Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Surprisingly, it only comes up once. In spite of the fact that they don’t try to hide it — or maybe because they don’t try to hide it — there is only ever one time that their fourth child is ever brought to the public's attention. 

It’s an interview for The Dartmouth during Jed’s run for the House in the 1st District. He hadn’t thought much about it other than that it would be a good experience for the kid running it and that he had a few ideas to kick around while people were still listening. 

More importantly, he didn’t intend to be so thrown off by a relatively simple question about child welfare reform. 

He knew that there was a machine weaving the proposal into local legislation. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the heat turned to him for a vote or a sponsorship, and he would be forced to land one way or the other. He knew it was only a matter of time before the truth came out anyway and his family was dragged through the streets about a private matter. 

He knew all of those things and so, consequently, he didn’t intend to say anything more than, yes, I’ve seen the draft and intend to think about it very hard in the coming months. Or something equally moronic and open-ended. 

(He was supposed to be an also-ran economics professor from up North — it wasn’t supposed to matter what he thought on high-price ticket items.)

But he also knew that it was his fourth daughter’s tenth birthday and found himself missing her like a limb. So what came out of his mouth instead was, Well, given my personal experience with the child welfare system, I intend to fight as hard as I can to ensure all families have the right to make choices that are right for them. 

It just happens. 

Luckily, the Q&A ended up mostly buried, anyway (something the EIC has yet to forgive himself for to this day) after they’re able to score fifteen minutes with Geraldine Ferraro. It becomes nothing more than a 13-inch spread and a hitch in the breaths of the people who knew the truth about a baby born in 1974 with tufts of blonde hair and shock-blue eyes. 

Mostly, though, those people — few as they are — were filled with relief and a renewed sense of hope for the future. If his campaign can make it under the wire with this on record, they figure it can make it through anything. 

And then Donnatella Moss happens and that hope goes up in smoke.

Chapter Text

It’s not like they can just ask her. Three days with her on the campaign and the whole thing is so obvious they can almost taste it. 

“Well, we have to say something,” Abbey says with a certain finality that has always managed to rankle her husband just a bit. “I honestly can’t believe we've waited this long.”

She’s being generous, they both know. We is generous, considering Abbey had been gone for the first two of the three days Donna’s been on staff. Jed had looked at, spoken to, and joked with the girl for 48 hours and nothing came of it; Abbey had only just  shaken Donna’s hand before excusing herself and her husband for the nearest private room — a stuffy printer closet — with a wild look on her face. 

“What do you mean, ‘this long’?” It’s hard to tell without better light, but she swears she can almost see him sweating. “You’ve known her for all of two minutes.” 

She knows he’s thinking about it, that he feels off-filter now and unsure about himself. Usually this version of him softens her a little, makes her rush to slow the world down a little or elbow it out of their sphere. Now, though, she’s riding full cylinders and needs him to pick up some slack. 

“That’s to say nothing of the 24 years we’ve got to pony up to after we abandoned her—” 

“We did not abandon her. Even if she is our—”

“She is, Jed.”

“Even if,” he says, flailing so much that he catches his elbow painfully on the corner of the xerox machine. He lets out a hiss and soothes a hand over his sleeve. 

After a minute, he takes a deep breath before carrying on in a much calmer tone. “Don’t you think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves?” 

“Do you honestly think I wouldn’t know my own daughter when I see her?”

It rings between them like a slap for a moment. It’s not where they would normally be in a conversation like this. What she just said should’ve been charged with a biting undertone, should’ve been something cutting and mean. 

Really, it had just been honest. 

“Besides,” she says finally, markedly less severe in an attempt to bring some levity back to the conversation. “She looks just like your Aunt Nora.” 

He can’t deny that. Still. “We don’t know anything about her. She could be a perfectly normal girl from a perfectly normal family, and you want to merrily go and pull the pin out from under her life for what might be nothing but a bunch of false starts? That hardly seems fair.”

“She’s got your eyes, Jed,” Abbey says. Pleads. “How do we just not say anything?”

He sighs and pauses for a long while. He scrubs a hand over his face and cradles his elbow again. Abbey watches the gears in his head grind to a halt before firing again and turning in a new direction. Eventually, he speaks.

“What would we even say?”

As the campaign drags on, she drifts away. (Well, drifts as far as she can in the maximum 20 yards of distance they’re allowed around the clock everyday between hotels, town halls, buses, and planes.) 

In the beginning, as far as either of them can tell, Donna’s very open and generous with her smiles. She relates well to people along the trail, picking up votes and sponsors left and right, seemingly without realizing it. She quickly becomes known for an odd awareness of the goings on around the campaign, and for never being too busy for a quick question or a friendly chat about the weather. 

Steadily, though, she wears. Her smile dims and her edges sharpen. Such is to be expected on a national-level campaign, but Jed and Abbey can’t help but watch with an undue sense of helplessness. 

They’re cowards, they know. They never did get around to saying anything to her, too busy with their intermittent panic and an honest bid for the highest office in the land to overcome their initial cowardice. 

Hiding — ducking and weaving around the truth — had never been either of their styles. But for some reason (some secret, super special reason that would never be uncovered, alas) Donna makes them especially nervous. 

It doesn’t help that she spends a lot of time looking at them both with significant glances and knowing smirks. She does her job quickly and efficiently, but sometimes she carries on with these little comments and jibes under her breath. She never elaborates when they ask and she barely looks at them when she can avoid it. 

Their paranoia over what she may or may not know hits a fever pitch after two weeks, but they say nothing. In less than a month, she’s gone.

It can’t be said they take her return well, per se. 

They’re happy, no doubt, to have her with them again. To have her on the campaign. She’s whip-smart, charming, and she has no qualms about learning exactly where her place is and staying there. Donna’s strategic value had never been in question, but the Bartlets’ outrage had been noticeably personal to those that knew them well. 

Their gripe manifests as passive aggressive, uncouth, and entirely one-sided. They pretend to forget her name. There are biting comments and inflexible demands. They refuse to let her in on a meeting or two. 

For the most part, she takes it quietly on the nose. It doesn’t take long for it to comes to head. 

In all honesty, to say that they have an issue would be overstating things a bit. Abbey had been heartbroken after Donna had left, sure. But she'd had a sense of grace and poise about it that left Jed looking like a red-faced, heavy-fisted tyrant when Donna came back. 

Jed, only two weeks after her return and with copious urgings from Abbey, decided the matter was best handled by cornering Donna in the middle of a repurposed Hilton ballroom one night when he was sure they were alone. 

“So,” he announces his presence, hands in pockets and rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. He keeps a good table’s worth of distance between them. “You’re back.” 

She doesn’t look up from her work. It’s leaked projections for Kentucky, he thinks, struggling with the upside angle he has on it. She finishes annotating whatever sentence she’s on and without looking up she answers, “Yes, sir.” 

So she’s upset with me after all. Swell.  

If he were in a better mood, he would laugh at her gumption. He’s not, so he just says, “You were gone for quite some time.”

“A month,” she hums, noncommittal. “I was … confused about some things.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s changed?”

She looks up then, fixing him with a stare so reminiscent of Abbey it makes him want to cry a little. Or yell. 

“I’m not confused anymore,” she says simply, too pointed to pull off dispassion.  

“Anything you’d like to share with the class there, Donna?” 

“So I get to be Donna again,” she snipes. “Not Darla or Diane?”

He winces, filled very suddenly with the urge to crawl under the table. He opts to try and smooth it over. “Takes some nerve to talk to your candidate like that.”

“I get it from my mother,” she throws back. And then quieter, more accusatory: “Or at least, I thought I did. Hard to say now.”

“I take it you know, then?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

He’s not sure where exactly he’d lost control of the conversation. This was meant to be nothing more than a reconnaissance on why she’d left, maybe even an apology if he had the time. Instead, here they were hurtling over some kind of edge he was not prepared to be taken over alone. 

Curious by nature, he wants to crack this thing wide open. How did you find out? How did your parents take it? Did you tell them? What are they like? Do you hate me? Do you hate us? Are you going to call up The Inquirer, now? Write a memoir, maybe? What was your favorite color in the third grade?

But he’s trying to be an adult right now — her boss — not … whatever else he could possibly be to her. Her candidate, her father, her greatest disappointment. As any of them, he asks instead, “Not going to leave again, are you?”

It’s awhile before she answers, suddenly very interested in all parts of the room except him. When her eyes finally land on him again they’re unsure and sad. If he knew her well enough he might call it betrayal, but really they’re just big and wet looking. 

“Can I stay, even?”

“You can always stay,” he says fiercely, hands gripping the back of the chair in front of him to curb how desperately he wants to go to her. “You will always have a place with us, if you want it. And if you don’t, it’ll be right here waiting until you do again.”

The distance still feels safe, but also utterly wrong . He doesn’t cross it, keeps his white knuckles on the chair back. She doesn’t either, and eventually her gaze neutralizes and she turns back to the Kentucky papers. When she starts annotating again, he takes it as a dismissal and leaves. 

He feels— not better, necessarily, but more settled. Abbey’s asleep when he makes it back to their room, and he doesn’t wake her. She’d told him to, said she probably wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, waiting to hear how the talk went. 

He figures eight hours between now and when she wakes up won’t make much of a difference on the news. As long as Donna doesn’t leave, they’ll all be able to figure it out together in the morning.

Chapter Text

Donna doesn’t leave and everybody decides to count it as a win. 

She doesn’t leave during the early half of the race when it's all tight calls in states where they had no business having hope in the first place. She doesn’t leave when they lose races in states they had no business having hope in the first place, either. 

She doesn’t leave during any of Jed’s temper tantrums, with causes ranging from that one wise guy at The Post calling at four in the morning, to bad polling numbers, to her insistence on staying with some random family during the Hartsfield's Landing stop in New Hampshire instead of at the farmhouse with them.

Nor does she leaving during any of Abbey’s cold fronts, brought on by handsy constituents, Leo interrupting a date night for the third time in a row, or Donna’s insistence on calling her Dr. Bartlet. 

She doesn’t leave, and eventually the campaign turns into the Tuesday after the first Monday of November. One minute she’s a relatively lowly staffer for a plucky candidate running on fumes and folksy charm, and then next she’s a bonafide member of the official transition team. 

And then they’re in the White House.

And then they’re passing the first hundred days in office.   

(And, aside from Josh shouting down Mary Marsh, everything’s going swimmingly.)

She brings him coffee because she’s good at her job. She cares. 

She asks him, “Do you think he’s gonna do it?” 

She doesn’t say, He can’t do it. He shouldn’t do it. It would be petty and cruel, for one thing — not his style. 

Vehemently, she adds, “You won that election for him.”

She doesn’t say, But then again, there’s me. Maybe it’s more his style than we think it is.

It’s another one of their small blessings, probably, that nobody says anything about Abbey sitting up with Donna after Rosslyn. She checks on Zoey and sees to Jed’s care first, but after that she plants herself by Donna’s side for the rest of the night and nobody says a word. 

The President was shot, of course — there are more important things to worry about. 

Still. 

Fourteen hours in hardback hospital chairs, heads bent together and hands often interwoven, and no one has anything to say about the First Lady of the United States sitting vigil beside a junior White House staffer in a GW waiting room instead of with her own husband, the President, who was shot only the day before. 

Overlooking small blessings, and all that. 

When Toby tells her what Sagittarius really means, her first thought about it is, Oh, his poor family. 

Her second thought — after he finishes telling her all she needs to know and sends her on her way — is, Wait. 

The knowledge settles in a more disconnected manner than she’s comfortable with. She’s angry with them, sure — has been since the campaign and likely will be for the rest of her life.

But the thing is: Donna cries at baby food commercials and testimonials on the back of baby-brand sunscreen. She’s never worn insouciance well, even for the little things.

And this isn't a little thing.  

As outraged as she feels, she refuses to be a bystander in her life any longer. 

She’s not entirely sure what that realization means, exactly. Part of that probably includes therapy and modified self-talk, she thinks. 

Part of it very much includes sidling up to Charlie’s desk over her lunch hour and demanding the next open five minutes the President had on his schedule. He’s surprised, visibly, but he gives it to her. 

And then, later that night, she’s standing in the middle of the Oval Office, like an idiot, glaring at him like she could reasonably expect to win in a fight 1-v-1 with the 82nd Airborne if it came to that. 

“I would like to stop learning things about you from other people,” she tells him, flatly, and with a sense of confidence she does not feel. 

The silence that follows makes her skin crawl. If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he just looks at her like she has any idea of what kind of hell to which this conversation is going. 

“I know we’re not, you know, family really, or anything,” she continues. “But I think—”

“We could be.”

“What?” 

“You were the one—“ he starts, stopping himself as if by rote. “You seem to be the one who doesn’t want that. To be family.”

“I don’t.”

“I might believe that if you weren’t so utterly lying,” he tells her. “You storm into the Oval Office and sass the President of the United States like that? Ask yourself who else might behave the way you just did.”

“Leo.”

“Leo is family.”

“CJ, Josh—“

“There’s no one you can name on this side of the building who I can honestly say I don’t consider family.”

“I’m sure Bonnie and Ginger don’t crack the list.”

“I’m sure they might if I was given a refresher on who the hell Bonnie and Ginger are.”

“Oh that’s easy,” she spits. “They’re some of the only people left near senior staff who don’t know what Sagittarius is!”

When he doesn’t say anything, she begins to feel some of the hot indignation leave her. In its place, she feels tired and wrung out. A result of weeks spent unknowingly working as a double agent, probably. But mostly a type of grief with which she isn’t familiar. 

Belatedly, she realizes her face is wet. A mix of sweat and tears. She can feel her stomach roil and her hands where they're balled into fists shake at her sides. God, she’s a mess.  

And then, in a voice smaller than she knew she had, she hears herself ask, “Are you going to die?”

He flails a little. She recognizes an aborted move to cross to the other side of the desk and— do what, she doesn’t know. Despite her best efforts, she remembers the gesture from where she’s seen it before.

Moving to wrap his coat around Zoey’s shoulders after her first breakup on the campaign trail; tucking the First Lady into his side after a particularly long dinner with the Prime Minister of Sweden; putting himself between Josh and Toby, and Mary Marsh and Al Caldwell.  

A move to offer comfort, to shield. 

But he doesn’t give it to her — can’t, maybe.

Instead says, “No, Donna, I’m not going to die.” Then he pauses, musing. “At least, not from this." 

She sniffs. Nods, hands still in fists and crossing her arms over her chest. "Well, if anything changes—" She moves her shoulders. You know where I'll be.

He looks at her, face impassive. They stand for a moment in a teetering silence until she moves to leave. 

She's almost at the door before she hears him call, "Donna?" She turns to him. "I hope this means you can return

She nods. 

"For what it's worth, it wasn't an easy decision — hiding it from you." Then, softer: "I'm very glad you know."

It's entirely too tender, too gentle for a room like this in the building they're in. Her face does something, threatens to crack open entirely. But she doesn't answer the admission. 

She leaves. 

Later that night she's barely home, before her phone rings. 

"Hello?"

"Hi." A pause, long enough for her to decide she's not entirely surprised. "Josh call you yet?"

"No," she says, elongates the word to be a question he doesn't answer. "Is he supposed to?"

"No, but I'm sure he will. He's good like that."

"Mr. President," she says slowly. For a moment, she has the grace to be worried that she's actually fired, her certifiable display in the Oval very much withstanding. "Is everything okay? 

"Our discussions today," he offers in an odd voice, like an answer. "I'm not quite so slow on the uptake."

Oh? 

"Mr. President, I—"

"Dolores Landingham was—" His voice shakes, and she realizes it's the first time she's ever heard it do that. He clears his throat and begins again. "Dolores Landingham was my father's secretary. After he was gone, she was always on my staff. Always been with me, even when I was nothing more than a nutty adjunct."

"You two have always been close?"

"She's like a sister to me."

They both know, she thinks, that this hadn't quite been what she meant all those hours ago. Of all the things to tell her — of all the things she might learn from someone else — this should be the least urgent. 

There's something else. 

"Mr. President, why are you calling me?" 

And then he tells her about a terrible accident in a brand new car on a street crossing she's never heard of.

It's horribly devastating and threadbare-honest, but among all of that — it's a start. 

Chapter Text

There’s no denying it’s weird. 

Nobody ever mentions the visit or the call, so to speak. But there's no mutual, unspoken pact to not mention it either. So there's that. 

For weeks, everything is all blurred lines and significant looks. After Mrs. Landingham's funeral — after the re-election announcement, the press conference — Donna's personal calendar is officially updated, from the desk of the President (read: Charlie). She now has a standing 20-minute slot at the end of her work day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays left permanently cleared, marked: "in-session."

She's left with a similar, yet entirely separate notation after getting off of the phone with the First Lady's Chief of Staff one afternoon. The First Lady would like to see you over the lunch hour on Mondays and Fridays, if it's not too much trouble? She said to open a standing time, so this week I'll have you between her meetings with the literacy fund and the household staff. I also took the liberty of—

Yeah.

Weird is apt. 

It's four weeks that she watches their world almost come apart.

Well, the world is overstating things a bit. Really, it's just the campaign. All because, everyone seems to agree, he can't manage an, "Hey, America, sorry I lied to your faces about the state of your reality for three years."

The irony there is salivating, if only in her personal life. She tries not to mention it when they're alone, tries not to rub it in. He goes out of his way not to bring up work, when it can be helped, and most days she sees no reason to pick a fight. 

Secretly to the American public, she thinks, Yeah, now you get how I feel. 

(It's not that she's been told not to tell anyone.) 

"Donna, why does it say you can't come to the luncheon?" 

"What luncheon?"

"The— Do you have to go through the mail while I'm... Thank you. Anyway, the Commerce luncheon. It says you can't go to the Commerce luncheon." 

"Since when does Commerce have a luncheon?"

"Since... I don't know. Since Mitch Bryce needs to fulfill some perpetual need to hide behind the President's skirts while he coasts on the economic growth we hand to him on a silver platter."

"Does the President wear a petticoat in all your put downs of perfectly nice Cabinet secretaries?" 

"Only the ones that help me figure out why there's a hole in your schedule I didn't put there." 

(It's not that she's been told not to tell Josh.)

"What do you want from me? I didn't know there was a luncheon. It's a luncheon. Big deal."

"Yeah, but why can't you go?"

"Because I didn't know it existed? Nobody from Bryce's office called about it. When were you going to tell me about it, if it's so important to you?"

"After I'd scheduled it." 

"Why didn't you?"

"I couldn't. The computer says you're unavailable, that you can't come." 

"When is it?"

"Friday." 

"Can't come." 

"Why?"

"Because I'm unavailable." 

"This is the problem I'm having. Why aren't you available? Where are you going to be?"

"I'll be in the middle of an incredibly secretive rendezvous with the First Lady discussing the matter of my birth and whether or not the President is going to be needing hair plugs in the not so distant future."

(It's just that, if there's fun to be had with this thing, she might as well be the one having it.)

The look he gives her is priceless.

She adds, "It's over my free period, Josh, of course I'm not going to a stupid luncheon. I have things to attend to." 

Things happen sometimes. And other times, not.  

They talk at their meetings, usually. With the President, it's easier: he's eclectic and painfully earnest in turns in the same way she is, and so Donna never feels the need to come to him with false cheeriness. When things get truly awkward, they always find safe ground talking about the news, or Donna asks him questions about history or economics. On her mind-numbingly busy days, she tricks him into ranting about policies they're pushing or campaign minutiae, which can sometimes have the dual benefit of making him see if he's being too much of a hardass about something that really could be done another way.

Whether he recognizes her tactics for what they are or not, he never says. 

Mostly, though, he does his best to focus on her. He asks a lot of questions without asking them, by asking other questions. He wants to know about the books she's read and what she's thought of them. He delights over her brief stint in college, over the way she's accumulated knowledge like a thief in the night, stealing what she wants as quick as she can, and then even more so for good measure. He never asks her directly, but he needles her background and interests out of her with a sartorial grace that reminds her that he really is one of the better political minds of their time.

Mrs. Bartlet is much the same, if only worse at it.

Where the President leads, she stumbles. Where he skirts around the edges, she delves. The First Lady asks, openly, about Donna's dating life and her hobbies and whether or not she eats enough or how she finds living in D.C. She lashes out, in her own way, when she's nervous. When Donna makes her nervous. (Through such nefarious acts, Donna can't help but notice, as looking her in eye, sighing at her questions about Donna's vaccine schedule, showing up to the meetings she specifically asked Donna to attend, and breathing.) 

She seems incapable of expressing negative emotions about Donna, so these moods usually lead to sharper lines of questioning or rants about a fascinating array of subjects, such as the President, her staff, the New York Post, the New England Journal of Medicine. 

Donna is trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, tries to show them she really is trying. That she means no harm, and that she's trying to believe the same of them. 

This isn't something you fix, she wants to tell them. This is just how we live now. 

She can't imagine it would help. 

The backhandedness comes to a head one day. Mrs. Bartlet is seventeen minutes late to their meeting and she comes in to her office flustered, muttering something about bitchslapping Oliver Babish. She paces about the room in silence for a long, pushing papers and straightening pens on her desk, like Donna's not even there. 

Donna's day has been hell too. Not comparably, she knows, but she doesn't mind the moment's peace. 

Minutes pass and finally, back turned, Mrs. Bartlet says, “Would it help if I said that I regret our decision?” 

She should've known better to let her guard down. 

It's a first, for the both of them. For all the bluff and bluster Donna's brought to the President those few times, she's never had so much as snark for the First Lady.

This is new; Donna doesn't know if she cares for it. She decides to play it safe. 

"Which decision?"

"You." She turns on her heel, leans against the front of the desk, and crosses her arms. "Our decision about you."

There's no tone, nothing in the line of the other woman's body to let Donna know what she might be thinking.

Donna feels adrift about it. It's the one thing she's never let herself wonder so openly about, coming from the one woman she's never let herself want it from. 

In for a penny. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she says plainly, a bit too quickly to be believable. “Every day since we did it.”

And then— “But also, no.”

Donna nods. It’s nice, in a way, to finally get the truth. Really, she thinks, it might be the only kindness there is left to give between the two of them. 

"You must have wondered?"

Donna shrugs. 

It's quiet again for a while. The First Lady stays standing, and Donna can't look anywhere but her shoes. It's harder than she had expected it to be, hearing that. She'd never expected to hear anything at all. She doesn't know which is worse. 

Eventually, Mrs. Bartlet clears her throat. “Giving you up was the hardest thing I ever had to do," she murmurs. "I won't speak for Jed, but I think it's the hardest thing we ever did together."

She moves, slowly, to sit in her usual chair across from Donna. The chairs are stiff and slightly understaffed — antiques from an age of hoop skirts and whalebone corsets. Donna spares a thought for all the women who might have sat in these chairs before them, how small she and Mrs. Bartlet must seem in comparison.

There's only a stocked teapoy between them but, for the first time in her life, Donna feels choked by her surroundings.

She finally looks up at Mrs. Bartlet — oh please, her mind supplies her from weeks earlier when she'd slipped and called the woman that to her face, call me Abbey, at least — who sighs and settles into an undignified slouch against the chairback.

She's looking at Donna head-on now, something wistful and sad in her eye. And Donna may know much (less and less, it seems, each time they are together like this) but she knows a memory-burdened mother when she sees one.

"You were tiny," she starts softly, lips turning up just so at the corners. "And loud and alive. You were perfect, Donna, and you were ours.

"We always wanted a big family. It was just me, with my parents, and Jed only has Jon. We wanted something different for our family, but I... We tried. So hard. We were young when we had Lizzy and we thought it would be so easy after that. 

"I got pregnant four times between the two of you and... I'm a doctor, I know how these things go. But back then, I was young and sad. I felt horribly alone, even with your fath—" (Donna flinches, a little thing with her face, but Mrs. Bartlet's ready on a dime.) "With Jed.

"And then you came along."

And it's like the sun has opened on her face. A smile, if only a tragic one. There are tears, though on whose face it doesn't seem to matter. There are two sets of hands itching at their palms, unbearably empty in a moment where it seems egregious to be. The moment breaks like shattered glass across the two of them. 

"I couldn't believe it," she whispers. "We'd given up after the last one and I never thought... It had only been a few months, but you felt different. I felt different, more like Lizzy. I could feel... I knew." I knew you, she doesn't say. I knew you before. 

"We were so excited, at first. Once we knew you were staying, we tried to be prepared. We were so stretched thin, between campaigns and my job and Lizzy. The closer it came, the more we realized that we just couldn't... That I couldn't— I couldn't be what you needed. I wasn't ready. I wasn't recovered." 

Donna feel an odd surge of protectiveness just then — a sharp instinct to go to Abbey, to hold her hand or fold an arm around her shoulders. Something to say, it's okay. It's alright, I understand. You did everything you could, and it was enough. A thought occurs to her, then, if this is the most a daughter can be in these moments: a tribute to hurts long past that you caused long before you could know enough to want to hurt someone. She wants to reach for the other woman. She wants to ask about this tapestry of pain.  

But she doesn't have time to do any of those things before Abbey shoots forward and snatches Donna's hands out of her lap. 

"I always wondered about you, Donna," she says fiercely, hands squeezing around Donna's like a vice. "Not a day went by that I didn’t think about you, about what your life must be like, who you were. I worry about you everyday. I've worried. You've always been the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep at night."

It should be enough. It's the answers to all the questions she's ever had her whole life through. Every secret thing she's ever wound around her heart and left out to dry has been dusted off and handed back to her in twenty minutes. It should be done, now. 

But this is a hurt, it turns out, that she can't help but poke at.

(She wonders if that's for daughters, too.) 

"When did you know it was me?" she asks. "After I joined the campaign, I mean." 

Abbey (and hey, when did that happen?) scoffs, and her grip relaxes. "I knew who you were the minute we met. I knew you were mine the second I laid eyes on you." 

Mine. 

Huh. 

The thing is, Donna's parents never made her feel left out among her brothers, nor her family among her cousins. She always knew she was adopted, but it's never mattered in the ways that count. Still, there's something about being claimed this way. Claimed as mine by Abigail Bartlet in the East Wing of the White House in the middle of the workday. 

She's a bit rocked by that, more than she thought she'd be by anything Abbey had to offer. Thankfully, the woman isn't done yet. 

"You must have questions," Abbey says. "I'm sorry if I've never— If we ever made it seem like you couldn't ask them. Whatever you have to ask, whatever you have ever wanted to know, Donna, I want to tell you." 

The first part, the asking part, seems easy. When it comes to the asking, she's like a river or a particularly annoying creek. But when she thinks about it for more than a second, she realizes it's the knowing bit, for better or worse, that gets stuck in her throat. 

There are things she needs to know, though. She figures that's as good of a place to start as any. 

"Does somebody have this?" she starts tentatively. "With the lawyers... I know there's a lot on the table. I know there might be hearings and that there will definitely be depositions. But... Did you start this because someone has it ready to go?"

There's another bout of shuttering, and Donna can tell that Mrs. Bartlet was looking for (hoping for, maybe) something a little more personal. She recovers quickly, though, and she never lets go of Donna's hand. 

"These chats... I wanted to get to know you better," she says. "But I also wanted space so we could get to know each other. Not that I mind chatting about boys and bosses," she adds, cheeky a minute before going serious and heavy again. "I didn't — don't — want you left to the wolves, learning things only when the going gets ugly.

"It's not my medical history being called into question here," she continues. "It's certainly not off the table of things to be asked about, but it doesn't seem to be at the forefront of anyone's mind." She offers Donna an apologetic smile. "Between Jed and I, we're limited in the feelers we can send out about, obviously. But we also know that the people we worked with were good. Discreet."  

And that should be enough, but "Have you told your daughters, yet?" slips out like it's just been waiting to pounce at the back of her throat, and oh my God—

Instantly, she slaps a hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry! That was incredibly... You don't have to answer that, obviously! I'm not sure where that came from."

Mrs. Bartlet just waves her off with a chuckle. "They know. Liz has always known — she was too old to forget. Ellie and Zoey know, but... Well, for them it's always been more of a construct than—"

"No," Donna interrupts because wow, could this day get any weirder or more insubordinate? "I mean, do they know it's me?"

Because, from her limited interactions with the Bartlet girls over part two years, it's always seemed like—

"No. No they don't." 

She admits it quietly and with a dose of shame Donna doesn't understand. 

"Do you want to tell them?"

"We always thought that should be up to you," Mrs. Bartlet tells her. "They know what we did. They've had questions over the years and we've never really lied to them. But you didn't sign up for everything all at once. It's your life, Donna. It should be up to you who knows and who doesn't know. We will support you no matter what you decide." 

Huh. 

Yeah. 

Weird. 

It’s not long after that that the niceties unofficially end.

They last long enough for a sit down chat between her, the President, and the First Lady. They are gracious and delicate, and Donna wants to pull her teeth out with rusty pliers. But besides that, it's fine.

It is decided that they will tell their daughters in the coming weeks. Donna doesn't care how and she doesn't particularly care when, just so long as it is when she is not there and soon. None of them want to make a national headline out of the thing, and they can cross all other bridges when they come to them. 

Once that's settled, though, the gloves come off. She is suddenly expected at weekend lunches and morning chess. She gets scolded about vegetables and whether or not she's wearing her jacket as much as she should. They are vocal about their distaste in the men she dates and are comfortable enough, it seems, to threaten her with a Service detail if she doesn't start to "aim higher."

They still keep a wide berth around specific questions about her childhood, her parents, her brothers, but they are much less skittish when the subjects come up naturally. 

They are confident, she realizes just a few weeks down the line. They're settling.

The first time Zoey sees her after, she pounces.

It's just the four of them — the President, Mrs. Bartlet, Zoey, and Donna — and they had figured a simple dinner at the residence would be enough of a neutral ground to keep everyone comfortable, but that doesn't stop Zoey from taking Donna down in a tackle on the living room floor. For hours, the youngest Bartlet girl is relentless — clothes, makeup, boys — without letting Donna up for air. By the time dinner is served, she's calling Donna, sissy, and simply decides that she'll be taking her shopping next weekend.  

Eleanor is a bit of a tougher nut to crack in that she insists on the formality of it all. The woman revels in the shaking of hands and kissing of cheeks and minutes-long apologies for the general fact of her existence. They both keep insane hours, so she organizes a dinner after they both got off work one night, some seafood place downtown that would normally be well out of both of their budgets. (Something Donna allows because she has a sneaking suspicion it's going on some kind of family card that doesn't see much action anyway.)

It’s not long before they both just get wine-drunk over oysters and lay out their lives for each other.

To Ellie, Donna says, I don’t know what to do with all of this. I don’t know how to be part of your family.

To Donna, Ellie says, yeah, me too. 

At the end of the night, Ellie hugs her for a long time without letting go, says welcome to the family. It's the first time it doesn't seem like a challenge or a platitude, the first time it's just a warm fact.  

Liz is almost entirely unaffected. She's up on a weekend for something with her husband and barely looks at Donna longer than absolutely necessary. She shakes Donna's hand, despite the fact that they’ve been at least vaguely acquainted since the campaign, and she only talks to her directly three times in two hours. Her coldness winds Donna up a little, tightens her chest and straightens her back as if against an onslaught. 

But it’s not long before Liz kids come toddling along and she introduces her, Kids, this is your Auntie Donna. 

And she loosens a little. 

She catches sight of the dopey grins Mr. and Mrs. Bartlet flash each other when they think no one is looking, and loosens more. 

And if this is the hardest it gets, she thinks. okay. If this is the worst there is, let's go. From the feet up. 

It's not any of those things. She knows it's not.

But she thinks they might just be okay anyway. 

Chapter Text

Jed once told Josh that there were worse reasons to do something than because your daughter asks you to. He meant it. 

And so he calls Molly Morello. He calls Molly Morello, and he ought not rule Congress with an iron fist, but he is able to give Stackhouse an assist during the filibuster. Turns out he actually can’t pardon Donovan Morrisey right now, but he resolves to do it in the spring even though he’s not sure he wants to do it at all. 

And, when the kid ends up killing himself over it, Jed’s the one letting Donna shout at him until she’s red in the face in the privacy of the Oval, head bent submissively and waiting for her to fall into his arms and cry.

(She doesn’t cry. But the way she lets his hand hover over her arm as she holds her head in her hands is almost better.)

There are worse reasons to do something . And that’s true. 

Sometimes, though, the grin and warmth she blesses him with — all her mother’s — are far better ones than he deserves. 

+

Sometimes he says, I’m proud of you , when he’s saying something else. 

Though it’s not the worst idea in the world. 

I swear to God, if Donna wasn't there, they'd have to buy a house.  

She took the bullet we all managed to dodge.

Sometimes she answers back to him. 

Like when she stands on a corner all day in the November cold, haggling with Ritchie voters so her ballot is counted for him. Or when she makes sure the members of his senior staff are ready to do their job and not needlessly bogged down by what they’re only too comfortable referring to as the knucklehead stuff. Or when she takes credit for a disparaging quote about the White House — not because it will help her out in any way, but because she believes in the magic of a second chance for an honest mistake, the kind of thing he models for her every day.  

Sometimes she says back to him, thanks, Dad, me too , without even realizing it. 

Usually, though, she says nothing at all.  

+

It’s a bit of a blur after she’s pulled from the car. She remembers waking up, trying to place herself like it’s all been some disorienting afternoon nap. The CODEL — you’re in Gaza, Donna, get a grip. 

She remembers Colin and the militant border guards and getting into the SUV. She remembers the flash, and the hot, and the flying, and her body dangling above her, dripping and leaking and jutting in places she’s never considered before. Her leg is on fire, literally or otherwise. She remembers being pulled from the car, and then nothing at all. 

Well, that’s a lie. She remembers the pain just fine. 

There is no face or space where these things happen, just voices shouting and the sound of helicopter blades blaring in the distance. But the blindingly hot agony radiating up and throughout her entire body? She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to forget that. 

+ 

Things come to her in flashes. 

The medivac, the paramedics, the doctors. She doesn’t understand much of what they’re saying and no one will stop to explain it to her, and that’s how she knows she’s really in trouble. Every person that puts their hands on her just tells her she’s going to be alright, and that she needs to stay awake — stay with us, Donna — which she can barely manage. 

Her eyes flutter against all manner of harsh lights and clanging metal. They put her in a machine or two. Needles pull air out of her lungs and push in fluids that make the world heavy and quiet. The difference between sleeping and awake is a sweet, numbing relief. There is crying and screaming coming from someone she’s almost certain is her. She tries to stop, begs for everything to just stop . 

She doesn’t have that kind of time. There’s never enough time . 

+

When she finally does wake up for real, the world is a dull buzz. She is alone. Her mouth is dry. 

“I’ll get you some water.”

Huh? 

The woman standing at her bedside — a nurse , her mind sluggishly supplies — leaves, and behind her blooms a familiar figure. 

Josh? 

He looks awful. He comes to hover over her, looking awful and saying something she can’t quite make out. 

“What happened to you?”

“To me?” he asks, voice softer than she’s ever heard it before. 

She can barely speak and her eyes are heavier than dumbbells, but she can still see. “You need to shave,” she tells him. He starts to splutter something about time and her mind catches. “Where am I?”

She’s in Germany, he tells her. A military hospital. (With non-German nurses, she finds out, though this doesn’t seem to matter as much to him.) She doesn’t understand much and even less is sinking in. 

There’s morphine, she learns. A lot of it, but never enough. 

Something familiar nudges at the edges of her mind — something about hospital, and fear , and Josh — but everything is only soft pain. A haze in which little registers, except for the fact that Josh is there and she doesn’t feel good. She doesn’t feel good. She feels alone and scared but she isn’t alone because Josh is here . 

The last thing she knows is the nurse taking her blood, and then she feels nothing at all. 

+

He’s trying to take a meeting, like something out of a bad dime novel — a shitty scheme from an even shittier 007 knock-off. Something about flowers and the son of the sword. Whatever . 

Donna doesn’t like it. It’s not safe, whatever Kate says, but Donna can’t walk. She can barely stay awake, let alone argue with him the way he needs to be argued with. So who cares what she has to say? 

He goes, and then she’s alone again. 

That’s probably why her chest hurts. 

Right?

+

She wakes up after her lung collapses and, for a second, all she feels is alone. This room is warmer than her other one. Smaller, quieter. It’s late in the day or early in the morning, and she has no idea how she got here. 

But then Josh is there. Again.

She’s not alone. Her throat burns and of course his name is the first thing out of her mouth. 

He leans over her, worse-looking than the first time. He says, Your mom is here. And maybe it’s the drugs, but for a minute — honest to God — Donna isn’t sure who he’s talking about. 

She has to convince herself her relief outweighs her disappointment. 

After all, Josh is still there. 

+

But then he leaves. 

He leaves, because of course he has to. Of course he can’t stay with her. Her mother is here. She’s a big girl surrounded by some of the best medical staff in the world. There’s no reason for him to stay. 

Still, she can’t pretend like it doesn’t stir something in her to have to force him to do it. That there isn’t something touching and warm that blossoms in the pit of her belly every time he starts to raise his voice about it. 

I’m here as long as I need to be, Donna, and that’s the end of it! 

They’ve scaled back her morphine, put her on pills. She’d been exhausted when it’d started, but cognizant enough to work with Leo behind Josh’s back every time he left to grab food or to stretch his legs. 

I can’t lie to you, kid, Leo had said the first time. It’s getting rough over here. I don’t want you worried about any of that, though. 

But he had sounded just as tired as she was after everything. Bone-weary and defeated like she’s never heard him before. And she may be a little banged up, a little out of sorts . But she’s still Donna . She’s still Donnatella Moss , Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, still the girl to get her guys where they need to be. In this situation, Donnatella Moss would straighten her spine, find a notepad, and say, Here’s what I think we should do . 

So that’s exactly what she did. And — because she is Donnatella fucking Moss — it works. 

Before he leaves, he presses a satellite phone into her hands and makes her look at him. 

“I’ll be here,” he tells her. His face is hard and twisting at the mouth, the same it’s been since she handed him the print-out Maryland plane tickets the nurses helped her with. 

Still, his eyes are soft and desperate. Wet in a way she ignores and pleading in a way she can’t. “You can call me anytime, day or night , and I’ll be there. I’ll be checking in as often as I can, but I don’t want you to hesitate to call just to tell me what you had for breakfast.” 

He leans down and presses his forehead to hers. He’s taken to doing this lately, another thing they haven’t discussed. Why can’t you look me in the eye anymore? Why does every member of the Bartlet household keep calling? Why won’t you speak to any of them? Why does the world fall away when I touch you like this? 

“You say the word , Donna,” he whispers, his breath hot and voice trembling. “ One word, and my ass is back in this chair. You read me?”

And it’s not… It’s not real . She knows it’s not real . She’s an adult — she understands, of course she does. He may not have stopped for a beer, may not have wasted a second between getting thrown out of a meeting and hopping on a plane to be at her bedside. She’s grateful for that alone. But he wasn’t the one who could shuck off red lights so easily. Josh would always have to stop at red lights, even for her, and this is one of them. She doesn’t begrudge him that. 

But there is a beast in Donna’s head she has been beating back her whole life. A specter, or maybe just a girl. Some scrawny, sickly, rabid thing champing at any bit thrown its way, looking to sink its teeth into anything (any person ) willing to stand still close enough, long enough. Usually, she can quiet it with her pithy dates, her one night stands, her special meetings with Mrs. Bartlet, her calls back home. Solid evidence of things that can be kept, things that are hers .  

It clamors when she can’t, cries of unwanted! unloved! given back! forgotten!

Alone!

And right now, Josh is poking that thing with a stick. 

But Donnatella Moss does not need — not like that. Never openly, anyway, and never so much from Josh. She’s the guy behind the guy, and in this moment, he needs his guy to buck up and get him going. 

So she nods her head against his and pushes at his shoulders. “I read you.” She does. 

“Promise me,” he says vehemently, his eyes closed tight in front of hers. “Promise me you’ll ask.” Please ask. 

“I will.” She won’t. 

He stumbles back, like she’s struck him, a betrayal written on his face that he doesn’t voice. It’s gone in a flash, replaced with some imitation of a smile that makes her sicker than the opioids. 

He says, “You’ll be back before you know it.” 

And then he’s gone, and she’s—

+

And she almost forgets about the Bartlets. Everything before the… Everything from before almost feels like a dream. Even them. 

Especially them. 

It’s not that she doesn’t have her reminders. 

Josh really does check in a lot from Camp David. (Almost on-the-hour, when he can manage it; never more than five hours, when he absolutely can’t.) Her family calls, too, when they can — her dad, her brothers, a few of her aunts. CNN is a constant thrum in the background, only off when they run updates on the CODEL or the peace talks. They allow her The Post every other day and, though she doesn’t check it, she knows her voicemail is packed with well-wishers. 

Apart from Josh, Leo’s is the only call that she had accepted from anyone associated with the White House, and even that had only been a few times. 

It’s just… There’s a different kind of pain in thinking about how they might be with her now. She got off easy. She’s alive. There’s nothing in her condition now that should warrant the tenderness in CJ’s voice, or the soft rumble of Toby’s, or the quiet panic of Sam’s. Carol and Margaret will be pitying and she really didn’t know if she could handle the slightest waver towards protective camaraderie from Charlie.  

She really is too tired most days. Even when she is feeling up to it, she can still barely speak loud enough to be heard. Her lungs still tucker out well ahead of her mind and, anyway, they’re all busy. 

Still, much as she’d like to pretend she was very casual and cool on that third call with Leo, she simply wasn’t. He’s been asking for you. They both have been. They’re devastated, kid, and I’m running out of things to tell them.  

Not even close. 

Still, she almost has herself convinced — right up until her mom billows back into her room with a huff. Donna had forced her out while she did breathing exercises, searching for some scrap of dignity and privacy as she pathetically duked it out with the spirometer. Donna’s lucky if she gets fifteen minutes to sulk alone these days, but she’d been graced with almost an hour today. 

“ That man called again,” her mom tells her, and she understands. 

No one has ever accused Francesca Moss of being a woman playing anything close to the chest. From the way she says it, Donna knows she isn’t talking about Josh. Knows there is only one man she holds that much disdain for.  

“Yeah,” Donna scoffs. (It’s more of a wheeze, really, but she’s doing the best she can. Sue her.) She pointedly ignores the TV in the corner: a photomontage of Admiral Fitzwallace’s career is plastered across CNN as they discuss the new chairman selection and debate the lack of a state service.

(Mrs. Fitzwallace didn’t want one, said the Admiral wouldn’t have wanted one. Said all he needed were his ashes shaken out over the Gulf of Aden where he’d once seen the most beautiful sunset in his entire life.) 

She wants to be an adult about it. Wants to buck up, and be bold. But the spirometer is bullshit and the Bartlets are bullshit and Josh is bullshit and her leg is bullshit . Her mom is here and she doesn’t feel good . She just wants to go home .  

“You shouldn’t have answered.” 

Her mom gapes a little, also pissy but equally torn about Donna’s suggestion. “Honey,” she starts, tone gentle. “I don’t think I’m going to send the President of the United States to voicemail.”

“You do it once, you do it a thousand times,” she offers flippantly. “The First Lady, too. I promise, the novelty wears off after a while.”

Her mother is kind enough not to call her bluff on this. They both know there’s no world in which, under normal circumstances, Donna could ever dream of being so rude — especially to the leaders of the Free World. No, the whole “silenced calls, refused visits to German hospitals” song and dance only started after she took a roadside bomb to the everywhere and got some bolts along her calf as souvenirs. 

The Bartlets, for their part, had been more or less gracious. Donna asked for space — demanded it, really, like a feral cat — and they allowed it. She knew they could go the way of Josh and pull rank at the military hospital. Hell, she’d actually had one particularly vivid dream while on morphine about Mrs. Bartlet haranguing medical staff and brushing Donna’s hair. They gave her what she asked for, and she should be grateful. 

But there had been a phone call they all pretended she didn’t know about. Some stoic thing, something like two hours and an open line between the Bartlets and her parents in the middle of the night. She doesn’t know what they discussed, only that it resulted in her father seething on their call the next day trying to convince her to leave the White House, and a sneer her mother wore every time she was reminded of Donna’s life stateside. 

The exact same one she wore right now, trying to tell Donna about her call. 

“It’s nice of him to think of us all the way over here,” Donna says after a while. “He’s a busy man.”

“It’s not decent ,” her mom snaps. “He should just— We need time, Donnatella. You deserve… distance, from all of this. To heal, with your family .”

Donna doesn’t have anything to say to that, just looks out the window and sighs. 

If it were months ago, weeks ago, she would argue that the White House is like family. Like her family. All the time they spend together, all the good work they do. Protecting people, housing people. Feeding the poor, helping the hungry. 

( Peace in the Middle East , the beast hisses.)

It’s what her parents raised her to do. And she always thought — she was always grateful — she got to do it among people she loved so much. Who loved her . 

But she isn’t his daughter. She’s just some girl who got a little too big for her boots in a sand pit and got knocked down a peg or two. (She’s alone.) 

It’s time everybody remember that.