Chapter Text
On Monday, a tree falls, the FCC rejects the latest BlackBerry, and the White House endorses the practice of fracking.
“We’re not endorsing it,” Leo tells her, later, when he finds her curled up on the couch in the aides’ break room with her face covered with a sheaf of specs that somebody from BlackBerry had written all over in an eye-watering shade of teal. “We’re just choosing to leave it out of the list of things we are endorsing. There’s a difference, Josh.”
Josh makes a noncommittal noise. “I know.”
“Do you,” Leo says. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re doing a hell of an impression of not. Knowing, I mean.”
Josh peers up through several layers of letter paper at where Leo is looking down at her with an infuriatingly paternal expression on his face. He’s not actually old enough to be her father and Mallory wouldn’t stand for this kind of thing besides, so Josh feels most of the way justified for telling him, “Maybe you’re just standing in the wrong place.”
“Am I,” Leo replies, and because he’s Leo and therefore allowed, makes her take the papers off her face before shifting her up the couch and dropping into the foot of it. He looks consideringly at her for some minutes before he says, “If this is about the the/thee situation, I thought he’d improved by leaps and even more leaps.”
“It’s not about the situation.”
Leo makes a face. “You sure? Because I was lying about the improvement.”
Josh smiles, and she knows it looks slender but can’t bring herself to do much more. “He was good, Leo,” she says. “Maybe even too good.”
Leo cocks a brow. “Your own words, Josh. There is no such thing as too good.”
“I never said that,” Josh protests.
“You did,” Leo says. “Right before you made me miss Jenny’s sister’s birthday dinner to read section three item one line item four of the SPARS bill fourteen more times.”
“I meant there was no section three item one line item four of the SPARS bill. It was worrying.”
“I still missed Jenny's sister's birthday, Josh.”
“You thought Jenny’s sister was a bitch.”
“I didn’t think she was a bitch,” Leo argues.
“You blessed her heart many, many times in my direct presence,” Josh reminds him.
Leo doesn’t actually dignify that with an answer, just crosses his legs and looks at her with his scary ass half-dimple sunken patiently into his cheek. It’s a move as dismally predictable as it is effective, and Josh rolls away from him as she says, groaning, “That’s not going to work on me forever, Leo.”
“Good, because I don’t plan on keeping you around for that long,” Leo says, and then performs the final suplex by nudging her gently with his knee. “Josephine.”
“Damn it,” Josh mutters, shrinking and sticking out an arm to start groping about the coffee table. “Fine, fine, he was too good because he was so convincing that if I hadn’t been there when Toby pulled the first draft of the speech into that meeting with Reno — ”
“That meeting with Reno was provisional,” Leo argues.
“ — then I’d be compelled to believe that the White House really had deserted none of the promises it had made when you walked into the president’s room that evening in 1996 and bullied him out of his peaceful late-life plans into gunning for this job for the future of the country,” Josh finishes, and puts the specs back on her face before she can do something embarrassing like cry.
Leo looks at her for a long moment before he says, “Josh, you’re a good girl.”
“Holy shit, Leo,” Josh wheezes. “Listen, we all loved Jenny, but trust me, I’m not nearly as bright or beautiful a star as — ”
“Oh, shut the hell up, why don’t you,” Leo says, and then reaches over to pull her into a hug. It’s not the done thing, obviously, but people who do done things also don’t make it into the White House, so Josh fists her hands into the back of his suit jacket and lets him gather her in, the kind of fierce, awkward embrace clutched out between tow-headed boys who went off to college and called their mothers twice a day, dutiful, and gruff fathers who slunk downstairs to read the paper and pretended not to be listening and bursting with pride.
“I devised this strategy,” she says into his shoulder, muffled. “You and Toby and I went into a room and I wrote the God damn playbook on what we were going to do about fracking and I don’t fucking know why it upsets me so much — that we’re following the steps I put down.”
“You did write the God damn playbook,” Leo tells her. “Which is why we know it’s good. Which is why we know we aren’t giving up on any of the promises the president made when he asked for the attention of the country in that high school gymnasium in Concord — ”
“ — and didn’t let it go until inauguration in Washington, yeah, yeah, I know,” Josh says. “You really gotta update those sometime, Leo. Hell, Mandy’s starting to pick up on them, and he hasn’t even seen you golf.”
“He’s your ex — forgive him if he’s a bit slow on picking up on the red flags,” Leo says, saucy, and claps her on the shoulder before she can squawk in outrage. “Pusser’s coming in in half an hour to make his case to the FCC,” he tells her kindly. “Take it out on him — I hear he’s Canadian. They’re made for that sort of thing.”
***
The thing is, Josh isn’t made for this — not really.
Not for politics, which doesn’t fail upwards so much as onwards most days, and certainly not for dealing with politicians, many of whom managed to keep themselves unviolated by common sense to an extent that Josh would find fascinating if she didn’t have to lawmake with the fallout. Josh has always been terrible at keeping her cool over the things she loves, and it sounds excruciating to her own ears, but she does love this country. And sometimes it’s difficult to remember that her love is not the kind that she should be starting bar fights over, is best and more productively expressed through whatever the opposite of lobbing a chair at Yann McKardakye’s head is.
Because no matter the dress and the sign on her door and the leagues of people now convinced that she’d sold her soul to the devil or — even worse — Vladimir Lenin, Josh will always be that snot-nosed so-and-so who sat in the James S. Brandt Lecture Hall for seven weeks in the first term of her freshman year and fell hopelessly in love with the compassionate ambitions of Aristotle and Martha Nussbaum, the wink-wink of Irving Berlin and the intelligent goofiness of Rawls. She’d been dazzled by MacCallum and quietly struck by Schmitt and altered, importantly and indelibly, by the guttural anger of Engels and Marx; critical of their analogies and agonist entropy yet perceptive also of the ardent idealism that ran beneath it all, the revolutionary zeal that shone brightly through the flaws of their arguments like ore through the fault lines of a geode.
She’d been taken through the depth and breadth of democracy and come away stupidly in love, like the man who was shown his beloved’s hundred and one flaws and still picked out his flowers and said I want this, I want her — she’d become pragmatic and a political operative and Jed Bartlet’s Deputy Chief of Staff out of necessity, but had this been the gregarious decade and the streets of her city infested with sophists and fools and the likes of Adeimantus, she’d have happily given her life to the project of justice and the legitimization of political activity, to the hum and theory of it all that some found stifling, some useless, some interesting in the abstract but inadequate in practice.
Underneath it all, Josh has always been a hopeless idealist, and it aches, sometimes, to have the heart of it struck, to be made weak by the weakness that made Josh Lyman Josh Lyman — that had made Leo McGarry eye her consideringly all those years ago, over a tome of Pseudo-Xenophon and what was to become the epistocratic mark Jason Brennan made in political philosophy, and say, “So you’re willing to let motherfuckers like Dan Quayle have a vote in this country?” and they’d been off.