Run

***

1. When he was seven years old, he and his best friend (at the time) had been playing in the elemetary school playground. They'd been bouncing a ball back and forth and cursing in the way that seven year olds find titillating when one of the much larger fourth-graders had taken a keen interest.

Abram (his friend) had ended up face down on the playground, bleeding from a split lip. Abram had always had more courage than practical sense and had stood up to the larger boy. Josh had gone running for the teacher when the first punch had been thrown but hadn't been in time.

His third therapist had tried to nail this particular memory down as the cause of his 'hero' complex. Not soon after, Josh moved on to his fourth therapist.

2. It's very, very late at night two weeks before the Illinois, and they're in New York. It had been a long (generally successful) day that had been capped by a rather fun, invigorating round of sex with Mandy. He'd enjoyed it. It had been a good day. He'd even gotten some promising news from his mother on his father (just before his father had stolen the phone and yelled across the house about how he can answer his own questions, thank you) when he'd called earlier.

But he's wide awake and listening to Mandy breathe next to him.

He shouldn't worry about it. It's nothing. A one-off. But she'd said it.

He's close to forty years old. Hearing it shouldn't cause the panic it does. It shouldn't make his chest ache, and he sure as hell shouldn't want to slip quietly out of their hotel room and run until he can't feel his feet anymore and won't ever see her again.

He likes Mandy. He more then likes Mandy. She's funny, pithy, strong-willed, intelligent, empowered, forthright, and independent. He's got a whole list of adjectives about his current girlfriend and most of them are even positive.

He shouldn't.

Josh just stares up at the hotel room ceiling, the echo of Mandy's "I love you" in his ears.

She might be next to him, but he's already gone.

3. Josh is on hour thirty of what is looking like a thirty two hour day when Margaret speeds past his office, glances over, and quickens her pace.

He lets that wash over him for a minute before sweeping the notebook he's scribbling on into his backpack and standing up. There's only one thing that would make Margaret do that at eight o'clock at night - hell, there was only one reason Margaret was here at eight - and that involved Leo wanting Josh's head.

Normally, he'd be all for walking in and getting yelled at. Okay, that was a lie. He'd rather have the yelling over and done with so he could get on with whatever thing he was getting yelled at for fixed. It was easier that way. He'd always hated walking around waiting for the axe to fall more than standing up and getting whacked in the head.

But for some reason tonight he really didn't feel like being Leo's punching bag. Maybe it was the lack of food (which normally didn't bother him, but Donna was out with the flu so no one had forced dinner on him), or the lack of sleep (this was the third all-night marathon he'd pulled since the beginning of the month and it was only the tenth) but he just didn't care.

He wanted to go home, order some Thai food, call his mother and go to bed. If it actually was a national emergency, Leo (and everyone else) damn well had his cell number.

Josh didn't even look back when he exited out the East Gate.

4. She's angry at him. It isn't exactly obvious to everyone, but to Josh - who's been in Donna's pocket for the last eight years - it's like staring at a billboard.

She's been snippy at him for closing in on a year now. Hundreds of little comments and offhand remarks build up in him and he knows that it's something he needs to fix. He misses his Donna. The one that would laugh with him and smile and, sure, pick up his laundry but she hadn't done that since the first campaign so that was kind of a distant pipe dream.

He watches her when she's not looking. Maybe she knows, maybe she doesn't, but he does it. Sees that she's starting to get half-assed on some of the filing. He knows he's just plugging a hole in a dam about to bust when he transfers over a few more interns, but the thing he knows will fix it is something he doesn't want to do. It's something that's not up to him, even if she thinks it is.

Sometimes he wonders if she knows just how much of his job she's actually doing. Admittedly, his job is too much for any three people, but he and Donna are freaks and the fact that they actually manage it, and have done for seven years, is a testament to their collective compulsive streak.

He knows what she's going to say when they actually do go to lunch. She's scheduled two of them with him and he'd intentionally only cancelled the first. The second had been interrupted (not literally) by a wild fire in Oregon.

He's looking down at the third, scheduled later this afternoon, after a meeting with Pancressi on the Hill. She'd written it down in his calender the day before.

Pancressi always takes forever to get to the point. Donna knows that.

He wonders if she doesn't want to do this either, but makes a note to cancel with her anyway.

5. Six months after Donna dies during a routine local anesthesia to correct a heel spur (shouldn't someone have noticed an allergy after all the drugs they gave her in Germany, asks everyone) Josh hires a nanny for their eight year-old daughter and goes back to work.

It's hard at first. The pitying looks and the claps on the back from friends who were sure that he'd devote the rest of his life to her memory and their child. That's almost funny considering everyone knew Donna and everyone knew him, and him being a permanent house parent would have eventually involved a murder (probably his).

But things get easier and the work piles up. He is careful to take breaks, but his working hours increase (as they always did) and he is at work for longer and longer periods of time.

Everyone whispers it is because Donna isn't there to redirect his priorities. He never tells anyone that it's because he sees what's in his daughter's eyes when he actually is at home. The anger. The loss.

He's never been good at taking care of other people.

Besides. There's a Congress to ride herd on.

-fin-

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