Early Warning Signs
Rating: PG
Fandom: West Wing
Pairing: Josh/Amy, Will/Donna
Word Count: 986
Disclaimer: Not mine
Notes: Written for the LiveJournal FirstLines1000 Challenge #6
“When you get your
hand stuck in a jar, you know you're about to have one of the worst days of
your life.”
Josh knows that that’s not true, not really, that it’s just one of the
things that Sam used to say, one of the things that would have people looking
at him strangely, making him look down, all flustered and faintly embarrassed,
saying that it may not be true, that it was just something his mother used to
say. He had a ready store of them, Mrs Seaborn being an
aphorism-for-every-occasion kind of girl, but Josh has never more wanted one of
them to be true.
Because he got up this morning, managed to make himself some toast,
found that the only thing in his apartment to spread on it was a jar of peanut
butter, and if he’d got his hand stuck in the jar, at least he would have had
some warning as to what this day was going to turn out like. As it is, he’s
learning as he goes.
It starts off normally enough, with a Senior Staff meeting where the
President ends up going off on a tear about something or other, and Josh is
expected to do something about it, not unlike Christmas a couple of years ago
when the President instructed him to re-write the Federal Budget scant days
before the print deadline. Today’s task is just as impossible, yet still he
tries, and still he fails, but this time, the President doesn’t call off the
dogs, so at the end of the day, Josh is thoroughly in the doghouse.
The day isn’t made easier by another in a long line of clashes with
Amy, or by the fact that he has three separate meetings with various Republicans,
each successive one seeming to hate him more than the previous one. By the
final meeting, he can literally feel his blood pressure rising, is sure that if
he runs his hand through his hair one more time that it will start coming out
in clumps.
And if all that isn’t enough, Donna gives him a salad for lunch. No
meat, no burger so well done that if you dropped it, it would break. A salad.
This day cannot be over soon enough, and he has every intention of
going home early, even lets Donna leave ahead of him. She wastes no time in
getting out of his way, probably as a result of him having taken the brunt of
his bad mood out on her, and he knows he’s going to have to apologise to her
tomorrow, hopefully without too much grovelling.
However, this is him and Donna, so he knows that grovelling is pretty
much a certainty; tomorrow therefore not looking that much better than today.
The day takes a bright turn, if it can be called that, when Amy calls
to his door, leans against it, asks him if he wants to go get a drink with her.
This morning’s clash aside, they’re currently going through one of their “on”
phases at the moment, one of the times when they can be in one another’s
company and only want to rip one another’s clothes, rather than one another’s
heads off.
They go to the Hawk and Dove, a favourite haunt of his, indeed of all
the Senior Staff’s, and for a weekday night, it’s fairly crowded. So crowded in
fact that he doesn’t see them at first, needs Amy’s eagle eyes to point them
out to him.
“Look, there’s Will and Donna,” she says, and Josh’s head turns so
sharply he’s sure he’s going to suffer from whiplash. Indeed, there are Will
and Donna, sitting side by side at a table, so close that you could hardly
slide a piece of paper between them. There’s something about them that Josh has
never seen before, some kind of intimacy hanging over them, and it makes Josh
uncomfortable. He hasn’t seen Donna like that with a guy in a long time, not
since Commander Wonderful.
“Let’s go over,” he says, stepping in that direction, but Amy’s hand is
hard on his arm, her grip strong, and she’s looking at him strangely when she
replies.
“We’re not interrupting Donna’s date,” she says, her voice firm as her
grip, and he laughs, because the whole idea is absurd… isn’t it?
“That’s not a date,” he scoffs. “That’s just Will…”
The look of disgust and confusion on Amy’s face makes him stop talking,
makes him look over at Will and Donna, only to see Will reaching out, taking
Donna’s hand in his, an unmistakeably smitten look on his face. Faintly, as if
from very far away, and not just because of the crowd in the bar, he hears
Amy’s voice saying, “They’ve been together for months Josh… you mean you didn’t
know?”
“No,” he says, his voice sounding hollow to his ears. “I didn’t.”
He goes to the bar with Amy, buys them both a drink, but it tastes
oddly bitter to him, and he only has the stomach for one, even as he hears
Donna’s voice in his head, railing against his sensitive system. He makes his
excuses, tells Amy that he’s had a bad day, that he’s tired, and while her
voice says that she understands, her eyes say something else altogether, say it
even more loudly when they walk past Donna and Will, still lost in one another,
on the way out, and Josh can’t keep his eyes off them, can’t get the sight out
of his mind, and he doesn’t protest when Amy gets into a cab on her own.
He goes home alone too, hoping that tomorrow will be better than today,
and when he sees the
half-empty jar of peanut butter on the kitchen counter where he left it this
morning, he throws it into the bin in disgust.
So much for early warning signs.