FF: Schrödinger Dreams
Title: Schrödinger Dreams
Author: Little Zigzags
Rating: PG
Pairing: J/D
Disclaimer: No money from these beauties.
Spoilers: 7A WF 83429
Summary: She doesn’t think it’s bizarre that she wants to hole somewhere and wait until her world rights itself. She thinks it’s a bit bizarre that she’s pretty sure she wants him to be there, too.
A/N: Ahh, summer. I’ve taken a long break from LJ and thought I’d dip my toes in the fic pool with this angsty number. Thanks for all the comments I’ve received on earlier fics, they are much appreciated! And to my new friends *jumps around* I literally haven’t been around since I last posted, so I’ll be sure to friend you back soon! As always, commentage is love.
Also, sorry to any physics majors out there if I’ve botched the concept! I’m merely an amateur science reader :-)
She hasn’t cried yet, but she almost loses it when she turns and catches a glimpse of his face in the candlelight.
She’s not really surprised. He looks the way he does a lot of the time, so terribly, insanely open, as though all the fear in this night is transformed onto his boyish, sad face. She sees him close his eyes for a second, his mouth still parted in tender surprise, hears the small intake of breath as they stand amongst the thousands of people crowding the White House gates.
She looks back at the messages. Hundreds of them, flowers and candles, and through it all, Zoey’s face repeating like a message in the night air.
She looks back only to find him watching her, pressing a crumpled tissue into her hand and she realizes that she's crying, she is and she doesn’t remember ever starting. She doesn’t dab her eyes, doesn’t think too hard about his fingers brushing hers as he sways a little as if from an invisible gust of wind.
He’s shivering a little and in the end she must tear him away, pry him from the masses. She looks back in their wake and their place in the vigil is overtaken by two more. They’re pushing a little to get through the swarms of bodies and she feels him grasp her hand in his warm one, their shoulders brushing as they reach open air and are suddenly released into empty, bodiless space.
They’re both staring vacantly into the night, and he’s still holding her hand. It’s as though the world has slowed down, split apart: on the one side she’s got her old life, where Bartlet was still the President, Zoey was dangling French nobility under Charlie’s nose, the life where she got up each morning to herd Josh around with papers and schedules and ponder the improbability that is his and Amy’s relationship.
But now she’s got this. Zoey’s gone and there’s a republican in the Oval Office and Josh is standing there looking like he’s remembering not gunshots and sirens but the tang of smoke and the sweet ache of loss blooming in his chest.
But then again, she can barely feel the hot tear tracks on her face and she’s clutching her boss’ hand in the middle of a crowded D.C. street. They both need to get out of the public eye. She doesn’t think it’s bizarre that she wants to hole somewhere and wait until her world rights itself.
She thinks it’s a bit bizarre that she’s pretty sure she wants him to be there, too.
He drops her hand suddenly and scuffs at his brow with his hand. “C’mon,” he jerks his head down the street, away from the onslaught; his voice is a bit raspy. “I’ll walk you home.”
She nods slowly and settles into a pace with him. Everything is unnaturally quiet, and soon she realizes why: there’s no airplanes. The night is cool and strange and there’s no hum of electronics in the sky.
She peers at him out the corner of her eye as they approach her building. He’s got his hands deep in his coat pockets, his shoes scuffing the pavement. His mouth is a awful line across his face and she fights the urge to smooth the wrinkles out under her hand.
“Do you want to come up?”
It’s not really a question and they both know it. She can handle being alone, she can make sweet tea and bundle up on the couch and watch the clouds lit by the street lamps drift by her window.
But Josh, Josh doesn’t do alone. Josh gets drunk and stumbles out into the street and finds himself at her apartment or CJ’s or one time even Toby’s somber doorway, his hair mussed and melancholy from the voyage. He used to go to Sam’s, she knows, Sam who within their odd, tender friendship knew how to dial Josh down, how to set him right.
But now Sam’s in California, and he’s passed the torch. She knows this and that’s why she slips her hand into the crook of his arm and pulls him up the front steps, keeps it there as they climb the stairs to her apartment.
She knows he’s distracted because he stands too close as she unlocks her door, right behind her and breathing shallow puffs of warm air onto the back of her neck. Josh may talk big, but he’s overbearingly cautious most of the time about space: four steps across the office from her. Hands on her arm, her lower back. But he stands close tonight, his breath displacing the little hairs by her collar.
She breathes out and pushes the door open. He passes her and flops unceremoniously onto her couch, rubbing his eyes again like he’s been doing all night, like he’s tired.
Like he’s too tired to even face the world they’ve found themselves in.
“It’ll be okay, Josh.” She knows it’s not true, and she knows he hears the waver in her voice. He shakes his head, stands up.
She watches him pace a little, silent for several long minutes, watches his thoughts gather speed.
“They’re writing two speeches. Did you know they’re writing two speeches?”
“Toby?”
“And Will. Two of them. Preparing for every outcome.”
Her mind whirrs. There are so many outcomes, she thinks, because at this moment Zoey’s existence is bloomed out into thousands of possibilities.
“Schrödinger’s cat,” she says, almost absently, her eyes focused out the window.
“What?” He pauses mid-stride and turns to look at her, his face curious.
“Shrödinger’s cat. It’s… it’s a thought experiment.” She pauses, trying to remember a long-ago lecture hall. He'll like this, she thinks, remembering half-forgotten string theory rants from his bedside. “There’s a cat, a cat inside a box with a radioactive material that’s got a 50 percent chance of decaying in a certain about of time. If it does decay it will trigger the release of poison gas that will kill the cat.”
He’s looking at her in that bemused way he always does when she’s reciting some inane information, and she swats lightly at his knee. “Shut up. Anyway, at the end of that time the cat is with equal probability either alive or dead, and no one can tell which. The experiment is supposed to show how odd quantum mechanics is, because according to it, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.” Her voice becomes quieter, and she lays her hand over his on his knee. “We don’t know. Anything is possible.”
She watches him swallow, hard. He shakes his head slowly, his amusement gone. “She’s going to be okay, Josh.”
He stands up again quickly, brushing her hand away. “You don’t know that,” he says loudly, brokenly. “We can’t know that!”
“Josh-”
“They’re writing two speeches, Donna.”
She stands. “I know.”
“They’re writing a speech for if she dies.”
“I know.”
He breathes out, he shoulders slumped. She knows this isn’t about politics, that he’s not even thinking about the fact that if Zoey Bartlet dies then this presidency, Josh's presidency is dead in the water. He isn’t thinking about the message it will send, any of the political implications. He’s thinking about her, the impish grin and the sweet, challenging eyes. He’s thinking about him putting 15 year old Zoey to work in his office in the campaign headquarters, buying her M and M’s and Cokes and joking with her about the weirdness of her secret service detail and people knowing her on the street. He’s thinking about being the only one able to coax her out on the dance floor at the Inaugural Ball, about her barreling into his office, interrupting a meeting with the Labor Secretary sporting an unmatched grin and her acceptance letter to Georgetown. He’s thinking about her sad, hopeful face as she tugged a downcast Charlie into his hospital room, about him touching her arm and trying to voice his release of the other man’s guilt as she cried fat, silent tears.
He loves her like a daughter, or a sister, she knows that. She wishes she could haul Zoey back with her own hands so that Josh didn’t have to lose another bright eyed, smart-alecky girl.
“You’ll make a good father, Josh.” She doesn’t know where it comes from, doesn’t even process the words leaving her lips.
He turns to look at her, his mouth slightly agape. Then a corner of his mouth turns up. “All evidence to the contrary.”
“No, I mean it.” She stands so that he has to face her.
“Oh, come on, Donna. At this point, there’s like zero chance of me finding someone crazy enough to enter into some sense of cohabitation, let alone have children with me.” He smiles wryly.
She grabs his hand impulsively. “Josh, you’ll have kids, I know it.” And she does. Somehow in the way he looks at children, the way his mind is bursting with boyish enthusiasm, she just knows.
“Is that an offer?” He leers at her, and she curses herself at the way imaginary children burst through her mind, a blue eyed boy with dimples and a sweet smile before she realizes that he’s kidding.
But he’s not telling her things either, the way he sometimes, when he’s bored in the office, he imagines her pregnant, her with a toddler on her hip, her doling out pasta elbows from the stove, before he clears his head and returns to running the country.
She makes a noise at him, and then before she can process her actions she’s hugging him, her long arms clutched around his waist. He feels a moment of surprise before he tucks his head into her sweet-smelling hair and closes his eyes for a second, savoring the feel of her cool little body tucked up into his, and is suddenly overcome by the deep ache lingering all day in his chest and throat. “I wish I could have protected her,” he says softly, amazed at the words, amazed at how history has repeated itself, left him standing outside the building as she disappeared and his world crumpled down around him. “I couldn’t protect either of them.”
She pulls back, and looks at him squarely, her eyes showing a faint glimmer of surprise at his candid words. “You protect me, Josh.” She knows it’s a little cheesy, and she also knows it’s not exactly true; she’s grown and she’s strong and for the most part, she alone and she protects herself. But there are other times, times with testimonies and sleazy ex-boyfriends and the way he hired her unsure, uneducated mind on nothing more than her honest, excruciating pleadings and she knows it’s at least a little bit true.
He’s looking at her with blind surprise, his eyebrows disappearing into his wild hair, and so she seals it, impulsively kissing him on the corner of his mouth, her hands on the sides of his head and lingering a little as though in blessing.
She pulls back, her thumbs still brushing the side of his face. She feels hasty, half-drunk, and he looks the same so when he leans in and kisses her fully she’s not sure she’s surprised. It’s crazy, it’s insane, a stranger with a yippy dog in Bartlet’s chair, and god, little Zoey may be dead and she’s not sure she cares anymore about why Josh shouldn’t be kissing her so, so carefully in her apartment late at night.
She kisses him to banish all of this, all of this and the look on Charlie’s face, half-dead and full of all of these terrible possibilities. He’s kissing her slowly, his tongue sliding lightly against hers but she’s desperate now, pushing herself hard against him, biting down on his lower lip. She feels his gasp of surprise at the sheer eroticism of the moment, and she knows when thinking about it later with a burning face that it could have gone anywhere, anywhere after that but then she’s crying, sobbing really against his mouth before pulling away, trying to hide her flushed cheeks and her choking, awful tears.
“Donna-”
“Josh, just, don’t-”
But he’s there, pulling her against him as she cries outright into his warm neck. He strokes her hair, running his fingers through it. “She’s going to be okay.” She starts as he repeats her words back to her, pressing his dry lips to her temple.
She moves to pull away and he tightens his arms around her. They stand like that, quiet in her dark apartment, listening to the silent possibilities mill in the engine-less sky.
Author: Little Zigzags
Rating: PG
Pairing: J/D
Disclaimer: No money from these beauties.
Spoilers: 7A WF 83429
Summary: She doesn’t think it’s bizarre that she wants to hole somewhere and wait until her world rights itself. She thinks it’s a bit bizarre that she’s pretty sure she wants him to be there, too.
A/N: Ahh, summer. I’ve taken a long break from LJ and thought I’d dip my toes in the fic pool with this angsty number. Thanks for all the comments I’ve received on earlier fics, they are much appreciated! And to my new friends *jumps around* I literally haven’t been around since I last posted, so I’ll be sure to friend you back soon! As always, commentage is love.
Also, sorry to any physics majors out there if I’ve botched the concept! I’m merely an amateur science reader :-)
She hasn’t cried yet, but she almost loses it when she turns and catches a glimpse of his face in the candlelight.
She’s not really surprised. He looks the way he does a lot of the time, so terribly, insanely open, as though all the fear in this night is transformed onto his boyish, sad face. She sees him close his eyes for a second, his mouth still parted in tender surprise, hears the small intake of breath as they stand amongst the thousands of people crowding the White House gates.
She looks back at the messages. Hundreds of them, flowers and candles, and through it all, Zoey’s face repeating like a message in the night air.
She looks back only to find him watching her, pressing a crumpled tissue into her hand and she realizes that she's crying, she is and she doesn’t remember ever starting. She doesn’t dab her eyes, doesn’t think too hard about his fingers brushing hers as he sways a little as if from an invisible gust of wind.
He’s shivering a little and in the end she must tear him away, pry him from the masses. She looks back in their wake and their place in the vigil is overtaken by two more. They’re pushing a little to get through the swarms of bodies and she feels him grasp her hand in his warm one, their shoulders brushing as they reach open air and are suddenly released into empty, bodiless space.
They’re both staring vacantly into the night, and he’s still holding her hand. It’s as though the world has slowed down, split apart: on the one side she’s got her old life, where Bartlet was still the President, Zoey was dangling French nobility under Charlie’s nose, the life where she got up each morning to herd Josh around with papers and schedules and ponder the improbability that is his and Amy’s relationship.
But now she’s got this. Zoey’s gone and there’s a republican in the Oval Office and Josh is standing there looking like he’s remembering not gunshots and sirens but the tang of smoke and the sweet ache of loss blooming in his chest.
But then again, she can barely feel the hot tear tracks on her face and she’s clutching her boss’ hand in the middle of a crowded D.C. street. They both need to get out of the public eye. She doesn’t think it’s bizarre that she wants to hole somewhere and wait until her world rights itself.
She thinks it’s a bit bizarre that she’s pretty sure she wants him to be there, too.
He drops her hand suddenly and scuffs at his brow with his hand. “C’mon,” he jerks his head down the street, away from the onslaught; his voice is a bit raspy. “I’ll walk you home.”
She nods slowly and settles into a pace with him. Everything is unnaturally quiet, and soon she realizes why: there’s no airplanes. The night is cool and strange and there’s no hum of electronics in the sky.
She peers at him out the corner of her eye as they approach her building. He’s got his hands deep in his coat pockets, his shoes scuffing the pavement. His mouth is a awful line across his face and she fights the urge to smooth the wrinkles out under her hand.
“Do you want to come up?”
It’s not really a question and they both know it. She can handle being alone, she can make sweet tea and bundle up on the couch and watch the clouds lit by the street lamps drift by her window.
But Josh, Josh doesn’t do alone. Josh gets drunk and stumbles out into the street and finds himself at her apartment or CJ’s or one time even Toby’s somber doorway, his hair mussed and melancholy from the voyage. He used to go to Sam’s, she knows, Sam who within their odd, tender friendship knew how to dial Josh down, how to set him right.
But now Sam’s in California, and he’s passed the torch. She knows this and that’s why she slips her hand into the crook of his arm and pulls him up the front steps, keeps it there as they climb the stairs to her apartment.
She knows he’s distracted because he stands too close as she unlocks her door, right behind her and breathing shallow puffs of warm air onto the back of her neck. Josh may talk big, but he’s overbearingly cautious most of the time about space: four steps across the office from her. Hands on her arm, her lower back. But he stands close tonight, his breath displacing the little hairs by her collar.
She breathes out and pushes the door open. He passes her and flops unceremoniously onto her couch, rubbing his eyes again like he’s been doing all night, like he’s tired.
Like he’s too tired to even face the world they’ve found themselves in.
“It’ll be okay, Josh.” She knows it’s not true, and she knows he hears the waver in her voice. He shakes his head, stands up.
She watches him pace a little, silent for several long minutes, watches his thoughts gather speed.
“They’re writing two speeches. Did you know they’re writing two speeches?”
“Toby?”
“And Will. Two of them. Preparing for every outcome.”
Her mind whirrs. There are so many outcomes, she thinks, because at this moment Zoey’s existence is bloomed out into thousands of possibilities.
“Schrödinger’s cat,” she says, almost absently, her eyes focused out the window.
“What?” He pauses mid-stride and turns to look at her, his face curious.
“Shrödinger’s cat. It’s… it’s a thought experiment.” She pauses, trying to remember a long-ago lecture hall. He'll like this, she thinks, remembering half-forgotten string theory rants from his bedside. “There’s a cat, a cat inside a box with a radioactive material that’s got a 50 percent chance of decaying in a certain about of time. If it does decay it will trigger the release of poison gas that will kill the cat.”
He’s looking at her in that bemused way he always does when she’s reciting some inane information, and she swats lightly at his knee. “Shut up. Anyway, at the end of that time the cat is with equal probability either alive or dead, and no one can tell which. The experiment is supposed to show how odd quantum mechanics is, because according to it, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.” Her voice becomes quieter, and she lays her hand over his on his knee. “We don’t know. Anything is possible.”
She watches him swallow, hard. He shakes his head slowly, his amusement gone. “She’s going to be okay, Josh.”
He stands up again quickly, brushing her hand away. “You don’t know that,” he says loudly, brokenly. “We can’t know that!”
“Josh-”
“They’re writing two speeches, Donna.”
She stands. “I know.”
“They’re writing a speech for if she dies.”
“I know.”
He breathes out, he shoulders slumped. She knows this isn’t about politics, that he’s not even thinking about the fact that if Zoey Bartlet dies then this presidency, Josh's presidency is dead in the water. He isn’t thinking about the message it will send, any of the political implications. He’s thinking about her, the impish grin and the sweet, challenging eyes. He’s thinking about him putting 15 year old Zoey to work in his office in the campaign headquarters, buying her M and M’s and Cokes and joking with her about the weirdness of her secret service detail and people knowing her on the street. He’s thinking about being the only one able to coax her out on the dance floor at the Inaugural Ball, about her barreling into his office, interrupting a meeting with the Labor Secretary sporting an unmatched grin and her acceptance letter to Georgetown. He’s thinking about her sad, hopeful face as she tugged a downcast Charlie into his hospital room, about him touching her arm and trying to voice his release of the other man’s guilt as she cried fat, silent tears.
He loves her like a daughter, or a sister, she knows that. She wishes she could haul Zoey back with her own hands so that Josh didn’t have to lose another bright eyed, smart-alecky girl.
“You’ll make a good father, Josh.” She doesn’t know where it comes from, doesn’t even process the words leaving her lips.
He turns to look at her, his mouth slightly agape. Then a corner of his mouth turns up. “All evidence to the contrary.”
“No, I mean it.” She stands so that he has to face her.
“Oh, come on, Donna. At this point, there’s like zero chance of me finding someone crazy enough to enter into some sense of cohabitation, let alone have children with me.” He smiles wryly.
She grabs his hand impulsively. “Josh, you’ll have kids, I know it.” And she does. Somehow in the way he looks at children, the way his mind is bursting with boyish enthusiasm, she just knows.
“Is that an offer?” He leers at her, and she curses herself at the way imaginary children burst through her mind, a blue eyed boy with dimples and a sweet smile before she realizes that he’s kidding.
But he’s not telling her things either, the way he sometimes, when he’s bored in the office, he imagines her pregnant, her with a toddler on her hip, her doling out pasta elbows from the stove, before he clears his head and returns to running the country.
She makes a noise at him, and then before she can process her actions she’s hugging him, her long arms clutched around his waist. He feels a moment of surprise before he tucks his head into her sweet-smelling hair and closes his eyes for a second, savoring the feel of her cool little body tucked up into his, and is suddenly overcome by the deep ache lingering all day in his chest and throat. “I wish I could have protected her,” he says softly, amazed at the words, amazed at how history has repeated itself, left him standing outside the building as she disappeared and his world crumpled down around him. “I couldn’t protect either of them.”
She pulls back, and looks at him squarely, her eyes showing a faint glimmer of surprise at his candid words. “You protect me, Josh.” She knows it’s a little cheesy, and she also knows it’s not exactly true; she’s grown and she’s strong and for the most part, she alone and she protects herself. But there are other times, times with testimonies and sleazy ex-boyfriends and the way he hired her unsure, uneducated mind on nothing more than her honest, excruciating pleadings and she knows it’s at least a little bit true.
He’s looking at her with blind surprise, his eyebrows disappearing into his wild hair, and so she seals it, impulsively kissing him on the corner of his mouth, her hands on the sides of his head and lingering a little as though in blessing.
She pulls back, her thumbs still brushing the side of his face. She feels hasty, half-drunk, and he looks the same so when he leans in and kisses her fully she’s not sure she’s surprised. It’s crazy, it’s insane, a stranger with a yippy dog in Bartlet’s chair, and god, little Zoey may be dead and she’s not sure she cares anymore about why Josh shouldn’t be kissing her so, so carefully in her apartment late at night.
She kisses him to banish all of this, all of this and the look on Charlie’s face, half-dead and full of all of these terrible possibilities. He’s kissing her slowly, his tongue sliding lightly against hers but she’s desperate now, pushing herself hard against him, biting down on his lower lip. She feels his gasp of surprise at the sheer eroticism of the moment, and she knows when thinking about it later with a burning face that it could have gone anywhere, anywhere after that but then she’s crying, sobbing really against his mouth before pulling away, trying to hide her flushed cheeks and her choking, awful tears.
“Donna-”
“Josh, just, don’t-”
But he’s there, pulling her against him as she cries outright into his warm neck. He strokes her hair, running his fingers through it. “She’s going to be okay.” She starts as he repeats her words back to her, pressing his dry lips to her temple.
She moves to pull away and he tightens his arms around her. They stand like that, quiet in her dark apartment, listening to the silent possibilities mill in the engine-less sky.