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Title: Ostriches and Dodos

Author: Wombat

Rating: PG

Archive: If you'd care to, bit please let me know where.

Disclaimer: Not one character or situation is mine. All intellectual 
copyright and kudos to Aaron Sorkin.

Spoilers: Assume all of season two despite the fact that here in 
England we haven't seen most of it yet!

Summary: More midnight ramblings from the Deputy Chief of Staff

Notes: I guess this is a sequel to my first fic 'Schrödinger's Cat' 
but it doesn't need to be read to understand this one. Can I just 
take this opportunity to thank all the amazingly kind people who sent 
me feedback for the last one. I never expected anything like that so 
you only have youselves to blame for my writing this one! Once again 
your generosity warms the heart so I hope you like this attempt.

The quote at the end is from one of my favourite novels of all time 
and explains the odd title. Do read the book if you can he's a 
wonderful writer.





Ostriches and Dodos 

There's something I want to get off my chest - other than this damn 
scar that is. I look down at it sometimes and I swear it looks back 
at me. It lurks there like a livid, crimson spider, taunting me. A 
malevolent, permanent presence, a reminder that some things don't 
change, don't get better with time and don't get easier to bear. 
Other times I think it looks like a hand grasping my heart, fingers 
spread, nothing evading its grasp. Late at night in the dark, in my 
apartment I swear I can feel its weight. I don't exercise like I used 
to – I can't stand the sensation of sweat running over the scar 
tissue – and I suppose that it's nothing more that stress combining 
with a lack of fitness. That's what Donna would say, right before she 
delivered fourteen statistics on heart disease, the current AMA 
position on physical exercise for coronary patients and why I should 
work shorter hours and give her a raise, but I know the truth. It's 
trying to kill me. Oh, it's smart, it's biding its time. It's not 
finished playing with me yet. It has a plan.

Divide and conquer, that's the only chance it has. I mean, one small 
lump of desiccated platelets and atrophied muscle tissue can't take 
on the great Joshua Lyman, can it? One mass of dead cells is hardly 
going to manage what the entire Republican party, West Virginia White 
Pride and Mandy Hampton have failed to achieve, is it? Give me a 
stand-up fight and I'll kick ass with the best of them – hell, I do 
that every day – but it doesn't fight like that. It has my heart in 
it's fist and it's slowly squeezing the life from it. Paralyse one 
organ and it's on to the next. The domino effect in action right here 
in my own body. I have my own sphere of influence – it's not getting 
anywhere near my brain – my body may weaken before it, but my mind is 
invulnerable. Every day, though, there's a police action in my heart –
and we all know how well those work out.

It's an odd thing, the heart. For a start it's not heart shaped. Who 
started that in the first place? That neat, even shape you see on 
every Valentine card and every moron's bumper sticker, that's a 
cardioid. Now at some point the two got linked, don't ask me how, I 
guess the President could tell me but I don't have that kind of 
patience. A real heart looks like a lump, a mess. It's little more 
than a pulsing mass no-one was meant to ever see. It looks all wrong 
because it should never be on display – that's a sign that something 
is badly wrong .If people could see the heart every day, if we truly 
wore it on our sleeves then it would never have wound up associated 
with love. Trust me, it's that ugly. You want to draw a heart shape, 
stick with tradition. Two simple swipes of the pen and there you are. 
No one wants to see the truth - draw the symbol. It's buried deep 
within the body for a reason and should always be kept hidden from 
sight. Except mine wasn't. It's not enough that it's marked forever 
like a flag of weakness – you want to find my heart just aim for the 
big, red ink blot on my chest – she's seen it. 

I didn't find out for months after the shooting. Sam, naturally, let 
slip just after I'd returned to the White House, that Donna had seen 
my operation. Stood in the observation gallery and watched them sever 
my ribs, pull them apart and expose the raw, bleeding morass beneath. 
She saw them isolate it from the rest of my body, watched it stop 
beating and lie there limply oozing whilst they patched it back 
together. To anyone else the phrase `she saw right through to my 
heart' would be romantic hyperbole, for us it's nothing less than the 
truth. And the harsh, unpitying truth is that nothing changed. Oh, 
sure, she now has an even greater mandate to pilfer my fries, nag me 
over my diet and ban my coffee intake but the Josh and Donna show 
rolls on. Shows daily, folks, come see the longest running double act 
in Washington. Witness the witty banter and sparkling repartee. Laugh 
as the demanding yet brilliant boss get no respect from his 
infuriating, beautiful assistant. Gasp as the Deputy Chief of Staff 
manages to make it to all of his meetings on time despite a mutinous 
timepiece and a constant barrage of useless trivia. Come back next 
year, we'll still be here. 

It's not like I wanted things to be different then. Hell, I was 
fighting with every ounce of energy I had to prove that it was all 
over, back to normal. Intermission over, time for act two. Christmas 
proved what a good idea that was but hindsight's 20/20. What can I 
say? I'm the king of denial and it's a beautiful place to visit. My 
scar tissue, physical and mental was a shield to cover and protect 
all that was weak and vulnerable and secret and as time progressed it 
just grew stronger, more brittle and started to squeeze tighter.

One more useless fact for all you trivia buffs out there that I'm 
holding in reserve for the next time the President decides that I 
need to hear about our beloved national parks. After death the heart 
slowly changes shape until it forms a blunted pyramid. Deep inside, 
every corpse carries its own mausoleum. If you want to be truly 
morbid, I'm carrying my own tombstone around with me inside my chest. 
I've got to stop keeping beer at home. Seriously, this is only my 
second and already I'm writing my own epitaph. I really think I 
should leave that to Sam. Toby can always add the punctuation later.

If I don't let Sam do it, he'll only read more of his precious 
subtext into my version. I mean, does he think that I am an idiot or 
something? I know CJ's answer to that but I was kinda banking on 
spanky there. Does he really think that I don't see that Donna and I 
have been wilfully blind to the obvious for five years now? Okay, I 
was a little slow on the uptake on this one but even I've spotted 
that there is a thing. We have a thing. Hell, we are a thing and that 
leads me to my big confession of the evening. 

Ever since I realised that I loved Donna, that I had anchored my life 
to her, that she was, is as much a part of me as this patched, 
misshapen heart of mine the whole boss/assistant thing has never been 
the issue. Don't get me wrong, I'm not underestimating the 
possibilities of catching seven kinds of hell over it. I'm the 
political wunderkind of Washington, Bartlett's pit bull, I'm the 
terror of Capitol Hill. I know exactly how much joy and dancing our 
collective enemies would experience if this ever came out, I just 
don't care. It's just a hurdle, an obstacle, another problem to 
analyse, attack and solve. That's what I do and there's nobody as 
good at it as I am. As we are. Donna and me versus the moral 
majority, the Republican agenda and every enemy I ever made? They 
don't stand a chance. If that were all that were stopping me I could 
have a strategy on Leo's desk by one tomorrow afternoon. By the time 
the team had pulled it apart and put it back together we'd be ready 
for the evening briefing and could bury it in the Friday trash. But 
this is not about me, this is about us.

I've never experienced anything like the relationship we have. I've 
met people as smart, as passionate, as committed and nearly as 
beautiful as she is. Admittedly never all at once but that's not what 
makes us us. Anyone with half a mind could see how amazing she is as 
a person and she's been out with most of the ones with half a mind. I 
even thought Mandy was pretty special at one point, but no-one has 
ever come close to what we have together. Watch us in action one day 
and we fit like a perfect match, we complete each others weakness 
with our strengths, we operate in tandem without thinking, knowing 
exactly where the other one is. It's like that damn film she made we 
watch, when I was a prisoner in my own home, about some sports agent –
she completes me.

That's what terrifies me, not some bigoted right-winger judging us by 
their own standards. Tinker with something that close to perfection 
and you risk losing it. I don't know how we manage it so how could I 
know what could destroy it? Every time I think that maybe it's worth 
the risk, that maybe we would only fulfil our promise, maybe it would 
become something even better, I feel that dead hand around my heart. 
Every time I wake up in the dark and wonder what it would be like to 
see her stretched out beside me, I see that evil spider. I wonder 
what I have to offer her and all I see is that punctured, patched, 
exposed and marked organ in my chest. 

Donna has seen me open and bleeding, reduced to a helpless infant 
unable to feed or bathe myself. She's seen my incapable of walking to 
the bathroom to relieve myself, she's held me in the dark as I wake 
screaming and sweating from another nightmare. She's helped me 
stagger home after three beers and she's stood in my office with 
tears in my eyes as I tore into her to cover my own pain. She's been 
there throughout my highs and lows and seen every side of me and most 
of my insides. She knows the depths of my soul and the heights of my 
dreams. She knows me better than I know myself and that's all I have 
to offer her – it could never be enough, could it?

So I sit here in the dark as the fear tightens my chest and I feel 
the scar clutch tighter. Paralyse the heart first and then on to the 
next target, but it hasn't won yet. Tomorrow we'll all stand out in 
the cold and watch the President get sworn in again. Tomorrow we'll 
start another four year fight  together, side by side. While there's 
life there's hope, and there's life in this scuffed, beaten heart yet.





"So where does love come in? It's not strictly necessary, is it? We 
can build dams, like the beaver, without love. We can organize 
complex societies, like the bee, without love. We can travel long 
distances, like the albatross, without love. We can put our heads in 
the sand, like the ostrich, without love. We can die out as a 
species, like the dodo, without love."                  
      Julian Barnes, `A History of the World in 10˝ Chapters