In the dream

In her dream she was the first to arrive. She stood and watched helplessly, uselessly, as they ran, wheeling him in, as he mumbled something that sounded like her name, like an accusation. She stood, in her dream as she had in reality: speechless, her hand clamped over her mouth.

But in her dream, she was the first one there and as each person arrived she said the words herself. Josh was hit. It's critical. In the dream she said it deadpan, delivered as though it were an inconsequential inconvenience.

Hit. Critical. Critical. Critical...

In the dream, no one hugged her either. In the dream they nodded and went on their way, walking calmly to the room where they would wait, and wait, and wait. In the dream she spoke calmly and her knees did not buckle under her and she asked no ridiculous questions. In the dream a nurse eventually came over to her, when the last of them had walked calmly to the waiting room, and she offered her a glass of water, and inexplicably asked if she was his wife, and that was when Donna began to cry. And the nurse did what none of the others had done; she slipped one arm around Donna's shoulder and led her to a chair.

She didn't know why she wasn't following the others, except that even in her dream she was dimly aware of a sense of betrayal, a sense of injustice. The nurse offered no empty words of meaningless comfort, no he's going to be okay that no-one suspected to be true, but just for a minute or two someone had taken care of her and in the dream for those two minutes she was aware of her shoulders lightening. But she woke up to the sensation of falling, to the familiar nausea tightening her stomach, to her shoulders sighing again under the weight of responsibility, to the sobs convulsing her body, to a haunting loneliness that she knew would never leave her if he didn't live.

The meaning of nothing

The dress plunges low, low, down to the small of her back and when he puts his hand there to gently guide her toward the dining hall he is surprised to be touching skin.

"Josh, it's okay," she says, and he realizes he has instinctively pulled his hand away.

"I didn't - " he says, and then he stops, because how is he going to finish that sentence? I didn't expect to touch you? I didn't expect your skin to be so soft? Or, worse, I didn't want you to think - careless words that would mean exactly what they both knew them to mean, and before the minute was over they would be stuck in that cycle of theirs, she wanting him to say it, he desperately trying to avoid saying it.

"Didn't what?" She turns her innocent blue eyes toward him. So not saying anything is clearly not going to work either.

"I didn't expect your back to be there," he says, a note of pleading in his voice.

"You thought I was a disembodied dress?"

Sometimes, he thinks, that would make my life simpler. If there were no body.

"Yes, Donna," he says, impressing her, he hopes, with his newfound ability to laugh at himself. "That's exactly what I thought."

"You crack me up," she says, not cracking up, and then adds in a low voice, perhaps a little drunk already, "A little skin to skin contact is going to kills us?"

"It might."

Here we go, he thinks, and sure enough.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing."

She's stopped walking. He turns his head back to her and sees that the front of the dress has one of those ruched necklines. Ruched? Where did he learn that word?

"Why did you stop walking?"

"Because you always do that."

"Always do what?" Though of course he knows. But maybe the Bambi thing will work for him too.

"You always almost say it."

"Say what?"

He is aware of his quickening pulse. If she puts words to it, the game is over. And in the absence of anything beyond the game, he likes the game.

"Nothing," she says, playing too, refusing the risk too. But she looks into his eyes as she says it, as though she were confident that his nothing meant the same as hers, or perhaps as though she were gambling everything on that one word.

He holds out his arm and she takes it, and he seriously considers dancing with her later.