Chapter Text
November 2006.
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“I’m Jewish,” he mumbles, sliding in beside her in the back seat of the cab.
She nods, watches as he fastens his seatbelt and stays quiet.
“I’ve spent more of my adult life inside Churches than Synagogues, isn’t that a thing?” He asks. Donna stays silent. She watches the set of his jaw clench and unclench, the blink of his eyes; watches him curl the pain, the frustration and the anger back down somewhere around his already splintered heart.
She saw the look CJ gave her when they rose together and bid their farewells in the residence, it came only thirty seconds or so after Josh had captured her eyes from across the room, as if she hadn’t been sneaking furtive glances all night.
As if gravity wasn’t always pulling her to him whenever they were in the same place.
Don’t leave me alone tonight.
The slight movement of her chin.
I’ve got you.
So they walked the familiar path through the building they had grown together in, and then apart. The building they would soon return to again. This time, hand in hand.
He turns to her, in the back seat of the taxi, the exhaustion a barrier to his normal obfuscation. He looks destroyed. “I’ve been a pallbearer too many times,” he whispers.
“I know you have Josh, I know,” is her reply. He slumps towards her, his head falling to her shoulder and she reaches for his hand across the middle seat