Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

All else being equal, she might not have noticed.

It came in waves over the years, Donna's fixation on her soulmate. There were periods of her life (her teenage years, of course, and for a while in her very early twenties) when she’d thought about little else, when she’d traced the mysterious black mark—the shape of a heart, with the pattern of her soulmate’s fingerprint--on her ribs with her finger, wondered who it belonged to, wondered when she’d know, when it would change from black to red like it was supposed to, wondered every single day when she woke up whether that would be the day that she met them, whether she’d even realize if she had.

And for a while, she thought she had. For a while, she told herself she must have, because if she hadn’t, who was she quitting school and taking double shifts at the diner for?

She’d stared at her mark in the bathroom mirror on more than one occasion, trying to convince herself that it looked a tad bit redder than it had before, that it wasn’t quite so dark anymore, that maybe these things took time, that maybe soulmate marks were supposed to change slowly, not in an instant like she’d always heard. That maybe it wasn't so much when you met them, like she'd always heard, as it was when you became certain that they were meant for you. Maybe these things happened differently for different people.

The thing was, her boyfriend’s mark hadn’t changed either. His was on his bicep, high enough to be covered by a shirt sleeve, and sometimes, at night, she’d squint at it, while he was sleeping, trying to tell herself that maybe his was changing slowly, too.

She never bothered trying to match her fingerprint to the pattern of his mark, though. It wasn’t worth the confirmation, wasn’t worth the disappointment that that would bring.

She’d stopped thinking about soulmates, sometime in the middle (or maybe towards the end—it all felt like the end, looking back) of that relationship. For a while, it had been what had gotten her through those all-night shifts—the notion that this was it, that she’d found it, the thing that everyone spent their whole lives searching for.

But sooner or later, that notion wasn’t enough. Because not everyone did find it—she knew that as well as anyone. There were plenty of people who went their whole lives waiting to feel the burn of their mark turning from black to red, waiting to feel the all-encompassing warmth of the knowledge that they were among the lucky few after all, that they would get the happily-ever-after that the whole world sought after.

She doesn’t remember when she realized that she was one of those people that was still waiting, she doesn’t remember when she realized that when she did find her soulmate, it shouldn’t feel anything like this, it wouldn’t torment her like this, it shouldn’t feel like she was putting herself through hell in pursuit of the happiness of someone who didn’t seem to care much about her at all.

She doesn't remember realizing that her mark wasn't going to change at all. Not then, anyway. Not with him.

It hadn’t happened all at once, that realization. That much, she’s sure of. It had happened slowly, a series of things that added up to the knowledge that this wasn’t at all how things were supposed to be, this wasn’t at all the fulfillment of all the dreams that she’d had as a little girl.

That, in fact, she herself was one of those people who might never find her soulmate.

What she does remember is getting in her car one night, after cleaning out her feeble balance and closing out her bank account—so that her boyfriend couldn’t get to it first—and driving straight through the night, driving until she got to New Hampshire, not even bothering to think through what she might do when she got there, or how she was possibly going to live on the little money she had.

It’s not until she’s parking, two blocks down from the Bartlet for America campaign office, that she realizes that she has no real idea what brought her here in the first place. For half a second, the thought occurs to her that perhaps her soulmate has brought her here—she’s heard those stories, the same myths whispered during slumber parties when she was a little girl, the ones everyone has heard, the ones in which people find themselves doing something altogether inexplicable, until that very, perplexing event is the occasion by which their soulmate enters their lives.

She’d had a classmate growing up—Lucy Bushman—who said it had happened to her uncle. He’d been terrified of heights his whole life—terrified of anything even remotely resembling a thrill, really—and then, one day, found himself deciding to go skydiving, out of the blue. He barely remembered signing up, paying for it, didn’t even realize what he was doing until he was in the air, actually.

But he’d married his skydiving instructor.

Donna can’t explain why that story pops into her head, as she feeds quarters into the parking meter. She can still picture Lucy’s wide eyes as she’d told it, can picture the group of girls—her childhood friends—sitting on their sleeping bags in the basement of her parents’ condo, silently savoring the story, silently wondering when it would happen for them, if they’d one day find themselves in the same bizarre situation, if they’d one day be rewarded for following those inexplicable cues, the invisible pull of the fates, leading them to the person that was made for them, that they were destined to be with all along.

In any case, Donna dismisses the thought as quickly as it comes. It’s not as though this is entirely out of the blue, after all. She had to get out of Wisconsin, that much she knew for sure. And, even if this wasn’t the most predictable thing in the world, it was a logical next step. She’d spent hours watching campaign coverage during those long nights in the empty diner, and she’d been so drawn to Bartlet’s campaign—there was something about him that was different. He was the real deal, that much she was sure of.

And, after everything, she wanted to do something that mattered, something that she could be good at. She wanted to do something of value, after all of those nights of pouring coffee and slicing pie and praying her beat-up car would manage for just one more day, just one more trip back and forth from the diner.

And that same beat-up car had now brought her here, so that had to be a good sign, right? There had to be something here for her, something that would make her semester as a political science major worthwhile, something that she could do that would be valuable, that would quell her uncertainties about leaving everything she’d ever known behind in Wisconsin.

She feeds enough quarters into the meter to get her to the 5pm posted deadline—after which, she’d allowed to park there for free all night, if she needs to—and takes a deep breath. She’s really going to do this. She’s going to walk into the Bartlet for America headquarters, and she will find a way to do something valuable. She will find a way to belong there, a way to make sense of the fact that she’s here, thousands of miles from home, without a degree, without any relevant work experience.

She doesn’t think about soulmates again.

Not in that moment, anyway.

She doesn’t think of them again until hours later, in fact, when she finds herself—miraculously—on a campaign bus, crammed into the seat next to the man who just became her boss, rubbing absent-mindedly at her ribs, and that’s when it hits her.

She knows—just knows, in the depth of her soul—that if she were to lift up her shirt just now, if she were to find herself, once again, staring at the mark in the bathroom mirror, that she would find it glowing red, as it never has before.

And she realizes that all along—in all of the stories about soulmates that she’s ever heard, in all of the thousands of myths and fables and “based on a  true story” made-for-TV movies that she’s watched over the course of her twenty-four years, no one has ever bothered to tell her that when her mark did change, when it finally revealed to her that she’d met the person whose fate was inextricably linked with hers, it would feel quite like this.

No one ever told her that it wouldn’t be peace that would flood through her veins, but fear.

No one had told her that, in the instant that she’d realized, she would desperately run through her day in her head, counting back to the very first moment that she’d felt a twinge in her side, that it would feel very much like counting back the days of a missed period before taking a pregnancy test, that the “what-am-I-going-to-do” feeling would be much the same.

Because she’d met dozens of people that day. She’d shaken so many hands that it’s a wonder her hand doesn’t hurt along with the ache in her side. She has so many names tumbling through her head that she can’t fathom the idea of matching the correct one to the correct face, the next time that she needs to.

But in all of that, in all of the chaos of the day, she knows with unwavering certainty the moment that her mark had begun to burn.

It was the moment that she’d seen him—really seen him—seen the kindness in his eyes, watched him as he took the lanyard from around his neck, held it out to her, felt the brush of his fingertips against hers as she took it, felt the weight of it in her hand, felt the weight of those kind, intelligent eyes on her face.

That was it, that was the sticking point. Because in that moment, she’d felt it—felt the world shift right off its axis, felt the weight of that world fall off her shoulders, after all those months of the diner and the doctor and never, ever being enough.

That was the moment that she’d felt, for the first time, that she was going to find herself here, on this campaign, in the messy cubicle with “Josh Lyman” taped to the front, with the equally messy man with his rumpled hair and rumpled shirt that was unbuttoned just too far, who looked at her like she didn’t need to prove herself; like somehow, somewhere along the way—sometime, maybe, when they’d been going up and down the stairs, around the office, when he’d somehow cracked her open like a book, looked over her entire educational background, practically her entire romantic history, before he’d given her the go ahead when his phone rang—she already had.

If she’d paid more attention, maybe, if she hadn’t gotten quite so caught up in the moment, in the notion that that lanyard that he’d held out to her—the chain still warm from where it had been pressed against his skin a moment earlier, or from his hand, where he’d held it, maybe—was the first jewelry anyone had ever given to her, and far more precious than any she’d ever admired, in a shop window, or in the catalogues she’d left out on the coffee table for her boyfriend to find.

If she’d paused in that moment, perhaps she could have seen it—because, if she was honest with herself, she could have known in that moment that this man was different, that it was him, and not the dozens of others that she’d met that day, that would spell trouble--because, after all, how could a man with dimples that, for half a second, as he’d stood there in the doorway, looking at her with that light in his eyes, she’d felt a strange urge to reach out and trace with her finger, not spell some kind of trouble?

If she’d thought about it then, she might have realized that that feeling, in that moment, of wanting to reach out and trace the dimples carved into the skin of the man who just became her boss, might have been the exact same sort of inexplicable situation that Lucy Bushman warned her about at that sleepover back in the sixth grade.

But she didn’t.

And so it’s not until later, not until she’s crammed on the bench seat of the campaign bus next to Josh Lyman himself, that she realizes that she’s already in way over her head.

A moment later, the bus rumbles over a patch of uneven pavement, sending Josh jostling into her from where he’s been leaning against the window, his side pressing directly into the spot on her ribs that she only just realized has been burning all day. The pressure soothes the pain, for a moment, and then Josh looks at her. She thinks he’s blushing, just a little, dimples carving into his cheeks again as he gives her a sheepish half-smile. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

It’s funny, she thinks, how he has absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything, to be sorry for.

(The ache she feels, this time, is in her chest.)

Chapter Text

If Josh had gotten more sleep, perhaps he would have noticed sooner.

(There was some sort of terrible irony in that—in the fact that it was Donna, of all people, that was constantly urging him to get more sleep, and it was the very fact that he’d just woken up from what might have been the best sleep he’d gotten on the campaign trail when he noticed that something, at some point, had gone terribly wrong.)

And he had no way of knowing exactly when it had gone wrong, except that he had a sinking feeling in his chest the instant he noticed that he knew exactly who caused it, that the woman whose knee had been poking into his hip (which, in another sick twist of fate, is what had caused him to look at his hip as he undressed for his shower in the first place) was absolutely the one to blame.

It’s just that he’s been stumbling into the shower in the morning with his eyes still half closed since the campaign began, practically sleeping standing up as the water washes over him, not really opening his eyes until later, when he pours his first cup of crappy hotel coffee from whatever crappy hotel coffee maker is available in his room in the crappy hotel du jour.

And so, really, it’s hardly his fault that he didn’t notice when it changed.

But he’d woken up vaguely disoriented—it wasn’t the first time Donna had fallen asleep in his room, after they’d stayed up too late, working, and woken up in the morning surrounded by crumpled files and notes, but it was the first time they’d woken up like this.

Donna had been curled up on her side, her knee pressing into his hip, her face just inches from his cheek, and he’d been on his stomach, his arm slung low across her middle, like he’d tried to pull her closer over the course of the night.

Which wasn’t necessarily outside of the realm of possibility, he realized with horror. If his instincts were correct, and it was Donna who had caused his soulmate mark to burn (with ever-increasing urgency), then it was entirely possible that he had tried, unconsciously, to pull her closer to him.

He’d heard the rumors, same as everyone else had, about how soulmates had a way of doing that, a kind of magnetic pull that made you always want them closer, closer, closer.

He’d never paid attention to any of that, until now.

Had it been that that had done it, her knee against his hip? No one ever told him that he had to actually touch his soulmate for his mark to change.

And yet, that's worse, somehow, because he knows--knows down to his core--that they didn't have to touch. Not the two of them. They didn’t have to even touch at all.

And if that’s true, that means it didn’t have to happen this morning.

That means that the very fact of it may have been what led him to this morning, what led him to hire an assistant who falls asleep, in his bed, working late, with him, and whose presence in said bed went completely unquestioned in his mind until this particular moment; what led him to wake up with his arm draped over Donna’s waist and not think about Mandy even once.

But maybe there was still a way to salvage this, maybe it was someone else. He met hundreds of people--sometimes hundreds of people daily--on the campaign trail, it could easily be any one of them that had caused this. He hadn't so much as glanced at his mark in weeks, it could have changed ages ago. There was no reason he had to jump to any crazy conclusions, there was no reason it had to be the first person he'd thought of, the woman, who--he'd discovered last night, when he'd woken up in the middle of the night to discover that she was sharing his pillow--used shampoo that smelled like lavender, who was quick-witted but never unkind, who built him up and teased him mercilessly all in the same breath. 

It didn't have to be Donna, right? The universe wouldn't do this to him, would it?

He tries desperately to think back to the first moment it might have changed as he stares down at the mark on his hip, the one with the pattern that's always been mysterious to him, the one that used to be black but was now glowing red, just the way that every storybook he'd ever read as a kid had always warned him that it would.

His hip has been bugging him for weeks, now that he thinks about it, but although he’d noticed the twinge of pain from time to time, even complaining about it to CJ once, he’d chalked it up to sleeping on bad mattresses, and to the fact that, well, he’s not in his twenties anymore, and all that time on the bus can’t be good for anyone.

The bus! Oh, God. That was the first time he’d felt it, he realized, but he hadn’t thought anything of it, then.

It was that very first day—the very day that he met Donna—and the bus had rumbled over a pothole or something, sending him jostling into Donna on the seat next to him. He’d felt it, then, that twinge in his hip, and it hadn’t let up since.

So it was Donna. It had to be.

All at once, things started to make sense—he had thought it was strange, how he’d felt so close to her so quickly, how being around her just felt better, safer, how he had never been quite as certain of the fact that the Bartlet for America campaign was exactly where he was supposed to be as he was once Donna began working for him.

He’d even told her about Joanie, early on.

He hardly ever told anyone about Joanie. Sam knew, and Leo, of course, as an old friend of his dad’s, but he’d yet to mention Joanie in front of CJ or Toby. It’s not like there was a common way it came up in conversation, anyway. There wasn’t usually a natural way to mention Joanie offhand, not in the busy-ness of the campaign.

But he’d told Donna, not even two weeks after he’d met her.

It had been another one of those late nights in his hotel room, maybe the first one since Donna started working for him, and his mom had called. She didn’t want to bother him, but she couldn’t sleep, and she didn’t want to wake his dad up, not when he’d been so tired lately from all the chemo.

It had been the anniversary of the fire. He hadn’t meant to forget that—he always called his mom on the anniversary--but there had been a change in travel plans that morning and it had been a chaotic day on the campaign, and in all of that, he’d just forgotten what day it was.

If it had been anyone else in his room when his mom called, he would have asked them to step out—and maybe that was something he should have paid attention to, he realized, how Donna had been there all of a week and a half, and she was already the exception to every rule of privacy he’d ever had for himself—but he’d let Donna stay, and when he’d hung up with his mom, he’d hastily explained the whole thing—the anniversary, that he had lost his sister, all of that. He’d tried to pass it off as no big deal. Really, he tried.

But Donna had seen right through him. (And maybe that was another clue, the way she always seemed to see right through him.)

Donna had looked at him, kindness in her eyes, and then she’d sat on the edge of the bed, next to him, taken his hand in hers, and said, “Tell me about her.”

“About Joanie?”

She nodded. “What was she like?”

He’d smiled, then—it had been a long time since someone asked him that--and before he knew it, he was telling her everything, about Joanie’s love for music, about how no one played the piano like she did, about how she loved the color purple, how she used to let him stay up past his bedtime to watch The Twilight Zone re-runs with her, even though he always ended up running, terrified, into her room in the middle of the night and sleeping in her bed with her, where it was safe.

That night was the first night Donna had stayed in his room with him, and it’s only now that he realizes that maybe she hadn’t fallen asleep there that night entirely by accident.

But it had been easy, after that.

Talking about Joanie, that is.

There had been this one time that Donna had sprinted down the hallway towards him at top speed, following him into his hotel room as he finally managed to get the door open, and unzipping his backpack while it was still on his back, pawing through it.

“I need the California donor files,” she said.

Josh was still trying to get his backpack off of his back, which was getting increasingly more difficult with Donna hanging onto it. “What the hell?”

“CJ said you had a file on Matthew Perry—you knew Matthew Perry made donation to this campaign and you didn’t tell me? Is it in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know, Josh? Did you not hear me say Matthew Perry?”

She successfully pulled his backpack from his back and went to sit on the edge of his bed with it, while Josh leaned against the desk, watching her frantically tear it apart in mild amusement.

“Jesus, Donna, you’re not going to find it that way.”

“This is my method,” she replied, unbothered.

“That’s not a method, that’s destruction!”

She looked up at him, her lips pursed. “If you want to find it yourself--.”

Josh made no move to take the backpack, and she smirked at him. “That’s what I thought. So you’re objecting to my method because--?”

“Well, it’s not the prize in a box of Cracker Jack, Donna, you can’t just root around in there.”

“Why not?” Donna asked, her voice muffled as she continued to rifle through his backpack.

“I could have things in there!”

“What kind of things?”

Josh sighed, shrugging. “You know—personal things!”

Donna looked up, smirking a little at him again. “You mean like--.”

He grinned, in spite of himself. “Mind out of the gutter, Donnatella. I’ll get it myself.”

She ignored him. “How many files do you have in here?”

“I was going to do some work tonight--,” he began, in half-hearted defense, and then trailed off, watching Donna dig through his bag.

“Joanie liked Cracker Jack,” he said, after a moment.

Donna looks up at him, tearing her eyes and her hand from his bag for a second. “Yeah?”

He smiles, and it’s easy, like it always is with Donna, talking about Joanie. “Well, what she liked was the prizes. Our Dad would get us a big box to share, you know, when we went to a Mets game, and Joanie would dig through it for the prize, first thing. It didn’t matter how old she got, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—she wanted that prize.”

He got sad, suddenly, thinking about sixteen, thinking about Joanie and Cracker Jack--Joanie and popcorn--thinking about how he didn’t even remember the last Mets game he’d gone to with Joanie and his dad. He hoped he’d let her have the prize. He hoped he hadn't fought over it with her, as he knew he sometimes had. He feels his cheeks grow warm, feeling suddenly awkward. “I don’t know why I thought of that, just now.”

Donna smiles at him. “It’s a nice memory, Josh, I’m glad you did.”

Really, he should have known, then. He hadn’t talked as much about Joanie in years as he had in a few weeks with Donna. He’d never felt comfortable enough, certainly not this quickly.

How could he not have thought about that in all this time, how could he not have realized what it meant? How could he not have realized that the ache in his hip wasn’t “the struggle of maintaining your girlish figure”, as CJ had quipped when he’d griped about it on the bus one day, but something much, much worse?

Because it was bad, wasn’t it? First of all, just because Donna was his soulmate didn’t necessarily mean that he was hers—everyone knew those people, the ones whose soulmates didn’t want them in return. It wasn’t as common, but it did happen, and Josh had never had terribly good luck, so it wasn’t like there was any guarantee that he’d be one of the lucky ones, whose soulmate actually wanted them, in this case. And he didn't even know if her mark had changed, was the other thing. Or maybe it had long before she ever met him, maybe she had another soulmate waiting for her somewhere, someone that would be good to her, that would love her, that would take care of her, that wasn't twelve years older and had time to have a family.

In fact, now that he thought about it, the whole thing was bad luck, wasn’t it? Donna was his assistant, and even if, by some miracle, he was her soulmate, that didn’t even guarantee that she’d want him to be, that she’d ever tell him, that she’d ever want him. Soulmates were given by the universe, sure, but they were chosen, too. Just because the universe pushed you towards someone didn’t mean you’d go, not if you didn’t want to.

And what would Donna want with him, anyway? After all, he was twelve years older than her. His hairline was receding, he was always stressed out, and Donna had already been witness to several moments when his temper left a little something to be desired.

(Although he never lost his temper at her, not yet, and he wondered if that, too, was something that should have clued him in. He knew he wasn’t the easiest person to work for—his job was typically just too big to be assisted by only one person—but Donna was so damn good at her job that he’d never had a single reason to complain about her or the work that she’d done.)

There were so many times he should have realized, he thinks, as he stands there, tracing his mark with the pad of his thumb, knowing that if he went into the other room, woke Donna up, held her fingerprint up to his mark at this very moment, the patterns would match.

And that wasn’t all. Hell, the mark was on his skin, for God’s sake. How could he not have glanced at it, even once? How could he not have analyzed all of these signs, all of these moments with her that seemed too good to be anything but fate? Even if he was doomed to be someone whose soulmate didn’t want him, how could he not have thought about soulmates even once since the day he’d first met her?

After all, the first time he met her, he’d sort of wondered.

Not about soulmates, exactly—Josh had never paid much attention to the whole soulmate thing, which was probably why he hadn’t thought to glance at his own mark. But he’d wondered about Donna, certainly, about how someone who was clearly intelligent and responsible and deserving of respect, could have let someone walk all over her, could have let someone take her dreams from her.

And maybe he’d half wondered, in that moment—even if he couldn’t quite articulate it—what it was about her boyfriend—Dr. Freeride, as he called him—that had made him seem worth all of that.

It doesn’t hit him that maybe it was the soulmate thing that made her stay until later, until he gets to his cubicle one day and finds a note folded on his desk, his name in Donna’s messy scrawl on the outside.

And he only considers Donna’s soulmate then, on that day, when something much worse occurs to him—his soulmate is gone. He was never going to see her again.

It’s exactly as he feared. Not only is he not one of the lucky ones, whose soulmate actually wants them back, but it appears that Donna isn’t, either. It appears that Donna—beautiful, wonderful Donna, who he would trust with his life after mere weeks of knowing her, who he’s already trusted with most everything else—is destined for the man who had made her drop out of school, who had ignored her dreams, who—from the little tidbits Donna has shared over the last few weeks—had belittled her daily, had never treated her the way that she deserved to be treated.

He’d never had much faith in the fairness of the order of the universe, but this was another level entirely. He’d accepted that he was unlucky, that he was fated to have Donna as his soulmate, that he was burdened with not being hers in return, but this was something much, much worse than that.

Because what he’d been holding onto, ever since that day that he’d woken up, gingerly removed his arm from around her waist, and discovered, in the hotel bathroom, that he was destined to want her forever, he’d been hoping that, at the very least, Donna would find a way to be happy. Maybe not with him—it seemed terribly unlikely, given his luck, and everything else, that he was her soulmate in return—but if he couldn’t be the soulmate she deserved, maybe, at the very least, someone else could, someone good, someone who could maybe, possibly deserve her.

And it just didn’t seem like the boyfriend she’d described could ever find a way to be that person.

And so, four weeks later, when Donna appears, sheepishly, in the doorway to his office, a bandage on her ankle, and hope surges through him, “Thank God,” is all that he can think to say. He catches himself, before he blurts out anything more compromising, hastily tacking on “there’s a pile of stuff on the desk,” to amend his statement, but the sentiment remains.

(Because, no matter how hopeless, how futile, the whole thing is, despite the fact that she could never want him, no matter what the universe says, at least she’s here. He hasn’t totally lost her after all, not forever, not for right now.)

He can’t help himself, later, from alluding to all of it, from asking her, just for the sake of his own sanity, as she sits across from him at his tiny desk, her good knee brushing his under the desk, while her ankle is propped up on another chair next to her that he hastily set up for her. “So…Dr. Freeride…?”

Donna looks up at him, smiling just a little, although there’s something in her eyes that looks a little sad, and he regrets bringing it up at all, regrets causing her so much as an instant of pain, especially on her first day back.

“He wasn’t the one,” she says at last.

Josh can’t help it—he beams.

Chapter Text

It doesn’t last, the happiness.

Well, the elation over the fact that Donna is back does.

But the happiness over the realization that good old Dr. Freeride isn’t her soulmate after all really doesn’t.

Because, really, Josh could have told her that. Practically did tell her that, on her very first day, back when he’d first coined the name “Dr. Freeride”. (Or maybe she was the one who told him that Freeride wasn’t the one that first day—who’s to say, really?)

And in any case, it doesn’t take very long for Josh to realize that the soulmate thing isn’t the thing about Donna, not to him.

Because maybe it was the catalyst, for a while. Maybe it was the thing that made him decide to end things with Mandy…eventually. Maybe it’s the reason he knows that he’s never going to be quite happy, not as happy as he should be, not as long as Donna is his soulmate, but he’s more than likely not hers.

But it’s not the thing that endears her to him, not the reason for the affection he feels for her, which he refuses to call attraction, even if that’s what it is.

Because the affection—the attraction, all of it—happens entirely separately from whatever magnetic pull may or may not exist between people who may or may not (but probably not, he reminds himself, every time he dares to get his hopes up) be soulmates.

Regardless, whatever it is about Donna—the things that make her Donna—exists entirely independently from the soulmate thing.

And so he doesn’t tell her. He doesn’t say a word.

But he starts to fall anyway, somewhere between sitting across from Donna at the diner down the road from the campaign office on a particularly cold day, watching her drink hot chocolate, a smudge of whipped cream on her nose, and the time that she steals the chunky knit socks his mom made for him, flopping around his room in them as they work at night, complaining that he keeps his room way too cold. (It’s that that she uses as an excuse to steal his favorite sweatshirt, too—the Wesleyan one that had belonged to his dad—and when she asks him, one day, while wearing it, why he has a Wesleyan sweatshirt, when he hadn’t even gone there, and he tells her the truth, she peels the sweatshirt off (he tries very hard not to look at the strip of her stomach that’s revealed for just a moment when her shirt rises up with it) immediately, folding it gently on the edge of his bed, before immediately going to his suitcase and pulling his Harvard sweatshirt over her head instead.

(“It’s okay,” he wants to tell her. “You can wear the Wesleyan one.”)

(His dad would have liked her, he thinks. He would have liked her a lot.)

He makes some half-hearted protests about all the theft, but he likes it, Donna wearing his clothes. He likes pretending it means something to her, means half as much to her as it does to him, and sometimes, he lets himself pretend it does, reminding himself that he’s never seen Donna steal Toby’s sweatshirt or Sam’s socks, and then that image is so bizarre—so funny—that he almost laughs. 

Those are the times that he almost tells her—because really, he’s dying to ask her, dying to know if he’s a fool or if this really does mean something to her, something like it means to him (even though he doesn’t dare to believe that it does). He’s dying to find out about her soulmate mark, whether it had changed when his had, why she’d gone back to her boyfriend, and then—why she’d left her boyfriend again, why she’d come back to the campaign.

Some nights, he lay there, in his hotel room, staring at the ceiling, imagining a scenario when he’d actually ask Donna all of that, actually entertaining the fantasy that maybe the pull of soulmates was as strong for her as it felt for him, that maybe someday she’d show him her mark (and that was the other thing, the thing he didn’t even let himself really think about—where was her mark? What did it look like?) and it would be his fingerprint there; he could press his finger right to it, and it would match.

But then something would happen—some guy would buy Donna a drink in the bar of whatever hotel they were staying in, and he’d watch her cheeks turn pink, watch her thank him, even watch her flirt with him, sometimes, for a little while. Sometimes, he’d even have to watch her give him a smile, Josh’s favorite smile, the one that took over her whole face, the one that radiated off of her whole being, practically, and Josh would remember that the whole thing was an exercise in futility; he was in this alone, as he always had been.

That’s usually when he would go find Mandy, and he wouldn’t bother glancing around to see if Donna was watching him, because what was the point? Either Donna’s mark had never changed, or it had changed with someone else, somewhere, and he wasn’t sure which was worse—Donna already having a soulmate, who wasn’t him, or knowing that, sooner or later, he was probably going to have to watch Donna find her soulmate, maybe right here in one of these stupid hotel bars.

In the end, it probably didn’t matter, because in the end, he would still be doomed to be drawn to her in precisely this manner, to want her and not have her, to know without even having to look that her eyes weren’t following him around the room the way that his followed her.

And yet, sometimes he wondered.

Sometimes, he and Donna would be holed up in his room, late at night, and Donna would be telling him some story, a tangent off of some bizarre “fun fact” that she had insisted on sharing with him—Donna was always doing that, sharing fun facts that were often barely fun and, he suspected, not even always factual—and they’d end up laughing so hard they could hardly speak, and sometimes they’d be sitting close enough that his knee would press into hers, and as he laughed, as he watched her laugh, watched the light in her eyes, watched his favorite smile wash over her face…sometimes, he had to wonder if she felt it, too. He had to wonder how he could possibly be out there on his own, in those moments.

(Sometimes, those nights, too, are what lead him to Mandy’s bed, because sometimes the richness of that time with Donna is too overwhelming, the want is too overwhelming, and when the realization—the reminder—that it’s all one-sided finally comes back to him, it’s too depressing to bear on his own. So he makes his way to Mandy.)

When it finally ends with Mandy—and he remains uncertain how, exactly, it had ended with Mandy, even later on, because Mandy hates him as though he’d dumped her, but the screaming match that had finally been the final nail in the coffin of their relationship was a lot more her than him, and it was her who had finally proclaimed the whole thing over—he’s almost reluctant to tell Donna, because he knows it’s only going to get harder from here. Now he really has to watch himself around Donna, more than he already has to, after CJ and Leo had each individually remarked how awfully close he seemed to be with his assistant.

Mandy had been a good cover for all of that; Mandy had been a good excuse.

But in the end, that doesn’t matter either, because when he tells Donna—trying to mention it as casually, as offhand as possible—she seems unbothered.

“What’d you do?” she asks.

It catches him off guard. “Me? Why do you assume I did anything?”

“Probably the same reason that you assumed my boyfriend broke up with me the day you met me,” she replies coolly, and he wonders how often she thinks about that, to have that response ready. A pang of regret hits him right in the chest.

“Well--,” he pauses, because suddenly he can see this conversation ending very, very badly.

Donna turns on her heel. “Well, what?”

Josh hesitates.

“Oh my God,” she says, “you still think he broke up with me.”

Josh winces, because he’s suddenly realizing the way that Donna must have heard that—as of course her boyfriend had dumped her, even when that couldn’t be farther from what he meant. Although, to be fair, Donna hadn’t said much of anything to the contrary, even when she’d returned. But the idea of someone breaking up with Donna remained unfathomable to him, when she remained so depressingly far out of his reach.

“That’s not what I was going to say!” he protested.

“Really, Joshua? Then what were you going to say?” But she’s smiling, she’s teasing him, and just like that, they’re back. The relief is strong enough to almost knock him over.

“I was going to say, ‘well, you assumed Mandy broke up with me!”

“Didn’t she?”

He sighs. “Not the point--.”

Donna laughs. “Okay, you see this? You see how you just talked us in a giant circle, just now?”

“I’m just saying,” he says. “We don’t have to automatically assume I’m the problem.”

Donna’s quiet for a moment, something unreadable on her face, and then she shrugs.

“You’ll get back together,” she says, and he can’t read her tone, because it sounds, strangely, a little more like resignation than reassurance.

~~

For Donna’s part, she almost asked him. Because the truth was, she didn’t know that he would get back with Mandy. But it was something to say, something to make him stop looking at her in that way, looking at her like he was waiting—hoping—for her to say something, though she couldn’t imagine what, couldn’t read it on his face.

But she’d never understood Josh’s relationship with Mandy anyway, never really gotten what they’d seen in each other.

She’d tried to talk herself out of that—Donna had always had a knack for seeing the best in people, even people that it was hard to see the best in (her previous relationship was proof enough of that), and if she couldn’t see the best in Mandy, she knew, it was only because of jealousy.

But it also filled her with dread, thinking about it. Because it didn’t make sense, Josh and Mandy. They fought all the time, and not in the way she fought with Josh, not in the way that was more teasing and banter than it ever was arguing, not in the way that left them both smiling, left them laughing so hard that their stomachs ached, that they could hardly breathe.

And if it didn’t make sense, then maybe there was something else at play. Because soulmates did that, didn’t they? Soulmate relationships, she’d been told, often didn’t make sense to people on the outside.

And if Mandy was Josh’s soulmate—if that was the reason that Donna just couldn’t see it, that their relationship didn’t seem to make sense—then they would get back together, wouldn’t they? They had to.

(It had been Josh’s relationship with Mandy that had made Donna run, had made her go back when her boyfriend had called her, begging for a second chance. She knew he wasn’t her soulmate, she knew it wouldn’t last, but the call came one night, after everyone had had a bit too much to drink, and she’d had to watch Josh on the dance floor of the little bar they’d all gone to with Mandy, watched their bodies pressed against each other, watched Mandy lean up to kiss him, and even though she knew that Josh and Mandy were rarely happy, that their relationship was constantly volatile, unpredictable, it had all been too much. And so she’d left, not letting herself think about it as leaving Josh, even though of course she was. That was all it ever was, even though it was silly—they weren’t even (and would never be, as far as she could tell) together.)

(When she got back, they were still together—though on the rocks, as ever—but it didn’t matter as much as it had before, because being around Josh, even like this, was so much better than the weeks that she’d spent away from him, so much better than trying to make her dead-end relationship work when she knew exactly where her real heart, her real soulmate, was. If Josh had to remain out of her reach—as he always would—at the very least, she liked at least having him in her sights.)

And the thing was, even when he was with Mandy, Josh spent more time with her than he ever seemed to spend with Mandy.

Oh sure, there were times when he’d go to Mandy’s when Donna left his room for the night, or there were nights when Mandy would appear in his doorway, insist that they pack up the work for the night, and Donna would simply leave, herself, leaving them to it—whatever it was, which she didn’t want to know.

But there were also the nights when she and Josh accidentally fell asleep, when she’d wake up in the middle of the night to find that their heads were on the same pillow, and once, even, that Josh had wrapped his arm around her, the weight of his arm across her middle warm and comforting, even as she forced herself to scoot out from under it, make her way back to her own room, or at least to the other side of the bed, if she was too worn out to make it all the way.

(Sometimes, she’d wake up from those nights, the next morning, to find that they’d both migrated towards the middle of the bed again, and she’d wonder about the magnetic pull of soulmates, the tug she’d always been told about, the way that two people would be drawn to each other in a way that was useless to fight against, as pointless as trying to swim against a rip current. After too many of those mornings, she forced herself to start leaving Josh’s room if she woke up in the middle of the night, no matter how tired she was. But that didn’t stop the nights where she was too content, too secure, too peaceful, to wake up until morning, and those were the ones that truly terrified her.)

Because she couldn’t want this, that much she knew for sure.

She’d heard what Josh had told her, that very first day—this is a campaign for the presidency, and there’s nothing I take more seriously than that.

And, moreover, she knew that it would never work. She couldn’t forget what her old boyfriend had told her—she was nobody. She had no education, no experience, no real right to be in this position on the campaign. Even if she was Josh’s soulmate, that didn’t mean he’d want her. That didn’t mean that the idea of them together would ever be anything but laughable.

And so maybe Josh should get back together with Mandy. For all of her flaws, Mandy is brilliant, valuable, important. Josh belongs with someone like Mandy, surely, much more than he belongs with his assistant.

And yet, when the election is called for Bartlet, Josh doesn’t even look around the room for Mandy, she notices, a surge of hope flooding through her.

Instead, he turns, immediately, to her, crushing her in a bear hug, holding her so tightly that he’s practically lifting her off her feet. “We did it,” he says in her ear, and she tries not to focus on how close he is to her, tries not to notice the way that she can feel the brush of his lips against her skin as he whispers, “We did it, we did it,” in a voice that’s almost choked.

(She tries not to think about the way his voice sounds choked up too much, the way that this victory is probably tinged in sadness for him, the way he’s probably thinking about his dad right now, wishing he could share this night that he made possible.)

“You did it,” she whispers back, and she holds him tighter to her, like that will take away the sadness.

Josh pulls back from her then, gripping her shoulders, and looks directly into her eyes, his gaze a mix of sincerity and a softness that always seems to be there, just a little bit, when he looks at her. “We did it, Donnatella,” he says softly. “This is your victory.”

And then he’s hugging her again, and they’re half dancing, and even though they’re surrounded, in the room, with people yelling, people hugging, people cheering, people clapping, Donna doesn’t notice any of it, doesn’t notice anything but him, doesn’t feel anything but elation, giddy with the way it feels to be this close to him, in his arms, peaceful, happy, safe.

Because even though she’s terrified, still—even though she understands that this victory sentences her to four more years—eight, if they’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you looked at it)--of pretending Josh isn’t her soulmate, of trying not to want him, of hoping her feelings don’t show on her face, of tearing her eyes off of him when he’s across the room—and not only that, but the end of the campaign is the end of the nights together in his hotel room, the end of the mornings (which had been more frequent than she could have hoped for, while still infrequent enough to give them the deniability of having been accidental) of waking up next to each other and pretending that having his face be the first thing she saw in the morning didn’t make her breathtakingly, unbelievably happy.

It means the end of hearing Josh’s voice when it’s still heavy with sleep, the end of falling asleep with her head tucked on his shoulder on the bus, and waking up to discover his coat tucked around her, even though she knows he’s cold, too.

It means the end of eating every meal with him, of spending upwards of sixteen hours out of every day with him (well, actually, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of that, if what Josh has told her about D.C. politics is any indication, but still).

It doesn’t mean the end of all the little moments with him, she knows—moments that she savors, collects, so she can look over them again later, as she falls asleep, trying (and failing) not to conjure up the image of his dimpled grin, of the shine in his eyes when he looks at her, just after saying something that he knows will make her laugh.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of sharing beers with him, the end of picking at his french fries and pretending not to notice when he starts ordering a double order of fries just so that she can pick at them, because noticing will make her blush. It doesn’t mean the end of passing notes to each other in meetings that are way too important for them to be passing notes to each other.

And she hopes it doesn’t mean the end of Josh’s hand on the small of her back, of feeling the warmth of his hand through her shirt as he guides her through a doorway or down a hallway.

But it does mean that the eyes that have always been on them—CJ’s eyes, Leo’s eyes, hell, even probably Toby’s eyes—won’t be the only ones. It means that the stakes will be much higher now--it means that she has to be careful, much more careful than she had to be on the campaign, not to let anyone even suspect that she had a crush on him. She’d heard some of the whispers, heard some of the warnings Josh had received, the ones he’d tried to keep from her, the ones he’d used his relationship with Mandy to defend against.

She waited with bated breath, when she once accidentally overheard Josh getting chastised about their closeness while she stood, waiting, for him, outside a meeting. She’d tried not to listen, but it was too hard—so, instead, she waited for him to tell whoever was scolding him that Donna was nobody, that his soulmate was Mandy, that it was ridiculous to even assume that he was behaving inappropriately towards Donna when he was obviously meant for someone else.

“You’re leading her on,” she heard someone say.

“If you think I lead Donna anywhere,” Josh answered, “then you don’t know Donna.”

And then he changed the subject. “We were celebrating,” he’d said, in defense of whatever he was supposed to be defending that time. “Did you know Donna got Congressman Steiner’s office to make a statement of support for the Governor’s foreign policy plans? She’s incredible.” After a moment, he’d continued, in a way that Donna had to force herself not to think of as an afterthought, “Besides, I’m with Mandy, you know that.”

(She tried not to savor his praise too much, tried not to let herself think too hard about things that she never should have overheard in the first place.)

(She isn’t successful.)

No one ever warned Donna about her behavior towards Josh, even if she suspected that they could all see it. They probably pitied her, she thought. They could probably see her feelings for him written all over her face—poor, uneducated, under-qualified Donna, with a hopeless crush on her boss, the man who’s quickly becoming known as one of the brightest political minds in the country. 

(It was more than a crush, of course—he was her soulmate, even if she wasn’t his—but that, especially, was an unforgivable crime. That, more than anything, was something that no one could ever, ever find out.)

And so, when the election is called, when Josh holds her to him, when Josh hugs her close, dancing her around, as the room breaks out in chants of ‘Bartlet! Bartlet! Bartlet!’, and even when he lets her go, at last, after holding her for what feels like hours, though it couldn’t have been longer than a moment, and kisses her on the cheek as he turns to make his way towards the Governor, before turning back to her, grabbing her hand, dragging her along with him so they can greet the President-elect together, all she can feel—despite the fear, the dread, that she’s slowly realizing will always be there, at least so long as he’s in her life, at least so long as he’s in her life like this—is that everything is right, everything is exactly as it should be.

Because she feels the burn of her soulmate’s lips on her cheek, feels the warmth of his hand in hers, feels the ache of the mark of her ribs that always stings, just a little, when she gets close to him like this, and it’s enough. It’s enough to have him, just like this, this beautiful man who insists that she share his victory, share his credit, take her place in the White House with him—it’s enough just to be here with the man who has already given her way more chances than a waitress from Wisconsin without a degree should have had, it’s enough to be next to this man who is her boss but who treats her like his equal, like his friend, like someone who matters.

When her soulmate is Josh--Josh with his dimples and his scruffy curls and the gentle way he talks to her, looks out for her, cares for her—when he’s the one the fates have drawn her to, made for her, whether it’s requited or not, it’s enough. It’s enough just to want.

(As long as she doesn’t let herself think about that, that is.)

(As long as she doesn’t ask herself how long that can last.) 

Chapter Text

Donna’s right, in a way.

And, in another, more important way, she’s not right at all.

Because Mandy does come back; Mandy gets hired, their first year in office. And even though Josh protests against it, when it’s suggested—and protests loudly, as he’s wont to do—Donna finds that when they hire Mandy anyway, she’s hardly surprised.

This is how it happens, she thinks.

But that’s where she’s wrong, because Josh and Mandy don’t get back together. Mandy seems as disinterested, in fact, in getting back together with him as Josh is in her, but Donna watches them with a skeptical eye, certain that it’s only a matter of time before things shift, before they find a way back to each other.

(After all, if Josh and Mandy are soulmates, of course they’ll find their way back, right? Isn’t that what soulmates do?)

And yet, sometimes she wonders.

Because, first of all, Josh and Mandy hardly talk, and when they do, they nearly always fight, and on the rare occasion that they’re talking and not fighting, they seem to more tolerate each other than actually like each other.

(That can happen sometimes between soulmates, though, Donna muses, before she can get her hopes up. Sometimes that’s a stage between soulmates. Isn’t that, after all, basically the entirety of Pride and Prejudice, that misunderstanding of each other, of the person one is destined to be with?)

One time, when Josh and Mandy have spent the morning arguing particularly loudly, she asks him about it.

She’s in his office, in the early evening, getting ready to brief him for his meetings on the Hill the following day. Josh had spent the morning arguing with Mandy, and then the afternoon in a meeting about social security, and so Donna hadn’t had a chance to ask him about the arguing, about the morning, until it’s almost seven in the evening, and they’re finally alone in his office, Josh nursing the rest of a cup of coffee that has to be at least eight hours old.

“That coffee’s cold,” she says.

Josh raises an eyebrow at her. “Yeah, I got that from…you know, drinking it.”

“It’s been on your desk since ten-thirty,” she continues, as though he hadn’t spoken, handing him the folder he’ll need for tomorrow.

“Well,” he says, looking down at the folder, “I haven’t been at my desk since ten-thirty.”

“Yes,” she agrees sagely, “You were busy having a lover’s quarrel.”

Josh sputters, spitting the mouthful of cold coffee down his front. “The hell?”

“You know,” she says. “A tiff, a lover’s spat. It’s a thing, Josh.”

“Not a thing I’m having!”

Donna sighs. “Do you think,” she asks, “Mandy’s fighting with you because--?”

Josh cuts her off. “Hold on, this is about Mandy?”

Donna raises an eyebrow at him, smirking. “Have you been quarreling with someone else?”

Josh opens his mouth as if to say something, and then closes it again, the tips of his ears turning red. Suddenly, Donna is desperate to know what he was going to say. Finally, he opens it again, and Donna can tell—can just tell—that whatever he’d been about to say before, he isn’t going to say it now.

“For me to have a lover’s quarrel with Mandy,” he says carefully, “we’d have to be, you know--.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to say ‘lovers’,” he says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

“You just did,” she points out, smiling.

“Well, I’m not going to say it in relation to me and Mandy,” he cries out, indignant. “It’s been—God, what year is it?—that’s been over for I don’t even know how long.”

“But if you’re,” she pauses, her throat feeling suddenly dry, and suddenly she’s not sure she wants to ask him this at all, she’s not sure that she wants to know. “If you’re soulmates--.”

Josh looks visibly startled, and there’s an expression on his face that Donna can’t quite read, something that—if she didn’t know better—looks a little like sadness, a little like wistfulness (though for what, she can’t imagine), mixed with indignation.

“Jesus, Donna, we’re not soulmates!”

“Sometimes soulmates don’t get along for a while, Josh, have you ever read Pride and Prejudice?”

“That,” says Josh, “is a novel.”

“So?”

“So, it’s fiction, Donna!”

“So, you’re saying soulmates never argue? Never have a lover’s quarrel?”

“Would you--,” Josh pauses, sighing, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Would you stop saying ‘lover’s quarrel’?”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“You’re saying soulmates never argue? Never have a difference of opinion?”

“I’m not even saying soulmates are a thing,” he says weakly, and his whole face is red, now, not just the tips of his ears, but he doesn’t look angry, he just looks strangely sad again.

Donna freezes. “Oh.”  

She’s going to drop it, going to drop it right then and never pick it up again, because even though she’s considered—over and over again—that she isn’t Josh’s soulmate, that his soulmate might be Mandy, might be someone else, might be someone he hasn’t met yet, she’s never considered the fact that he might not have one at all.

Some people don’t, see.

It’s rare—incredibly, unbelievably rare—but then, there are many things about Josh that are unlike any man she’s ever met. And of course, of course, by some sick twist of fate, of course it’s possible that he has no soulmate at all.

It’s just that that had never occurred to her, that the universe could be that cruel, to either him or her. That must be why he looks so sad—if he has no soulmate, it must be incredibly painful to have to hear her talk about them, like they’re a great fortune that everyone has.

She can empathize with his pain, she thinks, because that precise pain—whatever pain Josh is in now—is the reason for her own, is the reason she’s doomed to misery.

She’d accepted that she isn’t his soulmate, but she hadn’t accepted that that could mean that he didn’t have one, that he’d never get to be happy, not with anyone.

And Josh must read some of that, must see something like horror, shock, devastation on her face, because he adds, hastily, “I’m not saying they’re not a thing, I’m just--.” He pauses, again, seeming not to know what to say.

Donna waits, not saying anything.

“I’m just saying,” he continues, finally, “assuming that they are—that they might be—a thing, Mandy’s not mine, okay?”

Donna can’t help smiling at that, because Josh looks more flustered than she’s ever seen him, and because this means the door isn’t closed, maybe, not yet. Not completely. “Okay.”

She thinks about it, then, about probing a little more, about asking him if he’s got a soulmate, if he’s got a mark, maybe even if his mark has changed, if he’s got one.

But she doesn’t.

She finds, suddenly, that she’s not sure that she wants to know.

Not that she’s sure he would tell her, if she asked. But even so, she’s afraid of what he might say if she did.

So she doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t volunteer any further information.

And the one, unspoken, cardinal rule between them remains true, remains true for both of them--they don’t ever talk about their marks.

~~~~

It’s Joey Lucas that makes Josh reconsider things.

Well, at first he’s just glad that Donna finally seems to have dropped the Mandy thing. After that one conversation in his office—the one where Donna wouldn’t stop talking about Jane Austen or something—she hasn’t bothered him about Mandy again.

And he would be glad about that—only glad—if he didn’t feel a little bothered by the fact that Donna clearly thinks it’s plausible that his soulmate is Mandy.

And if Donna finds it plausible that his soulmate is Mandy—and what’s more, if she’s as unbothered by that as she seemed to be, throughout that entire conversation—then it’s become more clear than ever that he’s not Donna’s soulmate, that it’s not reciprocated.

Because if he is, if it was, why the hell would she be pushing him towards someone else?

Of course, it’s not until Joey Lucas—not until the hotel in LA, where Joey also happens to be staying—that he realizes all of this.

Meeting Joey for the first time had been a disaster, after all. In fact, he doesn’t remember much of that day at all, other than wearing Sam’s fishing waders, and clinging to Donna’s arm as they walked down the hall to find somewhere for him to change into the fresh suit she’d somehow procured for him.

(He remembers clinging to Donna’s arm, which would be strange, in a day that he barely remembers, but he’s already realized that that’s how he catalogues his days, even the ones that are otherwise hazy—in the moments that he shares with Donna, no matter what those moments look like. Sometimes his only memory of useless meetings, ones that he should have farmed out, that he shouldn’t have needed to be present for, is Donna coming in sometime in the middle, to pass along a message to him, feeling her lips almost graze his ear as she whispers something to him that ought not be made known to the rest of the group. It’s always interesting reporting back to Leo after those meetings, when his only memories are Donna, Donna, Donna.)

But in LA, knowing Joey’s there, things are different.

Because Donna’s egging him on, encouraging him, saying something about rosebuds, the kind of encouragement that only Donna gives, and he can’t think too much about the fact that it’s Donna encouraging him to go after someone else or he’d be betrayed by the devastation that would surely show on his face, so he allows himself to be excited.

Or, as excited as he could be, given that Joey, for all of her charm and intellect and humor, isn’t Donna.

(And it’s not just about the fates, that thought. It’s not just about the fact that Joey isn’t the one that the hands of destiny have chosen for him, it comes back to the simple fact that she isn’t Donna, and he wonders if maybe he would have felt that way anyway, would have come to that realization even if there were no such thing as soulmates, no mark burning red on his hip.)

(But this is this world, and in this world, he musters up all the excitement he’s supposed to have, musters up the joy that really, anyone thinking they have a shot with Joey Lucas ought to have, without Donna to compare her to.)

(He finds himself returning to that, more often than not, though—the fact that it’s not the soulmate thing that’s done this to him. Because it’s not as though it’s the end of the world and he and Donna are the last two people on earth, or they’ve been left on a desert island, just the two of them—it’s not the simple fact that the universe is telling him that this is it, that she’s the only one, the only possibility. It’s the fact that, all else being equal, with everyone currently in the world remaining in the world, or everyone in the world being on that island—which, well, he supposes wouldn’t be deserted, at that point, anymore—with everything just like this, just the way it is, with the whole wide world of possibilities, it would still be her. It’s the fact that everything about her makes him know—know without ever being able to confirm it—that she’s the only one, anyway, the only one that would ever make any sense, that he could ever want like this.)

And so, no, Joey’s not his soulmate, of course she’s not, and she never will be. But even Josh knows that he’d be an idiot not to notice that she’s attractive, that she’s smart, that she’s funny.

And if he can’t have Donna—and Donna’s encouragement is surely a sign that he cannot have Donna, even without all the other obvious reasons that he cannot have her—well, he could do a lot worse than Joey Lucas.

(And he has.)

Plus, there’s an upside to letting Donna wax on about rosebuds and poetry and not letting opportunities fall by the wayside, and that is: getting to watch Donna in those moments, Donna kneeling on the bed—his bed, hands on her hips, eyes wide and dramatic.

And for a moment—before the party, right when they get to the hotel, and Donna is giving him his messages, asking if he’s got a crush on Joey—he thinks he almost detects a little jealousy in her.

It’s stupid, and he feels like a high schooler for even noticing, but he can’t help the thrill of hope that rushes through him when Donna tells him to call Joey back (because you’re really bothering me).

He tries not to think about that too much, because if he does, it might all slip out, he might ask her something, something he can’t take back, like, But why does this bother you? Is it ever hard, for you, to watch me think about someone else, like it’s impossible for me to watch you go on dates? Don’t you realize that this doesn’t matter—that none of this matters, not enough, not when there’s a mark burning on my hip that reminds me that it was only ever supposed to be you?

Of course, he doesn’t say any of that—he can’t say any of that—and it’s ridiculous, anyhow. Donna’s bothered because she’s in here, with him, reading him phone messages, instead of tanning outside with CJ like she’d plotted on the plane. That’s why she reminded him about her alabaster skin (not that he needs the reminder, mind you, it’s not as though he can’t stop looking at it or anything), because she wanted to be outside, not because she was jealous of Joey, jealous for Josh’s attraction.

And then, of course, the other problem is that it all endears her to him more than ever, the same way, regardless of her intentions, this whole trip has endeared her to him more than ever—I have alabaster skin, you know---and he wonders if, on some level, she understands all of that.

He wonders if, on some level, she knows that all of this only makes it harder, that watching Donna convince him to ask out another woman only makes his stubborn heart want Donna all the more.

But that’s wishful thinking.

Donna neither knows nor cares what his heart is doing, and why should she? Well, of course she cares, but not in the way that he’s almost given up wishing that she would. She cares because that’s what Donna does; Donna cares about people, people others forget about. It’s part of what makes her so damn good at her job, the way she’s always bugging him about the people that are impacted by the policies they make.

It’s also one of the things that he likes most about her, the way he’s always learning from her, from the way that she cares.

But even with that, with the way she cares, the way she always does, and more than that, the way she cares because of who they are to each other—Donna is his best friend, even if he’s never told her that—surely she doesn’t care about his crushes on a personal level, doesn’t see them as something that’s going to impact her, other than keeping her from tanning during the fifteen minutes or whatever time she’d planned to carve out during their twenty hours in California.

But just for a moment, when she tells him that he’s really bothering her, he lets himself pretend that it has to do with jealousy, that Donna doesn’t like the idea of him and Joey any more than he likes the idea of Donna with…well, anyone that’s not him.

But he doesn’t let himself dwell on it, on any of it. In fact, he hardly even lets himself think about Donna, about Joey, about anything, really, until they get to the fundraiser that night.

Donna’s distracted, that night at the party. She’s like a puppy dog, walking around, her head turning at one person after another, and it makes him smile to watch her, to see how adorable she is with awe and excitement painted all over her face, with the blush in her cheeks that he finds almost unbearably attractive.

He catches himself thinking about that more than once that night—about how beautiful she is, all soft blonde hair and wide blue eyes and alabaster skin, punctuated with the constellations of freckles that have somehow appeared after only a few hours in California—and every time he does, he forces himself out of it, forces himself to yank his eyes away from her, to look around for something else to distract him.

After he talks to Joey Lucas, and then Toby, and then Joey again, he drags Donna away from where she was talking quite animatedly to a bewildered-looking Matthew Perry, and it’s only as he’s pulling her away that he realizes that he has no excuse for doing so. It hasn’t even been that long since the first time he pulled her away from someone tonight. (Although, to be fair, he hadn’t had much of an excuse for that, either. He just likes being around Donna, at events like this. It makes it all feel less overwhelming.)

(Well, he likes being around Donna all the time—it makes any event better, not just these—but this isn’t the moment to think about that.)

“Josh,” she scolds, as he pulls her away, his hand finding her lower back like it always does, because what he needs tonight—what he needs right now—is the familiarity of her, of her warmth, of the way she puts him at ease. “We were having a moment.”

“You were having a moment. He looked like he was no longer sure what year it was.”

“I have that effect on men.”

“You disorient them? Donna, I don’t know that that’s the brag you think it is.”

“Joooosh--,” she whines. “It was Matt Perry, you know how I am about him.”

“You’re calling him Matt now?”

She sniffs. “It’s what his friends call him.”

“Did he tell you to call him that?”

“He was about to, if you hadn’t pulled me away--.”

Josh raises an eyebrow at her.

“Fine, it was Matthew Perry, Josh, you know how I am about--.”

“Okay, what is the fixation on Matthew Perry?”

It comes out like a joke, which of course it is, and of course it isn’t, because as unfair as it is—seeing how he has been looking around for Joey Lucas all night, and actually talking to Joey the rest of it—he doesn’t like the idea that Donna’s been watching anyone, even if it is someone as unattainable as a TV star.

“To be fair, I also spoke to David Hasselhoff.”

“Right.”

“You’re not the only handsome and powerful man here, you know,” she teases, laughter in her voice, taking a sip of the drink in her hand.

He waves her off. “Yeah, yeah.”

He hates when she says things like that. He should love it—he knows he should love it—but surely Donna’s only saying it as a joke, Donna’s only saying it because she doesn’t really mean it, couldn’t possibly really mean that she finds him handsome, and how can he love that?

She’s takes another sip of her drink—where the hell did Donna get another drink?—and Josh is about to ask her about it when he realizes it’s his.

“When did you take my drink?” he asks, and he should be more surprised than he is, except that Donna is always taking things right out of his hands, and he doesn’t notice nearly as often as he should, because when he’s standing close enough for Donna to take something right out of his hands, he’s usually not looking at—not thinking about—his hands at all, except for earlier tonight, when he found himself holding her hand before he even really noticed he was doing it.

(He hadn’t even really noticed that he was holding her hand earlier, in fact, so much as he noticed the absence of it, when she pulled her hand away (after he took her drink and told her to stop drinking) and patted him on the chest as she went off in pursuit of—who else?—Matthew Perry.)

Donna rolls her eyes, and this time he thinks he almost hears a hint of annoyance in her voice. “You were scanning the crowd for Joey Lucas again.”

“I really wasn’t.”

She eyes him. “She wanted to see you, Josh, remember? That’s why she left that message for you, the one you never returned?”

“She’s with somebody,” he says distractedly, unbothered, because for some reason, standing here with Donna, he’s suddenly not that concerned with Joey, not now, not in this moment, when he and Donna are passing the-drink-formerly-known-as-his back and forth between them, when they’re standing close enough that her side presses against his hip, making his mark burn underneath all the layers of clothing, the way it always does when they touch.

Donna cranes her neck, squinting towards the table where Joey is still sitting. “I’m pretty sure that’s Kenny.”

He snorts. “Not Kenny. She came here with someone, she told me.”

“Well, whoever he is, he’s not with her now,” Donna says. “You should go over there.”

“I already said goodbye to her, I can’t go over there now.”

“Why not?”

“It’ll look weird!”

“Well--.” Donna starts, but Josh cuts her off.

“Just,” he pauses. “Let’s drop it, okay?”

Donna studies him for a long moment, weighing her options.

Then, she shrugs, taking another sip of his drink, before grabbing his hand (and trying very hard not to notice the way his fingers curl around hers, almost reflexively, almost like earlier, when he held her hand without a word as he walked her away from David Hasselhoff, and then, when he’d dropped it, before she could even gasp, he’d switched sides, grabbing her other hand, like he, too, wasn’t ready to stop holding hands, now that they’d started—but that’s a road she can’t go down, that’s a thought that has to be cut off right there, right at the knees, and so she drops that, too, as though he’d asked her to) and placing the drink back in it.

She does drop the Joey thing, for the moment.

She drops it until they get back to the hotel, until she gets a chance to ask him again exactly what Joey said about being with someone.

Donna doesn’t know why she’s encouraging him. Yeah, it throws him off the scent—she’s pretty sure, at this point, that Josh has absolutely no idea that he’s her soulmate (not that it would make much difference if he did, not that he would be with her if he did—but it saves her a lot of embarrassment and most likely her job, having him not know), but the fact that Josh has no idea why she needs to save face doesn’t stop her from doing it.

And besides, she likes Joey Lucas.

What’s more, much as it pains her to admit it, Josh likes Joey Lucas. And she promised herself when she came back to him, way back on the campaign, that she would let him be happy, that if being in his life as his assistant was all that she got, she’d find a way to make that be enough.

And it almost is. They’ve moved well beyond boss and assistant at this point. Josh is more than that, even with the soulmate thing aside. He’s her best friend, the only person she’s always happy to see, happy to be around, the only person she can always speak candidly to (with the exception of the topic of soulmates, of course, although Josh seems to steer just as clear of that topic as she does, for reasons that remain unclear).

It’s almost enough, being Josh’s best friend, because it still gives her an excuse to put him first, it still gives her a plausible reason to want his happiness, to want what’s best for him, to want him to find someone to make him happy.

(She remembers, after all, the devastation she’d felt for him, in the moments when she’d thought he was telling her that he didn’t have a soulmate, when he was really trying to tell her—well, she hoped was really trying to tell her—that Mandy wasn’t it.)

It’s almost enough, but she knows, as she flops back onto his bed, defeated, the second he leaves his room to go down to Joey’s, ostensibly to say goodbye, that it isn’t quite enough, that maybe it never will be.

Because if it was enough—if it was truly enough—she would feel better, sending him off to pursue another woman. And, granted, it does feel better that that woman isn’t Mandy, and she likes Joey, she really does.

It’s just that she liked perching on Josh’s bed, watching him watch her as she stupidly egged him on, chicken noises and all, better—much better—than any of that.

And no one has ever accused Donna of being selfish, but the thing is this: she’s never wanted something—someone—so badly, so desperately, before.

It’s enough to make her wonder if she’s ever really wanted anything at all.

And she supposes that will always be the hang-up, that will always be the thing that stops this from being enough. Because even if Josh is happy, then what? Then she’ll have to watch him marry Joey Lucas? Or even if it isn’t Joey—she’ll have to watch him look at someone else with the softness in his eyes that up until now, she’s noticed, only seems to come out for her?

If he marries Joey Lucas, she won’t be in his hotel room, on his bed, like this, anymore. She won’t do a lot of things anymore. And so even if this is enough for right now—and only just barely enough, at that—it’s not enough forever, not when she knows that it can’t last, not when she knows, already, what it is to want, to want so deeply that she can barely stand it, and she also knows that she’s only just at the very beginning of this, of the endless want, and, furthermore, she knows besides that she will never have what it is that she wants so very badly.

She almost asks him, then—almost asks him if he’s sure, how he could possibly be sure, almost asks him if Joey might be his soulmate, because if she is, they’ll find their way back, and if she’s not…well then, maybe there’s a chance.

(Although she’s not sure what she’d say, if Josh asked what she meant by that--who, exactly, she’s referring to--when she says that there might be a chance.)

(It’s not like Al Kieffer is likely anyone’s soulmate, anyhow.)

(She wants to tell him that—the thing about Al Kieffer—if only because she knows that it will make him laugh, but it’s too close, too close to the things that they just don’t speak about; and, moreover, it doesn’t get to the heart of the thing, doesn’t get to his fingerprint on her ribs or the want that’s threatening, in this very moment, to overtake her.)

It’s almost impossible to stop herself, when Josh comes back to his room and stands there, in his casual clothes, his shirt unbuttoned just too much, just like it was that day that she felt her mark burn for the first time, and the rush of affection that she has for him, with his scruffy curls and the undershirt that’s peeking out from the undone buttons (why doesn’t he ever button those damn buttons?) almost overwhelms her. It’s almost too much, it almost compels her to say something that, all else being equal, she knows she’d regret.

She almost asks him, in that moment that he returns from Joey’s--looking somehow less defeated than she imagined he might about it--about all of it, about his mark, about his soulmate, but she doesn’t.

Because, no matter what, that’s the one topic that’s off-limits, that’s the one place that they never go.

They never talk about their marks.

Chapter Text

The world stops when Josh is shot.

One minute, Donna’s in her apartment, her roommate’s cat on her lap, lazily channel surfing, and the next minute, the world as she’s known it has come to an end.

Rationally, she knows that there’s a lot of time that passed between the channel surfing and the end of the world—time when she threw on a jacket, got a taxi, frantically scrambled to find a secret service agent who would let her in, someone who would let her through, help her find everyone else.

It’s almost funny—and, of course, it isn’t funny, not even a little bit, not at all—in retrospect, because she remembers exactly what she’d thought, when she saw what was on TV, when she knew she’d have to find a way to the hospital, a way to be there.

I have to get to Josh, she thought. That was the only thing in her mind, in the taxi, while she was talking to the secret service, the whole way. I have to get to Josh, I have to get to Josh, I have to get to Josh.

And she hadn’t even known that he’d been shot, then, she just knew that she didn’t want him to be alone. There were reports that the President had been shot, and she didn’t want Josh facing that all alone. (She knew, of course, that he wouldn’t be alone, that all of senior staff was bound to be around, but CJ would probably have to leave to do a briefing, and Toby and Sam might have to draft a statement, and all she could picture was Josh in an empty waiting room, refusing to leave until he knew that the President would be okay. Josh didn’t leave people, not when he thought that there was any chance they might be in trouble, that they might need help.)

And so she wanted to be there for Josh, wanted to sit with him, waiting for news about the President, wanted to hold his hand, if he needed, while they waited, while the rest got back to business.

It never occurred to her that maybe the I need to get to Josh that kept echoing through her mind was the pull of the fates, a cosmic preparation for the unfathomable words that would come out of Toby’s mouth when she finally got to an utterly Josh-less waiting room.

She’s never met someone else whose soulmate has been shot, so she’s not sure what it’s supposed to feel like, but all she knows, in that moment, is that the world has ended. It must have.

“I don’t understand,” she says, and she doesn’t, because Toby can’t mean what she thinks he means. He can’t mean that, not about Josh.

And that’s a horrible thing to think, she knows, that he can’t mean that about Josh, because it’s not as though Donna would wish this on anyone else.

But he can’t mean that about Josh.

Because, suddenly, Donna feels like Toby is the one who doesn’t understand, Toby is the one who doesn’t know. In fact, no one in this room understands, because Josh is her soulmate, Josh is the person she was born for, made for, destined to love for the rest of her life.

But it isn’t supposed to be like this. Because Donna will love him for the rest of her life, she has no doubts about that, but he was supposed to be there for that, she was supposed to continue loving him while he was still alive.

And the thing is, ever since that moment, that very first day on the campaign bus, when she first noticed that her mark had changed, she’s been telling herself that it’s never going to happen. Josh Lyman is never going to love her, to want her, the way that she wants him. She knows that, she understands that, she always has.

Except maybe she doesn’t, because it’s only as she’s standing here, listening to Toby telling her that Josh was hit, that his condition is not only serious but critical, that she realizes that there was always a part of her—a part of her that’s stronger, more significant than she ever would have admitted to herself—that didn’t believe it, that was holding onto hope that someday, by some miracle, Josh might want her back, Josh might be able to love her the way that she loves him.

And not only has that hope been dashed, but she might have spent her last moment with him, and she didn’t even know it.

She might never hear his voice again, she might never know what it’s like to get to pull him towards her, kiss each of those stupid, unbearable dimples in turn, the way she’s suddenly realizing she’s never stopped hoping that she might.

She might never hear him yelling for her again, his voice echoing through the bullpen. (She loves when he yells, even if she’d never have admitted that to him. She likes the thought that he needs her, because even if it isn’t in the way that she needs him, it’s not nothing. And it isn’t always a bellow—she knows him well enough to be able to discern his mood from the sound of his voice, from the way he says her name. When he’s late for something, or annoyed about something, or sleep deprived, it’s a little gruffer, a little throatier. When he’s happy, when he’s excited, when there’s something he wants to tell her, some boast about something he’s accomplished or someone he’s met with, or something that’s going to change the lives of millions of Americans, his voice gets vaguely sing-song-y, and she wishes she’d told him that, because she would’ve liked to watch his ears turn red as she did.)

But her favorite voice of Josh’s is when his voice gets sort of shy, soft, when he’s looking at her with warmth and softness, something a little like affection, in his eyes.

It was the way that he’d looked at her at Christmas, when he’d given her the skiing book with the note inside. The look on his face had been so fragile that she wanted to treat it gently, gingerly, wanted to hold onto the moment, to savor it with him.

Josh didn’t always look at her like that, but she’s only just realizing that the fragile hope she’d apparently held onto since she’d noticed her mark had changed was born from that look, was born from the moments of soft affection between them, from the moments that felt private, fragile, just for them to savor and hold onto themselves.

She can’t fathom a world without those moments, a world in which she never gets to experience that affection from him again.

She can’t imagine never getting to hug him again, to feel his arms wrap tightly around her and hold her so close, to not get to feel his face burying into her shoulder, to never again know the way time froze just for the two of them.

You don’t understand, she wants to tell Toby. You don’t understand.

Because it was never supposed to be like this.

No matter how many times that she told herself that she was never going to get to be with Josh, that they could never find a way to make it work, that he was never going to look at her—without a degree, without any qualifications, so unlike the rest of the people they worked with—as anyone but the person who made sure that he wasn’t late to senior staff (or, at least, not late to senior staff every single day—even she wasn’t a miracle worker), it still was never supposed to be like this.

She wasn’t supposed to lose him, not so early, not like this.

He wasn’t supposed to be ripped away from her like this, they were supposed to have more time.

She was supposed to have time to figure this out.

She doesn’t know what she says to Toby, doesn’t remember responding to him. She’s sinking into a chair before she even knows that she’s doing it, and thank God that there’s a chair there, because she’d just as well have fallen on the floor if there hadn’t been.

Later, Mrs. Landingham will take her hand, and that will be the first time she’ll feel grounded again, the first time it will occur to her that she has no idea how long she’s been sitting there, no idea how long Josh has been in surgery, no idea how it’s going.

She’ll wonder, for a moment, if maybe Mrs. Landingham is the only one who could maybe understand what she’s feeling, sitting there, waiting for news, but she dismisses that thought as soon as it comes—it’s not like the President and Mrs. Landingham, her and Josh. Sure, the power differential may be somewhat similar, but it isn’t like them.

She and Josh aren’t like any of them, any of the other bosses and assistants in the West Wing, and even though it isn’t what she wishes it was—even though Josh doesn’t love her, or at least, isn’t in love with her—she knows that. It’s not the same.

The thing with her and Josh, it’s like this:

There was this one time, back on the campaign trail, when the campaign had gone to Madison.

(That was a trip that Donna hadn’t wanted to go on—the only one that she can remember not wanting to go on, actually. But she also hadn’t wanted to let it show that she didn’t want to go. She’d only just been put on a salary then, and she didn’t want to give anyone any reason to think that she didn’t deserve it, especially since she was absolutely sure that she didn’t.)

(The lack of qualifications thing had been a much bigger deal to her, then.)

She’d tried to hide her trepidation all week leading up to the trip, not wanting anyone to ask her about it, not wanting anyone to notice.

When Josh had asked her about Madison, said something like, “Hey, you’re from there, aren’t you? Think your parents will come to any of the events?”, she’d dismissed him, shrugged it off, made some comment about the fact that her parents were Republicans, and she’d tried to make her voice sound as normal as possible, tried to make it seem like nothing was wrong.

Josh had given her a strange look and been silent for a long moment—probably the longest moment since she’d started working for him—but he hadn’t pushed back at all, hadn’t pressed her any further.

In fact, it wasn’t her parents that worried her—she loved her parents. But her ex-boyfriend was still in Madison (“Dr. Freeride”, as Josh had called him, gleefully, from the very first day), and Donna very much did not want to see him.

They hadn’t exactly ended things on good terms, and even when she’d gone back to the campaign the second time, he’d called her for the first several days, whining about some bill that was due, or how she’d abandoned him, how she would pay for that someday, how it wasn’t like she had anything to offer anyone, in her new job, and how “that boss you love so much” was going to notice how pathetic she was immediately and send her home, where she’d be out of a place to live, and maybe she should have thought about that!

(She’d never picked up the calls, but he hadn’t been shy about leaving voicemails.)

She was worried about her ex showing up at some event, or at the hotel they were staying at. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of him (although she was, a little—there had been moments, in their relationship, that she still can’t let herself even think about without feeling sick to her stomach, and the voicemails with promises that she’d pay for leaving him hadn’t exactly boosted her confidence), but she was also embarrassed. She was just starting to really like the person that she was becoming, here on the campaign, here in this job. She was just starting to feel like she belonged here, and she didn’t want anyone to be reminded of who she used to be.

(A part of her was a little afraid that her ex was right, after all. Maybe she was pathetic, maybe she didn’t deserve to be here, maybe if people took a second to remember that she was completely unqualified, they might realize that, and then what would happen?)

But Josh hadn’t pressed her, in the days leading up to the trip.

She had noticed, though, that he seemed to be a little bit needier, as the trip grew closer. He seemed to want her closer to him than he usually did, seemed to want her always by his side, seemed to watch her a little bit more closely than she was used to.

And even though he never said anything, she could tell that there was something on his mind, something he wasn’t telling her. Something was bothering him, something was different, in the way that he looked at her.

But it helped, regardless.

Maybe that was the thing about soulmates, something that you didn’t figure out until you met yours; maybe soulmates could calm you down in a way that no one else could, because when Donna was with Josh that week, going to Madison suddenly didn’t seem so scary, suddenly didn’t seem like anything to worry about.

That is, until they get there, and the hotel they’re staying at turns out to be the one right across the street from the diner where Donna used to spend every night.

She decides immediately when they arrive that she doesn’t care how late their nights are on this trip, she will not be setting foot in that diner, and she prays that no one suggests it.

But that hope is dashed on their very first night.

She’d already been on edge since they arrived in Madison. As soon as they’d dumped their stuff in the hotel (she’d left her suitcase in Josh’s room, not having time to get to hers after having to help him with his room key), they’d gone to check out the venue for the rally the next day, making sure everything was in order, and on the way back to the hotel, she’d asked Josh, in a voice that she hoped was nonchalant, “How hard would it be for someone to figure out where the campaign is staying?”

“Depends,” Josh said. “We’re not exactly a secret, but someone trying to find the Governor’s room would have a harder time.”

Donna must have looked nervous, because Josh nudged her with his elbow from the seat next to her, and he didn’t pull away. “He’ll be fine,” he says. “He’s got security, he’ll be fine.”

She nods, and she doesn’t say anything else, not wanting to betray the fact that the Governor wasn’t who she was worried about. But she can feel Josh’s eyes on her, studying her, the way he’s been doing all week, and he looks as though he’s finally figuring something out, finally straightening out what had been bothering him.

(The thing about Josh is that he’s not very subtle. He thinks he is, the same way that he thinks he can hold his liquor, or put hot sauce on his scrambled eggs without hastily gulping down a glass of water afterwards, his whole face the color of a fire engine, but although the man has a million virtues, subtlety isn’t among them.)

“Donna,” he says, slowly, quietly, after a moment. He looks around to make sure that no one else on the campaign bus is paying any attention to them. “Are you—I mean, do you think someone might be trying to look for you?”

Donna doesn’t say anything, suddenly embarrassed, because maybe this is what her ex was referring to, maybe this is the part where Josh looks at her like she’s pathetic, like she’s stupid.

But there’s nothing but kindness and sincerity in his eyes, so she sighs. “I know it…it probably sounds stupid,” she says.

“It doesn’t sound stupid,” he says softly, immediately, his voice a little breathy.

(She loves him, in that moment. She loves him so much in that moment that she doesn’t know what to do with it, because this is why her mark changed when she met him, this is why it’s so hard to separate herself from him, this is why she left her ex and came back to him.)

She laughs, in spite of herself. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

He shakes his head. “I know it’s not stupid.”

She smiles again, and a little bit of the anxiety melts away. “It’s just…my ex…we didn’t,” she pauses. “We didn’t exactly leave things on good terms, and I don’t think he’d be dumb enough to try anything, but I just…I don’t want him to know where I am.”

“Okay,” Josh says, and then, again, a minute later, “Okay.”

He’s got a look on his face that she recognizes—he’s thinking this over, he’s coming up with a plan, with a strategy.

“Josh,” she says, and she goes to put her hand on his shoulder, to stop him from whatever he’s trying to figure out, and it’s only then that she realizes that they’re still sitting shoulder to shoulder, their arms pressed together, that Josh is trying to cling to her the way that he has all week, and it’s only then that it occurs to her that he might have suspected that there was something like this going on, that that might have been the very thing that’s been bothering him all week.

“Josh, you don’t have to--,” she continues, but Josh cuts her off this time.

“Okay,” he says, “Here’s what we do. You stay with me the whole time we’re here, okay? I mean it—meals, everything. We can get the hotel to bring an extra cot to my room, I’ll sleep on that. That way, even if anyone goes looking for you, you’re not in your room. We’ll be fine at the event tomorrow—there’ll be tons of security there, no one will be able to get to you without getting through them and me—and then we’re back on the bus tomorrow night, we’re home free.”

He’s looking at her, his eyes so serious, so gentle, and it makes her want to cry. Because this is the other thing, the other thing that brought her back to him—the way he immediately made this his problem, and his use of the word “we” in every sentence—and the way that he shows her that this is important to him, as if they’re in this together, Josh and Donna against the world--is almost more than she can handle.

Her eyes are welling up before she can stop them, and Josh must misinterpret that, because he glances around, to make sure no one is paying attention to them, and then tugs his arm from where it was pressed against hers and throws it around her shoulders, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her closer. “It’s going to be fine, Donna,” he whispers. “I promise.”

She knows she shouldn’t, she knows it’s wrong, but she lets him hold her anyway.

She feels better.

Later, when they get back to the hotel, the whole group decides to go over to the diner across the way for dinner. Donna sits on Josh’s bed, holding a pillow on her lap, idly playing with the fringe on the edge of the pillowcase, while Josh changes his clothes in the bathroom, wondering how she’s going to tell him that she doesn’t want to go to the diner without spoiling his entire night.

“You wanna go over there with everyone?” Josh asks, when he emerges, looking unfairly good as he always does when he dresses casually, in a white t-shirt with a blue flannel shirt unbuttoned over it.

After a second, he scratches his head. “I think, you know, with everyone there, it shouldn’t be too much of a--,” he pauses. “But only if you’re comfortable, it’s okay if you’re not, I know you might not want to be in public--.” He trails off, looking at her uncertainly.

“It’s not,” she hesitates. “It’s not that, it’s just…”

She doesn’t know how to say it, and it doesn’t make sense that she can’t find the words, because Josh is being so wonderful to her, has been so wonderful to her, not only on this trip, but every single day since that very first day, when she’d…well, sort of hired herself, and she has no reason to think that telling him that she used to work at a diner would make him suddenly more aware of her lack of qualifications for this job than he already was, but suddenly she’s afraid.

“Donna?” Josh looks more worried now. “It’s okay, we don’t have to go. You always say I’m eating too many burgers, anyway. It’s better, actually, if we don’t go--.” Josh’s eyebrows are somewhere near his hairline and he’s starting to ramble, the way he only does if he’s getting really worried about something, and it’s that that makes her tell him.

“I used to work there!” she blurts out, and Josh stops pacing by the door, looking at her.

“At the—at the diner?”

“Yes.”

“That guy made you drop out of school to work at that diner?”

“Josh--.”

He shakes his head. “Sorry. Okay.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, looking at the ground. After a beat, he looks up at her again, smiling broadly at her. “Okay, so I’m thinking we order a pizza.”

It’s so far from what they were talking about that the heaviness in the room dissipates instantly, and Donna laughs. Josh has a way of doing that—of making her feel lighter when she’s so anxious that she doesn’t know what to do--and before she knows it, the diner is forgotten, the fear and trepidation of the day disappearing the second that he mentioned pizza.

They do order a pizza, and they eat it side by side on his bed while they watch a marathon of old episodes of Cheers on the TV.

What they forget to order, Donna realizes the next morning, when she wakes up to find Josh’s arm slung across her middle, was the cot. Josh is next to her, on his stomach, his head turned towards her, and is fast asleep with his mouth open just a little, his arm wrapped fully around her, as though he’d tried to pull her closer over the course of the night.

It’s so endearing, the way he’s protective even in his sleep, and she’s tempted to reach over, to run her fingers through his hair—which is even more unruly than usual in his sleep, and that’s saying something—or  to snuggle closer to him, this man that she loves so much, despite what’s probably best for her.

It’s a few minutes, a few minutes of silence, lying there, with Josh asleep just a few inches away, before she remembers why she’d stayed in his room in the first place.

Because she isn’t afraid, not in that moment, not anymore.

And that’s another thing that Josh does—he makes her not afraid, he makes her feel secure, safe, cared for, in a way that no one else ever has. (She wonders, just for a moment, if that—if her subconscious noticing just how vast the difference is between the way that Josh cares for her and the way her ex had…or hadn’t, if she’s being honest—was the thing that really brought her back to him.)

That night, for the first time, in the many times she’d accidentally fallen asleep in Josh’s bed over the course of the campaign, she didn’t force herself to wriggle away from him. She just closed her eyes and let herself doze, enjoying the warm weight of his arm across her hips, until the alarm blared.

She doesn’t quite know what it is that makes her think of that night, as she sits there with Mrs. Landingham while Josh is in surgery, but she’s grateful that she didn’t move away from him, that she let herself have it, now that she knows that it’s unlikely that she’ll ever have it again.

But it wasn’t that, she knows—it was the way that that night had felt, the way that Josh had made her feel so safe with him, the way that he had told her, the very second that he realized that she was afraid, not to worry. It was the way he’d been there for her, been right in it with her, without making her talk about it, or tell him about why, exactly, she was so scared of seeing her ex, about the nights that “Dr. Freeride” (as she had now taken to calling him, herself—it helped, in a way) had terrified her, about why the diner, even with the coworkers she’d genuinely liked, did not hold happy memories for her.

He hadn’t made her talk about any of it, he’d just thrown his arm around her and, later, bought her a pizza, offering up his own bed, his protection, his company.

There’s a terrible sort of irony in thinking about that now, though, she realizes, because only Josh makes her feel safe like that, secure like that, when she’s so scared she can barely breathe.

Only Josh would know what to do, would know how to make her feel like she was going to be okay, like she was going to be able to breathe again.

And of course it’s Josh--only Josh—that can’t help her now.

It’s been a long time since Donna prayed—she doesn’t know quite how long; she’s never been particularly religious. But she prays, that night, while she grips Mrs. Landingham’s hand (and, later, Dr. Bartlet’s). She prays as she watches him, through the observation window, and she prays when watching him becomes too much, when she can’t look at him lying there, so utterly quiet and still that he hardly looks like Josh at all.

She thinks about that night again, that night on the campaign, about how Josh had taken it upon himself to never leave her side, to make sure that she felt safe, to make sure that she made it through.

If he lives, she vows, she won’t leave his side. She will do for him what he did for her that night, what he does for her every day, making her feel safe and cared for. If he lives, she will make sure he never feels alone in his recovery.

It’s funny, she thinks, making this promise, because in some sense, she’s done this before. She’s already promised herself to Josh, without him even knowing about it, although perhaps the soulmate thing is less of a choice, less of a conscious action.

(Except it is a choice, she thinks. The universe may designate soulmates, but no one is under any obligation to cooperate with the universe. Soulmates are given, yes, but they’re also chosen—she could have left Josh, could’ve walked away from the campaign and the administration when she realized he was her soulmate and he could never want her back. It might have hurt less. But she chose to stay. She chose him, regardless of her better judgment, regardless of the universe. And she vowed to keep choosing him, if he made it through this. She wouldn’t leave his side, she wouldn’t leave him.)

When the world comes back—when her world wakes up—she keeps her promise.

It has nothing to do with the universe.

It has everything to do with him, everything to do with the fact that she knows, now, even if it was only for a few hours, what it was like to live without him, what it was like to have to even consider a life without him in it, and she never wants to live like that again, she never wants to be apart from him, she will never choose to be away from him, no matter how hard it is to be linked to him by fate, without him being tied to her in return.

And so she tells herself that it doesn’t matter what the universe says, she’s never going to choose anything but this.

She keeps choosing him, choosing him as he recovers, as she moves into his apartment, as she spends every moment that she possibly can taking care of him, monitoring him, making sure that he has everything he needs.

She keeps choosing him, day in and day out, as she learns to clean and care for his wounds, as she keeps him comfortable, as she crawls into bed with him when his nightmares become too overwhelming, as she keeps an eye on the temperature of the apartment to make sure he’s never too cold or too hot, which is more difficult than it sounds in the heat of a DC Indian summer.

She keeps choosing him, and she tells herself that it has nothing to do with the order of the universe.

And then, one night, all of that changes.

She’s changing his bandages before he goes to sleep. Even though he’ll probably wake up sweating in the middle of the night, his bandages soaked through and his heart racing, she always makes sure his wounds are clean before bed.

Josh has taken to sleeping without a shirt on, lately, since he gets overheated easily in sleep, and she hasn’t thought much about it, has strangely grown accustomed to seeing him lying there in nothing but his boxers or a pair of pajama bottoms, a sheet or blanket around his waist.

She cleans his wounds, business as usual, taking the care that she always does to work as gently as possible, to say something—anything—to keep Josh distracted while she works so that he doesn’t notice the way his wounds still sting, so that he doesn’t glance down at them, with his stomach weaker than ever from all the medication he’s on.

But that night, her words of distraction die on her lips.

Because she’s used to seeing Josh in just pajama bottoms, and she’s almost at the point where she doesn’t even think about the fact that he’s half-naked anymore.

But that night, that night, his waistband hits him just a fraction of a centimeter lower on his hips than it usually does, or at least than she’s ever noticed before.

And there, on his hip, is the edge of a mark.

Donna can’t get a good look at it—the edge that’s peeking out of his waistband is just a sliver, and she doesn’t want him to think that she’s ogling, that she’s paying any attention, that she’s invading the last shred of privacy that might exist between them—but she can tell just from the edge of it that the pattern is a fingerprint.

But that’s not it, that’s not all, that’s not the part that makes her heart drop to her stomach.

Josh’s mark…it’s bright red.

Chapter Text

Donna always talks, while she cleans Josh’s wounds. She talks about all kinds of things, things that don’t matter, things that will keep him calm when it stings, things that will keep her calm in the tragic intimacy of tending to the wounds of the man whom she is in love with, who is not in love with her.

And so, this time, when she doesn’t, when she isn’t talking, it disrupts the calm immediately.

She stops speaking so abruptly that she doesn’t even notice, but Josh does, Josh must, because he reaches up to still her hands, still cleaning his wound just as carefully, even though she’s fallen silent.

“Donna?” He asks softly. “Are you okay?”

(He’s always watching her, is the thing. Donna uses the time when she’s cleaning and bandaging his wounds to talk to him, say little stupid things that don’t matter, even to her, but Josh uses the time to study her, to get to gaze up at her and drink her in for as long as he wants to, longer than he ever can in the light of day, in front of anyone else, or even in front of her, when she doesn’t have something like this to distract her. And so yeah, he notices where her eyes fall, when her voice stutters and then stops, when her hands tremble just a little. Of course he does. He notices immediately.)

She doesn’t know what to say in response. In some sense, of course she’s not—she hasn’t been in weeks—of course there’s absolutely nothing about this situation, about cleaning the wound in Josh’s chest from where he almost died that’s okay, except, of course, for the fact that he is still alive.

But, it’s just that Josh’s mark is red. So not only does Josh have a soulmate—not only is he not without one, like she’d thought for a while, like he’d sort of led her to believe—but he’s met her already. He already knows who his soulmate is.

“Is that—is that a…,” she trails off, not sure how to ask something as unbearably intimate as this, even with whatever boundaries that remain between them tumbling down more and more each day, crumbling before them like the walls of Jericho.

“You know,” she tries again, at last. “On your hip. A mark?”

Josh lets out a strange, sort of strangled yelp, because even as he’d seen where Donna’s eyes were looking, even as he’d expected her to ask, somewhere, someday, he hadn’t actually expected it to happen right now, and he hasn’t actually decided what he’s going to tell her.

Donna, luckily, misinterprets the noise, mistaking the surprise in his voice for pain.

Except it isn’t lucky at all, Josh realizes, when he sees the horror on her face. He hates when Donna looks like this, hates realizing what a toll his injury has taken on her, hates recognizing that, in some sense, Donna, too, was a victim of the shooting, if only secondhand.

“I’m so sorry,” she says hurriedly, “I’ll be more careful, I know this stings sometimes--.”

He touches her hand again to still it. “It’s okay,” he says. “I--.” He feels like he needs to say something here, and not just to allow himself to think of something to say, some way to answer the question that’s inevitably coming.

“I appreciate what you’re doing,” he says. “You know that, right? I was just surprised at the…at the question, is all. But you—you have nothing to apologize for.”

It’s not enough, not nearly enough, to express what she is to him, what he thinks every time he looks up at her while she takes care of him so gently, so precisely.

And it’s not enough to get him out of the moment, he realizes a moment later, but it wasn’t about that, anyway, and seeing the small, tight smile that Donna gives him—worlds better than the look of horror that had been on her face a moment earlier, even if it’s not his favorite smile of his—is enough to satisfy him, enough to make his chest not quite so tight.

“It’s red,” she says quietly, and it’s not a question—he might’ve known that Donna wouldn’t ask him the question, not now—but he knows, nevertheless, because he knows her, that she’s still waiting for an answer.

He lets out a little laugh, and Donna might have noticed how nervous his laugh was, if she had been able to hear anything but the blood rushing in her ears, her heart pounding so wildly it might well beat right out of her chest.

Josh, of course, is faced with his own decision, and it seems wildly unfair that the decision should have to come in a moment like this, when he doesn’t have time to really think about it.

But it comes to him, almost before he even realizes that he’s making a decision. It’s not really a conscious choice, is the thing, because in order to make a conscious choice, you have to have options, and even though this situation—this question—is exactly what he’s always feared, in the back of his mind, he’d never realized how limited his options actually are.

He’s never let himself think about what this moment would look like, see.

Even on the days that he let himself really think about all of it—think about the fact that the universe has destined him to love this woman, and, moreover, that he does love this woman, regardless of fate, regardless of the universe—he didn’t really conceive of a moment like this.

He’s spent hours, after all, telling himself that the soulmate marks don’t really have to matter, that maybe there’s a future, somewhere down the line, that maybe, even if Donna has a soulmate that’s not him, there’s a path out there some way, somewhere.

He’s spent a while trying to convince himself that the world couldn’t be that dark, couldn’t be so cruel, as to fate him to this woman with whom he has no possible future, is what it is.

Except that he’s been lying in a bed for the better part of a month because a skinhead tried to shoot a black man for the crime of daring to date a white woman, and then shot at anyone and everyone who didn’t object to that relationship, so why he ever believed that the world couldn’t be even darker and crueler than he could have even imagined is beyond him.

But in all that time, in all that time of trying to make himself feel better, and then chastising himself for trying to make himself feel better, he’s never really thought about what he would say, if Donna ever asked him.

Granted, he didn’t exactly anticipate that Donna would have the opportunity to see his mark—not unless things were miraculously going much better between them than even he ever dared to imagine—so it wasn’t like this was a situation that he should have expected.

But he still should have been ready. He still should have come up with something.

Because he can’t tell her the truth; of that, he’s certain. He can’t tell her the truth in a moment like this, not when he still needs her so badly.

If he doesn’t lie, won’t that send her away? If he doesn’t lie, and it’s as unrequited as he’d always assumed, she wouldn’t stay—how could she?

And he doesn’t know what to do without her, doesn’t know how he could possibly make it through the nightmares without Donna crawling into bed beside him, smoothing his sweaty hair back from his forehead, falling asleep curled up right next to him, neither of them worrying about boundaries, not in the middle of the night, not in the midst of the darkness that’s always lingering there in the room when the nightmares wake him again.

He doesn’t know what he’d do if she left. Having a taste of it during the campaign—of what it was like without her—was bad enough, but now that he knows what it is to wake up in the morning and find Donna only inches from him, sometimes even waking up to her sunshine smile beaming at him from the pillow next to his, her fingers still intertwined with his from the way they’d slept the night before, he can’t imagine going back to not having it.

(Rationally, he knows that one day, he will go back to work, and Donna will go back home, and his home will stop feeling like this, stop feeling quite like home, in the absence of Donna, but he doesn’t want to have to confront that right now, doesn’t want to do anything but savor the time that he has for as long as he has it.)

He doesn’t want her to go. Not ever, if he’s being honest, but oh, God, especially not now.

So what does it matter, in the end, if he lies about his mark? He’s never going to have her, no matter what he tells her now. But if playing it off like this, like it doesn’t matter, like he doesn’t think about his soulmate every damn minute of every day, if shrugging it off means he gets to keep her, keep her here, just for a little while, does it really matter?

It’s not as though the truth would do him any good.

And so maybe it doesn’t matter that he has no plan, when he knows in his heart of hearts that he never planned on telling her the truth, of sentencing her to a life with him, of limiting her options, of changing the way that she sees him, forever.

“In college,” he says, finally, hoping his face doesn’t betray his lie. “I don’t know who it was.”

Donna tries her best to laugh, hoping to God that it doesn’t sound as hollow, as empty, as it feels. “And here I thought romance was dead.”

He smiles, but it’s half-hearted, his dimples not carving quite as deeply in his cheeks as they do when he means it.

(In retrospect, he’s not sure why he said college, of all things. It was just the first period in his life that came to him, the first thing he could think of. In retrospect, he should have just told her that it happened on the campaign, even if he followed it with “I don’t know who it was”. If he had, everything might have been easier. But college is what came to him, so college is what he said.)

“Do you--?” His voice is soft, hesitant, in a way that would, all else being equal, be unlike Josh Lyman, but which, Donna thinks, is in fact very much like him in moments like these, in the soft, intimate moments that they’d shared just like this, every night since she’d moved it.

He clears his throat, causing her hands to jump just a little before she stills them and keeps working, and then continues. “I mean—do you have a…?”

He doesn’t know why he can’t finish the sentence, why he can’t force the word soulmate past his lips, not now, not here, not when he can feel the warmth of his soulmate’s fingers even through the fresh gauze she just placed gently over his surgical site.

“A mark?” she asks, and he’s certain he’s imagining it, but her voice sounds different, her voice doesn’t sound like hers.

He nods, unable to bring himself to open his mouth.

She looks at him for a long moment, her eyes boring into his, and he thinks—he swears he thinks--something passes between them. It’s as fragile as the moment when they first met—they’d stared at each other, just like this (I think you might find me valuable), and the whole world had changed, his whole life had transformed, just then.

She’s studying him, now, the way that he always studies her, in moments like this one, when she’s usually distracted, cleaning up his injuries. Her gaze holds steady, her eyes fixed on his, and then, for a fraction of a second—if he blinked, he would have missed it--he thinks he sees her eyes flicker to his lips, and then back up to his eyes. She swallows hard, like she’s made a decision.

“Hasn’t changed,” she lies, and her voice still sounds wrong, her voice still sounds like she’s been caught terribly off-guard, like she doesn’t know what to say. She wonders if Josh notices that. “Haven’t met him yet, I guess.”

It feels like she’s sealed her fate, in a way that she wasn’t prepared for.

Surely it wouldn’t feel like this, a conversation between soulmates, if they were, in fact, soulmates.

But Josh has just told her that he has one, and that it isn’t her. And she had to say something, had to find some way to avoid thinking about how pathetic it all is, how useless this endeavor has been from the beginning, how she has ignored the universe and fallen in love with this man in spite of what the fates told her, rather than because of them.

And she doesn’t know what the point of it all is, except that there is no point at all.

Because this was the moment she’d hoped for and prayed for and dreaded and feared, and it had all come to fruition in exactly the way she’d expected it to. And it’s only just now that it’s dawning on her that she’d always hoped some miracle would happen, and it wouldn’t turn out like this.

It would have been helpful, she thinks, if she’d had a little less faith in miracles.

Or maybe if she’d just learned to be grateful for the miracle she’s already gotten.

Because Josh is here, Josh is right here with her; somewhere beneath the gauze and the scar that’s just starting to form, somewhere safe and out of sight, Josh’s heart is beating, still.

And is there anything on earth more miraculous than that?

She’d do well to remember that, she knows. She’d do well to remember that night, remember the promises she’d made in the first prayers she’d prayed in years, certainly the most fervent prayers she’d ever prayed. She’d promised—absolutely vowed—that she would never walk away from him, that if he lived, she’d stand right by him and love him forever, just like this, in this terrible, complicated, tragic sort of way, and damned if she’s going to break that promise now.

And so that’s why she lies—because what difference does it make? Josh’s mark has changed, and what’s more, he doesn’t seem to care. It doesn’t keep him up at night like it does her. It doesn’t haunt him, as they lie there, in his bed, at night, her head on his shoulder, her hand in his.

He doesn’t have a secret that sits there, all day, like a weight in his stomach, the way she does. He has clearly never tried to talk himself out of that weight, that guilt, by reminding himself that at least he’s never been faced with the question directly, not the way that she does.

Except now, there’s no denying it. Now, she’s faced the question head-on, and she couldn’t bear to tell him the truth.

And it’s not only that the truth could—would, she’s almost certain of it—destroy everything they already have, it’s also that it might undo his trust in her.

Josh is so vulnerable with her, here, in the few weeks that she’s been staying with him, and she doesn’t want him to think that she’s been here out of any sense of obligation. Even though, clearly, Josh has some soulmate somewhere who isn’t her, the fact that Josh is her soulmate could lead him to believe that Donna’s only here because the universe told her to be, that she’s here caring for him out of duty, out of obligation, rather than because there’s nowhere else on earth that she would ever choose to be.

So she goes back to cleaning his wound, to getting him ready for bed, trying her best to think of something to say, something that’s light, dumb, that isn’t important, that doesn’t feel heavy on her tongue the way that all the lies of the last several minutes have. She needs something that doesn’t matter, needs it desperately, now that she’s learned that everything in the world that does matter to her will never be hers, not fully, not completely.

But Josh isn’t ready to move on.

“You know what I think?” he says, after a minute of silence.

“I’m sure you’ll tell me,” she answers, doing her best to smile for him, to even out her breathing, even as the adrenaline still pumps through her.

“I think I can handle myself,” he says.

“Yes,” Donna agrees, in mock-sincerity. “Because that’s never gone awry for you. Tell me, how is the President’s secret plan to fight inflation coming along?”

“Donna--,” he whines.

She just grins at him, as she begins to finish taping up his new bandage. A real grin, this time. Whiny Josh is the Josh she knows, the Josh that’s coming a little bit back to himself. It’s always a relief to see it, after the agony of the last several weeks.

“I’m serious,” he says. “Can’t I make my own choices about who I should—who my ‘soulmate’--.” He tries to raise his arms to do the air quotes, but Donna interjects.

“Put your arms down!”

He glares at her. “Fine. Who my soulmate—which I mean in the most sarcastic way, by the way—is?”

“You just say that because you don’t know who it is.”

“You just say that because yours hasn’t changed.”  He chuckles a little. “Look, Donna, I’m just saying—does it really matter what the mark does? Wouldn’t I have met mine in college if it was going to make that much of a difference?”

It’s not much, but it’s the best he can come up with, it’s the best he can do for now, because even if he knows—rationally—he can’t help hoping, however stupidly, that there’s still a way, somehow. And the only way there could possibly be, from here, is if he manages to half convince Donna that it doesn’t matter that whatever mark she has on her body tells her it isn’t supposed to be him.

“You did meet yours in college,” Donna says, and she’s smiling, but it’s a cover. It’s a cover, because what Josh said is echoing in her head. Does it really matter what the mark does?

Of course it matters, she wants to say. Don’t you understand? Don’t you see how very much it matters? How I’m going to love you for the rest of my life, and yes, I chose to, but I’m supposed to, too, don’t you see? Don’t you see it was always supposed to be us?

They’re both quiet for a minute. “Besides,” Donna says, finally, and she doesn’t know whether she’s trying to remind herself or Josh, “people can come back to you, you know. Just because you don’t know who it was then doesn’t mean that you never will.”

Josh takes a long look at her, something unreadable on his face. “People don’t always come back,” he says, and he wonders if she knows he’s thinking about the campaign, thinking about the agony of assuming she was gone for good, thinking about how people always leave him, and they don’t always come back, and Donna’s the only one who knows about that part of him, the only one he’s ever felt comfortable really talking about it to, and if she ever left him, he doesn’t think he’d survive it, he thinks it would be it for him, the last straw, the very end.

“Josh--,” she begins, reading him as she always does, seeming to recognize that he’s on the verge of spiraling.

He shrugs, wincing as the sudden movement pulls on his injury. “I’m just saying,” he says, steering them back to a safe place, “there’s more than just the marks, isn’t there? Doesn’t there have to be?”

“You’ve been reading too much philosophy,” Donna says, and she’s back to business, then. “Here, lift your head up for a second.”

He does, and she adjusts his pillows so that he can lie flat to sleep, instead of being propped up like he had been.

It’s only when she’s turned the light out and slid under the covers next to him—the bed already feeling warmer, even though her back is to him, and she’s not even touching him—that he thinks of anything else to say.

“Physics,” he says.

Donna rolls over to face him, and he can feel her eyes on him in the darkness. “What?”

“I’ve been reading physics,” he says, “not philosophy.”

Donna lets out a huff of laughter, in spite of herself. “Go to sleep, Josh,” she says.

But she doesn’t roll back over.

Instead, she rests her head on his shoulder, just like she usually only does in the middle of the night, and curls up next to him.

He sleeps okay, that night.

Chapter Text

It doesn’t last, the intimacy of those long, emotional months when Donna lived with Josh in his apartment.

Not that either of them were really expecting it to; they were both painfully aware that Donna would move out eventually, and when she did, the intimacy—or at least the frequency of that level of intimacy—would leave with her.

When Josh goes back to work, Donna does move out, and things do change, and it’s just as painful as they each (separately—they never discussed how badly they missed each other, neither knowing how to explain how much they missed someone that they still saw sixteen hours a day) expected it to be.

Because they don’t hold hands anymore.

(Except for one particular Christmas Eve, and the occasional fancy White House event, when they can manage to dance for one song without it looking anything but innocent, their hands clasped together, their smiles wider than they probably should be.)

They don’t sleep in the same bed anymore.

(Except…sometimes they do, sometimes there are exceptions, like the aforementioned Christmas Eve, when she stays without him even having to ask, or the night Mrs. Landingham dies, the night Donna found out about the MS, when he drives her home and she asks him to stay, because there’s nothing to do but hold each other, nothing to do but let themselves—just for this once—be within each other’s reach, finding solace in each other the way they just can’t in anyone else.)

But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the intimacy changes.

Because what doesn’t go away—what never goes away, even now that Donna knows that Josh has a soulmate, and it isn’t her—is that there are still moments when she just…wonders.

(Like the time, for example, when she finally gets the courage to tell Josh the truth about her ex, the one he’d saved her from encountering, on that trip to Madison, when she finally tells Josh about the car accident, the way her boyfriend had left her, just sitting there, waiting, in a hospital waiting room, and then, the next day, she’d left him, to come back to a man who, in his own words, would never have done that to her.)

(“I wouldn’t stop for a beer,” he said, and what the hell did that mean, anyway? What did the look on his face mean as he said it?)

(“I wouldn’t stop for red lights,” she’d responded, because if he can say things like that, she can, too. If he can say things that are bordering on…something, so can she, because this is never going to happen anyway, so she may as well say something true, for once.)

There are still all these moments between them when he looks at her just so, when there’s light and softness and affection in his eyes, and she knows—she knows—that they have a special relationship, that they’re not just boss and assistant, that they’re best friends, but the thing is that this…this sometimes feels like more than that.

But this moment isn’t that.

This moment isn’t one of those.

In this moment, Josh is in his office, alone, having just slammed the door, after Donna told him that she’d seen Cliff Calley—twice.

The thing is, Josh thinks, that Donna goes on dates. Of course she does, she has no reason not to.

In fact, he thinks, trying to swallow the enormous lump that suddenly rises in his throat, Donna should be going on dates, because as far as either of them knows, her soulmate is still out there, somewhere, probably searching just as hard for her as she is for him, and she has no idea that her pathetic boss is sitting here, in his office, his head in his hands, trying to remember how to breathe, because he has to meet with the president in five minutes, and the mark on his hip—the mark that changed for her, just her, only ever her—is stinging like crazy, like even the stupid brand on his skin knows that the whole soulmate thing was never supposed to feel like this.

But he’s so jealous that he can’t see straight. This was worse than that time that she went out with what’s-his-name, when she wore the red dress that drove him insane, and it was all too much, the sirens in his head, the red dress for someone else, someone that, for all he knew, could have been her soulmate, could have been the one, like she’d told him he was before she left.

(He hadn’t been, and the relief when Josh learned that was greater than anything he’d ever known, but the relief had turned to shame when he saw the sadness in her eyes, when he remembered that he—he, Josh, before the guy she’d even gone out with—had put that sadness there, had taken her excitement and stomped all over it, all because he couldn’t stand the thought of her with someone else.)

His temper had been too quick with Donna tonight—he knew that. He’d been too quick to tell her that she couldn’t see him anymore, too quick to ask her when her dates had taken place, too quick with all of it.

It’s just that it had felt, suddenly, stiflingly warm in the bullpen. His shirt had felt too tight, like he had to force himself to breathe, and it was too much, too fast, all at once. Because Donna had been with this man—this man that was very much not him—not once, but twice, and she’d known that he was on Ways and Means, and Josh had been entrenched in a battle with Ways and Means over the estate tax, and she hadn’t cared, and then this guy had been moved to the House Oversight Committee, and Donna had seen him twice. Twice without reporters, which meant they’d been at his place or hers. Donna had been with this guy twice. His Donna.

Except it’s not his Donna, he reminds himself, and suddenly he’s trying to remind himself to breathe again, because the suffocating feeling is back.

Donna isn’t his.

It isn’t her fault that her mark is branded into his skin. It isn’t her fault that it all feels like this.

It isn’t her fault that there’s no one in the world whose presence is more comforting to him than Donna’s, no one who makes him laugh harder or smile more, no one who challenges him and tells him when he’s wrong and encourages him to keep going, keep fighting, when he’s right, quite like she does.

It isn’t her fault that he’s in love with her, and she’s not in love with him, and she wouldn’t be, even without the soulmate thing, even if they were just two regular people that worked together.

Because Donna deserves better, Donna deserves to find someone who’s going to make her happy, who’s not going to get jealous and slam doors, and then sit here, by himself, trying not to cry over her. Donna deserves someone that she didn’t have to nurse back to health, that she didn’t have to hold in the middle of the night because he’s woken up screaming from nightmares.

Donna deserves someone whole, someone without a scar bisecting his chest, without another scar on his hand, someone who she can spend Christmas with without having to let him cry on her, without taking care of him.

Donna deserves someone who can take care of her, who can treat her like she deserves, not like this; she deserves someone who hadn’t gritted his teeth, setting his jaw, the second he heard the words, “I was set up on a blind date a few nights ago”.

And maybe she thought she’d found it in this guy, he thinks. She’d seen him twice, after all, and that’s something that he can’t stop thinking about, because Donna went on a date here or there, but she rarely dated the same person more than once.

Oh, God, what if this guy was Donna’s soulmate?

What if—it was enough to know that he’d hurt Donna back there, he felt guilty enough for that, felt the guilt settling like a weight in his stomach, and he knew it would last, he knew he would forever feel guilty for the way he’d just spoken to her, but…what if he’d just inadvertently told Donna that she couldn’t see her soulmate, couldn’t see him again?

It was unlikely, he knew, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that, earlier tonight, Donna had been in his office with him, standing over him while she tied his bowtie—these were his favorite moments with Donna now, for the same reasons as when she used to clean his wounds, because he could study her, he could drink her in, he could look at her as much as he wanted to, as long as he remembered to try not to let himself react to the feel of her fingers brushing against his neck—and she’d been looking at him like…well, it felt stupid to even think it (it always felt stupid to even think it), but she’d been looking at him like they might be more to each other than this, like they might be more to each other than boss and assistant, even than best friends.

(She wouldn’t have looked at him like that if she’d found her soulmate, would she?)

(But then, she did that, sometimes. There were these moments between them, moments he never knew how to explain, how to articulate, and even though he was tempted to let himself get lost in them, he couldn’t, because if it was what he wanted it to be, Donna’s mark would have changed, and she’d told him it hadn’t, so these moments couldn’t be what he wanted them to be, no matter what they felt like.)

And then…when he’d gone into the bullpen just now, it hadn’t been lost on him that his untied bowtie from before was still draped around her neck, where she’d put it when she’d gone to put the pre-tied one on him.

(She’d probably just forgotten it was there, he knew, but there was something that felt oddly intimate about it, and he couldn’t help noticing that. It was her Tony Bennett moment, maybe, and it was working for her.)

(He hadn’t minded the pre-tied bowtie, either, no matter what he’d said to her, because a second bowtie meant a second moment with Donna, and he never minded that. He would never mind that.)

But he can’t think about bowties anymore, because he has to make things right with Donna, especially if—despite the ache that goes through him at the thought—this guy she met is more to her than he knows.

And besides all of that, there isn’t time, because suddenly, there she is, and he stands up hurriedly from behind his desk, trying with everything he has not to look like he was moping, because Donna is opening the door to his office tentatively, looking at him softly, carefully, with something like trepidation.

“You have—you have the meeting with the President,” she says quietly.

He nods.

“Josh, I--,” she starts, but he can’t let her finish, because he might lose his momentum, and he has to find out if this guy was her soulmate, if he’s just destroyed her life because he was too upset and jealous to ask her any questions in the moment.

“You saw him twice?” He asks, and Donna looks at him oddly. There’s something heavy in his voice, something like hurt, and she can’t understand why.

“Yes.”

“Was there…,” he pauses, seeming not to know how to ask what he’s trying to ask. “I mean…was he…?”

Josh pauses again, and Donna waits, trying to give him time to come up with whatever it is that he’s trying to say.

Whatever it is that he’s thinking, Josh looks mortified for even trying to ask it, so she expects him to just give up, change his mind, say something other than what he means, like he usually does when things get unexpectedly heavy between them.

“Was there something about him, I mean?” He asks, finally, and his voice is just barely above a whisper, his face flushed red with embarrassment, and not for the first time, Donna wonders what stake he has in all of this.

It feels like more than the committee thing, more than the Republican thing, is the thing. It feels different than that.

And suddenly, she thinks she might understand what he’s getting at—something he has no right (and, perhaps, every right, but no right he knows about) to ask, something she has no right to answer entirely truthfully.

“He’s not my soulmate, Josh,” she says, as gently as she can, because somehow she thinks that’s what he cares about, and why he should care so much about that, when his soulmate is some anonymous girl from college, is beyond her, but she feels compelled to answer it. “It wasn’t like that with us, okay?”

She watches the word ‘us’ land, and even that seems to wound him, even that seems to make the lines of hurt on his face etch themselves even deeper.

“He’s no one to me,” she says softly. “You understand that, right? It was just—it was fun, but it never meant anything. He never meant anything to me, and he doesn’t now.”

Josh nods slowly, and he looks, inexplicably, a little bit relieved.

“He didn’t even spend the night,” Donna continues, and that seems to help a little bit more. She looks up at him, then, looks at him until he looks back at her, something vulnerable in those unfairly large brown eyes of his. “I didn’t ask him to stay the night,” she says. “Okay?”

He nods, and Donna can tell that he’s looking for something to say, something to take them out of the awkwardness of this moment, so she does it for him.

“And you know what else?” she says, and he quirks an eyebrow at her, like he’s hoping she’ll bring them out of it, too, but he doesn’t say anything.

“He’s 5’6”,” she says, “effectively eliminating any potential of a Tony Bennett moment at the end of, you know, any given night.”

“Ah,” he says, a little too high-pitched, before he clears his throat. “And this is—understandably—a deal-breaker for you?”

She shrugs. “Among other things. If height is gonna stand between a guy and a Tony Bennett moment, it can’t be because Tony Bennett is too tall.”

He grins, ducking his head, and she can see his dimples pop out in his cheeks. The relief almost knocks her over. “I, uh, didn’t realize that was so important to you,” he says.

“Well,” she says, taking his untied bowtie from before, which is still, inexplicably, around her neck, and putting it around his collar instead, “turns out you were right, there’s something about it.”

She smiles at him—Josh has gone strangely speechless, his mouth falling open, not unlike that night she’d brushed past him, just a foot from where they’re standing now, when she’d told him that she wouldn’t stop for red lights—and then she leaves his office, leaves him standing there, just like that, only pausing to call to him, “you’ve got the President, remember?”, because even though she can’t tell him the truth—can tell him only that Cliff isn’t her soulmate, and not that he, Josh, is—sometimes she just can’t stop herself from saying something.

Because these things—these moments—seem to just happen with them, and words like that come out of her mouth before she’s really thought about them, before she thinks about how they’ll land, before she realizes that Josh might just figure it out one day, all on his own.

She almost hopes that he would.

Except then, what happens is what always does, and that is that, only a few days later, something else happens, something else that almost destroys whatever it is that they’ve built in moments with bowties and flirting and statements that are just subtle enough, just indecipherable enough, that they can tell themselves they don’t really mean anything at all.

And a few days later, it does fall apart, like it always does, like she always knew it would.

There’s a moment just before she tells him about the diary, when she first gets back to the office—he hasn’t seen her yet—and she sees him, standing at her desk, looking at his watch, like standing next to her desk might make her appear there faster.

She wants to cherish it, that moment when he’s standing there, waiting for her, caring for her, the way he always does, before she tells him how she’s ruined everything. How she went out with Cliff, because he wasn’t Josh, and because she needed to stop waiting for Josh, and she regretted it, because it hurt him, because when Cliff was on Ways and Means, he’d been battling Josh, and Josh didn’t deserve to be betrayed like that, not when he was always caring and caring and caring for her, and she’d just thrown it back in his face.

And now she’d betrayed him again—worse, this time—and now she would have to tell him, she would have to ruin everything all over again, only days after she’d ruined it the first time.

She watches him, just for a moment—and it feels like a last chance, in a strange way, which, in retrospect, makes no sense, because it was never a chance to begin with—but it’s almost as if she knows that this is the last moment of peace before something shifts, before she tells him about the diary. She watches him because it’s her last chance, for now, to stand there, loving him, watching him stand there, caring for her, even despite the fact that he’s probably still pissed at her and has every right to be, and all of that was nothing compared to how pissed he’s about to be, which, again, is his right.

(It doesn’t make sense, but maybe it is a last chance, after all, because that diary is full of Josh. Pages and pages of Josh, pages and pages of all of these moments that she can’t explain, all of the times that she’s contemplated telling him that she’s in love with him, that he’s her soulmate, that there’s a mark of her ribs that proves it, and then, of course, pages and pages of her remembering that he already has a soulmate, and it’s someone else, and she can’t tell him any of it.)

He’s going to ask what’s in the diary, is the thing. She’s going to have to lie to him.

He’s going to have to ask her how Cliff even knows that there is a diary, and she’s going to have to tell him, and whatever moment they had in Josh’s office with his bowtie will have been useless after all, because it won’t have been enough to fix this, to fix the fact that she has to reiterate that yes, she slept with Cliff twice, and now she perjured herself as a result.

It’s going to be about Cliff, is the thing, and Josh won’t understand.

But what he has to understand—what she wishes he would just understand—is that it was never about Cliff, none of it.

It comes back to Josh. It always does. The diary, the dates, all of it—it all comes back to the red mark on her ribs and the man who doesn’t want her back.

Because the thing is this: Donna goes on dates. Of course she does. She has to, because what difference does it make? And Cliff was cute and smart and funny, and it was never going to go anywhere, and it was never going to matter, and it was nice to just…forget, sometimes, that she already knew who she belonged to, that nothing was ever going to change about that.

(For what it’s worth, Cliff had a mark, too—also red. They never talked about it. Not the first night, and not the second. And maybe that’s why there was a second night, to begin with—whatever Cliff’s story was, he was running, too. And there was something refreshing about that, something that made whatever their fling was okay. It was never going to be anything more than this, and they both knew it, and that was precisely the point. Ainsley had said that Cliff and his girlfriend had broken up, when she’d first mentioned him to Donna, so maybe Cliff needed Donna—needed the distraction—as badly as Donna needed him.)

When Donna was a child, she hadn’t realized how often it probably worked this way. Childhood had been filled with storybooks and sleepover conversations and TV movies, and every single one of them ended in happily ever after. But it didn’t work like that in reality, because Donna’s mark was red and Cliff’s mark was red and Josh’s mark was red, and not one of them was having a happily ever after.

Not one of them, Donna realized, even seemed to expect it.

It’s strange, but that’s what she’s thinking about again, that night on the bench, after Josh had handed the book containing her whole life, her whole soul—the soul that Josh didn’t even realize belonged to him—to Cliff.

And now Cliff will know. Cliff will know, and Josh still won’t, and there’s something that remains so terribly unfair about that, even though it’s her own doing.

Josh had asked her what was in the diary, but she didn’t tell him, and he didn’t pry after that. He’d seemed so overcome with guilt after yelling at her that all that he’d tried to do, once he’d come up with the plan to let Cliff read it, let him see for himself that there was nothing in it, was apologize to Donna for the way he’d reacted, for scaring her, and then he’d told her it would be fine.

He’d echoed that, when he’d come back to the bench—even putting his arm around her—but she couldn’t bring herself to respond, because right now, Josh is next to her, and he doesn’t know that, a block away, Cliff is learning just how pathetic she is, what an awful hand the fates have dealt her, to love Josh, to want Josh, to have been made for Josh, and to be able to do absolutely nothing about it.

Cliff’s mark might be red, but surely it isn’t like this for him. Surely no one else in the world knows suffering quite like this.

(Quite like this as it pertains to soulmates, that is—Donna isn’t bold enough to claim that no one in the world suffers more in general. After all, she works at the White House. She hears about deeper suffering than this on a daily basis, and most of the reason why she works there—why she and Josh both work there—is in an attempt to alleviate it. But when it comes to the soulmate thing, she’s pretty sure that she has the market cornered on suffering.)

Josh, too, is thinking about suffering.

Well, sort of.

Josh is thinking about how freezing he is on the bench.

Josh doesn’t know why he’s thinking about that—why that, of all things, keeps occurring to him—but the cold air seems to mock them, the chill of the night seeming a fitting echo of how bereft, how cold, how dark it’s felt since Donna first told him about Cliff, even before the diary, even before any of this.

He tries not to look at Donna, but he can’t help himself.

She’s shivering too, her coat too thin for a night like this one, and she sniffles from time to time, in the covert way he’s seen her do before, on terrible nights in his apartment, when she tried to pretend that she wasn’t having nightmares nearly as awful as his.

Donna cries softly like this when she wants to pretend that she isn’t crying at all, when she doesn’t want Josh to know that she’s crying.

And he usually pretends, for her sake, that he doesn’t notice.

Except not today, not when he knows that he failed her again, just like he had the very first time that she told him about her dates. (He’d scared her, he realized, the moment he saw her face, saw her standing there, wide-eyed and afraid, wanting him to fix it, needing him to understand. He’d scared her. The thought devastated him, then, and it devastates him again, sitting next to Donna, listening to her try not to cry.)

Except that this, this moment on the bench just now, is why this can’t happen, why he can’t ever tell Donna the truth about his feelings for her, about how it shouldn’t matter what the fates decided because he fell in love with her no matter what her mark said, and he will love her always, and he knows he’s failed her time and time again, but there is no one in the world that’s more important to him than she is, and if he thought he had half a chance, he would never, ever, ever let her feel like this again. Not by anyone else’s hand, and, God, certainly not by his.

Except that she’d looked so damn scared in his office, before, when she got back from the deposition, and he hadn’t made it better, he hadn’t wrapped his arms around her like he wanted to, he hadn’t told her the truth, which is that he’d rather die than let that smug bastard Cliff Calley scare her like this, would go to jail in a heartbeat rather than let Donna go on feeling like this.

(He’d apologized, since then—it had been surprise, that was all. He wasn’t angry with her. He never had been. He was angry with himself. It always came back to that, with this whole soulmate thing, with every day that he kept the truth from his best friend, from the most important person in his life. He was always angry with himself.)

(He’d spent the rest of the day apologizing, the rest of the day trying to convince her that it was all going to be okay, that she had nothing to worry about. But it was never enough. Not if she was still sitting here, next to him, scared and cold, while Cliff ran his hands all over the piece of her heart that she’d been forced into giving him.)

He doesn’t know what to say to her now.

Except the sound of Donna sniffling feels like it’s ripping him apart. The last shred of sanity that he’s held onto ever since before he yelled at her, before he hurt her so badly with his reaction to the diary thing that he’s pretty sure he’ll never stop feeling guilty for it, not for the rest of his life, seems to dissolve into thin air, and if he has to sit here any longer, not saying anything, not touching her, while she cries and pretends not to, he’s going to start crying himself, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot louder and more obvious than Donna’s tears.

“Hey,” he says, pulling her closer this time, until her head is on his shoulder, her face pressed into his neck. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay? I promise. It’s going to be fine.”

Donna sniffles again, louder this time, and Josh feels the collar of his t-shirt, below his coat, begin to dampen just a little. He wraps his arm more tightly around her, then brings one hand up to stroke her hair.

“I’m serious,” he says softly. “Whatever’s in there, Donna—it doesn’t matter, I’m never going to let anything happen to you, okay? I’ll kick his smarmy ass; Bartlet will give me a pardon, no problem.”

Donna snorts, in spite of herself, and when Josh dares to glance down at her, he sees that she’s smiling, just a little, even with tear tracks on her face.

They sit there, like that, Josh holding onto her, Donna letting herself be held, until they can see Cliff start to approach the fountain, Donna’s diary in hand, and they both stand to meet him.

When Cliff reaches them, he asks to speak to Donna, alone, and Josh takes a protective half-step in front of her without even thinking about it, but Donna puts her hand on his arm gently before he can say anything. “It’s okay,” she says softly, and she follows Cliff towards the fountain, just far enough to grant them privacy.

They stop right next to the fountain, where the babbling of the water is enough to keep Josh from being able to hear them, and neither of them say anything for a moment.

Donna waits for Cliff to speak. They both know that there’s nothing material in the diary--nothing but pages and pages of her love for the man who’s waiting by the bench, the man who is fated to another—but she needs to hear it from him before she can breathe a sigh of relief.

“There’s nothing relevant in there,” he says.

“No,” she agrees, and she can’t help herself—she’s a little haughty in her tone, even though she has no right to be, knowing that he knows nearly every embarrassing thing about her now, but she feels like he deserves it, after his tone at the deposition.

Cliff looks at Josh, standing just out of earshot. Donna can’t see Josh—her back is to him—but she knows him well enough to know that his stance is still defensive, that he’s no doubt glaring daggers at Cliff and wishing that he had asked Joey Lucas for lip reading tips. Cliff sighs, and then looks back at Donna.

“I’m really sorry,” is all he says, his voice softer and kinder than Donna expected of him, after all he’s put her through with the testifying and her doorstep and the diary.

She doesn’t think to ask him what he’s sorry for—whether he means the whole situation, or what—but as he looks from Josh to her, she’s pretty sure she knows why he’s apologizing.

She remembers Cliff’s mark, for just a moment, and she’s pretty sure she knows why understanding has leaked into his voice.

But she just nods at him, and she shakes his hand when he offers it, and then she goes back to Josh, who doesn’t ask her what Cliff said, who has the good sense to know that if she opens her mouth, she’ll cry.

Instead, he puts his hand on the small of her back and leads her to his car, opening her door for her and helping her inside, even gently buckling her seatbelt around her, before he drives her home.

She doesn’t ask Josh to stay, this time, but it’s nights like this that make her wonder, that make her feel like--despite everything, despite the fact that she knows it’s impossible, she knows that his soulmate is someone else—he might feel the pull of the fates, too.

Because she doesn’t ask him to stay with her, but she doesn’t have to. She knows he’ll stay anyway. She knows that he’ll know that she needs him tonight.

And so he’ll stay.

Because it’s nights like these—despite the fear, despite the pain, despite the anxiety—that are almost enough to make them forget that they don’t belong to each other. Not really, not totally.

But nights like these make them almost forget to care.

Chapter Text

There’s something that sticks with Josh, when the whole thing with Cliff is all said and done, something he can’t stop remembering, even as they move forward, slowly, even as everything becomes okay again.

Because he’s long since given up on the idea that Donna’s soulmate mark might reciprocate his; hers hasn’t changed, and that’s the end of that.

But he hasn’t given up on the idea that maybe there’s still a way, somehow. (He wonders if he’ll ever truly give up that fragile hope.)

And if there is a way—no matter how unlikely that seems—he has to be better than this. He has to learn how to possibly deserve Donna.

And how can he ever deserve Donna?

Donna, who had been there at the hospital; been there, with him, in his apartment as he healed, cleaning his bandages day after day, curling up next to him at night to keep the nightmares away.

Donna, who had been there the Christmas Eve that he got diagnosed with PTSD, who had held his good hand while the doctor stitched up his injury, and then held him, later, when he finally came clean with her about all of it, when all the fear and anxiety and exhaustion came pouring out of him all at once.

She’d been there in the aftermath, always looking out for him, always checking in on him, making excuses for him to get him out of meetings when she could tell he was somewhere dark in his head, and not in whatever meeting he’d been in.

It had been Donna who kept making sure he took his medications, Donna who had “accidentally” stayed on his couch more than once, when she could tell he didn’t want to be alone, Donna who noticed when he’d hardly eaten in days, Donna who’d forced him to drink water (another cup of coffee doesn’t count, Josh), and eat vegetables (that is a french fry, Joshua, you need something green and leafy) and…well, stay alive, to put it bluntly.

Donna’s just…been there for him, quietly supportive, quietly observant, never overbearing.

He wants to protect her, the way that she protected him.

He’d screwed it up, initially, with Calley, but he hoped maybe he’d partially redeemed himself, when nothing more came of the diary after that night at the fountain.

But it wasn’t enough, he knew. It wasn’t enough to deserve her. Donna deserved so much better than him.

And maybe it’s that that spurs his big mistake, when the time comes.

Because it sticks with Josh, the realization that he can’t possibly deserve Donna, that he doesn’t now, and that maybe he never will.

It just nags at him, a quiet rumble that’s always in the back of his mind.

But it’s not until much, much later—maybe too late—that he realizes just how much power that quiet voice might hold.

And maybe the only way to silence it—the only way to make it go away—is to prove it right, eventually.

It’s just that there’s a part of him—and even he isn’t sure how big this part of him is—that is so intertwined with his love for Donna that he’s not sure he could even separate himself out, when he eventually has to, when she eventually finds the person she’s really meant for.

That part of him appears when he’s ordering takeout, halfway through his order, when he realizes that he doesn’t even remember if he likes this sandwich place or that Chinese restaurant, or if it’s Donna that likes it, Donna that’s the reason he chose to go there.

It appears whenever he stops for coffee on the way to work in the morning, and orders Donna’s along with his before he even knows that he’s doing it, just wanting to find a way to surprise her, to make her day better.

It shows itself, too, when he has days that are so busy that he barely has time to breathe, when he’s running from meetings on the Hill to make it to senior staff on time, and still makes sure that he loops through the bullpen, even though it isn’t on his way, and he doesn’t have time, just so that he can see her smile up at him, and that smile can give him something to savor through his next meeting.

He should resent the parts of him that are so entangled with her, he knows, but he doesn’t.

What he resents is the voice that’s always in the back of his mind, reminding him that she will never be his, she will never want him, he will never deserve her.

Maybe that’s why he does it, to quell the mounting evidence that’s always running through his head that what he wants—or, rather, who he wants, more than anything—will never truly be his.

But he doesn’t know that, now. For now, he knows only this: he absolutely, unequivocally, does not deserve to be loved by Donnatella Moss.

--

There had been a time, when Josh had first gone back to work, and Donna had moved out of his apartment, that Donna had been sure that they would never go back to the intimacy they’d found when she was living with him, that they could never find a way to recover it.

Then, there’d been another time--that time when she paused, coming back from the deposition, to see him standing over her desk, and stopped for just a minute, just to take him in, just to watch him before she had to tell him about the diary about Cliff—when she was sure she’d been right, when she was absolutely sure that there was no going back, no way to find those scraps of intimacy again, not anymore.

But she was wrong.

Because they do find their way back to each other, if more gradually than they did before.

It starts that same night—the night with Cliff and the bench and the diary—in her apartment.

Josh has been so gentle with her, ever since he’d told her his plan to fix things. He’d apologized to her over and over again for his initial reaction, and she could tell just by looking at him how very sorry he really was.

Everything after that first apology has been gentle, Josh’s arm around her on the bench, the way he’d led her to the car, even buckling her seatbelt for her; and then, when they get to her apartment, he follows her up, his hand a comforting presence at the small of her back.

He takes her keys from her and opens her door—it’s only then that Donna realizes that her hands are shaking, her whole body trembling—and it’s just a moment after they get inside, as Josh tries to help her slide her coat off her shoulders so that he can hang it up, that she suddenly finds herself weeping.

“Donna?” The concern in Josh’s voice is immediate and evident.

“I’m sorry,” Donna whispers, shaking her head. “Josh, I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.”

“Donna, hey.” Josh’s voice is soft, his hands suddenly on her shoulders, grounding her.

But she still can’t look at him, she still can’t stand to really look at him, not after she screwed up like this.

She feels one of his hands leave her shoulder, and then he’s reaching out, tentatively, tilting her chin up to look at him.

When she does, she sees that his eyes are filled with tears, too. They haven’t fallen yet, but the image is striking, all the same. Josh hardly ever cries, outside of involuntarily, in his nightmares, and a few times when the pain of his recovery had been so brutal that he couldn’t speak.

(And last Christmas, but that was night was something else entirely, and she doesn’t think of it now.)

“It was a mistake,” Josh says softly. “That’s all it was. I should have—I should have reassured you from the beginning.”

“It was so stupid--,” she begins, but Josh cuts her off.

“It was a mistake, Donna. It could have happened to anyone--.”

“Not to you,” she protests, still crying, her voice unsteady.

Josh lets out a huff of laughter, and she looks up at him in surprise. “Donna, my mouth gets me in more trouble than anybody in the White House, you of all people should know that!”

She gives him a watery half-smile.

“Seriously,” he says. “Do I need to get Mary Marsh on the phone? She’ll tell you--.”

Donna’s lips quirk up just a little more, in spite of herself, and then Josh is serious again.

“It was just a mistake,” he says, and the gentleness is back in his voice, his hands on her shoulders again. “And it’s over now, it’s going to be fine. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay? Certainly not over something like this.”

He pulls her into his arms, then, his arms tightening around her, as if to emphasize the point, and he burrows his head into her shoulder, the way he does when he’s trying to be as close to her as possible, toeing the line of permissibility even more than usual.

“I’m sorry, too, you know,” he whispers, and Donna can hear that his voice, too, is shaky. Maybe he wasn’t ready to look up at her for this, just the way she couldn’t look at him before. “You should never have been in that position,” he continues. “I should have been with you, before, getting you ready for the deposition, I shouldn’t have left you to deal with that on your own--.”

Josh’s voice breaks on the last word, and they stand there, trembling, together, for a long moment. Donna can’t tell, but she thinks he might be crying, too.

They hold onto each other for a long time, right there in her entryway, whispering apologies, trying to get past the trembling, trying to finally escape the chill of the night, trying to outrun the fear of that hour on the bench.

That night, they fall asleep curled up around each other, Donna’s face buried in the comforting warmth of Josh’s neck, his arms wrapped tightly—protectively—around her.

It’s not even an accident, this time. There’s an understanding that passes between them—unspoken as ever—that they need to heal in precisely this way.

And it feels right. It feels safe, it feels like home. It feels, Donna thinks, the way she’d always imagined her soulmate would make her feel, like they were two halves of a whole, two puzzle pieces that have, at long last, clicked into place.

She knows that that isn’t what’s happening, but the night has been too long and too cold and too emotionally taxing, so she lets herself fall asleep imagining that this isn’t a one-night thing, anyway. It’s simply too much to ask, to talk herself out of that, after the night they’ve had.

It's not until she’s just about to fall asleep that she notices that her mark isn’t stinging. There’s always a dull ache, an ache she’s gotten used to, ever since the very first time that her mark changed. The pain is always present—subtle enough that she can tune it out, but always, always there.

But not tonight, not here, with Josh’s arms wrapped around her, keeping her close, keeping her safe.

She wonders if they’ve tricked the fates; if the fates think what was once supposed to be has finally come to fruition.

She knows better than that.

But on that night, falling asleep pressed against him, she pretends this is permanent.

She pretends—just this once—that she’s finally found a way out.

--

All things considered, Josh might have known that the hope would die again, inevitably.

But for a while, it’s good.

They find a way to heal, together, that night in Donna’s apartment, and even though Josh knows he still has things to make up for—knows that he still has such a long way to go before he even scratches the surface of beginning to deserve to be loved by Donna—for a while, things are steady; for a while, things are good.

They’re both breathing a sigh of relief, Josh thinks. Cliff wasn’t Donna’s soulmate, and it’s been so long since they discussed his own soulmate that it’s possible that Donna believes him—that he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. And if she can believe him about that, the door might stay open, just a little, just enough.

Things are good, he thinks.

After Cliff, after everything that happened in the aftermath of the shooting, things are finally going okay. He’s finally doing right by Donna, he’s finally feeling like maybe, just maybe, it isn’t such an awful hand that he’s been dealt after all.

Maybe there’s a way forward.

Because after Cliff, the weather turns even colder, and he and Donna return to each other, in a way, seeking shelter, maybe, seeking warmth.

It happens in little moments, like when Donna is sitting across from him at a booth in a diner on Christmas Eve, leaning forward, ostensibly to blow on her hot chocolate, a chunk of her hair falling forward from behind her ear, about to land in the aforementioned hot chocolate.

Josh reaches out before he can help himself, tucking it gently back behind her ear, and he’s so startled by the way she looks up at him, smiling in the way that lights up her whole face, that the pad of his thumb is stroking her cheekbone before he even has time to stop himself.

She makes no move to stop him, but just then their food arrives, and Josh feels his face turn beet red, like he’s a teenager again, and he jolts back at once, slumping against the booth so hard that the silverware clatters on the table, too embarrassed to even answer the waitress when she asks if they need anything else.

(Donna answers the waitress, of course, but he doesn’t dare look up at her to see if she’s as affected by whatever just happened as he is—he has to assume that she’s not, seeing as her voice still works.)

He knows why Donna is with him on Christmas Eve, of course—he doesn’t bother lying to himself about that—after last year, he knows that she’s worried about him, that she’s watching him for signs of his PTSD like she always is.

And what’s more, this year, Leo’s been called to testify in the Congressional Investigation into the President, following the revelation of his diagnosis, and all day, Josh knows, Donna has watched him worry about Leo. (There was still guilt on Donna’s face, whenever they discussed the investigation, and Josh knows it has to do with Cliff, but he doesn’t ask her about it. It’s better, he thinks, that the door stays closed on that matter.)

Still, regardless of the reason, he’s happy that Donna’s with him for Christmas. She hadn’t even attempted to go home this year, hadn’t even mentioned returning to Wisconsin, and in his head, he pretends it’s because she wants to be with him, more than just the sense of duty to be by his side that she surely feels.

It’s hard not to think that maybe there’s something to all of it, after all, when they go to leave the diner and Donna reaches for his scarf before he does, wrapping it around his neck and adjusting it for him, and the small gesture feels almost like it always does when she does up his bowtie, like she’s looking for an excuse to let her fingers graze his neck.

He hardly needs the scarf, when Donna is standing so close to him, caring for him, like that, because suddenly he feels so warm he wonders if he even needs his coat and scarf at all.

She links her arm through his, as they leave the diner to make their way back to his apartment, and Josh swears he can feel the warmth of her body pressing against his, even through two layers of coats.

He wonders what Donna would say about all the affection, all the little, just-innocent touches, if he asked her.

She’d probably just say that she’s warmer when they’re huddled together, which is probably true. Warmth is a good excuse, he thinks.

It’s the one she always gives when she steals his coat, and returns it, later, smelling like her. (He never minds; in fact, as soon as the smell of her perfume fades from the collar, it’s all he can do to stop himself from pushing it into her hands, offering it to her, making her take it again, just so that he can walk home for one more night and feel like Donna’s right there beside him.)

It’s also the excuse she makes when they get back to his place, and she rummages through his drawers until she finds his favorite Mets sweatshirt, pulling it over her head before dropping onto his couch, his remote already in her hand.

He just watches her, because he loves this Donna, the Donna who is at home in his place, the Donna who knows where everything is, who just belongs right here. It’s all he can do to stop himself from closing his eyes, pretending that this is Donna’s home, too, that she won’t fold up the quilt his mom knitted for him when she wakes up on the couch in the morning, giving him back the pillow he’ll give her for the couch from his bed, like she’s any other guest, like the illusion of her being at home here is just that—an illusion.

When he settles on the couch next to her, after she finishes flipping through the channels, settling on It’s a Wonderful Life, which she’s made him watch before, insisting that it’s a classic (that’s one of the things he loves most about Donna, he thinks, the way that she has an opinion on absolutely everything, the way she talks through most movies to make sure he knows what her opinions are, so that he usually can tell if she’s fallen asleep purely based on the fact that she isn’t talking), she leans against him, tucking his mom’s knit blanket around both their laps.

By halfway through the movie, they’ve both adjusted enough (without ever speaking about it) that they’re more lying down than sitting, Donna still tucked under his arm, and when he’s sure that she’s asleep, he presses a kiss to the crown of her head, before giving himself permission to succumb to sleep as well.

(He knows his back will be killing him in the morning, but he also knows it’s worth it. It’s Christmas, after all, and even if it isn’t his holiday, it feels right to let himself have this, to finally feel at peace from all the stress of the day and worrying about Leo, and from the fact that…well, he’s not entirely immune to the Christmas carols that have been playing everywhere, even though it’s not nearly as bad as last year. He knows Donna has noticed that, though, has felt her hand tighten around his arm, steering him gently away from carolers on the street, and fiddling with his radio whenever he’d driven her home until she found some talk station, where he wouldn’t have to hear music at all.)

When Josh wakes up, his back surprisingly not as sore as he expected, Donna’s in the kitchen, making coffee. They spend the morning lazily drinking their coffee on his couch as they make their way through another Christmas movie, which Josh again pretends to protest, but secretly enjoys. She doesn’t slump fully against him like she had the night before, but her thigh is pressed against his under the blanket, and the same warmth, the same feeling of being at home, courses through him, like it did the night before when he’d watched her pull on his sweatshirt.

He wonders, as he sits there with her, what Donna makes of mornings like these. Perhaps there’s another excuse there—“it’s Christmas” seems like it could serve the same purpose as “your coat’s warmer”—or maybe it’s just her need to take care of him, her need to make sure that he isn’t hearing sirens again.

A small, hopeful part of him wonders if maybe what he said to her about soulmates, over a year ago, back when she’d been living with him, taking care of him, and had seen his mark, is finally getting through to her. He wonders if the affection she gives him, on days like this, has anything to do with that; that maybe, even if she knows that they’re not soulmates, because her mark hasn’t changed, she might be willing to see past that.

He knows that’s stupid and unlikely, but it helps, anyway, to think that maybe it’s possible.

And yet, nothing’s really changed—he knows that. They’ve gotten better since Cliff, after that night in Donna’s apartment, when they’d held each other and cried and started to heal, but that night feels like it happened on a different plane, like he and Donna—the reality of him and Donna—is a separate thing from the little, intimate moments.

It’s like they exist separately from each other, he thinks. He’s always thought that. Because they never speak about these heavy, all-encompassing moments, the moments that he would never, ever have with anyone else that he works with, the moments that he can’t explain, where he feels like the rules are suspended, where he feels like maybe there’s a chance that Donna might want him the way that he wants her.

But those moments always feel like they’re not happening in reality, like they’re happening in some sort of dream-state, some sort of liminal realm where things like this can happen, where magic exists and Donna rejects the fact that the fates have tied her to someone else and instead chooses him.

Because when the Christmas holiday ends, and things go back to normal, everything goes back to the way it always is between them, which means that, once in a while, Donna will grab his hand to prompt him to do something, or to pull him towards her desk to look at something.

It means that his hand is always on the small of her back if they’re walking somewhere, means that she leans in just too close to give him a message when he’s in a meeting, so that he can almost feel the brush of her lips against his skin as she whispers to him.

It means that he has all of these moments with Donna, little moments, that they never talk about, but that mean more to him than he knows how to say, anyway, and then, at the end of the night, he has to watch her walk away, dressed in something beautiful that more often than not makes her eyes look even bluer than they always do, to go out on a date with someone that isn’t him.

And he remembers why they ignore all those moments, why they happen in a state apart from reality, somewhere where they never have to offer any kind of explanation for them.

Because Donna goes on dates, and Josh watches her leave, and the hope he holds onto begins to dwindle, more and more, no matter what moments they share, even as he tries desperately to keep it alive.

And then, one day, the first lady appears in his office, to tell him about a letter she received, full of grievances from women’s groups.

It’s from Amy Gardner, Dr. Bartlet says, I want you to meet with her.

All things considered, Josh might have known that the hope would die again, inevitably.

He just hadn’t known that he’d be the one to kill it.

Chapter Text

The petty, juvenile part of Josh wants to point out—although to whom, exactly, he wishes to point it out is not entirely clear—that Donna started it.

(Donna, that’s who. He wants to point out to Donna that she’s the one who started it.)

In his defense (and seeing as he wasn’t the one who started it), it’s not like the whole thing was out of retaliation.

She’s been prancing around all week, waiting for opportunities to remind Josh that she’s dating a lawyer, as if that’s supposed to impress him, as if he isn’t, himself, a lawyer. (Yeah, but you don’t practice, Donna said. He’d stopped, looked at her. What do you think it is that we do here all day?, he asked. She’d shrugged, pursing her lips. You know what I mean.)

But it’s not fair to say that it’s entirely reactionary, because of course it isn’t.

There’s a part of him—a part of him that’s been there since the college days—that’s always wondered about Amy Gardner, after all.

And yes, okay, maybe there is a part of that that’s a little bit reactionary, but he can’t help it.

Because, when it all began, it began like this:

Amy had asked him, Are you dating your assistant?, and he’d been too shocked by the question to know what to say, too shocked to say anything but No.

And Amy had pressed on, seeming to read the shock on his face without even having to look at him, I heard you might be.

Josh really hadn’t known what to do with that, because sure, he knows, abstractly, that people talk about him and Donna. He’s heard enough rumblings over the years, from CJ and others, and Danny Concannon had made the odd remark here and there about the rumors circulating in the pressroom, but he hadn’t ever really thought about how far those rumors might reach, hadn’t ever even considered that they might make their way to someone like Amy.

I’m not, he’d answered, as though it was as simple as that, as though that were the entire truth of it.

He’s not.

It’s just that it’s so much more than that. Because no, he’s not dating his assistant, but he’s fated to her in such a way that a phrase like “dating” seems almost silly, stupid, childish. He isn’t dating his assistant—and that will always, depressingly, be true—but he’s committed to her, yoked to her, bonded to her in a way that seems, sometimes, outside of time and space, far outside the realm that a simple word like “dating” could ever hope to encompass.

She’s cute, said Amy.

She’s my assistant, he’d responded, and that’s the truth, but it reduces the truth so significantly that, much like, I’m not, it almost isn’t even the truth, not really.

And what’s more, it had been damn near impossible to force the words, she’s my assistant out of his mouth, because all he’d wanted to say was I know, or even worse—to protest the use of the word ‘cute’ itself, because that wasn’t fair to Donna, that didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Donna, didn’t come close to describing her in any real, true way.

(“Assistant,” after all, had been a last-ditch effort to regain control of the sentence—if he hadn’t been very careful, he might not otherwise have caught the word “soulmate” that was about to emerge from his mouth in its place.)

Amy had seemed to accept his protest—accepted the words, that is—but then came the part that Josh couldn’t even really defend to himself as not reactionary, because Amy had seemed to accept it in a way that was…well, it was hard to explain.

He’d known Amy for a long time, was the thing.

He’d known her back in college, and he might have liked her then, except that she’d been dating his roommate, and Josh had spent most of his time in the library, in those days, so he hadn’t had much time to think about her, really.

But Amy hadn’t changed much, since then.

She’d always had this way of getting under his skin, even then.

Because Amy had this way of talking to him—well, talking to everyone, if her work in the District was any indication—like she knew more than you, but not in an off-putting way. It was as though there was some secret beneath the surface, something yet unbeknownst to you, and Amy knew it, and was just waiting for you to figure it out, too.

It drove Josh crazy.

Because yes, on the surface, Amy had seemed to accept his explanation about Donna. On the surface, she’d seemed to take him at his word.

But she’d done so in a way that unsettled him, in a way that made it seem like she knew something about him that Josh himself hasn’t really figured out yet.

And he’d felt this sudden need to prove to her that she was wrong.

(Wrong about what, he wasn’t totally sure of—maybe that she was wrong about Donna, wrong about her importance to him, wrong about her beauty, wrong about all of it—or maybe it wasn’t so much that she was wrong as it was that she was right. Because no matter how much Josh wanted to be with Donna, no matter how much he wished that his pathetic feelings for her, the curse of the fates, might be reciprocated, it never would be. And thus, the way that Amy had described his relationship with Donna—that he might be dating his “cute” assistant—was, as far as he knew, not reductive at all, but in fact, more than it might ever turn out to be.)

It’s the way that Amy had said it, that’s the thing—like she was in on a secret about Josh, one that he was yet unaware of.

But it exposes him to this broader truth, one that he is aware of, is painfully aware of, but pretends not to be, if only for his own survival.

He’s not dating Donna. He’s never going to be dating Donna.

And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that he can do about that, just as there’s nothing that he can do to change the mark on his hip, the one that taught him that no matter what he does—no matter where he goes, in this life—he will never stop wanting her.

But for Amy to say that—to come right out and remind him of the fact that’s been staring him in the face since that day in the hotel room when he woke up and saw the mark for himself, realized that the rest of his life would be spent in cruel pursuit of the woman who won’t love him back—is too much for him to handle.

And something in him shifts, something in him seems to snap.

He can’t have Donna, he knows that.

But maybe he’s been going about this all wrong. Because as long as he’s known that he can’t have Donna, he’s tried to compensate for that by getting as close to her as possible, by trying to survive on the scraps of affection that he can get, by trying to make all of these little moments with her enough to get by on.

And sure, he’s stayed alive this way, but it’s never been enough to distract him from how much he loves her, how badly he wants to be with her.

And so maybe this was the wrong approach—maybe, what he should have been doing, was moving in the opposite direction.

If he can’t have Donna, maybe he should look for someone who is exactly not Donna, the way that Mandy had been exactly not Donna.

(What he forgets, when he thinks of this, is how spectacularly that situation with Mandy had imploded, how much damage all of that had done.)

If he dated someone that wasn’t Donna, it might be enough to forget, it might be enough to teach him to want something else entirely, to change his trajectory from the one he’s been on, the one that could only ever lead to misery.

And if he’s going to date someone that’s not Donna, he’d be hard pressed to find a closer antithesis to Donna than Amy Gardner.

He can’t articulate it then, that first night in Amy’s office, that night that he realizes that she’s not Donna, and maybe if she’s not Donna enough, he could like her, he could find a way for this to work.

He can’t articulate it that first night, but later—much later—he’ll realize what it is:

Amy’s aggressive, in a way that Donna’s not.

Because Donna argues with him—bantering, mostly, and maybe a little more than that if she really has something to prove—but Amy seems to fight with him, and she fights to win.

And she isn’t trustworthy, the way that Donna is.

Josh trusted Donna instantly—independent of the soulmate thing, which he knows for sure, because he hadn’t even realized the soulmate thing until after he’d let her in more than he’d let nearly anyone else in since he was a kid—and Amy, well, it wasn’t quite the same with her.

Because he’d told Donna about Joanie within days of knowing her, and he can’t quite imagine telling Amy about Joanie, at least not in the way that he had with Donna, where it felt so natural, felt so right.

He can’t imagine having Amy, and not Donna, living with him as he recovered from the shooting, couldn’t imagine Amy comforting him the way Donna did, soothing him and holding him through the worst of his nightmares, cleaning his wounds every day, helping him stay calm, helping him fight through the worst of the darkness.

He can’t even picture talking to Amy about that stuff, and he lives in fear that she might accidentally witness one of his nightmares someday.

It’s not that he doesn’t trust Amy, though, not really. It’s just that he doesn’t trust her like he trusts Donna, doesn’t feel like Amy would never hurt him, the way that he knows that Donna would never hurt him, not on purpose. Because Donna is his best friend, first and foremost, and although Amy is many things to him—many impressive, and wonderful things, at that—‘friend’ is pretty low on the list of how he sees her.

(And maybe that comes back to the ‘Amy fights to win’ thing. Donna is his best friend first, and what that means is that she’s on Josh’s team, always. She’s even said as much, on days, long ago now, when he thought he might get fired—if you go, I go, she’d said then—and she’s proved it a thousand times over. But Amy…Amy likes him, he gets that, but she’s not on his team. Not like Donna, never like Donna.)

For right now, though, he doesn’t know that, can’t articulate that, doesn’t realize just how cavernous the divide between Amy and Donna truly is.

But he could have, if he’d thought about it. He might have known, might have known before it even began. Because when it began, what he knows is this:

He’d gone to Donna’s, that first night, the night that Amy had stood on a balcony above him and thrown the water balloon at his head.

He’d gotten in the cab, and he’d gone straight to Donna’s.

Because it wasn’t until he’d gotten in the cab that he’d really felt the adrenaline, and by then, he was almost gasping, croaking out Donna’s address to the cabbie.

By the time he got out in front of her building, he was desperately fighting off the sirens in his head, desperately trying to talk himself down, desperately telling himself that there’s no reasonable reason he should have this reaction to a water balloon being thrown at him, even if it was from several stories up.

Donna had opened the door for him immediately, trying to hide the fear on her face as she helped him take his coat and scarf off, and by the time she led him gently by the hand to the couch, the feeling has receded—he can breathe again.

(He thinks about that, sometimes—how Donna is the only one who can make him breathe again.)

Donna had wrapped her arms around him on the couch, rubbing his back, murmuring soft words to him as he tried to explain it, tried to tell her about the water balloon, about Amy, about how he wasn’t mad at Amy, but it had taken him by surprise.

Donna had just listened, holding onto him, breathing slowly, in and out, until he matched her breathing, like they always did when he started to come out of his skin, and she’d told him—amidst his frantic apologies—that he had nothing to be embarrassed about, that it’s perfectly rational that the incident would have spooked him, that she’s right there with him and she isn’t going anywhere.

When he’d finally relaxed, finally shrugged a little out of her arms, she’d asked him whether he wanted to talk or wanted to be distracted.

He’d chosen distracted, and she’d stood up to turn the TV on to a sitcom, before returning to the spot next to him, resuming rubbing his back gently.

She knew him well enough to know that he was going to talk about it, eventually, which Josh can tell, because her silence feels sort of…expectant, in a way he can’t explain.

And it’s for the best, anyway, because he wants to explain, wants Donna to understand why this incident had happened and why, despite that…there’s a part of him, a large part of him, that still wants to see Amy again.

“I think…I think she was flirting with me,” Josh says, breaking the silence they’ve been sitting in since Donna sat back down on the couch, her hand still rubbing his back mindlessly in a comforting pattern.

Donna’s hand stills, but she doesn’t look up at him. “With the water balloon?”

“Yeah. I think…I mean, she doesn’t know about--,” he trails off, making a gesture between himself and Donna, and what he means to say is about his PTSD, about how he still needs Donna so much sometimes, to make the world feel safe again, about how the sirens still come, sometimes, without warning.

Donna raises an eyebrow. “About?”

He swallows. “Me…you know, what happened. I mean, I’m sure she knows the obvious stuff—the news stuff, but not, you know…the Stanley stuff.”

Donna lets out a breath that sounds a little like a sigh. “Right.”

“What I mean is,” Josh says, noticing as he says it that Donna has removed her arm completely from around him, now, “I don’t think it was malicious, you know. I think she really was just trying to…get my attention, or something.”

Donna doesn’t say anything.

“I’ve known Amy for a long time,” he continues, a little defensively, after a moment. “And she—she’s like this, I think.”

Donna stays quiet, waiting for him to explain more.

“What I mean is, I think she wanted me to—I mean, I think there’s something there, Donna, you know?”

He looks at her face, and he’s praying for some kind of reaction, but Donna seems to be keeping her face awfully well-composed, betraying absolutely nothing. He wants so badly to ask her what she’s thinking, what she makes of all of it, but she gets to him first.

“What are you going to do about that?” she asks, and her voice is still steady, her face still devastatingly blank.

“I think I’m going to see her again,” he says, and then clears his throat. “Not, uh, not for the thing. You know, socially.”

There’s a long silence between them, a long moment in which nothing really happens.

This could be the moment, Josh thinks, this could be the moment when she tells me not to do it.

But of course it isn’t, because Donna’s dating a lawyer, and he’s all but told her he’s interested in Amy, and besides any of that, Donna isn’t—has never—looked at him the way he looks at her, and even if she did, why should she now, when he’s just run to her yet again in an attempt to keep his nightmares at bay?

“Well,” Donna says, turning back towards the TV, her voice still steady. “Make sure your first date is on level ground.”

There’s a smile in her voice, but her expression tells him that she, for whatever reason, doesn’t find her own joke funny. Her voice cracks just slightly on the word ‘ground’, like there’s the barest hint of regret for what she’s saying, and Josh can’t help it—he smiles.

It makes no sense at all, really, to smile—the door is closed, has been closed, and both he and Donna just deadbolted it in a catastrophic team effort—but still, the tremble in her voice makes him smile, just for a moment.

They stay on the couch, for a long time, mindlessly watching TV—although Josh suspects that neither of them are really watching. Donna doesn’t put her arm around him again, but she doesn’t move away, either.

At last, he stands up. “I should go,” he says, making his way towards the coat rack. “It’s getting late.”

Donna hesitates. “You can stay, Josh,” she says. “I mean, you don’t have to leave.”

He nods. “I’m going to be fine,” he says, and he is, but only because she made it so.

“I know,” she says. “But you could stay--.”

Josh shakes his head before she can finish, and a moment later, he’s glad.

“On the couch, if you want,” she continues.

And even though it has no right to, Josh’s heart breaks. Because damn it, this is why. This is why he has to leave, this is why he’s going to see Amy again. Because of course Donna wasn’t offering for him to stay with her, next to her, in her bed, like they always used to when he needed her, when he’d had a panic attack.

Of course she hadn’t been offering that, and he had no right to be disappointed, not when Donna has a lawyer boyfriend, not when he should never want Donna to compromise herself or her relationship that way, not when Donna doesn’t need him, has never needed him, least of all the way that he so pathetically needs her.

He puts on his coat, and then his scarf. “I’ll be fine,” he says again, more gruffly than he intends to, and he turns towards the door.

Donna’s voice, soft and nervous, makes his head turn. “You’ll call,” she asks, “tonight? If you need to?”

She’s looking at him, her eyes wide and scared, and a little of something else, something unreadable, and Josh tells himself that it’s just concern, nothing more.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, his throat suddenly dry, feeling suddenly like he might cry.

“You really can stay, you know,” she says, gently, “if you need to.”

“I know,” he says, and he wants so badly to turn back, wants so badly to accept the offer, to spend one more night here with her.

But Donna offered him the couch. And not in the way she’d offered it at Christmas, not with her staying on the couch with him, curled up with him.

Because Donna has a boyfriend. The lawyer. The lawyer boyfriend that he has only just refrained from asking her about.

And so now he has…well, he might have an Amy. And it’s not reactionary, but of course it is. Of course it is, because he can’t have—will never have—this.

He studies her for a moment, watching her eyes on him, and he swears he thinks it looks like she’s hurting, too, like she wants him to stay just as badly as he wants to be there.

And then he turns away.  

--

For Donna’s part, she hadn’t actually meant to start anything.

Yes, technically she’s dating a lawyer—but the thing about the term ‘dating’ is that it’s really kind of an umbrella term, isn’t it?

She’s been on a handful of dates with this guy—which, granted, is further than she’s gotten with almost anyone in several years—but she knows full well that if anyone asked him if they were “dating”, it’d freak him out so much that she’d never hear from him again.

He’s not the type to commit, is the thing. She’s only been on a handful of dates with him, but they’ve been more than enough to make that clear.

And that’s kind of the point, anyway.

This guy she’s been seeing—Andrew—is a textbook gamophobe.

(Gamophobe being, of course, the word for someone afflicted with a fear of long-term relationships, particularly those that might—gasp—result in marriage. Donna had learned this word during a high school relationship—one that she’d been far more invested in than her boyfriend had been—and she’d never forgotten it. She’d taught the word to Josh, once, who’d snorted. Sounds like ‘gomer’, he’d said.)

Anyway, Andrew is a classic case of a relationship that’s bound to go nowhere, and that’s kind of the point. Because Donna, herself, is emotionally unavailable, so it’s only fair to be seeing someone who’s just as emotionally unavailable, if not for precisely the same reason.

It wouldn’t be fair to lead someone on, she knows, not when she knows that this relationship will never go anywhere—could never go anywhere, not as long as Josh is in her life. (Or in the world in general, for that matter.)

But Josh doesn’t actually know that this relationship with Andrew isn’t going to go anywhere, and, well, she’s certainly not going to tell him.

It’s too much fun to see Josh’s reaction to her going out on dates, is the thing.

It’s the only time, these days, when she feels like there might still be something there, there might still be a chance that the door hasn’t closed for them completely, that even though it’s all utterly hopeless and always has been, there’s still a part of Josh that doesn’t want to see her with someone else.

And, if there’s a part of Josh that doesn’t want to see her with someone else—no matter how small that part might be—that’s something to hold on to, something she can cling to, something that she can pretend means more than it does.

It’s like a game, in some way.

(In some sick, twisted sort of way, that is.)

In fact, sometimes Donna is half convinced that it is a game, that she and Josh are playing this sort of twisted game with each other—against each other, maybe, and yet they always seem to be somewhat on the same team, in a way she can’t quite explain.

There’s this thing between them—this thing that’s always been there—this need that they have to see if they can get a rise out of each other, to see if they can get any sort of reaction from each other, when they go out with someone else.

She’s wondered about that game, from time to time—wondered what Josh would say about it, if she asked him—but never enough to stop playing it, never enough to stop feeling some relief when she tells Josh she’s got a date, and he looks at her, something that looks quite a lot like jealousy in his eyes.

So no, she hadn’t meant to start anything, not exactly, but maybe she had.

She’d wanted Josh to notice when she said that she was dating someone—dating a lawyer—anyway. She’d wanted Josh to care, even if that care never translated into anything real, anything tangible, anything she could really name.

She hadn’t meant to start anything except another round of this unnamed, unspoken game.

Because the game was harmless, wasn’t it? Josh wasn’t tied to her, not in any meaningful way, not the way that she was tied to him, so what harm did it to do to pretend that he was, to make believe that if Josh looked jealous at the prospect of her on a date, it might be anything more than the fact that she, unlike most everyone in the west wing, actually had a social life?

Except there’s more potential for harm than she realized, because there’s something Donna forgot to think about, when she tried to start another round.

Because Donna had never really thought about whether or not this game might ever end—it had been going on for longer than she could even remember, longer than the administration had been in office—and she’d never given much more than a passing thought to the fact that it might end one day, might end when he got married, to someone that wasn’t her, might end when he found his soulmate, and she continued, miserably, to go on dates with gamophobes for the rest of her life.

She’d always sort of figured—and maybe this was the dumbest thing about it all—that if the game were to ever end, it would be a mutual ending. Both sides would come together and decide to end the game, because that was how most games ended, wasn’t it?

Plus, this game had always felt more like a joint effort than true opposition—they’d always seemed to play, simultaneously, with and against each other.

Except maybe she’d forgotten to tell Josh that, or maybe he’s just better at this game than she thought.

There’s something to be said for taking your opponent by surprise, she supposes.

Because that’s what it is, when Josh comes into work, the day after Amy Gardner had showed up on his front step and kissed him.

Donna had learned about the encounter quite by accident—she’d overheard Josh telling Sam, after she’d watched him pull Sam into his office, leaving the door cracked only slightly, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to hear it because he hadn’t told her.

(They used to tell each other everything, that’s what scares her. Part of what makes the game work is that there are no secrets, nothing off-limits—and if there are no secrets, then nothing is that serious. It can’t be.)

“She was just there, when I got home,” he’d said—and that was when Donna had started listening.

“On your stoop?” Sam asked, helpfully.

Josh sighed. “Ye—don’t say ‘stoop’.”

“That’s the correct word.” Sam said, sounding almost dumbfounded.

“I know, it’s just...it’s a dumb word. You can’t say front step?”

“Josh,” Sam said.

“Right. Okay, anyway, we’re on the--.”

“Stoop.”

“Front step, and she’s asking me why I didn’t, you know, make a move in college--.”

“Amy thought you should’ve asked her out in college?”

“I should have asked her out in college, I guess!” Josh said, his voice getting just a little louder.

Not that it mattered—Donna had already heard more than enough—but that was what made her gasp. That was when it all came crashing down.

Because that, right then, was when she realized why there’d been a sinking feeling in her chest, ever since Josh had gone to Amy and then come back to Donna’s apartment. This was her worst fear, the end of the world as she’d known it—Josh’s soulmate was back in his life.

It wasn’t going to be temporary, this thing with Amy.

But she couldn’t dwell on it then, because after she’d gasped, she’d heard Josh say a muffled, “hold on,” and his door had cracked open a bit wider, so he could poke his head out.

“The lurking, Donna! You’ve got to stop with the lurking!”

“If I didn’t lurk,” she’d said, her back to him so he wouldn’t see her face crumbling, “you’d never know that you were talking too loud, now, would you?”

Josh sighs and then opens the door wider. “Look, are you coming in, or not?”

“Not,” she’d said, distractedly, as if she were too busy to care about Josh’s conversation, rather than standing there, her back still to him, trying to pull some air into her lungs. “You and Sam have both got senior staff in ten minutes.”

There had been more—Josh had told Sam more, about how Amy had kissed him, how he was going to see her again, that very night—but Donna had barely heard it over the blood rushing in her ears, over the shattering of her heart.

It’s an ambush, that’s what it was, a complete assault on the safe little bubble they’d been residing in, up to that point. And, strategically, it’s a move that’s never really been made, in the game they’ve been playing.

Because they don’t play with sincerity; they don’t play for the Gotcha! moment, because, to Donna, it would always feel sort of like a loss all-around, if they did. When their dates don’t work out, there’s a collective sigh of relief from both of them—victory, it seems, only really comes when there’s no one left but each other.

And, besides, apart from Josh’s relationship with Mandy all those years ago, or the times he’d almost asked Joey Lucas out, it’s always been Donna going out on dates, anyway. It’s always been Donna who’s had anything even approaching the opportunity for an ambush like this one.

Which is maybe why it takes her so much by surprise, when Josh is the one to strike first, this time.

Well, not strike first—she supposes she might’ve been the one to do that, going on and on about the lawyer that she’s seeing—but the one to strike harder, anyway.

And she hadn’t thought it was going to be Amy that caused it, not at first.

Because, after all, that first night he’d gone to see Amy, he’d come back to Donna’s, afterward.

He’d been more than a little anxious that night, more than a little frantic, just on the edge of a panic attack. Something was really nagging at him, from the moment he walked in her door, and after trying to coax an explanation out of him, eventually he’d come around and admitted that Amy had thrown a water balloon at him, that that wouldn’t have bothered him except that, for obvious reasons, having something unexpected thrown at his head from a few stories up had spooked him.

He’d been embarrassed about that, embarrassed that something like a water balloon could cause that sort of reaction in him, and so Donna had done what she could to talk him out of that, to help him realize that it wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about, that of course it had bothered him, how could it not?

For a moment, she’d gotten to comfort him, for a moment she’d forgotten her exaggeration about the lawyer, and she’d just gotten to bask in the fact that Josh had come to her for comfort, Josh had let her soothe him, Josh had let her hold him close and rub his back and help him steady his breathing, and they didn’t have to pretend that they were both half-asleep.

And then that moment had ended.

They’d sat silently for a while, pretending to watch whatever station Donna had picked on the TV—she couldn’t even recall what show was on—and Josh had told her that he wanted to see Amy again.

He hadn’t offered any sort of real explanation—or, at least, not any that held water, at least not to Donna—and she didn’t know then what she knows now: he didn’t need to. He might not have even known the real explanation himself, not when the hands of fate were the ones pulling the strings.

After he’d told her he was going to see Amy again, she’d made some snarky remark, some joke that had landed badly (and come out badly, too, come to think of it—even if it hadn’t been way too soon to joke about the water balloon, it wouldn’t have been funny), and they’d gone quiet again until he’d left, Donna’s heart silently breaking on the couch next to him for reasons she didn’t know how to explain, couldn’t find a way to make sense of it all, put it into words.

(But then, just before he’d gone, he’d stood on the threshold, and Donna—before she’d even realized what she was saying—had told him he could stay. She’d held her breath in that moment, held her breath as though she’d just blurted out that she loved him, that she always had, that there was a mark on her ribs that proved it—and then he’d turned her down. He’d turned her down, and he’d walked off into the night, and she remembered how futile it had been since the beginning.)

(She wouldn’t have made him stay on the couch. Of course not.)

(Not that it mattered.)

(Because then, of course, the world had truly come crashing down, days later, when she’d overheard that conversation with Sam, overheard everything.)

He didn’t mention that he’d known Amy since college, not in her apartment, not that first night, and in retrospect, Donna thinks, it’s probably good that he didn’t—she’s not sure what she would have said if he had, what she might have asked him, whether she’d even be able to look at him without devastation on her face.

(She knows it would have felt different, though, all of it. It wouldn’t have felt, when Josh left, like he’d wanted to stay, not if they had both known that his soulmate had just waltzed back into his life.)

It’s strange, now, to think of it, but a part of her might actually have known then, a part of her might have suspected. Because when he’d left, that night, there’d been a strange taste in Donna’s mouth, and it’s not until later—not until it’s too late—that she realizes what it was, what it must have been.

Finality, she thinks. It’s the first time she’s ever known its bitterness.

Chapter Text

Donna had hoped that the sense of loss, the sense of hopelessness, she’d felt when she first understood what was happening might dissipate. 

After all, she’d tried to remind herself, she’d felt some sense of loss when the whole Cliff fiasco had happened. She hadn’t thought, after that, that they’d be able to return to the same sense of intimacy, and they had.

But that hadn’t been like this. 

That hadn’t been final , not like this, because it hadn’t had to do with Josh, then. It had been her, all her. There had been no danger that Josh’s soulmate had come back into his life, not like there is now. And she doesn’t know what to do with that sense of finality, that sense that it’s all over, that–once again–she’d been grasping onto hope longer than she even knew, and now that hope was gone in one fell swoop. 

Josh is gracious about it, at least, or he seems to be. He keeps most of it away from her, at least. She overhears him talking to Sam about it, once, and then to Toby, once they realize John Tandy is in the picture, but he tries not to be too excited about it in front of her, and for that, she’s grateful. 

But she notices the changes in him, and that confirms it for her even more, that this really is his soulmate, that Amy really is the woman that the fates have destined for Josh. 

But she can’t stop herself from feeling like it isn’t quite right , like it doesn’t quite make sense, in the way that it should. Because she’s met Amy, and she doesn’t dislike her, not exactly, but she just doesn’t seem right for Josh, the same way that Mandy hadn’t seemed quite right for him. 

And maybe it’s the fact that Donna knows Josh so intimately–has cleaned his wounds, has seen him when he was barely alive, had let him cling  to her, night after night, in the throes of nightmares, among a million other tiny intimacies–but she just can’t see Josh’s soulmate being someone as…well, callous, as Amy. Yes, Donna’s biased, and she knows it, but it’s always seemed to her that Josh needs someone softer than that, someone who would care for him, and let him care for her, in the soft, affectionate way that she knows Josh responds to, that she has seen Josh want, has  known Josh to need. 

Whenever she thinks about it, she tries to shake the thoughts from her mind. After all, who is she to say what Josh’s relationship with Amy is like?

But she watches Amy with him, watches the way Amy is dismissive, even cold, sometimes, and not in a way that Josh might like, not in a way that’s at all similar to banter. Amy is cold, sometimes, in a way that seems to sting, even if Josh doesn’t let it show on his face in any way that might be obvious to anyone except Donna. 

But Josh, nevertheless, seems determined to make it work. 

In the years she’s known him, Josh hasn’t ever seemed so driven, not when it comes to a relationship. After Mandy, there was Joey Lucas, whom Josh had never really made it happen with, and then after that, there’d been an occasional date, from time to time, but none of them had warranted much more than a mention at work the next day, and so he’d never given Donna too much of a reason to worry that things were getting serious. 

But it’s not like that with Amy. Josh is serious in a way she’s never seen before, determined to make it work, even though he’s only spent a handful of nights with her. 

They must have gone well, Donna thinks, depressingly. In fact, they must have gone very well, for Josh to be in rare form like this, but then, what else would be expected, for someone who’s just realized that he’s found his soulmate?

After all, she remembers how it had felt with Josh, when she’d first realized he was hers. Yes, of course there had been fear at first, but there had also, once it had sunk in, been an overwhelming feeling of security. Josh had always made her feel safe with him, comfortable with him. 

She still remembered waking up in his bed, during those days on the campaign, especially the days in Madison, when she’d been terrified that her ex was going to come find her, and Josh had consoled her, cared for her, fallen asleep with his arms wrapped around her protectively, and she’d felt so safe, so cared for, so sure that–even though she wasn’t Josh’s soulmate–this sense of being cared for and protected was what one’s soulmate was supposed  to make them feel. 

She wondered with horror if that was how Amy felt about Josh now, too, or if–even worse–that was how Josh felt, with Amy. 

And of course, she wanted him to be happy–she wanted nothing more than that, of course she did–but she couldn’t imagine Amy possibly making Josh feel as safe and loved (even though it had never been loved in precisely the way Donna wished it was) and cared for as Josh had made Donna feel. 

It doesn’t seem like Amy makes Josh feel that way, from Donna’s angle. Hell, half the time she’s seen them together, Amy’s been telling Josh not to talk to her, and effectively shutting him up when he tries, and although that’s worse–the fact that Josh’s soulmate seems to not treat him with the care and respect that a soulmate should, the way Josh deserves to be treated–she can’t pretend to understand the real dynamics of a soulmate relationship, not when her soulmate is fated to someone else. 

Besides, if it wasn’t the real thing, Josh wouldn’t dive headfirst into it like this, would he? He wouldn’t have treated it with this level of sincerity, for sure. 

And he is serious. Because even as she’s tried not to hear about any of the details, tried not to count the number of dates they’ve been on, tried to avoid talk of Amy at all costs, she can’t avoid it entirely.

Especially not when Josh comes to her, beaming, telling her he’s going to be away for a few days.

He’s taking Amy to Tahiti.

A million responses race through her mind, but none of them seem appropriate. Her old line, about how he’s never taken her on a tropical vacation, doesn’t seem quite right–it would be too direct a comparison, her to Amy, and she doesn’t have it in her to watch the look on Josh’s face as he made that internal comparison himself and they both realized at once how deeply wanting he found her, next to Amy.

So she doesn’t say anything at first, and then, when he doesn’t go away, seeming to want something from her (encouragement, maybe? Though why he would need encouragement from her is beyond her), she swallows. 

“You want me to get you the tickets?” she asks, and she can’t quite stop her voice from sounding flat, can’t quite stop the tiny bit of woundedness that leaks in. 

And maybe Josh picks up on that, on the bit of jealousy that she can’t quite hide, because he frowns. “No, of course not,” he says. “I’ll do that myself, on the–you know–the…website.” His voice is uncertain as he finishes, matching the look on his face. 

She grins at him, a little teasingly, because she can get control back in this conversation, she can –”I’m sorry, when did you learn how to use the internet?”

“I know how to use the internet!” he protests. “Donna, I’m a–.”

“A Fulbright scholar, I know,” she agrees, with a heavy sigh. 

“That wasn’t—well, yes, I am–,” he starts, and Donna rolls her eyes, at him, but also at herself. This moment is as good as any to remind herself that of course he’s her soulmate, because how else would she find his arrogance as endearing as it is?

“Anyway, that wasn’t why I was telling you that,” he says finally. 

“Telling me about the trip?”

“Yeah.”

“You were hoping I’d say something like what will we ever do without you for three days ?” she asks, in mock despair.

He hesitates. “Well, kind of.”

She smiles at him, but it’s not a real smile, and she knows he knows it, too. “Josh, you’ve been on trips before, your office isn’t going to fall apart.”

“I haven’t been on vacation ,” he argues. 

“Yeah, but it’s not like you won’t have a phone, right?” she asks. “You’d never leave your phone, even on vacation, would you?”

“Of course not.” 

“Then we’ll be fine,” she says. 

“I know you’ll be fine, I just thought you’d be–.” He pauses, suddenly at a loss, because of course, what he’d wanted was for Donna to be jealous, but he couldn’t articulate that now , couldn’t find a way, without sounding pathetic, to explain that what he’d hoped for was that she’d protest in some way, some way that might give him some hope that maybe there was still a possibility, somehow, by some miracle, that his soulmate actually didn’t want him to go on vacation with another woman. 

“Thought I’d be what?”

“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. 

“Okay,” she says, giving him a strange look. “Well, bring me back some rum or something.” 

“Sure,” he says, and then he turns back to his office, trying not to let the disappointment he suddenly feels show on his face. 

Donna waits until she’s sure he’s gone before she angles her chair so her back is to her office door–and he wouldn’t be able to see her face, even if he was looking–and lets herself crumble a little bit, lets herself let out a breath, lets herself feel the weight of her sadness, just for a moment.

And then she gets back to work. 

It’s almost the end of the day when he circles back to her desk–she’s not expecting him to circle back to her; they’ve been sort of half-arguing with each other ever since their conversation earlier, and they’d argued about him not being able to get her out of jury duty, among other things–and for once, she’s not all that happy to see him.

(She’d almost made it to the end of the day, is the thing. She’d almost made it, and then she could go home, pour herself a glass of wine, and let herself feel the weight of all of it; let herself crumble alone, the way she always did, without him.)

“I need your help with something,” he says. 

“For your vacation?”

“Yes–no,” he says. “Not exactly. I’m not going on vacation, it turns out.”

Donna can’t help it–she feels the hope rise up in her chest. “You’re not going at all?”

“I can’t,” he says. “I’ve gotta stay for the meeting, day after tomorrow.”

“Leo’s making you stay?” She frowns. 

“Not exactly. Look, can you help me?”

“With what?” she asks, and she looks strangely relieved, for reasons Josh can’t understand. 

“I gotta do a thing–a gesture–,” he says. “You know, since I’m not taking Amy to Tahiti. And I thought you might have some ideas. I don’t know, you’re good at this kind of thing.” 

“I’m good at making it up to people when I don’t take them on the tropical vacations I promised them?” she asks, amused. 

“ Donna –.”

“Sorry.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?” she asks.

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Okay,” she says. “When you ask someone for help, see, it’s usually polite to give them, I don’t know, more than thirty seconds, before you go all belligerent–.”

“I’m not belligerent!” he insists, and even as it comes out, he hears a little belligerence in his voice. 

“Convincing,” she says, laughing. 

“This is funny for you?”

“A little, yeah,” she says, still giggling, and then stopping at the look on his face. “Okay, okay, I’m thinking.”

He knows it’s not fair, asking this of her. It’s not Donna’s fault that she’s his soulmate, after all. It’s not Donna’s fault that she doesn’t want him, that he has to make this work with Amy precisely because  of the way his traitorous heart had immediately thought of her while he was talking to Leo, when Leo had tried to convince him to skip the meeting, to  make it work with Amy. 

Donna, for her part, is trying her best not to think of the unfairness of it all, because this is the thing that’s almost broken her, ever since Josh started seeing Amy a few weeks back. He’s taking it all too seriously; he’s too committed to her, and it makes her heart feel like it’s cracking in half. 

So she tries to think about it sincerely, too. If she wants Josh to be happy, she should do this for him, should help him with this, no matter how much it breaks her heart to do it. 

“Have you thought about bringing Tahiti to her?” she asks. 

His eyebrows knit together. “What do you mean?”

“You know,” she says. “Little string lights, flowers, those tiki torch things, some music, little cocktails with umbrellas in them–.”

Josh looks at her like she’s got two heads. “Yes, I know what Tahiti entails –.”

“In your apartment,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m saying you get all that stuff, and you invite Amy over, and it’s a little Tahiti, in Georgetown.”

Josh pauses, considering, a smile beginning to spread over his face. “You think she’d like that?”

Donna tries not to sound too invested. “I would,” she says, “you know, if it were me. It’s a pretty big gesture, for sure.”

Josh looks at her strangely, swallowing. “Yeah.”

They’re quiet for a moment, and it feels strange, to Josh, like there’s something in the way Donna’s looking at him that he doesn’t quite understand, but maybe he’s misreading it. Maybe Donna’s looking at him like this because he just reacted to her strangely, when it hit him how bizarre this thing he’s asked of her is–here she is, his soulmate (even if that’s unbeknownst to her), and he’s asked her to plan this gesture for someone else.

After a long moment, Donna clears her throat, looking at him with kind of an amused affection, and then checks her watch. “Come on,” she says. “It’s five now. I’ll help you–if we hurry, you can salvage this thing with Amy tonight.”

It’s two and a half hours later, when they finally stand back to admire their handiwork. 

Donna had known just the place to go to for everything they needed–a party supply store just a few blocks from Josh’s place with a surprisingly extensive island-themed selection–and with her help, his apartment has transformed pretty completely.

She’s tried not to let on how much it’s hurting her, all of it, to help him with this, but the longer they’ve worked, the worse it feels. She’s not sure what she’s done to deserve this–what she could have possibly done to make the fates punish her in such a cruel way–but it’s devastating, watching Josh’s excitement grow the longer they work, the more it all comes together. 

As they stand back to look it over, she tries to be strong. Really, she tries. “It looks really great, Josh,” she says, and damn it, her voice breaks just a little, just at the end. 

Josh doesn’t seem to catch it, though, which is fitting for this particular moment. “It’s all thanks to you,” he says generously, and that hits her harder than it should–because he’s right, she’s in a prison of her own making; she’s built this hellscape all herself. 

He shakes his head. “Amy’s going to go nuts for this,” he says. “Thanks, Donna.”

She can’t bring herself to reply, so she just nods, and maybe that’s why Josh looks over at her in surprise, which immediately seems to turn to concern when he sees the brokenness she’s sure is evident on her face.

“Are you okay?” he asks, looking both concerned and confused. 

She nods again, and then, before she can stop herself, the words are coming out. “Josh, we’re–,” she pauses, and he looks almost alarmed, seeming to pick up on the trepidation in her voice. 

“What?” he asks softly, and then when she doesn’t answer right away, he moves a little closer to her, and continues. “Donna, you can ask me whatever  you want to ask me.”

She takes a deep breath, and there’s something in her eyes that he can’t quite read, something that looks simultaneously like fear and like a deep, all-encompassing sadness, but he can’t begin to imagine why. 

“Josh, we’re doing all of this for Amy because…,” she pauses again, seeming to gather courage.

“Because?”

“Because she’s your soulmate, right?”

–

Of all things, Josh hadn’t expected that Donna would ask him that question. 

In fact, he hadn’t actually even remembered that he’d told Donna that he’d met his soulmate in college, when the whole thing with Amy began. He hadn’t connected the dots, anyway, that Donna would immediately think that Amy was his soulmate. 

Because that wasn’t the point of him being with Amy. Of course it wasn’t the point. In fact, maybe it was the opposite of the point, because the whole reason that he was so invested in this relationship with Amy was that he’d thought–however foolishly–that it might help him feel less helpless about his pathetic love for Donna. 

He’d thought it might help him move on, in a way, might help it sink in that yes, he was never going to have Donna, but he might as well find a way to be halfway happy, to have someone in his life, even if that someone paled in comparison to Donna, even if that someone wasn’t comparable at all to Donna, not in any way that really mattered. 

And of course it wasn’t really working , because he should have known, based on the simple fact that he hadn’t been able to get the soulmate thing off his mind for longer than a moment or two since 1998, that he couldn’t distract himself from Donna, not really . He couldn’t ever really forget about it, couldn’t ever really stop comparing Amy to Donna, seeing all the ways in which Amy wasn’t his soulmate, not even a little bit, not even at all. 

Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t fun , the thing with Amy. 

It’s just that he couldn’t avoid the topic of soulmates throughout all of it, no matter how hard he’s tried, not even with Amy. 

It’s not quite right to call it an afterglow, the moments after he’s been with Amy. She’s not much of a cuddler, first of all. Sure, she’ll stay in the bed with him, for a few minutes, but it’s not comfortable, exactly; it never seems to match the intimacy that they just shared, not in the way that Josh wants it to.

Although, to be fair, Amy isn’t the only one holding back on intimacy. He’s never, after all, even removed his shirt in front of her, not wanting her to see the scars on his chest, and Amy’s never asked him to. It’s all a little rushed, a little frantic, when they get together, anyway, in a way that sort of makes sense with Amy, because there’s a certain level of carelessness that’s always present in it; a certain hesitancy to get too close, even as they share one of the more intimate acts possible in a relationship. 

(That’s the other thing–it doesn’t always feel like a moment shared between them, between him and Amy, so much as it feels like she wants something from him, and he gives it to her. And he knows she’s not his soulmate, but he can’t help comparing the way it all feels, with Amy, to the way he’s imagined it might feel, with Donna–because even little moments with Donna, moments completely devoid of sensuality, moments as small as a passing exchange in the office, or a glance at one another in a meeting, have always seemed laden with intimacy, overflowing with it, even, and he has no doubt that actually being intimate with her, the way he is with Amy, would be much the same, would be union unlike any he’s ever known. A moment like this with Donna would be a moment shared, he’s sure of it, each of them fully and wholeheartedly devoted to each other, to caring for each other in a way only they know how. But it hurts too much to imagine something that can never be, and so he tries not to think of it too much, tries to shake it from his mind, especially when it pops up at the most inappropriate times, like when he’s actually– ahem – in the middle of something with Amy.)

He doesn’t know why he holds back on letting Amy see his scars–he’s never really asked himself that–but he suspects that that, too, has something to do with Donna, has to do with the fact that the only person he’s really felt comfortable seeing them is Donna, who had never looked at them with disgust, but instead cared for them so tenderly, almost reverently, and reminded him that those scars meant that he was alive.

(That’s what she’d always said to him, in the middle of the night, when he was drenched in sweat, and had woken himself up, clawing at his chest, from a nightmare. Those scars mean you’re alive, Josh, she’d whispered to him, more than once, as he clung to her, weeping, do you know how grateful I am for them? Those scars mean you’re still here, you’re still with me. Then she’d brush her fingers through his hair, until he’d calm down, quiet down, and she’d re-clean and rebandage his wounds, not wanting him to have to shiver through the rest of the night beneath his sweat-soaked bandages.) 

But he’s never spoken to Amy about the shooting, and he has no plans to. It’s not that she wouldn’t understand–he knows that people think Amy is cold, callous, standoffish, but she also makes balloon animals for her nephews; she’s not a monster–but that she wouldn’t understand the way Donna had, and he can’t decide if it’s worse to have to talk about his scars with her or for her to see them and say nothing about them at all. 

He’s so distracted by all of this, even in the throes of intimacy with Amy, that he forgets that when his shirt rides up just a little, Amy can see the mark–the bright red mark, Donna’s mark–on his hip. 

And it’s not until later, until they’re through, lying a foot apart on his bed–Amy always moves away immediately after, and it always stings a little–that she brings it up. 

“You’ve got a soulmate mark,” she says, in the way only Amy can, which is half question, and half complete disinterest. 

It’s so surprising that he almost laughs. He doesn’t know what to do with it at first–it makes no sense to deny it; this isn’t his first night with Amy, and who knows how many times she’s seen it? (Plus, soulmate marks aren’t exactly known for their subtlety.) 

So, he chuckles, trying to act like it isn’t a big deal, trying to make it seem like it doesn’t mean anything to him. “Seems that way,” he says. “Unless it’s a tattoo I really don’t remember getting.”

Amy doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t blame her; the air around them is tense, sort of awkward, and he can’t believe this hadn’t been his first thought, that he was going to have to talk about this with her at some point. 

“How long has it been since it–you know–changed?”  she asked. 

Josh hesitates for a minute, but this is an easy question to shrug off. “A long time.”

“Are you going to tell me who–?” Her tone hasn’t changed; she’s still speaking flatly, as though she’s distracted, barely engaged, in the conversation, and he can’t stop himself from comparing even this conversation to the one he’d had with Donna, when she’d first noticed his mark, back when she was taking care of him, during recovery. It had been awkward, yes–he supposed soulmate mark conversations, in some sense, always were–but it hadn’t been awkward like this; he’d still felt supported, cared for, like it mattered to Donna that he had a soulmate mark, while Amy seems to be acting as though she couldn’t care less.

So he makes a joke of it, trying to change the tone of the conversation so it becomes a little lighter, a little less awkward. “What if it’s you?” he asked playfully.

Amy snorts. “It’s not me .”

“Could be,” he says, still teasing her, and he’s not sure why he’s joking like this, maybe it’s just that he still can’t get Amy asking, Are you dating your assistant? out of his head, and he doesn’t want her to see through him, not this time. 

But Amy rolls even further away from him. “Josh, be serious,” she says. 

He sighs, sitting up a little. “Yeah.”

“You know who it is, don’t you?” she asks. 

“No.”

“You do.”

“I really don’t!” he insists, his voice getting high in the way it always does when he’s trying to deny something that he’s not quite sure he can plausibly deny. 

Amy studies him for a moment. “Well, it’s not me,” she says at last. 

“Fine,” he agrees wearily, feeling suddenly defensive.

“It’s not!” She says again. “Did you see a red mark anywhere on my body just now?”

“Would you believe I was actually a little bit focused on other things than looking for a soulmate mark?” he asks, smirking, and she finally grins back. 

“I don’t have one, is what I’m saying,” she says. 

“You don’t have a–?”

Amy puts her hand up to stop him. “I don’t have one, and don’t do that thing where you look at me like a wounded puppy. I don’t have one, and it doesn’t bother me. It’s not really my thing, the whole fates-controlling-your-whole-future thing anyway.”

“Well, you do like to be in control,” he agrees, hoping the flirtation in his voice might get them away from this topic. 

“That’s right,” she says, and then she crawls back on top of him to kiss him again, and they don’t pick the topic up again. 

–

It’s not until Donna asks the question that he thinks about the conversation he’d had with Amy, and even still, he doesn’t think about what he’d told Donna initially, about his soulmate mark. It doesn’t occur to him, why she would think–and appear to think with a great deal of conviction, he might add–that Amy must be his soulmate. 

(The truth of it is that there’s more than one reason that he’s staying home from the trip. The meeting, for one thing, but also what Leo had said to him, when Leo had tried to convince him to go on the trip anyway. My wife lives in my house. I live in a hotel. , Leo had said, and he’d meant that Josh should go with Amy, but all Josh could think, pathetically–all Josh’s heart could stand to do in that moment–when he’d heard the words ‘my wife’, was think of Donna, and he’d known he wasn’t going on the trip. Of course he wasn’t.)

He frowns at her in confusion, when Donna  asks if this is because Amy is his soulmate. “My soulmate?”

Donna looks pained, like she can’t believe he’s going to make her explain herself, but he can’t begin to imagine why. 

“You mean you didn’t realize?” she asks softly. 

“Realize what?” He’s absolutely bewildered now, and he knows that he’s raised his eyebrows so far up that they’ve probably disappeared completely into his hairline, which is saying something, given how far his hairline has receded as of late, with everything going on with the administration and Donna and Amy and all of it. 

“Your soulmate,” she says, her voice almost a whisper. “You met her in college, remember? And you didn’t know–you didn’t know who–.”

Donna’s voice trails off as she watches him, and Josh’s mouth has fallen open because he never , not in a million years, thought that this was where their conversation was going. He hadn’t remembered that he’d told Donna something as specific as college–he remembered how desperate he had been, in that moment, to come up with something to say, but he hadn’t recalled that that was what he had come up with; he only remembered telling her that he didn’t know who it was, because he’d wanted so desperately to be out of that conversation. 

But now he’s standing here, in front of his real soulmate, as she helps him decorate his apartment for another woman, and the whole situation is so convoluted that he doesn’t know what to say. 

But Donna misinterprets his silence, his shock, as something else entirely.

“Oh my God,” she whispers. “You didn’t realize until just now–you didn’t know it was Amy until right now.” She puts her hand to her mouth, and the look on her face is devastated, like she’s just delivered some sort of awful news. “I didn’t mean to–I thought you would have realized…” Her voice trails off weakly, and he wants nothing more than to go to her, to wrap his arms around her, to tell her that she’s misunderstood, but he doesn’t know how . 

Because where does he go from here? How does he tell her anything without telling her everything? 

And this isn’t the moment to tell her the truth –he knows that for sure. He would never thrust the truth upon her in a moment like this one, and how would he even explain himself if he did? 

"That's not--I mean, Amy's mark doesn't..." he trails off, unsure what to say. It feels unfair to Amy to share that she hasn't got a mark, but to say it doesn't match his isn't precisely the truth either.

Regardless, that's how Donna seems to hear it--that it doesn't match his, the mark she already knows about, the mark she's seen. “That doesn’t mean it’s not Amy,” she says. “You can…I mean, I’m sorry, Josh, but sometimes it happens that, you know, someone is your soulmate, but you’re not…you’re not theirs.” 

“It’s not like that,” he says, “with Amy. That’s not–I mean, even if that does happen sometimes–,” he fumbles for a moment, trying not to reveal to Donna that he knows that that does happen, because it’s happened to him, albeit not with Amy. But he finds himself at a loss again, having no idea how to explain that he'd known Amy wasn't his soulmate long before he ever realized she had no mark, without making Donna realize how pathetic he is, or question why he's pursuing all of this so hard in the first place.

But Donna misunderstands him again.

“It does happen,” Donna says, and she’s not looking at him anymore, she's looking down at the ground, her eyes dejected.

“Even if it does–.”

“It does, Josh,” Donna interjects, in a voice that he’s rarely heard from her, a voice that sounds disconsolate, almost, a voice so unlike the cheerful Donna he’s used to, but a voice that is entirely confident all the same, entirely sure of what she’s saying.

He sucks in a breath, because there’s still something he’s confused about–Donna’s mark, after all, hasn’t changed. “How do you know?”

Donna steels herself, looking him straight in the eye, and swallows hard. “I just do.”

Chapter Text

For a moment, everything stands still. 

Donna can hear the blood rushing in her ears, her heart hammering as she waits for Josh to respond to what she’d just told him; Josh can hear his own heartbeat, too, echoing through the room at a pace that his cardiologist absolutely would not approve of. 

Josh’s heart is in his throat. He can’t form words, can’t swallow, can’t find a way to properly respond to what Donna’s just said. 

It’s all a giant misunderstanding—she thinks Amy is his soulmate, and she thinks she’s the one who just told him so. She thinks that she’s breaking his heart, telling him that sometimes it happens like this, that it happens that one person’s mark changes, and the other person’s doesn’t; that some people’s soulmates don’t want them in return.

And the thing that he can’t tell her is that she is breaking his heart, but not because she’s right about Amy. She’s breaking his heart because she’s confirming the one thing that he can’t get past, the one thing that he still prays isn’t true–in spite of himself, in spite of everything he knows about what’s possible and what’s impossible–which is that his love for her isn’t reciprocated. 

Because if Donna’s gone into all this, into turning his apartment into Tahiti, that is, believing that Amy is his soulmate; believing, furthermore, that Josh was well aware of Amy being his soulmate, and she’d gone ahead with helping him with all of it, she must not be bothered by it. 

After all, she’d initially asked the question almost innocently, just as a means to confirm what she thought that she already knew–Josh had known Amy since college, and now Amy was back in his life, and he wanted to go away with her on vacation and then decorate his apartment for her, so she must be the person he’d forgotten about, the person he’d claimed not to remember. 

Idly, Josh wonders if Donna hears her old question echoing in the room around them the same way he does, or if it’s all in his head: she’s your soulmate, right?

The question felt like it was strangling him, like it was ripping him apart. He knows, he knows, he knows, that he isn’t Donna’s soulmate. He hasn’t had any misconceptions about that. But to hear her ask him this confirms it: there’s no mutuality there. If Donna really thinks Amy is his soulmate, if her concern is really from the fact that she thought Josh hadn’t realized, before, then there isn’t any mutuality. There can’t be. 

And that’s not all. Because what she’d said next is the kicker; what she’d said next is the part that he can’t understand. She’s still looking at him with conviction, almost defiant, and he can’t quite place her expression, but there’s a part of him that feels like she’s waiting, like she wants him to challenge her again, wants him to prove her wrong. 

She’d told him that soulmates weren’t always mutual, that sometimes people’s marks changed, and they didn’t match, and when he’d tried to ask her how she knew, she hadn’t given him a real answer, hadn’t told him anything that he could work with. 

“I just do,” she’d said, and she hadn’t explained herself further. 

Donna knows lots of things, is the thing. She knows lots of things that she has no real basis for knowing, and part of it is that she collects trivia the way some people collect coins or antiques–her collection isn’t on display all the time, but the second she needs it, it’s polished up and ready-to-go. There have been hundreds of times over the years when he hasn’t known something, and yet he has known in an instant that Donna will know, that all he has to do is ask, and the walking encyclopedia that sits just outside his office will tell him whatever it is that he needs to know. 

Part of that is just her intellect. Donna is stunningly, amazingly smart, and that’s why she’s the first person he wants to discuss anything with, the only person that can motivate him to action when he’s set in his ways, the only one who can make him see a situation in a different light, even after Leo and the President have made their attempts. 

But the other part of it is that Donna is interested in everything. She likes learning things, likes developing and refining new skills, likes to know every facet of everything, turning over every new piece of information in her mind until she’s seen all sides of it. Even more than her intellect, it’s that piece of her that makes her so invaluable to him at work. It’s why he hates when anyone else has to brief him on anything; no one can do the job quite like Donna, because it doesn’t matter what questions he throws at her, she’s never stumped. She’s always learned everything he could ever possibly need to know about a subject and then some. 

So it’s not like it’s exactly surprising, that Donna would know something without much of an explanation. Donna knows lots of things that he doesn’t, Donna tells him lots of things without explaining where she got her information. 

It’s just that this is different. Because this thing–this soulmate thing–isn’t like when she’s prepping him for a briefing about tax reform or family leave. There’s not quite enough information out there about soulmates, is the thing. Sure, there have been studies done, books written, thinkpieces published in thousands of magazines and journals, but the thing about soulmates is that most of what the world knows about them is still anecdotal; it’s still passed in whispers from one person to another, or learned firsthand. Much of it is still a mystery, still something that’s sort of discovered as it happens. 

So how does Donna know? How does Donna just know that sometimes people’s soulmates don’t want them back? How does Donna–whose soulmate mark hasn’t even changed –possibly know that? 

He wants to push back again, wants to ask her to prove it, because a part of him, a little tiny part that he always pushes away as best he can, doesn’t want her to be right, wants to believe that it’s him that’s been wrong all this time, him that’s been wrong to think that Donna can be meant for someone else, when all the while he’s only ever been meant for her. 

So he’s dying to ask her to prove herself, dying to ask her, for once, where she’s gotten her certainty. 

Of course, he can’t do that, because she’s right, of course she is. And that’s the awful catch-22 of the whole affair– he knows she’s right, knows it firsthand, knows it because of her. So how can he challenge her point? How can he ask her to prove it, when she doesn’t have to? 

For a fleeting second, he wonders if Donna knows the secret he’s tried to hide from her. Is it possible that she knows that she’s his soulmate, that his mark had changed, not for Amy, but for her, for Donna? Is it possible that Donna somehow knows all of that, and wants to give him a way out, so as not to embarrass him over his feelings for her, which she’ll never reciprocate? 

Is it possible that Donna somehow knows, that the knowledge that she “just has”, without explanation, is knowledge that she has because she’s seen right through him?

He pushes the thoughts away. It’s too humiliating, and besides, he doesn’t think, if it were true, that Donna would push him on it, like this. It’s not her style. If it were true, he thinks, she’d keep it to herself, she wouldn’t want to hurt him by making him talk about it. She was too protective over him, often even at her own expense. It wouldn’t be in her nature to confront him in a moment like this, even if she had somehow managed to figure out the secret he’d done everything in his power to keep hidden from her.

So if it hadn’t been that, then what? What had given her this knowledge? What proof did she have of the existence of soulmates that weren’t reciprocated? 

Before he can stop himself, he opens his mouth to ask her, realizing that he wants to push her on the point, that he almost has no choice, because what does he have to lose? So he opens his mouth, about to formulate the question, about to challenge Donna, who’s still looking at him defiantly, like she wants him to ask her about what she’s just said…

And then his buzzer sounds. 

It startles both of them; both of them having forgotten the whole reason that they’re in Josh’s apartment. Donna gasps, and Josh jumps about a foot in the air.

It might’ve been funny, on another day, in another moment, if it hadn’t just interrupted whatever moment it was that they had been stuck in, whatever conversation they had accidentally stumbled into. But it isn’t funny now. Because there isn’t anything funny about the conversation they’d been having, and there isn’t anything funny about what Josh has to say next. 

“It’s…uh, that’ll be Amy,” he says reluctantly, and he glances down at his watch. “Her meeting must’ve ended early, I told her to come over after.” 

Donna doesn’t say anything for a moment, still staring at him like she had been a moment earlier, like she’d been waiting for him to break the spell, to finally have a real conversation about his soulmate mark.

But then she seems to kind of snap out of whatever trance she’d fallen into, shaking her head as if to clear it. “I’d better go, then, I think,” she says, her voice carefully cheerful. “Kind of kills the Tahiti mood to have your assistant hanging around, doesn’t it?”

She gives him a small smile as she turns to get her coat, but her comment feels like lead in his stomach. It’s so unlike her, is the thing–the false cheer, the way she’d referred to herself as his assistant.

 “Donna, I–,” he begins. “You know that’s not what I–.” He trails off, uncertainly, not knowing how to explain himself. 

Donna almost never calls herself his assistant, even though they both know, of course, that she is. It’s just that she’s so much more than that to him; even if she weren’t his soulmate, she’s his best friend, his closest confidante, much more a partner than a subordinate, even at work. She knows she’s much more than an assistant to him, too, even if she doesn’t know quite how much more, and that’s why her comment stings even more.

And, she’s not entirely wrong–yes, it might kill the mood with Amy to have Donna here, but in this moment, he’s not actually in the mood to be with Amy. In fact, the whole thing with Amy, the trying to make the relationship thing work to help him forget that the stars have tied him to the woman who’s currently gathering up her coat, seems as futile as it ever has. 

Donna turns back, when she’s got her coat on. “It’s okay, you know,” she says, softly.

Before he can ask her what she means, she’s giving him another smile–this one even smaller and sadder than the first–and then she’s opening his door softly, slipping away, and it’s all he can do to not call after her, all he can do to remind himself that there’s another woman on her way up the stairs, and he better damn well not screw that up, since his heart has been ripped from his chest and is currently walking out of the building and down towards the street, and there’s not a chance in hell that he’ll ever have it back, not the way he wants it. 

He flips the lights off in his apartment, so that his Tahitian living room will be a surprise for Amy, and for a moment, the darkness gives him some space to breathe. He has to get his head back in the game, he has to put himself back into this, has to throw himself fully into this thing with Amy, because he’ll never have Donna–as she just reminded him, some people’s soulmates are unrequited.

The knock on his door a moment later feels something like relief, in a way that’s unexpected. He can do this. He can be this person. He can date Amy, and it can work. 

After all, if Amy has no soulmate, and his soulmate doesn’t want him, who would this really be hurting? He can commit himself to this, he can . 

And so he throws himself into it, all of it, trying to push Donna completely out of his head, trying not to see the sad smile she’d given him when she’d left, trying not to recall the quiet way she’d slipped out of his apartment, like she didn’t want him to look at her, trying not to remember the conversation they’d had–well, sort of had–before she left, about soulmates and what happened when they weren’t mutual. 

He turns off the news when Amy flips it on, both to prove something–though he’s not entirely sure what–to Amy, and because, if he isn’t watching the news, he won’t know what they’re saying about the President in Iowa, which means he won’t have any reason to call Donna later, to discuss it, to strategize, to think about what will come next for them tomorrow morning at work. 

(Not that he’s ever needed a genuine reason to call Donna–she’s usually the last person he talks to before he goes to bed at night, whether he has a reason to call her or not–but he knows watching the news will make him think about her, about what she’ll say about the coverage, and if he doesn’t keep himself completely in the moment, completely with Amy…if he doesn’t force his mind to stop conjuring up images of Donna, then this whole thing will fall apart.) 

He tries very hard to keep his mind from straying to Donna, and he’s about as successful as he can hope to be–which is still somewhere just shy of success, but as close as he can get, given the circumstances. 

But then it’s later and he and Amy are in his bed, their breathing still a little labored–and he thinks that Amy might actually fall asleep and stay over this time, which she doesn’t usually do, although she’s firmly on the other side of the bed, away from him, even after the night they’ve had, even after what they’ve just done–when Amy says, apropos of nothing, “you know, I ran into Donna on the stairs.”

His mind, it seems, isn’t the only one that kept straying to Donna, to how she’d left his apartment earlier. 

For a moment, he doesn’t know what to say to Amy, so he settles for making a non-committal noise and hopes that maybe that’s all that she was going to say. 

“She set up Tahiti?” Amy asks, and he knows her well enough to know that it’s not exactly a question. 

Josh lets out a breath. So, they’re doing this. “She…uh, she helped, yeah.” 

He mentally apologizes to Donna for taking the bulk of the credit for her idea; given the fact that he’s currently in bed with Amy, though, it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t give Donna more credit just now.

Amy’s quiet for a moment, and he hopes that means she’s going to drop it. Maybe that was all that she wanted to know, maybe there’s nothing further to be said about this topic, maybe there’s no follow up. 

“You shouldn’t make her do stuff like that, honey.” Amy says, and even though she’s using a pet name, there’s something almost smug in her tone. “It’s kind of cruel.”

He frowns in confusion and rolls onto his side to face her. “What are you talking about?”

Amy rolls her eyes. “Oh, please. I know you’ve heard the way people talk. You know she’s got a crush on you. You shouldn’t make her do things like this.”

Now it’s his turn to roll his eyes, because Amy couldn’t be further from the truth. Sure, there have been times that he’s hoped there might be…something, on Donna’s end, and it’s not the first time someone’s mentioned it to him, but everything that he knows about fate and soulmates and the universe and, hell, Donna herself , has told him otherwise. 

(Even still, even though he knows none of it's true, he hates the way his heart leaps to hear someone say that Donna has a crush on him; he hates the way hope floods through him, even when he knows what Amy's saying is completely unfounded. Amy wants something cruel, huh? There it is.)

“Donna doesn’t have a crush on me,” he says. “It’s people trying to stir the pot, you asked me about this before.” 

“Before, you just said she’s your assistant.”

“She is my assistant!” he says, and he knows he’s being overly defensive, but it doesn’t matter, because denying all of this stings just as much as when Donna had demeaned herself earlier, just before she’d left. Kind of kills the Tahiti mood to have your assistant hanging around , she’d said, and although she’d sounded cheerful, the hint of sadness in her voice had betrayed her. 

And she hadn’t known the half of it, because in a way, right now, the Tahiti mood has been effectively killed because of his assistant, and she’s not even here. He idly wonders if this is what it feels like, for her, when he interrupts one of her dates with whatever gomer she’s currently seeing.

Probably not, though, because Donna probably saw a potential future with some of those guys–or at least she tried to–and Josh is lying here knowing full well that he’ll never really want anyone but Donna, no matter how many Polynesian islands he builds in his living room. 

“That’s not my point,” Amy says, and she’s combative too. It’s not the first time that they’ve fought about Donna, of course, but this time feels different, and he wonders if it’s just the way he’d forced himself into tonight, tried to throw himself into this relationship so his heart wouldn’t feel so broken over watching Donna walk out the door.

So he fires back, laughing a little, even though he hears the hollowness in it. “Why are you pushing this?” 

“I’m not pushing anything. I’m just saying, you didn’t see her face,” Amy says, “on the stairs. She was clearly upset.” 

“Donna was upset?” he asks softly, and even though he knew it, even though he had seen the sad smile on Donna’s face with his own two eyes, even he hears the distress in his own voice, even he feels the way his heart clenches at the very idea that Donna might have been upset, let alone the fact that he’d done something to cause it. 

He thinks back to the moment in his living room, when he’d turned off the TV, trying not to give himself a reason to call Donna. How futile that had been. All he wants to do now is call her, check on her. Maybe he can make something up–she’d taken the metro back from his place to hers, right? He always made her check in when she took the metro home at night. He didn’t like not being sure that she was okay, didn’t like the idea of her on the metro at night, and then walking the three blocks back from the metro stop by her place to her apartment in the dark.

Yeah, that might work. He could tell her he was concerned that she hadn’t checked in. 

Except…Donna would see through that, because of course she wouldn’t have called, not when she knew he was spending the evening with Amy, and what’s more, she thought that he was spending the evening with Amy after recently discovering that Amy was his soulmate . She would never expect him to call on a night like this.

He had to fix this. 

He usually talked to Donna before he went to sleep, anyway. It wasn’t uncommon for him to call her when he got home, stay on the phone with her through dinner (if it was an early night) or as he got ready for bed (if it wasn’t), and it wasn’t even entirely uncommon for him to fall asleep while still on the line with her, waking up in the morning to a phone that needed to be charged, or sometimes in the middle of the night to the sound of Donna’s gentle breathing in his ear as she slept on the other end of the line. 

(That had all started after she moved out of his apartment after his recovery–the phone calls, that is. He’d started calling her sometimes when he had nightmares, and then it had morphed into something else entirely–a co-dependent kind of thing, where he called her at night just because he wanted to, where he bookended his days, from the very beginning to the very end–with the sound of her voice.)

He forgets to notice that Amy has been talking all this time, that he hasn’t listened to a word she’s said since she told him that Donna was unhappy, that his traitorous heart, even in this moment, in his bed with Amy, is yearning to be soothed by the sound of Donna’s voice, by Donna’s reassurance. 

Luckily for him, Amy hasn’t seemed to notice either. “I’m just saying,” she finishes. “Your assistant has a crush on you, and that’s fine, that’s not a big deal, but you shouldn’t yank her around like this.”

“If you think I yank Donna around anywhere,” Josh says, making sure to put air quotes around ‘yank Donna around’, even though Amy isn’t even looking at him, “then you don’t know Donna. Anyway, can we drop this?”

“You should listen to me,” Amy says.

“Fine,” he sighs, but there’s enough resignation in it that even Amy knows it’s still a cue to stop talking.

So she does stop, for a moment. 

They lie there quietly in the dark, not quite looking at each other. “It was a nice evening,” she says, a minute or two later, turning her head to smile at him. She’s trying to salvage this moment, he knows, and she’s going to let her. “Three kinds of rum and all.” 

He smiles back, relieved that it seems that she is going to let the matter drop. 

“Think it could get even nicer?” she asks, and then she pulls him towards her to start a second round, and he tries to fall into her, tries to ignore the pit still sitting in his stomach, the way his heart is still aching over what Amy had said about Donna being upset, the way he still can’t get Donna’s sad smile out of his mind. 

Later still, when Amy has exhausted herself and retreated–once again–to the other side of the bed, and fallen asleep, he lies awake, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the day he’s had. 

He’d actually been excited, this morning, at the prospect of going away with Amy, and then excited again later, a little, as they’d decorated his apartment, before the way things had ended with Donna. 

When he can’t take it anymore, he gingerly leaves his bed, leaving his bedroom door halfway ajar and heading towards his living room, where he left his cell phone on the coffee table, in the dim light of the paper lanterns Donna had picked out.

Donna picks up on the second ring. “Josh?”

“You’re not asleep!” he says.

Donna laughs a little, and he closes his eyes at the sound of it, relishing the warmth of her laughter. That’s another thing about Amy–he doesn’t laugh as much with her, not the way he laughs with Donna.

“You hoped to wake me up?” she asks.

“You’re always going on and on about how I never let you sleep, I thought you might’ve taken advantage.”

“Where’s Amy?” Donna asks, and he can’t quite decipher the tone of her voice. 

“She’s, uh…,” he lowers his voice, because the last thing he wants is Amy waking up and walking into this conversation. “She’s in the other room.” 

“Is she sleeping?”

He cranes his neck, looking down the hallway towards his bedroom to make sure that Amy is, in fact, still sleeping. “Uh, yeah.” 

They’re both quiet for a moment, and every excuse that Josh possibly had for calling runs out of his mind. 

None of them are true, anyway. The truth is, he just wanted Donna. One night of throwing himself into this relationship with Amy and he’s already tired of pretending that he wants anyone but Donna. 

“Josh?” Donna asks, after a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Did you…you know, need something?”

You , he thinks, but of course he can’t say that. What had he thought about before? Something about the metro or walking home? 

“Um, Iowa.” He stammers at last. “I couldn’t watch the coverage.” 

“I missed it, too,” she sighs. “I only went back to the office for a minute because I forgot to cancel the meeting with Senator Haffley tomorrow, and then the metro stalled at Dupont Circle, and by the time I made it home, I’d already missed most of it.”  

He hums in acknowledgement, and then tried to think of something else to say, something to dispense with the weirdness Amy had left him feeling earlier. 

“Did Amy like the surprise?” Donna asks.

“Loved it,” he says, and that’s true. Up until the weird moment he and Amy had had in his bed, he had thought she loved it, but then, who wouldn’t? The whole thing had been Donna’s idea, and Donna was great at stuff like this, at making people feel loved, known, cared about, celebrated. 

“That’s great,” she says, and he thinks he detects something a little forced in it, but that might just be his imagination. 

“Well, it’s thanks to you, you know.” 

Donna doesn’t say anything, and he wishes he could see her face. Their late-night phone conversations aren’t usually stilted, like this. Usually Donna’s talking a mile a minute, and he’s just content to sit there, eyes closed, phone pressed to his ear, letting her voice wash over him.

But then, usually he doesn’t have a woman that Donna thinks is his soulmate sleeping in his bed down the hall. 

“You should–you should probably get back to Amy.” Donna says, a moment later. 

This time he knows her voice is sad, and he remembers the real reason that he’s calling. 

“Amy said you were sad, earlier,” he says, the words coming out faster than he means them to. “When she saw you on the stairs.” 

She’s quiet again, and he doesn’t know if he should push a little or wait her out. When she speaks again, she sounds almost cautious, as though she’s deciding what to say as she says it. 

“I wasn’t sure if I’d ruined things for you,” she says, at last.

“Ruined things? How?”

“I just…you didn’t seem to know about Amy, about how she was your soulmate,” Donna says slowly. “And I didn’t know that you didn’t know, but I didn’t like leaving you with that, right before she arrived.” 

He sighs, and he doesn’t know why that answer disappoints him. Probably for the same reason he’d been disappointed earlier, when he’d wanted Donna to be jealous that he was going to Tahiti, and she hadn’t given him any reason to believe that she was. 

“And that was the only reason?” he asks.

“What other reason would there be?” she responds, and there’s a note of defense in her voice.

“I don’t know, I guess…,” he pauses. 

“What?”

“I guess…I don’t know.”

“ Josh .”

“I guess I was just,” he pauses, stalling again, and then lets himself ask. He may as well ask again, even if he already knows what the answer is. “Donna, your soulmate mark…it, uh, it hasn’t changed, right?”

There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the phone; whatever Donna had thought he was trying to ask, evidently it wasn’t that. “I told you it hasn’t,” she says, finally. 

“Right,” he answers, except that that doesn’t answer his question. Yes, Donna had told him that, and he had no reason—then or now—not to believe her. Except that she didn’t really answer his question this time, and she didn’t answer what he really wanted to know earlier, even if her reasoning was nothing more than an inkling, or maybe something she’d picked up from a magazine article: how did she know that soulmates sometimes weren’t reciprocated? Something in her tone had told him that she’d said all of that for some reason that was stronger than just a hunch. 

But it couldn’t be, could it? Because what stronger reason could there be, given that her own mark hadn’t changed? 

“I guess I just,” he pauses, and then laughs a little, because he’d gotten way too close to just blurting everything out. Wished it had, wished it was me. “I don’t know.” He runs his fingers through his hair and then scrubs his hand over his face. “Look, it’s getting late.” 

“Yeah.” 

“I’ll call you in the morning, okay?” he asks, gently, feeling suddenly, strangely, like he’s trying to absolve himself of something, but he can’t articulate exactly what. 

“Sure,” she says. “Hey, don’t forget that we canceled Haffley because Matt Skinner will be over early.” 

“Right,” he says, and then, in the silence before she hangs up, he blurts out, “hey, Donna?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.” 

He knows what she’ll ask before she asks it. “For what?” 

It doesn’t occur to him–not then, not until later–that Donna didn’t sound exactly confused by his apology. She’d sounded curious, sure, but not exactly confused. Later, he’ll remember the last thing she’d said to him before she left his apartment– it’s okay, you know –and he’ll wonder what she meant by it, wonder why it sounded like she was accepting an apology he hadn’t made yet, an apology for something he couldn’t define, wonder why maybe she’d been expecting the apology he’d sort of offered on the phone. 

Later, he’ll wonder, again, if she already knew, if she was accepting his apology for wanting her, for the fact that his mark had changed because of her, because of a love he had that she did not reciprocate. 

It doesn’t occur to him now, because for now, he’s just trying to articulate why he’s sorry. There’s too much to be sorry about, is the thing. 

There’s too much, and he doesn’t know where to start. For lying about his soulmate, maybe, or for asking her, again, about hers. For wanting her to be jealous of Amy, and being disappointed when she hadn’t been. For making her sad, in his apartment, earlier, whether it was for the reason she’d said it was, or for some other reason she hadn’t wanted to name. For having Amy in his bed right now, while the mark on his hip burned because of Donna alone; while his heart yearned to have her, Donna, next to him instead, next to him always, next to him for the rest of his life. 

For yearning for her, maybe, when he didn’t have any right to, when she would never want him back, and even if, by some miracle, she did, the universe was always going to call her elsewhere. 

None of those reasons, unbeknownst to him, were why Donna had offered him absolution, earlier, in the foyer of his apartment. But he won’t know that, either, for a while. 

“I just am,” he says softly, and then, before she can respond, he hangs up.

Chapter Text

During the weeks on the campaign when Donna had left him to go back to Dr. Freeride, Josh had begun to feel an exceptional amount of soreness in his jaw. He’d mentioned it to Sam in passing, who had turned immediately serious. 

“When’s the last time you went to the dentist?”

Josh, who’d been working such long hours that he couldn’t remember if he’d even brushed his teeth that morning, shrugged. “It’s not my teeth, it’s my jaw.”

“It’s all connected,” Sam said. “You’ve probably started grinding your teeth in your sleep or something, and let me tell you, Josh, that’s a gateway to all kinds of issues.”

Josh looked at him skeptically, unsure that he’d even been sleeping enough to start grinding his teeth, but made an appointment to squeeze in and see his dentist when the campaign rolled through DC a few days later. 

“I can fit you for a mouth guard,” his dentist had said, “but I don’t see any evidence of grinding, and there is always the possibility of other causes.” 

Josh, not wanting yet another thing to inevitably leave behind in hotel rooms across the United States, and unsure of when he’d even be back in DC to pick up the mouth guard, instead opted to schedule a follow-up appointment for a few months later, leaving the dentist’s office with his jaw still rigid. 

It was weeks later–-a few weeks after Donna had returned–when he’d realized that the pain was gone, that it had simply slipped away, at some point in the chaos of the campaign, without him noticing, so he doesn’t feel guilty when he eventually cancels the follow-up appointment. 

By then, the jaw pain is a distant memory, and it’ll be years before he thinks of it again.

---

Josh doesn’t sleep, after he gets off the phone with Donna, the night they built Tahiti in his apartment.

It all feels wrong, is the thing, and it’s too hard to sleep when the sound of Amy breathing beside him–this would be the one time she actually stayed over–only serves as a reminder that this love he has for Donna, this horrible, all-encompassing, ever-unrequited thing is causing him to hurt everyone around him. 

(Not that he’s necessarily hurting Amy, he knows. Amy knows full well that she has no soulmate and seems completely unbothered by that fact; she knows, too, that Josh has a soulmate and that it isn’t her, so it’s not as though all of this is really happening without her consent. Still, it feels wrong. He never thought having a soulmate and knowing who she was would make him feel like this.)

It’s just that he feels like he’s slowly losing his grip on everything. For a while, it had seemed like this would work. Like, maybe it wasn’t ideal , the situation he was in, but maybe he could find a way to make his unrequited love for Donna not hurt quite so much, not haunt him every second of every day.

Only, now, it seems like he might have been wrong about that. He might have been wrong, and that might be the reason that Donna had seemed so hurt, when Amy had run into her on the stairs. 

And the thing is, he doesn’t know how to fix it. He can’t tell Donna why he’s been hurting her, and he doesn’t understand why all of this would upset her to begin with, so he’s at a loss of what to do. 

The only thing he knows is that he can’t keep hurting Donna. To hurt Donna is to wound his very heart, his very soul, because those things belong to her just as surely as they belong to him. So, he might not have the answer, but he knows the answer can’t be this. They can’t just keep going on like this. 

Across town, Donna isn’t sleeping either. 

She’d been exhausted when she’d come home, and she’d wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and forget about her day, forget about Josh and Amy and Tahiti and all of it, but then Josh had called. 

And now she can’t seem to forget any of it at all. 

She and Josh had always had a way of understanding each other, hadn’t they? They’d rarely ever had miscommunications, and when they had, they were always easily fixed, always chalked up to someone having a bad day and snapping out of turn, or the usual stress that comes with working in the White House, but this didn’t feel like that.

This seemed like something bigger than that, like there’s a piece missing to this whole thing, and that’s why they can’t seem to get through to each other lately. 

And Donna has a horrible feeling that it’s all her fault. After all, the only piece of information that Josh is missing is the fact that she’s loved him as long as she’s known him, and she knows that she always will. The one thing that she’s never been able to share with him is the very essence of her soul, the part of her that’s been neatly labeled as his since the second he walked into his office and found her answering his phone. 

And isn’t that quite the sticking point?

Because Josh’s soul isn’t labeled for her in return, Josh wasn’t impacted by that day in the campaign office in the same way that she was, Josh’s mark has been red since he met Amy in college, whether he realized it or not. 

And the thing that made her maybe saddest of all was the fact that he’d apologized  to her about it on the phone. He has no reason to apologize to her, or at least, none that she could see, but he’d sounded almost sad about how it all had gone down, about how Donna had been the one to have to inform him that Amy was his soulmate, because he hadn’t realized.

And she hated that she’d done that to him. 

After all, he’d just found his soulmate! He should be celebrating, he should have been having the happiest night of his life, and instead, he was on the phone with her, apologizing for the fact that he might have hurt her in the process. 

It was one of the things she loved most about Josh–the way that he cares so deeply for those around him–but tonight, it just makes her sad for him, sad for the fact that he’d been so worried he might have hurt someone else by finding his soulmate that he hardly seemed able to enjoy it. 

And it makes the longing worse, in a way. Josh has always treated her like this, is the thing. Josh has always treated her like someone of value, someone that really mattered to him. She still remembers what she’d written in his inscription in The Art and Artistry of Alpine Skiing , the book he’d given her their first year in office. She still remembers the look of his words on the page, No matter what’s on our plate here, you make every day good, and none of this would be worthwhile without you. 

She still remembers what it felt like to read those words, what it felt like to be held by him afterwards, as he tucked his face into her shoulder and whispered, “I meant it”. 

Josh had always given her more than she deserved, and that was what made all of this so difficult. 

It’s what she always came back to, on a night like this, when the whole soulmate thing felt like the universe mocking her, like it was much more trouble than it could ever possibly be worth: she would have loved him anyway, even if the universe never told her to.

She would have loved him anyway, and how does someone move on after that?

---

The problem, Josh thought–well, not the problem, perhaps, but a significant factor, at least–was that there were always too many things happening at once. There was never just one thing going on; they never even had a night in which there was only one thing to focus on. He’s heard that bad things happen in threes, and maybe it isn’t quite that, but it seems to him to be pretty damn close, most of the time. 

It’s an election year, which, for all intents and purposes, basically means they’ve made it through an entire term, and yet, still, things seem to be getting harder. There just always seems to be too much happening at once. Donna found out about the President’s MS, then Mrs. Landingham dies in the same evening. It’s too much, is all. 

It makes whatever’s going on with Amy feel like nothing more than background noise, and yet he knows it’s more than that, because ever since it began, he feels like he’s been missing the mark with Donna. 

And he can’t really put his finger on what that means. As far as anyone else is concerned, he and Donna probably appear to be carrying themselves like they always have. There’s nothing new in the way that they treat each other out in the open, nothing different about the way Donna calls him out when he needs it, or somehow anticipates everything he needs before he asks. 

But there are differences in the moments that are theirs , in the moments that are private, that used to be shared only between the two of them, and that makes it impossible for him to seek any counsel on it. Perhaps it’s just that there seems to be fewer private moments, and maybe that’s just an inevitable consequence of how much is happening around them, but he thinks it’s more than that. He thinks it’s connected to this thing with Amy, even though Donna never so much as mentions Amy to him. 

One night, Donna gets back from having drinks with a friend–a male friend, which she’d neglected to mention when she’d asked him if she could leave for a little while–and she tells him that she’s been offered a job. He’s deciding which thing to make a big deal out of–who her date was or the job thing–when he realizes that she’s serious. 

There’s a job on the table for her, it turns out, and it comes with money. Money and a title. 

He’s always worried about this, in the back of his mind, that someone would offer Donna what she really deserves, which is much more than he can give her. She can’t have money, so long as she’s working as a public servant, and she can’t have a title bump, so long as she still works with him, and his title is the only one directly above hers, but he’s known for years that she deserves more than this, more than him, and he’s always worried that a chance will come along, and that she’ll take it. 

(And it’s not that he’d begrudge her the opportunity –Lord knows that Donna is smarter than him, more organized, put together, maybe even capable than him–but if she doesn’t work for him anymore, that means that he’ll lose her entirely, and he’s never been more scared of anything than he is of that.) 

But this thing between them feels so precarious now that he worries he might still lose it if he makes the wrong move, like the Fates themselves are holding their scissors up to the string that ties him and Donna together, and he, with his hands shaking and his heart aching, is guiding them towards snipping it apart. 

He worries constantly that he’s going to lose her, going to lose even the achingly small ways in which he currently has her, and it’s all he can do to keep that from happening. 

And so he doesn’t make anything out of it–out of the job offer or the guy she was with–and he hopes that that will be enough, that that will keep Donna from pursuing it. He teases her just a little–about working for an internet start-up or something, it doesn’t matter–but not enough to indicate that he’s taking the idea of her leaving seriously. 

It’s the coward’s way out, he knows, to not acknowledge how very much she deserves a raise and a promotion, but he doesn’t know how to say so without encouraging her to leave him, and he’s already trying desperately to hang on to the little bits of her that he gets to have, so what else can he do? 

---

It doesn’t seem to make sense, to Donna, the ways things are always happening all at once. She doesn’t even register the job thing, not really. It’s an honor to be offered a position like that, of course, but it’s ludicrous to think that she would ever break her own heart and leave Josh. 

As it is, she’s felt them slipping away from each other lately, like sand running through her fingers, and it’s Amy, of course, that’s a part of it, but it’s more than that, too. 

Because one of the ways that Donna has always been sure that Josh is her soulmate, after all, is the way that they always just seem to get each other, without even needing words, most of the time. 

But it hasn’t felt like that recently, since Amy came into the picture, since Josh, she assumes, doesn’t need her, Donna, so much anymore, now that he’s found his real soulmate. 

And maybe that’s the reason that she tells him about the job offer in the first place, since it’s not as though she’s actually considering taking it. 

“Dot. coms aren’t dying, you know,” she tells him. “Just the hype.” 

She wants him to say something, something about how she can’t leave her job, she can’t really be thinking about this, something that will show her that this is more than just meaningless banter to him. 

He almost does, but as it’s always been lately, it’s not quite what she needs from him. “You can’t be thinking about taking a job that may not be around a year from now,” he says. 

“ This job may not be around a year from now!” she replies, and she wants him to hit back, wants him to tell her, it doesn’t matter, Donna, we’ll find something else. Even if–God forbid–we’re not here next year, we’ll go somewhere else, you and me.

Mostly, she thinks, she just wants it to matter to him, the thought of losing her. Because she’s losing him to Amy right now, she can feel it, and even though it’s not the same–even though the soulmate thing is an entirely different thing from a professional working relationship–she just wants the stability of knowing it all matters to him. 

He doesn’t say any of that, seeming to find the idea of her leaving too ludicrous to entertain, although not, she thinks, feeling suddenly sick, for the same reason that she does. 

“I need the sugar subsidy editorial and the facebook, okay?” He says, seeming to consider the matter closed. Without waiting for a response, he turns her back to her and heads into his office. 

She watches him leave, his back to her painfully symbolic.

Not for the first time, she wonders how walking away from him could possibly be more painful than this.

---

He’s at his desk, biting the inside of his cheek and trying to ignore a knot in his hip, which has started aching–well, aching more than usual–out of nowhere, when he realizes that he might just be an idiot. 

Because Donna had mentioned the job offer she’d gotten, and when he’d ignored it, she’d dropped it, which was never a good sign. 

When something didn’t really matter to Donna, she’d fold it into the daily joke cycle, the daily banter between them. 

But she hadn’t come into his office once since their conversation about the job. Well, she had, but she hadn’t said anything, and that’s how he knows he’s done something wrong. Because if it didn’t matter, he never would have heard the end of it.

The only things that Donna doesn’t talk about are the ones that weigh on her too deeply to mention. 

They’ve always been alike, in that way. 

---

Donna has felt the ache in her ribs more keenly since Amy had come into the picture. Sometimes, when she lies awake at night, trying not to think of where Josh is–in Amy’s bed, somewhere, or lying next to Amy in his own–the pain in her ribs feels more pressing, more urgent, and she wonders if that can really be how it works, if the longer you avoid your soulmate, or the longer you don’t get to be with them, the more pressing that pain grows. 

She wonders at what point it will rupture, at what point it will be too much to live with, and what will she do with it, then? 

The answer comes sooner than she thinks, or maybe it’s simply an answer to a different question. Because the truth is, regardless of Amy, regardless of all that is still wrong between them, there are times in which she simply needs Josh , both because of and in spite of the predicament she’s found herself in. 

---

Donna saw a graphic once, in an article in National Geographic that was written for the eightieth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. It was a diagram of an iceberg, meant to underline just how truly massive the iceberg in question had been, to destroy the unsinkable ship. 

Of course, Donna had heard the phrase “the tip of the iceberg”, and she’d always understood the idea of something so enormous that just a piece of it can do significant damage, but she hadn’t ever really understood the full scope of it, what it meant to think you’re looking at an iceberg, and to actually be looking at a tiny fraction of it, not nearly enough to know what you’re getting yourself into. 

Ninety percent of an iceberg, the diagram explained, is hidden underwater. And it’s not just that the tip of the iceberg is enough to destroy on its own, it’s just that that’s the only part of the iceberg that you can even see. The rest of it–the majority of it–is lurking silently underneath, never warning you of its danger, but simply lying in wait. Moreover, by the time you’re close enough to realize what you’re up against, it’s too late. You can’t understand how much of the iceberg you’ve been missing until it’s already crippling you, already ripping a gaping hole in your meticulously welded steel wall. 

You won’t even know what happened, in fact, until water is already seeping in, until the sinking process is already underway. 

So it’s not the tip of the iceberg that will get you, in the end, it’s just the part that you’ll remember noticing, when you look back to figure out what, exactly, went wrong. 

---

There had been a night, when Josh was recovering and Donna was staying with him, when she’d woken in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in her neck. 

She’d grown used to that kind of pain before, from falling asleep on campaign buses, from dozing at her desk on workdays that spanned twenty-four hours, but this felt different from that.

Between Josh and her, the unspoken rule had always been this: put on the other’s oxygen mask before you take care of your own. And there’s a reason that they always warn you not to do that on airplanes; there’s a reason that people protect their own safety first, there’s a reason for the phrase “every man for himself”.

But since Josh had been shot, she’d never allowed herself to feel pain, not of any kind. Because if she let herself start to feel it, it might overtake her. If she let herself think about how it felt to look at him through the window of the operating room, what it looked like to almost lose him forever, she might not be able to come back from that. It might distract her from caring for Josh now , from what he needed from her now, while he was getting better.

And so it shocks her, when she wakes up and realizes that for the first time in weeks, she is in pain. It’s startling; it’s frightening. And it’s not because it’s so terribly painful physically–although it is–it’s because of what it might mean. 

If she’s able to feel pain again–to feel it for herself–does that mean that she’s letting him down? 

The thought makes her eyes pop open, and when she does, she realizes that Josh, too, is awake, now, that he’s expending incredible energy to pull himself into an upright position, concern building on his face. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, and she can hear the concern flooding the sleep-saturated husk of his words. “You made a noise in your sleep, I thought–.”

“It’s nothing,” she says, reaching over to put a hand on his arm and still his movement–the last thing he needs is to waste his energy on her. “Just slept a little funny. Go back to sleep. Do you need me to help you lie back down?”

Josh gives her a skeptical look. “Are you sure? I just–I can get you an aspirin or something.”

She almost laughs, because although Josh is getting better, he still has enormous trouble moving out of his bed. Moreover, as she’s the one who doles out his medicine every day, he’d have no idea where to find it. 

“Josh, we both know that even trying to get out of bed right now would hurt you much worse than me,” she says, smiling, and she reaches for him to help him lie back down. 

She tries to ignore the pain that shoots up her spine and into her shoulders and neck as she moves towards him, but Josh must see her wince, because he says. “See, I knew it. Let me–please, I want to help you.”

“I’m fine,” she says again, determinedly scooting closer to him and helping him ease back down until he’s lying flat.

She moves closer to him to tuck her head against his shoulder as she, too, lies back down. It’s a position that’s not exactly comfortable and not exactly better for her neck pain, but it seems to settle him. 

“Thank you,” she whispers into the darkness, “for wanting to help me.”

“Chivalry is not dead, Donnatella,” he says, his voice slipping back into a sleepy, fading thing, and just as she thinks he’s gone back to sleep, she feels his hand against the juncture of her shoulder and her neck, weakly trying to coax away the knot in her muscle. 

He’s still trying, she realizes, even as his oxygen mask dangles uselessly in front of him. 

He’s still doing everything he can to make sure she’s wearing hers. 

---

It’s not just that there’s too much happening, lately, Donna thinks. (If she’d had a problem with too much happening at once, after all, she never would have accepted a job in the White House.) 

It’s just that, since Amy–Josh’s real soulmate, she forces herself to recall–came along, the rules have been different. 

What used to work, what used to get them through any given day, isn’t really doing the trick anymore. 

It’s like there’s a slow leak between her and Josh, oxygen slipping away from their grasp, like they’re unmoored in a way they haven’t been. But what’s striking about it is that it feels, in a way that Donna can’t really articulate, like they’re both in pain, like it’s not so much that they haven’t put on each other’s oxygen masks this time but like the oxygen flow is somehow corrupted; it’s not doing enough, anymore.

When oxygen is depleted, after all, often the first symptom is a sense of confusion. And that has to be the explanation, doesn’t it? Why else would the things that always made sense between them before seem to be strangling her now? 

It’s not that they spend less time together–with the re-election on, they probably spend even more time than they used to–but that time doesn’t feel the same. It’s like they’re playing chess without any kings; they’ve lost the plot, their movements seem meaningless in a way they never had before. 

She doesn’t know how to reach him, anymore. She doesn’t know how to shout for him, when she can no longer breathe. 

---

Josh watched her from his doorway. Her back was to him, but he knows even still the horror she felt, as she watched C.J. deliver the news he’d only just delivered himself, a moment before. 

This might be the thing that breaks him, he thinks, and he’s glad he can’t see her face. It’s enough just to imagine it, and he feels himself breaking right along with her. 

She must feel him watching her, because she turns around–maybe it’s become too much for her to watch the anguish on Billy Price’s wife’s face–and for just a moment, they just look at each other. 

He wants to say something to her, but he doesn’t know how. He thinks maybe she knows, anyhow, knows that she can come to him, can follow him to his office if she needs to, because Donna has always understood him, Donna has never needed words from him, not in moments like this one. He hopes she understands, anyway.

Although it’s been a while since they’ve felt like that, like they can communicate without needing to speak, and he almost gets up, a few moments later, to find her, sure that he can’t let her carry this alone, can’t let her endure this. 

But things have been so off between them, and he knows that’s his doing, but that doesn’t make it feel any less wrong, so he doesn’t move, instead doing his best to get back to the work that awaits him, does his best to convince himself that if Donna needed him, if Donna wanted him, she’d come find him. 

---

She’d known what Josh was going to say before he’d said it, known it the second he left his office and headed towards where she’d been standing with C.J. and Leonard Wallace, Billy Price’s editor. 

And she knew–just knew–before Josh even opened his mouth, that Billy must be dead. 

The facts were never in his favor–he’d been in the Congo, he’d missed two deadlines–but she’d just told his wife Janet that C.J. would do anything for her reporters, that she was sure that it would all be okay.

She’d just heard about Billy and Janet’s two children, three-year-old Harry, and seven-month-old Donna.

He’d had a daughter named Donna. 

And she doesn’t know why it’s that, of all things–as if it wasn’t enough just to know that he has (had?) two young children, a loving wife–that echoes in her mind, but she idly wonders if this is how it was for Josh, with the pilot who’d shared his birthday. Did that haunt him, those words in the pilot’s file, the way Janet Price’s words, “our daughter is Donna” ring in her ears, over and over again, now?

She watches C.J. deliver the news, watches C.J. catch Janet Price in her arms as she collapses, and she feels like she’s going to throw up. 

Our daughter is Donna, Janet had said, our daughter is Donna . 

From down the hall, she can feel Josh’s eyes on her, and when she turns to meet them, his expression is unreadable. They stare at each other for a moment, and then–like he’s done so often lately, even earlier tonight, when she’d mentioned the job offer–Josh turns away. 

---

An hour passes before Donna comes into Josh’s office and closes the door, and before he can even ask her what’s going on, he sees the look on her face again, the same look she’d been wearing when she’d stood there with C.J. and heard him say that Billy Price was killed. 

Before he can even open his mouth, she whispers, her voice hoarse and hollow, and so unlike Donna that it makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up, “their daughter–their infant daughter, Josh–her name is Donna”, and then her face is crumpling and he can’t even think, he’s just reaching for her, pulling her into arms, guiding them both down to the floor where he can hold her to his chest and rock her gently as she cries into his shoulder. 

It’s always come easily to both of them–comforting each other–and Josh feels a tiny bit buoyed by the fact that, in this moment, he still knows exactly what to do, could put it into words, instructions, step-by-step, if he had to. He knows how to hold her as tightly to him as he possibly can, one hand on the back of her head, his other arm wrapped around her waist, securing her to him. He knows to press his cheek and then his lips into her hair, to whisper little noises to her, comforting noises, things that don’t mean anything, necessarily, to her, and yet, if he’s honest with himself, mean everything to him, are a means to say the things he can’t put words to yet, not in front of her, not openly. 

In a way, he supposes, this is quite a bit like the night they’d spent on the bench by the fountain while Cliff read her diary. They needed to come back to each other sometimes, in this way. It was helpful, restorative, to hold each other just like this, to let walls down that only seemed to crumble in front of each other, to seek the kind of comfort that can only be found when they’re together. 

But it is different now, and it’s the difference, now, that makes his heart ache. Because he can comfort her here, behind the door in his office, but they can’t do the rest of it–they can’t go home together, they can’t fall asleep in the same bed, they can’t wrap themselves around each other and cling to each other in their sleep the way they had the night with Cliff Calley, or when he used to have nightmares after the shooting. They can’t seek out that level of comfort together anymore, and that’s his fault, that’s all his doing. 

He doesn’t know what he’d say, if someone were to burst through the door of his office just now and find the two of them together like that, bodies intertwined, clinging to each other. He doesn’t know how he’d explain it if he had to. 

It’s like a reflex, he thinks, the way he and Donna move together sometimes. It’s like when the doctor taps your knee with the little rubber hammer, and you don’t think, you just kick, and you haven’t even realized you’ve done it until the movement is already behind you. 

The moment Donna had stepped over the threshold of his doorway and into his office, he realizes now, he’d been rising out of his chair. Some part of him had known–before he could have ever articulated it–that he would need to go to her like this. She hadn’t had to speak, he hadn’t had to look at her, there had just been a part of him that had decided before he even knew that there was a decision to be made, before the doctor had brought the reflex hammer anywhere near his knee. 

It’s only now that she’s here, in his arms–and, oh God, this is the wrong moment to be realizing this–that he realizes how much he misses her. How he’s been missing her, ever since Amy came along, and the only time he ever feels settled anymore is when they’re this close to each other. 

Which–he knows, okay? He knows –is an awful thing to think, when Donna’s crumbling in his arms and there is nothing more that he can do for her, nothing that goes beyond this room, beyond this moment, but the only time he doesn’t feel the constant twinge in his hip, the only time his heart isn’t drowning in agony, is when she’s pressed against him like this. 

He’s already known–known for as long as Amy’s been back in his life–that Amy can’t fix that, that she can’t fill the void, that she can’t be absolved from the sin of not-being-Donna, but it’s just that he’s never been faced with it quite like this; the physical relief of having Donna so close to him is staggering, and that’s something that he hadn’t really thought about, before.

He’d thought by now he would have considered this thing from every angle, is the thing. Even with all that’s happening around him all the time, with the bad things that come in pairs, or threes, or dozens, even, he never stops thinking about Donna, never stops wanting her, never stops wishing that things were different, that he had time to take back whatever he’d done to piss off the Fates and get a do-over, get a chance to love her the way that he wants to. 

But he’d always told himself that he could make it through, that however painful this thing was between them, it was at least survivable. If it hadn’t killed him yet, he’d always told himself, then he must still have the upper hand, he must still have a hold on beating this thing, it might not be so bad. He might be able to go on living like this–not that he had a choice–for the rest of his life, and yes, it would hurt and he wouldn’t be happy, but he could do it, couldn’t he? He could survive it, surely. 

In retrospect, he ought to have known better. How often, after all, had his cardiologist warned him about silent killers, about the way death could creep in, silently, unexpectedly, asymptomatically, sneaking up without warning until it choked you out? He ought to have known that this thing could be much the same; he ought to have known that he could be completely unaware of the depth of the pain he was in until he received a modicum of relief from the brush of her hand against his, or from the way she fell so readily, so easily, so trustingly into his arms. 

And yet–-and yet –there was something to the fact that he’d known what he needed to do for her before he’d even seen her face. It’s an Occam’s razor sort of solution to how to fix what’s broken between them. The simplest answer is usually the best one, and the simplest thing between them has always been this–has always been falling into each other just like this, even if he is pulled by the Fates and she is not. 

---

It had been Josh’s therapist that told him how the body can hang onto emotions, storing them in particular muscles over time. Emotions were nothing to be afraid of, his therapist had told him many times, but their repercussions can extend far beyond one’s own mind, and it’s the body that keeps score, the body that can bear the brunt of the physical consequences for the pain in the mind. 

It had been after the shooting when his therapist had mentioned it. Josh hadn’t gone back to work yet, but his GP had recommended that Josh check in with a mental health provider before returning to work. As Josh already had a therapist in DC–though one he rarely saw–he’d let Donna drive him to therapy, as she did to all his appointments, so he could check it off the list, and he’d mentioned that Donna had driven him to his therapist, Stanley. 

Donna kept track of all his appointments, an especially arduous task in the aftermath of the shooting, since he still had so many appointments with his team of doctors, along with the more unusual appointments added to the list, like the therapy visit his GP had recommended. But Donna had kept track of all of his appointments long before the shooting, too, and he’d said so to Stanley, mentioning that Donna was even the reason behind the first dentist appointment he’d had since the campaign, just before the shooting. 

He hadn’t been in a few years before that, not since the incident with the jaw pain. 

“I had this thing with my jaw,” he says, “anyway–doesn’t matter–it went away–back on the campaign, while Donna was…well, that was the last time I’d gone.”

“What was Donna doing?” Stanley asks him. 

“While I was at the dentist?”

Stanley smiles patiently. “No, the last time you’d gone. You mentioned Donna was somewhere, or doing something.”

“She–she’d gone back to her old boyfriend for a bit,” Josh says, frowning and pausing as it all comes back–what it felt like when Donna had left, when he’d thought he’d lost his soulmate for good, when he thought she might’ve gone back to her true soulmate, and he might never see her again. He shakes his head to clear it. “Anyway, she came back. But the jaw thing happened while she was gone.” 

“When did it get better, your jaw?” Stanley asks.

Josh waves his hand. “I don’t know, a few weeks later, maybe. I don’t know why I even remembered it, it was a blip. Sam thought I was grinding my teeth. Maybe I was, I don’t know.”

“Did the jaw pain go away when Donna was back?”

Josh frowns. “The two aren’t related.” 

Stanley frowns, but doesn’t say anything for a moment. “You know, Josh,” he says, a moment later, “sometimes the body holds onto emotions, when we aren’t available for them.”

“I–.”

“Did you know, for instance,” Stanley muses, “that anxiety is often stored in the jaw? When you’re anxious, sometimes your jaw muscle holds onto that, even when you don’t know that it’s doing that.” 

Josh pinches the bridge of his nose. “Stanley, I really don’t see how–.”

Although he’d mentioned Donna to his therapist many times before, he’d never really told him who Donna was to him, never really gotten into the soulmate thing. Because not everyone believed in soulmates, and even among those who did, not everyone understood. Stanley wore a wedding band; it was possible Stanley might know just the right thing to say, but Josh never knew how to say it. 

“You’ve mentioned that Donna is a calming presence for you,” Stanley says. “You had this unexplained jaw pain while she was gone, and it disappeared when she came back. It’s possible that the anxiety she typically takes off your shoulders appeared there, in her absence.” 

Josh doesn’t say anything in response. He doesn’t need to. As the silence stretches between them, he feels a familiar twinge in his hip. 

Chapter Text

There’s a part of Josh that loves when he thinks he detects a little jealousy in Donna. 

And there’s something unbelievably ridiculous about that, almost silly, because he knows, even if she doesn’t, that his whole self is hers, that women like the Flenders’ daughter don’t even register for a fraction of a second in his brain, not when he spends all day with Donna. 

But he likes that it, you know, seems like it bothers her, just a little bit, how when he told her that Jennifer Flender had sent him an email, she’d responded without a second of hesitation, “Why is she emailing you?”, her tone just a little sharper than usual, undetectable to anyone but him. 

And then, when he’d flaunted it just a little bit further, mentioned that the Flender girl had a little crush on him, Donna had demanded to know if he’d slept with her, as though it were even possible, as though it might have mattered if it were. 

He’s with Amy, and Donna knows it, so it’s not as if Jennifer Flender, whom he met for maybe an hour or two four years earlier–and hadn’t slept with, by the way–means anything at all to him, but still. He likes that it bugs Donna, if only for a second.

He hates that he likes it, but he does. 

The reality is that he barely remembers the Flenders’ daughter, even though he does remember, with perfect clarity, the last time that they were in Hartsfield’s Landing. 

It had been before Donna left to go back to her boyfriend, but after he’d realized who she was to him. 

He hadn’t realized how easy it had been, in those days, how low the stakes were before she’d gone back to her boyfriend, before they’d been in the White House, before they had eyes on them all the time, back when he could still be open about his pride in her, his affection for her. 

(Not as open as he’d like to be, of course, but more open than it was acceptable to be once the President was elected.)

The thing was that he’d thought, before Hartsfield’s Landing, that he was probably a little bit biased. He knew Donna was special to him, but he also knew why . So it wasn’t surprising, to him, how much his mood lifted every day with her, how he felt like she’d come bursting onto the scene like a breath of fresh air, how he couldn’t remember feeling nearly as energetic, as hopeful about their prospects before she’d joined the campaign. 

But that time with the Flenders had made him remember that it wasn’t just the soulmate thing, his admiration for Donna. 

Because the Flenders, even four years ago, had been…well, difficult. 

Oh, sure, they were supportive of the President (the Governor, back then). They’d housed some campaign staff, had provided beds and meals and, most importantly, votes. But there had been a tone to Mack–the husband–that Josh hadn’t much liked. 

Roberta, his wife, had been the generous one, the one that had probably offered to take them in, the one that openly praised the Governor, the one that seemed excited to have them in town, but Mack had seemed suspicious. He’d lived in Hartsfield’s Landing all his life, he’d mentioned on their first night at the Flenders’ house, and he didn’t like the spotlight that was on them now during every election. It hadn’t been there in his youth–the media hadn’t been like it was now, then–and he didn’t like it. 

He hadn’t said much more than that, but he regarded all of them with an air of suspicion. 

All of them, in fact, except Donna. 

She hadn’t been the exception at first. At first, he’d treated her like all the others, with a welcome that was begrudging at best, but that made it clear that he couldn’t wait for all of them to be gone. 

The Flenders ran a tackle shop, and Mack had asked Josh, when he, Donna, and Toby, had arrived to stay with them for the second night, having barely said anything at all to them the first night, if he did any fishing. Josh had looked at Toby out of the corner of his eye, who grimaced at him. Neither of them fished, but even worse, neither of them even knew much about it. If only Sam had been there, Sam could have made conversation about fishing. 

“No, sir,” Josh had said, at last, at a loss for what to say next, and wishing he knew enough about fishing to even fake it. 

It had been Donna who stepped in then, Donna who talked to Mack Flander for the rest of the evening, making him laugh with stories of fishing trips she’d been on with her dad and brothers, about the time her brother had bragged for weeks before she’d been allowed to accompany them for the first time about the size of the fish he caught, stopping only when she–Donna–had been the only one to catch anything on the trip. 

Mack Flender’s whole demeanor had changed after that. He’d hugged them all before they left, even Toby, who seemed even more uncomfortable with the hug than Josh, and he’d promised to send Donna one of the new ultra-light fishing rods he’d just gotten into the shop for her to pass along to her dad. 

It had been Donna, Josh had thought later, that had almost certainly secured Mack Flender’s vote. 

He’d felt so lucky then, he remembered, when he got in the rental car beside Donna (with Toby in the backseat), as they pulled away from the Flenders’ house, Mack waving at them from the driveway. He was sure, then, that the fates had smiled upon him, because it was so easy to love Donna, it was shockingly easy to feel affection for her. 

It wasn’t about the campaign, it was about the magic that was Donna. If she could soften someone like Mack, how could anyone help but love her?

He hadn’t known how hard it would become, because he hadn’t been thinking, much, about Donna’s feelings for him, he’d been thinking only of how lucky he was to love her, how maybe, just maybe, there might be a whole future ahead of them, someday. 

He hadn’t known that four years later, he’d be grasping at straws, clinging to crumbs, like Donna’s alleged jealousy of the Flenders’ daughter, who had a crush on him. 

Back then, it hadn’t been about jealousy. It hadn’t been about the Flenders. It hadn’t been about Amy, or about anyone else. 

He’d thought it would always be that easy.

Sure, there’d been a little anxiety about the fact that she was his assistant, that he was so much older than her, but mostly he’d just allowed himself to be comforted by her presence, to enjoy the little moments, her elbow bumping against his on the console as they drove away, the grin she gave him, one hand on the wheel, as she said, “I think that went well.” 

He’d been so proud of her, on that trip. He’d looked at her as she drove, while she was looking at the road, and thought that he wasn’t biased, after all. Donna really was just that special. How could anyone in the world not recognize it like he did?

The anxiety crept in a moment later (though he wouldn’t feel it in full force until a few weeks later, when he came into his office and found the note telling him that she’d left him), when he’d thought–maybe more seriously than he ever had before–that Donna was special, of course she was. He’d known it since the moment he met her, and it didn’t take anyone else long to figure it out, either. 

So what, then, could she ever want with him?

—

It’s stupid, how much comfort Donna finds in wearing Josh’s coat. 

Even when he’s bugging her, even when he’s sending her out in the cold to try and make points to the Flenders that are probably moot anyway, it’s comforting to be surrounded by him, in this stupid little way. 

It’s probably a placebo, it’s probably all in her head, but her ribs don’t ache as much as they usually do, when she’s wearing his clothes. She wonders–not for the first time–if it’s some kind of trick that she’s playing on the fates, like the way the ache goes away on the rare occasion she falls asleep in Josh’s bed, his arms wrapped around her. It always feels like a reminder, this is the way that it should be, this is how it’s supposed to be . 

But, inevitably, that only hurts worse, because she knows in her bones that it ought to be that way.

She also knows that it never will. 

Still, she takes comfort in his coat, in the way it smells like him.

She takes comfort in the Harvard sweatshirt she sleeps in most nights, in the Bartlet for America shirt she’d stolen from him back on the first campaign, even though they’ve long since stopped smelling like him, having been washed too many times for even the ghost of him to linger. 

She takes comfort in the small things, on nights like tonight, the way Josh lets her wear his coat, the way he runs out to her, shivering, without it, and doesn’t ask for it back, the way he runs ahead to open the gate for her, before his fingers find their usual purchase on her lower back to guide her back inside.

Days later, it’s only small things that she can hold onto again, when he’s at the party, and she’s sitting at his desk. Little things like the olives he’d brought her, in a napkin in his pocket, you look good , I’m working on getting you into the party . 

Or, later that evening, when he’d brought her a piece of birthday cake, and she’d asked him why he kept coming back to check on her, wouldn’t he be missed at the party?

“I missed you ,” he’d said, shyly, and then he’d made some excuse to leave, but not before she’d seen the tips of his ears begin to turn red. 

It’s not nearly enough, it’s never enough, but she clings to those small things. They’re all she has. 

—

He misses her.

Which, all things considered, is absolutely ridiculous. 

Donna is still literally in the same building as he is , but she’s not at the party, and because she’s not at the party, not standing directly next to him, he misses her. 

Also–and this is beside the point, at this point, considering he’s never not feeling it, these days–his hip hurts. He rubs at it, idly, like he always does, and wonders if anyone’s ever noticed that he does that, if anyone thinks he has some weird tic or something, like, have you noticed how Josh Lyman is always rubbing at his hip?

It’s just that he always feels better when Donna’s next to him, which has been true as long as he’s known her, but was even more true, in large crowds, after Rosslyn. His anxiety always spikes when there are too many people around, even in protected, secure circumstances like this one, but he’s never had a lot of success with telling his anxiety that it’s irrational. 

And besides, the security of tonight’s party is his exact problem , right now. 

He couldn’t believe it when Donna had told him there was a security issue with her, but even stranger was when he’d learned what it actually was . 

One second, Donna had been tying his bowtie for him; the next, she was in his office, sadly eating the olives he’d brought her, looking absolutely stunning for a party she couldn’t attend, and he was at a party he didn’t want to attend, wishing she was with him.

If Donna were here, there’d be an excuse to dance with her, he thinks. Amy’s disappeared somewhere with CJ and Dr. Bartlet, and if Donna were here, they could be dancing together, right now. He could tell her–could find some way to tell her that wasn’t inappropriate, that was just the right thing to say–how beautiful she looked tonight, instead of the rushed, “you look good,” he’d given her earlier, which didn’t even so much as slightly convey how he felt, looking at her. 

Instead, Donna’s in his office, eating linty olives from his pocket, and Amy’s plotting ways to disrupt the campaign he should be running without her input, and he’s stuck here, rubbing at a spot on his hip that won’t stop bugging him, and he wonders how it all ends. 

Because somehow, someday, it all will have to end, won’t it?

Amy knows–well, she doesn’t know , he doesn’t think, not everything, but she knows enough. She knows he has a soulmate, and it isn’t her. She knows they’re not in it for the long haul, that they can’t be. 

And Donna hasn’t met her soulmate, yet, which is probably, he realizes, his heart sinking as it always does when he remembers this, how it will have to end , someday. Donna will meet her soulmate, and she’ll love him, and she’ll marry him, and Josh will be there, watching, his heart breaking and his hip aching.

He’s almost glad when Leo interrupts his train of thought, to scold him about letting the political director thing get out of hand with Amy.  He’s glad for Leo’s anger, he needs the distraction. 

After all, eventually, he knows, there will be nothing left to distract him. 

—

In Amy’s defense, it wasn’t like she had actually meant to roadblock Josh in his attempt to hire a Deputy Political Director. That hadn’t actually been her goal, at the beginning of the evening. 

With Josh, it seemed to work like that frequently–or, at least, it seemed to work that way in their relationship. They didn’t mean to get in each other’s way, it was just that it often felt like they couldn’t help it. 

And, okay, if she’s honest with herself, she’d been a little bit petty, going about things in the way that she had. 

But she hadn’t really started it. That, as usual, had been all Josh. 

She’d gone to his office to find him earlier, wanting to walk into the party together, as they’d be expected to do. He was there, at his desk, already dressed, except for the untied bowtie hanging loosely around his neck. 

She’d walked into his office as he was standing up, his hands on his hips, calling for Donna. (Donna hadn’t been at her desk when Amy walked past, but she didn’t feel like enlightening Josh with that particular piece of information. Besides, she already knew why he was looking for her.)

“Almost ready?” she asks. 

He doesn’t look up at her. “In a minute– Donna !” he calls again, and Amy wonders idly how anyone in the adjacent desks gets anything done all day, since she’s certain this must be how it is all the time, Josh bellowing for Donna until she appears. 

They’re quiet for a moment, and again, Donna doesn’t appear. 

“Where is she?” Josh murmurs, still not looking up at Amy.

Amy wonders, for a moment, if Josh has really even registered that she’s standing there. 

“I can tie a bowtie, you know,” she says. 

“Yeah,” Josh answers, distractedly, as he walks past her. “Look, I need–I have to go find Donna.”

He’d returned maybe ten minutes later, his bowtie now neatly tied, and seemed almost surprised to find her in his office, as though he hadn’t really seen her when he’d left. 

She didn’t say anything to him about it, just walked with him to the party, but when she’d asked Josh, later, after Chuck had walked away, You guys planning a heist? , there had maybe been a piece of her mind that was stuck on all that had happened earlier. In his office, I need to go find Donna; at the party, I’m not sure what’s keeping Donna ; the way his eyes darted around the room as they danced, looking, she knew, for a flash of blonde hair, a blur of magenta silk. 

(She’d thrown this at him, earlier, just after Chuck had walked away, knowing she could distract him, knowing it would buy her time to go around him to Dr. Bartlet. He’d asked if she was tricking him, and she told him she wasn’t. Hey, what happened to Donna?, she’d asked, a second later, and it was like the fog had cleared from his eyes, and immediately he was away from her again, both figuratively and literally.)

There had maybe been a little bit of her, later, when she had gotten the First Lady on her side, that needed to be petty, a little bit of her that needed to make up for the fact that she felt, all at once, like she was surrounded by people sharing a very strange sort of inside joke that she couldn’t understand. 

But that wasn’t entirely true, either. Because from the second she’s seen the mark on Josh’s hip, she’d known–and, moreover, she’d understood immediately that he didn’t . He didn’t know what she knew. 

In a way, she thought, maybe there was an inside joke. But how could that be if only she seemed to know the punchline?

—

As the last few strains of the Canadian national anthem fall away, Donna wonders if it’s too early to sneak out of the party. She’d only just arrived, but she’s still mortified at how she’d spoken to the First Lady, and she doesn’t feel like sticking around Josh, just to watch him dance and flirt with Amy for the rest of the night. 

He’d told her she looked good earlier, and that was enough. That was something she could return to tonight, when she was inevitably lying awake, reliving her words to the First Lady and trying desperately to think about anything besides her embarrassment. 

Just as she’s beginning to move away from the group, beginning to plan her escape, Abbey Bartlet appears by her side again. 

“Thinking of leaving?” she asks, watching Donna in amusement and following her eyeline to the door. 

“Oh,” Donna says, caught off-guard, and wondering if she’s offended the First Lady again by trying to sneak out of her birthday party. “I was just…” 

“Relax,” Abbey says, “I was thinking the same thing. But I’m not done with you,” she says, pulling Donna to her side. “CJ, come along, we’re drinking again.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” CJ says. “Should I grab Amy?”

“I think she and Josh have some things to sort out,” Abbey says, and they all turn at once to see Amy and Josh engrossed in an argument. Donna tries not to feel hopeful at the sight of it–it isn’t worth getting her hopes up, not with how often Josh and Amy argue. 

Turning away again, they sneak back up to the residence, which looks exactly as they left it, half-empty bottles of wine still littering the coffee table. 

Within minutes, the wine is flowing again, and Donna hopes that the light buzz she’s starting to feel might be enough to help her forget how the night has gone so far–her embarrassment, earlier, and then whatever was happening with Josh and Amy–but it’s only a few minutes before the conversation takes a turn and it all comes rushing back. 

“Josh was pretty preoccupied with getting your citizenship back all night,” the First Lady comments.

Donna shrugs evenly. “Well, if I started setting off Secret Service alarms, it would cause some problems for his office pretty quick, I would think.” 

“Oh please,” says CJ, “it wasn’t that.” 

Donna looks at her, confused, and CJ takes another drink of wine, straight from one of the bottles they’d left behind earlier. 

“It’s that thing between you guys,” she says calmly, “the thing that causes me never-ending anxiety as press secretary, because it’s only a matter of time.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Donna says, because this is all happening too fast, and she almost wishes Amy was with them again. If she had been, this wouldn’t have happened. 

“Of course you do,” the First Lady says, across from them. “Even I always wondered about the two of you.”

“It’s not like that,” Donna says, and when CJ gives her a look, she repeats, more emphatically. “It’s not ! And besides, Amy–.”

“Oh, I adore Amy,” Abbey says. “You know that I do. There’s no one here who fights for women better than she does, and Lord knows that’s something this country needs. But her and Josh? I may take the credit for those two, but they’re too headstrong for each other.” 

CJ snorts. “Like you and the President aren’t headstrong?” 

Abbey waves her hand. “We’ve been married nearly forty years. And besides–we’re rarely really at odds.”

“Josh and Amy have known each other since college,” Donna offers, even as her heart clenches painfully with the reminder. 

But Abbey shakes her head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that, I think Josh will have to make a choice sooner or later, and I’m not so sure Amy will be what he chooses.”

“When it comes to his career, you mean,” CJ clarifies. 

Abbey is looking carefully at Donna, and it’s a moment before she responds. “Sure.”

“You know him better than anyone, Donna, what do you think?” CJ asks. 

Donna hesitates. “It’s really none of my business.” 

The way Abbey is looking at her is starting to make her uncomfortable, and all at once, she feels the mood in the room shift, knowing what Dr. Bartlet is about to ask her before she asks it. 

It helps that CJ and Dr. Bartlet are drunk, but it doesn’t help enough. Not with this particular question. Because Donna knows that no one’s drunk enough not to remember what she says. No one is drunk enough that she doesn’t have to, in this moment, be very, very careful with her choice of words. 

“Come on, you never looked at him that way?” Abbey asks. “Not once?”

“It’s not…” Donna pauses, hesitating, twisting her fingers together while she frantically tries to think of a way to explain herself, a way to explain herself that isn’t actually the explanation she doesn’t want to give.

Because she can’t bring up soulmates here, she can’t . If they knew–if anyone knew–that she’d been marked by the fates for Josh, and for Josh alone, she would never be able to overcome it. It would change everything, everything she’d done for the administration, everything she’d done for Josh…they would pity her, CJ and Dr. Bartlet, and they would never look at her the same way again. 

Especially if they knew, as she does, that Josh’s soulmate is someone else, that he isn’t tied to her in the same way. 

But the truth is that there are a lot of reasons that she can never tell Josh the truth, and that’s only one of them. The biggest one, for sure–the biggest one by a long shot–but not the only one. 

She sighs, having trailed off, and not really sure how she wants to finish her sentence. 

How can she explain all of this in a way that makes sense, but doesn’t lay all her cards out on the table? How can she make them understand that the stakes are too high, and even without including the soulmate thing, there’s just too much at risk?

“What?” Abbey asks. 

“It’s not…it’s not about not seeing it,” she says at last, and she hopes they can leave it there, just like that, nothing more, nothing less. 

“Then why not?”

“Because,” she says quietly, “you can never go back.” 

There’s a pregnant pause in the room, a moment in which no one says anything. 

But Donna already knows–can tell from the way that they’re looking at her–that she missed the mark. She didn’t want them to feel sorry for her, but they do, anyway. 

And they don’t understand –not the way that she needs them to. That much is evident immediately. 

Finally CJ breaks the silence, and Donna can’t quite read her face. There’s something like pity on it, but it’s caught up in what she surely must feel as press secretary, the notion that this–something like this—could be a disaster for an administration that’s already straining under so much scandal. 

“If you don’t think he–.”

But Donna shakes her head, cutting her off. They can’t go there now. They can’t . “You have to understand,” she begins, “when I came to New Hampshire…the first time, I mean, I had nothing. Nothing . No job, no money, nowhere else to go, no life .” 

Dr. Bartlet is gazing at her, not unkindly, but intently, like there’s a piece of this that is beginning to click in her mind. It’s too much, the intensity of her gaze, so Donna looks to CJ again. . 

Even CJ is watching her with interest now, without the judgment that had been on her face a moment earlier, and Donna wonders what CJ had thought of the girl she had been back then. CJ had always been kind to her, from the very beginning–letting her crash in her hotel room, even–but Donna hadn’t given much thought to how she must have appeared to CJ, how CJ must have seen her wide-eyed admiration of Josh from the get-go, how CJ must have wondered why Josh was so keen to find a place for this girl with no degree, no connections. 

“Josh gave me all of those things,” she says slowly. “He gave me a job, a place to figure out what I was good at, to find my value. Before New Hampshire, I was out of options. I was working in a diner to pay my boyfriend’s way through school; I was stuck in a dead-end relationship and I knew it, but I never saw a real way out before Josh hired me.” 

Both CJ and the First Lady have fallen silent, watching her, waiting for her to continue, and she doesn’t know what to say. Tonight wasn’t supposed to be like this, it wasn’t supposed to have gotten this serious. It was never supposed to have been about her and Josh.

And if she hadn’t been so candid with the First Lady earlier, it might not have been. 

But tonight has turned into something she never expected; tonight hasn’t been the way she thought it would be. 

And CJ and Dr. Bartlet have been drinking, or else they wouldn’t ask, not in this way, not in a way she feels compelled to respond to.

Moreover, Donna’s been drinking. 

And it all feels like too much, all at once. Having to watch Josh with Amy tonight, knowing that, in spite of everything, Josh has chosen Amy, will continue to choose Amy, because that’s what the stars say, and it’s their direction that Josh is following. 

She hates that she is starting to resent it, all of it. 

Not him–it’s not his fault. 

But everything else. Because it isn’t her fault, either, that she can no longer even imagine being happy without him. She’d tried to imagine it, tried to tell herself that she didn’t have to obey the fates if she didn’t want to, that she could ignore her mark, find happiness elsewhere.

But she knows that’s not true. She knows there will never be anyone else. She knows that she can’t imagine the rest of her life without him, even though a life with him is an impossibility. 

And she knows that she can’t articulate that, that she can’t put it into words in a way that they’ll understand. It would be crazy to start talking about the fates, the soulmate marks, how it feels to be fated to someone who will never, ever want her in return. 

It’s pointless, trying to explain all of that, especially to two of her intoxicated superiors. And so maybe it’s that hopelessness, the futility of it all, that makes her say what she says next, because when she does speak, it all comes out wrong. 

“It’s…not about not seeing it,” she says, finally. “That’s what I mean. It’s…if I ever…if I ever tried to make it happen, we couldn’t go back after that. I know we couldn’t. And if he gave me everything I have now, how could I just give it all back? Like it didn’t mean anything?”

—

Josh doesn’t exactly patch things up with Amy. Not quite.

“I understand, and I forgive you,” he’d told her, but both he and Amy knew that that was kind of a cutting remark to make. 

It had been Dr. Bartlet who’d made Amy accept his forgiveness, in a manner of speaking, but when she’d gone, Amy had looked at him the way she had before they’d gotten together, the don’t talk to me kind of look. 

He’s not entirely surprised to see it, and not for the first time, he wonders if all of this is worth it. 

The thing about Amy is that she likes to win. She doesn’t like compromises; she doesn’t like draws. She likes to win outright, and often, she does. 

It’s just that he hadn’t thought she’d win so often at his expense. He hadn’t thought it would feel like this.

He’s at his desk, thinking about all of this, when Donna appears in his doorway. He’d wondered where she’d gone when she’d disappeared with CJ and Dr. Bartlet, and he’d just assumed that she’d gone home eventually. 

It had been a strange night, without her. He’d missed her at the party, couldn’t keep himself from coming back to his office just to be with her, especially considering the tension between him and Amy. But evidently she hadn’t gone home, and he can tell that she’s been drinking, at least a bit, because she’s giving him the sort of dopey grin that only seems to appear when she’s had a little too much. 

“I didn’t think you’d still be here,” she says, smiling at him. “You didn’t go home with Amy?” 

He sighs. “It bugged me, tonight,” he says, “what Amy did, with the Deputy Political Director thing. It…it really bothered me.” He looks down at his hands as he says it, but he feels better, all the same. He always feels better when he can say things like this to Donna, because he knows, somehow, that she’ll understand, that she won’t fault him for feeling this way. 

Donna frowns, but she doesn’t say anything right away. 

“I mean, am I wrong to feel bothered by it?” He asks. “She has a job, I get that. And I’m not trying to be–I’m not trying to–,” he trails off, not sure what he’s trying to say. 

“Be what?” Donna asks. 

“I don’t know,” he says, sighing. “Anti-woman, or something. I’m really not. It’s just, there’s a list…we had our people, and it wasn’t…Amy made it something that it wasn’t.” 

Donna looks at him carefully. “I don’t know if it was so much about women,” she says, “as it was about Amy.” 

Instantly, Donna regrets saying anything, as she watches Josh’s eyebrows leap to his hairline. She’s not being fair to Amy and she knows it; she respects the work Amy does for women, like Dr. Bartlet had said earlier, Lord knows that no one else in Washington looks out for women as fiercely as Amy does. And she can’t let her love for Josh allow her to say things like this. It’s not fair to Amy, and it’s not fair to Josh. Because neither Amy nor Josh is actually at fault for making her feel the way she does. It’s the fates, as it always has been. There’s no one else to blame. 

God, why can’t she stop putting her foot in her mouth tonight?

“I didn’t mean–,” she starts. “I didn’t mean that the way that it sounds.” 

Josh doesn’t look upset. “What did you mean?”

He knows already what she must have meant–Donna always had a way of knowing what he was thinking, and this time, he was sure that she meant the same thing he’d been thinking only a moment ago, before she’d arrived. 

Amy makes him feel small, sometimes, is the thing. It’s not that he needs to feel important, and it’s not that he doesn’t respect what she does, but sometimes Amy treats him as nothing more than a means to an end, an end that otherwise has nothing to do with him. 

But that’s not fair either, and he knows it. Because isn’t he doing the exact same thing to Amy, being with her like this, when he already knows that he belongs only to Donna? Isn’t he treating Amy as a means to distract himself, an end which–if he’s honest with himself–has nothing to do with Amy?

He can’t look at Donna after he realizes this, because he knows she’d read the shame on his face, and he can’t bring himself to show it to her. 

Instead, he asks her again, “what did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she says. 

They both know she’s lying. 

“Donna–.”

“I don’t know, I just…I don’t like the way she pushes you around sometimes,” she says. “I just…I think when she does that, it’s not necessarily on behalf of women.”

He smiles at her. “You push me around all the time.” 

“It’s different.”

“How?”

“Well,” she says carefully, not meeting his eyes, “you’re not dating me.”

And there it is.

He pauses. For a long moment they don’t look at each other, Donna leaning further into the door frame as though she wishes she could disappear into it, and Josh suddenly finding the pattern of the wood grain on his desk unbelievably interesting.

“No,” he says softly, at last. “That’s true.”

Donna takes a deep breath. She’s been honest enough tonight, maybe there’s a little honesty left in her. She can’t change who Josh’s soulmate is, but she can tell him that he doesn’t deserve this, can’t she?

“It just…sometimes it just…sometimes it seems like Amy…steamrolls you a little bit,” Donna says finally. “Maybe she doesn’t mean to, maybe she really is just passionate, just trying to advocate for women, but sometimes it seems like Amy doesn’t care how many casualties there are in her battles, and she doesn’t care if you’re one of them.”

Josh simply stares at her, because Donna doesn’t…Donna doesn’t say things like this, not to him. Not about other people. And yes, she’s been drinking, but she still isn’t usually this honest, and even from where he’s sitting, he can see that she knows it, too; he can see her hands shaking as they’re gripping the doorframe. 

“I don’t have a lot of experience with this,” Donna says softly. “With soulmates, I mean,” and for a second, she looks so breathtakingly sad that it’s all Josh can do not to go to her, wrap his arms around her, tell her that it isn’t what it looks like, with Amy, it isn’t what he’s led her to believe. 

“I know I can’t tell you what it feels like,” Donna says, her voice somehow even quieter than it had been a moment before, “to be with your soulmate. But I know what it is to be mistreated in a relationship. I know how it feels to not be…to not be considered, let alone not be put first. And it shouldn’t…you shouldn’t have to feel like that, not with your soulmate.”

There’s a haunted look in Josh’s eyes, and Donna isn’t sure what to make of it. It’s true, what she said. It feels, sometimes, like watching Josh with Amy is like watching herself with Freeride, watching him accept being treated in a way that’s so much less than he deserves. 

But she’s wrong about that. She has to be wrong about that, because her ex wasn’t her soulmate, so it’s not the same. It’s not the same situation at all, no matter how it looks. 

And who is she to say something like this to him, anyway? This was one night in Josh’s relationship with Amy. She has no idea what the rest of their nights together look like. After all, Josh had built Tahiti in his apartment for Amy. That had to mean something. There had to be something there that she didn’t understand, that she couldn’t possibly know from the outside looking in, something that only soulmates could truly understand, could truly feel with each other. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Josh, I’m sorry. I don’t know why–I shouldn’t have said that, it’s none of my business. I don’t even know Amy well enough to say anything like that. I’m sorry.” 

He sighs, standing up from his desk and moving towards her, if only because he can’t stand how far away she is, can’t stand the way she’s almost shrinking away from him, can’t stand that this is the closest thing to an honest conversation that they’ve had in a long time, and half of it, on his end, hasn’t even been true. 

He stops just short of her, like he always does.

Like they always do.

“No,” he says. “No, you were right. And I needed to hear it. Because I was hurt by it, by what happened tonight. And maybe you’re right, maybe she really is just passionate about her cause, which I do respect, I do–but I was hurt by it.” 

“I have no right to ask you this,” Donna says, “But did you tell Amy that?”

He gives her a smile that’s sadder than it should be. “That’s not really how it works, with us,” he says. 

But Donna misinterprets what he means, she must, because she just looks sadly back at him. “You should, Josh. I know I said it’s none of my business, and I’m not trying to pry, but if you…if Amy is your…I don’t know, I just mean, if you’re with Amy, she should respect that. She shouldn’t–wouldn’t–want you hurt.” 

He opens his mouth to respond, then closes it again. It’s not that that’s really hurting, he wants to say, it’s not really about Amy, but he stops himself just in time, because he knows Donna, knows that Donna would look at him carefully for a long moment and then ask him what he meant. 

And what could he say, if she did?

It’s not really about Amy, it’s about you. It’s always about you . 

But even though that’s the truth, it’s impossible. He can’t say that, not to her. There’s no way to explain it without explaining all of it. 

So he doesn’t say anything at all. 

Chapter Text

There was a time, way back when Josh was recovering from Rosslyn, when the power had gone out. 

It was late September, past when the temperatures ought to have started to drop, but it was unreasonably hot and muggy still, the air outside–not that Donna allowed Josh outside yet–thick and sticky, the way it always got in the dregs of summer. 

But it was raining that day, the kind of downpour when the skies just can’t hold back the humidity any longer, and the rain finally breaks through the mugginess. It was just rain–no thunder or lightning, no violence–and so it was surprising when, in the midst of the rain, the power went out. 

The first sign, of course, was the quiet, steady hum of the air conditioning grinding to a stop. It wasn’t yet dusk, so there weren’t many lights on in his apartment yet. He might not have otherwise noticed the small lamp on his bedside table going out, since it didn’t offer much light with the late afternoon light still streaming through his window. 

Which is probably why Donna didn’t notice right away. He was used to Donna’s watchfulness, the way she was always aware of what was going on with him, usually before he was. And she was there, already–in his apartment–having come home–well, back to his place, he had to stop thinking about it as her coming home , so it wouldn’t hurt so much when she eventually moved back out–earlier than usual, to make sure that he was doing okay, but she didn’t come into his bedroom to check on him right away. 

When she does come into his room, she’s frantic, and he recognizes in her the guilt that he’s seen only glimpses of, from time to time, the thought that–impossibly, from his perspective–she might not be doing enough for him, the fear that he still sees in her eyes that maybe he’s still not out of the woods.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t realize the power went out, because it was still light enough in here. It just got so quiet, and I realized the AC must have kicked off, and when I went to reset it, I saw the oven clock flashing. Let me open a window, let’s get it cooled down in here.”

Josh gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “It only just went out a few minutes ago, Donna. I’m fine. I haven’t even had time to feel warmer. Look,” he says, motioning down at his t-shirt, “I haven’t even started sweating or anything.” 

Donna goes straight to the windows, halfway across the room, by his desk, and begins to open them. Even from his bed, he can see her hands still shaking a little, can still see the stress coming off of her in waves. 

It’s only once she’s cracked the windows that she turns around, seeming to calm down a little when the light breeze from the rain outside starts to make its way into his room. 

“Do you need anything?” she asks, the calm she’s trying to display belied by a little tremble in her voice. “The window should keep it from getting too hot while the power’s out. Hopefully it’ll be back soon.” 

“Donna,” he says softly, “I’m okay. Everything’s okay.”

She just stands there, nodding, and then takes a deep breath, like she’s still trying to come down from the anxiety, still trying to believe him. 

“Come here,” he says gently, patting the bed next to him. 

She doesn’t move for a moment, but he keeps looking at her. “Come on, Donna, it’s okay.”

She’s tentative at first, leaving a respectable amount of room from where she crawls in on the side of the bed that he now thinks of as hers, to where he’s lying on the other side, but he reaches out, tugging on her arm to pull her closer, and it doesn’t take much more than that for her to cuddle against him, her head falling into the crook of his neck as he wraps his arm around her. 

She’s careful, as always, not to jostle him too much, not to accidentally graze the wounds she painstakingly cleans for him every night, but after a moment, her arm snakes around him, too, settling low–but not too low–against his middle, warm through his t-shirt, so that her hand–still a little shaky– curls around his hip to pull him closer to her. 

He wonders if she knows that her hand is placed directly over his mark, even with the thin fabrics of his boxers and t-shirt preventing them from skin-to-skin contact. He wonders if she, nonetheless, can feel the warm burn his mark seems to radiate, a pleasant warmth, unlike its usual sting, as though his mark knows that the fingerprint that his mark displays belongs to the hand poised just above it. 

Donna does, after all, know that the mark is there, having inadvertently discovered it a few days earlier, but he can’t be sure whether the position of her hand in this moment is intentional or not. It could be purely coincidental, after all–it’s not like Donna has probably spent much time thinking about his mark since she glimpsed the edge of it the other day–but in the times that they’ve cuddled together in the past, he can’t remember her hand ever finding his hip like this, almost as though she sought it out. 

He knows it’s probably impossible that that’s the case, especially since it’s not like he’s Donna’s soulmate, anyhow, since her mark hasn’t changed, but the thought of Donna touching his mark–however unintentionally–emboldens him a little bit.

He pulls her a little tighter to him, and presses a kiss into her hair, something he’s never allowed himself to do in waking hours. She seems to respond in kind, nestling her head a little further into the crook of his neck, the hand curling around his hip tightening a little, finally stilling, like she, too, is soothed by placing her hand in precisely that spot. 

They don’t say anything, for a while. They don’t need to. 

It’s enough to just be close like this, to hold each other as the room grows darker and the rain grows louder, and pretend that the power outage somehow excuses all of it, makes whatever happens here, together, okay, in a way that it wouldn’t be in the west wing, in a way that’s somehow deeper than the way they’ve already bent the rules the whole time that Donna’s been living with him. 

It’s the most peaceful moment Josh has had since the shooting, just lying there, listening to the rain outside, holding Donna, saying nothing at all, but feeling her heartbeat next to his, feeling the warm weight of her hand, heavy on his hip, stroking his own hand through her soft hair and down her back. 

If only it could be like this all the time, if only it all felt as simple as it did right then, his soulmate’s heart beating in time with his, his soulmate’s hand pressed soothingly against his mark. 

But it can’t be, he knows it can’t be. 

And it’s then that the feeling of peace that had washed over him starts to falter. Because what can he possibly do next? How can he possibly give up the peace of a moment like this, when he knows what it feels like to hold her so close to him? 

Not for the first time, he wondered if he could really do this, if he could really never have her the way he wanted to, if he could watch her go on to find her real soulmate one day, if he could find a way to be happy for her. 

He wonders if, when the power comes back on and she eventually leaves his bed, he’ll ever stop missing this moment with her, if he’ll ever stop longing for that peace. 

Nearly two years later, the next time the power goes off in his apartment, he knows for sure: the longing lingers on. 

–

What Josh doesn’t know–at least at first–is that there’s a whole section of the forum on lemonlyman.com dedicated solely to the topic of Josh’s potential soulmate. 

All things considered, it’s not that surprising–there seem to be few Josh-related topics that don’t warrant their own sections of the website–but Donna still almost gasps when the soulmate tab catches her eye as she looks over the website with Margaret, Bonnie, and Ginger. 

She doesn’t dare click on it when they’re all still gathered around her desk–not wanting to call any attention to the fact that she ever even thinks about Josh potentially having a soulmate at all–but she knows she’ll return to the website to look at it later. 

To look for what , she’s not entirely sure. It’s just that maybe there’s a part of her that wants to find something soothing there, something to make her believe that the situation with Josh’s soulmate isn’t nearly as dire as the last several months with Amy have made it seem. 

When she does look at the website again, it’s later that evening, the bullpen all but empty, and Josh is away in a late meeting with a senator from North Carolina. 

The comments start out fairly predictably–speculating on if Josh has a mark, if it’s turned red yet, and a few posts positing some very, ahem, creative spots on his body in which said mark might be found. 

Naturally, the comments move from where the mark might be to whether or not it’s changed, and if it has, who might be the person who caused the change. Several comments digress from the general discussion, declaring that it’s impossible that Josh’s mark has changed, since he hasn’t yet met them, specifically, and their own marks have yet to change.

When the diversions trickle out and the comments get back on course, the real speculation begins.

For all of Josh’s bravado to those he’s close to about his knowledge of women, he actually keeps his personal relationships pretty private. A few odd comments–older ones, mostly–mention his former relationship with Mandy, and then begins several comments about his relationship with Amy, most of them declaring more forcefully than Donna is entirely comfortable with–regardless of her personal agreement with the sentiment–that Amy is the only potential soulmate that seems to make any sense.

It’s just as she’s reading a comment–which, glancing down to the comments beneath it, seems to be a rare dissenting opinion from the pro-Amy comments–that speculates that Josh’s soulmate could be someone they don’t know of yet, when the lobby door bangs open and Josh returns from his meeting. 

Quickly, she closes the website, vowing to herself not to open it again, and tries to lose herself in Josh’s rant about the meeting. By the time they finally leave the office, close to midnight, she’s too tired to think of it again, so it’s not until the next day, when Josh calls her into his office to type something for him, that she remembers the website even exists. 

When Josh has finished dictating his retort to the latest inane accusation from his fansite, and she’s begged him for the millionth time not to engage with the fanatics again, thinking maybe this time she’s finally gotten through to him, something goes wrong. 

“What’s that tab?” He asks, his head leaning in closer to her face as he looks over her shoulder. “The soulmate one. Click on that.” 

“Josh, please. The last thing we need is to be giving these people one more second of our attention.” 

Josh ignores her. “Click on it, I want to read it.” 

“Josh, I really don’t think–” 

“ Donna ,” he whines. 

She sighs, relenting, and taking her hand off the mouse so that Josh can scroll himself. 

“At your own peril,” she says.

He waves her off. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, his eyes already moving back and forth across the page. 

Donna closes her eyes for a long moment and then opens them, watching his face as he reads. When he gets to the more imaginative comments about the placement of his mark that she’d blushed at the day before, his eyes nearly bug out of his head. 

“I told you,” Donna says, “they’re deranged.”

“It’s just,” he says, his voice a little strangled. “I don’t–how would that even work, like, physically?”

“Those of us with a more pedestrian relationship with reality are trying not to think about it,” Donna responds drily. 

Josh doesn’t answer, reading the comment again, his face flaming and his eyes rounder than Donna has ever seen them.

Donna rolls her eyes. “Josh, I told you, these people are nutty. Unhinged. This is actually probably one of the cleaner tabs on this site, if what Margaret told me at lunch yesterday is true–.” She takes Josh’s frozen hand off the mouse and manipulates the mouse herself, moving to close the window, when Josh clears his throat. 

“Hang on, I want to see what else they say.” 

“Josh–.” 

“It’s about me, I want to see it.” 

“Josh, looking at more of this website hasn’t exactly boded well for you so far. This isn’t a good idea. It’s just a bunch of crackpots speculating because they don’t have any, I don’t know, jobs, or useful hobbies, to occupy their time.” 

The truth is that Donna doesn’t know what else Josh might find on that page. She’d only scrolled down so far, having stopped when Josh came back from his meeting, after seeing enough comments opining that, obviously, Josh’s soulmate was none-other than Amy Gardner, that she wasn’t exactly enticed to return to the website again, and then the night before had gotten so late and so busy, that she never returned to keep reading. She didn’t know what came next. 

She watches Josh carefully as he continues to scroll and keep reading, hoping against hope that she might learn something from his reaction to the comments. 

He snorts and hoots, as she expected, at the comments from women (and more than one man) who still believe that they might be Josh’s soulmate, since he hasn’t met them yet, but his face displays nothing as he scrolls through the comments about Amy, about the rumors about their relationship, about how all the signs seem to point to the idea that Amy might just be the one that Josh is fated for, if he, in fact, has a soulmate mark. 

She watches him intently as he reads the comments carefully, but his face doesn’t betray him. She doesn’t know what he’s thinking, and that almost scares her. Even though she knows that there are things between them that are secret, obviously, based on the fact that he doesn’t even know that he’s her soulmate, for one thing, they’ve always been able to read each other’s minds in an almost uncanny way, always been privy to each other’s thoughts in an almost telepathic manner. 

But whenever soulmates come up in conversation, it brings out something in him that she’s never seen, something that she can’t read, can’t understand. 

She’s thinking of this as she mindlessly watches him scroll, through comments about Amy, the diversion into comments about Josh’s soulmate being someone yet unknown, and back through more comments about Amy, when suddenly he gasps, and his face goes white. 

Immediately, she feels panicked. Maybe something triggered him, maybe he’s having a panic attack, maybe one of the comments somehow mentioned the shooting in an insensitive way and he wasn’t expecting it. 

“Josh?” she asks. “Josh? Are you okay?”

Josh doesn’t say anything for a moment, and she grows more panicked, wondering if she should go grab someone–Sam, CJ, maybe even get Stanley on the phone. 

But then he speaks, and she understands immediately why he’s gone so pale. 

“This comment,” he says. “This one is about you.”

_

Josh and Amy start to drift apart after the First Lady’s birthday party. It’s not an all at once sort of thing, but Donna notices it, all the same. It’s not like there’s a big breakup, or anything that dramatic, but things just seem to cool slightly.

When Josh had first started dating Amy, he’d seemed to try to find a little bit more of a balance between his work life and his personal life. It’s not like he went home early every day–or ever went home early at all, really, he was still Josh–but he seemed to try to leave at a decent hour a few times a week. 

When he called Donna in the evenings, a few hours after they’d both gone home, it was often from Amy’s place, or from his place, where she could hear Amy in the background. 

But after the First Lady’s birthday party, the reasonable-hour nights seemed fewer and farther between. Sometimes, it even seemed like Josh was looking for reasons not to leave work, like maybe he wasn’t as excited to make it home to Amy as he had been before.

She tells herself that it’s all in her head. There’s no reason to think that anything has changed between Josh and Amy. Their fight at the birthday party had seemed to blow over, the way their fights always do, and she’d even heard some of the other assistants talking about them, about how some couples just fought, how that was a sign that they were actually more passionate, rather than less, and how Josh and Amy seemed to be a good example of that. 

The rest of the evening of the birthday party, after all, had blown over, in a way that Donna hadn’t expected it to. What she’d said to CJ and Dr. Bartlet, later in the evening when Amy wasn’t with them, seems forgotten, and it’s possible that they’d understood it the way that she’d wanted them to, that it wasn’t so much that she has feelings for Josh, or he for her, but that he had given her everything, and that she would never do anything to jeopardize that trust. 

And besides, Josh and Amy are still together, regardless of how much time they actually spend together these days. There are parts of the administration, parts of Josh’s day-to-day, that Donna isn’t privy to, so maybe it’s just that he’s busier at work than he used to be. There’s an election that seems to be rapidly approaching, it isn’t necessarily the case that things have cooled for him and Amy. 

And even if they had, it doesn’t change anything, does it? If Amy is his soulmate, they’ll find each other, and they’ll work it out. They have to, that’s how it works. No matter what Donna thinks, no matter what she wants, no matter how badly she hopes that the way that Amy treats Josh isn’t what he’s fated for for the rest of his life, she knows one thing for sure: what the fates have set in motion, nothing can stop.

And so she tells herself there’s nothing different about Josh and Amy. She tells herself that it’s all in her head. 

—

Actually, it’s not in her head at all. 

Things had changed after the First Lady’s birthday party, for Josh at least. 

It’s not exactly like he’d gained any new information about Amy. He’d known her a long time, he knew exactly what she was like, and he always had. Even what Donna had said about her–surprising as it was, coming from Donna–hadn’t actually been new information to him, it had just been what he already knew, rephrased in a better way than he could have said it himself. 

And he’d already known that Amy wasn’t his soulmate, anyway, had already known that–regardless of how long this thing between them went on–Amy wasn’t it for him, would never be it for him, because he could never make his heart belong to anyone but Donna, even though she would never want him the way that he wanted her. 

It’s just that, before the birthday party, it had been kind of working well enough to pretend it wasn’t all temporary. It’s not like it wasn’t fun, being with Amy. She was fiery and smart, and he liked her, he did. 

But he didn’t like her enough. He didn’t like her enough for it to be worthwhile, when she went around him to Dr. Bartlet, humiliating him in front of his boss, or when she treated him in the same derisive manner that he’d seen her regard other men. It was never going to be worthwhile, he was starting to realize, when he would always, always belong to someone else. 

And so he does start cooling things off, in little pieces. He stays later at work, calls Amy late in the evenings when he finally gets home, choosing not to invite her over so that he can call Donna after he hangs up with Amy, if he needs to, if he can’t sleep or any of the other litany of excuses he’s invented before. 

He doesn’t even really notice all the ways he begins to choose Donna over Amy, even when Donna doesn’t even know he’s doing it.  

Still, he does spend some time with Amy. They haven’t broken up or anything, and Amy, at least, seems to be making something of an effort. 

She invites herself over one night, suggesting a casual night in. Takeout and a movie, maybe, and maybe something a little more strenuous later on. 

As it happens, he’s leaving work fairly early. A storm is set to roll in, and he’d walked to work that day, so he wanted to make it home before it hit. He’d sent Donna home half an hour earlier–she’d taken the metro to work, and when she wouldn’t take cab fare from him, he’d just sent her home, since the metro was known to get stuck and delayed when the weather got especially bad. 

He hears the first crack of thunder just as he’s hanging his coat on the rack by his door, and Amy arrives a few minutes later with pizza, looking a little drizzled on, but not quite damp. 

The rain builds as they eat, and they’ve only made it through half an hour of the movie when he hears a little buzzing sound, and all at once, the television clicks off, along with all of the lights in his apartment. 

Neither he nor Amy says anything for a moment, and he remembers the last time this happened, how Donna had rushed into his room, almost shaking, worried for him. 

Amy laughs, after a second. “I guess that’s the universe’s way of telling us to move on to the other stuff a little earlier,” she says, and she grabs his hand, tugging him up off the couch so she can pull him towards the bedroom. 

She must sense his hesitation, because she stops when he doesn’t immediately follow her lead. “Josh?” she asks in confusion. 

It hits him like a wave, how different this moment is from the last time the power went out in his apartment, and how badly, in this moment, he suddenly misses Donna, misses that perfect moment with her, the sound of the rain outside his apartment, holding her close to him in his bed, the way her hand had felt pressed to his hip, against his mark.

In this moment, he doesn’t want to be there, in that same bed with Amy. He knows it will fall short of his time with Donna, that no matter what plans Amy has for him, it will never, ever measure up to the perfection of the last storm, with Donna. 

And all at once, he knows that it will never be enough. All at once, he gets the answer to the question he’d pondered when the power went out the last time. He will never stop missing her, he will never stop wishing for more of her, more than he has. 

“I’m going to call Donna,” he says, releasing her hand and turning towards the coat rack, where he’d left his cell phone in his pocket. “I just want to–I’m just gonna make sure she’s okay.”

–

Donna’s heart sinks the second the words leave Josh’s mouth. 

“This comment is about you,” he repeats, but he says it so quietly that he almost seems–oddly–to be saying it to himself, rather than to her, although he must know that she’s there, since his words are directed at her. 

The color hasn’t returned to his face, and she feels frozen, too, unable to form words. 

It’s that horrible, that unfathomable, of a prospect , she thinks, that I might be his soulmate . 

She’s not sure how she’s possibly going to recover from this, how she’s ever going to feel okay again, knowing that the mere suggestion that she could be Josh’s soulmate–which they both know isn’t true, anyway– has caused him to lose the power of speech, lose the ability to even look at her. 

She’s not sure that he’s even breathing. 

He reads over the comment aloud, softly, and once again, she has the strange feeling that Josh isn’t even fully aware that she’s in the room. “Has anyone mentioned his assistant, Diane Moss?” he reads quietly, and Donna snorts. 

“Your soulmate’s named Diane Moss?” Donna jokes. “I’d love to meet her.” Her heart is pounding as she says it, and it’s not her best work, but she’s white-knuckling the edge of his desk, now, and she can salvage this, she can . 

Josh doesn’t seem to hear her. “I work on the Hill–who the hell is writing these comments from the Hill ?” he asks, his voice rising, and his color almost returning to normal. “I’m not allowed to comment from the White House, but anyone can post from the Hill ?”

While he’s busy being indignant, Donna reads the rest of the comment. “I work on the Hill, and there are all kinds of rumors about Josh and his assistant. He never goes anywhere without her, and everyone knows that if you want to get to him, you have to get through her. Most people just think they’re sleeping together, but maybe there’s more to it than we think.” 

“Okay,” Josh says finally, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Here’s what we say: I’m not sure about the credibility of this comment, since her name is Donna Moss, and maybe if you spent more time on, I don’t know, policy , we might not be dealing with such a–!”

His voice has risen unnaturally high, and Donna puts her hand on his arm to stop him. For the first time since he laid eyes on the comment, he looks at her, his face looking too pale again.  

“Josh,” she says slowly, carefully. “Like I said, these people are making you crazy. Obviously, we’re not going to say anything to them, you can’t weigh in on a conversation like this. You know that, right?”

Josh sighs, but doesn’t look away from her. She doesn’t take her hand off his arm. 

“Looking at this page of the website at all was a bad idea,” she says. “We can’t spend any more time on this, okay?” 

He nods, slowly, but the color hasn’t returned to his face, and he’s still staring at her, like he’s searching for something on her face, but isn’t finding it. 

She does her best to look as composed as she can, to look like this conversation hasn’t just ripped her heart–the heart that belongs to him, that always has–right out of her chest. 

“It’s not what you think,” he says softly. “I know people talk. I know…I know what they say. About us. And it’s not that it’s you that they mentioned, okay? It’s just that this kind of thing…this is different. I just– I’m afraid that–I don’t want–I don’t know–.” He trails off, seeming unsure of exactly how to say whatever it is that he’s afraid of. 

So Donna squeezes his arm gently, doing her best to give him a soft smile, to try to tell him that it’s okay, even though she feels like screaming, and it’s not okay. 

It’s not okay at all. 

“I know,” she says. 

Except, she doesn’t. 

She doesn’t know what he means at all. 

–

He’d never really thought about it before, about how, although they’d talked about soulmates a handful of times over the years, they’d never come close to approaching the topic of Donna as his soulmate, not even in a joking manner. 

Of course, he would never have joked about it, but for all he knew, Donna could see the whole thing as so blatantly absurd that maybe she might. 

In a way, he kind of wishes it had come up at some point, because if it had, maybe he would have known how to react, maybe he would have figured out how to respond to the very idea in a better way than he had. 

He’d just been so surprised when it had come up, is all. In retrospect, he shouldn’t have been–Donna was right, the people on the website were truly off their rockers–but it shocked him to see it written down, all the same. 

He didn’t know what to do, when he realized the comments were going in a different direction than merely placing his soulmate mark in an anatomically ludicrous spot. 

He knows that he’s panicking, that his reaction is way over the top, that Donna can see quite plainly that something with him has gone terribly wrong, but he doesn’t know what to say about the comment that brings Donna (even as ‘Diane’) into the conversation for the first time.  

He tries to make it about something else, about the person claiming to work on the Hill, which Josh, frankly, doubts–more likely, they have a friend or a cousin or something on the Hill, and are borrowing their job to claim some credibility–but he knows that Donna sees right through him as always, that Donna knows that the fact that he’s freaking out has absolutely nothing to do with workplace decorum. 

He’s just not ready to have the conversation about what it would mean if she was his soulmate. He’s not ready to lay it all out and have Donna, undoubtedly, reject him, albeit in the extremely kind way he’s sure that she would come up with. 

And he hadn’t thought anyone else knew ! It’s not that the stupid commenter actually knows , he knows, but it’s the first time anyone has really said it in front of him, let alone said it in front of Donna, and he wasn’t ready for that. He wasn’t ready for all the implications of that, the implications about how Donna got hired in the first place, about how their relationship is different, about how Donna isn’t actually Senior Staff, but how everyone treats her as as good as, anyway. 

But when he looks at Donna, he sees hurt in her eyes, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. 

Of course, they both know that people have talked about them. They’ve both heard the gossip over the years, although the gossip mill has never once mentioned soulmates, not to him. 

They both know that people have guessed that they’re sleeping together, that people think their unnatural closeness has something to do with that–he’s been warned about the gossip by CJ several times over, anyway, and for all he knows, Donna has as well–but if Donna’s hurt that he’s reacting this way, there must be something else going on. 

He wonders if she thinks that he’s scoffing at her, that he would never be with her, even though that thought is so absurd that it almost makes him laugh, because Donna is so clearly out of his league that he doesn’t know how she could ever not see that. 

But then he remembers that Donna thinks that Amy is his soulmate, and Donna must think that he’s offended by the mere notion that his soulmate could be anyone but Amy. 

So he stammers out something that doesn’t make any sense, that doesn’t close any loops and doesn’t explain anything, starting and stopping sentence after sentence, without really saying anything at all. “It’s not what you think, I know people talk,” he says.“I know…I know what they say. About us. And it’s not that it’s you that they mentioned, okay? It’s just that this kind of thing…this is different. I just– I’m afraid that–I don’t want–I don’t know–.”

It’s not what you think, Amy was never my soulmate, he wishes he could say. It’s not that they’re talking about you, because Amy has never meant a fraction of what you mean to me . 

But this is different, they’ve never gossiped about something that was actually true, he almost says. They’ve never come so close to printing, for the whole world to see, that the fates made me with you in mind. 

I just didn’t think that I was that obvious, that anyone suspected the truth , he wants to say.

I’m afraid that people would think that all of this has something to do with you getting hired, and I don’t want you to ever lose any credit for what you do in this administration, because you deserve everything you’ve earned here and a lot more, besides. 

I don’t know how to tell you any of this, when you’ll never feel the same way.

Donna just squeezes his arm, looking at him with a pain in her eyes that he thinks must match his, although he doesn’t understand quite why, and a tight-lipped, sad smile that isn’t her, that doesn’t reach her eyes. 

“I know,” she says, and he knows that she doesn’t. 

But he just looks at her sadly, and lets the moment pass. 

–

It wasn’t going to be moose, the gift that he’d brought Donna from Helsinki. Actually, the moose had been gifted to each member of the White House staff that had been on the trip, and he’d thought–initially–that it’d be funny to bring it back to her, pretend that that’s what he’d brought her from Finland, before pawning it off on Ed or Larry or Ainsley or someone, and giving her her real gift. 

It wasn’t like he’d forgotten to pick out a real gift, either. He’d actually spent most of the trip thinking about Donna, wishing that Donna was with him, the way that he always did when he had to spend more than a few hours away from her. 

On this trip, he’d been thinking about Donna after he’d written the memo on Molly Morello for the President, the way she’d come back to his office, beaming at him, before throwing her arms around him, whispering, “thank you,” into the crook of his neck. 

(He’d known from the moment that she’d mentioned the Molly Morello thing that he’d write a memo about it. He’d known that she wouldn’t get a presidential proclamation–and that really couldn’t be helped–but he’d also known that he’d do everything in his power to make sure something special happened for her, that her teacher was acknowledged in some way. Donna asked for so little from him, and besides, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard her mention Mrs. Morello. He knew that Donna was sometimes insecure about having not finished college, so he liked when she talked about the education that had shaped her, the teachers that had made her one of the smartest people he knew.)

(Aside from that, he just–he just wanted to make her happy, okay? She deserved that. If there was one thing he knew above all, it was that, if knew of anything in his power that could make Donna happy, he would choose to do it.) 

When they’d had time, on the second day of the trip, to go look through some of the shops (except for CJ, who was protesting Simon Donovan’s “persistent tailing” by refusing to go anywhere unless he wasn’t going with her. “It’s the second safest city in the world!” she’d exclaimed, more than a few times. “Can you not leave me alone for ten minutes?”), he’d split off from the others, finding himself in a small shop by the water, which had drawn him in with the little pine wood figurines in the window that looked hand-carved. 

Inside, there was much more than the figurines, and he’d found an extensive collection of jewelry at a counter in the back, all of which seemed to be packaged in beautiful, hand-carved and painted wooden boxes, in the same style as the figurines he’d noticed in the window. 

It’s a set of earrings that immediately catches his eye, beautiful blue-gray stones with flecks of green. They make him think of Donna at once, and he pauses as he looks at them, thinking about how beautiful her eyes would look when she wore them. 

Spectrolite, the clerk tells him, is what the gemstones are called. It can be expensive, but it’s only found in Finland, and like most gems that are hard to find, that can show up on the price tag. 

Josh is buying them before he even realizes what he’s doing, and he doesn’t realize until he’s leaving the shop that the souvenir tour had taken longer than he expected, and he’s late for a meeting. 

It’s not until he finally returns to his hotel room that night, pulling the small wooden box from his pocket, that he realizes several things at once, and embarrassment washes over him, even though he’s alone in his room. 

He can’t give the earrings to Donna, he knows. Not now , anyway. Not while he’s her boss and she’s his assistant and she doesn’t know how he feels about her, doesn’t know that she means more to him than anyone in the world, that the fates have tied him to her, that there will never be anyone else. 

He can’t give her a gift like that, a gift that’s far more extravagant and expensive than any he’s ever given any girlfriend in the past. 

It’s that that makes shame wash over him again, because he hadn’t thought about Amy at all. Not when they went looking for souvenirs, not when he’d been standing at the jewelry counter, and not until he’d realized that he couldn’t give the earrings to Donna. 

But he can’t give the earrings to Amy, either. 

Because–and this is almost fitting, after everything–the earrings really belong to Donna, and no one else. He can’t give them away like they weren’t meant for her. 

So he gives Donna the complimentary moose, and he brings nothing at all to Amy, who doesn’t ask and didn’t really seem to have missed him, let alone have expected him to bring her a gift. 

“I missed you so much,” Donna says, as she frowns at the box of moose meat on his desk, and even he can see her genuine disappointment.

He tries not to think about the earrings that he tucked into the back of his sock drawer when he got home the night before. 

He tries not to think about everything else that belongs to Donna that he keeps hiding from her, everything else he keeps almost giving away.

Chapter Text

By the time the campaign officially begins, it feels like the campaign has already been underway for months. Years, even. 

In a way, of course, it has, in the way that every campaign is mostly a continuation of the campaign that came before it. The actual presidency, too, is a campaign of sorts, and, if they manage to somehow win this election again, the second term is something of a campaign for whichever candidate the party should put up in the next election. 

And yet, Josh thinks, this campaign feels almost nothing like the first one. Not in the ways that really matter, anyway. 

Really, it should feel the same, he thinks, but in some sense, it’s like they’re running an entirely different candidate. 

And maybe they are. 

After all, the Bartlet of four years ago, for all intents and purposes, was a different beast entirely. That Bartlet didn’t (at least to anyone’s knowledge) have MS, hadn’t defrauded the public, hadn’t been censured, hadn’t been shot . 

(And on that point, neither, Josh supposed, had the Josh of four years ago.)

But then again, that’s not what feels different. Or, not the bulk of what feels different, anyway. 

Because all of that is part of his work, but it’s not really a part of his day-to-day. And the day-to-day of Josh of four years ago was dating–or, more accurately, fighting with and then sleeping with–Mandy, while pining for Donna, who’d only just entered into his life and already changed everything he knew to be true. 

And the Josh of now has just ended a relationship with Amy, which–then again, now that he thinks of it–had consisted of mostly fighting with and sleeping with Amy, all while longing for Donna. 

It’s four years on, and there are things that are different, and there are things that are exactly the same. 

_

She knows Josh feels responsible for Amy losing her job. 

That’s not entirely unreasonable, Donna thinks, as she watches him from his doorway, because, in all fairness, he is pretty much responsible for Amy losing her job. 

But she wonders what it must be like between them, where they’re going to go from here. True, they’d seemed to cool a little bit after the First Lady’s birthday party, but they hadn’t broken up. (Knowing Josh as she does, she knows that that doesn’t make much of a difference–it isn’t as though he wouldn’t feel guilty for her losing her job if they’d broken up first. He’d feel guilty either way. But from the outside, it’s not a great look, his responsibility.)

The part of Donna that’s never really understood Amy wonders what she’ll make of all of it. She seems so cold sometimes, so unmoveable, but she can’t be entirely that way. She can’t be entirely that way, because there must be a piece of her that’s softer, a piece of her that treats Josh well, even if it’s invisible to everyone else around them. There must be something in her that Josh sees and Donna can’t. 

And that’s where Donna always stops pulling the thread, before the whole sweater unravels. Because no matter what Josh says, the only explanation that makes sense in Donna’s head is that the fates are somehow involved, that there’s a soulmate mark–or, more likely, two–at play, and that’s what’s keeping them together after all of this. 

She reads the guilt on Josh’s face as he hangs up with Toby, knowing that Amy will lose her job, knowing it wouldn’t have happened without him, and she knows he’s going to beat himself up for this. 

“You did all right, okay?” She tells him. It was the only way, and they both know it. 

But he’s not proud of it, and they both know that, too. He’s not going to strut through the hallways crowing about it, he’s going to go home–or maybe to Amy’s, to try to somehow fix this–and hurt . 

He’s going to hurt, and–in something as complicated as this, something tied up with soulmates and romance and the guilt Josh always feels, when something he had no choice but to do hurts someone else–there’s absolutely nothing that she can do to make it better, to take it all away. 

And so when he gathers his things with barely a word to her, when he turns to leave his office, she just watches him. 

It’s not her comfort, not her absolution, that he wants right now. 

–

It’s not like it’s a surprise, when his relationship with Amy ends. 

To everyone around them, after all, Josh had just lost Amy her job. 

But to Josh–and probably, in some ways, to Amy–the relationship had been over before it even began. 

And it’s not like their working relationship has ended. In fact, they break up in an almost completely amiable way, especially considering Josh had as good as lost Amy her job, and considering that they fought quite a lot when they were together. 

But they’d known each other for such a long time, and neither of them had really been in it , the relationship, Josh knows, and that’s why the breakup goes as smoothly as it does. They take a little time apart, and the next thing he knows, he’s calling her again for advice on the campaign, asking her opinion on things again, even flirting a little, because it doesn’t mean anything to either of them, and they both know it.

Even when Amy had said she missed him, at that Rock the Vote event, he’d known she hadn’t really meant it, not in the way anyone that overheard it would have assumed. They’d had fun together, the two of them, but Amy had known from the second she’d seen his soulmate mark, the second she’d told him that she, herself, didn’t have a soulmate mark, that it wasn’t really going to last, and they hadn’t tried to make it last any longer than it should.

Nevertheless, they’d had fun, they’d even  genuinely liked each other, even if not in a this-could-be-it sort of way, and he knew that’s what Amy meant, when she’d said she missed him, even though it surprised him a bit to hear it. 

What he’s more surprised about is that Donna doesn’t ever really ask him about it, the breakup. They haven’t talked about Amy much, not since the night of Dr. Bartlet’s birthday party, when he knows–regardless of the fact that she’d been right –Donna feels that she’d said a little bit too much. 

She’d stopped asking him anything to do with Amy after that, and it’s driven him a little bit crazy, how much he wants her to ask about Amy, to be at least a little jealous of Amy again, even though he has absolutely no idea what he’d say to Donna if she displayed any interest in any of it at all. 

And sure, Donna had consoled him, when he knew he’d lost Amy her job, but she hadn’t said anything more than that, hadn’t said anything at all about his personal relationship with Amy, even though he was sure she must’ve known–as everyone did–that he’d lost that, too. 

A part of him wants to ask Donna what she makes of all of it, why she consoled him when she knew he was upset that he got Amy fired, but didn’t console him on the rest of it. 

He just needs her to acknowledge the breakup, is the thing, and he has no idea why. There’s no reason, after all, that they need to keep doing this whole song-and-dance. And there’s a bizarre sort-of masochism in all of it anyway, since he knows Donna will likely, once again, wax poetic about how if Amy is really his soulmate, they’ll get back together, and he shouldn’t be worried. 

It’s important to him, for reasons he can’t really understand, to know if she still thinks that. 

And for what? He can’t let her go on thinking that indefinitely. Yes, it’s embarrassing and demoralizing, the notion that he is fated to love Donna forever, but never to truly have her. Yes, it’s easier to just let her assume that Amy’s the one, but how long can that go on for? He was never going to be happy with Amy, not really, and even though Amy has no soulmate mark of her own, it wasn’t really fair to keep stringing her along, either. 

And he just–-a part of him just wants Donna to know that Amy’s not his soulmate, once and for all. A part of him needs her to know, just to know what she’ll make of it. What would her face look like when he tells her, he wonders. Will there be pity there, or sorrow, or–no, he can’t even let himself hope–something else, something like relief?

No, he thinks. No, it’ll probably be betrayal. Because regardless of what else she means to him, Donna is his best friend, his closest confidante, the person who knows him best in the world. 

And he’s kept this from her, kept it from her intentionally, carefully led her to believe that Amy was his soulmate, and explicitly kept himself from correcting her when she’d mentioned it. 

He’d been too cowardly to trust her with the truth, and it seems too late to start telling the truth now, not without hurting her. 

And so, when she doesn’t ask about anything beyond Amy’s employment status, he doesn’t tell her anything else, keeping everything that really matters inside, where it can’t hurt her. 

Where it once again hurts, instead, only him.  

–

It’s not entirely fair to Donna, the way the tides began to shift. 

Of course, it’s only in looking back that Donna would have any awareness of when the shifting began. When it happens, as is often the case, she’s not aware that any such shift is beginning, although the unfairness of it all is evident at once. 

And the unfairness doesn’t shock her, because this is the way things often go with Josh. When he has something on his mind, when he’s too anxious to sleep, he goes to Donna, and then, when he’s unburdened himself enough to fall into a peaceful rest, he leaves her to lie awake with whatever it is he’s just passed from his plate to hers, and in the morning, he’ll greet her, bright-eyed, with a coffee prepared just the way that she likes it, and she’ll have covered the bags under her own eyes–the bags that appeared over the course of the night that she spent lying awake, pondering the burden she’s taken from him–and it will be unfair, but it will also just be the way it is, with them. 

After all, she knows, he would–and has, many times over–done the same for her, if not with such frequency, and not, typically, on the campaign trail.

And, granted, it’s usually on the phone, when she can’t sleep and needs to talk to him. And, also, he’s not usually actually asleep when she calls, so in many ways, it’s not the same at all, the way Josh bursts into her room at what can only be called the middle of the night, swinging through the adjoining door between their rooms without so much as a knock to cushion his sudden presence, and making his way towards the bed she’s been trying to fall asleep in. 

All things considered, there’s absolutely no reason that Donna ought to be surprised. After all, it’s not like Josh hasn’t done this before, and it’s not like she wasn’t fully aware that he has access to her room–even when they’re in adjoining rooms, with a door that opens between them, like this one, they always have a key to each other’s rooms, because more often than not, on the campaign trail, someone’s stuff has to get stored somewhere other than their own room, for one reason or another, and it’s just more convenient to have each other’s key–but nevertheless, she’s not expecting it. 

Because Josh, generally, doesn’t show up in the middle of the night, and when he does, there’s usually a reason–a legitimate, campaign-related reason–for it, and it’s usually…well, it’s usually sort of predictable. 

He usually doesn’t show up ages after they’d stopped working to go to sleep, for example, not unless there’s been some crazy twist in the campaign that he needs her help to counter, and even then , there’s usually a phone call, he doesn’t usually just barge in like this. 

(She’s reminded, tonight, of a night that had felt similar to this one. Not on the campaign trail, not quite, but in Manchester, a night when he’d blown the tobacco thing, when he launched himself onto her bed in the middle of the night with a bag of gummy bears, when he hadn’t left her room so much as collapsed in exhaustion next to her, slept by her side, and then disappeared before the sun came in through the curtains in the morning.) 

(That night, more than any of the others, when they’d had to respond to legitimate campaign emergencies, felt like this one.) 

And so, even though she’s surprised, even though his presence in her room is the last thing she’d expected, even though she’s been lying in bed with the lights off for at least half an hour already, she knows immediately that something’s bothering him, that there’s something on his mind that he can’t wait until morning to discuss, and that, probably, she’s going to have to talk him off the ledge in some way. 

There are no gummy bears this time, either, although that’s probably for the best, since she hasn’t seen Josh consume anything other than coffee and a slice of pizza or stale donut since the campaign began, and she doubts the sugar would do him any favors. 

Still, lack of gummy bears aside, everything else about Josh’s sudden intrusion into her room is somewhat familiar. He launches himself onto her bed without ceremony, without even announcing his presence, and she wonders why the ease, the familiarity, with which he intrudes into her space just makes her vaguely sad. 

(It’s because he’s her soulmate, and yet he’s not hers –doesn’t it always come back to that?)

“Josh,” she sighs, “I was sleeping.”

He snorts. “No, you weren’t. You’ve slept on my shoulder a thousand times, you’re not that easy to wake up.”

“I could have been,” she says. “I could have been sleeping.”

“Okay,” he says. “But, you weren’t, though.” 

She huffs out a non-committal noise, waiting for him to tell her why he’s here. 

Instead, he flops from his side onto his stomach and sighs. 

“Josh,” she says finally.

(Because that’s how he is, sometimes, and they both know it. Something is bugging him, and he sighs to make her ask him about it, and even then, most of the time, he hasn’t really decided whether or not he’s going to tell her what it is, like his plan to sigh and hem and haw was in motion before he really realized where he was going with it.)

“What?”

Now it’s her turn to sigh, but she isn’t going to ask him, not yet. Instead, she wriggles her leg vaguely at him, where it’s pinned down under the covers by his weight on the comforter. “You’re making the blankets too tight.” 

He sighs again but shifts a little so that she can tug the sheets loose. 

He says absolutely nothing about why he’s in her room. 

–

The biggest thing he misses, when he thinks about the first campaign, isn’t the simplicity of it. 

(Not that it had been entirely simple–they’d been the dark horse candidate for a long time, after all.) 

No, the biggest thing he misses is the time with Donna. 

He was flush with it, then, almost drunk on it, on the car rides, the late nights, the thousands of moments when it had all just begun, when he got to just soak in the time with her, when he got to marvel at her, even when it hurt. 

They’d talked about a lot of things, in those endless car rides on the first campaign. It hadn’t always made sense for them to drive instead of riding the bus with the rest of the staff, but there had been times when Josh needed some distance from Mandy, needed some time to think, or needed to be at a different campaign stop than the others, and so they’d ridden separately. 

What would he have done if Donna had never wandered into his office, never started answering his phone? He wondered if he’d still have felt the same need to distance himself from Mandy, wondered if he’d have made those long, boring car rides on his own. 

Probably not, he thinks. 

Because the truth is–even when there were other reasons, plausible, reasonable concerns that have made it necessary for he and Donna to drive separately from the rest of the staff–the truth is that he just liked it, the quiet time with Donna, those car rides that were just for them. 

It’s the memory of all of that, more than anything else, that led him to her room in the middle of the night. He can’t stop thinking about the first campaign, about how much he misses that time with her, before the ways these last four years have tested them, before Amy, before he knew how much he’d yearn for Donna, how much it was going to hurt to have to love her in this devastating, unrequited way. 

And, yet, maybe just to torture himself, he wants to ask her if she ever thinks about it, and if she does, if she thinks about it as often as he does, about how precious that time was, back when it was all just beginning, when he was just starting to know the tender pain of being so close to her all the time, but not being with her. 

It hadn’t yet been written into his bones, then, the pain that would become his, that would worsen, intensify, over the years to follow, years of longing for her, being near her but never, ever near enough. 

Back then, it had been painful, yes, but in a sweet, keen sort of way, a cautiously hopeful way, a way where there still felt like there might be possibilities somehow, where the only problems were not knowing whether she had a soulmate mark, and the fact that she worked for him. How simple, how uncomplicated those hurdles were! 

He hadn’t known, then, how painful it would become, and he supposes that’s why he looks back on it with such fondness, with the affection of one looking back on their youth, not knowing how difficult life was about to become. 

In reality, obviously, if he were to think about it for any longer than the blissful few moments he allows himself, he would remember that it wasn’t really like that, so peaceful, so possible. He’d been with Mandy, after all, and Donna had gone back to Free Ride for a while, and it had taken some time for them to heal from both of those things. 

Reality, after all, is never quite as simple, as easy, as hindsight makes it seem. 

And anyway, he doesn’t know how to ask her if she still thinks about all of it, about those car rides with him on the first campaign, about the way they’d first gotten to know each other, when he’d fallen in love with her completely independently from the mark burning on his hip. 

He doesn’t know how to begin to tell her that he thinks about it all the time, that he misses her all the time, that that’s why he’d let her go on believing that Amy was his soulmate–that he had a soulmate that wasn’t her at all–for all this time, that he’s wanted and wanted to tell her the truth, but when he opens his mouth to tell her any of it, he just can’t seem to make the words come out. 

He doesn’t know how to ask her what she’s made of it, all these years, while he’s been wrestling with the soulmate question, while he’s been trying to find a way to heal the ache in his soul that could only ever be remedied by her, while he’s been distracting himself from missing her with Mandy and Amy, and even Joey, to an extent. 

He doesn’t know how to begin to articulate how much he’s longed for her, all these years, since that very first moment together. It’s overwhelms him, when he thinks about it too much. 

Which is probably why, once he’s opened her door, once he’s lying there, in her bed, next to her, while she patiently waits for him to tell her why he's there, he can’t think of how to ask her about it at all. 

–

“It’s getting late,” Donna says, breaking the silence of the last several minutes.

Josh has been lying there, eyes closed, trying to think of how to explain to her what, exactly, he meant to do by coming into her room.

He cracks one eye open to look at her. “Are you tired?”

She snorts. “Josh, I was lying in my bed, eyes closed, lights off, when you came in here. What do you think?”

He pushes himself onto one elbow. “Do you want me to leave?”

She exhales, closing her eyes for a long, weary beat, and then looks at him. “I want to know what’s bothering you.” 

Once again, Josh curses himself for not coming up with a better cover story, because really, he came into her room because he missed her, missed the way things were with her back on the first campaign, before everything got so complicated–well, realistically, when things were only just starting  to get complicated–and all he’s been thinking about, as he’s been lying there next to her, is how he somehow still misses her, even when she’s right next to him, how he misses, somehow, without ever having experienced it, what they could be, what they would be if only the fates didn’t hate him quite so much. 

Sometimes he wants so badly to just tell her the truth–to tell her all of it, everything, let the chips fall where they may–that he has to almost physically stop himself from opening his mouth and letting it all out. 

He feels a little bit delirious with all of it, and he’s starting to feel exhausted in a heavy, genuine way, but since he’s come in here and said nothing, really, at all, he doesn’t quite know how to make his exit. 

He rolls onto his back, unintentionally shifting a little bit closer to her on the bed, and they lie there together in silence, as he contemplates his next move. 

He’s just contemplating a Looney Tunes exit–that’s all, folks! and a quick flee–when it occurs to him how ridiculous all of it is. 

Here he is, bothering Donna, interrupting her sleep yet again, and for what? He hasn’t even said anything to her, nothing of substance, anyway. 

And Donna would see right through all of it, would know that something’s bugging him. She always does, even–maybe especially–when he wishes she wouldn’t. 

But as usual, he’s a coward, so he says the first thing he can think of, something he’d been mulling over the last few days but isn’t really concerned with, something Donna already knows about, anyway. 

“I’ve been thinking about Figueroa, that senator from Florida, the incumbent,” he says. 

“What about him?”

“Well, he’s been making kind of a splash in the headlines,” he says, “talking about the MS.”

“I know, we’ve already talked about that,” she says. “I meant, is there anything new? Why are you losing sleep over this?”

“The Democrats are supposed to be on our side,” he says. “I don’t like the idea that he’s talking about this the way he is, it makes me worry that there are more like him, trying to separate themselves from the President like this.” 

“He’s trying to win,” she says, “you know that. He’s got to appeal to the other guys if he wants to stay in office, and besides, all the coverage has been talking about how close his race is, that he’s this close to losing. He has to look like a moderate if he wants to win.” 

“His race is close,” Josh concedes. “But I’m worried that he’s calling too much attention to the MS thing. What if there are others who feel the same way? The polls could be wrong, there could be–I don’t even know how many–others who feel the same way.” 

Donna scoffs. “He’s grasping at straws! His polls probably say it’s even closer than we think, he probably thinks he has to say all of that.” 

“I guess,” he says, “although, we’ll kind of need him. We can’t–I mean, nothing is a sure thing for us this time, not even in Congress. We’ll need these wins, we’ll need bigger numbers.”

“Josh,” she says. “He’s one guy, in one race.” 

“Yeah,” he says, and he doesn’t know why he’s suddenly almost arguing with her, when she’s right , “but they’re all just one guy, in one race, and if this is a pattern–.”

“It’s not a pattern.”

“But if he loses–.”

He feels, more than sees, her shrug next to him. “So he’ll lose, and we’ll lose a representative. Better him than Bartlet.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, and since he still can’t bring himself to overcome his cowardice, he begins to push himself up off her bed. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.” 

“It’ll be fine,” she says. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Yeah, okay.” 

His feet land on the floor with a soft thud, and it hits him, how ashamed he is that he’s chickened out of saying anything real to her again, that he’s going to spend another night lying awake, thinking about the things he almost told her, while she sleeps on the other side of the wall instead of the other side of his bed. 

He takes a step towards the door. 

—

The Figueroa thing is a sham, and Donna can’t help but wonder why they’re talking about it again. 

They’ve been over it already, is the thing. They had this whole conversation two days ago, and then again, hours earlier, watching coverage of one of Figueroa’s campaign speeches on CNN. 

The Figueroa thing isn’t what’s bothering Josh, and it’s starting to bother Donna that he’s acting like it is, instead of just coming out with whatever it is that’s really on his mind. 

For a moment, she second guesses herself. Sometimes Josh does just need a little extra reassurance, after all, and she’s been having more trouble reading him, lately. Ever since he started going out with Amy, in fact. 

Lately, she’s felt like there’s something he’s hiding from her, something he doesn’t know how to say, maybe, or something he doesn’t want her to know. And she can’t tell if she’s just reading too far into things, out of some misplaced jealousy, or some vain hope that there’s still a part of him that only she can see, a part of him that–even if it’s not enough, even if it’s not what she really wants–belongs to her. 

But she doesn’t know how to ask him about it, because she’s sure he’d deny it if she asks. 

It feels like that time back in his apartment, when she’d seen his soulmate mark for the first time, and her hands had trembled as she asked him about it, that time when she’d known for the first time the keen devastation that would become second nature to her. 

But even though things have changed since he began dating Amy, he’s not dating Amy now, and yet that thing she’d noticed between them–the thing he isn’t telling her–remains. 

He’s making his way towards the door separating his room from hers awfully slowly, she notices, and she wonders for the first time if maybe he wanted her to notice that there was something on his mind, if he’s inching his way towards the door because he’s still hoping she will. 

And so, gathering her courage and taking a deep breath, she does. 

“Josh?” She asks, and he turns back.

“Yeah?”

“Why’d you–why are you really in here?” She asks. 

“What do you mean?” He asks, and his voice sounds almost innocent, but not quite innocent enough to make her doubt herself. 

She rolls her eyes. “Josh, I know you. I know something’s bothering you, and you haven’t told me what it is. And when I said I was tired, I meant ‘get to the point’, I didn’t mean you had to leave, not when you haven’t even told me what it really is–.”

“It’s about Amy,” he blurts out, and maybe, after all, it's a good thing his cowardice has kept himself from ever saying anything true about this to her before. 

She starts, and her brow furrows just a little. “You’re in here because of Amy?”

He nods, then shakes his head. “Yes–well, no–not exactly.”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, her frown growing even deeper as she tries to work it out. “The breakup, it’s the breakup that’s bothering you? Because Josh, it really doesn’t have to–.”

“No,” he says, “you don’t understand, it’s not what you think.” 

(He really should, he thinks again, plan a little better before he starts talking to her about all of this, because how is it possible that he manages to give her precisely the wrong idea every time?)

“Oh, Josh. I know you guys just split up, but that doesn’t mean–.”

He shakes his head. “This isn’t about that. About the breakup, I mean. Well, I guess it’s sort of about that, but not the way you–not the way you’re–.” He pauses, sighing, pinching the bridge of his nose and looking at the ground. 

She waits, knowing him well enough to know that he’ll finish his thought if she just gives him a little time. 

“She said she misses me,” he says, and boy, is that the wrong thing to say, he thinks, because that will give her exactly the opposite idea of what he’s going for.  

Sure enough, Donna sits up, playing with the hem of the sheet between her fingers and looking at him carefully. “Amy said she misses you?”

“Yeah, at the–at the thing, the other week. The Rock the Vote thing.” 

There’s a long pause, and then Donna, her voice somehow smaller than usual, asks, “Well, do you miss her?”

“No,” he says, and he huffs out a laugh, because suddenly, he knows, he knows how to tell her–well, sort of tell her–why he came in here in the first place. “No, that’s what I came in here to tell you.” 

She frowns, still sitting up in bed looking at him, clutching the sheet pooled at her waist. “What do you mean?”

“Look,” he says at last. “I knew she wasn’t my soulmate, okay? I knew from the beginning and–well. There were a lot of reasons, I guess, that it wasn’t working out, but I–.” 

He pauses again, still looking at the ground. Seeming to gather himself, he looks up, and even in the dark, she can tell that his eyes are wide, searching, boring into hers. 

“I knew she’s not my soulmate,” he says. “Without a doubt. And it’s important to me that you know that.” 

Before Donna can really take it all in, before she can really understand what, exactly, he’s said to her, and what it can possibly mean, he’s turned again, and he’s back through their adjoining door before she can even begin to formulate a question. 

“Goodnight,” he murmurs, so softly she’s not sure she didn’t imagine it, with the blood rushing through her ears and the shock coursing through her veins. 

He shuts the door behind him with a soft click, leaving her, as he does, with no hope of sleeping, not now, not after that, not with the words, it’s important to me that you know that playing in her head over and over and over again, not when he’s left her with more questions than ever. 

It’s annoying, she thinks, more than anything else, because what difference should it make to Josh whether she thinks Amy is his soulmate or not?

She thinks back to when they’d looked at Josh’s fansite together, how bothered Josh had seemed by all of it, by the speculation. He is a private person, after all, and so maybe it really has been nagging at him since then. 

Or maybe her first thought was right, maybe this is because of the breakup. Maybe he’s embarrassed about all of it, because if you met your soulmate, of course you weren’t supposed to break up, everyone knows that. 

Or maybe it’s because of Amy herself, because she hasn’t exactly ever seemed to like Donna, not particularly. 

And the other thing is, it hurts–not that Amy’s not his soulmate, obviously, but that he hadn’t told her that before, that he’d just let her believe that Amy was his soulmate, that he hadn’t trusted her enough to tell her otherwise. 

And it’s ridiculous, she knows, to feel hurt about that, when he hadn’t owed her any explanation, and that brings her back to annoyance, both at him, for throwing this new piece of information–if it’s even, this time, the truth–at her in the middle of the night, and at herself, for being hurt over it. 

But beneath her annoyance, beneath her bewilderment, lurking below the surface where it always seems to be, ever since that day on the first campaign, when she’d bumped her side into Josh’s and realized , there’s a sadness. 

And even though it’s not Josh’s fault, she thinks, that’s the real unfairness of him busting down her door in the middle of the night and crawling into bed with her. 

Because how is he supposed to know that that’s all she ever wants, night after night, is him next to her, him with her, together, the way things ought to be? 

If he knew, she tells herself, if he knew that she was fated to want him in this way, in a way that feels like it’s choking her, as she lies in bed next to him, but not in the way that she wants–if he really knew , if he understood what that felt like– he’d never talk to her like this, never leave her with all of these questions, with frustration and confusion and annoyance, and the sadness that blankets all of it. 

If he understood how she felt, she thinks, he wouldn’t torment her like this, wouldn’t bother her with the soulmate thing, with whether it’s Amy or not Amy, because he would know at the end of the day, it doesn’t make much difference to her, not when she always reaches the same conclusion: whether his heart belongs to Amy or to someone else besides, he is not hers, and he never will be. 

Later, she’ll wonder why it never occurred to her, not then, not that night when things started to shift, to hope.