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FF: Back Against The Wall
Title: Back Against The Wall
Series: Things Not Meant To Be (Part 1 of 4)
Part 1: Back Against The Wall
Part 2: Best Keep This To Myself
Part 3: Tilting At Windmills
Part 4: The Honorable Thing
Category: Angst
Disclaimer: I do not own The West Wing or any West Wing characters.
Rating: R (mostly for language)
Note: This is a much darker look at the future of the Santos Administration (and of Josh and Donna's relationship) that I normally take. The series title is from the James Taylor song "Long Ago And Far Away." If you never heard it before, you really should. I've been working on this series for almost a year and, after months and months of waiting, I'm finally going to post this! A HUGE thank you to![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
caz963 for holding my hand throughout this whole process and to seri_scribble for being my canary. Six months is a LONG time to be kept in the dark!!! Be thankful that you guys are only going to have to wait a week between installments!
April 2009
His back was up against the wall. Both figuratively and literally. He was sitting on the floor watching his wife pack for a trip that now had no scheduled end date. And there was nothing he could do about it.
“This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be,” Josh said wearily, as he let his head fall back against the wall behind him, the tension that had left him earlier slowly returning.
“Yet, here we are,” Donna sighed, trying to make order out of her suitcase and the mess they had recklessly made when they had first gotten home.
“It’s all turned to shit.”
“What did you expect, Josh?”
“I don’t know,” he shot back, matching her intense tone—not quite yelling… but close. “Something sure as hell different from this! What did you expect?”
“I expected fidelity,” she said with quiet dignity and knelt beside him so she could better see his face.
“Well, that was your first fucking mistake… or mine, depending on how you look at it,” he sneered.
He let his head roll towards her and their eyes met. They stared at each other for a beat. Two. And then they were in each other’s arms holding on for dear life, each simultaneously reaching for the other. Donna swung an arm and leg over him as Josh practically dragged her across his body, both of them trying to get as close as they possibly could. The day… week… year had been long. Far too long. And it seemed like they had been at odds for most of it. Right now, it seemed that the best way to survive this was by simply clinging to each other.
“If you ever cheated on me, I think I’d kill you,” Donna mumbled into somewhere between Josh’s neck and collarbone.
“I’d deserve it. Good thing the President already has protection.” That elicited a weak laugh from Donna, but her head remained buried as she began to run her hand gently up and down her husband’s bare back, reveling in the feel of his warm skin against her palm. This is what had been missing earlier. Even though the results had been more than satisfying physically, their actions had been motivated by sorrow and desperation and had done nothing to solve either. But just sitting like this was soothing her frayed emotions.
“Thank you for not telling me,” she sighed.
“I don’t like keeping secrets from you. I hated this one, especially. But I couldn’t put you in that position. No one should have to tell their boss that her husband is having an affair. And the last thing Mrs. Santos needed was to think that her staff was keeping things from her.”
“You’re right there. I don’t think I could have faked my shock if I’d known.” There was something in Donna’s voice that worried Josh. She was even more upset than he’d expected. Something more than the time bomb the President had let explode today had shaken her.
“It’s an uncomfortable enough situation without having to act, drama minor aside.” When that didn’t even earn him a snigger, Josh tried to pull away to get a better look at her face. But Donna just buried herself deeper into his arms.
“Uncomfortable is not the word,” came her muffled voice. “It lacks the element of sheer torture.”
“Donna?”
“She was fuming. I was trying to be as supportive as I could, but she wasn’t even listening to a word I had to say. Then she rounded on me and yelled ‘Why should I trust you? You’re married to him!’ She didn’t even have the respect to call you by name,” Donna pulled back to look at Josh, a cold anger simmering in her eyes. “I told her that I would do everything in my power to help her make it through this mess with as much as grace as humanly possible… but if she thought I would divorce my husband just to make her more comfortable, she would need a new Chief of Staff.”
“Donna…” Josh breathed, running his hands over her shirt… or rather his shirt which she’d donned when she’d decided she needed to pack sooner rather than later. “She didn’t mean it. She was at a level of pain I don’t ever want to imagine and she was lashing out without knowing what her words would do to you. She’ll apologize as soon as she realizes.”
“She already has. But Josh, that’s not the point,” she stated, burying herself against him again, finding comfort in his warmth. “I always suspected she disapproved of our marriage, but I just told myself I was being over sensitive. That I wasn’t used to being so open about our relationship. But not only does she not approve, she counts it against me. No one has ever respected me less for loving you. No one. Not Will. Not Lou. Not anyone. Except her. And I leave with her tomorrow for two weeks in Chicago, followed by who knows how long in any place where Matt Santos isn’t."
"Don't remind me," her husband grumbled, as he moved his hands down to her bare thighs.
"Josh..."
"Seriously, do you think you could come down with a case of the measles or something? Because otherwise I'm never going to see you!”
“Josh, I’ve been vaccinated against the measles. But it’s not like I can stay away from the office indefinitely. Or from you. Tried that before. It was awful. But blaming Helen Santos is not going to change that it’s my job to go with her in the morning.”
“I’m not blaming Mrs. Santos for this mess. I blame her husband, that’s who I blame. I don’t care what his reasons are. The Democratic Party is facing yet another sex scandal because he forgot who he was!”
“It all comes down to sex doesn’t it?”
“For me or for him?”
“Josh!”
“Hey, I’m just grateful that she isn’t an intern.”
“You know who she is?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“You really, really don’t want to know.”
“You’re serious.”
“Very.”
“Josh, it’s just that I keep thinking… and I know I’m just being silly and I feel horrible that I could even think that because there’s no way it could be her. But the thing is, it got into my head somehow and I just can’t get it out. I just need you to tell me that it….”
“It’s not Ronna.”
“Okay. Yeah, that would be more upsetting. But Josh… Oh, God… It is, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I just never thought she would… that she could… I mean, she doesn’t always… But this is something completely different. She doesn’t do things like this. She’s not that person,” Donna said with conviction.
“She loves him, Donna. It’s written all over her face. I don’t think she can help it.”
“What about him?”
“Who the hell knows? Either way, he’s going to break her heart.”
“What did he say when he told you?”
“He didn’t.”
“The President didn’t tell you?”
“No. A couple of months ago, Sam caught what he called a stray “vibe” between them and came to me, mostly to reassure himself that he was imagining things. Except he wasn’t. I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but I’m thinking that this… this is a fairly recent thing. But for all we know it’s been going on since the transition… or even before. Not that it matters. As soon as I found out, I had to do something about it. He wasn’t violating any laws… except a few moral ones. But there was no way I was going to stand by and silently condone… It was wrong. Wrong for the kids. Wrong for his wife. Wrong for the country. God… wrong for her! What kind of friend would I be if I just left her in that situation?”
“Compulsive fixer.”
“Probably. The President sure as hell didn’t thank me for involving myself. Tried to tell me it was none of my business.” Now it was Donna’s turn to soothe and offer comfort. She held him tightly as Josh continued with his head buried in the crook of her neck. “I told him if this costs us the election it would sure as hell be my business. Told him either he’d have to tell his wife or I would, so that the East Wing wouldn’t be blindsided by this. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a President like that.”
“It worked.”
“Yeah.”
“Is this going to hurt us?”
“Probably. The President’s bedroom activities will get more attention than anything he tries to do in the Oval Office. And we are not going to discuss any bedroom activities that might have taken place in the Oval Office.”
“No, I meant, is this going to hurt us? You and me. The Chief of Staff sleeping with his former assistant.”
“The Chief of Staff married to his former assistant… who now happens to be a Chief of Staff herself. And no, they won’t touch us. They can’t. When we got married, the papers went for the whole stupid Cinderella fairytale angle. They can’t sleaze it up now; it’s too late. They did their job too well before.”
“I never thought I’d be grateful for all that publicity.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Donna, you do realize that if this comes out… and it will come out… it’s going to be worse than anything that we faced with President Bartlet’s MS. Things will be torn apart and the press will hound everyone. There’s nothing titillating about a man keeping his illness to himself. Sex in the Oval Office is a totally different ballgame. A Congressional investigation will seem like the easy way out. We’re going to be dragged through the mud and everything we attempt from now on is going to be overshadowed by this… even if we manage to win re-election. And we won’t if the Republicans figure out what’s going on.”
“I know,” Donna replied as she nuzzled his neck and then grew serious. “We have to talk about what’s next. We can’t stay as we are.”
“I don’t know… I’m finding this position pretty comfortable,” Josh observed as he ran his hands up and under his stolen dress shirt.
“Josh, be serious. You have a boss that doesn’t listen to you and I have a boss that doesn’t trust me. We can’t work like this. Not when we’re facing what we know has to be coming.”
“You’re right,” he sighed. “You’re right.”
“You don’t want to hear this, I know, but it’s time.”
“To leave? And do what? I left Hoynes because I found someone I could believe in, someone I could fight for. I left President Bartlet because I believed the party had more to offer than just Bingo Bob. Though I might have been more successful if I’d tried to turn Vinick into a Democrat.”
“You did a brilliant thing, Josh. Never doubt that. You found the man who could have led this country into a new Golden Age.”
“Too bad he had feet of clay.”
“You can’t control who you fall in love with. You know that.”
“You can control what you do about it. Do you know how often I wanted to pin you against the nearest flat surface and not let you loose until you had screamed my name? But I never did. I never even tried. You were my assistant and there was a line. A big, black, immovable line. And if we’d crossed it, it would have cost us everything. I’d have been just another guy who banged his ditzy blond secretary. You deserved better than that. There were rumors and dirty jokes at our expense, of course, but most people knew that we never did anything dishonorable. So, we were allowed to break every other rule as long as we never violated the important one.”
“You could act like my husband. But you could never be my husband.”
“Something like that. At least, not until you left my shadow and were finally seen as your own woman. Not that you weren’t always, but everybody knows it now. There’s not a legislator or lobbyist who wouldn’t jump at the chance to hire you.”
“I may have options. But you can write you own ticket anywhere. You are the party, Josh. You’re the heir of Jed Bartlet and Leo McGarry. You don’t have to wait for the next thing to happen. You can create it. You just have to decide what’s next.”
“Or, you know, I could always become an exotic dancer or something,” Josh offered with eyebrows raised. It was a lousy joke. But, like most lousy jokes, it effectively cracked them both up and alleviated some of the gut-twisting tension they both had been carrying.
“Nah,” laughed Donna. “Your little fangirls already want to take a hit out on me. We don’t want to give them even more incentive!”
“Yeah, we don’t need that. So, we’ll go with Plan B then. Now I just have to figure out what that is. What about you? What do you want out of the near future?”
“Me? I plan on getting knocked up.”
“Wait…WHAT!?”
“It seems like a good time in my career.”
"You did mean by me, right?"
"No, Josh, I meant one of the other gomers I married!”
“Should I take a number?”
“I think there’s something else you should be taking.”
“You serious?”
“Very. I’m ready. I want to start a family. I want to start our family.”
“What about your job?”
“I’d rather spend my time with our baby than with grown ups who act like babies. I can always find something later. But for now, I want to concentrate on this.”
“Take as long as you want. Even with me searching for the next big thing, we can make this work.”
“Thanks. You’re not freaking out even a little, are you?”
“Nope. I’m ready, too.”
“So, are you in?”
“Oh, definitely.”
"Okay," Donna said, rising to her knees, her hands finding the waistband of his boxers. "So, you want keeping talking about it or do you want to do something about it?"
"Well, they don't call me a man of action for nothing," Josh replied, lifting his hips.
"Josh, nobody calls you a man of action," Donna grinned, as she settled back down against him, causing him to groan in anticipation.
"Like that matters. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that actions speak louder than words?" he smirked as he stole back his shirt and sent it flying across the room for the second time that night.
Go to Part 2: Best Keept This To Myself
Series: Things Not Meant To Be (Part 1 of 4)
Part 1: Back Against The Wall
Part 2: Best Keep This To Myself
Part 3: Tilting At Windmills
Part 4: The Honorable Thing
Category: Angst
Disclaimer: I do not own The West Wing or any West Wing characters.
Rating: R (mostly for language)
Note: This is a much darker look at the future of the Santos Administration (and of Josh and Donna's relationship) that I normally take. The series title is from the James Taylor song "Long Ago And Far Away." If you never heard it before, you really should. I've been working on this series for almost a year and, after months and months of waiting, I'm finally going to post this! A HUGE thank you to
caz963 for holding my hand throughout this whole process and to seri_scribble for being my canary. Six months is a LONG time to be kept in the dark!!! Be thankful that you guys are only going to have to wait a week between installments!April 2009
His back was up against the wall. Both figuratively and literally. He was sitting on the floor watching his wife pack for a trip that now had no scheduled end date. And there was nothing he could do about it.
“This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be,” Josh said wearily, as he let his head fall back against the wall behind him, the tension that had left him earlier slowly returning.
“Yet, here we are,” Donna sighed, trying to make order out of her suitcase and the mess they had recklessly made when they had first gotten home.
“It’s all turned to shit.”
“What did you expect, Josh?”
“I don’t know,” he shot back, matching her intense tone—not quite yelling… but close. “Something sure as hell different from this! What did you expect?”
“I expected fidelity,” she said with quiet dignity and knelt beside him so she could better see his face.
“Well, that was your first fucking mistake… or mine, depending on how you look at it,” he sneered.
He let his head roll towards her and their eyes met. They stared at each other for a beat. Two. And then they were in each other’s arms holding on for dear life, each simultaneously reaching for the other. Donna swung an arm and leg over him as Josh practically dragged her across his body, both of them trying to get as close as they possibly could. The day… week… year had been long. Far too long. And it seemed like they had been at odds for most of it. Right now, it seemed that the best way to survive this was by simply clinging to each other.
“If you ever cheated on me, I think I’d kill you,” Donna mumbled into somewhere between Josh’s neck and collarbone.
“I’d deserve it. Good thing the President already has protection.” That elicited a weak laugh from Donna, but her head remained buried as she began to run her hand gently up and down her husband’s bare back, reveling in the feel of his warm skin against her palm. This is what had been missing earlier. Even though the results had been more than satisfying physically, their actions had been motivated by sorrow and desperation and had done nothing to solve either. But just sitting like this was soothing her frayed emotions.
“Thank you for not telling me,” she sighed.
“I don’t like keeping secrets from you. I hated this one, especially. But I couldn’t put you in that position. No one should have to tell their boss that her husband is having an affair. And the last thing Mrs. Santos needed was to think that her staff was keeping things from her.”
“You’re right there. I don’t think I could have faked my shock if I’d known.” There was something in Donna’s voice that worried Josh. She was even more upset than he’d expected. Something more than the time bomb the President had let explode today had shaken her.
“It’s an uncomfortable enough situation without having to act, drama minor aside.” When that didn’t even earn him a snigger, Josh tried to pull away to get a better look at her face. But Donna just buried herself deeper into his arms.
“Uncomfortable is not the word,” came her muffled voice. “It lacks the element of sheer torture.”
“Donna?”
“She was fuming. I was trying to be as supportive as I could, but she wasn’t even listening to a word I had to say. Then she rounded on me and yelled ‘Why should I trust you? You’re married to him!’ She didn’t even have the respect to call you by name,” Donna pulled back to look at Josh, a cold anger simmering in her eyes. “I told her that I would do everything in my power to help her make it through this mess with as much as grace as humanly possible… but if she thought I would divorce my husband just to make her more comfortable, she would need a new Chief of Staff.”
“Donna…” Josh breathed, running his hands over her shirt… or rather his shirt which she’d donned when she’d decided she needed to pack sooner rather than later. “She didn’t mean it. She was at a level of pain I don’t ever want to imagine and she was lashing out without knowing what her words would do to you. She’ll apologize as soon as she realizes.”
“She already has. But Josh, that’s not the point,” she stated, burying herself against him again, finding comfort in his warmth. “I always suspected she disapproved of our marriage, but I just told myself I was being over sensitive. That I wasn’t used to being so open about our relationship. But not only does she not approve, she counts it against me. No one has ever respected me less for loving you. No one. Not Will. Not Lou. Not anyone. Except her. And I leave with her tomorrow for two weeks in Chicago, followed by who knows how long in any place where Matt Santos isn’t."
"Don't remind me," her husband grumbled, as he moved his hands down to her bare thighs.
"Josh..."
"Seriously, do you think you could come down with a case of the measles or something? Because otherwise I'm never going to see you!”
“Josh, I’ve been vaccinated against the measles. But it’s not like I can stay away from the office indefinitely. Or from you. Tried that before. It was awful. But blaming Helen Santos is not going to change that it’s my job to go with her in the morning.”
“I’m not blaming Mrs. Santos for this mess. I blame her husband, that’s who I blame. I don’t care what his reasons are. The Democratic Party is facing yet another sex scandal because he forgot who he was!”
“It all comes down to sex doesn’t it?”
“For me or for him?”
“Josh!”
“Hey, I’m just grateful that she isn’t an intern.”
“You know who she is?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“You really, really don’t want to know.”
“You’re serious.”
“Very.”
“Josh, it’s just that I keep thinking… and I know I’m just being silly and I feel horrible that I could even think that because there’s no way it could be her. But the thing is, it got into my head somehow and I just can’t get it out. I just need you to tell me that it….”
“It’s not Ronna.”
“Okay. Yeah, that would be more upsetting. But Josh… Oh, God… It is, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I just never thought she would… that she could… I mean, she doesn’t always… But this is something completely different. She doesn’t do things like this. She’s not that person,” Donna said with conviction.
“She loves him, Donna. It’s written all over her face. I don’t think she can help it.”
“What about him?”
“Who the hell knows? Either way, he’s going to break her heart.”
“What did he say when he told you?”
“He didn’t.”
“The President didn’t tell you?”
“No. A couple of months ago, Sam caught what he called a stray “vibe” between them and came to me, mostly to reassure himself that he was imagining things. Except he wasn’t. I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but I’m thinking that this… this is a fairly recent thing. But for all we know it’s been going on since the transition… or even before. Not that it matters. As soon as I found out, I had to do something about it. He wasn’t violating any laws… except a few moral ones. But there was no way I was going to stand by and silently condone… It was wrong. Wrong for the kids. Wrong for his wife. Wrong for the country. God… wrong for her! What kind of friend would I be if I just left her in that situation?”
“Compulsive fixer.”
“Probably. The President sure as hell didn’t thank me for involving myself. Tried to tell me it was none of my business.” Now it was Donna’s turn to soothe and offer comfort. She held him tightly as Josh continued with his head buried in the crook of her neck. “I told him if this costs us the election it would sure as hell be my business. Told him either he’d have to tell his wife or I would, so that the East Wing wouldn’t be blindsided by this. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a President like that.”
“It worked.”
“Yeah.”
“Is this going to hurt us?”
“Probably. The President’s bedroom activities will get more attention than anything he tries to do in the Oval Office. And we are not going to discuss any bedroom activities that might have taken place in the Oval Office.”
“No, I meant, is this going to hurt us? You and me. The Chief of Staff sleeping with his former assistant.”
“The Chief of Staff married to his former assistant… who now happens to be a Chief of Staff herself. And no, they won’t touch us. They can’t. When we got married, the papers went for the whole stupid Cinderella fairytale angle. They can’t sleaze it up now; it’s too late. They did their job too well before.”
“I never thought I’d be grateful for all that publicity.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Donna, you do realize that if this comes out… and it will come out… it’s going to be worse than anything that we faced with President Bartlet’s MS. Things will be torn apart and the press will hound everyone. There’s nothing titillating about a man keeping his illness to himself. Sex in the Oval Office is a totally different ballgame. A Congressional investigation will seem like the easy way out. We’re going to be dragged through the mud and everything we attempt from now on is going to be overshadowed by this… even if we manage to win re-election. And we won’t if the Republicans figure out what’s going on.”
“I know,” Donna replied as she nuzzled his neck and then grew serious. “We have to talk about what’s next. We can’t stay as we are.”
“I don’t know… I’m finding this position pretty comfortable,” Josh observed as he ran his hands up and under his stolen dress shirt.
“Josh, be serious. You have a boss that doesn’t listen to you and I have a boss that doesn’t trust me. We can’t work like this. Not when we’re facing what we know has to be coming.”
“You’re right,” he sighed. “You’re right.”
“You don’t want to hear this, I know, but it’s time.”
“To leave? And do what? I left Hoynes because I found someone I could believe in, someone I could fight for. I left President Bartlet because I believed the party had more to offer than just Bingo Bob. Though I might have been more successful if I’d tried to turn Vinick into a Democrat.”
“You did a brilliant thing, Josh. Never doubt that. You found the man who could have led this country into a new Golden Age.”
“Too bad he had feet of clay.”
“You can’t control who you fall in love with. You know that.”
“You can control what you do about it. Do you know how often I wanted to pin you against the nearest flat surface and not let you loose until you had screamed my name? But I never did. I never even tried. You were my assistant and there was a line. A big, black, immovable line. And if we’d crossed it, it would have cost us everything. I’d have been just another guy who banged his ditzy blond secretary. You deserved better than that. There were rumors and dirty jokes at our expense, of course, but most people knew that we never did anything dishonorable. So, we were allowed to break every other rule as long as we never violated the important one.”
“You could act like my husband. But you could never be my husband.”
“Something like that. At least, not until you left my shadow and were finally seen as your own woman. Not that you weren’t always, but everybody knows it now. There’s not a legislator or lobbyist who wouldn’t jump at the chance to hire you.”
“I may have options. But you can write you own ticket anywhere. You are the party, Josh. You’re the heir of Jed Bartlet and Leo McGarry. You don’t have to wait for the next thing to happen. You can create it. You just have to decide what’s next.”
“Or, you know, I could always become an exotic dancer or something,” Josh offered with eyebrows raised. It was a lousy joke. But, like most lousy jokes, it effectively cracked them both up and alleviated some of the gut-twisting tension they both had been carrying.
“Nah,” laughed Donna. “Your little fangirls already want to take a hit out on me. We don’t want to give them even more incentive!”
“Yeah, we don’t need that. So, we’ll go with Plan B then. Now I just have to figure out what that is. What about you? What do you want out of the near future?”
“Me? I plan on getting knocked up.”
“Wait…WHAT!?”
“It seems like a good time in my career.”
"You did mean by me, right?"
"No, Josh, I meant one of the other gomers I married!”
“Should I take a number?”
“I think there’s something else you should be taking.”
“You serious?”
“Very. I’m ready. I want to start a family. I want to start our family.”
“What about your job?”
“I’d rather spend my time with our baby than with grown ups who act like babies. I can always find something later. But for now, I want to concentrate on this.”
“Take as long as you want. Even with me searching for the next big thing, we can make this work.”
“Thanks. You’re not freaking out even a little, are you?”
“Nope. I’m ready, too.”
“So, are you in?”
“Oh, definitely.”
"Okay," Donna said, rising to her knees, her hands finding the waistband of his boxers. "So, you want keeping talking about it or do you want to do something about it?"
"Well, they don't call me a man of action for nothing," Josh replied, lifting his hips.
"Josh, nobody calls you a man of action," Donna grinned, as she settled back down against him, causing him to groan in anticipation.
"Like that matters. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that actions speak louder than words?" he smirked as he stole back his shirt and sent it flying across the room for the second time that night.
Go to Part 2: Best Keept This To Myself