This Text file is old! In a 🏛️Museum, an unsorted archive of (user-)pages. (Saved from Geocities in Oct-2009. The archival story: oocities.org)
--------------------------------------- (To 🚫report any bad content: archivehelp @ gmail.com)

TITLE: Burning Buildings, Burning Bridges
AUTHOR: CazQ
RATED: PG
CATEGORY: J/D
DISTRIBUTION: please ask first for archiving/linking permission.
SPOILERS: Not much. Set in some pleasant imaginary season 1 springtime.
DISCLAIMER: C.J., Josh, Toby, Sam, POTUS, Donna and anyone else you 
recognise here belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner 
Bros., and NBC. I'm just playing with 'em. 
SUMMARY: "What would you save from a burning building?"
FEEDBACK: Yes please - it's my first time . CazQ@tesco.net
NOTES: at end. Now read on...

*******

Burning Buildings, Burning Bridges (1/1) by CazQ

*******

"Come to lunch with me, Josh," she says, standing in his doorway with a 
paper bag in one hand and a magazine in the other.

"Well, I don't know," he replies, looking up from the brain-achingly 
dull briefing memo he's been sent on the Kreutzer Amendment to HR839. 
He waves at the stacks of papers on his desk. "If you and I are both 
out of the office, who's gonna run the country?"

Donna gives him a wide, warm smile and says, "Josh, it's the first 
really pleasant day of spring, I might just possibly have dropped by 
Dunkin' Donuts after I went to Subway, and you should get some fresh 
air."

He rocks back in his chair, pushing away from the desk and looking up 
at her. She stands there, clutching her paper sack as if she were a kid 
on the way to the lunchroom at school. Her suit is the powdery blue of 
a spring sky, early in the morning on a clear day. 

"I guess we could trust Mrs. Landingham and Margaret to keep an eye on 
the country while we're gone," he says, and sees her smile get a little
 wider.

*******

She's right, it really is a pleasant day. There's still a chill and a 
fresh tang of rain on the breeze, but the cherry trees on the Mall are 
starting to bud, the very slightest haze of green appearing on the tips
of the branches. He can't remember the last time he sat out here and 
looked at those trees. He can't remember the last time he played hooky 
from the office to sit out on a bench in the weak spring sunshine and 
eat sub sandwiches with a pretty woman.

" 'Is He Seeing Someone Else? Ten Surefire Signs'," Donna reads out, 
flicking to the next page of her magazine.

"I can't believe you got me to leave my desk and have lunch with you 
just so you could ignore me in favour of Glamour," he complains. 

"Would you be more accepting of this if I were reading Newsweek? 
Because I have that in my bag too," she says, before nibbling at her 
Seafood and Crab Classic.

"No, because I already read that and I don't want Donna's Reader's 
Digest version of Newsweek any more than I want edited highlights of 
Glamour magazine."

" '1. Does he work late at the office on the slightest pretext or even 
claim he had to stay there the whole night to finish an urgent 
project?'." 

"You know I would never hire another assistant on the side. You'd 
notice as soon as she interfered with your filing system," he says, 
finishing his Subway Club and aiming the scrunched-up wrapper at the 
trash can nearby. He pokes around in the paper sack sitting on the 
bench between them and discovers that she did indeed stop off at 
Dunkin' Donuts.

"Okay, fine," she says, turning a few pages. " 'Take The Ultimate 
Glamour Personality Profile Quiz'."

"No. Absolutely not. Let me eat my donut in peace, woman, for the love 
of God."

"Did you know Dunkin' Donuts sells 6.4 million donuts a year, on 
average? That's enough donuts to circle the earth twice."

"Is that knowledge supposed to enhance my enjoyment of this particular 
donut?" he asks, hiding his smile by taking another bite. 

"I think it's interesting," she says, still scanning the magazine quiz. 
"Hey, Josh? '1. On that special one-year anniversary, do you want him 
to a) take you out for a romantic night of dinner and dancing somewhere 
classy, b) make you a gourmet meal at home and serve it to you by 
candlelight, c) whisk you away for a weekend somewhere foreign and 
exotic?"

"Who is this man and why have I been dating him for a year?" he asks, 
licking donut sugar off his fingers. "CJ's gonna be pissed if someone 
from the press sees me and my secret gay lover of a year's standing out 
dining and dancing."

She squints over at him, trying for stern but just looking like there's 
a giggle under the surface trying to break free. "Is that b), then?"

He shrugs easily and goes back to work on his donut. Donna is still 
nibbling away at her sandwich as if it's going to be her only meal for 
days and she wants to make it last.

"2. What would you save from a burning building? a) your pet, b) your 
Palmpilot, c) your favourite outfit, d) your journal?"

She looks up, startled, as he pushes himself up off the bench and 
tosses the last chunk of donut towards the trash can. It falls at least 
three feet wide.

"Josh, what -"

"What would I save from a burning building?"

She stares up at him as he takes a couple of steps back and forth, 
snapping his fingers absently and bouncing a little too high on the 
balls of his feet. She looks a little scared, but some little bit of 
him he usually keeps a tight rein on still remembers the acrid smell of 
smoke and how cold and wet the grass in the yard was under his feet 
when he ran out there in his pajamas. The same little bit that 
memorised the fire drills, escape routes and muster points the same day 
they moved into the West Wing, the same little bit that still can't 
watch 'Towering Inferno' or 'Backdraft', the same little bit that 
always notices whether a room has smoke alarms, a ground-floor window, 
a sprinkler system.

"It's just a question..." 

He comes to a halt in front of her, runs a hand through his hair. 
"You," he says, the word escaping him before he can think about it. She 
looks up at him, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open, but she 
doesn't say anything.

He turns on his heel and sets off back to the White House. He hears her 
shout his name, once, but she doesn't follow him, and he doesn't look 
back. All the way back to the West Wing, picturing her behind him, 
sitting under the green-misted cherry trees with her magazine, her 
half-eaten sandwich and those big, scared eyes.

*******

For once, Donna is late back from lunch. He has a feeling he has 
something scheduled for 2:15. A conference call? A meeting? One of the 
nebulous, important 'things' Donna keeps track of for him, anyways. As 
she isn't there to badger him about it, though, he feels he can get 
away with wandering the halls. 

He doesn't feel like sitting still. He's rattled, uncomfortable in his 
skin. It's like he left the door to a dark room unlocked by accident 
and Donna slipped in and flicked on all the lights, the glare hurting 
his eyes. He doesn't even know why he said that to her. Actually, he 
thinks that maybe he *does* know, and the implications of that 
are...things could get out of his control here, easily, so easily. He's 
just managed to scare the crap out of her and simultaneously reveal 
something better left unsaid, hasn't he? Josh Lyman, multi-tasker 
extraordinaire.

When he reaches Sam's office, Sam's sitting there with his gleaming 
wingtips up on the desk, mouthing sentences to himself and waving a pen 
in the air like he's conducting a symphony. Josh stands there and 
watches the show for a minute.

"We should include you in the tour," he says, eventually, when there's 
no sign that Sam's ever going to notice him. "Come see one of the 
crazies in daily contact with your President!"

Sam curses and the pen goes flying. At least he doesn't fall out of his 
chair. "Could you not, you know, do that when I'm in the middle of 
writing?" he says, gracefully swinging his legs down off the desk and 
ducking under the desk to look for his pen.

"Didn't look like writing to me," Josh points out, coming in to pace up 
and down the room, still clicking his fingers as his hands swing at his 
sides. 

Sam's head appears over the edge of the desk, glaring at him. "I was 
*composing*," he says coldly. "In the compositional stage of a delicate 
writerly process." The last two words are muffled as Sam dives back 
under the desk again.

"Well, since you're not composing now anyway, what would you save from 
a burning building?" The question feels thick and difficult to get out 
in his throat, beneath the careful air of nonchalance. He wants to 
hear Sam say something like "Cathy", or even "my sister" - just not "my 
Palmpilot" or "my favourite suit". 

There's a yelp of pain as the top of Sam's head connects with the edge 
of the desk on the way up. He slumps in his chair, rubbing his head 
with one hand and holding the pen aloft in the other. "This pen," he 
announces.

"No, really."

"Yes, really."

"You would save a cheap, plastic fountain pen you could replace for two 
bucks from a blazing building? Not, like, your laptop? Not even a real 
pen? You must have a Mont Blanc or something somewhere."

Sam looks wounded. "This pen cost me at least three dollars, I'll have 
you know. And as a matter of fact, I do have a silver Mont Blanc my 
grandmother gave me when I graduated Duke. But this is a good pen. My 
best ideas begin with this pen. Toby and I wrote down the first draft 
of the Inaugural Address using this pen."

"You have a lucky pen?"

"You have any more annoying questions you want to ask?"

Josh holds up his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay. I'm going."

As he swings out of Sam's door and into Toby's he hears Sam yell, 
"Don't you have a thing in ten minutes? Josh?"

******

Toby is sitting at his desk, bowed over his laptop, fingers steepled 
against his temples. He looks like he's praying.

"Toby, what would you save from a burning building?"

Toby glances up at him and then assumes his meditative position again. 
"Go away. I am a busy man. I busy myself with the business of this 
administration."

"You don't look busy," Josh points out, slouching against the 
doorframe, stuffing his hands in his pockets to try and still them. He 
finds what feels like a wrapped piece of hard candy in his left pocket, 
and starts jingling it around with the small change in there without 
even thinking about it.

"Busier than you," Toby replies, without looking up.

"I'll leave if you answer the question."

"Fine. Any building in particular?"

"Your apartment, I guess."

"I'd call 911, and be glad I keep everything valuable in a safety 
deposit box at the bank," Toby answers.

"Well. You're no fun," Josh complains.

"No, I'm not. I am a person devoid of fun. A person focused on the 
speech the President is going to give at the reception for the Chilean 
ambassador on Monday night, to the exclusion of all fun things. Now go 
*away*."

Toby rouses himself as Josh leaves and he hears the sound of fingers 
rattling over a keyboard as he goes back to his own office via the 
candy machine. On the way, Josh crosses paths with the President and 
the ever-present bevy of Secret Service agents - headed out to 
Manchester, he realises. That's right, tomorrow is a Saturday.

"Josh," the President cries, beckoning him. Bartlet appears to be in 
full Cheery Avuncular mode, judging by the grin and the truly horrible 
golf sweater. "Josh, what do you think I'm going to do this weekend?" 
He claps Josh on the back and then rubs his hands together like a kid 
about to get his Christmas presents. The grin gets even wider.

"Blind your golf partner with that sweater, thus ensuring a win, sir?" 
he ventures. 

Bartlet raises his eyebrows. "No. I am going to go and please CJ by 
having my picture taken playing golf with Tiger Woods and some people 
from Sports For Inner Cities. Mr. Woods will hopefully refrain from 
kicking my ass on the grounds that I am his President. Then I am going 
to spend the weekend in God's own state, New Hampshire, with my lovely 
wife, and we're going to enjoy the company of our youngest daughter for 
a couple of days. It's the perfect opportunity for her mother and I to 
work on grilling her and find out just what she's been up to lately in 
that pit of vice and sin that men call Georgetown."

"Sir, doesn't the Secret Service keep Zoey away from all Georgetown's 
dens of vice for you anyway?"

Bartlet winks at him. "I think Charlie has that covered, actually, but 
it never hurts to put a little of the fear of God into one's daughters 
just when they're starting to enjoy being out of the nest."

They turn a corner and Josh hesitates for a second, but this appears to 
be official Presidential down time, and there's that itch inside him 
again that he can't rid himself of, a need to get things straight in 
his mind, so...

"Sir, may I ask you a question?" Bartlet nods, glancing over at him 
curiously. "What would you save from a burning building?"

The eyebrows go up again, but Bartlet's been asked weirder questions. 
"The First Lady," he answers, smiling now rather than grinning. "I can 
replace everything else. Have a good weekend, Josh," and with that he's 
gone, the cluster of agents around him gently sidelining Josh and 
hustling Bartlet through a door towards the back of the White House and 
the waiting chopper.

Josh trails to a halt in the Presidential wake, and then wanders back 
towards his office, the candy machine all but forgotten. It floors him 
every time, the way Bartlet can say something that would sound cornball 
in anyone else's mouth and make it sound so right, so honest. The way 
the man can pierce right to the heart of whatever's bothering you, by 
sheer chance or intuition, as casually and as easily as if he's 
offering you a sandwich and a beer instead of an important truth. 

He blinks hard, and concentrates on his walk, on keeping the right 
amount of swaggering energy in it so no one who passes him in the halls 
looks twice. She didn't know, he reminds himself. She couldn't have 
known what she was asking. She thought it was just a...a question.

The phone is ringing as he walks in the door and it turns out the thing 
he had scheduled was a call from Congressman Ackerman about the steel 
imports thing. He swings his feet up onto the desk, a la Sam, and 
talks, and when he gets off the phone and notices that Donna's back, 
for once he doesn't call her in to arrange, research or find anything 
for him. Instead he watches her, craning his neck to see her at her 
desk, and notices that her eyes look slightly watery, and that even 
though she never looks up to see him watching her, there are two spots 
of colour high on her cheekbones. 

She blushes. He watches. And so the afternoon goes on.

*****

Donna leaves at 8:30. She comes in, coat already on, purse in hand, to 
check that he's all set before she goes. She draws a breath and opens 
her mouth like she's about to say something, and then huffs it out like 
she's blowing away a bothersome fly and disappears.

He hauls himself out of his chair and sticks his head out of the door 
to watch her go. She and Ginger are walking briskly down the hall 
together, their strides crisp and measured, hips swinging. He realises 
Donna had looked like she'd touched up her lipstick and combed her hair 
out, and wonders if they're going out someplace.

He's meant to be going over the briefing he's been sent on how their 
proposed white-collar fraud legislation is polling. Instead he plays a 
little wastepaper basket b-ball, hops back and forth between C-SPAN and 
CNN for a half-hour or so, makes paper airplanes out of the front 
covers of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and, when he 
can't think of anything else to do in the way of disassociative 
behaviour, he goes to pester CJ.

She's watching CNN with one eye while the other's on whatever she's 
typing up at her desk when he shows up, which isn't promising, but he 
comes in and flops down bonelessly on her couch anyway and waits for 
her to notice him.

"Something I can do for you, Josh?" she asks after a minute or two, 
when Christiane Amanpour and her flak jacket have disappeared and the 
anchor's moved on to an interest rate cut by the Bank of Japan.

"CJ, would you like to be Christiane Amanpour when you grow up?"

She pauses for a second. "Sure, why not? You think they sell flak 
jackets at Tall and Elegant?"

He fiddles idly with his tie for a moment and then says, "Have you 
noticed your fish is swimming backwards? I mean, fish aren't meant to 
do that, are they? Is there, like, something wrong with her?"

CJ clicks her tongue at him. "Don't say things like that in front of 
her. We prefer to refer to it as her 'special' way of swimming." 

He watches Gail's stately retrograde progression round the bowl. CJ 
watches him. "CJ, what are you afraid of?"

She spins her chair idly round, back and forth in half-circles, leaning 
back away from the desk. "Right now? Never getting to put the lid on 
and go home tonight because you're in here being rude to my fish and 
asking dumb questions."

He pushes himself up off the couch in one movement. "Forget it. I, I 
got a thing to do anyway -"

"Josh." Halfway to the door, he turns back towards her. Her voice is 
gentler, tinged with contrition. "Seriously?"

"Seriously".

She spins a full circle this time before answering. "Screwing up."

He coughs quietly with laughter. "You and everybody else in this 
building. Nothing else?"

"Heights. Hate 'em."

"Yeah?"

She nods, goes back to swinging the chair back and forth in 
half-circles. "Oh yeah. There's a reason I never sit near the windows 
on Air Force One. You remember that photo opp we arranged up the Empire 
State Building during the campaign?" She pauses, her eyes flicking away 
from his face. "I, uh, didn't really have a migraine that morning." Her 
fax starts to chirrup and beep in the corner, but she ignores the 
sheets emerging from it. "What about you?"

He shrugs, fiddles with his tie again, looking down at the silk weave - 
maroon with little navy blue dots today. "Fire."

"I guess we both have pretty pedestrian phobias, huh? You'd think one 
of us could come up with something more interesting. I met a guy at a 
party at the leadership conference who said he had a clinically 
confirmed phobia of knees. Or possibly bees. It was a noisy party. Is 
something up with you?"

"No. I was just, you know, thinking about it today. Donna had some 
ridiculous quiz she was making me do at lunch. It asked what I'd save 
from a burning building."

CJ gives up on her half-turns and starts rocking the chair gently 
backwards and forwards, eliciting a rhythmic protesting squeak from it. 
"So? What did you save from the proverbial house on fire?"

He takes a step forward to the desk, dabbles his fingertips in the 
water in the goldfish bowl. Gail moves out of reverse gear and comes up 
to the surface, nosing around expectantly for fish flakes. "I, 
uh...myself," he says. 

CJ looks at him blankly. "Okay. And what did the quiz have to say about 
that?"

He shakes the water off his fingers and wipes his hand on his suit 
pants. "I didn't put that as my answer," he tells her, wandering back 
out of her office. Behind him, CJ sits upright, the chair groaning 
loudly, and calls after him, but he isn't listening. He turns back 
along the hall to his office, shuts the door and turns out the lights. 
In the flickering glare from the TV, which is showing a bunch of 
venerable Japanese guys in suits, he sits down carefully and starts 
spinning slow circles in his desk chair.

******

Days go by. He contemplates calling Stanley, but doesn't pick up the 
phone. He eats, and sleeps when he can, and works, works, works. He 
contemplates being gentler than usual to Donna, but decides that would 
only freak her out more. Instead he is deliberately difficult and 
shouts more than usual for a day or two, which stops her looking at him 
all the time as if she's trying to diagnose an illness.

Days go by. He roams the West Wing, looking for Donna. "Why is it," he 
complains to the air as he passes through the bullpen, "that Donna can 
always find *me* when she has work for me to do, and I can never find 
her?"

Sam, who is standing outside his office holding a large package and 
having a heated three-way argument with Cathy and a roller-blading 
courier about something, nods at him. "They have *ways*," he says 
darkly, making a face at Cathy. "They know secret assistant things. 
Things that ordinary man was not meant to wot of."

"What?" says Josh, momentarily diverted.

"That's what I said. Wot of," says Sam, turning on his heel and 
vanishing into his office clutching the package, Cathy in tow and the 
courier gliding along behind.

He finds her in the copy room, having hunted her down through a 
detection process involving Margaret, Charlie and an intern from HR. 
She's leaning her hands on the machine, watching as it hums and whirs 
and spits out sheet after sheet. The tiny room smells overwhelmingly of 
hot copies and toner. She's singing to herself as she does a little 
shuffling on-the-spot dance to kill the time, but he can't make out the 
tune over the noise from the copier. He walks up behind her, until he's 
just inches away. 

"So *this* is what I pay you for. Copying. You know, I've often 
wondered."

She actually jumps in the air. Not only that, she squeaks with 
surprise. He's fascinated.

"Josh," she says crossly, spinning round, "could you *not* do that to 
me?"

"Oh, Donna, we're running a superpower here. I have to get my kicks 
where I can," he says. Then he realises he can smell her over the acrid 
scent of copier toner. That's how close they're standing. She looks up 
at him, her mouth still loose and slightly open with shock, and he can 
smell her, a clean scent like the budding cherry trees on the Mall 
after a rain shower, and he kisses her.

She squeaks into his mouth again in astonishment, but it's too late 
then, he's forgotten whatever it was he came to find her for and can 
only think that *this* is what he came looking for. He presses her up 
against the copier, which is still whirring away, and he can feel the 
vibrations from the machine going through her body and into him. She 
tastes of wintergreen Lifesavers, and for a few seconds she kisses 
back, her tongue sliding against his as her hands tighten round 
handfuls of his hair. 

The copier beeps loudly behind her back as it finishes the job, and 
then there's just silence and the sound of their rapid breathing as she 
pulls her mouth away and slides her body out from between him and the 
machine.

"Kicks?" she says, clutching with one hand at the nearest solid object, 
a stack of paper refill boxes. His mind's a blank for one awful moment.

"Donna, no. I...I didn't mean to, you know, do --"

"But you did," she interrupts, smoothing down her suit with a shaking 
hand. "In the copy room? You've finally lost your mind, right?"

"You participated!" he hisses, looking over his shoulder at the 
half-open door. 

She keeps running a hand over her clothes and her hair, as though 
determined to get rid of the slightest wrinkle he might have caused.

"You're my boss," she says finally.

"Really? 'Cause I always thought you were, I don't know, Toby's spare 
assistant or something, I thought you just helped me out 'cause you 
liked me." He's babbling and he doesn't know what to say to her that 
will be the one right thing. He wants a roll of wintergreen Lifesavers.

"You're my boss," she repeats, edging over to grab her stack of copies 
off the tray and holding them to her chest, like Joan of Arc with her 
shield raised. "You're the Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House, 
and I'm your assistant. You were graduating college when I was still in 
grade school. And you're often a real jerk."

"Um...yes?" He stuffs his hands in his pockets and starts playing with 
the loose change - no candy this time - because otherwise he's scared 
he might touch her again.

She stands there and stares at him, biting her bottom lip.

"You have a meeting on the oil exploration thing in the Roosevelt Room 
in four minutes," she says, and slips past him and out the door.

Oh God. He doesn't want to spend the next two hours talking about 
drilling test sites and Alaskan wilderness reserves. He wants - he 
doesn't know quite what he wants. He wants to be able to think about 
this clearly and want this without being afraid. He wants to have *not* 
just made a colossal screw-up.

He'd save her from a burning building, he thinks, as he makes his way 
out of the copy room and down the hall, trying not to meet anyone's 
eye. The trouble is, she wouldn't need saving. She'd probably do a 
pretty good job of saving herself and then chew him out for being 
stupid enough to go back into the flames for her. 

He really, really wants those Lifesavers now.

*****

Days go by. Days in which they do not, at any point, discuss what he's 
come to think of as That Copy Room Thing. 

His buzzer wakes him at 6:00 one Thursday morning, and when he looks 
through the peephole he sees her, distorted by the fish-eye lens, 
dressed all in black and holding a paper cup and a blue folder.

He opens the door and waits for her to say something.

"You have a breakfast meeting with Senators Adelman, Jackson and Weiss 
at 7:15," she says briskly. "You said you wanted the new numbers on 
Kreutzer before you met with them?" She steps past him and into his 
apartment and all he can do is spin round to look at her, clutching his 
robe around him. She's wearing a heavy winter coat and the spring 
weather must have turned again while he slept - the door's still open 
behind him and a cold breeze scurries in and winds round his bare legs, 
raising goosebumps. He turns to shut it, looks back at her and notices 
that her hair is darkened, the colour of ripe wheat and flat against 
her skull.

"It's raining?" he asks.

She huffs exasperatedly. "Yes, Josh, you get an A for observational 
skills. Here." She thrusts the cup she's holding into his right hand 
and the folder into his left.

"You brought me coffee?" he says, his voice ragged with confusion, 
sleep and disbelief.

"No, I brought you tea. It's herbal. It has ginseng in it. Or possibly 
ginkgo? Whatever it is, it's meant to make you alert without caffeine."

"I *like* caffeine," he says, but sees the frown lines forming on her 
forehead and adds, "but thank you." She nods and starts undoing the big 
black buttons on her coat. "Donna, you couldn't have just had the stuff 
couriered over here? Or have come in early and given me the numbers at 
the office before the meeting?"

She shakes her head, pausing as she toys with the third button down. "I 
guess so, but I just...wanted to make really sure you'd have them in 
time to look them over."

"Oh," he says, at a loss for anything else. He sets the Kreutzer folder 
down on a chair, takes the lid off the cup and sniffs at the steaming 
liquid gingerly. It smells disgusting, but he takes a sip anyway to 
humour her. It's sweet at first, but with a sharp aftertaste when he 
swallows. He'd kill for a nice oily, black espresso now. He needs it to 
deal with this.

It also occurs to him that he really wishes he was wearing more 
clothes. "Stay there," he says vaguely to Donna, who is still working 
clumsily at the buttons with her gloved fingers. He shuffles into his 
bedroom and pulls on a pair of sweatpants so that he's at least 
semi-decent under his robe. 

When he emerges from his bedroom, revolting herbal tea in hand, Donna 
has managed to unbutton her coat and take her gloves off, but she 
hasn't taken the coat off. She's sitting on his couch, hands folded 
neatly in her lap. She's also crying.

He sits down beside her, carefully not touching her, sets his cup down 
on the end table and watches her cry. She's not at all noisy or messy 
about it. She just sits there with the occasional sniffle and gulp for 
breath, while big glossy tears run slowly down her face and drip onto 
her wet overcoat.

"You're, uh, you're sorta leaking there, Donna," he says, very gently, 
laying one of his hands over her two joined hands. 

"Josh," she says, pulling her hands out from under his, "why'd you have 
to go and kiss me? We were doing just fine."

"Because...I wanted to? And because I thought you might want me to 
too?" Oh God, he really is a jerk. A jerk who forced unwanted sexual 
attentions on his subordinate in the copy room of the White House. A 
jerk who's made Donna cry. Oh God...

"Of *course* I wanted you to too!" she wails, twisting her fingers 
together anxiously. "But you still shouldn't have, because...because of 
all those reasons I said in the copy room!"

"Oh. Okay. Uh...does it matter to you that I'm older than you?" he 
asks, wishing she'd look him in the eye instead of staring at her 
hands.

"No..."

"Does it matter to you that I'm an incredibly arrogant jackass on 
occasion?"

She thinks for a moment. "No. Although I reserve the right to get mad 
at you when you are."

"And - just so I can be clear on this, 'cause it's pretty early and I 
do my best thinking after sun-up - you wouldn't describe that thing 
where I, you know, kissed you as a disagreeable experience?"

"No. It was very...agreeable." She blushes again.

"Okay. So, the only *real* problem here is that I'm your boss, and we 
work for the President of the United States."

"That was pretty much the gist of it, yes," she says, scrubbing at her 
eyes with the backs of her hands.

He reaches over and brushes the tears off her face with the pads of his 
thumbs. "I could fire you," he suggests. 

"No you couldn't. You don't even know what meetings you have scheduled 
for this afternoon, do you?"

"That's true," he admits. "Maybe I could trade you? You know, you could 
go work for Sam and I could take Cathy?"

"I don't want to work for Sam," she mumbles. "I like working for you. 
Sam's used to Cathy bringing him mochas in the mornings, even if she 
does steal his donuts. And he knows too many bizarre factoids of his 
own."

"Well, that pretty much closes off all available avenues. I'd just 
better not kiss you again, I guess."

"Right," she says, turning her head to look at him through the curtain 
of her water-sleek hair. There's a strand sticking to her cheek, and he 
leans in to pull it off her skin. That's when she kisses him. He combs 
his fingers through her heavy, cold mass of wet hair and feels her cool 
little fingers stroking the nape of his neck. He strokes his tongue 
against hers and hears her make a little sweet sighing sound deep in 
her throat.

"Oh this is so, so" - she breaks off to bite lightly at his lower lip - 
"*stupid*, Josh, I mean, really catastrophically dumb..."

"Yeah," he agrees, dotting little light kisses along her jawline in a 
way that makes her shiver, although it could just be the cold. "Leo's 
gonna decapitate us and put our heads on poles in the Rose Garden as a 
warning to others."

"I'm not sure you're taking this seriously enough," she complains, 
although she gasps as he flicks the tip of his tongue lightly against 
her earlobe. "I shouldn't have come over, I -"

"Donna Moss," he says, sitting back a little and placing a hand on 
either side of her face, "we are smart people. Or rather, you are smart 
people and you keep me in check. We'll find a way. There's gotta be a 
way."

Her eyes are too big for her face, and he can feel her cheekbones close 
to the surface of her skin as he touches her. She shakes her head 
slightly. "No, Josh. There really isn't." She says "There really isn't"
the way he imagines she might say "I love you", and he gets it. There 
really isn't a way, but she came here anyway. There really isn't a way, 
but this thing between them, that really is there, and it's no less 
real and urgent just for being impossible too.

He sits back against the couch cushions, but he slides the fingers of 
his right hand between the fingers of her left. There really isn't a 
way, but he wants to think up a way to make one. 

"Josh," she says very carefully, "you really would save me from a fire, 
wouldn't you?"

"I'd try," he says, looking down at their joined hands where his class 
ring gleams gold against her pale skin and squared-off nails. He's 
dreamed about it a couple of times this past week - running down 
hallways wearing pajamas, shouting her name, smoke curling up under 
closed doors, the door handles hot enough to burn his hand when he 
touches them - but this doesn't seem like the right moment to say that 
out loud. The last thing he wants is to scare her again.

"Trying is enough," she says, sighing and letting her head fall to the 
side to lean against his shoulder. He feels the cloth of his robe get 
damp against his shoulder where the water seeps through from her hair. 
She looks younger than she is like this, hair wet and slick to her 
head, her colour high, her eyes still watery. He doesn't mind that. She 
isn't too young for him underneath all that. She's picked up a lot of 
extra years, somehow, under her skin. And then she says it. "Don't tell 
anyone, but I think I might have a thing for my boss," she says. She 
says it like she'd tell him some useless fact about the principal 
exports of Mauritius.

"Well, that's convenient," he says, stroking his thumb across the back 
of her hand, thinking about the day she turned up in New Hampshire, all 
bloody-minded, wounded determination in a crappy car, with fifteen 
bucks in her pocket. "Seeing as I guess I might have...y'know...too. I 
mean, imagine if we'd been stupid enough to fall for the wrong people. 
Can you imagine if you were having to have this conversation with, I 
dunno, Toby?"

"There's a lot of people who'd say we were that stupid. There's a lot 
of people who would enjoy reading about this in the papers. People 
who'd call what you did in the copy room sexual harassment and abuse of 
power. People who would *use* this."

"Do you feel harassed?" He waits for her to answer, feeling an odd 
tightening in his chest. He's never felt this urgent fear about a woman 
before. With Mandy it had been easy, too easy. He'd bought her dry 
martinis and made her get into arguments with him in bars, and the 
first time she called him an arrogant fuck he knew they'd end up in bed 
together that same night. There hadn't been this delicate flutter of 
fear, this terror of making an irreparable mistake. 

"Frequently, usually when you're yelling at me to find something out 
for you five minutes ago and I've been at work for twelve hours 
already. But no, I'm not planning on filing a sexual harassment suit 
anytime soon. Even if the money would make up for that non-existent 
raise I deserve."

"Well, that's gonna come as a relief to the White House Counsel's 
office. And Donna, I know I have more enemies than is at all healthy, 
but a lot of people don't know that we were. That stupid, I mean. They 
still think we're just two incredibly smart people who have a healthy, 
bantering working dynamic." 

"I just...don't think I could keep this a secret until there's a new 
administration."

"I could sabotage the re-election campaign so we don't have a second 
term."

She looks at her watch. "You have that meeting in forty-five minutes. 
I'm not calling three senators later today to explain that you blew 
them off because we were discussing the impracticality of you and me 
being...together." He notices how she hesitates over the last word and 
wants nothing more than to take her to bed, curl up with her under the 
blankets while the rain falls outside and senators wait over stale 
croissants and cooling coffee.

At the door, she looks down to get her coat-buttons through the correct 
holes and says, "I'd go through a fire for you too, Josh." He hears her 
say that the way she wants to, without the indefinite article, inside 
his head, and wants again to make her stay.

"Donnatella. Are we going to talk about this?"

She looks up, coat buttoned all the way up to her neck. "There's 
nothing much to talk about, is there?" she says, all matter-of-fact, 
the very model of the modern political assistant. 

Shit. He feels a quick, painful constriction in his throat. This is why 
he was satisfied to keep things with Mandy on the level of fighting, 
fucking and politics. Because then there's nothing to lose when you 
make your mistakes. 

"So I guess we should just stop talking about it and get on with it, 
for as long as we can," she continues, smiling shyly now. "Because 
we're smart people. Can I come over here tonight? We could get some 
take-out, watch Leo's thing about the UPS strikes on Letterman, which 
I'm sure will be very romantic."

She leans in and kisses him as her words sink in, quick and sweet, and 
that tightness in his throat melts away. "This way works for me," he 
whispers, and she smiles and is gone. 

He goes to the window and watches her run through the sheets of rain to 
her car, and the thought of making their way *this* way through the 
thickets of impossibilities ahead feels nothing like a fire inside and 
everything like being saved.

*****

FINIS

*****

Wow, I never did that before. Does this mean I can no longer pretend 
not to be a multi-fandom ho?  

My thanks to the Punkensab Two-Headed Monster and August, for getting 
me hooked on the fic before I even saw the show; to EPur, who inspired 
me to give it a go and loaned me Rollerblade Guy; to Lena, EPur, 
Luperkal, Marguerite and Maria Nicole for boarding the beta bus. And, 
as always, to YV, for existing. Thanks to *you* for reading. I'd love 
to know what you thought. CazQ@tesco.net 

http://cazq.freeservers.com