Fic: "Only So An Hour" (SportsNight)
For phoebesmum. Prompt was schmoopy romantic Dan/Casey or Dan/OMC; I went with OMC. I hope this is enjoyable for you!
Title from Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
The way things are now is how you convince yourself things are always going to be. It's a trick the mind plays to protect itself. Dan's familiar with most of the mind's repertoire in that department. He's been to an ever-increasing string of therapists who specialize in breaking those tricks down and exposing the man behind the curtain.
The notion of constancy is one of the more basic self-deceptions, though, and Dan doesn't see much chance of losing it. Where you are is where you are, until you look up and find yourself somewhere else. When he was at SportsNight he couldn't imagine ever being anywhere but at the desk with Casey, Dana's voice in his earpiece, his own words in front of him.
And then one day that was over, and he was somewhere else--NBC, it was a good gig; he made it to the Olympics in '04, and seeing Casey on ESPN didn't even sting--and he thought that would be forever. Or at least long enough for him to feel like he'd managed to successfully get his shit together.
Well. Realistically, getting his shit together was a long-term project, but the point was that he'd thought that in front of the cameras was where he would be for more or less forever. He'd just assumed.
Life didn't take much interest in his assumptions, as it turned out.
"Dan?"
He looks up from his notebook, rolling his pen slowly between his fingers and blinking until Paul comes into focus above the rims of his glasses. "Yeah?"
"Heads or tails?"
Dan blinks again, letting the pen fall to his lap. "What?"
"I can't decide what to make for dinner, so I'm going to flip for it. Heads or tails?"
"Why don't you just tell me what the options are?"
"It's more fun this way." Paul shrugs and holds up a quarter, his mouth curving in the crooked half-grin that was how Dan recognized him when they met again, a year and a half after Athens. (He should give Athens more credit, in terms of changing everything, turning the way he thought things would always be on its head and sending him stumbling into a whole new world. Three years too late for some things, not that they would've worked anyway, but still in time for others. Good others. Others he's glad to have.
Paul is still looking at him expectantly. He probably should say something.)
"You and your fun," he says, picking up his pen again. "Heads."
Paul flips the coin, catches it, slaps it against the back of his opposite hand. "Heads it is."
"Which food option goes with heads?"
"Caesar salad and grilled chicken breasts."
Dan groans softly and flips to a clean page in his notebook, glancing at Paul again. "You're my favorite."
"Yeah, I know." Paul nods at the notebook. "Which one is that?"
"What?"
"Hold it up so I can see the cover." Dan obliges and Paul clicks his tongue against his teeth rapidly. "Let's see, blue is the novel, red is the memoir, so green must be...Daniel."
"Shut up."
"I'm not arguing with you, I'm just once again registering my objection on the grounds that it's slightly demented."
"Demented is strong wording, my friend."
"You're writing a thesis-length treatise on why you hate soccer. It's demented."
"I have supporters."
"You have crazy people who agree with you on your blog."
"Don't diss my blog, Paul. My blog is very important to me."
"Your blog is where you post deliberately provocative opinions so you can laugh at people on the Internet."
Dan grins and lets the notebook fall closed again. "Say that again."
"What?"
"Provocative. I like that word coming from you."
Paul rolls his eyes and throws the quarter at Dan's head. "You like the concept coming from me, because mentally you're about twelve years old."
"I have actual certification from a neurologist saying otherwise, buddy."
Paul sighs and rakes his fingers through his hair, his smile vanishing somewhere in the middle of the motion. "You have to make defensive jokes about that?"
"Yes, I do." Dan uncaps his pen, and draws a row of triangles down the notebook cover. "An entire section of the memoir is going to be nothing but defensive jokes about that."
"Brain damage isn't funny."
"I know it won't play in Peoria, but I'm aiming for a more East Coast audience anyway. And I don't have brain damage. My neurologist says so."
Paul rolls his eyes again and steps back. Dan once kept track for an entire day of how many times Paul rolled his eyes, just in the interest of science, not realizing that science's interests were counterproductive to his own until Paul handed him his car keys at the end of the evening and wished him a safe drive back to his own place. Subtlety, thy name is not, never has been, and never shall be Rydell. "You should come inside in about half an hour."
"Why?"
"Casey McCall's interviewing Michael Phelps."
Dan opens the notebook again, flipping through the pages carefully until he finds a blank one. "Oh."
"The TiVo alert thing told me."
"You set a TiVo alert for Michael Phelps?"
"Yeah, and so did you, and you also have one set for Casey."
"Oh, right."
"Right." Paul shakes his head, but Dan can see that he's smiling. "Half an hour."
Dan rolls his pen between his fingers again, then points it at Paul. "Is it weird for you?"
"Is what weird for me?"
"Watching the Olympics. Instead of, you know, being at the Olympics."
"No." Paul shrugs and runs his hand through his hair again. "I'm retired. You don't get to play in the Olympics if you're retired. It's in the rulebook. Pretty close to the beginning, actually, I think."
"Smartass."
"Takes one to know one." Paul pauses for a moment, then steps closer, reaching out to brush his fingers over Dan's shoulder. "I mean, is it weird for you? You were in Athens, too, and there's no reason you couldn't be covering this one."
Dan smiles a little and draws a thick, dark line down the center of the page, and feels his mouth twist into something vaguely like a smile. "I'm retired."
"You could come out of retirement with one phone call."
"A phone call, some plastic surgery, a quick trip to PR rehab, completely re-learning how to deal with cameras..."
Paul settles two fingers over Dan's lips, cutting him off. "That's all in your head."
"My head's a very complicated place."
"Jesus, you don't have to tell me." Paul steps back and retrieves the quarter from the floor next to Dan's seat. "Half an hour."
Dan nods and turns to the next clean page, uncapping the pen and licking his lip with determination. He has absolutely nothing to say about soccer at the moment. Instead, he writes the same thing he always writes when he has nothing to say.
June 15, 2005, 10:43 PM
The accident wasn't so much a turning point as a tipping point, the moment where all the things in his life he'd been precariously balancing for all those years got shifted violently to the side and fell. The biggest changes weren't physical; the scarring wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been and it turned out that a hell of a lot of world-class specialists in recovery from closed-head injuries were either sports fans or sportscaster-fans and the one was as good as the other. He really did have that clean bill from his neurologist that he used to win arguments with Paul. His brain was fine and his face only needed a good makeup artist and a better lighting guy.
As always, it was the mental that tripped him up, the psychological, the lurking ghosts in the machinery of his head. He flinched from the thought of cameras. He canceled appointments with plastic surgeons or didn't bother to cancel and just went to get coffee instead. He sat down to write and the only things that would come out had nothing to do with sports.
So he wrote those instead, to his agent's despair and consternation, and he spent a lot of time sitting by the window in his apartment and watching the pigeons, and he fully intended to continue doing exactly those things and nothing else until Jeremy and Natalie dragged him to a charity thing sponsored by ESPN and somebody in event planning seated him next to a beach volleyball player from the Athens games who turned out to have a familiar crooked smile.
And the rest, as boring people who fell back on cliches instead of going for a twist in their writing would say, was history. A lot of wine and a half-finished novel and a two-thirds finished memoir and quiet encouragement and a few shouting fights and the most incredibly awkward first time on a couch in recorded history and oh yeah, somewhere in there, a sexual identity crisis, but a very small one, especially in comparison to the whole-life renovation and makeover going on at the same time.
And then you wake up one morning, he writes underneath the date, and everything's different. It all changed when you weren't looking, and now this feels like the way things are, this feels like forever.
"Dan?" Paul shouts from the kitchen.
"Yeah?"
"Where's the thing?"
"The thing?"
"Yeah. Not the green thing, the metal thing."
Dan runs through the list of kitchen items they own that are best described as "thing," silently wonders if he has to kill himself because they have a couple's shorthand for their kitchen items, decides he doesn't want to die on an empty stomach, and calls back "Second drawer, in the back."
"I bet you five bucks that McCall's first question is how it felt to win eight medals."
Dan snaps his notebook shut and stands up. "Casey won't ask him that."
"So you're taking the bet?"
"That's a hack question. Casey won't ask it."
"They all ask it."
"Exactly. Because they're hacks."
"So what will he ask instead?"
Dan crosses the apartment to the kitchen and thinks for a moment. "When you were standing up there, watching the flag go up and hearing the Star Spangled Banner--for the eighth time--what went through your head? Was it different from, you know, the first seven times?"
Paul pauses and stares at him. "That was a truly eerie impression of Casey McCall."
Dan shrugs, feeling heat rise in his face. "I'm familiar with his material."
"I know. Please never do that again."
Ducking behind the refrigerator door provides a handy hiding place. "You want a beer?"
"Sure." Paul glances at him and then away. "What would you ask him?"
Dan pauses, shifting both bottles to one hand. "Probably the same thing."
"No, you wouldn't." Paul shakes his head. "You guys don't have the same style at all. Come on, what would you ask as your first question?"
Dan closes the refrigerator slowly. "What his plan's going to be the next time he gets in the pool."
"Isn't that more of a last question?"
"Exactly. Throw it out there at the beginning, mix things up a little. Throw him off guard." He pops the top off his beer and takes a long swallow. "Plus I'm just honestly curious. Where do you go from the top?"
Paul nods and leans against the counter. "Can't stay there forever."
"No. But figuring out where to go next, that's...well, that's a lifetime, you know?" Dan hands him the other beer, letting his fingers slide against Paul's, cool and slick from the bottles. "So I'd just ask him about the next trip to the pool."
"You're going all wise Zen master in your old age." Paul leans in and kisses him softly. "Go turn the TV on. I'll be right in."
"You're going to watch too?"
"Of course I am. I'm going to owe you five bucks when you're right about McCall's question, and I'm going to admire all the clips of Phelps doing his thing, and then I'm going to make you watch beach volleyball."
"You've got a whole plan going there."
"Yes, I do." Paul grins at him and turns back to the stove. "Put a chapter in your book about that, Rydell."
"Oh, there will be." Dan smiles at the back of Paul's head, thinking about what that chapter will say. That's his next trip to the pool, right there; the words on paper to tell the story of how he ended up where he is right now, balancing here on this particular precipice over forever. "If you're lucky, maybe even two."
Title from Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
The way things are now is how you convince yourself things are always going to be. It's a trick the mind plays to protect itself. Dan's familiar with most of the mind's repertoire in that department. He's been to an ever-increasing string of therapists who specialize in breaking those tricks down and exposing the man behind the curtain.
The notion of constancy is one of the more basic self-deceptions, though, and Dan doesn't see much chance of losing it. Where you are is where you are, until you look up and find yourself somewhere else. When he was at SportsNight he couldn't imagine ever being anywhere but at the desk with Casey, Dana's voice in his earpiece, his own words in front of him.
And then one day that was over, and he was somewhere else--NBC, it was a good gig; he made it to the Olympics in '04, and seeing Casey on ESPN didn't even sting--and he thought that would be forever. Or at least long enough for him to feel like he'd managed to successfully get his shit together.
Well. Realistically, getting his shit together was a long-term project, but the point was that he'd thought that in front of the cameras was where he would be for more or less forever. He'd just assumed.
Life didn't take much interest in his assumptions, as it turned out.
"Dan?"
He looks up from his notebook, rolling his pen slowly between his fingers and blinking until Paul comes into focus above the rims of his glasses. "Yeah?"
"Heads or tails?"
Dan blinks again, letting the pen fall to his lap. "What?"
"I can't decide what to make for dinner, so I'm going to flip for it. Heads or tails?"
"Why don't you just tell me what the options are?"
"It's more fun this way." Paul shrugs and holds up a quarter, his mouth curving in the crooked half-grin that was how Dan recognized him when they met again, a year and a half after Athens. (He should give Athens more credit, in terms of changing everything, turning the way he thought things would always be on its head and sending him stumbling into a whole new world. Three years too late for some things, not that they would've worked anyway, but still in time for others. Good others. Others he's glad to have.
Paul is still looking at him expectantly. He probably should say something.)
"You and your fun," he says, picking up his pen again. "Heads."
Paul flips the coin, catches it, slaps it against the back of his opposite hand. "Heads it is."
"Which food option goes with heads?"
"Caesar salad and grilled chicken breasts."
Dan groans softly and flips to a clean page in his notebook, glancing at Paul again. "You're my favorite."
"Yeah, I know." Paul nods at the notebook. "Which one is that?"
"What?"
"Hold it up so I can see the cover." Dan obliges and Paul clicks his tongue against his teeth rapidly. "Let's see, blue is the novel, red is the memoir, so green must be...Daniel."
"Shut up."
"I'm not arguing with you, I'm just once again registering my objection on the grounds that it's slightly demented."
"Demented is strong wording, my friend."
"You're writing a thesis-length treatise on why you hate soccer. It's demented."
"I have supporters."
"You have crazy people who agree with you on your blog."
"Don't diss my blog, Paul. My blog is very important to me."
"Your blog is where you post deliberately provocative opinions so you can laugh at people on the Internet."
Dan grins and lets the notebook fall closed again. "Say that again."
"What?"
"Provocative. I like that word coming from you."
Paul rolls his eyes and throws the quarter at Dan's head. "You like the concept coming from me, because mentally you're about twelve years old."
"I have actual certification from a neurologist saying otherwise, buddy."
Paul sighs and rakes his fingers through his hair, his smile vanishing somewhere in the middle of the motion. "You have to make defensive jokes about that?"
"Yes, I do." Dan uncaps his pen, and draws a row of triangles down the notebook cover. "An entire section of the memoir is going to be nothing but defensive jokes about that."
"Brain damage isn't funny."
"I know it won't play in Peoria, but I'm aiming for a more East Coast audience anyway. And I don't have brain damage. My neurologist says so."
Paul rolls his eyes again and steps back. Dan once kept track for an entire day of how many times Paul rolled his eyes, just in the interest of science, not realizing that science's interests were counterproductive to his own until Paul handed him his car keys at the end of the evening and wished him a safe drive back to his own place. Subtlety, thy name is not, never has been, and never shall be Rydell. "You should come inside in about half an hour."
"Why?"
"Casey McCall's interviewing Michael Phelps."
Dan opens the notebook again, flipping through the pages carefully until he finds a blank one. "Oh."
"The TiVo alert thing told me."
"You set a TiVo alert for Michael Phelps?"
"Yeah, and so did you, and you also have one set for Casey."
"Oh, right."
"Right." Paul shakes his head, but Dan can see that he's smiling. "Half an hour."
Dan rolls his pen between his fingers again, then points it at Paul. "Is it weird for you?"
"Is what weird for me?"
"Watching the Olympics. Instead of, you know, being at the Olympics."
"No." Paul shrugs and runs his hand through his hair again. "I'm retired. You don't get to play in the Olympics if you're retired. It's in the rulebook. Pretty close to the beginning, actually, I think."
"Smartass."
"Takes one to know one." Paul pauses for a moment, then steps closer, reaching out to brush his fingers over Dan's shoulder. "I mean, is it weird for you? You were in Athens, too, and there's no reason you couldn't be covering this one."
Dan smiles a little and draws a thick, dark line down the center of the page, and feels his mouth twist into something vaguely like a smile. "I'm retired."
"You could come out of retirement with one phone call."
"A phone call, some plastic surgery, a quick trip to PR rehab, completely re-learning how to deal with cameras..."
Paul settles two fingers over Dan's lips, cutting him off. "That's all in your head."
"My head's a very complicated place."
"Jesus, you don't have to tell me." Paul steps back and retrieves the quarter from the floor next to Dan's seat. "Half an hour."
Dan nods and turns to the next clean page, uncapping the pen and licking his lip with determination. He has absolutely nothing to say about soccer at the moment. Instead, he writes the same thing he always writes when he has nothing to say.
June 15, 2005, 10:43 PM
The accident wasn't so much a turning point as a tipping point, the moment where all the things in his life he'd been precariously balancing for all those years got shifted violently to the side and fell. The biggest changes weren't physical; the scarring wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been and it turned out that a hell of a lot of world-class specialists in recovery from closed-head injuries were either sports fans or sportscaster-fans and the one was as good as the other. He really did have that clean bill from his neurologist that he used to win arguments with Paul. His brain was fine and his face only needed a good makeup artist and a better lighting guy.
As always, it was the mental that tripped him up, the psychological, the lurking ghosts in the machinery of his head. He flinched from the thought of cameras. He canceled appointments with plastic surgeons or didn't bother to cancel and just went to get coffee instead. He sat down to write and the only things that would come out had nothing to do with sports.
So he wrote those instead, to his agent's despair and consternation, and he spent a lot of time sitting by the window in his apartment and watching the pigeons, and he fully intended to continue doing exactly those things and nothing else until Jeremy and Natalie dragged him to a charity thing sponsored by ESPN and somebody in event planning seated him next to a beach volleyball player from the Athens games who turned out to have a familiar crooked smile.
And the rest, as boring people who fell back on cliches instead of going for a twist in their writing would say, was history. A lot of wine and a half-finished novel and a two-thirds finished memoir and quiet encouragement and a few shouting fights and the most incredibly awkward first time on a couch in recorded history and oh yeah, somewhere in there, a sexual identity crisis, but a very small one, especially in comparison to the whole-life renovation and makeover going on at the same time.
And then you wake up one morning, he writes underneath the date, and everything's different. It all changed when you weren't looking, and now this feels like the way things are, this feels like forever.
"Dan?" Paul shouts from the kitchen.
"Yeah?"
"Where's the thing?"
"The thing?"
"Yeah. Not the green thing, the metal thing."
Dan runs through the list of kitchen items they own that are best described as "thing," silently wonders if he has to kill himself because they have a couple's shorthand for their kitchen items, decides he doesn't want to die on an empty stomach, and calls back "Second drawer, in the back."
"I bet you five bucks that McCall's first question is how it felt to win eight medals."
Dan snaps his notebook shut and stands up. "Casey won't ask him that."
"So you're taking the bet?"
"That's a hack question. Casey won't ask it."
"They all ask it."
"Exactly. Because they're hacks."
"So what will he ask instead?"
Dan crosses the apartment to the kitchen and thinks for a moment. "When you were standing up there, watching the flag go up and hearing the Star Spangled Banner--for the eighth time--what went through your head? Was it different from, you know, the first seven times?"
Paul pauses and stares at him. "That was a truly eerie impression of Casey McCall."
Dan shrugs, feeling heat rise in his face. "I'm familiar with his material."
"I know. Please never do that again."
Ducking behind the refrigerator door provides a handy hiding place. "You want a beer?"
"Sure." Paul glances at him and then away. "What would you ask him?"
Dan pauses, shifting both bottles to one hand. "Probably the same thing."
"No, you wouldn't." Paul shakes his head. "You guys don't have the same style at all. Come on, what would you ask as your first question?"
Dan closes the refrigerator slowly. "What his plan's going to be the next time he gets in the pool."
"Isn't that more of a last question?"
"Exactly. Throw it out there at the beginning, mix things up a little. Throw him off guard." He pops the top off his beer and takes a long swallow. "Plus I'm just honestly curious. Where do you go from the top?"
Paul nods and leans against the counter. "Can't stay there forever."
"No. But figuring out where to go next, that's...well, that's a lifetime, you know?" Dan hands him the other beer, letting his fingers slide against Paul's, cool and slick from the bottles. "So I'd just ask him about the next trip to the pool."
"You're going all wise Zen master in your old age." Paul leans in and kisses him softly. "Go turn the TV on. I'll be right in."
"You're going to watch too?"
"Of course I am. I'm going to owe you five bucks when you're right about McCall's question, and I'm going to admire all the clips of Phelps doing his thing, and then I'm going to make you watch beach volleyball."
"You've got a whole plan going there."
"Yes, I do." Paul grins at him and turns back to the stove. "Put a chapter in your book about that, Rydell."
"Oh, there will be." Dan smiles at the back of Paul's head, thinking about what that chapter will say. That's his next trip to the pool, right there; the words on paper to tell the story of how he ended up where he is right now, balancing here on this particular precipice over forever. "If you're lucky, maybe even two."