Chapter Text
The Santos campaign, meager as it is, has a few things going for it.
The Santos campaign has a young, attractive, energetic candidate, who even Donna has to grudgingly admit is a much more inspiring choice than Bob Russell or John Hoynes. Practical? Probably not, but he looks good on TV and he’ll look good giving the keynote speech at the DNC before Russell gets the nomination.
The Santos campaign has minority support. Or they will, once they manage to raise enough money to catch the attention of minority groups in the party. Not a whole lot of that in New Hampshire or Iowa, however, and New Hampshire and Iowa are the places to buy attention.
The Santos campaign has an actual message. It’s an insane one, certainly—there’s no way he goes anywhere without the teachers, without the farmers, without the insurance companies—but it’s at least much more interesting to listen to than Russell’s bland promises to continue doing whatever Bartlet was doing, but with more subsidies for mining companies.
But most importantly, the Santos campaign has Josh Lyman. Sure, Washington insiders say he’s been on the outs since the before the government shutdown. She’s seen the editorials about how, passed over for Chief of Staff and laboring under delusions of grandeur, Josh Lyman started running Matt Santos’ campaign as a vanity project. They don’t know the truth. They don’t know that Josh was asked to run both the Russell and Hoynes campaigns, and turned them both down. They don’t know how much Josh has given up, will still give up, for what they call a pipe dream. For anyone else, it might be a pipe dream.
For Josh, she knows it’s not. For Josh, it’s real. Josh won’t give up until he puts his guy into the Oval Office, or until he dies trying.
Donna is afraid it might be the latter.
See, there are a few things that Santos campaign has going for it, but there are many, many things that the Santos campaign lacks. One of those things, Donna comes to find out, is health insurance.
It’s a month after she quits when she first sees him. She would have liked to say she hadn’t thought of him in that month, but the truth is, he never was far from her mind. The thought of him somehow made itself a bed in there, occupied entirely too much space, and happened to be a very stubborn tenant, disinclined to leave.
She’s busy, for sure, but it’s a different kind of busy. It’s interesting work—media targeting—and she’s pretty good at it, but it’s not quite like working at the White House. Nothing could be. It’s not enough to keep her mind off of him. Every so often, she picks up her phone, about to call him, and then she remembers how he didn’t even give her the respect of believing her when she said she was quitting. He had been so ignorant of her and her struggles and her feelings that he hadn’t even taken her seriously?
Did he ever take her seriously?
This is better, she thinks. Will… Will takes her seriously. He gave her a job that uses her skills. She’s happy.
Or so she thinks until she sees him one day in New Hampshire.
She walks into Will’s meeting, unsure what it’s about but just happy to be invited to a serious, high-level meeting, and then she sees him. He’s staring at her, mouth agape, his cheeks ruddy from the cold, and all she can think is that he doesn’t look happy.
She expects to feel a sense of smug satisfaction about that. He quit because she did, she thinks, and now he’s trying to run a long-shot candidate, which can’t be good for the infamous Lyman ego, and he looks cold and miserable.
It’s painful, though, because she feels cold and miserable too. So maybe things aren’t that much better.
She can’t help but wonder how he’s really doing. She spent so many years of her life forcing him to take care of himself that she can’t imagine he’s doing it on his own. He doesn’t look like he is, anyway; he’s pale and thin and his hair looks like it’s falling out (although that might be the truly hideous haircut he recently got—perhaps even he didn’t remember what barber he usually went to without her to schedule her appointments). She wonders if he’s still taking his medications, or going to see his therapist, or eating a salad once in a while, or sleeping… ever.
Probably not, she thinks, taking him in.
She watches from the upstairs window as he leaves the campaign office, blowing his cheeks out as the New Hampshire January cold hits him.
“Donna!” Will calls, and she remembers that she needs to put Josh Lyman out of her mind. She has a new job, a new life now, and that job is not to worry about him. It’s to worry about his candidate, and the new polling numbers Will is putting in front of her.
Then again, his candidate isn’t anything to worry about, she notes, consider he’s not even within the margin of error of being relevant. So Josh isn’t anything to worry about either.
She’s seen him a few more times since then—at silly New Hampshire campaign events, in the most awkward elevator ride of her life, at Iowan conventions celebrating corn—and each time, he looks worse and worse. She tries not to notice, very aware that she’s probably doing the same thing. Perhaps it’s the harsh lighting of her hotel room, but when she looks in the mirror, after a long day prepping for tomorrow’s caucus, she looks much older than she’s ever been. She feels it, too. Hotel beds make her bad leg ache, and she hasn’t slept more than five hours in god knows how long, and she can’t remember the last time she had a haircut. She’s certain if she searched hard enough, she could find a few gray hairs.
She wishes that she could cover up the mirror, to not be confronted with the specter of exhaustion she’s become. That’s how campaigns are, isn’t it? Everyone looks like a zombie by the end.
Although this isn’t the end. It’s barely the beginning.
Donna tries not to think about the first Bartlet campaign, about how young and energetic and excited she was. They all were back then, most of all Josh.
She flops back on her bed. She can’t think about Josh. She absolutely cannot spend tonight thinking about Josh.
The walls of the hotel are thin, however, and much to her dismay, as soon as she turns off the TV, she hears some coughing. Not just coughing, awful, disgusting hacking. The hotel walls are thin, sure, but the fact that anyone might be producing that much sound with a cough is frankly disturbing. She pulls her pillow over her ears, hoping to drown out the noise, but it seems that nothing can quiet it.
Something deep inside her knows who is capable of producing that sound. Who that cough is coming from.
She remembers months spent cringing at horribly painful coughs in a Georgetown apartment. They said it was normal, that coughing helped clear the damaged lung, that although it was painful, he needed to do it. Still, every time she would hear him hack upon waking up, she would worry that he might get started and then never stop. She knows that sound intimately, and she knows just how long she needs to wait before she can worry.
It’s not nearly long enough.
She gets up before she can even really think about it, taking a few deep breaths to push back the anxiety that seems to try to travel up her stomach to her throat. She never felt things like this before, not even when he was first hurt, but ever since she got blown up, it seems like she feels everything. She’s tired of feeling, frankly, but not even the ice-cold of Iowa can freeze her heart enough.
Her feet take her out the door, and across to his room, where sure enough, the coughing grows louder and more intense the closer she gets. It’s, without a doubt, him. And no wonder she could hear it so well in her own room; there’s a package of some sort that got lodged in the door preventing it from closing fully. Naturally, Josh didn’t notice—he never seems to—but it means Donna doesn’t even have to knock.
She does, of course. He used to barge in without knocking, but she’s never quite been able to get over that particular barrier. He doesn’t stop coughing long enough to answer, though, so Donna opens the door.
His room is in disarray. He’s been in Iowa only five days, but the contents of his suitcase seem to be strewn everywhere, across the floor, on the desk, a shirt hanging off the corner of the TV. He’s a mess, sure, but she’s never known it to be this bad, and the thought to her is more chilling than a wind chill of twenty below.
But worse than the messy state of the room is the state of him. His face is red, there’s a pile of used tissues next to him, and he can barely even look up to acknowledge her presence before launching into another coughing fit. He looks sweaty and exhausted and his shirt is hanging open, exposing the t-shirt underneath.
It’s awful to watch this, and she would be more worried if she hadn’t dealt with it before. His lung is damaged, half filled with scar tissue, making it more difficult to fight whatever respiratory viruses come his way. She knows this well, and it’s even more familiar to her ever since her pulmonologist explained this to her after her pulmonary embolism surgery. She hasn’t gotten sick since then, and she’s certainly not anticipating the new experience with any sort of excitement. In fact, if she were smart, she’d leave right now to avoid catching whatever he’s got, but she’s not smart. Not when it comes to Josh Lyman.
He’s been easily knocked down by colds ever since Rosslyn, and once or twice it’s devolved into pneumonia. Coincidentally, those instances were the times that he ignored her suggestion to go to the doctor until it was completely unavoidable, resulting in several forced days of rest, and in one case, a night spend in the emergency room. Donna gets the sense that if he doesn’t do anything about this soon, it’s going to be one of those instances.
She’ll have to force him to go to the doctor, she thinks, the thought almost automatic. But first he needs to stop coughing. She grabs a glass off of his bedside table, fills it with water, and holds it out to him. Usually, this is enough to at least stop the coughing for a bit, but what he really needs is his inhaler, if he has it, which it seems he rarely does.
He takes the glass and swallows it, and she sits beside him on the bed, a hand on his back to still him. It’s not even something she thinks about, but once his takes a sip and his heaving stills, she pulls her hand away before he can notice.
“I’m fine,” he mutters raspily, putting down the glass on the bedside table, very conspicuously not looking at her. “I’m fine.”
“You’re clearly not,” Donna says, scooting away from him. “Where’s your inhaler?”
“My…” he trails off, starting to cough again, although he’s able to stop after a few seconds. Donna picks up the glass of water and puts it back in his hand.
“Your inhaler? Do you even have it with you?”
He rolls his eyes, holding a hand to his forehead. “Donna, I don’t…”
“Don’t you dare tell me you don’t need it,” she says, “because I can clearly see otherwise.”
“What… what are you doing here, anyway?”
Donna pulls back, unsure how to answer that question. What is she doing here? What is she doing at all? Here in his room, here in Iowa, here on the Russell campaign… the truth is, she doesn’t really know. She might have once said she was getting away from him, and yet here she is, sitting on his bed, and she’s not sure why.
“I could hear you coughing all the way across the hall, and then your door was open and I…”
Josh rolls his eyes. “Donna, I’m fine.”
“Are you sick?”
He shrugs and take a slow, measured sip of the water. “Peter and Miranda must have given me whatever little thing they had…”
“Peter and Miranda?”
“The Congressman’s kids. But they had this a few days ago, and they’re fine now, so I’m not too worried that…”
“They may be fine,” Donna chides, “but you’re clearly not. You have a little more to be worried about, and I’m sure you don’t want to end up in the hospital with pneumonia, especially not when the caucus is tomorrow and the New Hampshire primary is a week away.”
He rolls his eyes again, pushing up from the bed, but falling back down when he starts coughing again. “I’m fine,” he says insistently, but it’s punctuated by more coughs.
Instinctively, Donna reaches out to touch his forehead. “You feel warm. Josh, can I at least take you to an urgent care or something? You need to get a refill for your inhaler if you don’t have it, and maybe they can get you started on something to make sure you don’t get pneumonia.”
“Donna…”
“Look, I know you don’t want to, but if you collapse on the floor of a high school gym at the caucus tomorrow, how’s that going to look? Your candidate is practically dead on his feet in the polls, how’s going to look if the campaign manager is actually dead?”
He pales at that, an impressive color change considering how red his face is from the fever and the coughing. “I’ll be fine. I was just about to take some Nyquil and knock out for a few hours.”
“I’m taking you to urgent care,” Donna says, “or we can go to an ER but of the two…”
“I can’t,” Josh says quietly.
“I know you’re stubborn about this but I’m not just going to sit across the hall and listen to you die, Joshua!” Donna says. “Even if that might make my campaign life easier, I almost… Josh, I’m not going to let you succumb to your own stubbornness.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not stubbornness.”
“What, do you not want to be seen as weak? Because believe me, if you faint on the caucus floor tomorrow I don’t think…”
“It’s not that, either,” he interrupts, wiping away the beads of sweat that are forming on his forehead. “I can’t afford it, Donna.”
Donna frowns. Josh doesn’t make a whole lot of money, or certainly not as much as he could be making in practically any other job, but he’s not irresponsible with money. Having dealt with his finances for a time, she knows that he has a decent amount of savings and that he certainly spends less than he makes. “What, you can’t afford a $100 copay?”
“Copay?” Josh chuckles, although it is without humor. “Donna, the Santos campaign consists of me, a couple people from his congressional office, and a lot of volunteers who aren’t even old enough to vote. You think I’m getting benefits on top of my nominal salary? I’m paying more in travel costs than I’m making!”
Donna blinks a few times as his statement sinks in. “You don’t have health insurance?”
He shakes his head and clears his throat, mercifully not coughing any more this time. “No,” he says. God, his voice sounds awful, painful and scratchy.
“Josh, you can’t just… you of all people need health insurance, what with all the…”
He gives her a slight smile. “What with all the preexisting conditions I have? Insurance companies are really going to all be jumping at the chance to cover me, considering that I’m on several medications, have an incurable psychological disorder, and oh yeah, a completely fucked up body from that time I got shot in the chest.” He probably would have gotten louder, but his voice sounds too raw to be anything but a low growl.
“Josh…”
He sighs. “I tried, Donna. I did apply. But it’s so hard to get approved if you’re not under an employer-funded group plan, especially when you’ve got a medical history as complicated as mine. And it’s not like I have time to fight anyone to get a plan.”
“I know,” Donna says, and she thinks of how many time she’s been thankful that, as part of a government delegation, she was able to be treated at military medical centers. Still, she’s on her own fair share of pills, and not all of the physical therapy she needed was covered. She had insurance at the White House, and she has insurance on the Russell campaign, but even then she’s worried about something else happening that bankrupts her completely. “Josh… please tell me you’re not… you’ve got your meds, right?”
He nods, clearing his throat again. “I’m not entirely stupid, I thought this through. I figure by the time I’m through the refills I got recently, I’ll either be out of the race and back into a job with benefits, or we’ll have DNC funding and maybe then we’ll actually be able to offer insurance because we’ll actually have paid campaign workers.”
“Josh, the convention isn’t until July,” she points out, and she doesn’t try to think too hard about the boldness of suggesting he’ll still be in the race come July.
He shrugs. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Josh…”
“What’s the worst that can happen?” he asks flippantly. “I can probably pay out of pocket for another refill, it’s not like I’m struggling for cash…”
Donna frowns. “They really rejected you?”
“Think about it, Donna. You’re an insurance adjustor. From a financial standpoint, what would be the benefit of insuring the guy whose monthly pharmacy run alone costs about what you would expect to get from him in premiums? If he, I don’t know, bursts an artery again or has a stroke or ends up in the hospital for pneumonia, you’re losing money on him, not making money. Why would you insure that guy?”
She frowns. It makes a lot of sense, she guesses, but it still makes her blood boil. It’s just anger she’s feeling, not fear, because she can’t bear the thought of any of that happening to Josh. She can’t even allow that thought to cross her mind, so instead she just has to be angry. “That should be illegal.”
“I agree,” Josh says, “but it’s not like we haven’t been trying to make it illegal for the last eight years. Too bad Republicans are in the pocket of the insurance companies.”
At least, Donna thinks, his anger hasn’t resulted in more coughing, even if his voice seems to be growing more strained by the minute. She doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t really know what to say. She could complain about the mess that is the healthcare system, and he’d probably agree, but that doesn’t help him get the healthcare he really needs. Because she’s still convinced he needs to go to an urgent care before he coughs too much to get any more oxygen into his lungs.
“It’s not like insurance helps that much even when you have it,” Josh continues, staring at the wall ahead of him. “I had to sue them to get them to pay my hospital bills when I was shot. If that happens to someone else who doesn’t have the funds or the knowledge of how to sue their provider, they’re pretty much bankrupt, because who has an extra $50,000 lying around?” He leans back on his forearms. “I figure I’ll be fine for the next few months,” he says, although the movement seems to make him start coughing again.
Donna cringes. “You are not fine,” she says. “You sound terrible, and I’m certain that if you ignore this you’re going to end up in the hospital, and then you’re going to need to pay even more medical bills. How much do you think you’d get billed for a visit to urgent care and some antibiotics and maybe another emergency inhaler since obviously…” she trails off as his coughs get more harsh. When he finally reaches for the almost empty glass of water and manages to get it down, she continues, “…obviously you need it.”
Josh groans and clears his throat again, sitting up. Usually, she knows, that helps with the coughing. He spent most of his months in recovery propped up to keep pressure off his damaged lung. “Donna, it’s not about… I mean, I’m sure I could afford a visit but it’s…”
“Don’t tell me this is about principle,” Donna says, rolling her eyes. “Josh, I admire your principles but frankly I’m more worried about your health and wellbeing.”
“Why?” he asks suddenly.
Donna is stunned by the simple question, but she doesn’t look at him. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why are you so worried?”
“Considering your track record with worrying, I don’t know that you have any right to ask me that question,” Donna shoots back, and immediately regrets it. To pick on Josh’s anxiety and neuroticism, things she knows he’s worked hard to cope with, seems like a bridge too far.
Apparently Josh doesn’t though, because he nods with understanding. “Yeah, but you don’t have a qualifying diagnosis.”
“Who’s to say that?” Donna asks, and once again, she regrets it. She should leave before saying anything more, considering what a disaster this conversation has been so far. She’s not even sure why she is so combative about that—certainly, it hasn’t been easy to recover from the aftermath of Gaza, and she has talked to someone a few times—but by comparison, her mental recovery has been far easier than his ever was or continues to be.
Josh catches onto this and frowns at her, seemingly hit with a realization. “Donna, you can’t… did you go see someone or get…”
“I’m fine,” Donna says, wincing. “I don’t know why I said that. Point is, I’m concerned about all the Americans who don’t have health insurance because they work for an employer that is too small to be required to provide it, or they work too many part-time jobs, or they’re practically volunteering their entire life to put a man in office.”
“But you’re worried about me,” he says.
She is. She’s worried about him on a personal level. She’s pretty sure from the moment she saw him in the hospital with a bullet in his chest, from the months of horribly painful recovery, from the moments when it was excessively clear that despite his physical recovery he was still not okay, she’s been worried about him. But that doesn’t mean anything, not really. She can’t let it.
So she reasserts herself.
“Josh,” she says softly. “You need health insurance.”
He leans back again, which only leads to more coughing. “And where do you propose I get that?”
Where do you propose I get that? Donna turns the words over in her head, over and over again.
And then she has an idea.
It’s a stupid idea, really. He’s sure to say no. He’s sure to laugh her out of the room, laugh her out of Iowa if it comes to that. Things are fragile enough between them, so the concept of doing this is ridiculous. He’ll never go along with it, and even if he did, how would it work? How could they possibly do it, what with being on different campaigns, with being in a kind of media spotlight, with being them.
And yet he’s right. Donna has seen his medical records; at one point, she had them memorized, filling out forms when his right arm was still too weak to do any kind of writing. She’s picked up white bag after white bag of little orange bottles from the pharmacy. She’s been the one to set up all of his many doctor’s appointments; they’ve gotten to be fewer and fewer over the years, but they’re still more frequent than probably anyone but the President. She probably knows the health issues he’s at risk for better than he does. There’s no way he’d get approved by an insurance company, not without paying a premium unaffordable even to him. The Santos campaign is too small to provide insurance, and he won’t quit just because of that. So there isn’t any other solution.
“Propose,” she whispers again, the word sticking into her brain.
It’s crazy, she thinks, but it just might work.
“Josh…” she says quietly. “Josh, I think we need to get married.”