A/N: This is very much an AU fic, for those of you who might have missed the summary. :) After all the kissing scenes, I've always thought that "King Corn" was the quintessential Josh and Donna episode, and I've always wanted to explore what would have happened had Josh gone ahead and knocked on her door. So, this was written for the prompt "King Corn" as a part of the tenyearsoftww on livejournal - a fest celebrating ten years since The West Wing once aired....

A big thanks to hondagirl for the beta; I promise you'll get your Bones fic soon.

The knock is quiet, at first.

The hallway stretches on to oblivion behind him. The walls are fading, chips of paint spiralling to the ground like cigarette ash. Behind him, the air conditioning unit hums monotonously, pulsating against the wall; one-two, one-two. In the nine seconds before she opens the door, it’s easier to focus on these things.

“Josh.”

Her voice stretches out to meet him. Her surprise caught against the doorframe as she opens it wider, beckons him in. Josh won’t deny it – it’s a better reception than he expected. There was a part of him that was worried she’d push him away, even if he won’t admit it. He’s come to accept this about himself; his heart has been wounded once, twice before, by his sister and by a bullet and it will always be fragile, no matter how much he protests it’s healed.

“Why did you come here?”

He misses that, the way she’s direct with him, like so few others are. She’s trapped on the path from A to B and, like a river, she won’t flow around him, but erode her way through him, scraping against the edges of his heart. In her absence, the cracks and crevices still haven’t been filled. Lately, he’s noticed this. Lately, he’s noticed several things, the kind of which should not have evaded him before.

“I missed you,” he says, simply because it’s the truth.

“I missed you too Josh, but that doesn’t mean -” Donna flicks the TV off; behind her, the newsreader fades slowly into black. The room is too tiny, the walls boxing them in. Her every move is amplified by the smallness of the space; a strange sensation folds over him – he’s too close, and yet too far away.

He can’t help but notice how dainty her wrists are, the way the fabric of her shirt wrinkles across her chest. Six years they’ve been in office together, and he’s never noticed the little things. She might have looked good in that red dress once, slinky and bright, but he’d never really seen the way she brushes her hair from her eyes, heard the way her voice stiffened slightly, words catching in the back of her throat the more angry she became. Like the old adage – he didn’t know what he had until he lost it.

She sits down in the wicker chair beside the bar fridge; Josh takes that as an indication he’s supposed to stand. “It doesn’t mean you can just barge into my motel room and expect me to come leaping back on board your campaign bus because I’m from Wisconsin and you’re lacking the Midwest human touch,” she says.

“We happen to be polling quite well in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, thank you.”

“You haven’t changed, have you?” she says.

He waits for the punch line. It never comes.

“I like to think I’ve changed,” he says finally, slightly unsure because this is something he can’t laugh off, can’t make into a tasteless joke. For the first time ever, Josh finds it difficult to build up his defences. “I certainly didn’t ask you to get my paperwork or crack a joke so mean about the Republicans that even Ainsley Hayes would weep.”

“It’s not that, Josh.” In this tiny motel room, he can almost taste her wearied breaths. He wants to taste them, to kiss her – it’s a feeling which he’s never had to fight so hard before; it tugs at his very heartstrings, so difficult to repress. “It’s you.”

He raises an eyebrow curiously. “I’m flattered, Donna. But…”

“Me taking this job with Russell was about trying to move on from you and your inability to give me what I want and then you come barging back into my life like you belong in it.”

Maybe I do. He can’t bring himself to say it. Sometimes, he wonders if he ever will. Their relationship has always been like this, stationary sometimes and then gushing on at others like a strange kind of flow. Josh and Donna, they were never meant to make things easy.

“Do you want to have dinner?” he says. He thinks as this not as a tangent, their relationship shifting in a new direction, but simply as the natural progression of things. They’ve been colleagues for seven years and the closest they’ve come to dinner before was McDonalds in the back seat of a limousine on their way back to the White House from New York. He wants to fix that, in the kind of brash, uncompromising way that only he can. Like so many things, he takes the responsibility upon his shoulders, bowing slightly under the weight. Atlas, Sam once called him, but if only he knew it’s not the world he carried but the burden of first Joanie and then Donna, their bodies limp and lifeless in the rubble.

He still can’t understand why he was so lucky that at least one of them survived. As if she can sense it, Donna rolls her eyes. And then slowly, as though she isn’t entirely sure, she nods.

Downstairs, the cafeteria is silent, filled only with the rhythmic pulse of the dish-lady as she throws pots and pans into the sink. It makes Josh laugh – when he was with Joey and Amy, he would have been ashamed to bring them here. He worked in the White House and earned a lot of money and it was important that he was held up to a standard like that. With Donna, it’s different. With her, it’s always been different.

Somewhere along the line, the things they have come to define themselves by have changed – once it was about Democrats and Republicans, environmental protection agencies and budget shutdowns, easily identifiable things that they could build their lives around. The structure was there, supporting them, helping to mould them into what they believed themselves to be. Between Rosslyn and Gaza, it has still taken Josh seven years to realise these foundations can crack.

Lately, Josh has come to realise that he misses the quieter moments, the lapses between one federal crisis and the next, when they can just be themselves. Those tiny slivers are thin, slowly slicing their way through the boundaries he had set for himself. Today’s issue was corn and tomorrow’s will probably be the Texas-Mexico border – and somehow, thousands of illegal immigrants seem like a boundary much easier to cross.

He still wants to kiss her. It is a realisation that still hasn’t faded, lingering somewhere in the recesses of his mind. And yet, he still cannot say where it came from, just that he wants to, so desperately.

They sit down, and he’s all too acutely aware of the chair legs scraping, the dinner lady scowling in the background as she scrapes off the plates. He gestures at the menu. She nods and says she’s considering the chicken. Their conversation is forced, stilted, so different to what it once was. Josh thinks they’ve come down here tonight with different motives, different reasons.

When the waiter comes, they don’t order wine. It would feel too much like a date for that, he thinks. In some ways already does -right now there’s dinner and then there’s a motel room upstairs and it’s easy to forget, just for a moment, that they’ve already split in two and now they’re on opposite sides. It’s easy to forget that, Josh and Donna, they do things backwards.

Donna fiddles with her necklace, smiling shyly at him. There’s that tension in the air that means he needs her to say something, anything. She needs him to say something too, he can sense it – and after all the times she’s initiated contact, maybe it’s his turn to take the first step. Just like in politics – the only thing he fully understands – the laws of giving and taking might just apply here, kind of like a symbiosis. The problem is, Donna’s the one that studied biology at college, not him. Everything he knows is about politics and law, not pheromones and love.

“I liked Russell’s speech today,” he finally says. Josh didn’t, of course – like everything else about him, it was mediocre. He doesn’t understand how Donna can stand for being second best under Will, working for a man with no political drive. Working with a man who isn’t Jed Bartlet and certainly isn’t him.

“Isn’t that a bit of a change for you?” she says. Josh sees the way her upper lip twists to demonstrate her dissatisfaction, the way she tries to disassociate herself from him by shifting slightly back in her seat. He sighs – he should have known it would come down to this. These things, they’ve changed him, changed her, changed both of them. Perhaps, there’s something to be learnt from this, but there was something to be learnt from Gaza too and yet he let go of her again; she slipped through his fingers with his ambitions and, here’s the thing he doesn’t understand – it won’t take job offers but love to bring her back.

Their dinner arrives. He talks between mouthfuls, a polite little boy like his mama taught him to be, like he was for Amy and all those other women he dated, so long ago. And yet somehow, he knows that Donna, she can see right through the facade.

“Do you ever miss it?” he says.

“Do I miss what, Josh? Working with you, constantly fishing for your files because you have no organised computer system and being subjected to your political diatribe about fish?” She pauses for a minute, pretends to consider. “No.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” he replies. “I meant... do you miss the White House?”

He misses it more than he’ll ever let anyone know, and maybe she does too. For the past seven years, their lives have revolved around it, causing them to spin into orbits that intersected until they collided. Politics was what brought them together, and Josh doesn’t want it to drive them apart.

“Sometimes,” she sighs. “Not so much the hassle of budgets and votes and filibusters – remember that time we couldn’t shut Stackhouse up for hours?”

Josh smiles at that – it was Donna who figured out how to fix that problem and Donna who figured out how to fix the problem after that and the problem after that. He thinks he should tell her this, but he can’t bring himself too, not after so many years have passed.

“Of course I can,” he says. “He was worse that Leo, who, for all his brains, should have realised The Times doesn’t want to hear about the mistakes in their crossword. Then again, it’s pretty sad when an American paper has to stoop to using terrorists’ names as clues in the first place.”

“So the inability of a supposedly reputable American newspaper to include patriotic clues hasn’t forced you think about conspiracy theories and call the Feds. You really have changed,” she says. Josh can already detect the hint of sarcasm in her voice and he misses this, the way they can banter back and forth, not as political opponents, but as equals.

“Told you,” he says. She sighs at that; he smiles.

They both have more they want to say, but neither of them do. As the election divides them into more and more parts, separating their hopes and desires into neat compartmentalised boxes – most of Josh’s involve Santos winning but there’s also one with him and Donna that he’s never seen before - maybe they never will.

She stands up, pushing her chair beneath the table. He listens to it scrape against the vinyl; other patrons swing their heads. Tonight has been about her more than him – he made the first move, but now, for only the second time in six years, he lets her lead, their syntax so perfectly tuned. Josh thinks it’s maybe always been like this – like CJ wasn’t joking when she said there was chemistry between them and the winks Sam gave them both weren’t purely coincidence. He’s always been the last one to understand these things.

She walks towards the elevator. Inside, they stand slightly apart, all too acutely aware of the spaces between them. Underneath them, the floor whirrs. Their rooms are on the 32nd floor – he’s never realised how slow the trip goes before this. Donna is too close to him with her smouldering lips and her shy little smile and –

He kisses her

He kisses her and it releases him. Slowly, she kisses back, her fingers caught in his hair and the imprint of her lips of his, so shiny and soft. For one single moment, Josh is able to forget that they’re on separate teams, separate sides. Donna’s skin is slightly more dimpled than he imagined, her eyes wider. He notices this as she pulls away.

The elevator door beeps. It startles both of them.

Outside, the hallways are still dim. Paint still droops from her door handle, and it amazes Josh that he can still concentrate on these things. He thinks that the kiss should have changed him in bigger ways than it did. To him, it felt like a small moment in the time, the next step, the natural progression of things. And, thinking back over the last seven years, maybe it was. Maybe this was always meant to be.

Donna looks awkward. It’s not a good sign, he knows – he’s learning how to read her now.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she says.

He knows this and she knows this and for once, the consequences are greater than politics would make them out to be. An affair between staffers from two different campaigns might not only ruin Santos and Russell, it might also ruin them.

“But,” she says. “I think you should know that I still enjoyed it, because I understand that it had nothing to do with politics and you being you, for a change.”
He smiles – she’s right about that. Donna, she’s right about a lot of things, as he’s slowly coming to understand.

“You’re right,” he says. When she looks surprised, he continues. “I enjoyed it too,” he says.

They won’t try it again, at least not for a while. Josh knows this. After everything, they are still Josh and Donna and they are still dedicated to their candidates and their jobs and the things that have come to define them for so long. These lines will never fade but simply shift slightly, allowing them to come together in ways they once could not. He wants to say that it was this campaign that changed them, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all, but maybe it happened earlier than that. Maybe it was Rosslyn that changed them or maybe it was Gaza, or maybe, just maybe, they didn’t need to change.

By definition, maybe this was meant to be.