Summary: Josh and Donna 17 years from now.

Spoilers: None really.

Disclaimers: The belong to Aaron and Co.

Feedback: Heck yeah! (meridithnoelle@yahoo.com)

Rating: PG-13 (Better to rate too harshly, I guess.
Pisses off fewer people.)

Notes: There are more of these floating around inside
me. If you want to read them, tell me. If you don't,
you can tell me that too.

“I must have the wrong room,” he says as he walks
through the door to the Russell Room in the Capitol
building and finds a woman standing with her back to
him, her shoulder length blonde hair shining in the
florescent lights. The woman is looking intently at
the painting hanging on the back wall but turns at the
sound of his voice. The face is familiar. There was
a time when he knew it better than his own. The years
had softened it in places and hardened it in others.
He wants to reach out and touch her face to be
absolutely certain she is really there. He wants to
reach out and hold her and make all those years
disappear.

“Josh,” she says his name with a strange tone in her
voice that they both recognize. Her voice is full of
the same pain and anger and love that have been there
the last eleven years. He calculates the number of
years quickly in his head, wondering how and when he
got so old. She curses herself for not being able to
keep their history out of her voice. Their past seems
to be an uninvited third person in the room. No
matter how hard she tries to separate herself from it,
she can’t. He is too much a part of her, not only who
she was but also who she has become.

“Donna,” he says trying to let the genuine surprise in
his voice overshadow all the other feelings that
normally lurk deep inside him but now swirl and gurgle
to the surface at the sight of her and the sound of
her voice.

“Mac is sick,” she says. Seeing that confusion is
still in his eyes she continues, rambling in response
to the awkwardness. It does not strike her as strange
that she can still read the confusion in her eyes.
Some things are like riding a bicycle. “I wouldn’t
have taken the meeting. Mac is supposed to be here,
but he’s sick and Senator Taylor didn’t want to
cancel, so I called your assistant to warn you. I
didn’t know if you knew I was back or not. I didn’t
know if it mattered…” Her voice trailed off as the
confusion left his eyes. He still looked at her as if
he was seeing a ghost, but she didn’t know what to do
about that.

“Donald Moose,” he says as he flicks the post-it note
in his hand with his thumb and forefinger then
crumples it up and throws it in the trashcan next to
the doorway. She looks at him strangely. It is her
turn to be confused. There was a time when his
cryptic comments made immediate sense to her. Now she
has no idea what he is talking about. She doesn’t
like not knowing what he is talking about.

”Who?” she asks.

“My assistant left me a note saying I was supposed to
meet Donald Moose. She’s fired,” he says, as he
shakes his head.

“Is she impervious?”

“No, she’s brainless.”

“Hard to find a good assistant after having
perfection,” Donna says, realizing only after she said
it that they no longer spoke to each other like that.
They haven’t spoken to each other like that in years.
Even before they broke up they stopped talking like
that. The banter was the first thing to go.
Everything had been downhill from there. Donna took a
deep breath and tried to forget.

“Yeah,” he says, thinking about things that were hard
to find and perfection for a moment. “I had it really
great once,” he says more to his shoes than to her.

“Yeah, we did,” Donna says, her voice barely above a
whisper. They are quiet for a moment, staring at each
other across the room. The silence quickly takes over
the room. Neither of them can come up with a snide
remark or a piece of useful trivia to fill the moment.
Both just stand and for a moment mourn the death of
the banter.

“So…” Josh says, finally breaking the silence.
“Senator Rian’s office. That’s great. Are you glad
to be back in DC?” Donna shrugs. She wants to say
how great it is to be back, but the nation’s capitol
holds just as many bad memories as good, so it’s hard
to say yes. “Abbey said you loved New Hampshire. She
said you kicked some ass up there.”

“New Hampshire was wonderful,” she says blushing
slightly. “I guess I always had a loyalty to
over-educated liberal New Hampshire governors,” she
says with a smile.

“You made it through the ranks pretty quickly,” Josh
says loving this softer side of her no one gets to see
anymore. She’s no longer sweet Donna Moss who won’t
get him coffee and tries to get him to eat right. She
is now a balls buster, one of the toughest women in
politics. When they heard she was coming to DC,
everyone who didn’t fight to get her on their staff
feared her. He loves her hard as nails side too. He
thinks she got that from him.

“You followed my career?” she asks, shyly, feeling
like the girl who sat just outside his office all
those years ago. Always working a little too hard for
his approval. Always working a little to long for his
affection. Even now there were times when she wanted
to make him proud of all she has become both because
of him and in spite of him.

“Yeah,” he says. “I always figures I played a small
role in getting you there.”

“You were my greatest influence,” she said truthfully.
“You played a greater part than you could ever
imagine,” she said with a slightly guilty smile.

“What?” He knew that look. He never lets her get
away with that look. Well, at least he never used to
let her.

“My second day in New Hampshire I was mistaken for
someone who got coffee.” She smiled remembering it.
At the time it had sent her reeling. She had worked
too hard at school and too hard at the White House to
be relegated to fetching coffee and making copies for
some New Hampshire governor.

“And you are definitely not someone who gets anyone
else coffee.”

“So I let the Chief of Staff know… apparently he
liked my spunk.”

“You’ve always had plenty of that.”

“So I had his job by the time we left office.”

“Very impressive.”

“Thanks.” He was impressed. Who wouldn’t be? It was
a massive accomplishment. She didn’t want it to
matter that he was impressed, but it did.

“I still remember you answering my phone in New
Hampshire. Now you are the chief of staff to an
influential senator.” Josh shakes his head. When did
they get so grown up? “Once a University of Wisconsin
drop-out now a graduate of George Washington and Yale.
You’ve come real far. I always knew you would. A
real live Cinderella.” He sighs, feeling old and past
his prime. “I always knew I needed you more than you
needed me,” he says with a weak smile.

“That must be why you did your damnedest to push me
away,” she says, staring at the floor. Then she
shakes her head, trying to rid herself of the thoughts
about years past and things they had beaten to death a
long time ago. “Well,” she says, crossing the room to
stand right in front of him. “I guess we ought to get
down to business.” She can push aside her emotions
just like that and get to work. It is why her
opponents call her heartless and her allies call her
brilliant. It is the only way she was able to get
over losing him.

“Business,” Josh mutters, finding it hard to switch
gears so quickly. “Do you have note cards?”

“Yup,” she says opening her briefcase, taking out a
rubber-banded stack of cards, and tossing them on the
table. “Only now I have someone else who makes them
for me.”

“I can tell,” Josh says, flipping through them.
“They’re readable.” She wants to say ‘bite me’ and
whack him on the arm but stops herself. They are not
that close anymore.

“Josh,” she says with all the professionalism she can
muster. She is no longer the young girl whose knees
go weak at the sight of Josh Lyman and now it is her
chance to prove it. This is her moment of glory.
“Let’s cut to the chase,” she says. “Are you going to
give us what we want?”

“Don’t you think we should discuss it first?” he says,
sitting down and motioning for her to sit beside him.

“Why?” she asks, deadpanned. “We both know you’ve
already made up your mind and I’ve never had much luck
changing it, so let’s make at least part of this
easy.”

“Donna,” he says, shocked, amazed, and impressed. He
wants to say something else, something to put them on
equal footing, but his mind is blank. He is out of
practice at going head to head with Donna Moss. Not
that it matters much she usually won anyway.

She just looks in his eyes and knows she’s won. A
smug smile spreads across her face. A wry smile
spreads across his. His smile broadens when he
realizes where he’s seen that look before: in the
mirror. She was right. He was prepared to give in to
Taylor’s requests back when he thought he was meeting
Donald Moose. He had planned on raking the man over
the coals first and making him work for it, but he
couldn’t do that to Donna. She knew all his tricks.
She might use them against him and she might win.
Perish the thought. She also had the blonde, leggy,
woman of his dreams thing in her favor, even after all
these years. She would definitely win. Damn.

“So I’ll tell Senator Rian that a compromise was
reached,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“See, that wasn’t so hard,” she says.

“For you,” he mutters.

“I guess I learned from the best,” she says with a
broad smile as she puts her note cards in her
briefcase and prepares to leave. That smile still
makes his knees weak and reminds him how good he had
it and how much he screwed it up. “I’ll be seeing
you,” she says with such nonchalance he wants to grab
her and shake her. She can tell she’s affecting him
but it’s his own fault. She learned it from him: how
to be cold and appear unmoved and unfeeling.

“Donna,” he calls desperately as she is walking out
the door. Without a sound she turns to face him.
“I’m sorry,” he says.

“What?”

“I never told you…like a million years ago…but for
what it’s worth…I really am sorry.” He stumbles over
the words even now. The pain in his chest is still
raw, having been dulled only slightly by time and
space. She was it for him: the one, and he had
pushed her away. He had his chance to wake up beside
her every morning and fall asleep beside her every
night, and he let her slip through his hands. That
wasn’t what he was sorry for the most. He was sorry
he hurt her. He failed her. He was mostly sorry for
that.

“I know, Josh,” she says as she walks out the door.
“I know.”


*********