#tww season 7 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ivaalo · 4 months ago

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Introduction

This is a fan analysis about the results of 24 polls posted on Tumblr by the user @zeldatourney. Huge thanks to them to have organized this tourney.

(Keep in mind my first language isn't English, so I might make some minor mistakes)

This is a long post with multiple graphs, so I'm putting a "Read more" button here!

For each game, the question asked was "How high does [game] rank?" with 7 answers possible to choose:

S tier (One of the greatest)

A tier (A favorite)

B tier (I like it)

C tier (Meh)

D tier (I'd rather play something else)

F tier (AWFUL)

I haven't played this game

The poll started on the 2nd of December 2024 and ended the 9th of December 2024.

Disclaimer: This is not a representation of the Zelda community as a whole, but a result of people who saw and voted for the polls between those previously quoted dates.

For the rest of this post, I will simplify each game's name by its abbreviations. For example, "A Link To The Past" will be named "ALTTP". The polls didn't specify if it contains the original games or both the original games and the remakes. They will be named as such:

[TLOZ] The Legend of Zelda

[AOL] Adventure of Link

[ALTTP] A Link to the Past

[LA] Link's Awakening (DX) (+ the unnamed 2019 remake)

[OOT] Ocarina of Time (3D)

[MM] Majora's Mask (3D)

[OOS] Oracle of Seasons

[OOA] Oracle of Ages

[FS] Four Swords (Anniversary Edition)

[TWW] The Wind Waker (HD)

[FSA] Four Swords Adventures

[TMC] The Minish Cap

[TP] Twilight Princess (HD)

[PH] Phantom Hourglass

[ST] Spirit Tracks

[SS] Skyward Sword (HD)

[ALBW] A Link Between Worlds

[HW] Hyrule Warriors (Legend / Definitive Edition)

[TFH] Tri Force Heroes

[BOTW] Breath of the Wild

[COH] Cadence of Hyrule

[AOC] Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

[TOTK] Tears of the Kingdom

[EOW] Echoes of Wisdom

Collected data

Each poll being independent from each other, the number of votes varies from one poll to another.

For each games, I added the percentage (as picked up from the HTML for a better precision). The result is either 99.999, 100 or 100.001, so I sometimes cheated to add or remove 0.001 somewhere. Tumblr doesn't give you access to the exact numbers of vote per option.

So before ranking the games, I have to show you first what games are the most played. Adding all answers and doing:

Played (%) = 100 - "I haven't played this game" (%)

I'll use colours to differentiate 2D games (in terms of gameplay) to 3D games. I'll also highlight spin-off games and multiplayer games.

Here are the games played by more than 75% of players:

We can already see a huge pattern. All the 3D games are there. And the only 2D Zelda game to be played by 75% of players is ALBW. BOTW and OOT are the most played games of the sample, as those were huge turning points and both cultural and commercial success.

We can also notice the difference of 5% between the least played 3D game (MM) and the most played 2D game (ALBW).

Let's continue to look at the other played games:

EOW is most likely low as it's the most recent game, at this time, but also because it's not a 3D game. And the hype train was low compared to TOTK. (3 months of anticipation compared to 4 years)

And finally, the multiplayer games are the least played games, excluding COH. Also worth noting that all the spin-off games cited can also be played with another player, but it wasn't the main focus of the communication. COH being a musical tactical rogue-lite only appealed to a specific part of Zelda fans.

If these polls contained the CD-i Zelda games, Link's Crossbow Training and Tingle games, the score would probably be under COH, but we never know!

I'll keep these colours as labels, to recognize them better in the next images.

Alright. Time to share the ranking. Here is the global result, sorted by release date in North America:

It's kind of a lot to see! Overall, the games are pretty liked. So first, let's take a look at the disliked games:

Please note that the X-axis was zoomed, so we can see the result better.

We can already notice that AOL makes a huge contrast. As this game is considered as the black sheep of the franchise because of how different it is, its reputation mostly came from the difficulty of that game.

Almost a factor of 0.5 divides the first disliked game to the second. TFH the second disliked and the original TLOZ follows.

ALBW is the least disliked, with under 1%, counting D tier and F tier.

But notice the F-tier (red) line. It varies a lot, so let's take a look at the most hated games:

Yep, TOTK is third, this time. As I don't personally think it's awful, it definitively disappointed many by being too close to BOTW and having a lot of issues BOTW didn't have.

Nobody voted "F tier" for ALTTP nor OOT. Same for OOS but keep in mind this game was the least voted one too!

Alright, enough for the hate! Let's look at the most appreciated Zelda games.

Yep, the majority of Zelda fans like 22.5 out of 24 of the games! (TFH being exactly 50, I half-counted it!)

TWW is being almost unanimously appreciated, with almost 97%, and the second one to get this score is TMC, a 2D game, with more than 96%!

You can notice some gaps, like between ST and COH, and then between the Oracle games and TOTK.

Now let's look at the most loved games:

5 3D games are in the top 5, except for SS and TOTK. TMC is very close to beat BOTW and remains the most loved 2D Zelda game. Notice how SS and TOTK make a huge gap between the game before and the game after, like voters use them as references. The two Hyrule Warriors games are, in a funny way, between the Oracle ones.

Let's add a step forward and look at the S tier only:

Nothing changes for the top 9 games. However, EOW seems more nuanced and is less considered as best than TOTK.

Final results

And finally, let's rank them using the Majority Judgment:

The Majority Judgment was created to propose a more democratic way to vote. Each candidate has multiple mentions, and you (the elector) must attribute one mention to each candidate. Since this poll uses this exact method of vote, I decided to rank them all using the Majority Judgment. To count using the Majority Judgment, you must focus on the 50% axis, and look at the category that crosses it (more than 50%). That gives you the tier, and the best tier wins.

When two or more candidates get the same tier, there are multiple ways to rank:

The first way is to put a line at the middle and see which line has the higher percentage. (Less precise but more simple)

The second way is to divide it into multiple tiers by doing the first method again and again until each candidates has a unique tier. (More precise but less simple)

But since I didn't want to compare B++++ to B+++-, I used the first method. It's my democracy and I do whatever I want!

Just keep in mind that depending on the way to count these games may be swapped:

ALTTP and LA

OOA and PH

AOC and HW

SO, for the data. Top 5 is TWW, MM, TP, OOT and BOTW. To be honest, I imagined MM to be a more nuanced game, or at least more controversial, since it has a unique concept.

The A tier only contains 2D games, except SS. TMC, ST and ALBW are the favourite 2D games. ALTTP and LA are always very close. The last one of the tier is EOW.

Only mainline games are in the S and A tier.

The first game of the B tier is a spin-off game, followed by TOTK.

TFH was one vote away from being in the B tier. And no surprise, AOL is the last one.

To sum up, according to the participants who voted for these polls:

S tier

🥇 The Wind Waker

🥈 Majora's Mask

🥉 Twilight Princess

⭐ Ocarina of Time

⭐ Breath of the Wild

A+ tier

The Minish Cap

Spirit Tracks

A- tier

A Link Between Worlds

Skyward Sword

A Link to the Past

Link's Awakening

Echoes of Wisdom

B+ tier

Cadence of Hyrule

Tears of the Kingdom

Oracle of Seasons

Oracle of Ages

Phantom Hourglass

B- tier

Age of Calamity

Hyrule Warriors

Four Swords Adventures

Four Swords

The Legend of Zelda

C+ tier

Tri Force Heroes

C- tier

Adventure of Link

Thank you for reading! ~

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sheliesshattered · 2 months ago

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TWW fanfic: The Don't List

Josh/Donna, 9800 words, Rated T. Post s07e19: Transition. One airplane flight and one long conversation that was a long time coming, as Josh and Donna figure out what it is they want from each other.

So many thank yous and my deepest appreciation to @jessbakescakes and @jezunya for beta-reading this for me, your suggestions were the finishing touches this story needed for me to really be happy with it. And a big thank you to @bartletslesbians for cheering me on, and to my sweetheart Jack for reading this entire thing even though he's never seen a single episode of The West Wing.

Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

The Don't List

Be still and listen to me. I don’t know what this is. And you don’t either, which is perfectly fine and understandable. Whatever the build up, it’s all happened amid absurdly heightened emotional circumstances �� the election, Leo’s death — there’s been no moment to so much as take a breath, much less figure any of this out. And now this roller coaster’s plunging into the transition, with its time pressure demands, and then the Inauguration, and it’s hit-the-ground-running, and the first hundred days, and before you know it, the midterms and the new Congress, and then we’re running again, and four years becomes eight, and we’ve never had The Talk. And you can lose that look of panic in your eyes, we’re not going to have it now, we don’t ever have to have it. But there’s a window. I’d say four weeks. If we can’t get it together in that time to figure out what we want from each other, then clearly it’s not worth the trouble.

—The West Wing, season 7 episode 19: Transition

Josh waits until the captain has turned off the fasten seat belt sign before launching into his well-crafted opening line. He’s not nervous, exactly, but this seems like a cruising altitude, no-seat-belts-necessary kind of conversation. It’s an excruciating wait, but finally the garbled announcement from the cockpit ends, the little seat belt icon overhead goes ding! and Josh turns to look at Donna, who is at least pretending to be absorbed in the paperback spy thriller she bought in the airport.

“So I hear there’s a window,” he says, in that sort of conversational volume he’s honed over thousands of hours of plane flights, loud enough for Donna to hear above the ambient noise of the plane but not so loud as to invite everyone around them into the conversation.

She glances up at him out of the corner of her eye, her attention still primarily on the novel in her hands. “The window’s all yours, Josh,” she says easily, gaze sliding back to the book. “I’d rather have the aisle seat, because— you know.”

Because her leg still bothers her sometimes, as much as she tries to keep that fact hidden from everyone else. Which he did actually know, which is why he picked seats on the left side of the plane when he booked the tickets and why he took the window seat when he boarded, so that Donna would be able to stretch her right leg out into the aisle whenever she needed. He knew that, he actively thought about it, and he did the kind and caring thing for her, just because it was the kind and caring thing to do, and for half a moment he wants credit for that.

“No, I know, that’s why I— nevermind,” Josh says, quickly pulling himself away from that line of thinking. This no-seat-belts-necessary conversation isn’t about scoring little points with Donna, and he definitely doesn’t want to think about the injury she’s still recovering from, or that lonely flight to Germany when he’d been nearly out of his mind with worry about her. Wrenching his thoughts away from those particular memories, he shakes his head. “No, I meant the— you know, the time window.”

His delivery is all off, now, not at all how he’d imagined during his quick packing and frantic dash to the airport, when the words he wanted to say to her wouldn’t stop circling his mind. He was going to be smooth and romantic about this, and it’s not off to a great start.

But somehow he seems to have caught Donna’s attention with his clarification, at least, and she turns to look at him more fully, resting the paperback in her lap with one finger trapped between the pages to mark her place. “The time window,” she repeats. It isn’t a question, but she’s looking at him like she expects him to keep talking, so he does.

“Yeah, the four week window. Or, three weeks, five days, and,” he glances at his watch, “I don’t know, nine hours. Or whatever, it’s gonna be hard to keep track with the time zone change.”

“And you want to have that talk now?” she asks with gentle disbelief.

Josh shrugs, the motion somewhat muffled by the airplane seat. “I don’t want it hanging over us all week.”

He watches as she glances away, down at the paperback in her hands, then out at the narrow aisle just beyond her seat. He doesn’t think she’s contemplating ways to escape this conversation — Are you really going to try to convince me that I’m the one who finds this all awkward and hard to navigate? she’d said, and of course she was right, Donna is always right — but one of the benefits of doing this on the plane is that neither of them can walk away. There are no meetings to get to, no phone calls to interrupt them, nothing that needs read other than the mass-market novel in her hands.

“Josh, we don’t have to talk about it now,” she says, sad and soft under the steel determination she tries to clad her words in. “We don’t have to talk about it at all this week. We can just enjoy Hawaii and not worry about any of it. We don’t have to talk about it next week, either, or the week after. We don’t ever have to talk about it, if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to, though,” he says sincerely, smiling at her and taking her left hand, the hand that isn’t currently acting as a bookmark, and lacing their fingers together. It might be a no-seat-belts-necessary conversation, but he thinks it might also be a holding-hands kind of conversation. At least, he hopes it is. “That’s not why I was panicking when you brought it up the other day.”

“Really?” Donna asks in a sarcastic deadpan. But her hand is still in his, and Josh decides to take that as a good sign.

“Yes, really,” he says, grinning wider at her.

“I definitely detected panic.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t panicking. Just not about that.”

“What, then?”

There was one particular thought that had stormed in to occupy his mind as soon as he understood what she was getting at with her four week window speech. One thought that wound him up beyond even his usual levels of stress, that kept him awake at night and distracted during the day, despite his best efforts. One thought that was so overwhelming, so life-altering, that he couldn’t hope to tackle it head-on, not even in the privacy of his own mind.

“The size of the question is too big, is the thing,” he says, managing not to stumble over his words this time, and that’s slightly better, closer to how he imagined this going. “And I don’t want to get it wrong.”

“It’s not an SAT question, Josh. There isn’t a magical right answer.”

“I know that. But still, you have to admit, it’s a pretty big question: what we want from each other.”

“It is,” she agrees hesitantly. She starts to move, pauses, then seems to think better of it and follows through with the action of stowing her paperback in the seatback pocket in front of her, no longer bookmarked. Another good sign, he hopes.

“So I figured,” Josh says once Donna settles back in her seat and turns her gaze to him again, “that maybe I’ve got to come at this from the other side. Figure out what I don’t want. Cut the question down to size a bit.” He’s very consciously not calling it a problem. It’s a big question, and the answer carries a lot of consequences regardless of how this shakes out, but it is absolutely not a problem.

“Like what?” Donna asks, seeming genuinely curious.

“Like how this morning, you said you can’t work for me again, if there’s something happening between us. So that’s an easy one: I don’t want to be your boss again, not ever.”

“Then what was the Deputy Press Secretary offer?”

“That was—” He cuts himself off with a laugh, because it was stupid is what it was, and he knew it at the time. “It was the best I could do off the top of my head. It was desperate, if I’m being honest. I just didn’t want you running off to accept a six-figure offer from some thinktank or NGO before I could find the right fit for you in the new administration.”

“I accepted Helen’s offer,” Donna says in a rush, as though it’s a secret she’s been keeping from him for months, rather than a possibility she already told him about not twelve hours earlier. “First Lady’s Chief of Staff.”

“Donna, that’s great!” he says, throwing all of his enthusiasm into it, making sure it shows on his face and in his voice. “We’re gonna be Chiefs of Staff together!”

“And you’re okay with that?” she asks, and it hits him that she’s genuinely worried about it, that she didn’t call him earlier in the day to tell him she’d accepted the job because she was worried he wouldn’t take it well.

“More than okay,” he assures her, squeezing her hand. “You’re going to be great at it.”

“Thanks,” she says, and it’s still more hesitant than he’d like. Donna has seemed so confident lately, ever since Lou shoved them into a room together with a demand to figure things out, really. Confident about the work she does and her place on the campaign, confident about winning the election, confident about this thing between them. He kissed her first, sure, but after that Donna was the one setting the tone and the pace for their relationship. She’s not the one who finds this all awkward and hard to navigate, she told him so herself.

But Josh starts to wonder, with that little word hanging in the air between them, just how confident Donna actually feels about where their relationship is going. And if, just maybe, she’s been projecting confidence and nonchalance as a shield, something to hide her hurt behind in case he somehow manages to get the answer to the big question wrong.

He can’t get it wrong. He won’t.

“You’re going to be great,” he murmurs again, running his thumb over her knuckles. “We’ll have to talk policy goals, once we’re back at work. Get the West Wing and the East Wing working in coordination, right from the start. We can go to the Hill and bully Senators together,” he says with a grin, and watches in relief as Donna smiles back at him, wide and genuine and not nearly as fragile as before.

“That could be fun,” she agrees, and he can hear the smile in her voice, too.

“But,” he sighs theatrically, “that does mean that if the President-Elect ever comes to his senses and fires me, I won’t be able to come crawling to the East Wing for a job. I don’t think you should be my boss, either,” he adds more seriously.

She narrows her eyes at him with a playful edge he feels like he hasn’t seen in years. “Why? You think I wouldn’t be a good boss?”

“I know you’re going to be a great boss. I haven’t been doing such a good job with the boss thing lately, hopefully I can get you and Sam and Lou to smack me upside the head if it gets bad again. But I just mean, in terms of answering the big ‘what do we want from each other’ question, I think we should take any combination of boss and employee off the table.”

“And when you sat down to come up with an answer to that big question, the first thing you thought of was our working relationship?” There’s a layer of snark over her question, but Josh suspects it’s just another part of her shield, another way to hide how much is riding on the answer to the big question, how much this means to her.

“Nah, that was just the easy stuff,” he says, waving it away with his free hand. “I don’t want our working relationship to get in the way of the rest of what we want. We’ve always been a great team, professionally, but I don’t want that to be a distraction or an excuse not to—” he makes the mistake of looking over at her, and finds her watching him with wide eyes, dark blue in the dim cabin lighting, “not to, you know,” he stumbles, unable to look away, “...have a life.” He’s not even sure if that was a coherent sentence by the end, but he has to stop talking, has to swallow hard and watch her watching him.

After a moment, she nods. “Alright,” she says seriously, and it feels more like she’s responding to something she read off his face than whatever words he managed to string together there. “I suppose,” she says slowly, the corners of her mouth starting to curl up in a smile she’s desperately fighting against, “for the good of our relationship, I can give up my long-held dream of being your boss.”

“You bossed me around plenty all those years when I was supposedly your boss!” he shoots back in mock indignation, and she grins at him properly, all teeth and laughing eyes. “I can’t imagine that’ll change now.”

“You wouldn’t want it to,” Donna replies, knocking her shoulder into his, and they’ve somehow slipped out of the shielding snark and into a flirtatious banter that he’s missed.

“No,” Josh agrees. “In fact, I can add that to my list of things I don’t want: I don’t want you to ever stop bossing me around.”

“Good,” she says, her smile nearly blinding. “Someone has to keep you in check.”

“I wouldn’t trust the job to anyone else,” he tells her, and raises their joined hands to kiss the back of her palm. Beside him, Donna stills, and he looks up to find her watching him seriously again, her smile fading and a worry he thought he’d banished creeping back into her eyes.

“What else don’t you want, Josh?” she asks, her voice low and even.

“I don’t want this to just be a campaign fling.” The words pour out of him before he can stop to think about it, but they’re the words that had been circling his mind as he packed, as he sat in the back of the cab on the way to the airport, as he paced at the gate waiting for boarding to start. “Or, well— a transition fling, I guess,” he amends a moment later. “I don’t want this to be just a weird thing that happened when we lost our minds between Election Day and Inauguration Day, something we laugh about later, or worse, never talk about. I didn’t lose my mind, Donna,” he tells her sincerely. “Not about this, at least.”

She cracks the faintest of smiles. “The jury’s still out on the rest of your sanity,” she says, clearly teasing, even though her voice doesn’t quite reach the playful tone he associates with her teasing him. “What else?” she asks again. “What else don’t you want, Josh?”

He takes a deep breath and leans his head back against his seat. That was the easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit, the parts of this it didn’t cost him much to admit. But he owes her an answer, and he knows that the only way to the things he really wants is to take the chance on honesty.

“I don’t want this to end,” he says, risking a glance at her. “I don’t want to wake up one day and realize this is over, that I screwed it up.” He pauses for another deep breath and then says the thing that had been ever-present in his mind since she confronted him with the time window: “I don’t ever want to be your ex.”

“That’s an awfully bold statement for someone with commitment issues.”

“I don’t have commitment issues!”

“Your dating history might imply otherwise,” she counters, voice dry.

“I have no interest in dating!” he says flippantly, before realizing how that sounds. “Wait, no, that’s not— that came out wrong. What I mean is, the whole concept of dating just doesn’t— It’s these little appointments, right? You set up a time to meet, and then for the next few hours you’re on your best behavior, trying to prove how charming and witty and romantic you can be. And then the date ends, and you go back to your regular life, and it’s not— That’s not real. It’s some fake version of yourself that you’re trying to sell. And I’m just, I’m done with that. I have no interest in that kind of dating. And besides, we know each other too well for any of that, anyway.”

“So you don’t want this to be a fling, you don’t want to date, and you don’t want to break up?” Donna says, like he just asked her to accomplish three contradictory tasks for the good of the country. Her tone feels wrong for the weight and importance of this conversation, but she’s looking at him with something like trepidation, so the words tumble out of him before he can stop them.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “If that’s— I mean, assuming we’re on the same page here? I swear to god, Donna, if you want this to just be a fling you’re going to have to tell me that right now, using very small words.”

“You think I want this to be a fling?”

“No! I don’t know! I hope not! I just kind of assumed we’d be on the same page!”

“We are, Josh,” she says, squeezing his hand and pulling him out of his spiral before it can really get going.

“Well, good,” he replies, too emphatically, his bluster taking a moment to dissipate. “Because I have a, you know, an actual list, and if we got derailed on ‘not a fling’, I’m not sure where that would leave us.”

“Having a fling in Hawaii, presumably.”

“I’m serious!”

Donna squeezes his hand again, keeping the pressure up until his heart rate begins to slow. “I know, Josh.”

“I just don’t want you to think that I don’t take this seriously.”

“You made an actual list?” she asks, some of that teasing, flirtatious tone working its way back into her voice. “Can I see it?”

“I didn’t write it down,” he scoffs.

“Is it an ‘actual’ list if you didn’t write it down?”

“It’s a mental list! I don’t need to write it down, I’m not going to forget what’s on it.”

“A mental list of things you don’t want.”

“I'm narrowing down the size of the big question!” he shoots back defensively.

“The ‘what we want from each other’ question,” she nods, like she wasn't the one to send him off on this tangent to begin with.

“I couldn’t just say I want everything with you, that’s not a good enough answer.”

He feels her go still beside him, where they’re pressed together valiantly trying to share the narrow armrest, and with a sudden panic he wonders if that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

“No, not everything,” she says softly, unfocused gaze on the seatback rather than on him. “Not boss-employee, not dating, not exes, not a fling.” She takes a deep breath and turns back to him, seeming to pull herself out of whatever contemplation his words threw her into. “What exactly does that leave, Josh?”

The words everything else are on the tip of his tongue, but he bites them back. There are more entries on his mental list, and they exist to give that everything else a more specific shape. That’s the whole point of the list. “I don’t think we should have separate apartments, after we get back to DC,” he says. Donna’s eyebrows furrow, like that was not at all what she expected him to say, so he hastens to add, “I just mean, we’re both going to have demanding jobs, with long hours and late nights. It would be nice to spend the time we do have outside of work together, rather than trying to coordinate when we can drop by the other person’s place for a few short hours.”

“Are you asking me to move in with you?” she asks, eyes wide and brow still furrowed.

Josh winces, realizing he probably should have done just that, but there are other complications to consider. “I think I need to find a new place, actually — CJ said something about the Secret Service taking over her guest bedroom, and I have a planning email from Ron Butterfield that I've been meaning to read. I don’t think my one bedroom, eight hundred square foot apartment is going to cut it, after January twentieth. But maybe we could find a new place together?”

“Oh, you’re really serious about this,” Donna says, more surprised than disbelieving, he thinks.

“Are we back around to ‘not a fling’?” he asks, squinting at her.

She shakes her head and turns towards him, pressing her left shoulder into her seat so she can look at him as straight on as the small space will allow. It’s somewhat hampered by her seat belt, which she deftly releases with her right hand without removing her left hand from his grasp. Josh is reminded that this is a no-seat-belts-necessary conversation, and undoes his in solidarity, if significantly less grace.

“You want to move in together,” she says slowly, like she’s still trying to wrap her head around the concept, “and you don’t ever want us to break up.”

“Yeah.”

“So,” Donna pauses, wets her lips with the tip of her tongue, and for a moment Josh thinks seriously about kissing her — but he wants to hear whatever thought she’s so clearly working up the nerve to say, so he keeps the impulse to himself and waits as patiently as he can. “Theoretically at least, we could buy a house together. Since we’re never going to break up.”

She looks up at him from under her lashes, a posture he associates with difficult questions, with answers she doesn’t want to hear but knows she needs to. Buying a house hadn’t even occurred to him, but shared property ownership fits in easily with everything else he imagines for their future, so the question doesn’t quite bowl him over the way he thinks she expected it to.

“Yeah,” he says with as much nonchalance as he can summon, and watches as her shoulders visibly relax. “Theoretically, sure. I’m not sure the transition is the best time to go house-hunting, but we could talk about it.”

“And you think we’re ready for that?” she asks, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with her free hand. “Living together? We’re not rushing into things?”

“Nah, this feels like the furthest thing from rushing. I wanted to ask you to move in with me years ago, after all those months when you practically lived at my place. But the boss-employee thing kinda got in the way.” He flashes her a smile, the one with the dimples that he knows she likes.

“Josh...” she sighs, dropping her gaze to their joined hands, and with sudden horror he realizes it’s disappointment he hears in her voice.

“What?” he asks, stumbling over the words. “What did I—”

“You didn’t want to ask me to move in back then.” It’s not a question, just a statement of fact. A fact that she’s wrong about, but it’s her certainty that scares him.

“Yes I did,” he says in a rush, anxious to clear up whatever misunderstanding has led her to that incorrect assumption and get back to his list and the last few supremely important items on it.

“Then why didn’t you?” she asks, glancing up at him with her chin tucked low again. She asks it like it’s checkmate, like there is only one possible answer, like she’s caught him in a lie.

“Because I couldn’t,” he tells her honestly, the words falling out of him now that there’s finally nothing to hold them back. “Because I knew I wouldn’t be able to— to function, without you, at the White House. I didn’t last a week there after you left. If I’d told you how I felt, way back then, I would have lost you.”

“How you felt?” Donna prompts when he doesn’t go on, and oh, he can feel the weight in her words, the importance of her question, the dangerous territory he’s barrelling into. But there’s no sense in stopping now, nothing for it but to finally crash through this wall and see what’s on the other side.

“I’ve been in love with you for something like eight years now, Donnatella,” he says, the confession rolling off his tongue like he’s told her a hundred times before, like he hasn’t spent the better part of a decade carefully keeping those exact words in check. “This is just the first time I’ve been able to do anything about it.”

She turns and sits back in her seat so abruptly that the terror is instantly back, the fear that he’s said the wrong thing rushing through his veins and stealing his breath. “Donna,” he starts, clutching her hand so she can’t pull away any further.

“Shut up,” she commands in an undertone, looking straight ahead rather than at him.

“Donna.”

“Shush, I’m recalibrating.”

“Recalibrating?” he repeats. “What does that mean?” He finally tells her he loves her and she’s recalibrating??

She doesn’t answer, so he sits in silence, her hand still clasped in his, and tries valiantly to give her all the time she needs to process whatever is going on in her head. After the most tense thirty seconds he’s ever endured outside the White House or a hospital, he has to clamp his jaw shut to keep from saying something to try to hurry her along.

“You’re freaking out,” she says levelly, eyes fixed on the seatback in front of her.

“Well, yeah—”

“Stop freaking out, I’m just—”

“Donna—”

“Have you ever prepared for the wrong meeting?” she asks in a rush, still avoiding his gaze. “Just, one hundred percent ready for something that, as it turns out, isn’t happening right now?”

“I mean, yeah, but—”

“You were going to take Amy to Tahiti,” she says, finally turning to look at him.

The non sequitur throws him for a moment. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You were going to take Amy to Tahiti, and when you couldn’t go you decorated your apartment like Tahiti just for her. And then you still ended up breaking up with her a few months later.”

The comparison between then and now is ridiculous, and he would’ve expected Donna to know that. “This isn’t anything like whatever I had with Amy!”

“How is it different?” she demands, and it occurs to him maybe she really doesn’t know.

“I wasn’t in love with Amy!” he says, throwing his free hand up in exasperation. How can she not see, how can she not know?

“Then why keep dating her?”

“Plausible deniability,” he bites out. “If anyone had ever found out—”

“Can I get you two any snacks?” an unfamiliar voice breaks into their illusion of privacy. “Anything to drink?”

Donna turns to the flight attendant who has suddenly appeared in the aisle beside her seat and rattles off their usual commercial flight order with easy poise, as if they haven’t just been interrupted in the middle of what might well be the most important conversation of either of their lives. Josh forces himself to take a deep breath, scrubbing his left hand across his face before mechanically putting down his seatback tray and accepting the soda and peanuts Donna hands him, moving on autopilot even though he has no real interest in the food.

“Plausible deniability,” Donna says quietly, once the drink cart has moved on past them, “...about me?” she asks. “Because of our jobs?” At his nod, she adds, “But we never— Nothing unethical ever happened between us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says, shaking his head. “The optics of it would have made anyone doubt our denials. Even just an allegation, or a particularly persistent rumor, could have exploded into a scandal and reflected badly on the whole administration, not to mention derailed our careers. But if I could say, ‘of course I’m not in love with Donna, I’m dating someone else!’ — even just for a little while — it helped to quiet some of those rumors.”

“And that’s why you— Eight years, Josh??” Her expression is back to that shuttered shock, like she’s questioning her every assumption. Recalibrating, he supposes, and he’s not quite sure how they ended up here, his very important list momentarily abandoned in the light of the fact that he apparently hid his feelings for Donna so well that it was a secret even from her.

“I really thought you knew,” he says, his voice a bit weak as his stomach flips over, imagining how it must have looked from Donna’s perspective.

“I really thought you didn’t know,” she fires back immediately. “You can’t just— You can’t say ‘eight years’ and expect me to leave it at that! When did you know, exactly?”

“Inauguration Day,” he says without having to think about it. “The first one.”

Her eyebrows crease as she considers his answer, probably going over her own memories of that day. “At the balls that night?’

Josh shakes his head without moving his gaze from her face. “No, earlier in the day, when we did that tour of the office and you were so excited about your desk, and that silly print-out with your name on it, taped to the wall of your cubicle.”

Her eyes are still distant, but she smiles like it’s a reflex, like she can’t help but smile when remembering that first day of the Bartlet administration. He smiles along with her, no choice but to smile when Donna smiles.

“And I realized, standing there watching you go on and on about your new desk in the White House, that I’d probably just made the best and worst decision of my entire life, bringing you with me into that job,” he says, running his thumb over her knuckles and thinking about the moment that’s been crystal clear in his memory for nearly eight years now. “Because we would get to do all of that together: get a good man elected President and then work to change the country under his leadership. What felt, at the time, like the most important jobs we’d ever have. And I’d get to see you every day, probably spend more time with you than with anyone else, strategy meetings and late nights and out of town trips and nearly every meal, for at least four years, eight if we were lucky and worked harder than we’d ever worked.

“But it also meant that I couldn’t tell you, couldn’t tell anybody, couldn’t do anything about those feelings until we were out of the White House. All I could do was try to keep a lid on it and focus on the work, and try to distract and misdirect whenever it started to get too obvious.” He meets Donna’s gaze to find her studying his face, that recalibrating look shifting into something more contemplative. “I really thought you knew,” he says again, his voice barely above a murmur. “That you, I don’t know, figured it out somewhere along the way, I guess. That we’d silently agreed to leave it unspoken.”

She shakes her head and looks away. “I always managed to convince myself that I was reading too much into every little thing you did,” she says wryly. “That I was letting my own feelings color my perception of reality. This... puts things into a slightly different perspective. Might even explain why you kept going back to Amy.”

“You dated plenty over the last eight years, too,” he says, but he manages to make it more curious than accusatory.

“Well, yeah, to try to get over you,” Donna says, flashing him a fragile smile. “Exactly the same as I was planning to do when the wheels inevitably came off this— whatever it is we’re doing.”

“Donna,” he says gently, and waits until she looks over at him, unable to stop the smile spreading across his face. “The wheels aren’t going to come off this.”

She traces her gaze over his face searchingly. “You’re sure?” she asks, her voice breaking on the last word.

He nods and kisses the back of her hand again, feeling her let out a shuddering sigh. “Turns out it’s hard to sustain a relationship when you’re in love with someone else,” he tells her against her skin. “Won’t be a problem this time,” he adds, and can’t help but grin up at her. “I’m all in on this. And there’s more left on my list, you know.”

“More?” she asks in disbelief. “Beyond— where are we at now? In love, living together, never breaking up? What else—?”

“No, hang on,” he interrupts her, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat and utterly unable to keep his grin from sliding towards smug. “We are in love, Donnatella? Are you really going to claim to be part of that we without making your own confession, or so much as admit to your feelings out loud?”

She blows out an unsteady huff of air. “You’re not the only one who got far too good at hiding their feelings, Joshua.”

It’s clearly a deflection, obvious that she’s not quite ready to talk about it, so rather than push her on it, he says, “That’s something else I can add to my list of things I don’t want: I don’t ever want to have to hide my feelings for you again. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime. I’d rather run another Presidential campaign right now, on zero sleep and no access to caffeine, than ever have to do that again.”

Donna laughs and presses her forehead to his shoulder, but her voice sounds watery and quavering beneath the laughter. “I don’t want to hide any more, either.” She leans back only far enough to look him in the eye and says, “I love you, Josh. I’ve been in love with you for—” she cracks a smile, lopsided and genuine, even as her eyes glimmer with a hint of tears, “—something like eight years, now.”

He has to kiss her at that, twisting in his seat to try to find the best angle so he can show her just what it means to finally hear that from her.

“Something like eight years, huh?” he asks when they separate.

“Something like,” she confirms, leaning back into her seat and pressing her shoulder to his. “I couldn’t admit it to myself for a long time, but in hindsight, I know it’s one of the reasons I came back to the campaign that April.”

He turns that bit of information over in his mind, thinks back to how relieved he was when Donna walked back into the Nashua office in 1998, after he all but convinced himself he was never going to see her again — thinks about all the years he sent her flowers in April, how he couldn’t help but mark that anniversary. “When did you admit it to yourself?” he asks softly.

“When you were—” She stops abruptly, not meeting his gaze, her free hand idly toying with the cup of orange juice she’d requested from the flight attendant, balanced on her tray table. “When you were in surgery,” she says evenly, without any particular emotion, “and Toby told me it was critical.”

Toby once vaguely alluded to that conversation in the GW waiting room, and having lived through his own version of it in Germany, Josh can fill in the rest well enough on his own to understand what she means, how that would’ve been the moment when she couldn’t deny it anymore. He squeezes Donna’s hand, like he did when he woke up in a hospital bed, like he did when she woke up in hers. All those years keeping his love for her a secret, she was doing the same. She had been his all along, even when neither of them could acknowledge it.

“And you’re really going to try to tell me,” he says in that same soft tone, fighting to keep the growing sense of victory out of his voice, “that I didn’t want to ask you to move in with me, way back then?”

“Josh,” she scoffs, in a tone that means she absolutely can hear his smugness anyway.

“Only, I couldn’t, ‘cause that would have been inappropriate,” he says, smiling at her. “So I’m asking you now. Move in with me? Or, you know— help me pick out a place where we can live together?”

It should be an easy yes from her, given that they seem to be on the same page, given that she just admitted to being in love with him for almost as long as he’s been in love with her — but instead Donna hesitates, opening her mouth to reply before apparently thinking better of it and clicking her jaw shut again, and Josh abruptly realizes that she isn’t smiling back at him.

“Donna,” he says, leaning forward to try to catch her eye. “I thought we were—”

“No, it’s not—” she starts, holding up her free hand to stop him, then huffs out a breath and tries again. “I want to live together, Josh, I do. It’s just— I’m still not convinced we’re not moving too fast.”

“Moving too fast after eight years?”

“Eight years of not actually talking about any of this!”

“Because we couldn’t!”

“And then this last year of hardly talking at all, until suddenly we’re doing this—”

“Can we not,” he demands, cutting her off, “invoke all those months when I was convinced that you hated me?”

“You want to talk about moving in together, but you don’t want to talk about the misunderstanding that—”

“It was a pretty big misunderstanding!”

“Yes, because I didn’t know you were in love with me!” she snaps, bringing him up short. “Because I was nursing a broken heart and what I thought were unrequited feelings, for nearly a decade, and dating hadn’t helped me get over you! Casual flings hadn’t helped, trying to throw myself into serious relationships hadn’t helped, and trying to do more in my job in the West Wing hadn’t helped. Nothing helped, Josh! I couldn’t get over you. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I left. And that still didn’t help.”

“Donna,” he starts, when she pauses to swat away a tear rolling down her cheek, but before he can say anything else, she shakes her head.

“I never hated you, Josh. Not even when we were barely talking. But then you kissed me, and then you apologized for it, and I— I didn’t know what to think! Except that maybe none of this means as much to you as it does to me.”

“Of course it does! Why would you think—”

“I thought you were going to break up with me!”

“What?” he says, utterly baffled. “When?”

“When you called me on your way back from California, after going to see Sam, and you said we needed to talk. Except I wasn’t sure if I could even really think of it as a break up, since I didn’t know if this actually qualified as a relationship in the first place!”

“And yet you apparently checked my schedule or tracked my flight or whatever, and came over the moment I got home, very intent on not talking!”

“I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted, Josh! And then I woke up alone in your bed, and all I could think to do was give you a graceful way out of this that might not completely ruin our friendship!”

“That’s what the time window thing was about??”

“Yes! And I could tell you were panicking about it, and then this morning you said there was no way you could possibly meet my four week deadline, and somehow now you have it all figured out??”

“I had it all figured out this morning!”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Because a random hallway at the OEOB didn't seem like the right place to propose!” Josh snaps, the words flying out of him before he can think about what he's saying. “Because I couldn’t even start to get my head around where the right place would be or all the things we needed to talk about first, until Sam all but fired me from my own transition team!”

“You were going to propose?” Donna asks, the disbelief in her voice cutting through his tirade.

“Not this morning, no!”

“And now?”

“No! Wait, no— that is objectively the wrong answer— I just mean, I was thinking something more like— like a walk on the beach at sunset, or a romantic restaurant or, or, I don’t know, standing on the lip of a volcano or something! Not at thirty-eight thousand feet somewhere above the flyover states!”

“I'm from a flyover state, Josh.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re not over Wisconsin right now!”

“And that’s what’s stopping you from proposing??”

“Nothing’s stopping me!”

A familiar noise of frustration escapes her. “Josh! I love you, I really do, but we have to be honest with ourselves about this! We don’t need to set a new world speed record for jumping through every stage of a relationship in a week!”

“I am being honest!”

“Then let's focus on the living together topic and not throw around words like propose when you don’t really mean it!”

“Who says I don’t—!” He stops talking abruptly, too frustrated to continue. This argument is patently ridiculous and he can prove it to her. He frees his hand from hers with the intention of putting up his seatback tray, only to realize that the tray is still holding the bag of peanuts and little plastic cup of soda that Donna got for him. Without pausing, he tosses back all the liquid in the cup without really tasting it, then puts the empty cup and the peanuts on Donna’s tray table and snaps his tray back into place.

“Josh, I didn’t mean—” she starts.

“Apparently I’ve given you a whole lot of reasons to underestimate my commitment here, and I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says, leaning forward to pull his duffle bag out from under the seat in front of him. He unzips it on muscle memory, reaches in and finds the internal zipper pocket, quickly opening it without needing to see it, and pulls out the sole object from inside. It’s small, fitting into the curve of his palm naturally, but even now it doesn’t feel like his, it never really did — it always belonged to Donna, even when she didn’t know it. In one motion he pulls it free of the bag and plunks it down on the corner of her tray table, vaguely registering movement out of the corner of his eye as she quickly snatches up her orange juice to keep it from sloshing over the edge of her cup, while he zips his duffle bag closed again and kicks it back under the seat.

“I don’t have to pretend that I’m ready for a long-term relationship,” he says, leaning back in his seat and looking at Donna, “or whatever nonsense Amy was spouting the other day after the wake. Not with you. I am done pretending when it comes to you. The longest term you’ve got, baby, that’s what I want from you. That’s what I want us to want from each other.”

Donna is sitting stock still, her cup curled protectively toward her chest as she stares, pale and unblinking, at the small black velvet box he placed in the corner of her tray table. “Josh,” she manages after a moment, her voice choked and barely audible.

He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, trying to calm his galloping heartbeat, and it occurs to him that he let go of Donna’s hand in his rush to produce the one thing that might serve as adequate evidence of the depth of his feelings for her. Moving slowly, cautiously, he gently laces their fingers together again, relieved when she grips his hand firmly, even as her gaze remains fixed on the black velvet box.

“Listen,” he says carefully, “I know I’ve been rushing Sam, trying to get him to say yes to the DCoS position, but that’s just because we literally do not have the time for him to dither around on this, especially when it seems so completely impossible that he’d say no, that we could possibly run this administration without him— But anyway, that’s not the point. My point is: this isn’t me rushing you. I’m not trying to set a world speed record, or make your feelings fit into my calendar, or give you any sort of ultimatum, or anything like that. I just— I need you to know that I am serious about this. The absolute maximum amount of serious possible, when it comes to us. And I knew I was exactly this level of serious about it the moment you brought up the time window. I just couldn’t think clearly enough to figure out what to do about it until I was out of the transition office and packing to go on this trip with you.”

He can see Donna’s hand shaking as she tips up her orange juice and drinks it quickly, her gaze immediately returning to the little velvet box. Without taking her eyes off it, she stacks her empty cup inside his and then curls the fingers of her right hand around the edge of the tray table, not quite touching the proof he’s presented to her.

“Is that—?” she asks in a small voice.

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“And it’s for me?”

He smiles, sad and fond, at the incredulity in her voice. “It was always yours, Donna. It was always meant for you. There’s never been anyone else I could have possibly given it to.”

She looks over at him, her gaze tracing across his face even as her expression remains fixed in that look of shocked disbelief. “So this isn’t a fling in Hawaii?”

“No,” he agrees, shaking his head.

“And you’re not going to break up with me?”

“Never,” he assures her, squeezing her hand.

“And you don’t want me to, I don’t know— quit my job? Not work in the White House?”

The idea is ridiculous, and he suspects that deep down Donna knows that. But this moment seems to be about reassuring her, and so he answers with a simple and honest, “Of course not.”

“And you were going to— You brought this with you to propose?” she asks, her gaze sliding back to the little box.

“I didn’t have some grand plan I was going to ambush you with,” he admits ruefully. “But I knew I wanted to have the conversation, so it seemed like a good idea to bring it along.”

“When did you know?”

“Inauguration Day 1999,” Josh replies, and grins at her when she looks up at him again, then adds, unable to stop himself: “And when you took me to the emergency room to get my hand stitched up. And then again on Inauguration Day 2003. When you were going into surgery in Germany and asked to see me, and when you woke up from surgery and said my name. When you kissed me back after that national polling, and then like five separate times on election day. When you told me we had a four week window to figure this out, and all I could think was I never want to be your ex. Earlier today, when Sam told me in no uncertain terms that I needed to get a life. After I called you and asked you to come with me to Hawaii, and part of me was convinced that this was the only thing I actually needed to pack—”

Donna leans over the armrest and kisses him, ending his impromptu list in the best way possible. When they part, he presses his forehead to hers, not yet ready to put any space between them.

“If you think we’re moving too fast,” he murmurs quietly, “or if you’ve, I don’t know, developed a distaste for marriage as an institution or something — we don’t have to do this. But that ring is yours, Donna. It’s been yours for a long time now.”

She leans back only far enough to look him in the eye, that considering, recalibrating expression resolving little by little. “Can I see it?” she asks in a matching tone.

With the fingers of her left hand still laced with his right, it ends up taking both of them to open the hinged lid of the black velvet box, Josh holding the base of the box while Donna lifts the top. He doesn’t need to look down at the ring, he’s seen it more times than he can count, so he watches her face instead, watches a parade of emotions tick past in each little twitch of her eyebrows and curl of her mouth.

“Josh,” she says after a moment, still staring down at the box. “Josh, this is your mother’s ring.”

“Yeah,” he breathes out, weirdly relieved that she recognized it without him having to explain. “She gave it to me, to give to you.”

Donna glances from the ring to him and back. “I... When?”

“That Thanksgiving after she moved to Florida. She sat me down and told me that she wanted me to have her wedding ring, that she wanted me to give it to someone who would make me as happy as my dad had made her. And she said it with such a— a heavy implication that she knew that person was you, that I... kind of ended up telling her everything.”

“Josh, that was five years ago.”

“Yeah.”

“So every time I’ve talked to your mom in the last five years—??”

“...Yeah.” His mother knew how he felt about Donna, but she also understood all the reasons he couldn’t act on it. She’d kept his secret, but that hadn’t stopped her from privately considering Donna to be family, the last five years.

Donna hesitates, then runs the pad of one finger over the platinum setting, the square center diamond flanked by smaller matching stones. “You’ve had this for five years, and you were just... waiting?”

He nods. “And I’ll keep waiting, if that’s what you want,” he says quietly. It’s absolutely not what he wants, but he’ll wait the rest of his life for Donna to be ready, if that’s what it takes.

What he wants from her, what he wants for this relationship, can’t be so simply contained in a word like marriage. It’s not about the labels, or the legal standing, or any sort of societal expectation, and as much as he loves the idea of being married to Donna, he would happily give it up if it meant he got to keep her in his life. He would give up pretty much anything to keep his promise to never be her ex. Whatever it takes, so long as he never has to be separated from her. He doesn’t want another misunderstanding to ever come between them because he kept his feelings from her. He never wants her to doubt how strong his feelings are for her, not ever again.

“No,” Donna says, raising her eyes to his. It takes him a moment to catch up with what she’s saying, but before he can voice his confusion, she clarifies, “I don’t want to keep waiting. I think we’ve made each other wait long enough. I think...” She bites her lip, a smile starting to spread across her face. “I think you should ask me.”

“Yeah?” he breathes, dumbstruck.

She nods, smiling properly. “Definitely.”

And then she gently untangles their hands and turns to face him, raising her eyebrows expectantly.

“...Wait, now?” Josh demands when he finally realizes what she’s implying. “You wouldn’t rather wait until we actually get to Hawaii? Do this someplace, I don’t know, more romantic?”

“This is plenty romantic!”

“Coach seats on a red-eye flight is your definition of romantic?”

“Well not when you put it that way,” she huffs. “But just, look out that window, Josh.” She gestures behind him, and he turns to look, genuinely trying to understand the way she sees the world, the way she sees this moment. “We’ve got a sky full of stars and all those twinkling lights down below. And the old-school romanticism of winging our way silently through the night while the world sleeps, knowing that in the morning, we’ll step off the plane and into somewhere completely new.”

“You know planes aren’t actually silent, right?” he teases, turning away from the — admittedly — beautiful sight out the window and back to the even better one sitting beside him.

Donna waves away his interjection. “And just think about how often we’ve been here before, the two of us. Late night cross-country flights, huddled together working under our little reading lights until I fall asleep on your shoulder? That’s romantic, Josh, all of it. Besides, it could be years before we’re able to get away to Hawaii again, but we know we’ll be right back here, at thirty-eight thousand feet, plenty of times in the future. And every time, I’ll be able to say: this is where you proposed.”

He has to take a moment to just look at her, to memorize the way she looks right now, glowing under the dim cabin lighting, to memorize the way she’s looking at him, without a hint of recalibrating, without any of her confidence-as-a-shield, with nothing but love in her eyes as she gazes back at him, unhurried and unafraid.

“God, I love you,” he says, the words tumbling out of him without conscious thought.

Her smile turns a little mischievous. “I know.”

That isn’t just an acknowledgement of his feelings, Josh realizes with stark clarity. She really knows now, finally. After eight long years of keeping his feelings for her secret, eight long years of Donna convincing herself that he couldn’t possibly love her in return, she finally knows what this means to him. She’s stopped questioning it, stopped doubting him, stopped wondering where this thing between them is headed. She knows. And she loves him back. She doesn’t want to wait anymore, and Josh is gripped with the sudden conviction that this can’t possibly happen soon enough.

Tearing his eyes away from her, he looks down at the little velvet box still clutched in his hand, trying to come up with the right words, with any words, to voice the most important question of his life. But he was never a speech writer, he’s never been any good at that kind of planned eloquence, only the kind that just sort of spontaneously happens sometimes when he opens his mouth and says exactly what he means. The nervousness that ripples through him is incongruous with the current moment, and yet he can’t help the way his heart rate kicks up. He knows she’s going to say yes, and she’s already declared the circumstances to be plenty romantic, all he has to do now is open his mouth and say what he means.

Sure. No pressure.

But first: this was always a holding-hands conversation, so he scoops Donna’s left hand up with his right again, cradling her palm against his rather than lacing their fingers together this time, and takes courage from the way she clings to him. “Donnatella Moss,” he says, looking up and meeting her gaze. “I’ve been in love with you for a really long time now, and I don’t want to keep it a secret anymore. I don’t want you to ever doubt how much I love you, and I don’t ever want to face a future without you in it.” Across the armrest from him, Donna is watching him with rapt attention, her eyes starting to fill with tears — which makes his throat tighten in response, nearly overwhelmed by the realization that this is actually happening, right now. And yet he still hasn’t managed to ask the all-important question, his brain having decided to take a rambling and circuitous route to the point. “I don’t want to wait anymore,” he says before his emotions can get the best of him. “Marry me? Please?”

Donna holds his gaze for a long moment, then takes a breath and blinks her tears away. “Yes, Josh,” she says, nodding enthusiastically. “I would really, very much, like to marry you.”

Josh grins at her, because he can’t not, and kisses her swiftly before maneuvering his mother’s ring out of the box it’s lived in for the past five years and onto Donna’s left ring finger, where it was always meant to be. She turns her hand, watching the way her ring catches the light, and he can feel her breath hitch in her chest.

“I really am going to cry now,” she tells him, turning towards him and away from the sight of the engagement ring on her finger, where he’s dreamed of it being for so long, “so you better kiss me again, quick.”

He does as she asks, laughing with a lightheaded sort of joy even as he brushes her tears away with his thumbs. He hadn’t envisioned this, when he was packing and riding in the cab and waiting at the gate, hadn’t been able to think further than telling Donna that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But somehow this is exactly right, exactly what he didn’t know he was longing for in all those years when he couldn’t tell her how he felt. It was always going to be like this: the two of them on the move together, bantering and arguing and finally finding a way to be honest with each other. Nearly a decade of knowing her, of quietly loving her, and it was all always leading to this.

Not that this is any sort of ending, he knows. It’s just the next step. It’s what’s next.

And he couldn’t be happier.

To be continued in The Calendar's End

#The West Wing #TWW fanfic #Josh and Donna #Josh x Donna #Donna x Josh #Josh Lyman #Donna Moss #Joshua Lyman #Donnatella Moss #please comment and reblog!#available on AO3 under the same title and username #The Don't List #The Scrapbook Of All Our Days #which is the name of the series that I will hopefully be continuing on from here #my writing #my fanfic

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