Work Text:
“You said what to her?” Josh is distracted by Donna's hand on his arm, still there even though she'd pulled him into a corridor over a minute earlier and then frantically explained something to him, something that had to do with drinking and Mrs. Bartlet and something that appeared to be really freaking Donna out.
“I know, I know, it just came out. We were all being honest, and then…I don’t even know how it happened, Josh, I didn’t even know that I was thinking it until it came out of my mouth--.”
Josh pinches the bridge of his nose, not looking at her. Looking at her would be the wrong choice when they're standing this close to each other. He shakes his arm out of Donna's grasp so he can focus. “Tell me again exactly what you said.”
“I don’t know!” Donna exclaims, exasperated.
“Donna.”
“I just…everyone was being so open about everything—Amy had just asked why the suspension was a big deal, and then CJ had just said all this stuff about how she has a husband and kids and a life, and then Mrs. Bartlet started saying that she’s still a doctor, and then I said, ‘for crying out loud, you were also a doctor when your husband said ‘give me the drugs and don’t tell anybody’ and you said ‘okay’.”
“Donna.”
“Josh, you don’t have to tell me, okay? I know, I don’t know why I said it. I’m still not even sure if I meant it, it just came out!”
“So, just so I understand it, in the last two hours, you’ve not only stopped being an American, but you also blamed the First Lady of the United States for…well, everything, by the sound of it?”
“The American citizen thing has nothing to do with me! I was just minding my own business, trying to be born and whatnot. How was I supposed to know we were really in Canada?”
Josh sighs, still pinching the bridge of his nose, his eyes closed. “But she said it was okay?”
“Well, she said that, but I don’t know if she meant it. I don’t know anything, I just can’t believe I was drinking with the First Lady and I said that.”
Josh sighs again, taking a few steps away to an armchair and falling heavily into it. He could feel Donna’s eyes on him, studying him.
“What’s going on with you?” she asks at last.
“I don’t know, I just found out my assistant is apparently not an American. Or no longer an American. Or is some kind of threat to national security. There’s a lot going on for me right now.”
She snorts. “Yes, please tell me more about how alarming this must be for you, I can’t imagine how that feels.”
He smiles weakly at her. She takes a sip of his drink—the second drink she’d stolen from him tonight, he realizes, recognizing suddenly that he's not even sure when she took this one out of his hand—and studying him.
“No, there’s something else going on,” she says. “Something else is on your mind. What’s going on out there?”
He sighs. “It’s…nothing. Well, it’s not nothing. Amy just…,” he trails off. “Never mind, it’s not a big deal.”
“It sounds like a big deal. What did Amy do?”
Josh lets out a breath. “She just…she was pestering me earlier about adding some names to the list of prospective Deputy Political Directors. And then, I guess I wasn’t enthusiastic about it enough or something, because she went behind my back to the First Lady to get her to insist on the names, so now I can’t ignore them, and she was so unapologetic about how it might have affected me, and it just…bugged me.”
Donna was quiet, looking at her fingernails instead of at him, but not looking particularly surprised.
“What?” He asks at last. “Am I wrong about this? You don’t seem…fazed, or something, I don’t know.”
“Of course you’re right about this,” she says smoothly.
“But?”
“Well, Amy only cares about Amy,” she says, shrugging, almost nonchalantly.
It takes both of them a second to realize what she’d said.
Donna freezes, looking up at him for once, her eyes wide and mortified. “Oh God, oh no. Josh, I didn’t mean…”
He looks away from her, waving his hand. “It’s fine, I don’t…I can’t worry about that right now.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t mention it,” he says, getting up from his chair, not meeting her eyes. “You go do damage control with Mrs. Bartlet, I’ll do my best to get you back in Uncle Sam’s good graces.”
He leaves before they can say anything else to each other, before the full weight of her implications can hit him, before she can say anything stammer-y and apologetic and widen the gap between them even further than it already feels.
But he doesn’t think about anything else the rest of the night.
~~~
Josh doesn’t go home with Amy when the party ends. It’s not because of what Donna said, he tells himself, it’s not. But he needs some time to think for a while, and there’s always work to be done, so it just makes sense to go back to his office despite the late hour, even though he isn’t working so much as sitting aimlessly at his desk.
He’d started off the night a little bit more agitated than usual, he remembers. Of course, that, too, had to do with Donna. He hadn’t known what was keeping her away. In fact, he remembered commenting on that to Amy.
He hadn’t really understood why he needed to know where Donna was, not when he had Amy by his side and she was wonderful and she was impressive, and…and where the hell was Donna anyway?
It was just that crowds were one of the things that still tripped him up a little, after Rosslyn. It wasn’t every time, but it was sometimes, still, even though he wanted to be past all of that, and in those times, he needed Donna to ground him.
And what was more, Donna knew this. He sometimes wondered if she knew him better than he knew himself. She always sized up situations--like with crowds, or with unexpected noises like a car backfiring—that still got to him, from time to time, and she was there to calm him down almost before he even knew that he needed her.
So, he expected to walk into nights like this one with her by his side, hoping not to need her, but grateful that she was there in case he did.
He hadn’t told any of this to Amy yet. Not that he didn’t trust her, or that he was especially trying to hide it, it’s just that he didn’t like talking about Rosslyn. He especially didn’t like admitting that there were still more days than he cared to think about (though there were fewer of them these days) where he’d wake up in a cold sweat or find himself suddenly panicking. Only Donna really knew about those days, just as only Donna really knew the truth about how he’d been in the aftermath of the shooting, all those horrible nights as he tried (and failed) to get a grip on reality again.
Donna had been his lifeline then, and she still was. If something had happened at the party, something to make him jumpy or freaked out, or something that made him lose himself for a second, it would have been Donna that he would have looked around for.
Eventually, when he realized he was spending more time searching for Donna than anything else, he’d left Amy to mingle, and gone off to the West Wing in search of Donna himself.
He’d spotted Donna, moving gracefully around the bullpen in a pink silk dress, before she’d seen him. She looked amazing.
She always did, for things like this—he always had to keep himself from gawking at her on the days when she had to dress up, because she was so stunning it made him tongue-tied in a way that he, as the Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, and, more importantly, as her boss, decidedly did not want to be.
He’d told her she looked good, though, and he meant it, although he hadn’t really meant to say it—it had mostly just slipped out, and he’d tried not to meet her eyes, because if he watched her smile, watched the reaction he knew she’d have to his words, he might accidentally say something even dumber.
Plus, he’d been standing awfully close to her as he said it, and a second earlier, he’d touched her waist, inadvertently, trying to pull her towards him, ostensibly to go off to the party. Their whole conversation had maybe only lasted thirty seconds, but it made him ache in a way he didn’t quite know how to place, so he decided that not meeting her eyes—well, that and immediately stepping back, away from her, no matter how reluctant he felt as he did it—was the best course of action.
These conversations with Donna always seemed to do that to him, these days, and he didn’t know what to do with it. Sometimes it felt like a strange dance they were doing—constantly spinning away from each other, pushing each other further away, yet choreographed so perfectly that they somehow remained in sync. Donna never missed a step with him; she never had.
He wondered sometimes if the dance confused her as much as it confused him, if she would lie awake tonight thinking about the way that her eyes had flickered down to his lips for just a fraction of a second like he would, think about that moment when they’d been standing just a little closer than they ought to be; close enough to simultaneously remind him that he had a girlfriend in a party down the hall and also put Amy out of his mind entirely.
Amy. That was the crux of this whole thing, that was what was nagging at him. He liked Amy. It was hard not to be impressed with her, with her passion for her work, and her intellect, and the way that she was somehow cooler than everyone else in any given room, no matter how much it made him feel like a schoolboy to put it that way. And yet, there was always something when he was with her, something in the back of his mind that kept needling him, something that made him feel just the slightest bit uneasy when he was around her.
Something Donna, knowing him as she did, seemed to have accidentally brought out of the shadows tonight.
He felt like he’d spent the whole night putting different things on the back burner, trying to juggle too many questions and conflicts of various importance. Trying to prioritize had been especially difficult, he’d found.
He just kept thinking about Donna in that dress, about how much he wanted Donna to be at the party with him, even if he couldn’t articulate exactly why.
He’d done his best to keep everything above board, though, like he always did. She’d taken his drink when he’d found her at his desk to explain the citizenship problem to her. He’d hardly even noticed at the time, though, because even if he’d fully understood the citizenship issue himself, he’d have a hard time explaining it to her when he was looking at her in that dress. He’d been so focused on not focusing on her that he’d been halfway down the hallway before he’d noticed the weight of the glass missing from his hand.
That was something that seemed to happen with Donna a lot, too.
Not the drinking. (Well, sometimes the drinking. Every once in a while, they’d share a beer in his office on the really late nights, passing it back and forth, sometimes taking it right out of the other’s hands. Those were some of his favorite nights.)
It was just the way little things seemed to escape his notice, fall through the cracks, when he was with her, because of how easily he could be distracted. Perhaps if Donna weren’t his assistant, he could be focused enough not to need one. There was some irony.
And now he was distracted again. It was Amy he had been thinking about, Amy who had gone over his head and behind his back to get the First Lady to submit her own names for consideration. It was Amy who always acted like Josh didn’t know enough to do his own job thoroughly or properly, Amy who seemed to always discuss pressing issues with him in an accusatory way.
It was Amy who sometimes treated him as nothing more than a means to an end that had nothing to do with him.
Not that it was all bad. He liked Amy, liked being with her, liked a lot of things about her. He had for a long time. He liked the way they flirted with each other, liked the way she was as quick with a comeback as he was. But she made him feel small sometimes, and he hadn’t let himself see it until Donna, in her Donna way, had pointed it out.
And once she had, he couldn’t un-see it. He couldn’t un-hear the way Amy spoke to him, when he’d tried to let her know she’d hurt him by going behind his back by telling her he forgave her. She’d called him a jackass.
He was a jackass, and he ordinarily had no problem admitting that. Hell, Donna called him a jackass all the time. But she didn’t do it with the same biting tone, the tone that made him feel, sometimes, like Amy was disgusted by him, like she saw him as no better than the pigs she typically engaged in political warfare with. Like she had no respect for him at all.
He’s just put his head down on his desk, contemplating whether or not he should bother going home if he still had too many things on his mind to get any sleep anyway, when he hears footsteps outside his door.
“Hey,” Donna says.
He hadn’t expected Donna to appear in the doorway, out of the darkened hallway. He usually had a sense about these things; could usually tell when Donna was about to appear, like he was sort of naturally attuned to her, but he blushes now as he realizes that maybe he would have heard her coming if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with thinking about her.
Donna doesn’t seem to notice. “What are you still doing here? I thought you’d have gone home with Amy.”
He pauses for a moment, considering what to say to her. “I had some stuff to do here.”
She glances suspiciously at his desk, which is still clear save for the cards Donna had used to play solitaire a few hours earlier. “You’re not doing anything,” she points out, a trace of laughter in her voice.
“I just…I was thinking,” he responds lamely, feeling suddenly more flustered than he wants to.
She nods, accepting this. “Well, you should go home,” she says. “Get some sleep.”
He ignores this. “What are you still doing here?”
She shrugs. “Took longer to reinstate my status as an American than I thought it would.”
“You’re good now?”
She nods. “Got my complimentary bald eagle and everything. I left him on the South Lawn.”
He smiles but doesn’t respond.
They’re both quiet for a moment. Josh can tell that she’s still thinking about it too, about what she said earlier, and he wonders what she thinks about it. Did she really mean nothing by it, like she’d tried to say afterwards?
He’d let her say so afterwards, let her think that he thought nothing of it, that he understood that she hadn’t meant it, but that wasn’t true. If it had been true, he’d probably be home right now, fast asleep next to Amy, rather than being here, in his office, still trying to avoid looking at Donna while she’s still wearing that dress.
No, they both knew it hadn’t been a mistake, what she said. Well, it had been, in that she hadn’t meant to say it to him, but she’d believed the words she was saying. It was another instance of being more honest than she’d meant to be, like she had been with the First Lady.
“What did you mean, earlier?”
She looks at him, but doesn’t immediately say anything, and he can tell that she’s going to make him push, going to make him say it.
“When you said that Amy only cares about Amy,” he clarifies, “what did you mean by that?”
She sighs. “Josh, I shouldn’t have said that. It was a mistake.”
“Donna, I know you. You don’t say things that you don’t mean; you had to mean this. But what did you mean by it?”
She hesitates, and he catches himself almost holding his breath. Even though he knows what she meant—or he’s pretty sure he knows what she meant, he’s not sure how she’ll say it, what she’ll say to soften the blow or couch the harshness of what she’d said.
“I just don’t like how she pushes you around sometimes,” she says, her face flushing.
There’s more to it than that—much more to it, and Donna’s mind is working frantically. She has no idea to explain this to him—no idea how to say that it’s not just Amy pushing Josh around, although it’s also that, it’s the very fact that he’s with her at all, that he’s with someone who doesn’t seem to appreciate him and yet gets to have him, someone who speaks to him coldly and cruelly, and yet gets to be the one he wraps his arms around, the one he kisses in public at White House parties and goes home to.
Amy pushes him around and talks to him with so little respect and doesn’t even seem to see the goodness in him, the way his devotion to his work comes out of his beautiful heart, his genuine care for other people, his desire to do the right thing. Amy doesn’t seem to see any of that.
And, he is still hers.
She shakes her head to clear it, in time to hear his response.
“You push me around all the time,” he counters.
“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, Josh shuffling the cards quietly at his desk, and Donna suddenly finding a spot on the carpet unbelievably interesting.
“No,” he says softly, at last. “That’s true.”
She takes a deep breath. “It just…sometimes it just…sometimes it seems like Amy…steamrolls you a little bit,” she says finally. “Maybe she doesn’t mean to, maybe she’s just passionate about what she does, 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.”
The last part of her speech came out too quickly, as though she were ripping a band-aid off, and the silence between them afterward was harsh, abrupt. Donna looked both shocked and mortified by her own words; Josh simply stares.
Donna clears her throat. “Look, I don’t mean that how it sounds,” she says, even though she and Josh both know that she does. “It’s just that I happen to have some experience with this, with people who don’t put in what they get out of relationships, you know? I don’t want to see that happen to you.”
It’s true. All of it is true. Watching Josh with Amy sometimes feels like watching herself make her own mistakes, only it hurts maybe more because it’s Josh, and because Donna knows that he doesn’t deserve to be spoken to the way Amy speaks to him, and moreover, she knows that she, herself, would never treat him that way if given the chance. It hurts because she’s in love with him, and she knows it, and she has to carry that burden with her all day, every single day, and it was hard enough before she felt like she was watching him get hurt and could do nothing to stop it.
Her eyes are still wide, looking at him, and there’s something different in them now, a kind of searching, like she’s trying to see if Josh understands, like she’s hoping he knows what she means and she won’t have to elaborate any further.
And the thing is, he does.
Donna doesn’t talk about it much, the whole thing that had happened to bring her back to Josh, away from Dr. Freeride, the man who had overlooked Donna in a crisis for a beer with his friends, but Josh knows it hurt her more than she ever wanted to let on. He remembers, in those early weeks back, the way she’d thrown herself into her work, seemed a little quieter, a little more guarded, less perky and confident and up-to-the-task like she had been before she left.
Even on the night she’d told him what had really happened with the car accident, he’d never realized quite how much that relationship had impacted her self-esteem, and seeing it now, seeing the way Donna wanted to rescue him from a potential hurt, made his chest ache again.
“Donna,” he says softly, and he wants to move towards her, wants to wrap her up in his arms and find a way to heal the old wound that he’s only just realizing is still there, the wound she’s been carrying with her all this time, that she’s trying to shield him from now.
“Don’t, it’s okay,” Donna says, seeming to sense what he’s thinking, and it’s only as she says it that Josh realizes that he has taken a step towards her, has gotten out of his chair, and is now standing only a few feet from her.
“Josh, you’re my boss,” she continues.
“I know,” he says, and he grins at her cheekily, trying to change the mood, soften things, shift them away from whatever this is.
She shakes your head. “Josh, you’re my boss, and I shouldn’t have said all of that to you just now. It’s not my place to pry into your relationships, and I…I don’t even know Amy well enough to say any of this. It’s not fair of me.”
“No,” he says, “you were right. Maybe saying that to me in the way that you said it was a mistake, but…,” now it’s his turn to exhale, “you were right.”
“Josh, I--.”
“I was hurt by it,” he says quietly, then quickly moves to clarify as Donna’s eyes widen. “Not by what you said. I was hurt by what Amy did, and you recognized that. I know you were just looking out for me.” He doesn't know why he's being honest about that. Maybe it's simply the fact that he can be, that he doesn't have to be untouchable. Not about this. Not in front of Donna.
She nods, finding herself suddenly unable to come up with a response.
“You always look out for me,” he says, “and I appreciate that. I…I appreciate you, Donna.”
He looks up at her as he says it, and he’s glad he does, because he gets to see his favorite smile spread over her face, a smile he didn’t expect to see after the kind of evening they’ve had, a little glimmer of sunlight—like Donna herself—in the chaos of this job.
He smiles back—a real one—and it feels like the first time all night that his mind stops racing, that he isn’t juggling a dozen things that he’d rather not think about.
But Donna knows it’s time to let the moment pass, time to steer away from dangerous topics, when she’s already given a year’s worth of honesty to both Josh and Mrs. Bartlet tonight. It’s time to get back to being Josh-and-Donna, bantering and joking around, and maybe standing a little too closely to each other now and again (okay, more than now and again) but always with innocence, never with the weight and sincerity that have come to the surface tonight.
“Could I get that in writing?” she asks, effectively shattering—finally--the sincerity of the moment. “I think I’d like to frame it in case I never hear it again.”
“Any chance Mrs. Bartlet still wants to have you deported?” He asks, as they start to head for the door.
“Ask Amy, she has some pull with her, I’ve been told.”
He smiles. “Too soon.”
“Come on,” she says, putting her hand on his arm and leading him gently out the door, shutting the lights off as they go. “We’ll split a cab.”