say it.

“Clearly,” Brewer says. “Hey, is your campaign looking for any roles that…”

Josh shakes his head. “My campaign is mostly run on volunteer power right now. Until we get some DNC funding in the general, it’s going to be…"

“The little engine that could,” Donna fills in, remembering the way he used to describe his campaign.

“Well, we hope we can,” Josh says. “Can I do anything else for you?”

“No," Brewer says. “Just trying to figure out how you taught this one to bring down an entire political campaign,” he says with a raise of an eyebrow.

“I don’t think I taught her that at all,” Josh says. “That wasn’t part of the curriculum, was it?”

Donna gives him a weak smile. “I think that was Toby’s lesson for me.”

“Ah, yes. If you’ll excuse us for a moment, actually, I do need to speak with Donna,” Josh says.

Brewer gives a tight smile. “Of course. You have a special connection, I know. Wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.”

Josh and Donna stare at each other for a split second, before remembering what company they’re in. Donna takes Josh’s arm and drags him to a quiet corner of the courtyard, where she can finally lean against a stone wall and take some weight off her leg.

“What were you doing talking to that guy?” Josh asks.

“Look, I’ve tried to avoid it, but…”

“Was he flirting with you?” Josh asks incredulously. “Of all the people, I…”

“No, he wasn’t flirting with me,” Donna protests, “and if he were, what business of it is yours?”

“Well, as your husband…”

Donna rubs her forehead. “Don’t you dare say that too loud, you might get us into trouble.” She glances around the courtyard surreptitiously. "In fact, you’ve already almost done yourself in with the stupid flowers.”

“Did you like them?”

“You put your name on them! You alluded to our marriage in the note! You sent them publicly to me, gave me no warning or explanation, and then assumed I’d be fine to lie to cover our asses when we're still trying to keep this secret!”

Josh has the good grace to look at least a little sheepish, but all he says is, “You might want to keep your voice down.”

“Don’t tell me where to keep my voice!” Donna responds with a huff. “It was really stupid, Josh! You know… oh my god, I think Brewer might have seen the note.”

Now Josh looks concerned. “What?”

“He must have… yeah! God, he was in the office for an interview and he was rifling through the stuff on my desk and the flowers were there and… Josh, he’s gonna figure it out.”

“Calm down,” Josh says, although his mouth is pressed in a tight line. “I’m sure he didn’t… I mean, you and I, we understand things that people don’t. The note wouldn’t make sense to anyone else.”

Donna rubs at her aching leg. “Josh, you don’t have a monopoly on intelligence. You’re also not that sneaky. I don’t know what to tell you, but I think he read the note and after the weirdness of that interaction, I'm afraid he might have it figured out.”

“Well, what is he going to do with it?” Josh asks, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that Brewer isn’t anywhere within earshot.

“Well, he thinks I destroyed his campaign,” Donna says, “and then prevented him from getting another job. And it sounds like he hates you…”

“Yeah,” Josh says. “I hate that guy too.”

“Working for Hoynes must have been a blast,” Donna says flatly.

Josh shakes his head. “There are many reasons I quit, and the people there were just but one of them.”

“Bartlet being a better candidate was another?”

“Of course,” Josh says. “And Santos… I think he’s another Bartlet. I mean, not nearly the same, but he has something new to bring! Something fresh! Something the White House has never seen before!”
“Josh, you don’t have to stump for your guy with me here,” Donna says, although a part of her wishes she could feel that strongly about her own campaign. “I know you’re passionate about it.”

Josh shrugs. “I just wish you could join me.”
Sometimes, she does too, but she tries to ignore that, tries to ignore what she just heard come out of his mouth. “Well, if I had to join you, how would we get health insurance?” she asks jokingly.

“Do you think he’ll be able to figure out about the insurance piece?” Donna asks. "I mean, marriage records are public information, but maybe the reason for marriage can stay hidden because of HIPAA… I don’t…”

"I don’t know,” Josh says, “and frankly, it’s pretty low on my list of things to worry about. Like, below how our office isn’t up to fire code, but above how my favorite tie got lost and I have no clue what state it is in now.”

She chuckles. “You have a list?”

“Something my therapist told me to do. Rank my worries in order of most to least important. Of course, I think my list ended up being a whole lot longer than he was expecting.”

Donna laughs at that. “How many pieces of paper did you need for that?”

“Oh, binders and binders,” Josh jokes. “Hey, did you ever call…”

“I haven’t yet,” Donna says. “Look, I’m not going to have time to do it until the convention is over. There’s just no way.”

“I know.”

“But… I’ve been sleeping better,” she says, and while she knows it’s a lie, maybe it's a lie that will help Josh sleep better at night. “I really have been doing better. That night was just a… I’m not sure what was happening.” She swallows, and looks into his eyes. “Thank you for the flowers,” she says sincerely. “They were beautiful.”

“You didn’t throw them away?” Josh asks, and he seems genuinely surprised.

“Of course not,” Donna says. “They’re in my hotel room now, so that no one else reads the card. Next time, maybe be a little more subtle about it.”

Josh raises an eyebrow. “You think there’s going to be a next time?”

“We have another anniversary now, don’t we?”

She's surprised by how genuine his smile is. “Yeah, we do,” he says. He looks around the courtyard, questioning for the first time what she’s doing out here. “Hey, are you doing alright?”

Despite everything, Donna does feel better out here than she has in a little while. “Yeah,” she says. “Just got a little overwhelmed inside, but I’m better now.”

“Good,” Josh says. “I suppose we should go back in. By the way, your dress is beautiful. Did you steal that one?” He had seemed so genuine, and then the addition of that obnoxious, cocky grin, was simply pure Josh.

“No,” Donna replies. “No, I actually bought this one. At a thrift shop, in fact.”

“It looks good,” he says more genuinely.

She shrugs. “I just wish the slit was up the other side,” she says, pulling aside the fabric so that Josh can see a little bit of the white scar snaking down her leg. She isn’t sure why she does it.

His face blanches. “Donna…” And then a moment of silence, where it seems like he wants to say more. Donna doesn’t know what to say. “I’ve never seen them before,” Josh finally adds.

“Thankfully they’re not too hard to hide,” Donna says with a smile, trying to sound light and breezy. “Except when I buy the wrong dress, apparently.”

Josh manages to smile too, although he still looks pale and bothered. “Yeah,” he says. “Well, mine are a little easier to hide.”

It's stupid and impulsive, but she picks up his right hand in hers. “Not this one,” she says, tracing the white scar on the back. It’s faded and hardly noticeable anymore, but Donna can still feel the slight raise of the skin.

“No one notices that one,” Josh says. He rubs at his eye wit his free hand and blinks a few times. “Look, I’ve got to go back in. We should probably… you know, not go in together. Be discreet.”

“Like you were with the flowers?”

“I’m never going to live that down, am I?”

Donna grins, grateful for the return of levity. “No, you’re not. Go. I’m going to make a stop on the way back.”

Josh nods and heads back inside, and Donna watches, before enjoying a few more minutes out in the coolness of the courtyard, now emptied.

She wishes she could replace Bill Brewer’s creepy smile with Josh’s affectionate one, but the way she has left herself and Josh exposed weighs on her.

But that, she thinks, is a problem for later, and she heads back in, ready to do her job.

She manages to avoid looking Bill Brewer in the eye.

Chapter Text

Donna is tired of New Jersey, if she’s being honest. Usually, the New Jersey primary doesn’t matter at all. In some ways, this year’s New Jersey Primary doesn’t really matter at all, except that it's the last chance the Russell campaign has to prove that they are the right choice for the general, that Russell is the only candidate who can beat Vinick.

At least in New Jersey, she has a hotel. Back in DC, she is still staying at Josh’s, which is awkward at best. She can’t even think about what she might have to do between this last primary and the time of the convention.

Actually, staying with Josh is not that bad. Sure, his couch seems less comfortable than it was six years ago (but maybe Donna is just older), and there is an awkwardness between them even after they’ve opened up to each other some, but most of the time neither of them are there often enough for it to be a problem. Donna still often spends nights staring at a peculiar stain on Josh’s ceiling hoping he doesn’t catch her in the middle of a nightmare again, and trying her best to ignore some suspiciously concerning sounds coming from his bedroom late at night, but it really could be worse.

It’s good to be out on the road again, good to be able to forget about her homelessness for the time being, but sometimes she misses sharing funny anecdotes with him when he drags himself back to his apartment on one of those rare nights that they’re both there. Everything is surface level and shallow, of course, since neither of them actually want to share too much about the inner workings of their campaigns, and neither of them want to actually end up in another emotionally draining conversation.

So maybe New Jersey isn’t so bad, if it means that Donna can go back to her own room and pass out and not have to worry about someone hearing her if she starts to panic in the middle of the night. It’s not like it happens that often, either; the fear of it occurring is often worse than the reality of how much it happens. Still, Donna is sick and tired of this state and this pointless primary and there are still ten days to go before anything happens.

But then Will throws her a curveball, and Donna almost wishes she could permanently plant herself in New Jersey.

“Donna,” he tells her, that Saturday night just before she’s about to head back to her hotel room and collapse entirely. “Monday is Memorial Day, yeah?”

And she shudders because she didn’t realize. Because she hasn't been watching the calendar. Because the increase in frequency of her nightmares lately, the number of times she’s felt that burning pain that comes and steals her breath and then disappears without reason, the number of times she’s thought about the congressmen she was with, all the others who were in that car… 

That means tomorrow, a year ago, was the day the explosion occurred.

Donna has never really thought much about anniversaries. She doesn’t measure her life in years, in ‘on this day’ moments. Josh does much more of that, she knows. He's probably acutely aware of the significance of that date before she is. Still, it sends a shiver through her to think about it, to think about how it has been a year since her life was turned entirely upside down.

"I guess so,” Donna says. “You think I have time to look at a calendar?” And it’s funny, because she used to look at a calendar all the time when she used to work for Josh. Now she has people to do that for her.

Will shakes his head. “Look, there's some kind of ceremony on Monday. A Memorial Day service at Arlington, but this year, the President is going to be specifically honoring those who have died on the Gaza peacekeeping mission.”

Donna bites her lip. “He thinks that’s a good idea? To remind people how that has been, in some ways, a failure?”

Will doesn’t seem to have an answer to that. “Anyway, the Vice President would like to attend that as well.”

“He doesn’t have his own event scheduled? Something here?” Donna asks. “What about the… VFW thing”

“That’s in the evening. This is a morning event, and he should be able to get back here in time. It’s not like it’s in Guam or anything,” Will says. “Anyway, I’d like you to go. I’ve got to stay here because I have some meetings scheduled that day, but…”

Donna grimaces. “Is it… do I have to?”

“Donna, it’s a hour-long Memorial Day service. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge commitment.”

“I just…”

“The Vice President specifically requested that you attend,” Will says, and Donna doesn’t have a comeback for that.

She could tell him about Gaza, because Will probably forgot. He was around when it occurred, but she supposes it is easy enough to forget when you’re not directly connected to it. She’s always shocked by the number of people who don’t realize that Josh was shot at Rosslyn, but it’s much the same for her. Besides, Will has a million things on his mind, and her life experiences certainly don’t rank in the top 50% of what she’s worried about.

So she doesn’t say anything. “Get me the exact details, since I assume I’m going to answer any press questions?”

Will bites his lip. “Actually, the Vice President seems to think you’re going to be up on the stage with him. I’ve… I’ve seen his speech, and he mentions you in it.”

So Will does know, she thinks. Will knows, and he saw what happened to her when a reporter questioned her on Gaza, and he still thinks she should go to this.

Donna is already dreading it, but it’s hard to say no when the Vice President of the United States is trying to honor you, even if it’s for something you absolutely do not feel like you should be honored for.

“I would still like to have the details," Donna says. “And I… you don’t think there’s any way for me to get out of this?”

“You can take that up with the Vice President,” Will says with a shrug.

Donna swallows thickly. While Bob Russell doesn't exactly intimidate her, she certainly doesn’t have the will to go openly defy the candidate she’s working for. She’s probably get fired, and then she’d lose her insurance, and then both she and Josh would be in even more trouble. “I just… it's not something I like getting a lot of attention for,” she admits. That's true, although she’s also terrified that she won’t be able to keep it together, that she’ll embarrass herself and her candidate, that something will go terribly wrong. Donna has never been easily scared, but lately it seems like fear comes more naturally than it ever has.

“Understandably,” Will says, and while he doesn’t sound entirely sympathetic, at least he is being polite about it. “By the way, there’s an extra opening on Meet the Press tomorrow, and you’re on for it.”

Donna groans. “You couldn’t have told me that like… an hour ago, so I could have gone to bed at a decent time?”

“A decent time? What’s that?” Will questions, and while it’s not very funny, he laughs at himself and Donna manages to force out a slight chuckle as well. “There should be a packet delivered to your hotel room any minute now so you can prepare.”

Donna nods. “Thanks,” she murmurs. “Flying or driving?”

“Flying,” Will says. “Leaving tomorrow evening. You've got DC accommodation?”

Donna winces. Not technically, but Will can’t know that. “Yeah,” she says, and hopes that Josh won’t mind too much that she’ll once again be crashing on his couch. She’d feel awful about it, except for the fact that she is the only reason he has health insurance, so it seems like a fair trade.

Too bad it’s still uncomfortable for the both of them.

But also, it isn’t nearly as uncomfortable as she thinks it should be. Maybe that is due to the fact that they have known each other for so long, the fact that they have lived together before in a sense, but frankly, Donna had expected a far more awkward situation.

Not that she’s looking forward to tomorrow night, but hopefully Josh will be in New Jersey too, and she can have his apartment to herself.

Maybe she just won’t say anything and hope he never knows she’ll be in DC for the night. She does the morning shows, takes the flight to DC, goes straight to the office, and then finally, finally, heads toward Josh’s place for the night.

Of course, she thinks, as she staggers through the last block of the long walk back to Josh’s from the Metro (damn him for living so far away), the light in his living room is on. The curtains are open, too, because Josh has never been very good at remembering to closing them. “I like to live my life out loud, Donnatella,” he had told her once, until she had teased him for that life being yelling at Republicans on CNN and eating ramen that was still just a little too al dente because he wasn’t patient enough to completely boil the water.

Still, she can’t help but smile when she can see him moving around in his living room, standing up, the hair on his head somehow an utter mess even though he surely hasn’t been back there all that long. She rings the buzzer—she has a key of course, but since he’s there, it’s polite to not just wander in—and he answers.

“I’m so sorry,” Donna says, as he opens the door for her. “I thought you were in New Jersey, otherwise I would have…”

“You were going to come stay here without telling me?” Josh asks, and while he’s trying to put on an air of incredulity, he can’t hide an affectionate smile.

“Well, you gave me a key. What did you expect?”

“I gave you a key because I needed someone to come make sure my food didn’t all rot while I was in the hospital after Rosslyn,” Josh asserts. “You took the privilege and ran with it.”

“You’ve never complained,” Donna retorts, and just like that, it feels like them.

Josh chuckles and opens the door further for her. “How are you doing?”

“Just fine,” Donna says. 

“Clearly you’re not in New Jersey either,” he points out, looking at her small bag. “Quick trip?”

Donna bites her lip. “I’ve been… well, voluntold, basically, that I’m going to be at the Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington tomorrow.”

Josh nods. “That's why I’m here too. Well, not that one, but the Congressman is speaking at the ceremony at Annapolis tomorrow.”

“Ah," Donna says awkwardly, and she wonders if he’s thinking about the same thing she's thinking about. She wonders if he’s remembering how they spent their last memorial day, both of them in Germany. How she ended that day in emergency surgery, how she woke up again with him by her side. She wonders if he is remembering those hours in between, wondering if she might live or die from the same thing that killed his father; she knows she’ll never forget those fourteen hours she spent in limbo with no assurance that he would pull through.

Memory can be a cruel mistress.

“Yeah,” Josh says. “The one at Arlington, that’s a…”

“Honoring the Gaza peacekeeping mission,” Donna says flatly. It’s funny; she talked about it this morning on Meet the Press, and was able to switch between a sobriety about the situation and a confidence about the campaign seamlessly, but mentioning it around Josh suddenly makes her feel the impact of it all.

Josh swallows. “You’re up for that?”

“I have to be,” she says with a smile. “Look, it’s not really that bad, and I… I mean, you remember how it was for you, when people kept trying to make the anniversary of Rosslyn out to be a thing. We don’t need to talk about it.”

Josh blinks a few times, stunned, and honestly Donna is surprised she ever brought it up either. “Donna…” he whispers.

She brushes past him to drop her things on the couch. “I’m fine, okay?”

“Okay,” Josh says, although he sounds less than convinced.

“The Vice President wants me up on the stage,” Donna says. “He probably wants to… I don’t know, talk about me or something.” Actually, she does know, because she begged a speechwriter to show her what the Vice President was going to say. She knows that he’s going to try and honor her, or at least point out her presence at Gaza, point out the way that she too almost died in part of this effort to bring peace. It's far too much of a speech about honor and sacrifice, neither of which Donna believes she deserves credit for, and she had asked the speechwriter to tone down the language. He had promised to consult with the Vice President regarding her wishes, but nothing more than that.

God, Donna wishes she were working with Sam on that. Sam, she knows, would have respected her wishes, would probably not even have put her in this position in the first place.

Things are so different on this campaign, and sometimes it pains Donna to think about it.

Josh doesn’t look too impressed by this, but then again, he is rarely impressed by anything having to do with the Vice President. “Do you need anything?” he asks, trying to change the subject. She’s sure that he desperately wants to ask her if she’s actually going to be okay, if she actually wants to be up on that stage (the answer to which is ‘hell no’, but she has very little voice in the situation). She would want to ask him the same thing if their positions were reversed, but she also knows that the fragility of their relationship at the moment would not survive that.

“I’ll be fine,” Donna says. “I’m sorry to intrude. I really did think you were going to be in New Jersey, and I’d just... crash here and call it good and you’d never know. I can find somewhere else to stay if you’d like.”

“No, no, of course not,” Josh says. “And Donna…”

“Yeah?”

He blinks a few times, leaning forward, his hands resting on the back of the couch. “Today, tomorrow, this whole weekend… I know it’s going to be difficult. And if you're having a hard time, you just… you don’t have to hide it from me. Out of anyone in the world, I think I know best how that goes.”

Donna gives him a tight smile. “I know,” she says.

She doesn’t sleep that night anyway. Partly for the fear of waking up from a nightmare, and partly for the words of the Vice President’s speech, words that she believes not at all, running through her head. Words about courage and sacrifice, about honor and choice, about all these things that Donna knows don’t belong to her. She's never been one to take credit where credit isn’t due anyway, but something about the unearned attribution grates on her, feels like a pair of shoes rubbing blisters onto her feet, worse than she remembers her cast rubbing against her. It’s probably for the best she doesn't sleep anyway, because Josh is there on the other side of the door, and she doesn’t want to put herself in that position again.

Not that she minded sleeping in his bed, not really, but it’s the bad idea to end all bad ideas.

So she stretches out on the couch, trying to keep her breathing steady, staring once again at the stain on Josh’s ceiling that certainly should lower his rent by a hundred dollars or so. He's complained about rent increases on this place, and even pointed out once or twice the illegal actions of his landlord, but he’s never bothered to actually do anything about it. Ever since the insurance company lawsuit, she knows, he’s been hesitant to fight any battles like that. He’s hardly had the time to fight any battles, anyway.

Still, she wonders if maybe he needs to find somewhere new, where maintenance actually does their job, and where there aren’t as many memories of staring at this same spot on the ceiling through some emotionally intense nights.

She supposes that’s more her problem than his, though.

It’s late May, so daylight peeks through his half-closed curtains (Donna never got up to bother to close them fully) very early, and although the service at Arlington isn’t until 10, Donna gets up early to get dressed and go over to the OEOB to meet the Vice President and the rest of whatever entourage is attending.

She realizes, very suddenly, that President Bartlet is going to be there too.

It’s been a while since she saw him, but it’s strange to think that he’s one of the few who knows about the marriage. A part of her is looking forward to seeing him again, but a part of her almost dreads it. It’s hard to see him physically struggling, and not at all the same, and then be reminded of how she is also not nearly the same.

She takes a single sip of water but it’s bitter to her, and she puts the cup down by Josh’s sink with a sigh before heading out Josh’s door just before 6:30. She hears him moving around in his bedroom, but she’s almost grateful to not run into him. She just knows that he’d be concerned, and she doesn’t need to have to try and deal with that. She hardly has the emotional energy to deal with herself today; there’s no way she can cope with Josh as well.

There aren’t that many staff at the OEOB today; the vast majority of them are still back in New Jersey, coordinating the other congresspeople who have offered to stump for Russell, and any other donations or campaign events that might be coming up. Even Will is back in New Jersey, and that makes Donna feel more unmoored as she gets in and prepares for the event. While she’s not technically on press duty today, she knows she’ll have to end up answering some questions. She knows that she's going to be asked about her experience in Gaza, and while she’s not certain she’ll be able to talk about it, she thinks that maybe if she prepares some pretty emotionless answers, she’ll be able to handle it.

“Donna,” she hears, and it’s the Vice President behind her. “How are you doing this morning?”

"I'm doing well, sir,” she says, trying not to show how much his sudden appearance startled her.

“You’re not looking forward to this,” Russell concludes. For as bland and unassuming as he is, Bob Russell is still a politician and is still pretty good at reading people.

Donna bites her lip. “Did the speechwriter… what’s his name…”

“He brought up your concerns with me,” the Vice President says. “You know what I think? I think you’re just too modest. I’ve noticed that with plenty of women. You tend to shy away from the spotlight and not get paid your due. But that's not fair, is it?”

"With all due respect, sir…” Donna starts, but she isn’t able to say much more.

“I’m very much looking forward to this, Donna,” Russell says. “I want people to see the peacekeeping mission as a success rather than a failure, to thank those who have sacrificed their lives while seeing just how many lives—Israeli, Palestinian, and American alike—have been saved.”

Donna wants to argue, but this is one of the few subjects she doesn’t feel well-learned enough to argue on. It’s strange, considering her deeply personal involvement, but she also has avoided the topic pretty consistently since she got back from Germany. It’s not something she feels she can dive into. It would have seemed strange, especially considering the way Josh dove into gun control legislation just months after he came back, but then again, she and Josh work through these things differently.

And Josh definitely showed a different kind of stress when he was trying to deal with gun control. Perhaps he just had that initial stress reaction better handled than she did.

“Also, the President has requested that you ride in his car,” Russell says, raising an eyebrow at her. “Now, I told him you don’t work for him anymore, but he seemed to want the opportunity to catch up with you.”

Donna’s eyes widen. “Really?” President Bartlet wants to speak with her?

“I think he wants to pay you a little tribute in his own way,” Russell says. “Now, you better get going, if you’re…”

Donna blinks a few times, before nodding. “Thank you, sir.”

“I’ll see you there,” the Vice President says.

She's not convinced she actually wants him to be president, but sometimes Donna remembers that Bob Russell could be a far worse kind of person.

Donna has ridden in the motorcade with Josh more than a few times, but never, never in the President’s car. Oftentimes there would be another car to carry the assistants if they weren’t needed, or she rode with Josh if she was needed, but it was never in the President’s car. It’s strange, she thinks, to greet the Secret Service agents and be directed to the central car of the motorcade.

She waits inside, pressed against the door of the car, feeling deeply out of place, when the President gets in the car, accompanied by the First Lady. He’s still moving slowly, still holding onto his cane, although he seems to have little interest in using it (and doesn’t Donna know how that feels, considering how desperate she was to finally get off of her crutches), and he smiles broadly as he gets in. “Donnatella!" he says cheerfully. “How are you today?”

Donna bites her lip. “Grateful,” she says, and while it’s the first word that comes to mind, she could continue to think about how it is true. She is grateful to be alive, grateful to be moving up in the world, grateful and a bit blown away to be riding in the motorcade with the President of the United States a year on from the day she almost died… yes, grateful might actually be an understatement, even on the days where it’s difficult for her to see.

“So are we,” Bartlet says, and the First Lady nods, climbing in after him. “Very grateful you're here with us today. In fact, that’s why I wanted you to ride with us.”

“The Vice President seemed a little put out by that, sir,” Donna says with a smile. Even while she’s always been somewhat awed by the President’s presence in a way that Josh has never been, she has always found their interactions to be easy and light. She can joke with the President like she could with her father, with her friends, with Josh, and she tries not to think too hard about that very opportunity, or her mind might be blown.

“Well, he can suck it up and deal with it like a big boy,” the President says. “He gets to see you every day, and he’s going to be honoring you and all the other victims of the explosion in his speech today. So he can let me get ten minutes on the way to the ceremony to see you. How are you doing, Donna?”

She smiles as much as she can muster. “I’m well. Tired, of course.”

“Of course,” the President replies. He gives her a little wink. “So am I. Don’t let my wife hear that.”

Dr. Bartlet rolls her eyes fondly. “How’s that leg of yours doing?”

“Hurts most days when I’ve been on my feet too much,” Donna says with a shrug. “Which is most days.”

“I know the feeling,” the President says. “Are you liking campaign trail life?”

Donna nods. “It’s interesting, for sure. There are days I miss the White House, but I needed… I needed to move on.”

“And how about that husband of yours? How is he doing?”

Donna had almost forgotten that President Bartlet knew. "Sir, I…” She glances over at the First Lady, who definitely isn’t supposed to know.

“I know I said I’d keep it a secret,” he says apologetically, “but unfortunately my wife seems to think the rules don’t apply to her.”

Donna sighs, but she gives him a little bit of a smile. “He's doing well, I think. Somehow we’re worried about how close he is to us in the primaries. Maybe I shouldn’t have helped him out.”

“He’s recovering okay from his surgery?” the First Lady asks. “I called him when I found out, but he didn’t seem in the mood to go into details.”

“He probably came back to work too soon,” Donna says, “but the campaign trail stops for no one and you know him. Doesn’t seem like he’s going to have any long term issues or anything, though.”

“Good,” Bartlet says. “Have you talked about what you’re doing when this is all over?”

Donna blinks a few times. “Well, I’m hoping it’ll… I’m hoping it won’t be over soon, since there’s a general election to campaign for, but…”

“I meant you and Josh,” Bartlet interrupts.

She can’t even process this. Her and Josh? PLanning for the future? This is just a temporary arrangement, surely, and while she supposes it might be more complicated to get out of it than she considered, it’s not like they’re going anywhere. But she supposes that once the campaign is over, she’ll probably still be working on the campaign for the general, and Josh will be looking for a new job. Who knows, maybe that could be on the Russell campaign, if he hasn’t burned those bridges.

Donna can't even allow herself to think about the possibility of Santos winning, because that becomes even more complicated.

Before she can say anything, the car pulls into Arlington, and suddenly Secret Service agents are escorting them out and towards an area right behind the temporary stage and seating area that has been installed at the cemetery. There’s a band playing patriotic tunes, and from what Donna can see around the side, there's a decent crowd. Reporters are lining every possible spot that they can get to, unsurprisingly.

Donna takes a deep breath before she’s led onto the seating area on the stage. She’s not the only one there, thankfully; she recognizes Andy Wyatt on the other side, who she’s been meaning to catch up. There are a few other representatives and senators who are known for their military service or their involvement with the military, and plenty of other people who Donna doesn’t recognize despite her many years in DC.

She sits down on the stage, in the second row. She stands when she’s supposed to, bows her head when the chaplain offers a prayer. She tries not to listen too closely when the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs offers a tribute to Admiral Fitzwallace, or when Andy Wyatt speaks about her own experiences. She’s sure what they are saying is valuable, but she does not have the capacity to consider.

And then the Vice President goes up to speak.

“One year ago,” he says, “we found ourselves, as a nation, in the midst of a conflict that had not been our own. Our citizens, our leaders, were attacked on foreign soil. Today, here, I have with me a staffer who survived this horrific event. Donna Moss, would you stand?”

She manages to get to her feet, and tries to have a facial expression that isn’t a grimace as the crowd claps for her, but she begins to feel dizzy, the sound of the crowd washing over her. She sits again, and doesn’t hear a single word of the Vice President’s speech. She doesn’t even know why he asked her to stand, or what he might have said about her, or what example she might have been in his speech which she’s certain is a less than tactful campaign speech.

Donna had, in the few sessions she had with a therapist, learned a couple of grounding techniques, but frankly most of her knowledge comes from Josh and knowing what he would do. She doesn’t have a wall to back against, and she wishes she had worn a longer dress because the bottom of the plastic chair she’s seated on feels sticky on her legs in the DC humidity. She focuses on the sensation, though, hoping it will be enough to ground her.

Five things she can see, she thinks, blinking so that her vision might come back into focus. She can see the cemetery stretching before her, rows after rows of white gravestones marking those who gave their lives for their country. That's not helpful, Donna thinks, when she remembers how Fitzwallace is buried here too. She can see white clouds drift lazily against the sky, hardly belying just how hot it is here. The only time she can remember being this hot was right as she was climbing into the car, the car that… She sees cars too, part of the President’s motorcade, and wonders why black SUVs are always used for official travel. She blinks again, trying to find something else to latch onto. The President is speaking now. She can’t hear what he’s saying, her mind too fuzzy to process language, but he's there, and he… No, she can’t look at him, because she knows he’s talking about the peace accords. Donna wasn’t there for that, but she heard from Josh, from his spot perched up on the only hill that got cell service within Camp David. She can picture it, but that’s not something she sees now. That’s not going to ground her.

One more thing she can see.

Her eyes, still feeling rather glazed over, scan the crowd, and she only is really able to focus when she sees a rather familiar head of unkempt auburn hair.

Josh, she immediately thinks.

Why is Josh here? He isn’t supposed to be here. He has another thing going on today, a thing in Annapolis. He’s supposed to be there, with his candidate. Not here. Why is Josh here?

Maybe it’s not him, she thinks. It’s far enough away that she can’t make out the details of the face, just the hair, and while most people around are a little more well-groomed than that (although in Josh’s defense, his hair is incredibly difficult to keep neat), it could easily be someone else. It could also be her mind playing tricks on her.

But that’s why she does this exercise. To keep herself in reality. It hardly works, clearly, but at least now she’s thinking about why Josh would possibly want to be here, and not about how a year ago today she very nearly died because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and yet she was the only one to survive despite being the least deserving of her survival. That is a heavy burden to carry, and the more she remembers that it is on her back, the heavier it feels. The harder it gets to carry.

There’s a moment of silence once the President is done, and then the exit of the colors, and time seems to all blur together because Donna cannot remember a single thing that happened. She isn’t sure how she’s supposed to be getting back to the OEOB, and she frankly doesn’t care, because all she wants to do is get out of this crowd.

Donna went to Arlington for the service for Admiral Fitzwallace a few months after the explosion. It had taken a lot of time to identify his remains and get them back to the US, and while there had been a service in the National Cathedral, she hadn’t been back from Germany at that point. But she had been here for the burial. She hadn't told anyone she was going—she just told Josh she needed the morning off for a physical therapy appointment .But she saw Leo and the President at the ceremony. Neither of them had said anything, nor had Josh ever found out.

She finds her feet taking her towards that spot again, towards where she knows Admiral Fitzwallace is buried. The two Congressmen who died in Gaza are there too, she knows, and while Donna knows she wasn’t important enough to be put in Arlington, a part of her wonders where they might have buried her if she had been killed there too. With her grandfather and her uncle and her great-grandparents in Wisconsin? Somewhere in DC, arranged by Josh or by the President?

The morbid curiosity eats at her, and she once again begins to wonder why she isn’t under the ground too.

She’s halfway down the path towards where she know Fitzwallace is buried, but her legs feel like they’re going to threaten to give out on her, and she finds herself sinking against a low wall lining another area of the cemetary. She buries her face in her hands as the sun beats down, and she tries to breathe in deeply. Four things you can hear, she thinks, trying to refocus herself again.

Because there’s the pain again, a bright, burning pain coursing through her with no distinct beginning or end. She can’t place it, can’t put it into words. Rather than any specific sting from the injuries sustained, it’s as if her body is telling her that she shouldn’t be here, that something is very wrong. She knows nothing is actually wrong, because she’s had this happen before, and she knows her mind is just playing tricks on her, but knowing and believing it are two different things.

Four things she can hear. Or maybe it’s supposed to be four things she can touch. She doesn’t really remember, and she’s not sure if it matters, but she squeezes her eyes shut and listens. She can hear the band still playing out patriotic tunes, she can hear the crowd of people still talking as they spread out across the cemetery, and she can hear her name.

Who is saying her name? It sounds familiar.

She blinks, opening her eyes to the too-bright light, and lets them adjust, until she notices the shadow falling over her from someone crouching beside her.

It takes her a moment to realize that it’s Josh.

“Donna," she hears again, and his voice is soothingly familiar, and he has a hand gripping her arm tightly enough that it gives her the pressure she needs to come back down to earth. “Are you alright?”

“What are you doing here?” she mutters, rubbing at her eyes furiously. “Shouldn’t you be in Annapolis?”
Josh shrugs, adjusting his position as he still crouches next to her. “The Congressman is fine on his own. I wanted to come to this one. See the President, you know.”

She frowns. “Josh, I… if you came for me…”

He stands up and holds out a hand to her. “The Vice President left already,” he says.

“Oh, good,” Donna whispers. “And the President?”

Josh gestures towards the road behind them, where the motorcade is taking off. “Avoiding the press, I’m assuming.”

“As we should be,” Donna mumbles, pulling herself up with Josh’s help. Her leg aches fiercely, and she wonders if there will ever be a time where it doesn’t.

Josh puts his arm behind her back. “Let’s head back to my place,” he says. “I’m flying with the Congressman back to New Jersey later, but we can…”

“I think I should get back to the OEOB,” Donna says, pulling herself away from him, although she isn’t sure why. She still feels a little bit fuzzy-headed, a little bit off-kilter, and she certainly doesn't remember her schedule, but she’s sure she should be with the Vice President. “I’m not really sure what happened.”

“Time moves differently, doesn’t it?” Josh says knowingly. “Donna, you’re…”

“Don’t get on my case,” she snaps.

He shakes his head, moving away from her. “I’m not going to. I just think it will be good for you to go back, gather up your stuff, and have a moment to relax. Your body is still going to be pumping adrenaline, your brain might still think you’re in danger… honestly, there’s no excuse for how the Vice President called you out up there, how he made you and what you’ve been through the center of attention.”

“Is that why you came?”

Josh bites his lip. “The President called me this morning. He said he had seen the VP’s speech, and was livid about the way you were brought up in it. Not that he thinks you don’t deserve to be honored but…”

“The President called you? To talk about me?”

Josh chuckles. “You’re one of his favorite topics of conversation,” he says. His hand isn’t touching her back, but it hovers just behind her as they make their way back towards the parking lot. ‘Anyway, I didn’t know that was happening, really. I knew the Vice President wanted you up there but…”

Donna sighs. “Yeah.”

“I would never have… god, on today of all days, it’s just such a reminder, and that’s the last thing you need.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, when the President told me that, I just… I couldn’t go to Annapolis,” Josh says.

“Because you knew no one would be here to pick up the pieces?” Donna shoots at him, and while she doesn’t intend it to be that harsh, Josh seems to take it in stride.

“Yeah,” he says. “I knew you might need a moment with someone you trust afterwards, and while I know things have been broken between us for a little while… I hope I can be that someone you trust today.”

Donna swallows thickly, feeling wet tears prick at the edges of her eyes. She hasn’t felt like crying yet, but this might test her. “Yeah," she says. “Thank you.”

They don’t need any other words as they find Josh’s car. He drives back to his apartment, the traffic a little slow because of the residual effects of the motorcade. Neither of them say anything, and it’s a completely comfortable silence.

It’s strange, Donna thinks, how exhausted her body feels. She’s not even really sure what happened; she doesn't remember much between ascending the stage and finding herself against the wall along the pathway. Whole chunks of time are simply lost to her, and she wonders if with that time she’s also lost a significant part of herself.

She makes a phone call to the OEOB, finds out her flight information from one of the assistants there (VP left already, but she's booked on a 6pm flight from National), and then plants herself on Josh’s couch.

“Do you want something to eat?” Josh asks. He’s changed into something far more casual than he usually wears. “I’ve got to fly with the Congressman later, so if I puke on myself, I don’t want it to be something I care about,” he jokes, noticing Donna’s confusion. He looks through his kitchen cabinets. “I have… boxed mac and cheese?”

“Do you have milk?” Donna asks flatly. She’s pretty sure he’s offered that same box of mac and cheese for the last five years straight, and has never had the dairy ingredients to cook it with.

Josh opens his fridge, fruitlessly, because he definitely hasn’t been grocery shopping in months. “No.”

“Then I don’t think you’ll be able to make a boxed Mac and cheese worth eating,” Donna says with a sigh. “I’ll be fine. I’ll get something at the airport.”

“Do you want me to drive you to the airport?” Josh asks.

Donna shakes her head. “No, I’m going to the OEOB first. Someone will take me from there.”

Josh almost looks a little disappointed by this, but nods. “Okay,” he says. “Hey, are you doing alright?”

“I’m fine,” she replies, although her body still feels like it’s been put through the wringer, and she still can’t really remember what happened this afternoon.

He doesn’t seem convinced, but he sits down on the couch next to her, picking something up from the bedside table. “Donna,” he says. “I uh… I called my therapist this morning.”

“That’s good.”

“It wasn’t really for me,” he says. “I mean, I did just… check in, you know. But actually I asked him if he had any recommendations for other therapists.”

Donna frowns. “Josh…”

He presses the piece of paper into her hand. “Call this number if you need someone. She comes very highly recommended and my therapist thinks you would like her, which is enough for me,” Josh says. “I’d give you my therapist’s info, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea for him to hear both sides of our story.”

She can’t help but smile at that. “Probably not.” And while she’s not sure she has time (actually, she knows for sure that she doesn’t have time), there’s something very sweet about Josh going out of his way to find a therapist for her. “Thank you. I’d better get going.”

“See you in New Jersey?” Josh asks hopefully.

“Our campaign is going to kick your ass there,” Donna says, and while she doesn’t know it for sure, just joking with Josh makes her feel a little bit lighter.

A week later, the Santos campaign barely beats the Russell campaign in the state of New Jersey, and suddenly the primaries are over. They still don’t have a nominee, and everything is hurtling towards the convention.

Donna doesn’t sleep much the night after the primary.

In the morning, she pulls the piece of paper Josh gave her out of the pocket of her pants. It’s crumpled, but she can make out the number. She puts the number in her phone as a contact and is about to hit dial, but hesitates.

It’s enough, she thinks, that she has the number.

Chapter Text

Donna has only just dropped her bags off in the hotel in San Diego, where she’ll practically be living the next two weeks while they prepare for the convention, when she runs into someone in the bar that she very much does not want to see.

It’s not her husband (arguably, she wouldn’t mind seeing him, although that’s an argument she has to have with herself). Instead, it’s the recent bane of her existence, one particular Bill Brewer, who she would have thought had slunk away to whatever hole of political debauchery he came from. Unfortunately for her, he’s at the bar, and there are two empty glasses in front of him, a third half-drained.

And he makes eye contact with her.

“Donna Moss, as I live and breathe,” he says across the bar, so that Donna certainly can’t get out of it.

She gives him a tight smile, although the urge to mutter “I wish you wouldn’t,” under her breath is strong. Instead, she manages to politely wave at him. As she tries to walk away, though, he shakes his head and pats the chair next to him. 

“We have something to discuss,” Brewer says.

Donna frowns. “Do we? I don’t usually take meetings after 8pm.”

“It’s convention time now,” he replies. “You take meetings when you have a spare moment to breathe.”

She rubs her forehead and takes a few slow, reluctant steps towards him. “What do you need from me?”

“If I said your friendship, would you believe me?”

“If you said my body, I might believe you,” she shoots back. “I wouldn’t indulge you, but…”

“Whoa, Donna, that’s not what I’m here for at all!” Brewer says, holding up his hands before taking another swallow of his drink. “Actually, I have a business proposition for you.”

Donna shakes her head when the bartender asks her if she wants anything. “Just a water,” she says, turning back to Brewer. “A business proposition?”

“Well, I’d call it that. Others might not use such sympathetic terms, but…”

Donna blinks. “What sort of business are you in now?”

“The world has counted John Hoynes out of the Presidential race,” Brewer starts, leaning forward, his eyes beginning to shine.

“Yeah, usually when you publicly sexually assault someone, that’s the end of your career in politics. Well, at least in our party, I don’t know about the other guys,” she quips, wishing it weren’t so true.

Brewer rolls his eyes. “Accusations can be overcome. He’s got no convictions.”

“No convictions sounds about right.”

“You’ve got quite a mouth on you.”

Donna gives him a sweet smile. “Hard to survive in this business without one.”

“Listen, Donna. Or should I say Donnatella Moss. Donnatella Lyman? Donnatella Moss-Lyman? I’ve not sure which you’ve chosen, although in my opinion, the hyphenation really accentuates your desirability and independence both, so…”

Her eyes widen. “Bill…” she says softly, trying to swallow her fear, contain her suddenly racing heart.

“You’re not that hard to figure out,” he says. “Well, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to go digging if it weren’t for the flowers on your desk, but it seemed pretty suspicious that a supposedly unattached woman was given anniversary flowers.”

She squeezes her hands together tightly, trying to remove some of the tension, wondering if she might be able to feel a wedding ring pricking at her other hand if she imagined it enough. “I…” she starts, and realizes she doesn’t have words to say.

“That let me catch on, of course, and all it took was a little bit of digging. New Hampshire, huh? Guess their marriage laws are almost Vegas level lax. Worked out for the two of you.”

She bites her lip. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t know, it just strikes me as interesting that the campaign manager of the Santos campaign and the spokeswoman of the Russell campaign are together. Not to mention the fact that you got married during the New Hampshire primary. Now, I’m no investigative reporter, but I know a few, and I know one who happens to have been digging into this as well, and let’s just say we’ve found quite an interesting tale here. It’s maybe not front page worthy, but it certainly could take up a minute or two on the evening news, and I think there will be multiple blogs very interested in this. Might not be such a good look for Santos or Russell, to be honest.”

Donna swallow. He’s right, of course, and this was their biggest fear, that it would somehow get out like this. “What do you want?” she asks him, hoping her voice doesn’t sound as strained as she thinks it does.

“You have some influence within the Russell campaign, don’t you?”

Donna takes a swallow of her water. “A little. I mean, I’m not campaign manager or anything, but…”

“Whatever you do, don’t let Russell offer the Vice Presidency to Santos.”

She blinks a few times. “What?”

“Don’t let Russell offer the Vice Presidency to Santos. That’s it. If he doesn’t, your secret is safe with me. If he does, well… let’s just say the media is going to eat this one up.”

“You really think they’re that interested in me?”

“You and Josh? Together? I mean it’s not quite as sexy as a scandal with the candidates, but it will certainly be enough to get people talking. Get people doubting whether either of you actually believe in your candidates.”

Donna rubs her forehead. “Bill, I can’t… I don’t have that kind of influence on the campaign.”
“Do what you can,” Brewer says. “You might want to let Josh know too, but I’m more concerned about the offer being made than Santos taking it.”

“Why do you care?”

Brewer smiles, and she’s staring at the wall of liquor behind the bar, intently fixating on a bottle of Jack Daniels that she wishes she was downing right now. “Because if Santos takes the Vice Presidency, that kills the convention. No interest, no surprises, no third parties…”

“You’re working for Hoynes,” Donna puts together. “You’re… you want Santos and Russell to stay engaged in this fight for as long as possible so Hoynes can swoop in above the fray.”
He shrugs. “No point in denying it, that’s exactly what he’s going to do. Although if I get wind of you telling your campaign this…”

“And so you’re using blackmail to try and force me into fulfilling your will?”

Brewer takes a sip of his drink. “Donna, I’m using my connections to warn you of what might happen if you don’t take my advice. Frankly, whether or not your story comes out couldn’t mean less to me. I mean, except for the fact that you led me on when all I wanted was an opportunity with you. That was pretty brutal, actually.”

“I never led you on,” Donna defends. “I never showed an ounce of interest.”

“How much harder would it have been for you to tell me that you were married?”

She finishes the rest of her water. “A hell of a lot harder, obviously, and I think if you’re going to be blackmailing the opposition of a floor fight you’ve no chance to win then…”

“Donna!” she hears from across the bar, and it’s a familiar call. She knows that voice. She spent years listening and not listening to that voice call her name. “Donna!” he yells again, and she finally lays eyes on her husband, looking more than a little disheveled. Donna has no doubt that the way his hands have raked through his hair is due to watching the RNC convention, although according to her watch, they’ll have finished for the night by now.

She isn’t sure whether to smile or roll her eyes.

“Your husband approaches,” Brewer says, and there’s a nasty edge to his voice.

“Donna, are you doing alright?” Josh asks, looking a little concerned and sounding a little out of breath.

She nods rubbing her forehead. “Yeah.

“Bill Brewer,” Josh says. “Still trying to pretend that John Hoynes can win?”

Brewer purses his lips. “If a lying do-nothing economists from New Hampshire can, I still have hope.”

Donna can see the way that Josh stiffens at the harsh words about President Bartlet, and she reaches out a subtle hand to touch his arm and relax him. “Sounds like you two got along great,” she says.

“I used to be Donna’s boss,” Josh says, and the way he says it has a surprising air of possessiveness. “But she’s moved on to bigger and better things too.” Donna has heard him use it before, and she wonders if maybe he has that phrase canned to ensure that he can talk about her without sounding angry or bitter.

Brewer raises an eyebrow. “Bob Russell?” he questions doubtfully.

“I mean, she made the leap from White House assistant to campaign spokeswoman, I’d say that’s bigger and better things,” Josh argues, and Donna can see a kind of fire ablaze in his eyes that she tries not to read into.

“Well, Donna,” Brewer says, pushing his third drink back and standing up, stumbling a little as he gets himself off the barstool, “it was nice chatting with you. A pleasure, Josh, as always.”

“The minimal pleasure is all mine,” Josh shoots back, and as Brewer staggers off, he takes the seat next to Donna. “Are you okay?”

“Am I… Josh, I’m fine!” she protests. The bartender takes her empty water glass and when he asks her if she wants another, she requests a whiskey sour. She sure needs a drink tonight after that.

Josh looks down at the bar, his finger worrying the marble. “I just… I don’t know, Bill Brewer isn't a guy I have a lot of good feelings toward, and if he was trying to force you into something against your will…”

Well, he certainly was trying to do that, but not at all in the way Josh thinks. Josh is going to be so mad about the marriage leaking, she thinks, even if in some ways it was his own fault. He was the one who sent the flowers, which was what got Brewer thinking in the first place. She could easily blame this whole thing on Josh being stupid.

If she tells him, though, they might be able to scrap the whole potential Santos-Russell VP situation. Donna isn’t so sure about the idea of Santos being the vice presidential candidate anyway; she knows Russell is planning to ask Baker tonight, get a sense of how receptive he is, but she’s also not so sure that will go over well. She’s sure of very little right now, but she knows enough about politics to know that Santos taking the vice presidency would be a bad idea in more ways than one.

Still, there’s something that itches her about trying to use this situation to save her own skin. She might have tried to put in her two cents about the VP offer beforehand, but now that she’s being blackmailed to do it, she feels sick about the whole situation.

She doesn’t want Josh to feel that way, especially knowing that he’s in a much more persuasive position for his own candidate than she is for hers. She won’t tell him, she decides. If Baker takes the VP slot tonight, she’ll never have to worry about it. Well, she will, since someone on an opposing campaign knows about her marriage that is very much supposed to be a secret, and she wouldn’t put it past Bill Brewer to try and blackmail her or Josh again, but the less she engages with this, the better.

So that means she can’t tell Josh.

She presses her lips together. “He wasn’t,” she says. “I’m fine. I don’t need you to be my knight in shining armor.”

“Donna…”

“Do you need something from me?” she asks sharply, and watches his face fall a little bit.

He sighs. “No, I just… I saw that you looked uncomfortable, and I know this guy and I didn’t want you to be in a situation where you were uncomfortable.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t?” Donna asks sharply, rubbing at her leg a little bit. And that isn’t necessarily intentional, but she regrets saying it as soon as Josh’s face pales as he makes the connection. “Josh…”

“I’m gonna… go,” he says, pushing himself back from the bar. “Enjoy your drink. Make sure he didn’t spike it.”

“Josh!” When he turns back to her, her face softens. “Hey, sleep well,” she says. “And um… if someone tries to offer your candidate the Vice Presidency, think very hard about whether he would enjoy the straitjacket that is the position.”

Josh rubs his forehead. “I know what the Vice Presidency is like, Donna. And is this… we shouldn’t be discussing this here.”

“Don’t let there be an offer. At least not publicly,” Donna warns, and then puts a hand over her mouth. “It’s just… it’ll be better that way.”

“Better leverage for you?”

“Well, either you take the offer, and get stuck in the Vice Presidency, or you don’t take it and you look uncooperative and aspiring to way more than a three-term congressman really deserves,” Donna says, and she’s honestly not sure if it’s true.

Josh frowns. “Are you being Russell’s campaign spokeswoman or are you being yourself right now?”

“I’m always myself.” And as soon as she says it, she feels like she’s lying.

Josh can sense that too. He sighs and turns back around. “I assume I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says.

“We’re in the same hotel,” Donna says. “I think we’re stuck in each other’s lives for a bit.”

Josh lets himself show a tired smile. “Because the whole marriage thing wasn’t enough involvement already. Goodnight, Donna.”

She watches him leave, can see the exhaustion that has overwhelmed his body, wonders if she looks that tired too. She swallows the rest of her drink, barely feeling it as it slides down her throat. The bar is beginning to empty, and the bartender has begun cleaning up for the night, so he takes her glass and she tells him to charge to her room. Technically the campaign won’t pay for her drinks, but if anyone actually notices, she’ll call it a mistake. She’s making the highest wage she’s ever made, and yet if she was paid by the hour, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t even be scratching the surface of minimum wage.

Donna knows campaigns are like this, but they used to be a lot more joyful too. That use to make the long hours and all the travel easier. Now, the campaign is just wearying, full of faces she doesn’t know and stumping for a candidate she doesn’t really care about.

She heads up to her bedroom, feeling the effects of her one drink (or perhaps just of her own exhaustion), and passes out, only waking up to her alarm at five thirty and realizing that she slept in her clothes and only took one of her shoes off.

She’s pretty sure this wasn’t what her doctor meant when he said to take it easy last time he saw her.

Donna tracks down Will right before the morning staff meeting. “How did the talk go with Baker last night?” she asks.

Will shrugs. “He seemed receptive to the idea. He’s a good candidate. He probably would have blown us all out of the water if he’d been around in the primaries.”

“You’re going to offer it to him and not Santos?” Donna asks, pushing a stray piece of hair behind her ear.

“Oh no,” Will says. “Donna, Russell offered the Vice Presidency to Santos last night.”

Donna tries to think back, to remember if Josh had offered any clues as to this happening. “When last night?”

“What, do you want a timeline?”

“I mean…”

Will shrugs. “We’re having a hard time getting a read on whether Santos is going to take it though.” His face lights up a little bit with realization. “You know Josh, what do you think he’ll recommend?”

Donna can’t control the way her face scrunches up in distate.

“I’m not asking you to betray king and country!” Will shouts at her. “A best guess?”

And she doesn’t know, except that she knows the consequences if Santos does take the offer. So instead, she shakes her head furiously. “Will, this can’t leak.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m not planning to go to the papers, but you know there’s speculation that…”

“It. Can’t. Leak.” She grabs his arm and looks him in the eye. “I’m serious. We have to keep this offer under lock and key until Santos declines it.”

“You think he’s going to decline?” Will says.

Donna sighs. “I personally think he should, although I don’t think we should have made the offer in the first place.”

“I don’t recall you being so deeply involved in policy.”

“Well, I’ve grown up a lot,” Donna says. “I just… I had a meeting. I can’t tell you all the details, but I can tell you that if this leaks, it’s going to be bad for our campaign and the Santos campaign.”

Will frowns. “You can’t tell me why? Donna, anything that’s bad for both of us is just… it’s not going to make a difference. The Democrats are already in the pits of public opinion anyone, but a consensus might be able to signify party unity instead of having a messy floor fight.”

“And a messy floor fight might be the only way anybody listens to our message,” Donna protests. “Besides, we’re not the only ones in the race. Hoynes still thinks he has a shot.”

“Hoynes is lying to himself.”

Donna shrugs. “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean he won’t lash out and take us all down with him. When does Santos need to answer by?”

“Thursday,” Will says. “That way the media gets it out there before the weekend and we can bring the RNC bounce down.”

She bites her lip. “Okay. I’m serious. No leaks.”

“I can’t promise that,” Will says. “We’re not exactly equipped to make campaign staffers sign NDAs for every little thing.”

“This is not every little thing,” Donna says. “This is the Vice Presidency.”

“And having been chief of staff for a vice president, I can assure you that it actually is a pretty little thing,” Will replies. “Look, we’re late for the meeting. Are you going to be able to keep yourself together in there?”

Donna swallows. She didn’t feel like she was falling apart, necessarily, but she surreptitiously reaches one hand around the other wrist and realizes her pulse is much faster than it should be; perhaps she is making a mess of things. “Yes,” she says quietly, following Will into the conference room.

She’s in a much worse position than she ever thought she would be; there’s no way to stop the offer from being extended, and while most of the staff has an informal agreement to not share campaign details outside of campaign war rooms, there are no legal protects for the secrets that they may be sharing. A leak seems inevitable, and even if there is no leak, the possibility that Santos might actually accept puts them in an even worse position.

Donna wonders if she might need to come clean to the whole campaign staff, to get everyone on board to stop Brewer from leaking the marriage. She wonders if it might help, if she might get away with it.

Then again, she might get fired for putting the campaign in such a terrible position. Not to mention, if anyone found out her marriage was solely for the purpose of benefits sharing, her entire work on the campaign would be questioned. She’d probably never be able to find work again.

She has to talk to Josh first, she knows. Josh will know what to do. Josh will know how to stop the leaks.

She makes it through the day, checking the news sites and the blogs in every spare moment she has to ensure that the VP offer hasn’t leaked. It hasn’t, apparently, but Donna still holds her breath every time she refreshes, terrified that it might.

Donna isn’t sure what room he’s staying in this week. She knows that the Santos campaign is down at the other end of the hotel, has taken over the other big suite, the other big conference room. She’s not across the hall from him anymore, and she’s not in his bed.

She needs to stop thinking about his bed.

As she walks across the lobby, though, she hears the RNC playing on the TV in the bar. It’s Ray Sullivan, the Republican candidate for Vice President, giving a speech that is full of vitriol. That, she thinks, seems like a bridge too far, and the speech christens Sullivan as an attack dog for Vinick. She’s never been a fan of the governor of West Virginia, but he seems especially vicious now.

As much as Donna dislikes watching the speech, she can see a familiar head of hair, somehow even more messed up than the night before, and a familiar set of shoulders stiffening at every word.

“Is he doing what I think I’m doing?” Donna asks, as she comes up behind her husband, and watches Sullivan say something about “stumbling”. “The MS. He’s invoking the MS.”
Josh runs a hand through his hair, and it’s no wonder his hairline keeps receding. “This is gonna backfire,” he says, but he doesn’t sound too optimistic about it.”

“Maybe people won’t get it,” Donna says, watching the captions roll across the screen. As soon as she hears Sullivan say the word ‘sclerotic’, however, she’s lost all hope. “Okay, they’ll get that.”

“You’re going to hell!” Josh shouts at the TV, drawing the gazes of everyone else sitting in the room. Donna has seen him yell at the TV plenty of times before, but usually it’s in a more appropriate space such as his office or his apartment, not the very public bar of a hotel. 

She grabs him by the arm and pulls him toward a seating area further from the TV. “Josh, let’s sit over here,” she says, feeling several eyes keenly on the both of them. If the marriage comes out in the media this week, she supposes all these people will be eager eyewitnesses.

He gives the sea of eyes a tight smile, sitting down next to Donna heavily. “I mean, I realize the VP is the designated hatchet man, but that’s…”

Donna shrugs. “Santos accepts, you can get revenge.”

“Yeah,” Josh says, although he doesn’t sound thrilled about the idea. “You think I might find five or five hundred ways to call Vinick old. You want sclerotic, I’ll give you sclerotic.”

She presses her lips together, her eyes focused on his knee that simply will not stop bouncing. “Santos wouldn’t do it though,” she points out. She doesn’t claim to know Matt Santos that well, not as well as Josh does, but in her few interactions with him, he hasn’t struck her as much of a hatchet man.

“Probably not.”

“Maybe why he shouldn’t take the job,” Donna says, and she knows this is her moment. She has to tell Josh about Brewer tonight, or risk him also finding out in the papers without so much as a mitigation strategy.

Josh turns defensive. “Maybe why he’d be a great choice.”

“You want him to accept?” Donna questions. She knows Josh, knows what he thinks of the vice presidency, knows that the idea of coming all this way in the primaries only to play second fiddle to who he views as a supremely unqualified candidate must sting.

Josh looks surprised. “You don’t?”

She swallows. “I have concerns.”

“He’s not hitman enough,” Josh offers, and Donna wishes that was her only concern. But she’ll indulge him in this first.

“Too much voltage on the bottom of the ticket,” she admits. And that is a political concern.

“Overshadows the nominee,” Josh agrees. “Gets people wishing the names were reversed.”

Sometimes, Donna is one of those people who wishes the names were reversed. “Gets people willing to wait until next time,” she admits.

Josh smiles a little bit. “How did you get so smart about this?”

“I had a good teacher,” she says, and then she realizes how close to a thing this is. How much he’s smelling, how their relationship almost feels restored. Much as Donna wants that to be her reality, she can’t let it be. She has to be on a completely different emotional planet than Josh Lyman, especially if their marriage is to come under heavy scrutiny in the next days. So at his muttered thanks, she gives him a shrug. “I meant Will.” It’s not true at all, and she regrets saying it the moment she sees his face fall. Quickly, she pulls herself together again, taking a deep breath. “Look, Josh, I really need to talk to you in private.”

He still looks stunned and hurt. “What about?”

“I can’t really… say here.”

“Is this about the VP offer? Because we still have another day to decide, and the Congressman won’t be pushed around.”

Donna rubs her forehead. “It is, a little bit, but it’s more about us.”

“What do we have to do with this?”

She stands up, holding a hand out for him, not recognizing just how intimate the movement appears in front of their plethora of soon to be interested witnesses. “Come with me,” she tells him, dropping her voice a little bit.

She leads him down the hallway to her room. He instinctively knows to wander about five feet behind her, so that if anyone on her campaign saw them, they would think he was simply here for a meeting, and not associating with her. It’s not exactly the most subtle of moves, but it works well enough for them. She finds her hotel room and opens it up, looking around to ensure they have no observers before letting Josh step inside.

“What’s up?” Josh asks.

“Has anyone leaked the VP offer on your campaign?” Donna asks.

Josh shakes his head. “Not that I know of. It’s implicitly understood that sort of thing stays quiet around here.”

“Well let’s hope they haven’t,” Donna says, “because if it leaks, we’re screwed.”

“The Russell campaign is screwed?” Josh asks. “Because frankly…”

Donna shakes her head. “No. You and me personally. Our marriage. Bill Brewer has it. He told me to prevent Russell from offering the VP slot to Santos, but it was too late. He threatened to publish about our marriage if he heard anything about the offer, and the offer happened, so if Santos takes it or if it leaks, we might be on the front page of the New York Times or some other unsavory piece of paper.”

Josh rubs his forehead and paces back and forth across her hotel room, his feet plodding on the floor.. “You’re kidding me, right? You told Bill Brewer about our marriage! How could you possibly…”
“Josh!” she shouts, and he snaps his head to look at her. “Josh, I… I didn’t tell him. What do you think, that I’m stupid?”

“How did he find out then?”

Donna looks at him, holds his burning gaze. “The flowers,” she spits out, forming the words with care. “He saw the flowers you sent me. He did his research, put two and two together, and…”

Josh sits down on the edge of the bed, running his hands though the back of his hair furiously, as if his hair hasn’t been though enough today. “Oh my god,” he murmurs. “Donna, what are we supposed to do?” He tugs at the place where his pants stretch over his knee, his hands fidgeting in what she can see as an attempt to calm himself. “I fucked up, sending you those. This is just…”

He did fuck up, Donna thinks, but it’s not like she hasn’t made her share of missteps too. “Josh…”

“What do we do now?” he asks tightly.

“We hope this doesn’t leak,” Donna says. “Keep this locked up tight.”
Josh rubs at the spot over his eyebrow so fiercely that Donna is surprised he doesn’t take any skin off. “Why does he care about the offer?”

“Because…”

“Because Hoynes is going to try and get in the race,” Josh completes, not needing any more information than that. Josh is a smart guy, Donna thinks, and he knows all the players, so it isn’t a difficult connection to make.

Donna nods. “Yeah.”

“And Brewer thinks that if he takes both of our campaigns down, the Hoynes thing just got a whole lot easier for people to swallow.”

She nods again. “Yeah. Something like that.”

“Dammit,” Josh murmurs. “Does he… did he say how it was going to get leaked? If he had an article prewritten, or…”

Donna shakes her head. “No, he didn’t provide that tidbit of information to me… Josh, what are you playing at? What do you think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers. “I really don’t know.”

“How do we stop it from leaking?”

He shrugs. “It’s not exactly privileged information anymore. I mean I’ll give my people a talk about discretion but…”

“That’s all you can do?”

Josh bites his lip. “At this point, yeah.”

“And what if Santos takes the position? There’s no hiding the offer then.”

Josh shrugs. “If Santos takes the position, then there’s no contested convention and the story becomes a whole lot less interesting,” he says. “That may be our best option.”

“And is he going to take the position?”

“I don’t know.”

Donna walks up next to the lamp and lets her finger fiddle with the switch, casting shadows and beams across the hotel room intermittently. “What do you think?”

“Leo asked me the same thing today, you know?” Josh says. “He thinks Santos should take it. Good show of party unity, apparently, but…”

Donna raises an eyebrow. “But?”

“You got me thinking,” Josh says, “and honestly, I think he has his doubts too. His wife certainly does.”

“Helen?”

Josh frowns. “How do you know…” and then he makes a face of recognition. “Ah, yes, she walked in right after our wedding.”

Their wedding. So strange to think that it’s been six months now, that they’re halfway to having a real anniversary, that their lives have been intertwined in this way for so long and with such intensity. So strange to think that soon it won’t be necessary for them to be married at all. “Josh…” she says, “we’re going to have to think about how this ends.”

“How what ends?”

She swallows. “This. Us.”

She’d like to pretend she didn’t notice the way he immediately stiffens at that, but he seems to suddenly get an extra burst of anxiety from the very statement. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next week,” Josh says. “Look, let’s… talk about it after the convention.”

“The sooner we… let this go, the easier it’s gonna be. I mean, we’ll probably need lawyers, and it could be messy even if we don’t have any assets together, and…”

“Well, for one, I am a lawyer.” Josh claims.

“Not a divorce lawyer,” Donna points out, rolling her eyes.

He shrugs, stretching out backwards on the bed and letting out a sigh of relief. She wonders just how exhausted his poor body is. “I could figure it out,” he says.

“A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client,” Donna reminds him.

“You learned that from me, didn’t you?”

Donna shakes her head. “Sam, actually. You know, a real lawyer?”

“I am a real lawyer,” Josh says. He sits up quickly, his eyes widening. “Hey, do you think Sam is around?”

“Why?” Donna asks. He probably is, she thinks, considering that he lives in California and apparently has a job that requires far less of him than the White House ever did.

“I just… haven’t seen him in a long time,” Josh says. “I’d like to.” He makes a face as if he’s caught himself out from something though and shakes his head. “With what time?” he points out to himself, and laughs a little bit.

“Just wait until after the convention, and you’ll have all the time in the world,” Donna teases with a grin, although she’s sure he doesn’t actually want to have to think about that.

“Not if we take the VP deal,” Josh shoots back. Before he can say anything else, his phone begins to ring, and he picks it up. Donna watches as he stands up with a groan, as he paces the length of the room listening to what sounds like a good berating on the other end of this line. She doesn’t think she really should be in here, especially considering that what Josh is doing may be sensitive, but she doesn’t really have anywhere else to be; it is, after all, her hotel room.

Feeling sufficiently awkward, she finds herself in the hotel bathroom, starting her bedtime routine even though she knows it will be hours before she actually goes to bed. She washes her face, tries not to notice the way her stress has practically ruined her skin. When she no longer hears Josh on the phone outside, she emerges.

“What’s up?” she asks hesitantly.

He looks a little surprised to see her, but when he regains his composure, he shrugs. “Not a lot,” he says. “Just that Leo wants me in Washington tomorrow for some meeting about how we’ve all been fighting too much, as if any of us actually want a contested convention.”

“He’s making you fly all the way back just to be lectured? He couldn’t do that over the phone?”

Josh groans. “He’s tried. Apparently not. I’ve gotta… I need to go book a flight. Or get someone to book me a flight.”

“Yeah,” Donna says quietly. “Look, Josh… we do need to talk about what we’re going to…”

Josh rubs his forehead. “Yeah,” he says. “Can we… discuss this when I get back?”

Donna nods. “Yes,” she says, and hopes that her voice does’t indicate a disappointment that she’s not sure why she possesses. “You know where to find me.”

He gives her a tight smile and leaves the room.

Donna doesn’t sleep much that night. In the morning, the front page of the Post has speculation about the Russell VP offer. There aren’t any sources, but then, against her vehement protests, Russell decides to confirm the leak. He says it is to put Santos in the position where he has to make a choice, but Donna thinks they may all be in a worse position this way.

And sure enough, the evening edition of the New York Times comes out. She sees it on the Internet first, but there’s no doubting it will be in the main paper tomorrow.

TWO CAMPAIGNS, BOTH ALIKE IN DIGNITY: ROMEO AND JULIET OF THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES.

Donna looks at the headline on a media intern’s computer, and looks at her watch. Josh will be on his flight back from DC by now, which means that she probably has another two hours before she can talk it over with him. In that time, she’ll certainly have to explain herself.

Perhaps she should go run and hide, and forget about her duties for the rest of the day.

Perhaps she should just quit her job now.

But all she can manage to do is whisper, “Shit,” and scroll down a long article peppered with her name.

Shit.

“Donna?” she hears, and it’s Will Bailey standing behind her. He doesn’t look happy, and Donna doesn’t know what to tell him besides the truth. “Can you explain something to me?”

“I thought you were in DC,” she says, looking him over.

Will shrugs. “Meeting ended earlier than I expected. I caught a different flight back.”

“Did Josh get on that one too?” she asks, the question tumbling out of her mouth before she can stop herself.

Will shakes his head. “He had to stay to talk something over with Leo, I think. Didn’t see him on the plane. Next one lands in about two hours. Come on, let’s have a little talk.”

As if Donna didn’t know that. As if she hadn’t called to see what flights were offered the moment she had seen the Post leak, the moment she had realized what was coming.

The moment of realization is past and the moment of reality is now.

She swallows and follows Will into a small conference room nearby, willing her legs not to completely collapse underneath her.

There’s no way this is going to end well.

Chapter Text

Frankly, Josh is over long flights.

As a kid, he used to really enjoy airplanes. His family didn’t fly much—they didn’t need too, as there weren’t really relatives to visit, or places that Josh had to go outside of their little circle of New England and New York—but on the rare opportunities where they flew somewhere on vacation, Josh found himself marveling at the airplanes he rode on and the reality of flight itself.

Forty-something years later and far more flights than he could ever count, including several on Air Force One, and Josh really couldn’t be less enthused by the prospect of flying cross-country twice in a day. Could that meeting not have been a phone call? Couldn’t Leo have come out to California instead, considering that he doesn’t really have an official position at the White House anymore?

Josh hates being angry with Leo—Leo is like a father to him, and that sort of anger towards the people he loves is unsettling to him at best—but he also can’t bear being told what to do as if he hasn’t spent the last many years of his life working in politics. He knows the pros and cons of Santos taking the vice presidency, and being told that he has to take it for the good of the party riles Josh up. He’s done plenty for the party, and to be accused about not caring for the institution he dedicated his whole life frankly feels insulting, especially from a man he loves and respects so much.

But here he is, frustrated and angry and still having no better solution for how to work out the convention, for how to not make it the most public display of dysfunction the party has ever put on. Here he is trying to formulate a strategy in his head when all he can pull out is anger. Here he is on an interminable cross-country flight, stuck in a middle seat because Leo called this meeting so last-minute, trying to find a way to keep his candidate afloat in what is sure to be one of the most professionally difficult weeks of his life.

He has plenty of work to do on the plane, but all he can think about is the way Leo looked so disappointed in him. All he can think about is the way Leo thinks he is letting him down. He wishes he had someone on this flight with him to talk him down from the ledge. Donna was always good at doing that, but because he’s on an airplane, he can’t talk to Donna. He can’t do anything but stare, again and again, at the delegate numbers, as if he doesn’t know exactly how many each state has off the top of his head, as if he doesn’t know which ones might be willing to switch, and if he hasn’t spent his whole last month thinking about this.

He’s losing his touch, clearly. He’s probably losing it entirely, if he’s honest with himself, and if he doesn’t have a general election to campaign for, he’s not sure what he’ll do with himself. Go hide in a hole or something, perhaps. Get divorced…

Nope, he’s studiously going to avoid that thought. He doesn’t need anything else to upset him right now.

Josh is one of those people who turns on his phone as soon as the flight lands, too anxious to wait to check what he might have missed those six hours he was in the air. As soon as the flight touches down in San Diego, he turns his cell on, before the pilot gives permission.

He almost wishes he hadn’t.

He has so many missed calls that the screen of his Blackberry can’t show them all, as well as several text messages and even more emails. Most of them are written in all caps but the letters seem to swim in front of him. It’s like he never learned to read, never learned how to put letters together, never learned how to interpret the black lines on a white screen that assault him now.

He’s in a middle seat, and he’s certain this isn’t a conversation that he wants to have in row 27 of an airplane, but he has no choice. He has to figure out what is going on. He doesn’t even have to dial the number, though, because a call comes through on his phone.

It’s Donna.

He picks up, trying to ignore the way his whole digestive system, from his throat on down, seems to have tied itself up in knots. “Donna…” he says, not sure how to start. Surely she’s the one who has the information.

“Have you seen?” he hears on the other side of the line.

“Seen what?” Josh asks. “Donna, I’ve been on a flight for six hours, and I opened up my phone to a whole novel’s worth of texts and emails and I can’t…”

“An article got published,” she says, quietly enough that Josh hopes his seat mates don’t hear her. “About the marriage.”

And perhaps he should have seen that coming from the moment Donna suggested the arrangement, or the moment Helen Santos found out about them, or the moment that Bill Brewer threatened Donna with blackmail. “Because the VP deal leaked,” Josh concludes.

“It wasn’t written by Brewer, but I know he’s behind it,” Donna says. “Are you still on the plane?”

“Yeah,” Josh says. He stands up in the middle of the row, even though his part of the plane is a good five minutes away from being able to get off.

“Get off and call me back,” Donna says. “I’m going to pick you up from the airport.”

“That sounds like a bad idea,” Josh says doubtfully. “Donna, we probably shouldn’t be…”

“We need to talk. In private,” Donna says firmly. “Besides, it will get me away from any of the staffers here asking me questions for half an hour or so.”

Josh rubs his forehead, steadying himself on the ceiling of the plane with his other hand. “Okay,” he says. “The campaign just thinks I’m going to take a cab anyway. I should be out in 20 minutes or so if the people on this flight figure out how to move a little faster.”

He can practically hear Donna’s eye roll over the phone. “I’ll see you soon,” she says, and if Josh didn’t know her as well as he does, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hear the subtle way her voice shakes as she says it.

The people getting off of his plane are, indeed, very slow, and he feels himself getting more and more anxious with each passing moment. He can’t stop tapping his fingers on his legs, running his hands through his hair, and rocking on his feels, his whole body buzzing with anxious energy that he can’t expel in the back half of a 737. Finally, he’s able to pull his backpack out of the top compartment, almost hitting hit seatmate’s head with it, and head out to the pickup area of the airport.

He can’t pull up the internet on his phone, so he can’t look at the article Donna was talking about, and he begins to fabricate ideas in his brain of what it could possibly say. None of them are very nice or appealing.

Why would people care though, he wonders? Josh has never really understood celebrity culture, and he understands the appeal of himself as an object of public interest even less, but he cannot understand on a personal level why his and Donna’s marriage would ever be something that should take up space in a newspaper. How did Brewer even manage to convince someone to publish it?

He paces outside the San Diego airport, surely looking like a madman as he does so, until he sees Donna pull up in a van very clearly marked with Russell campaign stickers. He sighs heavily and gets in the front seat next to her.

“Oh my god, Josh,” she says to him.

“That’s all you have to say?” He really has been trying not to take his exasperation out on people, but it’s getting harder and harder by the day.

Donna rubs her forehead. “This is bad.”

“Worse for me than it is for you,” Josh recites.

“I didn’t come pick you up to compare the hierarchy of our pain and suffering,” Donna shoots back, “although if we were trying to do that, I’m sure it would be an interesting and very long discussion. I’m trying to figure out how we handle this.”

Josh fights the urge to reach up for the handle on the top of the car as Donna recklessly pulls out of the airport—he really has never liked driving with her—and steadies his breathing. “Who have you talked to?”

“Will, mostly,” Donna says.

“What did he say?”

“He’s shocked and appalled and all those things, and more than a little upset the Russell campaign is footing the bill of your health insurance.”

Josh rolls his eyes. “Shocked and appalled? Give me a break.”

“I’m a visible person in the campaign now, Josh! This is a bigger deal than it would have been initially!”

“You told him about the reasoning?”

Donna presses her lips together and shrugs. “Forgive me for not having a lie on the spot, especially considering you weren’t able to talk to me about it first! We have to keep our story straight, and telling the truth is going to be the only way to do that!”

Josh probably would have let out a sigh of relief once they were on the freeway, after Donna cut it very close merging in front of a big truck, but instead he just feels more tense. “So Will knows it’s about healthcare.”

“He’s not going to use it against you,” Donna says, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“I think I have enough influence on this campaign to keep that from happening,” Donna says firmly. “And Will isn’t that kind of guy.”

“I have to tell the Congressman,” Josh realizes, his eyes widening. “Unless Helen has told him already.” He checks his phone, and sees that both Santos and Helen have tried to call him in the last hour. “I’m sure she’s explained it all. Do you know who leaked it?”

Donna shrugs. “I don’t know, our campaign runs a pretty tight ship.”

“Your campaign has a thousand volunteers here right now and maybe about six of them actually like Russell’s policies. The rest are political science students trying to get ahead because they think your guy has the best shot at being in the general.”

“He has the most delegates,” Donna points out. “But let’s not argue about this here. I don’t have the energy. We have other problems to deal with.”

Josh leans back. “Yeah.”

“So we have to tell the truth,” Donna tells him. Her eyes are laser-focused on the road in front of her, although Josh isn’t certain she’s actually seeing anything as she drives.

“We don’t do that very much in this line of business.”

“Do we confront it publicly?” she asks. “Do we have our campaigns release a statement?”

“No, because it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, anyway.”

“It does.”

Josh can practically feel new lines beginning to appear on his forehead. “Well, maybe we should show people that we hate each other just as much as the rest of the people on these opposing campaigns do.”

“Oh yeah, because that’s productive,” Donna shoots back, and crosses three lanes of traffic at once. Josh doesn’t even realize he’s holding his breath until she barrels off the exit, but once he lets it go, he finds himself staring at her.

“Do we need to get divorced?” Josh asks.

“Oh, yeah, add more drama into the story, that will certainly get us out of the papers.”

He sighs. “I’m just saying, after this convention one of us is going to be unemployed. If it’s me, I’m going to be able to find another job that has benefits without too much trouble. Maybe CJ will even hire me back. If it’s you, then we’re both screwed.”

“The DNC will support campaign salaries and benefits if you’re the ones running in the general,” Donna says. “Or, Santos could take the VP nomination and then we’d both still be employed.”

“You didn’t want him to.”

“It reeks of undemocratic politics to me, yes,” Donna says, “but things just got complicated.”

“Things were already complicated.”

Donna turns on the turn signal, although this is the first time Josh remembers her using it in their perilous drive, and turns into the parking lot of the hotel. “Well, this was productive.”

“I’m gonna go talk to the Congressman,” Josh says, and he almost can’t get out of the car soon enough.

“You know he’s meeting with the Vice President first thing tomorrow,” Donna says.

“Yeah.”

“He’ll have to decide tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“If he doesn’t take the position I don’t know what we’ll…”

Josh brings his hands to his face as if blocking out any visual stimuli will calm down the anxious storm raging within him. “Donna, please, just… I need to go speak to the Congressman. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You don’t want to figure this out tonight? Before they meet?”

Frankly, if Josh had his way, they’d never bring this up again. They could stay married for the rest of time and just never talk about it; it’s not like his romantic prospects are any good anyway. And the very thought of dealing with this, especially publicly, sounds miserable. “No,” he says with a sigh. “But call me if you need me tonight.”

“Josh, we have to take this seriously.”

“I am,” he says. “I’m going to go talk to the Congressman.” He gets out of the car and slams the door shut.

Part of him thinks about walking the other way entirely, of finding the hotel’s pool and jumping in and never coming up for air. He’s sure his therapist, when (if) he ever goes back, would have plenty of fun unpacking that, but Josh isn’t sure he’ll make it through this convention intact anyway. Not with the way he’s certainly going to be chewed out by the Congressman.

He checks his phone, scrolls through the missed calls he has. The President, the First Lady, Leo, CJ, Sam… they’ve all tried to get ahold of him. Even Toby called, which is shocking considering he hasn’t talked to Josh since their fight. What could Toby possibly want with him, except maybe to mock him? He supposes it is rather a joke, the fact that he left the White House and then left himself exposed like this, left himself without insurance. Left himself in a position where Donna would have to save him.

Then again, it’s not his first time being in that position.

There are reporters in the hotel, and obviously they’re curious. Josh shakes his head as they approach, giving off his stormiest look. He pulls out his phone to give the appearance of being on a phone call before choosing the stairs rather than the elevator since the sea of reporters in the lobby seems a little bit easier to cross there.

The problem with the stairs is that the conference suite the Santos campaign has set up shop in is on the tenth floor, and climbing ten flights of stairs is not easy for Josh. It’s not so much that he’s out of shape—he actually does try to exercise when he has the rare opportunity, if only because it’s one of the few effective ways to release some of his anxiety—but moreso that he never really regained adequate lung capacity after Rosslyn. By the time he reaches the tenth floor, he’s out of breath and probably a little sweaty, although he isn’t sure if that’s from the exercise or the anxiety that has been pressing on him ever since he checked his phone (ever since he was eight years old).

Thankfully, there’s an external door into the Congressman’s room, so he doesn’t have to make his way through the war room, doesn’t have to endure the curious eyes of staffers who suddenly are a whole lot more interested in who their boss is.

He takes as deep of a breath as his still-heaving lungs will allow and knocks on the door.

Santos opens it, and to Josh’s surprise, there isn’t anger or dismay on his face. In fact, his face seems unreadable, a raised eyebrow the only real sign of any interest at all. His tie is undone, draping over his shoulders, and Josh can see behind him that Helen is sitting on the bed.

“Well Josh,” Santos says, stepping aside to let Josh enter the room and closing the door behind him. “Today is your lucky day.”

“Why is that, sir?” Josh asks. He doesn’t really have the patience to play games like this.

“You don’t have to explain yourself; my wife did it for you,” Santos says.

Josh meets Helen’s eyes, and she looks vaguely apologetic but shrugs. “Sorry, Josh,” she says. “He wanted to know and I had the answers, so…”

“No, no, that’s alright,” Josh says. “One less person I have to explain myself to.”

“This is an interesting piece,” Santos says, holding up the newspaper and waving it around. “You know, Josh, I didn’t know you were such a closet romantic. I feel like I should have known that about you.”

Josh rubs his forehead, still not quite comfortable stepping further into the room. “Sir…” he starts. “It’s been printed already?”

“Oh yes,” Santos says. “And they’ve got direct quotes from you.”

He frowns and takes a few steps forward to reach for the newspaper. “Who wrote it?” Josh asks.

“Alex Haverman, of the New York Times,” Santos says, tossing Josh the paper. Josh just barely catches it on the edge, the corner hanging between his fingers.

“Oh god,” Josh says. “I… after the who insurance lawsuit debacle, I did an interview with him. What quotes did he use?”

Santos takes the newspaper back, opening to the third page and skimming the article. “Well, did you happen to say that the only way to get adequate health coverage in this country is to marry someone rich?”

Josh pinches the bridge of his nose. “It was a quippy line, I don’t know. You know, a joke about how people marry for money?”

“Or for healthcare?”

“That’s not public knowledge, is it? That detail isn’t in the article.”
Helen shakes her head. “No, it’s not, but I filled him in.”
“Why did you do it?” Santos asks, and it isn’t accusatory or anything; more of an intense interest.

“I was desperate,” Josh says, staring at the hotel carpeting, golden swirls within a burgundy red carpet. Josh is no interior designer, but he’s developing an irrational hatred towards this carpet.

Santos twists his hands together and the newspaper crinkles. “You should have told me about that, Josh. We would have found a way.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Josh says. “This was back in New Hampshire, back in Iowa. Back where we were barely afloat, and employee benefits would have sunk us for sure. You saw the expense reports back then. You know I’m right about this.”

Santos sits on the bed next to his wife. “So you decided instead to go get married? Because that makes a whole lot more logical sense?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a thing!” Josh argues, throwing his hands out in exasperation. His lungs have finally almost recovered from his trip up the stairs, but now his chest is feeling tight for a whole different reason.

“You don’t think marriage is a thing, Josh?” Santos questions. “Because, I hate to break it to you, but I think if I referred to my marriage as not a thing with my wife right here in the room, I wouldn’t make it out alive.”

Helen rolls her eyes at that and gives Josh a sympathetic smile but says nothing.

“Donna and I, we’re not like that.”

“There’s the kicker,” Santos says. “You didn’t just marry anyone for health insurance, you married Donna Moss? The Russell spokeswoman?”

“She wasn’t then, and…”

“Of all the people in the world.”

Josh clasps his hands together until his knuckles turn white. “She was the one who offered. She knew better than anyone why I needed it, and might I mention, it was a very good thing I had health insurance when I had appendicitis!”

The memory of Josh doubled over in pain, suffering for reasons he couldn’t understand, makes Santos soften a little bit. “This was an insane thing for you to do, Josh. And did you think you were going to get away with it?”

“Actually, I did,” Josh says, honestly.

Helen chuckles. “Except for when I found out immediately after you got married.”

He has to chuckle at that. “Maybe that was a bad sign. But honestly, we thought we could keep it quiet. It’s not like we were spending all that much time together. We were living our separate lives, and unless anyone relevant was looking at our insurance cards…” He trails off, thinking about how it’s completely untrue. They have spent a lot of time together lately. She’s been in his apartment probably more than he has. She just picked him up from the airport. Maybe he needs to shut up before he tells any more lies. “We thought we would be able to keep it quiet, and after this all was over, once I had a job that would give me benefits again, that we’d be able to separate quietly and go on with our lives.”

Just saying those words makes him feel a little bit faint, though, because he truly can’t imagine his life without Donna. He can’t imagine moving on after this and never having a reason to speak to her again. He can’t imagine never seeing her again. He can’t imagine not having her in his apartment, not catching her eye in the hallways of the White House.

If they make it to the White House, and that’s a big if considering all that lies before them, he’s not sure he wants to be there without Donna.

“Well,” Helen says, standing up from the bed and dusting her hands together, “if you’re done with this pointless argument, because what’s done is done, what are we going to do about it?”

Santos wanders over to the window and looks out over the bay, leaning his forehead against the glass. “It depends on my choice about the VP deal, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Josh says slowly. “If you take the deal, we can coordinate. We can play it off. We can make it a funny anecdote, talk about the union of our campaigns.”

“You want us to make a joke out of your marriage?” Helen asks.

Josh leans back against the wall of the suite. “It is a joke at this point.”

“Are you so sure about that? I mean, I’ve seen you and Donna, and you…”

“No,” Josh corrects quickly. “No, there’s nothing there.”

Santos begins to pace the room again. “And if I don’t take the VP deal?”

“If you don’t, then… I don’t really know,” Josh admits. “The Russell campaign might jump on it as a chance to use it against us, put us on the spot about healthcare policy, or they might not.”

Helen frowns. “The article doesn’t officially state it’s related to healthcare policy,” she says. “I mean, aside from your joke.”

“Will knows,” Josh says. “And Donna and I decided that we have to be transparent about this, or else it will be impossible to keep our story straight.”

“The truth is certainly stranger than fiction,” Helen says, coming around to put an arm behind her husband’s back. “Honey, did you marry me for the benefits I was getting as an elementary education major?”

Santos laughs. “No, I’m pretty sure you married me for Tricare and VA benefits,” he replies.

“Mmmhmm,” Helen responds, continuing to rub his back. Sometimes it surprises Josh how easily affectionate they are with each other, and how willing they are to be affectionate in public, around him. It’s ideal, he thinks, for a campaign trail. He couldn’t ask for a better married couple to put on that convention center stage.

He never thought his own marriage would be so different, if he had really thought about it at all.

“I will tell you this though; if you don’t take the VP deal, Hoynes is going to pounce. Any shit we take from the Russell campaign, it will be a hundred times worse coming from Hoynes. He doesn’t have much leverage in this race, but he wanted this. He wanted to take down both of us. That’s why… that’s why this was published.”

“You know that?” Santos questions, stepping out of his wife’s grip.

“Yes,” Josh says. “I do. Donna was getting blackmailed. They wanted her to do something she had no power to do, and so… it didn’t work. They got the article published, and for some reason I unknowingly lent my words to it. I just… Congressman, if you don’t take the VP deal, the Democratic Party might implode entirely.”

It stings him to say that, because he was just mentally protesting against that very idea this morning on the flight back, but this has changed everything. He has changed everything, and for what? 

His party is going to fall apart, and they’ll have to concede to Vinick in the fall, and then they’ll be governed by a Republican for the next four years and who knows what kind of nightmares that will unleash, and it’s all because Josh Lyman needed health insurance.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Santos says. He pauses for a moment. “Josh, what do you think I should do?”

“I think it’s your choice,” Josh says honestly. “I think you should do what you feel is right. Are you prepared to be Vice President? Are you prepared to campaign as Russell’s Vice President? Are you prepared to get on board with his agenda?”

“I want to know what you think,” Santos says. “That is why I hired you.”

Josh rubs his forehead. “On the one hand,” he says, “you’re better than this. You’re better than being Russell’s Vice President, and frankly, it may be to his detriment, because I think at this point, a lot of the country likes you better than him.” He pauses, thinking about Leo’s words to him earlier. “On the other hand, you’re going to set yourself up as a future leader of the party if you take the spot. Maybe. Odds are, you won’t be VP. Vinick is going to be hard to beat no matter what, and Russell hardly has a shot. But you’ll be the presumptive frontrunner next time—that is, if you aren’t too humiliated this time around.”

“And there’s no third option?”

Josh shrugs. “If you don’t take it, you might be able to get enough delegates to switch support that you’ll win the nomination, but it could come at a cost. It could significantly weaken you in the general.”

Santos nods. “And those are my choices.”

“Not great ones, I’ll admit,” Josh says. “But this field is a buffet of bad choices, and you have to choose the least terrible one.”

“Like whether or not you have to marry the enemy in order to have healthcare?” Helen pipes up.

Josh grimaces. “Well, that’s a uniquely American problem.”

“One we’re going to solve,” Santos says. “Josh, I think we should talk about this. Talk about how even a presidential campaign manager can slip through the cracks with a perfectly legal oversight.”

“If it comes out that we can’t even provide benefits to our staffers, though…”

Santos shakes his head. “You made that choice. It was a difficult choice, and you made it for the good of the campaign. But if you were in another country—if you were in the UK or Canada or Sweden—you wouldn’t have had to make that choice. And we want to save the American people from your very dilemma.”

Josh chuckles. “What, having to marry your former assistant in order to get health benefits because the insurance companies all turn you down without a group rate because you were shot in the chest in a presidential assassination attempt?” He tries to grin to add some levity, and perhaps sound less insane.

“Something like that,” Santos says. “Look… no one from the campaign talks to the press tonight. We say nothing until the VP announcement tomorrow.”

“There’s going to be one?” Josh asks.

Santos takes a seat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know yet. But I guess tomorrow we’ll find out.”

Josh doesn’t sleep much that night, if at all. That’s not unusual, considering how little he usually manages to sleep, but he is aware of every single minute of tossing and turning. He consciously ignores all of the phone calls, screening them. He’d turn his phone off so that they would stop waking him up (why is CJ calling him at 4am DC time anyway?) but every time it rings, he has to check and makes sure that it isn’t Donna calling.

If she really needed him, he supposes she could come to his room, but that seems like such a risk right now; he’s already worried enough about running into reporters on the way over to Russell’s suite.

Donna never calls, and he tosses and turns all night, practically working himself into a knot over something he cannot do anything about anymore. Morning comes both sooner than he expects it to and far after it should have, and when Santos knocks on his door, he’s still in the process of buttoning up his shirt.

Thankfully, the hallway is cleared of reporters and they can take the elevator up to the Russell suite on the 15th floor. At least he won’t show up out of breath and (more) exhausted.

Santos knocks on the door, and Donna is the one who opens in. Josh remembers the first time he met Donna, how she was like a deer in headlights and yet so assured of herself. He had watched that fear, that hesitance shrink away into nothingness, but it seems like it’s back in full force today, with the way she seems to shrink back into herself. Josh can’t help but wonder if she’s been thoroughly eviscerated by her campaign team for her part in the situation. He wonders, if her campaign is treating her like that, if maybe he should stop Santos from even considering taking the spot.

Maybe, but it’s not up to him anymore. It never really was.

“Quick, hide the ouija board,” Will jokes half-heartedly.

Santos grins and turns to look at Josh. “See, they can afford ouija boards,” he remarks. “Josh has us reading chicken entrails.”

Josh can read Santos well enough now that he sees the signal. That means that Josh isn’t being pleasant enough, that he needs to have more of a sense of humor. And really, that shouldn’t be so hard. This whole thing is a massive joke.

“I’ll tell the VP that you’re here,” Donna says, and even the way she walks into the next room seems uncertain.

“We’re very excited that you’ve come,” Will says.

Santos nods. “Excited to be here,” he says, without much conviction. 

Josh realizes he hasn’t said a word the entire time he’s been in the room, and maybe he does need to show Will that he isn’t afraid. Of what, he’s not sure, because Josh is afraid of a great many things, but he suppose fake confidence can take him a long way. “It’s exciting,” he says, and then winces.

Before anyone can say anything (unlikely they would have, considering the awkwardness of the silence), Russell emerges. “Congressman, welcome,” he greets, reaching out to shake the hand of Matt Santos.

“Good of you to see me,” Santos replies.

Russell gestures towards the room he had been working in. “Shall we?”

“Remember, three feet on the floor at all times,” Josh quips, before he can stop the words from coming out of his mouth. There’s something for a sense of humor.

It doesn’t go over well, and the door shuts behind Santos and Russell, and Josh realizes that any chance he has to control this situation is long gone.

Will adjusts his glasses, taking in both Josh and Donna, and Josh realizes just how closely they are standing together. “Is that the motto for your marriage?” Will jokes.

Josh is taken aback by the statement and his face turns rather blank but Donna simply glares at Will with narrowed eyes. “Excuse me,” she says, tugging on Josh’s arm. “We need to talk.” He followed her out into the hallway and the door slams behind them.

“Do we really?”

“What was his reaction?” Donna asks. “Santos, I mean.”

Josh shrugs. “He’s… you know, shocked, but it could have bene worse.”

“And is he going to take the spot?”

“I don’t know,” Josh replies. “I’m frankly not even sure that he knows yet.”

Donna looks down at the floor, rocking on her heels a little bit. “Are you doing any public statements? I haven’t yet, but…”

“Depends on if Santos takes the spot or not.”

“If he does?”

Josh shoves his hands in his pocket. “Shouldn’t matter, then. Hopefully the story will disappear.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I suppose I’ll be having to defend myself a fair bit. Look… why did you pull me out here? Just to ask me that?”

She kicks at the floor a little bit with her foot, leaning all of her weight on her good leg. “I didn’t want to hear anything else from Will about this.”

“It was kind of a funny joke,” Josh concedes.

“It was’t funny when you said it, and Will just made it worse.”

“That’s not the kind of support I want to hear from my wife.”

Donna stops short, throwing her hands out to the sides. “What do you want from me? At this point, I don’t even know! Josh, you’re sending so many mixed signals; I’m not sure if you want to be my friend, or if you want an immediate divorce, or if you simply want to pretend we never knew each other at all!”

“I’m sending mixed signals?” Josh sputters. “I’m not trying to send any signals at all, I’m just trying to survive!”

“Well, good thing you have healthcare coverage so you didn’t die from something completely curable a few months back. Surely that’s useful for survival!”

“Donna…”

She starts to pace but he sees her wince slightly. She turns around and lowers her voice a little bit. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do,” she whispers. “What did we get ourselves into? How are we supposed to explain this? How are we supposed to even understand it?”

“We’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring the implications,” Josh notes. “We managed to convince ourselves no one would ever find out. Now I’ve got a whole list of ignored calls from people I haven’t talked to in months. Toby called me. Toby! We haven’t talked since…”

“He probably wants to tell you what an idiot you were for marrying me,” Donna says, trying to force a laugh.

“Nah,” Josh says. “He’d say that’s the smartest decision I’ve ever made.”

Before he can say anything more, the door to the suite opens, and Santos is storming out, looking determined. Josh certainly wouldn’t want to stand in the way of him. He looks at his watch; the meeting maybe lasted all of five minutes. He thinks he knows the answer, but he hurries down the hall, only taking one last look back to catch Donna slip back into the room. “How’d it go?” Josh asks, trying to sound as casual as he can possibly be.

“It went exactly how you think,” Santos says. “I… I just knew, sitting in there, that I couldn’t be Vice President to that man. I couldn’t do it.”

Josh gets in the elevator with Santos but says nothing.

Santos turns back to him, tilting his head. “Mad at me?”

And Josh has felt so much anger lately, enough to burn himself out from the inside, but none of it, he finds, applies to the man in this elevator. (None of it applies to his wife, either, but he doesn’t recognize that quite yet). “No, oddly.”

“Disappointed?” Santos questions.

Josh sets his shoulders back. “Proud, I think,” he says.

They’re still in the game, even if the leak has made their journey that much harder. Even if he’s not sure what the next week holds. Even if they’re going to be having conversation after conversation about healthcare. Even if he’ll be hearing about this marriage thing for the rest of his life.

If he’s going to have to hear about it, he may as well keep the marriage anyway.

“You’ve got a tough conversation ahead,” Santos notes, as the elevator opens up.

“Not so tough,” Josh says, and then he remembers Leo. Remembers the shame Leo tried to get him to feel, remember the anger he has at his mentor, the man who he sees as a father. He sighs heavily. “Yeah, I do.”

“And we’ll need to make a statement about the story,” Santos adds.

“Yes,” Josh says. “Let’s craft that, and then I’m going to go back to DC. There are some people I need to explain things to in person.”

“President Bartlet?” Santos questions.

“President Bartlet knows, but there are certainly some others in the White House who will be less than pleased that I kept this from them. And just one more thing for Leo to chew me out about.”

“Well,” Santos says, “let’s figure out a statement. Let’s figure out an approach, and then you can go and build some bridges with the White House again.”

Josh nods, and as soon as they get back to the staff room, he asks Ronna to book himself a flight. He’s going to put himself up in a metal tube for six hours with no ability to access the news again.

But he has to talk to Leo. About the Vice Presidency, and about himself.

Chapter Text

When the captain of the flight announces that they will be landing in thirty minutes, Josh’s constant low-level hum of anxiety has turning into a stomach-churning, heart-racing fear that isn’t calmed by tapping his foot or twisting his hands together. He leans back in his seat (middle seat again, because even all his miles can’t get him an upgrade on a summer flight from San Diego) and tries to take a deep breath, feeling claustrophobic from the closed off window and the way the man next to him has completely taken over the armrest.

All of that would be fine, he knows, if he wasn’t terrified about what was waiting for him on the ground.

Right before he boarded, Donna had called him, and he had only been able to catch a few words of her hurried rant—something about Will knowing, something about Russell and healthcare and attack ads. She had hung up when interrupted, before he could get a word in edgewise, and then the flight had taken off before he could get ahold of her again.

Six hours in a metal tube flying through the air, defying all laws of physics (and Josh would know), and yet what is waiting for him on the ground is infinitely more terrifying.

The moment the plane touches down, Josh grasps for his phone, almost elbowing the man next to him in the process (although, considering how he spent most of the flight elbowing Josh, he probably deserves it). He turns it on, and the number of messages that come up, the number of missed calls that come up… it does nothing to reassure him.

It is definitely rude to call someone on an airplane, but he can’t wait to find out what’s happening. He’s pretty sure if he had to wait another twenty minutes for this plane to get to the gate and clear out, he’d probably just keel over in the fetal position and stay there. So he calls Donna.

“What’s up?” he asks, trying to sound as casual as possible, although Donna probably knows him well enough to hear how heavily he’s breathing, especially considering he’s been sitting down for the last six hours.

He doesn’t really consciously hear anything, but he can sense how antsy Donna is over the phone. “Josh, I’m so sorry. I tried to stop him. I told him it wasn’t the public’s business why we got married.”

Josh frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Will…”

“Oh my god, I’m gonna kill him,” Josh murmurs, drawing the stares of everyone around him. It probably isn’t a good idea to make death threats on an airplane, he realizes, and he tries to provide a conciliatory smile that probably looks more like a grimace.

“He released our campaign’s statement. It talked… actually a fair bit about the insurance. He’s about to start banging the drum on healthcare. Everything that is scheduled in the next two days is about healthcare, and about how Santos can’t even provide it to his own team.”

Josh rubs the side of his face with such intensity it starts to tingle. “He’s putting the spotlight on healthcare right before the convention? Donna, that’s our issue! He’s gonna get creamed on policy.”

“I tried to tell him that,” Donna says. “I really did try. He didn’t listen.”

Josh groans and tightens his grip on the phone as his row stands up. “Donna… how bad is it going to be for us.”

“Well, it’s not going to be good. Will just made the story more interesting.”

“Less romantic, though,” Josh concedes.

Donna pauses for a second before agreeing. “Yeah.”

“We’re gonna have to release a statement.” He thinks about that for a second and then corrects. “The Santos campaign, I mean.” It’s funny, he thinks, how easy it is to forget Donna is one of them, how easy it is to assume that she’s part of his team. How wrong it is that she isn’t part of his team.

“You’re going to have to do more than that. You’re going to have to fight back.”

Josh holds his phone up with his shoulder as he reaches up to grab his overstuffed backpack that Donna used to tease him about (“That thing is the reason your back hurts all the time,” she’d tell him, not mentioning the real reason why his back and the rest of his body was a mess). “You’re giving me advice?” Josh asks. “You’re on the other team.”

“Jury’s out if it’s good advice,” Donna says. “Look, Will is pissed that you didn’t take the VP spot. Will is pissed that there’s going to be a floor fight. And Will is determined to win.”

“Are you determined to win?” Josh asks.

Donna hesitates. “I’m determined to do the right thing,” she says. “Look, I have to… I’ll talk to you later, alright? When are you back?”

“Late tomorrow night,” Josh says. “Leo summoned me back, probably to chew me out about the VP slot, or to chew me out about getting married. Either way, I’ll probably show up with some teeth marks on me.”

She laughs sympathetically on the other side of the line. “Good luck,” she says, “although, frankly, I’d be more scared of CJ. I finally was brave enough to pick up her call, and…”

“You’ve unlocked a whole new fear within me, Donna,” Josh groans. He’s out of the metal tube now, walking through the airport, but his anxiety has not at all decreased. “And I’ve had far too many of those unlocked to begin with.”

“Sorry,” Donna apologizes. “I’m going to send you the statement, although I’m sure someone else is already trying to get it to you. I’ll talk to you later. Good luck with the White House; they’re not going to be happy with you.”

“Were they ever?” Josh jokes, although sometimes he isn’t sure what good he ever did when he worked at the White House. Perhaps not so much a joke.

“Josh…” Donna says immediately, trailing off. She sounds like she’s about to argue with him, but she sighs heavily. “I’ll talk to you later,” she finishes, and hangs up.

Josh doesn’t feel much better.

He takes a cab to his apartment first, dropping off his things. It’s immaculate and spotless, except that his sheets are not on his bed but are completely clean and folded and placed on the end. Donna was the last person here, and she always washes his sheets when she uses his bed. 

He almost wishes she wouldn’t. He wouldn’t mind it if his bed smelled like her.

He had been in Texas for a few days with Santos while Donna had been here in DC, and then last time he was in DC, he hadn’t even stopped off here. If he divides the rent he’s paying by the number of days he’s stayed, his apartment is costing him far more than a hotel, but he supposes his nomadic life will be over soon.

He really is preparing for defeat.

He calls Santos while in a cab on the way to the White House, and while he doesn’t sound particularly thrilled about the way things have been going, he says he’ll draft a statement and have Josh take a look at it when he’s done with his meetings. It’s about all they can do.

“It’s not going to look hypocritical,” Josh says. “You’re following the law on providing healthcare, and I was the one who made that choice, and I wish I didn’t have to make that choice. Point out how most of your staffers had their government healthcare plans. Point out how most of the young, healthy ones with no preexisting conditions were able to get it on their own. But then point out how easily people can fall through the cracks.”

Santos sighs. “Josh, I… you’re going to have to talk to the press, too.”

“I know.”

“That’s not your favorite thing to do.”

“I can talk to the press,” Josh argues.

Santos chuckles. “You know, I don’t think you and I ever discussed your secret plan to fight inflation. Is that going to be such a secret when we’re in the White House?”

Josh somehow both laughs and sighs. “That was what, eight years ago? I’m not forgiven for that yet?”

“Oh, I have no grudge against you for that, although CJ Cregg might,” Santos says. “But Josh, if you’re hoping to be Press Secretary, I think you may have sealed your own coffin with that one.”

“Not a role I was going for,” Josh says with a grin. “Sir, I’m just about to the White House, so I’ll call and talk to you later.”

“You’re talking to Leo first?” Santos asks.

Josh grimaces. “CJ insisted on seeing me.”

“So two conversations that won’t be very fun for you,” Santos says.

Josh presses his lips together. “Yeah.”

“You’ll do great,” Santos says, hanging up the phone.

Josh climbs out of the cab. The White House has never felt so intimidating. Not on his first day of work as Deputy Chief of Staff, not on the day he came back to work after Rosslyn, not even any of the other times he has visited recently not as a staffer but an outsider. Today, it looms much taller than he’s ever seen it, and the the anxiety in him once again rises to levels he’s surprised he isn’t drowning in.

“I’m here to see CJ Cregg,” Josh says to the security man at the front desk. It’s someone he knows, someone who he saw every day walking into this building for six years, but there does not seem to be the same warmth and friendliness that he expects.

“Hi Josh,” Margaret says, as Josh enters the outside of CJ’s office. Margaret has six different Tupperware dishes set out in front of her, each with a different food in it. The smell is nauseating, but she seems to be enjoying her six-course lunch. “She’s finishing up with the Joint Chiefs but she’ll get you as soon as she’s done.”

Josh takes the seat in the visitor’s chair stiffly; long flights are not good for his already sometimes stiff leg. “Thanks,” he says, pulling out his phone again to look through some of the panicked texts he has received.

“I always knew you and Donna were going to get married,” Margaret says. “I could sense it in my soul. I have a sense for these things, you know?”

“You do?” Josh questions. Margaret has always been a little odd.

“Well, I thought it would be for love and not for health insurance, but the sense isn’t very detail oriented.”

It’s a good thing CJ comes out right then, because Josh has no clue how to respond to that.

“Joshua,” CJ says. She has a smile on her face but very little warmth in her voice. “Come on in.”

“Hi CJ,” he says, closing the door behind him. To his surprise, she gives him a hug, and every cell in his body squeezes her back, and he realizes just how desperately touch starved he is without his friends around.

She steps back far sooner than he wants her to and her expression changes entirely. “You got married! And you didn’t tell me?”

“CJ, look, it was…”

“Oh, I read the statement from the Russell campaign,” CJ says. “I know exactly what it was, and I’m still pissed as hell at you.”

“Well, it was supposed to be my business. No one was ever supposed to know!”

She rolls her eyes and takes a few steps behind her desk. “Because that has always worked so well for us in the past.”

“CJ!”

“You were here! You were here with Donna while you were married, and you didn’t think to tell me?”

Josh braces his arms on the back of her visitor’s chair and sighs. “No, because I didn’t want people to know. It was a…. I don’t even know, it was literally just so I could have healthcare, and if that doesn’t make a statement about what a mess this country is, then…”

“Well, it’s a good thing you had it,” CJ says. “By the way, how are you feeling?”

“I’m all good now,” Josh says. At least he is from his appendicitis incident; perhaps he isn’t all good in every way.

“Good,” she says, softening a little bit. “Josh, I just… I can’t believe you didn’t tell me? What did you think was going to happen?”

“That Donna and I would get divorced as soon as this situation was over. That it would just be healthcare, nothing else. That no one would ever know.”

CJ sighs. “And what’s going to happen now?”

“I don’t know,” Josh admits. “We haven’t… I just got off the plane and there’s already another complication and I’m not sure how the campaign will be able to work out the convention and I suspect the President is mad at me and I know Leo is mad at me and thinks I’m trying to betray the party for my own personal gain when sometimes I think I would give anything to just be done and not have to struggle through this world anymore, and I’m married somehow and I just…” He takes a few steps backwards, hoping to back up to the wall, but before he can, CJ comes back around and wraps her arms around him fully. This was the hug he was looking for before, the full contact between himself and the woman he considers a sister. He buries his head in her shoulder, knowing that if her blouse is a little wet when he comes up for air, she won’t say a thing.

“Josh,” she says softly, “I don’t think you should be worried about the divorce.”

He frowns. “What do you…”

CJ steps back and shrugs. “Just… you know, put it on the back burner. If I know you, and I do, I think you have better things to be worried about.”

“CJ,” he says, but he doesn’t question her anymore. Doesn’t have the energy for it. “Okay,” he says softly.

“I haven’t been a very good friend to you lately,” she says.

Josh shrugs. “You’ve done what you can. You’re in a difficult situation.”

“Still, if you ever need anything… I mean, for the time being, you’re going to have to be a little subtle about it, which we all know you’re bad at, but…”

“Hey, I kept my marriage hidden for six months!”

CJ tilts her head to the side. “How did people figure it out, anyway? Who was the leak?”

Josh has the good grace to look sheepish. “Um… I may have sent Donna some flowers on our anniversary in April.”

“April? You got married in January.”

Josh scrubs at his hair. “I mean, you remember when I used to get her flowers for our work anniversary. Like, there was that one night we were working on the speech for the correspondent’s dinner and…”

“I wasn’t there,” CJ points out.

Josh tries to think back. That was so long ago. It feels like a lifetime ago, even if only five years have passed. He misses those kind of late nights where everyone would gather in the Roosevelt Room around takeout and try and solve the biggest problems facing the country, or each other’s love lives. “I’m sure you’ve heard about this though.”

“Oh yes, Donna complained plenty. I considered reporting you to HR for harassment.”

“HR worked for me,” Josh says, with a little bit of that cocky grin he used to have making its appearance.

“I’d have figured out a way around that,” CJ shoots back. She closes her eyes and takes a step away from him, her manner changing in an instant. “Josh, Leo isn’t happy.”

“I could have told you that,” Josh says, although the thought of facing Leo already makes him sick to his stomach.

“He’s in emergency meetings until three, so if you want to stay here or say hello to anyone else, feel free, but… this is why I wanted to talk to you first. Because he’s going to try and convince you to take the Vice Presidency.”

Josh shakes his head. “The offer isn’t on the table anymore.”

“I know that, but Leo… Leo still thinks we can avoid a floor fight.” CJ looks at her shoes. “Leo thinks you can do anything, Josh.”

“Except for win a primary,” Josh mutters bitterly.

CJ reaches out and squeezes his forearm affectionately. “I’m supposed to be neutral,” she says, “so if you tell anyone I said this, I have the FBI and the CIA under me and I will use them, but after a year of dealing with Bob Russell, I don’t want to see him as President. I don’t even want to see him as a nominee.”

“I’m doing my best to stop that,” Josh says with a smile.

“And we all know you can.”

Josh wishes she wouldn’t have said that, because he remembers Toby’s office. He remembers papers being thrown at him, or maybe he threw the papers, but either way, he remembers how little Toby believed in him. “Toby doesn’t,” he mutters.

“Toby believes in very few people,” CJ replies firmly. “Hard as it may be to believe, you’re one of them. I think you should talk to him.”

“Why, so he can chew me out about how stupid I’ve been?”

CJ’s gentle smile seems to fade. “Josh, I… I have to get back to work. How about you go see him? And while you’re at it, the President requested your presence after you’ve talked with Leo, although he might be able to sneak you in before.”

“Is Toby in his office?” Josh asks. At CJ’s nod, he gives her a strained smile—things are still not as they were between them, but he supposes this counts as better—and leaves. Before he can even turn the corner out into the hallway, however, he very nearly runs over Charlie.

“Hey!” Charlie says, fighting to keep ahold of the papers he is carrying. “Josh! How’s it going?”

Josh shrugs. “Could be better. I’ve been summoned here to be chewed out by Leo McGarry, and from my previous experiences in that situation, it isn’t a fun place to be, and my campaign just had a major bombshell revelation that is going to cause us a lot of trouble going into the convention next week, and I had a middle seat on the flight, so… could be better.” He closes his eyes and rubs at his forehead. “Sorry, Charlie, I didn’t mean to go off on you like that.”

Charlie shrugs. “You’re good. Heard you got married?”

Josh bites his lip. “Yeah.”

“Cool. If you ask me, you should have done it years ago, but at least you finally figured it out,” Charlie says. “I gotta go see CJ, but I’ll try and catch you before you go.”

Josh swallows. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “See you, Charlie.”

Charlie gives him as much of a wave as he can manage with him arms full of papers and Josh smiles back, heading down the hallways he once knew like the back of his hand.

He makes his way to Toby’s office, finding the blinds and the door closed; usually that is a pretty clear signal that Toby is writing something and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Josh reconsiders knocking but he sighs; he really should talk to Toby, because the longer they put this off, the more likely it will be that they’ll never speak again, and Josh isn’t comfortable with that kind of discord in his life. Not if he can help it.

He knocks.

“What it it?” he hears from inside. Toby sounds particularly exasperated today.

Josh opens the door and offers a sheepish smile. “Hey Toby,” he says.

Toby looks up from his computer; his face is unreadable. “Hey. What are you doing?”

“Here to talk to Leo,” Josh explains. He doesn’t step further into the room; there’s an invisible line that he can’t bring himself to cross. “Get chewed out by him, most likely.”

“Yeah, when I saw the statement about your marriage,” Toby emphasizes, “I think we all figured out the VP offer hadn’t gone well.”

“Nice work, Sherlock.”

Toby grunts a little bit. “What now?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“Because in a week, we’re supposed to choose a nominee for the Democratic Party and no one knows who it’s going to be right now! And it’s up to you to figure that out. You and Will Bailey, and god knows I don’t want it to be Will Bailey figuring things out.”

Josh feels emboldened to step a little closer, although he still wants to stay out of striking distance; memories of what occurred last time he was in here are coming fast and furious. “Toby, I’m trying. We… we could have used you out there, you know?”

“You did okay without me,” Toby says, not looking up from his computer.

“It’s not the same. Could have pushed us over the edge,” Josh says, tapping his fingers on his leg. “Gotten us the nomination outright. Would have been nice for me to have someone I trusted.”

“We might have killed each other,” Toby remarks, although there’s a little bit of a glint in his eyes that tells Josh he’s ready to use some humor.

Josh shrugs. “Yeah, but we made it through two campaigns together already. I just… I hope you’re not too angry at me for leaving anymore.”

“I’m not angry at you, Josh,” Toby says, although he still won’t meet his eyes.

He swallows, shuffling his foot against a hole in the carpet from when one of Toby’s speech-burning sessions missed the garbage can. “What are you writing?”

“Trying to start the President’s speech for the convention,” Toby says. “Would help a lot if I knew who the nominee was.”

“I’m working on it!” Josh retorts, before backing up and rubbing his forehead. He doesn’t want to get heated with Toby. Not again. “Look, I really am trying.”

“I know,” Toby says. “Did you listen to Vinick at the convention?”

Josh shakes his head. “No.”

“You’re better off,” Toby says. “Might be better to lose the nomination now than to have to try and beat Vinick in the fall.”

He swallows. There’s still more, he thinks. If they make it through this week, there’s a whole general election that’s going to be a whole lot harder. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, offering up as much of a smile as he can muster.

“You and Donna, huh?” Toby asks, before Josh can turn around and leave.

Josh sticks his hands in his pockets, trying to look as casual as he can. “I assume you read the statement from the Russell campaign.”

“I did,” Toby says slowly. “I also don’t know anyone else in the world insane enough to get married to someone on an opposing campaign only for healthcare.”

“I was pretty desperate, Toby, I don’t know what to…”

Toby shakes his head. “Josh, you can argue and argue about this until you’re blue in the face, but no one gets married just for healthcare. And especially not you and Donna. How is she doing, by the way?”

“She’s… we’re making it through,” Josh says. Because Donna could not be described as good by any stretch, but then again, neither could he.

“You’re gonna divorce once this is all over?”

Josh shrugs. “We haven’t really talked about it. CJ said not to, although god knows why.”

“CJ doesn’t want you to do anything you’ll regret,” Toby says, “although I think with all of this, she’s very glad to not be the White House press secretary anymore.”

“And what do you think?” Josh asks.

Toby shrugs. “I’ve done the divorce thing, and let me tell you, it’s not a picnic. Especially if you ever change your mind.”

“Why would I change my mind?” Josh asks. “It was just an arrangement, it’s not…”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Toby says, “because I wouldn’t want to make a liar out of you.”

Before Josh can question what he means by that, there’s another knock on his door. “Josh,” Ginger says, peeking her head inside, “Leo wants you in the Mural Room.”

“I’ve been summoned behind the woodshed,” Josh quips as a way of saying goodbye.

“Good luck,” Toby says, and Josh can tell that he means it.

Josh makes his way over to the Mural Room slowly, even though every cell in his body is telling him to move quickly and get it over with. He opens the door and sees Leo waiting there, a heavy frown on his face.

Leo doesn’t say anything; his eyes are fixed on Josh, waiting for him to start.

“Santos turned Russell down,” Josh starts, and adds, “but I’m sure you figured that out already.”

Leo crosses his arms, and Josh stands awkwardly near the door; he’s never had a meeting like this with Leo. “Okay,” Leo says.

“Okay?” Josh questions.

“You get him to un-turn it down.”

Josh bites his lip, backing up a step. “Doesn’t work like that.”

“No,” Leo says, taking one more step towards Josh. “It does.”

“I told him to find a way to say yes!”

Leo shakes his head. “You find it for him.”

That bridge has been burned, Josh thinks, and frankly, he has no interest in finding a reason for Santos to take Russell’s offer. In fact, he doesn’t want to even try. “You’re not hearing me,” Josh says. You have to listen to me. His chest gets tighter, almost suffocatingly so.

“You’re not hearing me,” Leo repeats, and Josh wonders if this is really the same man he’s admired for so long. The man who mentored him, cared for him, loved him like a son. Perhaps the bridge between Santos and Russell is not the only one that has been burned, or at the very least, is at risk of catching on fire. “Matthew Santos had a terrific ride. Improbable, impressive, and over. This is a return to reality. He’s Russell’s Vice President.”

Josh shakes his head, setting his shoulders back. He hopes he isn’t as shaky as he feels at the moment. “It’s not gonna happen,” he says.

Leo doesn’t seem impressed. “You are going to do this for us. For the President. For your party.”

Eight years ago, Josh would have been swayed by that argument. Even a year ago, he might have been convinced. He served at the pleasure of the president, after all, and how could he deny that. Except that he’s a year older now, and he’s on the tail end of a nasty primary fight that he has no intention of losing. Certainly not to Bob Russell.

In most ways, Josh doesn’t think he has changed for the better over the last eight years. He’s physically far worse for wear, an emotional wreck most of the time, and more exhausted than he had ever imagined being. But his convictions are stronger than ever, and he didn’t fight this long to give up. “I’m not,” he says firmly. “I told Santos to say yes. I was wrong. He’s twice the man Russell is on his best days, ten times even. And Russell doesn’t have that many best days.”

Leo swallows, and looks Josh in the eye. It’s an almost agonizing contact, but he relents with a dramatic dropping of his shoulders. “I’ll go tell the president,” he says.

Josh shakes his head. “No, I can. If you need me to. He… he asked to see me.”

Leo waves a hand, but murmurs, “Josh…” just as he is about to walk out the door. Josh pauses and turns around, locking eyes with Leo. Leo manages a smile. “Congratulations on your marriage.”

Chapter Text

Donna knocks on the hotel room door, holding her breath as she waits for an answer. She rocks back on her heels; it’s barely five, but her body does not only hold the exhaustion of the day but the exhaustion of her life in the past year, and even though she’s pretty tall and she’d like to think, fairly strong, there is only so much a person can take.

She wonders, briefly, if you know when you hit your breaking point, or if it’s possible to run past it entirely.

The door opens, and she doesn’t wait for an invitation inside. She pushes past him, into his mess of a hotel room, and looks around. “You know you have a closet, right?”

Josh frowns. “How did you find my room? I don’t think I told you I moved but…”

“Ronna told me,” Donna says with a grin. “And I knew you moved because I let her know that you shouldn’t be in a smoking room. Secondhand smoke can linger for days.”

Josh runs a hand through his hair. It had looked as tamed as it could be before, but he’s messed it all up again now. “Why did Ronna tell you where I was?”

“She knows we’re married.”

“Everyone knows we’re married now, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, but Ronna knew before…” Donna sighs heavily; she doesn’t need to bring up what happened after his surgery right now. She takes a seat on the edge of his bed, casting aside a shirt that she can smell even without picking up. Josh, she realizes, is still in his undershirt and boxers. “You’re not dressed.”

“Well, I’m trying.”

“You’ve been wearing the same suit for days on end. Why change now?”

Josh bites his lip. “I have to give an interview,” he says tersely. “And before you say anything, it’s not my idea, it’s the Congressman’s, and I’m not looking forward to it, but I have to  be in the convention center in…” he glances at his watch, “fifteen minutes for a sit-down about this story and my statement, so if you could find some other time to bother me, that would be great.”

“You have to do an interview already? You barely got back from the airport.”

“Welcome to the life of a…” Josh stops short and his eyes narrow. “How did you know I just got back from the airport?”

Donna kicks a leg up, leaning back on her arms, braced straight behind her. “Because I tracked your flight.”

“You tracked my flight?” Josh drops the shirt he had been holding; probably a mercy, because Donna can see a big coffee stain on the sleeve.

“They have websites that can do that now, Josh, it’s not like…”

He holds up a hand, running his other one through his hair with aggression. “Wait, wait, wait. You tracked my flight? How did you even know which flight I was on?”

“Well, there are only three daily flights from Dulles to San Diego, and I know you’ll fly direct unless you absolutely can’t because you hate layovers and you especially hate O’Hare, which is where you’d likely have a layover if you…”

Josh lets out a heavy sigh, stopping Donna’s train of thought. “You’re insane, you know that?”

“It’s been suggested to me,” Donna says, trying to grin at the suggestion, although her mind keeps drifting back to the number of a therapist she hasn’t called yet.

He rolls his eyes, picking up the same shirt, noticing the coffee stain, and thowing it down in frustration. “What do you need, Donna?”

“Well, I know what you need,” she says, reaching into his suitcase, splayed open, and pulling out what is probably the only clean shirt he owns at this point and tossing it to him. “And you should probably change your undershirt too. TV audiences mights not be able to smell, but they still know.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Donna pulls out a tie—blue with silver stripes—and tosses that to him as well. She only barely lets the thought flit through her mind that she might have given him that one. “I don’t know, but I just have a sense about these things. Like the new guy, on the Today Show? Totally doesn’t use deodorant. You met him once, didn’t you?”

Josh swallows. “Last week.”

“Yeah, I watched that. Opposition research, you know. Did he wear deodorant?”

He blinks a few times. “No… I don’t think he did.”

Donna throws her head back with a chuckle. “See, I have a sense! And since you can’t shower, which you desperately need to do, before you go have this interview, at least get a clean undershirt.”

“In that case, I’m going to need you to leave. Why the hell are you in here, anyway? You still haven’t answered that.”

“We need to talk. And don’t worry, I’ve seen you shirtless. Actually, I’ve seen your whole body, but that’s besides the…”

Josh groans and throws off his undershirt, groping for a new one before Donna can actually get a good look at him. She doesn’t try to look too hard, instead averting her eyes. “Donna!” He interrupts her train of thought. “We don’t exactly have time to talk.”

“We can do it after, I guess,” Donna says. “I just… we have to coordinate. There’s going to be a floor fight, and we’re going to get brought up in it, and I wanted to make sure we know what we’re doing. What we’re saying.”

Josh shrugs. “Okay, but Donna… you know I’m impossibly busy, right?”

“Go do your interview, and then we’ll talk.” She smiles sweetly, tempted to bring up what happened last time he acted like he was too busy to talk to her, but she decides that’s unnecessarily cruel. Josh has been through enough lately, and she doesn’t need to throw salt on that wound. “What’s the interview for, anyway?”

“Well, you know Congressman Santos. He wants to turn everything into a healthcare kick. So I’m gonna go turn a personal interview into a stump speech for our agenda, or at least try to.” He pales a little bit. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that. Especially since you went and told Will about the reasons behind our marriage.”

“I was… I was stressed!” Donna expresses. “And you were on a flight, so it’s not like we could have figured out a cover story!”

Josh sighs. “And then he went and decided to share that information, so forgive me if I’m not sure I can trust you!”

Donna tries not to let her face fall. “Josh…” she whispers. “You can trust me. You know that, right?”

Josh bites his lip. “Yeah.”

She glances at the clock behind him. “You have to go,” she says. “Is it prerecorded or live?”

“Live,” Josh says with a sigh. “I wanted prerecorded but the station was insistent, and since they got us on air tonight, the Congressman was happy.”

“Don’t go insulting anyone’s religion, then,” Donna warns him.

To her surprise, he grins at that. “I’m in an interfaith marriage now, Donnatella, so I’ll be careful,” he tells her, reaching for his jacket. He still has a piece of hair sticking up, and while Donna knows from all the times that she has done television interviews that they’ll fix it at the studio, she can’t restrain herself from reaching up to smooth it down. “What are you doing?” he asks, pulling on the jacket.

“Your hair,” she says with a shrug. “Seemed like the wifely thing to do.” He doesn’t say anything in response, but Donna thinks his broad grin could make her melt. And maybe he’s just putting it on for television, but she hopes it stays, because she hasn’t seen it in far too long. “My room is 513,” she yells down the hallway. “Come there when you’re done.”

He turns back, gives her a nod, and then breaks into a run toward the elevator. She glances at her watch; he’ll be lucky if he isn’t late.

Donna heads back to her room; she is probably expected in the big conference room at some point to work on messaging strategy, but since no one has called her in desperation, she figures she can slip away for an hour or so. The past few days have been strange on the campaign; while she hasn’t exactly been treated as a pariah, there is a kind of animosity from the other campaign staff towards her, as if her marriage had ruined the whole campaign. She can almost certain reassure them that the delegates who are choosing the next presidential nominee are certainly not going to care about her and her marriage. It’s a filler story at best, soon to be overshadowed by the convention. Newspapers are getting antsy, she justifies. No one will care about this by Tuesday, once the floor fight gets into action. At least, as long as Josh doesn’t screw up this interview

Still, she can sense the judgment coming from her coworkers. She hasn’t been put on any interviews since the story came out, and she has to wonder if they don’t want her to be visible. Josh had always said this would be worse for his campaign than it would be for hers, but she isn’t so sure.

Whatever it is, no one really seems to need her contributions right now, which is alright by her. She slept in until seven this morning, which felt like a luxury. This job will be over soon, she thinks, and it’s strange the confidence she feels that Russell will not win. She doesn’t know what will happen, and he does have the most delegates, but she feels very strongly that he will not be the winner of this nomination.

Donna has been wrong about many things in her heart, but she’s not sure this is one of them.

With no one trying to contact her, she turns on the TV, curious about Josh’s interview. Josh, as well as she knows him, can be a wild card when it comes to things like this, and she isn’t sure how much she trusts him not to go off the rails. It isn’t so much about him as it is the situation: the oddness of their marriage and the oddness of the circumstances that necessitated it.

It’s just getting started when Donna turns on the TV. It’s strange to think that the man on her television set had been with her just twenty minutes ago. Despite what is probably the best rushed effort of a makeup team, Josh looks pretty harried. She’s sure running over to the media suite in the convention center did him no favors.

The interviewer is someone Donna has talked to a couple times, but usually just for short statements or TV segments. Donna didn’t hear the question, but Josh manages to redirect it to talk about the Santos healthcare plan. “What we’re trying to do,” he says, his hands gesticulating eagerly, “is fill the gap. There are lots of people getting caught in the cracks, myself included, and not everyone has someone to pull them out of that hole. I was lucky, and considering I had a medical emergency while I would have been otherwise uninsured, I was particularly lucky, but not everyone has someone in their lives to do that for them.”

“To marry them?”

The makeup crew didn’t do enough, because Donna can see a sweat bead forming on Josh’s brow. “Sure,” he says. “Now, my particular situation is unique, but it’s not as unique as you might think. Because insurance companies can discriminate against those with preexisting conditions, we get a lot of instances where people can’t manage to get insurance because they’re not part of a group plan. The Santos healthcare plan would eliminate that discriminatory ability of insurance companies, and would not allow them to raise rates based on health history. We would ensure that all people, regardless of their past experiences, regardless of their genetic luck, would be able to have access to high quality healthcare. The United States is a leader in healthcare research, in pharmaceutical development, in innovation, and yet we can’t pass those benefits onto our citizens because we have a fragmented and broken system that leaves people behind so that greedy middlemen can make a profit by bankrupting people who are already suffering. That’s why I’m fighting for this.”

Donna watches the way he shifts in his seat, the tension in his posture, and her heart aches a little bit. She knows he doesn’t want to bring his personal experiences into this, and she understands, but she also can’t help but swell with pride.

The interviewer asks a few more questions, and each one of them Josh manages to turn into a discussion about healthcare policy in the country. She is impressed, frankly, at how deftly he brings it back to the Santos healthcare plan.

She finds herself lost in staring at him, lost in watching him adjust the buttons on his jacket, pull at his tie, and almost reach back to muss up his hair again before suddenly stopping herself. When she realizes how she has drifted off, how she is not hearing what he’s saying, she tries to snap back into it. Josh is still waving his hands, on a rant. “While Medicare certainly has its flaws, the fact that we, as a nation, are able to provide healthcare to every senior citizen is proof that we can do more. Medicaid is a start, but if we could make Medicare available to every citizen, without the burden of proof of income, without the fear of losing healthcare if you make above a certain threshold, without the fear that losing your job means losing your right to your health, then maybe this would be a country where all could thrive as was initially envisioned.”

“Josh,” the interviewer says calmly, “You believe all these things, and yet as campaign manager, you did not make providing healthcare for your employees a priority. Do you have any way to reconcile those?”

“When the campaign first started,” Josh says with a swallow, “we were small. Very small, and our funding almost nonexistent. Providing insurance to the five or six people we had hired would have been cost-prohibitive, and that’s if we could find an insurance company to work with us. Most of the employees on the campaign were also congressional employees, which means they had government healthcare. Now I can tell you from experience that it leaves much to be desired, but I was the only one without it, and if that was the thing that would have sunk the campaign, it wasn’t worth it to me. As we’ve expanded, many of our roles have been seasonal or part-time, and while we would love to be able to provide benefits, in this kind of time frame, it isn’t realistic. Very few campaigns do, the Russell campaign being an exception due to their early and enthusiastic fundraising as presumed frontrunner. The campaign has never been under any legal obligation to provide healthcare, and while the Santos healthcare plan would change that legal obligation, the delegates are going to have to make that a reality.”

The interviewer blinks, and Donna almost has to laugh; she probably wasn’t expecting his answer to be that technical. She waits a few seconds, before looking down at her notes. “Thank you for your… clarifying answers on the nature of healthcare in our nation. Now, I have one more question for you.”

Josh shrugs and glances at his watch. “You have me for another ninety seconds before you have to go to commercial.”

“While some may argue that we have devalued the institution of marriage in the past few decades, it is still a very big step to take. When you married Donna Moss, spokeswoman for the Russell campaign, did you only marry her for the insurance policy?”

Donna swallows thickly, and while she doesn’t try to hold her breath, for a minute, her lungs simply refuse to take in any more air.

Josh blinks. “Are you trying to… audit my marriage? Because, believe me, I’m expecting enough trouble from the IRS this year.”

“No, Josh,” the interviewer says with a chuckle, leaning back casually. “All I’m saying is… I’m sure you could have found someone else to help you in this predicament. Or I’m sure you would have been willing to go a few months without insurance. Did you really marry a highly visible staffer on another campaign just for a government healthcare plan? Or was there something more?”

There isn’t anything more, Donna thinks. It was as simple as that. Just for insurance. If that’s the last question, then they’re home free.

Except that Josh hesitates.

He starts to say something, and then he stumbles over his words, and then he holds up a hand. She watches as he blinks rapidly, attempting to collect his thoughts, and watches as they spill into a mess again the minute he opens his mouth to speak. “I don’t…” he starts, and then starts to stutter unintelligibly again, his mouth moving in no particular order, articulating words that don’t exist.

“Do you love her?” the interviewer presses.

What kind of question is that? Donna can’t believe that a professional political journalist would stoop that low, would ask him a personal question like that when it really doesn’t matter. She thinks about turning the TV off, because she is certain she doesn’t want to hear the answer. If it’s yes, then they have a whole new complication that will sound scandalous and exciting to the general public and draw the attention away from what really matters. If it’s yes, then Donna isn’t sure how to face him again. Isn’t sure how they could ever navigate being in the same room, much less being in a marriage. If he loved her and never told her…

So the answer has to be no. It has to be no. It has to be about the insurance only, about the campaign only, about politics. That’s all Josh’s life has ever been about—politics—and it’s easiest for both of them if it stays that way.

But maybe she should turn off the TV so that she doesn’t have to face the heartache of hearing that two letter word come out of his mouth.

He looks stunned, and if he was speechless before, it’s worse now. He hesitates, silence filling the airwaves for at least a good fifteen seconds.

“Josh,” the interviewer prompts again.

“It’s a yes or no question,” Donna whispers. She knows he can’t hear her, but sometimes she wonders. If they were in some fantasy world, perhaps they’d have a psychic connection, and Josh would know what to do.

“I’m sorry,” he says, eyes darting around the room. “I don’t know how to answer… you asked me a few questions and I’m not sure I can succinctly…”

Before he can say anything else, the interviewer’s eyes widen. “Unfortunately,” she says, “that’s all we have time for. Thank you, Josh, for coming on the show today.”

“It was a pleasure,” Josh says blankly, although the lighting in the studio manages to catch the sweat in his brow. The program goes to commercial.

Donna is still holding her breath.

When she manages to come to her senses and let in some air again, her first plan is to call Josh’s number. “Get over here,” she tells him. “Right now!”

He doesn’t argue, but hangs up quickly, and Donna wonders if perhaps he didn’t want to face her wrath over the phone.

Not her wrath. That’s the wrong word. She isn’t angry with him, just confused. So confused. Josh isn’t the greatest at interviews, but he doesn’t freeze up like that. He doesn’t fall apart on TV like that. He doesn’t end an interview like that.

She’s not angry, she thinks, just worried.

Donna paces across the length of her hotel room, settling on pressing herself up against the window, feeling the warmth of the San Diego sun on the glass, before stalking back towards the door. The movement is just hard enough with her always aching leg to start to take her mind off of this, off of everything.

She is on her 28th trip across the hotel room floor when there’s a knock on the door.

She swallows, and then opens it.

Josh is standing there, looking pale and flushed all at the same time, holding himself upright with the greatest of effort. “Hi,” he says, trying his best to smile sheepishly.

“So… that was enlightening,” Donna murmurs, closing the door behind him. “Or that’s one word for it.”

He takes a few steps past her. “Donna, I’m not sure it was that bad…”

“She asked you a yes or no question, Josh! Don’t they teach you how to answer those at Yale Law?”

He looks down at his shoes. “Well, it’s actually quite a bit more complicated than…”

“Josh!”

His head snaps up and he meets her gaze. “Yeah…”

“What the hell happened in there? You were doing so well!”

“Well for you, or well for me?”

“What do you mean?” Donna asks, narrowing her eyes. The hotel room is starting to feel too small to contain the two of them.

“Something that is good for me and good for my campaign may not be so beneficial for yours, and the other way around.” Josh’s voice sounds like it is losing patience by the second. “So I think it’s reasonable to wonder what you wanted me to do in that interview. If I’m having a disastrous media moment, isn’t that to your benefit?”

Donna paces towards the window again, feels the air conditioner blow cold air, but not cold enough to steady her. “I’m talking about the last question!”

“The last question was completely out of the blue, and completely inappropriate to ask in the context! She should know better,” Josh says firmly. “My personal life is off limits.”

“It’s not going to be any more,” Donna says. “You could have just said it was off limits, if you couldn’t answer a yes or no question. Why did you hesitate?”

Josh leans his back against the wall, tension clenched in his fists. “Donna…” he says softly. He clearly doesn’t have answer.

“Why did you hesitate?” she continues, facing back towards the window. It’s too much to look at him right now, too much to watch as he tries to hold himself together. “We said we were going to tell the truth, now that it was out there. You didn’t answer her question. You didn’t tell the truth!”

She takes a glance over her shoulder to see him rocking on his feet, biting his lip. “Donna,” he repeats again, but no other words come out. She waits a few moments, seeing if he has anything else to say for himself, but he seems to have no more words.

“You should have said no right away! You should have said that it was just for the insurance, that there was no personal reason, no love involved, it was an arrangement and as simple as…”

“I didn’t want to lie!”

The buzz of the air conditioner is the only sound, aside from the ringing in Donna’s ears. I didn’t want to lie. What the hell does that mean? How could he say something like that? How could he…

“I didn’t want to lie,” he repeats, “because denying it would…” He kicks at the ground, before moving his feet to pace the few steps toward her. He doesn’t touch her, doesn’t come that close, but he watches her, soft dark eyes fixated on her. “It’s not a crime to lie on TV, or most everyone at Fox News would be in prison, but if I had lied in that interview, I would feel the guilt of it for the rest of my life.”

She stares at the carpet, at his scuffed up shoes, because she fears that she’ll lose it entirely if she meets his eyes. “Josh…” she whispers. “You can’t just… you didn’t tell the truth, either. You hesitated.”

“I’ve never spoken the truth out loud.” She hears his voice catch on the words.

Her eyes sting, but she continues to stare at the carpet as they water; she can hardly bring herself to blink. “What is the truth?”

She sees his feet take a step or two towards her, his toes nearly touching hers. She feels his gentle touch on the underside of her chin, lifting up her eyes with tenderness towards him. “The truth is…” he starts, his voice breathy and unconvinced. He clears his throat, and more strongly tells her, “The truth is, I love you, and I was too much of a coward to say that on national television.”

Donna closes her eyes, and if she can feel tears running down her cheeks, she’s sure Josh will be kind enough to ignore that. She doesn’t have the words, her mouth working to try to say something, anything of substance, but her thoughts are paralyzed, simply playing those eight letters over and over again in her head.

I love you.

Those could mean a lot of things, she thinks, and she desperately wants to ask him to clarify, but a part of her fears that she will be gravely disappointed if she does. If the truth isn’t exactly what she wants it to be, then she isn’t sure she’ll be able to face him again. So she doesn’t ask.

“Donna…” he says, and she opens her eyes again, focusing on him. “I hope that’s okay with you. I just…”

“Okay with me?” she repeats with a tearful chuckle.

“I’m not ashamed or anything… a little bit terrified, maybe,” he says, with his own unconvincing laugh, “but I also thought you deserved to hear it from me and not from your television.”

“When did you realize?” she asks, and she realizes the inherent unfairness of this. Perhaps he is waiting for her to say something in return. She wants to say something in return, but her brain cannot form the words. Her mind is stuck on Josh’s words, words she never thought he would say. Words she could never have hoped he would say.

His eyes widen. “I don’t… it came on so slowly, and then suddenly all at once, when she asked me… I knew.” And there is so much fear in those eyes, so much hesitation. “Donna, I’m sorry if this is… I know this makes everything more complicated, and it was certainly not what you intended when you married me, and if you want to…”

The words still are not coming to her. Her hands shake with the unknown, her body tense with anticipation. Ironic that she, who makes her living off of speaking for a Presidential candidate, would be so entirely lost for words, but she cannot use language. She can’t reassure him with letters.

Instead, she reaches out towards him, wraps her arms around his neck, and tiptoes up to kiss him.

At that moment, she knows she doesn’t need any words. She doesn’t need to tell him anything but this. At that moment, she knows that she is his forever, and she hopes he knows that too.

He doesn’t let her go, keeps pressing his body more closely towards her, keeps his lips on hers, his tongue exploring her face, his hands wrapped around her lower back, and it’s so different from any way she has touched him before. He pulls back for air for just one moment, before kissing her back and moving his hands down to her bottom, drifting them down towards her lower thighs, pulling them gently so that her legs are wrapped around her hips. He lifts her up.

“You shouldn’t…” she whispers.

“I never got to carry my wife across the threshold,” he replies. “But I want to carry you to bed.”

It is only a few steps, which is good because as intimately as Donna trusts Josh, she doesn’t trust his strength to not give out. He deposits her to sit on the bed, her legs still wrapped around him as she goes in for another kiss, another moment of perfection. She moves towards the edge of his mouth, lips exploring the lines of his face that didn’t exist when she first imagined doing this, imagined moments that she pushed away, disallowed herself from lingering on. Now, she doesn’t have to push them away, doesn’t have to push him away.

This is her husband, she thinks, and this is so very right.

She loosens the grip of her legs around his hips, so that he can roll over and sit on the edge of the bed next to her, although he never once disconnects their touch. She turns her head, hungry, eager for more.

“Remember our wedding?” Josh asks, between kisses.

Donna moves down towards his neck. “How could I forget?”

“Well, our kiss was not nearly enough for me,” he says, opening his mouth to let out a moan at the feeling of Donna’s lips coming down towards his throat. “I told you there was more where that came from,” he tells her, with a cocky grin that just turns Donna on more.

“You were right,” she says. “Shame we waited so long.”

His face turns suddenly serious. “We still need to… you know, talk about what this means.”

“Who said anything about talking?” Donna murmurs. “You’re my husband. I love you. That’s good enough for me.”

He sits up straight; he doesn’t exactly pull away from her touch, but he stiffens. “You… could you say that again?”

“I love you,” she repeats, the words feeling perfectly correct coming out of her mouth. The only words today that have felt right. Perhaps she has regained her ability to speak. “You’re my husband and I love you.”

“Donna…” he says, and she has heard him say her name many times before. She has heard him yell it across the bullpen, whisper it hoarsely after a tube was taken out of his throat, say it tearfully as she awoke in a foreign country, mutter it with disdain after she left him, but she has never heard it sound so right.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing, I just… that felt right,” he whispers, his lips grazing the cartilage of her ear.

Donna can’t help but beam. “Yeah, it did,” she replies, and before she knows it, she is reaching for the buttons on his shirt; she would have torn it off entirely, but she is aware that this is his last clean shirt. He shrugs it off, and begins to reach for the bottom of her blouse when his phone begins to ring.

Donna’s head snaps towards it, but Josh continues, his hands grazing the strip of exposed skin at the bottom of her blouse now. “Ignore it,” he says, and his lips find their way to her neck again.

The phone continues to ring insistently, and while Donna is hungry, eager for more, she catches sight of the caller ID. “Josh…” she whispers.

“Yeah?” he says breathlessly.

“It’s the President calling.”

He blinks a few times. “He can leave a message,” Josh says.

“No,” Donna whispers, “because now you’re going to be thinking about it the whole time, and so will I. You should answer it.”

Josh sighs and reaches across her, his body in contact with her the entire time as he picks up the phone. “Hello, sir,” he says, and he stands up, beginning to pace the room. Donna can’t help but stare at him, can’t help but admire him, exhausted as he looks. Can’t help but have her eyes drawn to the bulge in his pants.

“Thank you sir,” he finishes. He rubs his forehead in frustration and hangs up the phone. “I’m being summoned,” he tells Donna, despair in his voice.

She shrugs; she’s more than a little disappointed. “A preview of things to come,” she says, trying to force a smile.

“You think the President might understand if I was an hour late?”

Donna’s eyes gaze over him hungrily. “He knows you’re a married man.”

Josh looks serious for a moment, but his face breaks into a grin. “Yeah,” he says. “I think they can wait an hour.”

Chapter Text

Josh doesn’t see Donna for two days straight.

It’s not as if he doesn’t try to; he really wants to. He keeps thinking about their conversation, keeps thinking about their kiss, keeps thinking of what happened after. What happened before someone on the Russell campaign knocked on Donna’s door—Josh had to hide naked in her bathroom while she stole his shirt to assure one of the other staffers on the campaign that she would be at an important meeting in five minutes. It was about the vice presidency.

Hearing that conversation through the door reminded Josh that they were still on different sides.

Donna had left, and he had left—he really shouldn’t have waited so long to follow the President’s instructions to meet with Leo—but he showed up an hour late, and his shirt had smelled like Donna.

That’s a good thing, too, because he certainly won’t get the chance to wash or change it for the next two days.

Josh hasn’t been paying much attention to the clock; he wouldn’t know what day it is except for the fact that he turned in Matt Santos’ official petition for nomination this morning. He’s pretty sure it’s hour 43 without sleep, but he wouldn’t rely on his own perception of time or his own math skills. The only math he has been doing has been in an attempt to add up to a single number: 2162.

The convention starts this evening, and Josh is in a dark conference room in a corner of the convention hall with Will Bailey, whoever is managing the Hoynes campaign (thankfully, not Bill Brewer), and Leo McGarry trying to work out the details of the convention later today. The Republican convention had been a well-oiled machine, planned months in advance to practically be the coronation of Arnold Vinick; by comparison, the Democratic convention will look like a camp skit, planned and practiced in half an hour the day of.

Entertaining television, at least.

“Networks want balloting in primetime,” Leo says. His glasses are on, and he seems to have more lines on his face than he ever has. Josh would be worried, if he had any capacity at all for more anxiety.

“What are we supposed to do?” Will asks.

Leo shrugs. “Issue segments that build up the party no matter the nominee,” he says simply. Not particularly interesting to the average American, Josh thinks, but perhaps the only thing they can do until they have a platform solidly locked in.

“What issue would Santos like to lead with?” Will intones dully. “Healthcare?”

Josh bits his lip. “Ask the 44 million Americans who don’t have it,” he shoots back, and while he knows this isn’t something that is useful for him to get into, he can’t help but feel defensive. At least Santos is pursuing change on real issues; having campaigned against Russell for six months, he still couldn’t say what the Vice President actually stood for.

“Like yourself?”

“No, actually,” Josh mutters. “And I can thank your campaign for that. I also can thank your campaign for making it a national issue that people are interested in.”

Will rolls his eyes. “No problem.”

Leo sighs heavily, and Josh wishes it was to indicate which side he was on; without Leo being his stalwart supporter, he feels rather lost in this meeting. “We’ll vote on rules, we’ll recognize delegations, we’ll…”

“When is the President speaking?” Josh asks, hoping to steer the questions away from his own personal stake in the proceedings.

“He’s not,” Leo says.

Josh frowns. Part of him is concerned that the President won’t be making the trip out at all; has his MS gotten worse again? He feels so out of the loop when it comes to the people that he loves. “Second term Presidents always speak.”

“President is a unifying figure,” Leo explains. “We need the party and country to know he supports our nominee. He can’t do that until we actually have one. Moving on.”

He begins to start a discussion about which of the nominees will be speaking first, a problem that has not existed since the Democratic convention in 1968; Josh only barely remembers watching the coverage on TV, late at night after he was meant to go to bed. He would curl up next to his father, and while half of the words flew over his head, he watched with rapt attention to what was happening at the convention—and the coverage of what was going on outside. Perhaps this convention will be more chaotic inside the halls, but he hopes that the attention will be focused on the candidates, on a peaceful resolution to this floor fight.

Josh is tired of fighting, but he knows how much more he has to do. They are so close to clinching the nomination; perhaps, the second ballot will change their fate. As soon as this meeting is over, he thinks, he needs to check in with the delegations.

And he needs to go talk to John Hoynes.

Every time Josh walks around the hotel, or around the convention center, he finds himself hoping he’ll run into Donna. It’s become kind of pathetic, actually, how eager he is to see her. Well, it would be pathetic except that he has now slept with Donna Moss, and he’s not sure how any human could function after that.

It has been several hours and Josh is still basking in the afterglow of their hour together. He’s starting to feel withdrawal symptoms, starting to feel like if he doesn’t see Donna again soon, he might explode. He’s on the verge of exploding for many other reasons too, but it’s the lack of Donna that is getting him the worst.

He finds his crew, speculates about the vice presidential announcement Russell is certain to come out with—if he can get Baker on board, which seems like a big if. Santos has thrown out a couple names for a possible VP nominee, but none have really stuck to the wall. Josh hasn’t put much thought into it, afraid to get ahead of himself.

He gives instructions, hardly hearing the words as they spill out of his mouth. He calls six delegations, practically begging them to release themselves to Santos after the second ballot. The Washington delegates seem to be a pretty good lock for the second ballot, but he’s worried that North Carolina is wavering towards Russell. He has to get Hoynes to throw his support behind Santos.

The Hoynes campaign is much smaller than it once was—certainly far smaller than the massive operation Josh initially worked on—and Josh finds it difficult to process use how far this politician he worked for so long as fallen. Not fallen, exactly, but certainly a shadow of the political giant he used to be.

He checks in with Hoynes’ secretary, who directs him to wait not even in a room but in a chair in the hallway. Josh doesn’t recognize his secretary, but Hoynes always went through them quickly, especially when he decided to go too far in his affections with them. Josh shudders at the thought, and then realizes how hypocritical he might be. He just slept with his former assistant.

No, he reminds himself. He just slept with his wife. He never made a move, never did anything improper while she worked for him. And it killed him to keep his distance, but he’d rather be dead than disrespect Donna in that way.

Finally, the secretary allows him to go in. Josh jumps up from the chair, trying not to look like he’s entirely on edge, although that has become awfully hard to pull off. “Hey Josh,” Hoynes says as Josh enters his suite. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I got stuck on a call.”

Josh nods, and takes a seat.

“Do you want some watered down coffee or something? I ordered breakfast but I didn’t get a chance to eat.”

Is it only breakfast time? Josh feels like his blood might as well be caffeine at this point for the amount of bad coffee he’s had already in this sleepless night and day. “No,” he says, shaking his head.

“I heard your guy turned Russell down,” Hoynes says. “I’d love to be a fly on that wall. Bet old Bob had a heifer, huh?”

Josh tries to force a smile.

Hoynes takes a sip of his own coffee. “I’m glad you did. That kept me alive.” He leans back in his chair, looking over Josh with interest. “So Russell’s gonna announce Baker as his VP tonight,” he muses.

“That’s the rumor,” Josh says, not willing to give Hoynes any more information. All of the information he has is from Donna, and he doesn’t want to use that connection improperly, especially not to benefit John Hoynes.

“Guy’s got a hell of a nerve floating VPs before he has the nomination,” Hoynes says with a scoff. “Hubris. Ask Odysseus how that worked out.”

“You’ve certainly played your hand in the VP process,” Josh says. “You didn’t have to tell me you were glad that Santos turned Russell down; you tried to blackmail me to manipulate that.”

Hoynes takes another sip of his coffee. “Believe it or not, I didn’t know about that. Didn’t authorize it.”

“Did you fire Bill Brewer?” Josh questions.

“Josh…”

“Then you good as authorized it, and I know you were on board with the outcome,” Josh says. “You blackmailed me, and you blackmailed Donna, just to stay alive so you could pretend you had a shot at being President.”

“I never congratulated you on your marriage,” Hoynes says evenly. “Frankly, it surprised me. Surprised me you’d ever get married, and especially to your secretary.”

“Assistant… former assistant, actually.”

“And then I heard about the reasoning—and that leaking is on the Russell campaign, not on me—and it all came together. Shame we never passed that healthcare reform bill, huh? If you hadn’t have jumped ship…”

Josh blinks a few times. “The bill that I was pushing that you dropped from your campaign as soon as I left? Suddenly, once I was on the Bartlet campaign, you hardly said a word about healthcare.”

“Well, how could I have competed with good old Jed on that topic?” Hoynes asks.

“President Bartlet,” Josh corrects bitterly.

Josh could swear he sees Hoynes roll his eyes, but he manages to keep his mouth shut. “I know you got lucky with your pipe dream idealism once, Josh, but to expect lightning to strike twice…”

“Santos is twice the candidate Russell is, and you know it,” Josh replies. He leans back, blowing out his cheeks, trying to keep his frustration inside. “What do you want, sir?”

Hoynes shrugs. “What you got?”

“Bob Russell doesn’t get the nod,” Josh says simply.

“Spoiler?”

“Savior,” Josh corrects, although he’s not sure he sounds so convinced of himself. “Save the party from itself. Save the Democrats from ruin.”

“You think Santos can beat Arnie Vinick?”

“I know Bob Russell can’t.”

Hoynes chuckles a little bit, gives Josh that smile that once upon a time he found comforting. Josh hasn’t found comfort in that smile, however, in a long time. “I can beat him,” he says.

This man is delusional, Josh thinks. “It’s not gonna happen, sir.”

“A couple of deadlocked ballots, the party faithful panic.”

Josh shakes his head. “Your political life is over, sir. It was over the day you resigned the Vice Presidency. Your delegates will rush to lifeboats after the first ballot. They’re going to see Russell or Santos and rush to one of them.”

“And you want Santos to be the nearer lifeboat for my delegates,” Hoynes fills in. “Don’t sugarcoat, I can take it.”

“I mean, I’m not going for unpredictability with this strategy,” Josh says. “But sir, there’s not going to be an ambassadorship or a cabinet post coming your way. Your indiscretion saw to that. But your years of governmental service, your connections and experience can be invaluable to the party and to the country.”

“As a what? A lobbyist?”

Josh shakes his head. “Party elder. Power broker. It’s a role I can guarantee you in a Santos administration. I doubt you can say the same about a Russell administration.”

Another laugh escapes from Hoynes. “Santos sent you with nothing.”

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” Josh says honestly. Frankly, he’s sure Matt Santos doesn’t want John Hoynes in any capacity in his future administration, but Josh is getting increasingly desperate, and he can feel his chances to win this thing slip away. Santos could forgive anything for the sake of the nomination. “You’ve had a long and distinguished career, sir. Wouldn’t you like to see your name in the history books one last time without the word scandal after it?”

Hoynes raises an eyebrow. “Ah, yes. Scandal. It’s not as if you’re completely free of scandal anymore, Josh? How does it feel?”

“If being married to a woman I love is a scandal, then I can’t bring myself to care,” Josh says, standing up. He doesn’t even take in the impact of the words he just said, doesn’t see Hoynes’ raised eyebrow in his compulsion to leave. “My phone will be on. Let me know what you decide.”

Hoynes rubs at his chin with amusement. “I don’t have to do anything,” he says. “The delegates are free to vote how they choose. But if I decide to, I will certainly let you know. And Josh?”

Josh is halfway to the door, but he turns around quickly. “Yeah?”

“A woman you love?”

His eyes widen, as if he can’t believe he just said that. He can’t believe he just said that; he’d never even thought it before, not consciously. But he certainly isn’t going to take it back. “Yeah,” he says, and leaves John Hoynes behind him.

The rest of the day passes by in a blur, as balloting begins. It’s chaos; Josh is in the war room, trying to staff an operation to call delegates from all fifty states, trying desperately to hold onto what they have and find more in states that Josh hasn’t thought about in months. When Baker decides to throw his hat in the ring, what was once organized chaos becomes nothing of the sort. Josh’s heart pounds rapidly through the shouting, and he’s lucky he is so distracted, so busy, or else it might threaten to overwhelm him. As it is, he has realized in the middle of at least three phone calls he’s made tonight that his back is pressed solidly up against the wall and he has no memory of when he got there.

He wonders, briefly, if Donna is doing the same thing as he is tonight. Of course she is, he tells himself. Except she’s against him tonight.

After the second ballot is counted, and they are even further from determining a nominee than they were at the beginning of the night, Josh thinks, briefly, about going to bed. There’s not much he can do tonight, and tomorrow seems to be just as busy of a day. But he doesn’t want to go to bed alone.

He finds himself wandering down the halls of the hotel until he makes his way to Donna’s room. He can’t believe he’s here again, but he’d rather sleep in her bed instead of being alone. Perhaps that might cause a scandal, but he meant what he said; scandal doesn’t frighten him anymore. Not when it comes to Donna.

He knocks on the door, but doesn’t get an answer.

(He doesn’t find out until months later, lying on a tropical beach, that Donna at that same moment had knocked on the door of his hotel room, also looking for a few hours of sleep in someone’s arms.)

He knocks again, but nothing. Donna must not be back.

Who needs sleep anyway? He should be contacting the teacher’s unions. It’s three in the morning on the East Coast, which means in an hour, people will start getting up for work, which means he should be putting call sheets together now.

Josh doesn’t sleep that night.

Once he has farmed out some call sheets, he finds himself down on the convention floor again, looking at the littered detritus from the previous night. So much waste, he thinks, and still no candidate.

He finds himself in the shadow of the stage, his back against the wall, his knees pulled up to his chest. He closes his eyes for a moment, almost feeling like he’s floating. Almost feeling like he isn’t there at all.

That is, until he hears footsteps approaching him. He opens his eyes slowly and when they focus, he sees Leo in front of him, holding out a cup of coffee. “Don’t let Dr. Bartlet know I’m giving you this,” he says, and Josh could swear he sees him wink.

He accepts the coffee gratefully, taking an eager sip, hardly tasting it as the hot liquid slides down his throat. “Thanks,” he says simply.

“When’s the last time you slept in a bed?” Leo asks.

Josh thinks about the last time he was in a bed—in Donna’s bed—but he didn’t sleep then. He honestly can’t remember. He’s sure once the convention is over he’ll pass out for a day or two, but right now he just needs to keep pushing, keep going. He shrugs. “Overnight ratings came in,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Fifty-two million last night,” Josh says ,the words feeling like poison in his mouth. “Who knew if we set our hair on fire and jumped up and down people would actually tune in to watch?”

Leo chuckles. “You done good, kid.”

Five years ago, those words would have meant the world to Josh. Today, he can hardly believe them. “What have I done? Caused a massive scandal for my campaign?”

“Nah,” Leo scoffs, waving a hand. “Everyone’s forgotten about that by now. Although the President is pissed as hell that he didn’t get to officiate the wedding.”

Josh leans his head into his knees as he laughs. “He’s mentioned it several times.”

“You didn’t tell me, though, Josh,” Leo says. His voice is soft, and Josh can’t help but look at him. “I would have liked to know.”

“I would have liked you to know, too,” Josh says. “I mean… you’re the closest thing I have to a father, and Donna told my mom so…”

Leo reaches out and squeezes Josh’s knee. “Congratulations, kid.”

“I don’t know if there’s much to congratulate me on,” Josh says with a shrug. “I mean, it’s not really… it was just an arrangement.”

“But it’s not anymore?” Leo asks, and Josh can’t help but wonder how he knows. “I saw the interview,” Leo explains, at Josh’s puzzled look. “I don’t know if you’ve realized this yet, but the way you spoke about her, the way you… you’re clearly a man in love.”

Josh closes his eyes and laughs a little bit more. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t know that I can deny it.”

“Does she know that?”

He tries to keep his expression as neutral as possible, but that’s hard to do when it comes to Donna. “Yeah,” he says again, his smile lighting up his face. “She does.”

“Then you’ve done good, kid,” Leo repeats. “She’s the one for you.”

Josh nods, blinking back what are rather surprising tears. “Guess I don’t need to worry about that divorce lawyer,” he says.

Leo grins. “And I was about to recommend you mine.”

He lets out an inelegant snort at that. “Thank you Leo,” he whispers. He takes a deep breath, blinking back those few remaining tears before looking up at Leo again. “So, what’s next? What’s happening tonight?”

“The President is gonna have to put a stop to this.”

Josh understands, knew this was probably coming, knew that for all the backroom dealing he was making, the need for peace and stability within the party necessitated a different direction. “One more primary and we would have had it,” he says with a sigh. “Peaked a little late, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Leo says. “Guess you better go talk to your guy.”

“He’s not gonna do it just because I say so, Leo,” Josh says. “He’s his own man.”

Leo stands up, giving Josh a rather surprising pat on the head. He feels like a little kid again, finding his father and Leo having a conversation after dinner, asking Leo incessant questions about politics, and having Leo ruffle his hair and call him ‘kid’. If he closes his eyes, he could smell his mother’s cooking in the kitchen, could feel the linoleum floor under his bare toes. “And here I thought I found the last one,” Leo says. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Okay,” Josh says, swallowing.

“And Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“I may care about you, but if you ever hurt Donna… I’m on her side.”

Josh can’t help but grin at that. “I’d expect nothing less.”

Chapter Text

“Fax just came in,” Ronna says, the moment Josh walks through the door after talking to Leo. The room is full of plenty of other staffers who did not sleep at all—Josh hopes the funding they have left is enough to pay all the overtime they’ll be logging for this if they don’t manage to get the nomination—and is utter chaos. Ronna, typically calm and collected, looks frazzled and in need of a nap. Part of Josh wants to let her have it, to let all of them go to bed instead of embarking on this wild goose chase when the President is about to shut things down. Why is he overworking them like this?

But there’s a part of Josh, a very small part, that balks at the idea of giving up. He has to keep fighting, and so he doesn’t say anything about the frenetic energy of the room. He takes the fax from Ronna and frowns at it. “Who sent this to us?”

Ronna swallows. “I don’t know.”

“This is HIPAA protected! Who faxed this in?”

“I don’t know,” Ronna repeats. “The number… I don’t…”

Josh rubs his forehead. “Okay, whatever. I don’t care right now, just…” he takes a few steps forward, and then whirls around, lost in his own movement. “Where is the Congressman?”

“He’s meeting with Leo McGarry,” Ronna says.

Josh swallows. That certainly isn’t a good thing. “Let me know when he gets back to the room,” he says.

“Josh!” he hears, and he swirls around to look for the sound of the voice, but can’t identify it. His eyes seem out of focus and his brain is starting to feel fuzzy. He takes a deep breath, trying to get more oxygen through his body, trying to avoid dissociating entirely, and manages to grab Ned by the arm. “Whatever the delegates want, long as it doesn’t cost money right now… or ever, tell them they’ll get it. Jobs, the ear of the president… you name it, tell them we’ll owe them a favor.”

Ned nods and picks up the phone. Josh just barely manages to stumble out of the room again and into the hallway. He finds a bench at the end of the hallway, secluded in a small area with the ice machine, and sits down, putting his head in his hands, looking for something, anything to stop the pounding.

How is he supposed to lead like this? If he can’t make it through a goddamn convention, how is he going to handle leading people through an election? Josh is beginning to realize that this is outside of his capabilities. He was good at his job as deputy (arguably), but perhaps he’ll never be able to do more than that. He stares at the fax in his hand; just another reminder of how he is a liability.

He hears footsteps approaching, and he quickly turns the paper upside down, rubbing his eyes before he sees a head peek in. “Josh?” He hears, and he doesn’t ever want to hear his name said again except by her.

Somehow Donna has remained above the fray—her hair, which he is sure she hasn’t washed since their afternoon together, still looks perfect—and she smiles at him. “How’s it going?” she asks.

“How do you think it’s going?” he retorts. He doesn’t really mean to get snippy with her, but he is on his last straw of patience.

She sits on the bench next to him, letting out a heavy sigh. “Rumor is the teacher’s union might throw its weight behind you.”

“Rumors aren’t always true,” Josh says.

“You hear the one about Baker’s wife?” Donna asks, her eyes not quite meeting his.

Josh swallows. “That one’s not a rumor,” he replies, holding up the fax.

“You got that too,” Donna confirms.

“Yeah.”

“I’m trying to… I don’t want Will to use it,” Donna says. “I can’t get behind weaponizing someone’s mental health struggles.”

Josh presses his lips together. “On the one hand, it’s the sort of thing candidates should divulge. Leaves them susceptible to blackmail if they don’t. Same thing with illegitimate kids. Baker didn’t go through the public vetting process the rest of us did, and you and I both know how much that can bring out.”

“On the other hand…” Donna suggests.

He sighs and bangs his head against the wall, as if that will do anything for the headache that is beginning to pound at the edges of his skull. “On the other hand, I’m going to tell Santos not to use it. Honestly, I don’t think he will. But if he does… well, then people might start getting interested in who else needed therapy, or medications, or had a history of mental illness, and then suddenly I’m a story again.”

Donna’s face falls. “Josh…”

“Santos doesn’t know,” he says. “Actually, very few people know anymore. But I think… I think I have to tell him.”

Donna nods. “Maybe,” she says. “Maybe, but I don’t think you should worry about it.”

“I do worry about it,” Josh says. “Or did you not hear the bit about mental illness?” He laughs to pass it off as a joke, but Donna scoots closer to him.

“Santos won’t care,” Donna says, “and it’s not going to come out.”

“I just… if people are doubting Baker because of this thing with his wife, how can I expect anyone to trust me? To listen to me? I’m trying to guide this campaign through and I don’t think I’m good enough. I’ve done nothing but fuck it up.”

“That’s not true,” Donna says. “You’ve taken a three-term Congressman and turned him into the most popular Democrat running. You saw the Democratic platform, right? The fact that they even alluded to Medicare for All within the platform is a huge step, and it’s because of you. The education reforms we’re pushing as a party, the environmental…”

“All Santos,” Josh says.

“Sure, those are his policies, but he wouldn’t have a voice in this if it weren’t for you. You took a three-term Congressman, one of 435, and turned him into one of the loudest voices in the party. Josh, you’ve set the future direction?”

He bites his lip. “What does that matter if Vinick gets in and undoes all our progress over the last eight years?”

Donna shrugs. “You try again. But the battle isn’t over yet.”

“I’m not sure I can keep fighting. Especially if this…” he jabs pointedly at the fax next to him, “is the direction which this fight is going. I can’t be a part of that.”

“Then be above it,” Donna says. “Santos may not have the experience of the others, but that means he can be above the chaos, above the confusion. He can be the moral leader our party needs.”

Josh tilts his head and can’t help but laugh. “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.”

“Why?” Donna scoffs. “Am I not educated enough for that?”

“No, no, no,” Josh quickly corrects. “I always knew you were this smart. But I also know that you work for the other team, and here you are, giving me advice. If you’re looking for a consultant fee, I’m not sure our budget stretches to…”

“I’m saying this because I know it’s true. This fight is going to be over one way or another; if we prevail, then Santos isn’t stuck in the mud of partisanship for when he runs for office in the future, and he should. And if you somehow sneak out with the nomination, then…”

Josh opens his mouth. “He looks good. The party looks good.”

Donna folds her hands. “Yeah.”

“You come up with this stuff yourself?”

“Yeah.”
“I should have promoted you a long time ago.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you all along,” she says, and while the phrase could have been bitter, Josh detects none of that. She seems earnestly happy, even in the stress of the convention. She seems to fit right in.

He tries to swallow down the lump in his throat. “Well, if we manage to pull out the nomination, come see me for a job,” he says. “We could use you.”

“And get called out for nepotism since you hired your wife?” Donna shoots back.

Josh can’t help but grin at that. The word, which had seemed so strange to apply to Donna before (much as he still liked to use it) now seems to fit perfectly. “Worth the risk,” he says.

Donna turns to the side, looking down the hallway surreptitiously before she turns back toward Josh and takes his face in hers, hands resting against the unshaven stubble. Before Josh knows what is happening, she kisses him. She doesn’t linger long—it isn’t safe to here—but she pulls back with a satisfied grin.

“What was that?” he asks.

“Will that get you through the rest of the convention?” Donna asks.

“I’d rather go back to my room if…”

Donna shakes her head. “You need to go have a conversation with your candidate.”

“Oh yeah, that,” Josh replies sheepishly. He is certain that he’s turning utterly red, and the thought of that mortification makes him blush further.

She stands up. “You know what?” she says.

“What?”

“You gave me a promotion already.”

“What was the promotion?”

She takes a few steps away, but turns to look at him again. “You promoted me to wife.”

Josh, not having a response, lets his jaw drop as she walks away. It’s only a few moments later that he realizes he wishes he had run after her, but it’s too late. For now, at least. Perhaps he’ll find her later.

He picks up the fax and makes his way over to the Congressman’s room; he’s certain that the conversation Santos had with Leo was a short one. Sure enough, Santos is waiting in there when he enters. Josh swallows, clutching the fax a little bit tighter in his hand.

Santos finishes up his conversation and puts down his cell phone. “Josh,” he says.

“Did you hear the rumors about Baker’s wife?” Josh asks.

Santos doesn’t even seem to hear him. “Did you tell Ned to offer New Jersey delegates federal jobs? Do we know if these people are remotely qualified? I mean, do they even have degrees?”

“Well, you don’t necessarily need a degree to work in the federal…” Josh sighs and shakes his head, not wanting to get off on a tangent, although he can’t help but smile when he realizes just how much Donna occupies his thoughts. “We’re not violating any laws,” he says firmly.

Santos sighs. “Avoiding prosecution is not exactly the standard I was shooting for.”

“Think no one working on our campaign is doing it because they want jobs? Think none of your donors will want a meeting on the lifting of some trade embargo that would make them millions of dollars?” Josh argues. “Sir, did you hear what I asked before?”

“What about Baker’s wife?”

Josh bites his lip. “The rumors, you heard them?”

“The depression? It’s like the gay brother and the illegitimate child. Every politician gets rumors. Comes with the territory.”

“It’s not just a rumor,” Josh says slowly. “Somebody faxed over hospital admittance records. Dottie Baker was admitted twice for clinical depression.”

Santos widens his eyes. “Who?”

“We’re… looking into that,” Josh says. “Russell campaign got the same fax. Wouldn’t be shocked if Hoynes did too.”

“Josh, you can’t possibly…”

He swallows. He’s not going to advise that Santos use them, much as that may be to their benefit, but he does have to show both sides of the argument. And he simply doesn’t have the mental strength to tell Santos quite yet. “Depression is nothing to be ashamed of,” he says, hard as it has been for him to believe in his own life, “but there’s a reason presidents disclose illegitimate kids. They’re susceptible to blackmail.”

“And you want me to do the blackmailing?”

Josh shakes his head and pats the couch, indicating that Santos should sit next to him. “I’m not saying that at all. I am saying that you’ve been in the primaries. You’ve been vetted by the public and the press. People ought to get a crack at Baker too.”

“His wife isn’t running for anything.”

“I wasn’t running for anything either,” Josh says quietly. “And yet this campaign was blackmailed because of me. It’s one of those things. She gets to live in the building. There’s classified information sitting on her end table. There’s an argument that maybe this needs to come out now or in two days, when he’s our nominee.”

“I’m not doing it.”

“I know,” Josh says. “And I don’t think you have to. I think it’s going to come out either way, because Russell has it, and I would guess Hoynes has it, and whoever leaked it wants it to come out. We should keep our hands clean. It’s not going to look good—another hidden illness, which plays right in the Republican hands—but it’s going to come out.”

Santos narrows his eyes. “If you weren’t going to tell me to release it, why did you talk to me about it at all.”

“For a couple reasons,” Josh says. “First of all, I want you to be prepared. It’s going to turn into a discussion on mental health, or at least it might, and this way if we don’t get a chance to meet again, you’ll at least have some mental preparation for some questions.”

“What’s the other reason?”

Josh clenches his hands together, the pressure making the scar on the back of his hand that much whiter. “Because if someone is digging into health records, I’m worried they might find mine. Especially with the marriage, I mean… people are curious.”

“What’s in there?”

Josh doesn’t hear the question. “I mean, if we get into a whole thing about mental health, then there will be more questions. People might… they may start to wonder about other people connected to the campaign, and if you say the wrong thing and then it comes back and it turns out you were lying because you didn’t know then I don’t want…”

Santos puts a hand on Josh’s knee, drawing his attention away. “What’s in there?”

Josh swallows. “After I was… um, shot, I started behaving strangely. I don’t remember much about that time, to be honest, but I… well, I yelled at the President in the Oval—god, I shouldn’t have told you that—and I broke a window, and Leo McGarry brought in a therapist for me to talk to. He diagnosed me with PTSD. It’s you know… better now, but not cured, and I don’t think it will ever be. Anyway, if you get asked about your own staffers, your own people, and anything having to do with mental health you may not want to get too specific.”

“Josh…” Santos says quietly, and Josh can’t quite read his reaction.

“I went to therapy for a couple of years,” Josh says, turning his eyes away from the candidate, “and I’ve been on and off medication for it, but um… yes, I figured you needed to know that. And if somehow we get past this and you decide that you need someone else to be campaign manager, that’s alright. I understand. But I just…”

“Josh, look at me,” Santos says sharply. “I was in the Marines. You think I haven’t seen PTSD?”

“I’m sure you have, sir,” Josh says, lowering his eyes once again.

“I have, and so I’d like you give me a little credit here. I’m not going to fire you because of that, especially because you have not given me any reason to think that you couldn’t do your job because of it. In fact, I didn’t even know. Perhaps I might have suspected after you told me about the shooting—that is often how these things go—but I would not have known, and it does not affect my perception of you or your worth in any way,” Santos says firmly.

Josh takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Santos says in return.

Josh looks down at the fax again. “In any case, it would be wildly hypocritical of us to share this, especially since I’m the one running this campaign, so…”

Santos looks up at the news, which has been running quietly in the background this whole time. He points the remote at the TV and turns up the volume. “Well, don’t think we have a choice. I think it’s already out there.”

“Russell,” Josh says quietly. “Donna didn’t want him to, but…”

“Do you talk much with Donna?” Santos asks.

“Sir?”

“No, I’m just wondering how much you talk with your wife.”

He can’t help but blush at that, and wondered when he turned into someone who blushed at everything. “I don’t share campaign secrets or anything.”

“You know, I could have fired you for marrying her. In fact, I probably would have done it before I would fire you for what you just told me.”

Josh chuckles a little bit, trying to find some of the levity again. “And you’d reinstate me if I divorced her?”

“Possibly,” Santos says. “Are you going to?”

Josh closes his eyes. “Well, we haven’t really… discussed it, but at this point, I’m not sure it would be worth it.”

“Worth it how? Why not? You’re not looking to be married in the future?”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Why bother when I’m married in the present?”

Josh isn’t sure he has ever seen Santos’ jaw drop so far. “Are you and Donna…”

Josh can’t help but shrug. “I don’t know, yet, but I think… I think we might just stay together. If the other night was any…”

“So not only are you married to Russell’s spokeswoman, you’re sleeping with Russell’s spokeswoman?”

He laughs and turns away awkwardly. “I mean…”

“I’m happy for you, Josh.” Santos says, and Josh knows he means it.

“This all happened really fast, and I know it’s not going to be a good idea but now that people know we’re married I don’t know if maybe it’s a …less bad idea somehow, or if…” Josh stumbles all of his words; he can hardly manage to get them out fast enough.

Santos claps him on the back. “I’d like to get to know this Donna of yours better. Once we get to the other side of this, she and I are gonna have coffee.” He stands up and picks up his phone. “I’m gonna talk to the teacher’s union, see if they’re willing to budge. Or if I’m willing to. We’re playing the game right, Josh!”

Josh stands up and heads towards the door; he is certain he has more to do. “I only work for the people who do.”

“I have one more chance to address the convention,” Santos says. “Have the speechwriters do two speeches. One for if I secure enough delegates, and one for if I listen to Leo McGarry.”

“What did Leo tell you?”

“You know,” Santos says.

Josh nods. “I do.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because I wanted to know if you heard ‘give up’, or if you heard ‘keep fighting.’”

Santos grins. “Hello?” he says, as the person on the other end of the phone picks up. He covers the microphone with his hand. “No one ever has to tell me to keep fighting.”

Josh beams as he leaves the room.

The rest of the day is chaotic, but Josh feels better, surprisingly. He hasn’t felt this energized in a long time. This is how he used to feel back in the days of Bartlet for America, back in the days where campaigning was fun and he was doing it with his friends.

Maybe he’ll find that again on the second half of this campaign.

No, he can’t think that way. Not yet. 

Santos might concede tonight, he admits to himself. He might listen to Leo. Josh knows better than anybody that it is hard not to listen to Leo. But until then, he has to run around like a chicken with its head cut off to find some way for them to win.

He tries to ignore the news coverage about Baker’s wife, because any of that runs the risk of making him feel worse about himself and his own abilities. He manages to avoid significant overstimulation, although he does take a few calls with his back against the wall. He doesn’t see Donna again, but he keeps licking his lips, hoping he might get one more lingering taste of her.

And suddenly, it’s time for the convention to begin.

Josh sees Leo only very briefly, and they don’t speak; Leo simply nods, and Josh tries not to wince. He turns to Santos, who is looking very sharp in his suit. Helen is straightening his tie, and Josh’s hand goes to his own. Someday, perhaps, Donna might do that for him.

The emcee of the convention launches into a bio about Santos, about his accomplishments, his military service. Josh can’t help but be a little bit proud of the man he chose, of the race he ran, and can’t help but think that maybe, maybe, they still have a chance.

“Sure you don’t want me to look at the speech?” Josh asks.

Santos shakes his head. “I’m fine.

“I’m pretty good at…”

“Josh,” Santos says, and it’s only then that Josh realizes how much he is bouncing from foot to foot, letting his intense anxiety about tonight show. Then Santos smiles and reaches out to shake Josh’s hand. “Been a great ride.”

“You want to try again sometime?” Josh quips.

Santos grins. “You just pick up the phone, I’ll be there.” And suddenly, somebody is motioning for Santos to go up on stage and give his speech. He gives Helen a quick kiss before ascending the stairs, waving to the cheering crowd. The intensity of the cheering makes Josh wonder how they haven’t won the primaries outright.

“Think we’d win if this thing was decided by noise produced?” Josh says to Helen.

Helen gives him more of a smile than he’s earned from her in all the months he has been running this campaign. “I hear you and Donna worked things out.”

“What do you…” Josh frowns.

“Matt tells me everything,” she says. “I’m happy for you.”

“Okay, look, I don’t need everyone digging into how romantic or not my marriage is.”

Helen shrugs. “I wasn’t digging. Matt just told me. Anyway, I’m glad there was good news. I mean, you acted married from the very first moment I saw you two together, so I’m not surprised this was the outcome.”

“I am,” Josh says softly. He looks at the screen in the backstage area, which is broadcasting a feed of what the audience sees.

Santos has finally finished saying ‘thank you’ in an attempt to settle the crowd when he begins his speech. Josh read over the early draft, but that had been a good four hours ago, and things have changed since then. “You know, I had hoped to be standing here tonight under very different circumstances. And I have been asked by people that I respect to take this opportunity to support one of the other fine candidates who have made this race with me. To help decide who our nominee will be.”

Josh takes a deep breath and looks at Helen. She’s smiling. She should not be smiling like this, not at a concession speech.

Santos looks out over the crowd and continues. “But I can't do that. I can 't do that, because it's not my place to decide who our nominee should be. That decision is yours and yours alone.”

“Did you know he was going to do this?” Josh asks Helen, and she simply gives him that same smile.

“I may have had an inkling, although you know him well enough to know that he’s impossible to predict.”

“I’ll say,” Josh says, leaning back against the wall. This is out of his hands now, he knows, and in some ways, he likes that.

“There’s been a great deal made today of Governor Baker's decision not to disclose his wife's minor medical condition. Many people believe he should have. We had a similar situation within my campaign, when the marriage of my campaign manager to someone on another campaign came out in the media. It seems to me such a small issue, a non-issue, even. I don't believe Governor Baker failed to disclose it because he was ashamed or embarrassed. I don’t think Josh Lyman tried to hide his marriage because he did anything morally wrong. I think these things weren’t disclosed because we the voters are hypocrites.”

Josh blinks a couple times. “He’s… gonna call the delegates hypocrites?”

“Just keep watching,” Helen replies.

“We're all broken. Every single one of us. And yet we pretend that we're not. We all live lives of imperfection, and yet we cling to this fantasy that there's a perfect life and that our leaders should embody it. But if we expect our leaders to live on a higher moral plane than the rest of us… well, we're just asking to be deceived. This is not to say that the leaders of our country should not also be moral leaders; a good leader will lead by example and show what he wants the people of his country to be. But if we let ourselves get bogged down in the things that don’t matter, we’ll never be able to better our nation in the ways that really count.”

Josh can see reporters backstage eyeing him—they won’t rush him until the speech is over, but he is already trying to plan his escape without getting mobbed. Damn Santos for not warning him about this, although Josh can hardly help but be proud.

“See, if we were focused on the things that matter, this story about Baker’s wife’s minor medical condition would expose the stigma around mental health, and encourage us, as leaders, to fight it. If we were focused on the things that matter, the only story about Josh Lyman’s marriage would be that the campaign manager of a major Democratic Party candidate couldn’t get health insurance. These are the things our nation needs to fix. And I’m standing up here telling you that you can choose your handyman.”

“He’s really doing this, isn’t he?” Josh whispers to Helen.

“In all the years I’ve known Matt, he has never backed down from a fight. He won’t back down from this one.”

The crowd is cheering his name, but Santos continues on. “It's been suggested to me this week that I should try to buy your support with jobs and the promise of access. It's been suggested to me that party unity is more important than your democratic rights as delegates. It's not. And you have a decision to make. Don't vote for us because you think we're perfect. Don't vote for us because of what we might be able to do for you only. Vote for the person who shares your ideals, your hopes, your dreams. Vote for the person who most embodies what you believe we need to keep our nation strong and free. And when you have done that you can go back to Seattle and Boston, to Chicago, Omaha, to Tulsa and Miami and Atlanta with your head held high and say, ‘I am a member of the Democratic Party.’ The American people have been entrusted with a huge responsibility; don’t let your country down.”

With that, Santos leaves the stage to enormous applause and meets Josh’s eyes as he tries to avoid getting mobbed by reporters. Thankfully, staffers of the convention center are holding them back while Russell goes to take the stage.

Santos makes his way over to Josh and grins. “Well?”

“Well,” Josh sputters, unsure of what else to say.

“Now we have to act on it,” Santos says. “I spoke with the President earlier today. He’s going to help us get the teachers.”

“President Bartlet?” Josh asks.

“Yes,” Santos says. “In fact, he wants you to come with him. Go to his suite.”

Josh has about a million more questions buzzing in his brain, but he nods and runs past the field of reporters and very nearly runs straight into Donna as he rounds the corner.

“Hi,” he says, stopping suddenly when he sees the lights flash off familiar long blonde hair.

“Hi,” she replies, trying to stifle a smile. “Quite some speech.”

“We’ll see what happens now,” Josh replies. He can’t really tell her that he’s off to see the President, not with Will Bailey within earshot, but part of him simply wants to linger by her.

“Meet me afterward?” she asks. “After the vote.”

Josh nods. “Your room or mine? Actually, you know what? I’ll give you a call, let you know.”

“Okay,” Donna says brightly. “Good luck.”

“You too,” he says, and he doesn’t even have time to think about how odd it is that they are wishing each other luck.

It doesn’t matter anymore, not really. He and Donna, for all that they are on opposing campaigns, have always been on the same team.

“See you soon,” she says, and he isn’t sure that she means to lick her lips like that, but she is making his already frazzled brain almost unusable.

Donna is the only person who could ever do that to him, and Josh doesn’t mind keeping it that way.

He hurries back to the hotel, back to the President’s suite, so that he can arrange this meeting and start the rest of his life.

Chapter Text

“We’re gonna lose,” Will says, stepping back from the white board and twirling an expo marker in his fingers. “No doubt about it, we’re gonna lose.”

Donna swallows and blinks agains the bright lights of the war room. “Yeah,” she says quietly. 

“With the teacher’s union, we’ve lost New York. That’s the ball game. And if the President is throwing his support behind Santos instead of his own VP, well then…”

“Yeah,” Donna repeats, leaning back against the desk. She has barely been off of her feet this whole week, and it is taking a physical toll. “When’s the vote?”

“In fifteen minutes. I mean, I can try to… you know, see if maybe Pennsylvania will swing again but we’d need at least six more states to commit and I just… don’t see that happening.”

“We’re giving up?” another staffer asks.

Will gestures to the board. “You do the math for me. Tell me how there’s a way we get this nomination.”

“Has anyone told the Vice President that?” the staffer asks. “Because right now he’s out there promising jobs and tropical vacations to delegates.”

Will lets his shoulders fall. “I’ll do it.”

Donna turns her eyes to the TV, where there is a warning that the next ballot will begin in ten minutes now.

Ten minutes until her life changes again.

She probably should be more upset about this, more upset that all of a sudden, with a single speech, the campaign that she has worked for over the last six months has fallen to pieces. She probably should feel more strongly about this.

And yet, all she can think about is waiting for the vote to be over.

It should have been clear all along that Russell was never going to win. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but Russell would never have a shot at winning a general election against Vinick. He probably would never have a shot at all.

There’s a part of Donna that doesn’t mind so much. She’s about to be unemployed, sure, but she can probably rely on nepotism enough to get her a job on the Santos campaign. She’s a girl on a budget—she’s not above using her husband to get a job that she is now perfectly qualified for.

Anyway, she’ll cross that bridge after tonight.

Donna goes down to the convention floor to watch the vote, finding a spot near one of the doors, her back against the wall. She watches as each state comes forward to cast its vote; by the time they reach Virginia, Matthew Santos has exceeded 2162 votes.

Her chest tightens, and she isn’t quite sure how to feel, but she catches in the crowd a glimpse of Josh’s stunned face as he makes his way backstage, and she thinks what she feels is pride. She’s proud of him for pulling this off, and proud of herself for growing so much. In a way, without her marriage to Josh, the Santos campaign might have crashed and burned; she should bring that up to Josh when she inevitably asks him for a job.

She opens up her phone to see that Josh has sent her a text.

VP announcement soon. Come to room 1134 at 10:30. Proud of you.

It’s strange, she things, that Josh would tell her to come to a different room, that he would have moved rooms, but she supposes it isn’t entirely unprecedented.

She can’t let herself dwell on the last sentence.

Donna almost feels guilty that she feels as okay as she does. Shouldn’t she be upset? She lost. Her team lost, and her hard work over the last six months has been for nothing. Except that she has grown more and more disenchanted with Russell, and as President Bartlet introduces Santos as the nominee, and Leo as his Vice Presidential nominee, Donna can’t help but feel her heart swell.

She remembers the first convention she ever attended, where President Bartlet was nominated. She remembers Josh slinging his arm around her shoulder, whispering, “How does it feel, Donnatella, to have nominated the President of the United States?”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions there,” she had told him.

He had laughed it off. “Soak it in,” he told her. “Not many people get to experience this. You do.”

“Thanks for.. you know, letting me be a part of this.”

“Thanks for being a part of it,” he had replied. “I’m proud of you.”

Donna has never forgotten those words.

As the balloons drop and the arena begins to clear out, Donna checks her watch. Almost 10:15. Josh won’t mind if she’s a little early, she thinks, and the hotel is quite a walk away. Maybe she should check in with the Russell campaign, see if she needs to do anything tonight, but she can’t bring herself to potentially get wrapped up in a delay. She bites her lip and turns her phone off. If they fire her for it, so be it; her job is pretty much over anyway.

She makes her way up to room 1134.

The room is at the very end of a long hallway, the final doorway she can get to. She takes a deep breath and knocks on it, smoothing out her hair. Maybe she should have tried to make herself look a little nicer, a little less exhausted, but instead she is here, and she can’t wait any longer.

Josh opens the door.

Inside is not the typical hotel room Donna is used to, but a king sized bed covered in rose petals. The room is lit by candles (although Donna suspects, knowing Josh, they’re probably battery operated). Josh is standing there, and while he looks exhausted, he is grinning widely. His jacket is off but he is still wearing a (loosened) tie. He reaches into a bucket and pulls out a bottle.

“Champagne?” he asks.

Donna blinks. “Josh, what is…”

“Well, when I looked back on it, our wedding night was kind of a letdown,” he says. “So I wanted to make it up to you.”

“You should be celebrating tonight,” Donna says. “You… you just won the nomination. Santos is the nominee. Leo is the VP nominee! You should… you should be with them!” And she’s not sure why she’s saying this, because the champagne and the rose petal covered bed are certainly enticing. Still, she has never wanted to feel as if she’s keeping him from something.

Josh shakes his head. “I want to celebrate us,” he says. “We’ve waited long enough.” He pours a glass of champagne and hands it to her, before taking up his own and taking a big swallow.

“Josh… I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s a little cliche, I know,” he admits, “but it was the best I could do on short notice. I’ve been a little busy today.”

Donna raises an eyebrow. “I’ll say!”

“But do you… is it okay? Is there something else? I mean, I know we never got a honeymoon…”

Donna sits down on the bed and takes a sip of her own glass. “Hmm. Will we be campaigning in Hawaii?”

“We?”

“Well, I’m joining the Santos campaign,” Donna says with a grin. “You knew that, right?”

Josh sits down next to her and laughs, one hand snaking behind her back and resting around her side. Donna isn’t sure how they waited so long for this, because it feels so right. “Well, I don’t know how I can say no. You do have a habit of hiring yourself.”

“Consider me hired,” Donna says. “I’ll do whatever job you want me to, but I’m going to insist I get put on the payroll right away.”

“That I can do,” Josh says without hesitation.

“So, back to the honeymoon question,” Donna continues. “Is there a campaign stop planned for Hawaii?”

“Well, Hawaii is really far away,” Josh explains. “And pretty solidly blue. Not usually worth a stop for us.”

“I don’t know, a Republican like Vinick? Could sway some loyal democrats. Maybe we need to cover our bases.” She scoots closer to him on the bed, her leg touching his. He does smell a little bit like he hasn’t showered in days (he probably hasn’t) and part of her thinks that maybe they should share a shower before they share a bed, but he also smells distinctly like Josh, and that is not something she will complain about.

Josh turns to face her, his free hand cupping her cheek. “Believe me Donna, when I take you to Hawaii, it will be for pleasure, and pleasure only.”

“You’ll take me to Hawaii?”

Josh takes the last sip of his champagne.. “That’s something husbands do for their wives,” he tells her, and he reaches forward to brush a bit of hair out of her face. “Do you need to… you know, work tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Donna says, and then she amends it to “I don’t care.”

“Really?” Josh’s eyebrows shoot up towards the top of his forehead as he drinks her in hungrily.

“Really,” she says. “I’m done with this job. I’m just yours tonight. Do you have anything you need to do?”

“The Congressman told me to take the night off,” Josh says. “He’s… he’s busy doing interviews, and so is the rest of the staff, but he basically threatened to fire me unless I stayed out of it all tonight. I guess I’ve screwed up enough in interviews lately that I understand his concern.”

Donna shakes her head. “What you said… the other day. That wasn’t a screw-up.”

“No,” he says. “No, I just wish I could have told you… in a better way.”

“Would you have told me?”

Josh closes his eyes. “I… don’t know that I had the words until that moment where I was fighting with every bit of me to keep them in. And that’s the moment I knew.”

“You didn’t know before?” Donna asks.

“I knew,” he whispers. “I knew… I knew when I almost lost you that I couldn’t live without you. I just couldn’t admit it to myself then.”

“I knew when I almost lost you, too,” Donna shares, reaching out for his hand. Her thumb traces over the long-faded scars on the back of his hand. They’re so small now that no one who didn’t know they were there would notice them, but Donna knows just how hard they are for Josh to accept, however thin they happen to be. “I guess… it’s easy to look back and say I knew back then. It was harder to find the words. I’m glad you did.”

Josh nods, and sniffles a little bit, and Donna can see that his eyes are glazed over. Not quite tearful, but certainly not clear. “I guess we don’t need to worry about that divorce lawyer,” Josh says with a watery chuckle.

“No,” Donna says. “I’m not particularly interested in that. I’m interested in staying married to you.”

He squeezes her hand. “You didn’t have the wedding you deserved.”

“No,” Donna says, “but who’s to say we can’t have another?”

“It’s illegal to get married twice,” Josh tells her.

“Hmm,” Donna says. “Maybe we do need that divorce lawyer. So I can divorce you, and then marry you again. For real this time.”

This makes Josh beam brightly, even through his increasingly tearful eyes. “For real this time,” he repeats. “You know, the fact that you offered to marry me for the sole purpose of ensuring I had access to health insurance is certainly a statement.”

“About the state of healthcare in this country?”

“Well, that certainly, but also about the way you felt for me. I mean… who does that? Who offers their hand in marriage for that sole reason?”

Donna takes the last sip of her champagne and places the glass beside his before shifting closer to him on the bed, their bodies pressed against each other. “I figured if I was married to you, I’d get access to your trust fund someday. And maybe your credit cards. And hey, am I named on your life insurance policy?”

Josh laughs, burying his head in her shoulder, and Donna relaxes into his touch. “I love you,” he whispers into her shoulder, and while she knew that he’d said it before, it now sounds so perfectly natural coming from him that she can’t help but burst into tears. Big, wet, embarrassing teardrops run down her cheeks. Donna has never been a pretty crier—she has never been an ugly crier, either—but she fears she is ruining the moment. Especially when Josh sits up, eyes wide. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing!” Donna protests. “It’s just… god, I can’t believe you just said that to me. I can’t believe…”

“I love you?” Josh questions, and at her reaction, his smile widens. “Believe it, baby! I can say it every day if that helps.”

Donna laughs. “I won’t complain.”

“You never got a wedding, you never got a wedding night…” Josh murmurs. “And tonight is just the start of my quest to make it up to you. If you’re up to it, of course.”

Despite the exhaustion that permeates every part of her being, Donna would never pass up a night like tonight. She would never pass up being able to spend her evening like this, with him. “It would be a pleasure,” she says, lowering her voice. “But… what do you say we start this off in the shower?”

“My wife is a genius,” Josh says, and before she can say anything else, he scoops her up in his arms. Donna would protest, but there is something about his strong arms holding her close to his chest that makes her feel feral and yet completely safe.

Josh makes her feel safe, and that is something she hasn’t felt in a long time.

Their phones are off, cast onto one of the bedside tables, and there are no knocks on their door. The hotel room is miles away from anyone else on the campaign. It is them and only them here.

Her side may have lost tonight, but as she lays in Josh’s arms, sweaty and satisfied and euphoric, Donna can’t help but think that she won.

She falls asleep with her head on his chest, and for the first time in over a year, she sleeps well. She wakes up once, blinking to get her eyes used to the dark room, and moves her head to see Josh looking peaceful in slumber. She is freezing cold, her feet like blocks of ice. The hotel AC is on very low, and she runs cold anyway, but she knows that Josh runs warm. Rather than turning it down, she reaches over the side of the bed to grab Josh’s t-shirt and slips it on over herself, and then presses her feet into his warm calves. The sound of his breathing lulls her back to sleep, and when she wakes up again, even closer to him, her body pressed against his, she notices that it is already eight. She has not slept in that late since she began this job, at least not that she can remember.

Josh is awake, his eyes open, his arm wrapped around her although she can’t imagine how it isn’t numb. “Morning,” he says, his voice still a little rough, although whether it is from all the talking he has done over the last few days or from last night’s more pleasurable activities Donna cannot tell.

“Morning,” she replies. “Sleep well?”

“Better than I have in years,” he replies.

“Your campaign is probably wondering why you didn’t stay up all night celebrating with them.”

“I liked celebrating with you,” he whispers, moving his face close to hers, letting his lips move against her cheek. His cheek is stubbly—he hasn’t had time to shave—but Donna kind of likes that. He should be careful, Donna thinks, or they might get caught up for another hour.

“Much as I want to stay here with you,” Donna says, “you probably should make sure they know you’re alive.”

Josh pulls back a little and sighs. “We probably should talk a little first.”

“You can talk to me whenever you like,” Donna says.

He smiles at that, but it seems more like a grimace. “I want you on the Santos campaign, but I can’t have you be in a visible position,” he says. “You were so visible within the Russell campaign, and since there’s been so much media around you and I…”

“I get it,” Donna says, although there is a part of her that is terrified that Josh is about to say he’ll relegate her to an assistant role again, despite how far she has come from that.

“We’re going to expand our campaign headquarters in DC,” Josh says. “The DNC is going to put money behind our campaign now, so we’ll have some upfront cash to hire a workforce and provide benefits.”

“Like health insurance?” Donna asks.

Josh laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “We’re going to make sure that’s part of the deal.”

“Good,” Donna says, “because the month ends in a couple days and then we’re both out of luck.”

“I think we’ve had enough bad luck,” Josh replies. “It’s time to turn the tide.”

Donna grins at that, but then remembers that she still does not have a clear answer on her role. She sits up a little more in the bed, and looks over at him. “What do you think my role should be?”

Josh bites his lip. “You’re really good at the PR side of things,” he says. “You’re good at dealing with the press, but I don’t want you in view of the press. I think… Donna, I don’t have a deputy campaign manager. And I think you’d be great at it.”

Donna frowns a little bit. “Josh… you’re not meaning this to be like… an assistant role, are you? Because I think we’ve established that I’ve moved beyond that.”

“No, no, no,” Josh says quickly. “No, you’d be my right hand man… woman. You’d be helping me make the big decisions. Although… I hate to say it, but you probably should largely be running things from the DC office. Less visibility that way.”

Donna can’t help the way her face falls at this. “And you’d be traveling with the campaign?”

He bites his lip. “Yeah.”

“So we’d be apart a lot.”

“We’ve survived it before,” Josh says with a sigh.

Donna swallows down her disappointment. “Yeah.”

“It’s four months,” Josh says. “Three, really. August, September, October. And I’d be back in DC probably at least once a week. And we’d be on the phone all the time. But Donna… I need someone I can trust in that position. And I need you. I need you so badly. I know it’s a lot to ask, but it makes the most sense, and I… I want to look out for our future as well as our present.”

She moves her hand to intertwine with hers. “Our future,” she repeats.

His fingers tangle with hers, and his eyes widen. “You need a ring,” he says.

Donna laughs. “I mean, I still have the ones we had for our wedding.”

“Me too,” Josh says, “but we can do better for ourselves. Actually… for that, I think I need to call my mom.” He pushes the covers off of himself. “Donna, come on. I’m going to introduce you to the rest of the campaign staff. As my deputy campaign manager.”

Donna stands up and grins. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he repeats. “And you have another title, too.”

“What’s that?”

Josh comes around to the other side of the bed, wrapping her in his arms, kissing the top of her head tenderly. “My wife,” he says, and while Donna has heard him say those words before, this is the first time they’ve felt like this. This is the first time those words have sent a shiver up her spine, have made her want to burst into tears, have made her feel alive.

My wife.

Chapter Text

The sun is just beginning to peek through the blinds when Josh wakes up, blinking against the new brightness. He yawns heavily, and turns over to take a glance at the clock. Just past six. Just a few hours more until the inauguration ceremony.

He feels Donna’s hand on his back, and can’t help but let his lips quirk up at her touch. He rolls over to face her, one hand reaching out to embrace her arm. “Morning,” he says softly, his hand drifting up towards her hair, still soft and beautiful even after a night of sleep.

“Good morning,” she whispers back.

“You know what today is?”

“It’s only been circled on my calendar since November,” Donna says. “Today is the day you’ve officially made a man President.”

“Well, we did that,” he replies, affection filling his voice. “Couldn’t have done it without you. But that’s not what I meant.”

Donna frowns, puzzled. “What did you mean?”

“We got married a year ago today.”

She shifts upward, blinking rapidly. “What?”

“January 20th,” he repeats with a grin. “Our wedding anniversary.” He takes her hand in his, running his finger over the heirloom wedding ring he gave her. It was meant to be Joanie’s, originally, but Josh felt that if Joanie could not wear it, Donna should.

She gives him a blank stare. “Oh my god, how did I forget that?”

“It’s been a long year.”

“Yeah, but I…”

He too sits up, kissing her softly. Her lips are chapped from the January chill, and his are too, but he has no complaints. He never has any complaints about kissing Donna. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I never forget anniversaries.”

“I shouldn’t forget our wedding anniversary though,” Donna says. “God, I feel so stupid, I didn’t….”

“You don’t need to do anything,” Josh says. “Anyway, it’s kind of a weird anniversary. We also have the one in April and the one in July, so you have a couple more chances this year.”

Donna puts a hand to her head. “Did we really get married on Inauguration day?”

“Didn’t even try and yet…”

She laughs a little bit, before pushing the covers off. “Just watch, we’ll accidentally have a baby on Election Day. Wouldn’t that be typical?”

Josh’s eyes widen. They haven’t really talked about kids; typically, it’s something to discuss before marriage, but of course this marriage has been anything but typical. Josh had never been quite sure if it was something Donna wanted, and he is only beginning to realize that it is something he wants. “Donna… are you… trying to tell me something?”

“How long does a baby gestate?” Donna asks with a laugh. “If I was pregnant today, in which case I wouldn’t know, that would still be a very late baby. And if I were to be pregnant, I’m not interested in going over 40 weeks.”

Josh blushes a little bit, but nods. “But I mean… in the future? What do you think? Are you saying you…”

“Let me get started on this massive, overwhelming job first,” Donna says with a chuckle. “But in a year or two… I think an election day baby would be a fantastic gift.”

Josh rolls over to get off of Donna’s side of the bed, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing her shoulder softly. “I agree,” he tells her, his chin still resting on her.

“We should get ready,” Donna says. “I know we’re not going to the mass, but noon will come…”

Josh backs up a little bit. “Yeah,” he says. “By the way, President Bartlet asked to see us today.”

“You and me?”

Josh nods.

“What for?”

He shrugs, pulling on an undershirt before going over to the closet to take out a brand new suit that Donna picked out for him, insisting he needed something new for the inauguration. “Not sure,” he says.

“The President is leaving directly after the ceremony, right?”

“Right.”

Donna gives him a puzzled look. “He wants us to come see him in the Oval? On his very last day as President?”

“What else does he have to do?” Josh asks. “Sign pardons or whatever. Although he has threatened to sign an executive order declaring the supremacy of New Hampshire maple syrup over all other kinds.”

“What time?”

“Nine,” Josh says.

“Guess we better get ready then,” Donna says. “I do have a few things in the transition office I want to take care of before we move in today.” She turns to Josh, who is giving her a slack jawed grin, his eyes trained on her. “What?” she asks, upon seeing his expression.

He manages to pull himself together. “Nothing,” He says. “You’re just hot when you’re like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you,” he says. “Sure we don’t have any time for some extracurricular activities this morning?”

“Don’t distract me,” she replies. “But tonight… I think tonight is going to be good. You, me, after nine inaugural balls…”

“Think we can sneak out after the third one? If we claim it’s our anniversary, maybe we can…”

“We don’t have to claim it,” Donna replies. “It is our anniversary.”

“Oh, yeah,” Josh says, trying to keep his grin from becoming even more exceedingly stupid. “Right.”

Donna reaches forward to straighten his tie, and pulls him into a kiss without a thought. “Will that hold you over?”

“Not enough to keep me from looking at you like this all day,” Josh replies, and she laughs before stepping back to get herself dressed for one of the biggest days of her life.

While their first six months of marriage were odd, to say the least, the next six months have not been easy by any stretch of the imagination. The media interest had died down, and no one had really made much of Donna being immediately hired onto the Santos campaign, but she had spent most of her time at the DC office while Josh had been traveling around the country with the campaign. While their emotional distance had changed drastically for the better, the physical distance was a new challenge to cope with in what was already an unconventional marriage. While they had both been trying to heal, it was difficult to be so far apart.

The campaign had been long and challenging and close, and while they pulled it out in the end, losing Leo made that victory bittersweet. That, coupled with utter exhaustion and perhaps years of delayed mental health treatment led Josh to nearly have a breakdown, with only Sam’s interference and insistence that Josh take a vacation preventing a spiral that could have gotten much worse.

Sam only suggested a vacation, a week off, but Josh took Donna to Hawaii, just as he had promised he would do, for pleasure and for pleasure only.

The rest of the transition has been better, with Josh feeling more focused and calm and Donna starting to feel like she fits into her new role. She’s not sure she’ll ever feel entirely qualified, but she and Helen have developed a rapport and she has been hired as Chief of Staff for the First Lady, a job she never thought she would hold.

Donna never really moved out of Josh’s apartment; while her lease is about to be up, she has no interest in renewing. His apartment has been her home since that night he persuaded her to stay. It’s neater now than it used to be, and Donna has finally convinced Josh to buy a new duvet (and a new mattress has been ordered for both of their sakes). She has reorganized his closet to make room for all of her clothes, and they have settled into a domestic routine that somehow abides through all the ups and downs of the transition.

Josh makes her coffee and brings it to her as she finishes doing her makeup, placing it on the vanity. He wraps his arms around her and kisses the top of her head. “I’m going to go,” he says. “Talk to CJ.”

“A last ditch attempt to get her to join you?”

“Can you blame me for trying?”

Donna chuckles. “No, I can’t,” she says, “although I find it hard to imagine you’ll get anywhere.”

“I do too, but it’s still… I need to see her before she leaves and I take over her job.”

Donna nods and leans back to kiss the side of his jaw. “I’ll meet you outside the Oval, then? For whatever the President wants from us?”

“Yeah,” Josh replies. “See you soon.”

It is strange to walk through an emptying White House, with so many desks cleared, with so many walls empty. Josh knows that soon enough the chaos will be back, and he will be the one in charge of it all, but right now the White House feels so wrong without the people who made it his home for so many years.

His meeting with CJ doesn’t really go anywhere, not that he expected it to. It is still nice to talk to CJ as she imparts some last-minute advice to him about the role that has now been both of theirs, about the life that they alone understand.

“You’re going to be just fine,” CJ tells him after Margaret knocks on her door and tells her she has another meeting. She stands up and envelops Josh in a hug. “No one else I’d want to see running this country.”

“Are you sure?” Josh jokes. “Because after everything I put you through when you were Press Secretary I think…”

CJ shakes her head. “You have Donna to keep you in line now,” she says, “and I’m certain she will. Give her my love and tell her that if she’s ever out in California and doesn’t come to see me, I will personally kill you.”

“Why me and not her?”

“Never really needed a reason,” CJ replies flippantly, but she gives him a friendly pat on the back. “Good luck. You’ve been preparing for this your whole life, and if you need anything, just pick up the phone.”

“Thanks, Ceej,” Josh whispers, pulling her back into the hug briefly and burying his face in her shoulder. “Hey, I’ve got to go meet with the President— President Bartlet.”

CJ nods. “Yes, he’s very eager to do it.”

“I wonder why,” Josh mutters, waving goodbye as he heads towards the outer office. Donna is there, and he lets his face break into a broad grin at the sight of her. “Is he ready for us?”

“Yes,” Debbie Fiderer says. “Mind you, don’t take too much of his time. He’s got a ticking clock. Three more hours of his Presidency.”

“We won’t,” Josh replies, resting his hand behind Donna’s back and guiding her into the Oval. “Mr. President!”

President Bartlet takes off his glasses and stands up. “Josh, Donna! So good of you to come in.”

“So good of you to have us,” Josh says. “Sir… you didn’t really give a reason for this meeting.”

Bartlet shrugs and moves to the chair in the center of the room. “Never really needed a reason.”

“No,” Josh says, “but this is the last few hours of your presidency, and surely…”

“I think now is a good time to set a date for your wedding,” President Bartlet says firmly.

Josh and Donna share a look. “Our…” Donna starts. “Sir, you do realize that we are already married, right?”

The President nods. “I do, I do. However, you chose to get married without anyone in attendance, and that I cannot allow. While the law technically prohibits legal marriage twice, there is no reason you could not have a real wedding ceremony with all your family and friends in attendance. So, what date would you like the ceremony to be?”

“Sir… you’re the President of the United States,” Josh points out.

“Only for three more hours, thank God,” Bartlet replies.

“Are you really sure you want to spend those three hours… wedding planning?”

The President grins. “Oh yes, I do. Because it’s going to be awfully hard for the two of you to turn down my offer of hosting the wedding at my farm in New Hampshire while you’re sitting in the Oval Office.”

Donna raises an eyebrow. “He’s got a point there.”

“And if you somehow manage to refuse, I can sign an executive order right here and now compelling you to hold your wedding ceremony, and no one will care about the gross abuse of power because in three hours I will no longer have said powers.”

Josh laughs and grasps Donna’s hand, his fingers gently running over her ring. “Sir, I don’t think you needed to be too worried,” he says. “We’d love to.”

“Good,” the President says. “I was worried I’d have to force your hand. How does June sound? You’ll be out of the first hundred days, we’ll find a time with a Congressional recess so that you could…”

“June sounds great,” Donna says. “Thank you sir.”

“Is he treating you well?” The President asks, using his head to gesture towards Josh.

Donna gives him a broad grin. “He is.”

“Good, because otherwise I’ll kick his ass,” the President says. “Or get the Secret Service to do it.”

“It’s our anniversary,” Josh blurts out, not sure where that came from.

Bartlet smiles. “You two really got married on inauguration day?”

“We weren’t trying to!” Josh protests. “It was just the day that worked out best for us and we were in New Hampshire and…” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t regret it. Not in the least.”

“Happy anniversary,” Bartlet says, standing up. “Now go out there and help get out new President sworn in.”

Josh and Donna take hands and walk out of the Oval Office together.

Who would have thought that their hasty marriage for entirely mercenary reasons a year ago today would have brought them here?

Together, they sit on the dais of the Capitol building and watch a good man become President. Together, they walk back into the White House as Chiefs of Staff. Donna finds a bouquet of flowers on her desk, a note inserted in them telling her that the flowers are for their anniversary. She grins and clutches the note to her chest, wiping back a tear as she looks around her new, huge office.

Together, they dance at three of nine inaugural balls before going home to spend more time with each other. Together, they celebrate an anniversary that they both never expected to be meaningful.

A few days later, Donna realizes that they have not yet completed their official employment paperwork for their White House jobs. She manages to find everything she needs and everything Josh needs to sign to reinstate them as official White House employees. Even if this is the kind of thing that normally would be staffed out to an assistant, Donna thinks that it is important that they fulfill all the obligations of their jobs, including the pre-employment paperwork.

She fills out an emergency contact form (they’re each other’s, as if there was any doubt) and passes Josh his across the table to put in the same information before she looks at the next sheet of paper and has to laugh. “Josh,” she says. “Josh, we have to sign up for health insurance.”

Josh looks up at her and runs a hand through his hair. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. There are… eight pages of paperwork to fill out.”

He shakes his head. “They can’t just… use the same information from the last time we worked for the federal government?”

“Apparently not,” Donna says. “Anyway, since we’re married, we can…”

“Be on the same plan?”

“Yeah,” Donna says.

“But we still need to fill out two versions of the paperwork?”

Donna sighs and nods. “Yeah.”

He groans and takes the paper from her, beginning to write down all sorts of information. “Donna, do you know my RX number?”

“Look at your insurance card,” she says.

“If the US had single-payer healthcare, I wouldn’t have to do all this paperwork every time I want to actually use my healthcare benefits.”

Donna stands up and comes around to the other side of the table, placing her hands flat against his chest, her arms wrapped around his neck. “Good think you’re currently the second-most powerful man in the United States government.”

“Still isn’t gonna happen. Not with Congress the way it is.”

Donna shrugs. “You never know. Still, what did you and the President decide the first major policy push was going to be?”

Josh leans back to look up at her and grins broadly. “Healthcare reform?”

“Yeah,” she says, moving her lips to his. “Although we have our ridiculous system to thank for one thing.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Us.”

Josh gets up out of his chair and leans against the table to get a better angle to kiss her. By the time they have decided to make their way to the bedroom, the insurance paperwork is scattered all over the kitchen floor.