He knows she doesn't tell him everything, and if he's honest with himself he's glad of it. He doesn't really want to know what Admiral Fitzwallace looked like in the instant before he died, or whether Colin whispered her name when he came inside of her in a Gaza hotel room. Josh is quite capable of torturing himself without embroidering the mental images with added detail.

Besides, he has his own secrets, his own private burdens, and when it comes to emotional baggage he prefers to carry his own luggage. So he doesn't blame Donna for not sharing.

That doesn't stop him from wondering, though, about what's at work behind her eyes when she stops short in the middle of the sidewalk on a bright sunny day and grips his hand so tightly it hurts. He knows she can tell that he's wondering, too, which makes him crazy, because she knows him so well and keeps things from him precisely because of it. But he just squeezes
her hand back and places a soft kiss on her cheek and lets it be. Her grateful smile is his reward for not prying.

They can talk in circles for hours and hours about the most trivial of things, but when it comes to the dark buried demons of their souls they are silent as the grave. Josh wonders if that's weird, then decides he doesn't know enough about relationships to question it.

But when they make love -- god, when they make love -- she tells him everything he needs to know, with her mouth, and her body, and her breath. The first time they had sex he'd looked down at her and seen for an instant her face the way it had looked in the hospital,
scratched and bruised and pale and drawn. He pushed the false image away with an effort and focused on the way her warm, trembling body was arching beneath him, the rosy blush on her chest, the ecstatic smile
that kept tugging at the corners of her parted lips. When she came it sounded to his ears like a battle cry, his Valkyrie risen from the dead. He thrust triumphantly inside of her, the blinding force of his own orgasm keeping any darkness at bay.

Whenever he called Joanie names as a child, she'd snap "takes one to know one," and Josh finally knows how true that is. When Donna wakes from a particularly virulent nightmare he holds her close and murmurs, "I know, I know," into her hair, and she whispers "thank you" because she knows he isn't mouthing empty words. He hates that she understands him so well, now, wishes he could take all of her pain inside of him and add it on to his weight. He hates that her inner light has been ravaged by shadows. But there is only so much he can do, so he wraps his arms around her and she interlocks her limbs with his, the two of them tangled up together in a cocoon of sadness and guilt.

He's better than he used to be, of course, but doesn't think he'll ever truly be free. There's too much, now: Joanie, the shooting, sitting by Donna's hospital bed praying for her to wake up and recognize him. Fire and chaos and despair fighting for space in his head. So when an ambulance siren is particularly loud, or when he cuts his finger and blood clots thick and dark
on his skin, he breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth and then Donna embraces him from behind and helps him remain upright. He knows that sometimes she sees herself as weak, but to him she is
terrifyingly strong.

He always knew he needed Donna on some level, loath as he was to admit it, but it wasn't until her accident that he realized he actually needed her to breathe. His chest aches when he remembers sitting in the hospital hallway, waiting for her to come out of surgery, and feeling as if he cannot completely fill his lungs with air no matter how hard he tries. His throat constricts and his shoulders hurt and he wonders, briefly, if he is having a heart attack. In the thick of night, weary with sleep deprivation, he wonders if the doctor will let him pull out his own lung and give it to Donna, since he doesn't seem to be able to use his anyway.

Even though time has passed he still feels that way occasionally, feels as if he is only truly drawing air into his lungs when she is beside him, when he can watch the sun glint off her golden hair and the blue sky reflect in her eyes. He suspects that's unhealthy, but is too suffused with relief to care.

Sometimes when he dreams about the fire it is not the flames, but rather the water that is his downfall. He is hauling buckets and buckets of water, throwing
it onto the fire, but the conflagration keeps raging beyond his control, incinerating his sister and his home in a blaze of terrifying destruction. The water is
unimaginably heavy, and he is soaked to the bone, but still he keeps trying, getting wetter and wetter, until finally the water coats him completely, filling his nose and mouth and lungs. He wakes gasping for air, coughing in fright, and then Donna is there,
holding him close and whispering his name until his breathing returns to normal. He clings to her like the frightened child he once was, the warmth of her
skin and the achingly familiar scent of her grounding him to reality.

She loves him, he knows. And sometimes that's the only thing that keeps him from drowning.

End.