.fic: Newsprint - D/M (preslash, really) PG/PG13
It's a big fic day in aescville. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday glued to my computer writing RL-associated things, but managed to get some fic-in-progress finished, too.
Title: Newsprint
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M (pre-slash)
Rating/Warnings: PG/PG13-ish, angst. But, I hope, happiness at the end.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to CBS &co. And the fangirls were sore aggrieved.
Advertisements: Gap-filler for 4.18 "The Road Home." Coincidentally answers wordclaim50 challenge #29, "Missing Scene," and philosophy_20 #18 (And if the answer's no / Can I change your mind?) but it's really for another purpose altogether.
Notes: For mardia on her birthday (which we will pretend is today, but was actually a couple days ago) *hugs for her*
NEWSPRINT
Her first name’s Laura. Danny doesn’t know her last.
He knows everything else about her, though: that she’d grown up in San Diego, that her father had abused her, that she’d started drinking at fourteen, doing drugs at fifteen - marijuana to coke to heroin, others she can’t remember. She’d kept doing them for the next ten years, even when her boyfriend - her abusive boyfriend, because that’s how these things work - had gotten her pregnant.
She’d only stopped when her little girl had been born, realized she’d stopped nine months too late when the doctor had told her Gillian was too small, that she might develop learning and memory problems later on. Her heart’s damaged, the doctor had said; she’ll need an operation to correct it.
Gillian had died in surgery.
Laura’s been clean, or mostly clean, since then. She’d moved to New York just after Gillian had died, put herself through college and graduate school. She works for an ad design company now and hasn’t touched a drink for eight years, but like Danny, she still goes to meetings, sometimes to AA, sometimes to others, depending.
They usually sit next to each other and talk afterwards. Like her drinking and drugs, Laura’s sworn off men, and Danny figures she talks to him because he’s safe, because she knows he works in law enforcement and that he’s gay. Gay doesn’t mean dead, he tells her, and she is pretty, with thick, dark hair and a nice smile. She shrugs and looks away whenever he tells her this.
She’s not sitting next to him tonight, though. He’s got a copy of the Times on the chair to his left, and someone else is already on his other side. Laura remarks on this, as well as the fact that he’s in the wrong room - AA is down the hall.
You waiting for someone? she asks.
He shrugs and says maybe. He still doesn’t know if Martin will come, and in a way that he doesn’t like thinking about, he’s been waiting for Martin for three years now.
* * *
Seeing Danny on the other side of his door doesn’t surprise him. Looking back on it, Martin will think that he’d somehow known all along it would be Danny doing this - because, God knows, Danny’s watched his back a few times and saved his life once. Martin’s pretty sure Danny’s tired of it, but he doesn’t like thinking about that.
But Danny’s here, now, and that counts for something.
He’ll ask Sam about it eventually, why she’d talked to him, because Danny had been so angry that night after the Ethan Heller case. She’ll say yes, she did, and admit that the only way she could be there for him was not to be there, if that made any sense.
“It does,” he’ll say, and she’ll smile and laugh with relief, the shy, girlish laugh that makes him forget she’s almost as cynical as he is.
That’s in the future, though; Danny’s here, now.
“Hey, Martin.” Tie loose and jacket over one arm, fresh - or not fresh, Martin amends, taking in the shadowed eyes and wrinkled shirt - from work.
“Hey,” he says, lost for anything more profound. He knows what this is about, searches for anger and defensiveness because he doesn’t need Sam’s help and he sure as hell doesn’t need Danny Taylor’s, but all he finds is exhaustion.
“Can I come in?” Danny emphasizes the question with a nod in the direction of Martin’s apartment.
“Uh, sure.” He’d cleaned up a bit after Sam left, but his apartment still looks like... like some upscale version of a crack house, he supposes. At least the dishes are in the kitchen and all his stuff is piled in a few heaps instead of distributed throughout his living room. He watches Danny move past him, carefully not looking at the disaster area that is Martin’s apartment as he pushes a fleece blanket aside to sit down on the couch.
They look at each other for a moment.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” Martin asks.
“No, thanks.” Danny’s gaze is dark and resolute. “We need to talk, Martin.”
* * *
There’d been this bar he’d gone to a lot, the Reading Room. Not much studying had gone on there, obviously, and besides, ‘Reading Room’ wasn’t even its real name, only a nickname that the graduate students had given it. Danny had gone there regularly since starting at Columbia and every night he’d met friends there, knew the bartender and all the servers, had been Danny Taylor, bright, sarcastic, too popular for his own good, the center of attention.
The first time he’d ever been center of attention and hated it was when he’d stood up at his first AA meeting. He’d sat in the back, purposely invisible, for weeks before working up the courage to even say his name, much less that he was an alcoholic and he’d had everything going for him and then fucked it up.
But he had, eventually. Laura’d been there that day.
And that had been the beginning. Or the end; Danny really isn’t sure. Maybe it had been neither of those things, only one more step on the path from there to here. No clear lines, he thinks, between any two points in his life.
A new member starts talking now, voice rusty and hesitant, a story like any one of the thousands Danny’s heard before. It could be his own story, really, repeated endlessly throughout his nine years of meetings. He doesn’t mind, instead finds the stories comforting in a way, something new in each of them.
Tonight he can’t concentrate, though, the man’s voice - David, his name is, Danny thinks - weaving in and out of Danny’s distraction. It’s quarter after seven and Martin’s still not here. Danny swallows down his irritation, reminds himself that he’d needed four tries to get out of his apartment, another two to get through the doors of the community center, three more to walk into the room. It’s not fair to expect Martin to be here first time out of the gate.
Still, he can’t cut the thread of fear and anger that twists through him at Martin’s lateness, and he wonders why it is he needs Martin to be strong.
* * *
They’ve been in Martin’s living room for a half hour. Martin knows this because he’s glanced at the clock every thirty seconds. Danny’s sitting forward on the couch, elbows resting on his knees, listening to Martin try to explain himself, and Martin thinks with some despair he's making no sense at all.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Martin says, though he knows it’s really no mystery. Pain and too much stress, refusing to tell anyone, his own personality working against him. In a way, though, he really doesn’t know how he’d ended up this way; it’s as inexplicable as going to sleep and waking up in someone else’s bed. Bewildering, not quite waking up from nightmare. He’s still in it, he knows, but can’t make himself wake up.
He tries to explain this, fearing he’s making no sense whatsoever, but Danny nods anyway.
Martin can feel his hands wanting to shake and makes himself keep them still. He can’t keep back the tremors, though, and he knows Danny’s noticed them. In a way, that’s worse than Danny watching him lose his cool and almost get himself and Ethan Heller shot, because he can blame that on a fit of bad judgment. Nothing can explain away his hands, the trickle of sweat at the back of his neck.
“I can’t help you, you know,” Danny tells Martin when he’s done, tone flat, gentle but absolutely unyielding. “I can’t, unless you ask.”
“I don’t need anyone’s help.” Like he told Sam earlier, but there’s no force in the words anymore.
“Okay,” Danny says. Stands and collects his coat, draping it over one arm. “I’ll see you later, then.”
He brushes past Martin, soft rustle of clothing, faded hint of cologne when Martin breathes in sharply.
Distantly, Martin hears the door open, Danny’s footsteps muted, whine of the hinges covered by his voice, desperate suddenly.
“Danny, wait.”
* * *
David’s stepped down and another man, Roger, has just introduced himself. A coke addict for years, he explains, and he’d gotten hooked on it during his first two years at a brokerage firm on Wall Street - pressure of eighty-hour weeks and all his colleagues did it to keep themselves sharp, and Danny knows how that is.
Roger’s story wanders through the familiar cycles of denial, trying to quit, failing, losing everything, realization, failure again. Danny’s told Martin that this is what it’s going to be like, but telling is one thing and living’s another.
Like he told himself years ago that he could deal with wanting Martin and not having him. That worked out really well. Better in theory than in practice, as they say.
Though now he supposes that any hope, however vague, of having Martin is now off the table. He doesn’t know if it’s because Martin’s like him now, flawed, broken, never quite fixed, or if it’s because he’s already anticipating Martin hating him for what Martin’s going to go through in the next few months.
Danny tells himself he can deal with Martin hating him, but he can’t deal with Martin dead or Martin broken beyond any hope of being fixed again.
Not really wanting to, he looks at his watch.
After seven-thirty now, and he involuntarily looks over his shoulder at the door.
Across the row, Laura catches him in the act and offers him a slight smile. Sympathetic; they’ve both done this before, have dealt with success and failure - more the second than the first. He tries to smile back, but the smile doesn’t quite make it, and he makes himself look back at Roger.
* * *
I can’t do this by myself... I need... God, Danny.
He can hear Danny pause behind him, feel expectation drawing out, a tense thread, between the two of them.
Help. I need help, Danny.
“Okay,” Danny says.
The door closes.
* * *
The night he’d gone to see Martin, Danny had told him everything.
Martin had known he was an alcoholic, but he didn’t know why, didn’t know what had happened to make him quit. Danny told him about his parents, his brother, law school, the accident, the lawyer who’d plea-bargained him out of jail and into detox and the rest of his life.
Martin had listened intently, absorbing details like this was a case - and he wasn’t a goddamn case, Danny had thought resentfully - and when he’d finished, Martin hadn’t said anything, or done anything, just sat in silence for a minute.
“D’you...” Martin tapped an impatient finger on the coffee table. Behind him an old baseball game on ESPN Classic played soundlessly. “You probably think I’m... God, like, a pansy or something.”
“No, Martin, I don’t.” Because addiction can happen to anybody, and all the trite, unfortunately true advice they give at clinics and rehab groups. “I - we should have been there for you.”
“I didn’t want you there,” Martin had said quietly, painful awareness in his voice now, and that had hurt, Martin’s pain. “Or,” Martin had amended, “I’d thought I didn’t.”
“What about now?”
“I do,” Martin had said.
Now, days later sitting alone with a paper next to him and listening to Roger talk about his life, Danny hopes this is still true.
* * *
He’s been standing outside for a half hour now, staring at the bright lights of the community center from a safe, shadowed place across the street. People have been going in and out, some alone and some in groups, a few laughing, others silent. There’s a knot of people smoking under the bus shelter, and Martin remembers what Danny had told him about twelve-steppers.
Realizes he’s one step away from being one of them.
Fifty steps, his brain uselessly supplies. You’re not inside yet.
He’d actually seen Danny walking in, newspaper folded under his arm, and his heart had skipped weirdly at that - surprise that Danny was here, that he was doing what he’d promised.
I’ll meet you there, okay? Tuesday night, seven.
Seven-thirty now - past, Martin realizes, and he wonders suddenly why he’s surprised that Danny’s kept his promise when it's Martin who so clearly hasn’t kept his own.
He has a thousand reasons, he thinks, adjusting the hood of his sweatshirt. He’s tired these days, worn out by the simple effort of living, he hates meeting new people, if he goes in this will all be real, this thing he keeps telling himself is a bad dream he’ll wake from soon, if he tries hard enough to deny that it’s really his life.
And none of those reasons seem good enough anymore, empty next to the fact that Danny’s here, like he’d said he’d be.
Before he can think anymore about it, Martin jogs across the street and up the steps, trying to push past people and be polite about it, almost asks a woman for directions to the NA meeting room before he sees the signs posted on the wall and follows them to a plain grey-painted door with no window in it, no way to see what’s waiting for him on the other side.
* * *
Danny doesn’t look again, though he wants to; the meeting’s more than half over, and he’s pretty sure Martin would have come by now.
He makes himself listen to Roger, doesn’t think about what he’s going to tell Sam, what he’s going to do after tonight, because what he’ll do is exactly what he’s done in the past: nothing.
* * *
The first thing Martin does when he walks in is look for Danny, stutter of panic when he can’t find him right away.
But no, he’s there, back to the door, and Martin thinks absurdly that he’d recognize that spiky dark head anywhere. It takes Danny a second to look around, but he does, offers Martin a slight smile and a nod before turning around again.
Picks up the newspaper sitting on the chair next to him, casual like he wants to read it, and folds it in one hand, careless of the ink smudges he’ll get, and it’s clear what he’s offering.
Martin’s measured out the past couple of days, trying to take things one day at a time, like they say, only days are impossible units, so he breaks them up. He's spent today doing what he needs to do to get here.
Call Dr. Carlyle
Eat
Finish cleaning
Shower
Get dressed
Take subway to community center
Stand outside finding courage enough to cross the street
Walk in
Find the room
Stand outside the door
Stand outside finding courage enough to open it and go inside
Walk in
Stand here, stare at Danny’s back for a second, think that Danny either doesn’t care because he’s annoyed that Martin’s late, or that Danny trusts him enough to take the last few steps himself.
Martin hopes it’s the second as he gathers himself and takes those steps.
Slides in next to Danny, catches a woman in a green sweater looking at him from across the aisle. She nods politely, thin flicker of smile.
He glances over at Danny, not sure what he’s looking for. Approval? Acknowledgment? Help? He doesn’t know, only knows he has to look at Danny, see him, see maybe what Danny had offered him by coming here, by offering his help when Martin had asked.
More than help, Martin thinks, when Danny nods to him, an unobtrusive gesture before he looks forward again, and Martin looks up to listen to the man talking.
-end-
Post-fic notes: The woman wearing the light green sweater who's in the background when Martin comes in... she sort of glances over at him after he sits down. That's Laura. (Obviously I completely made up a name and history for her. Indulge me.)
Oh, and at the very very end, when Martin sits down next to Danny and looks at him, Danny gives him this sort of micro-wave with his index finger. It's such a tiny gesture, but I absolutely loved it.
Title: Newsprint
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: D/M (pre-slash)
Rating/Warnings: PG/PG13-ish, angst. But, I hope, happiness at the end.
Disclaimers: Without a Trace belongs to CBS &co. And the fangirls were sore aggrieved.
Advertisements: Gap-filler for 4.18 "The Road Home." Coincidentally answers wordclaim50 challenge #29, "Missing Scene," and philosophy_20 #18 (And if the answer's no / Can I change your mind?) but it's really for another purpose altogether.
Notes: For mardia on her birthday (which we will pretend is today, but was actually a couple days ago) *hugs for her*
NEWSPRINT
Her first name’s Laura. Danny doesn’t know her last.
He knows everything else about her, though: that she’d grown up in San Diego, that her father had abused her, that she’d started drinking at fourteen, doing drugs at fifteen - marijuana to coke to heroin, others she can’t remember. She’d kept doing them for the next ten years, even when her boyfriend - her abusive boyfriend, because that’s how these things work - had gotten her pregnant.
She’d only stopped when her little girl had been born, realized she’d stopped nine months too late when the doctor had told her Gillian was too small, that she might develop learning and memory problems later on. Her heart’s damaged, the doctor had said; she’ll need an operation to correct it.
Gillian had died in surgery.
Laura’s been clean, or mostly clean, since then. She’d moved to New York just after Gillian had died, put herself through college and graduate school. She works for an ad design company now and hasn’t touched a drink for eight years, but like Danny, she still goes to meetings, sometimes to AA, sometimes to others, depending.
They usually sit next to each other and talk afterwards. Like her drinking and drugs, Laura’s sworn off men, and Danny figures she talks to him because he’s safe, because she knows he works in law enforcement and that he’s gay. Gay doesn’t mean dead, he tells her, and she is pretty, with thick, dark hair and a nice smile. She shrugs and looks away whenever he tells her this.
She’s not sitting next to him tonight, though. He’s got a copy of the Times on the chair to his left, and someone else is already on his other side. Laura remarks on this, as well as the fact that he’s in the wrong room - AA is down the hall.
You waiting for someone? she asks.
He shrugs and says maybe. He still doesn’t know if Martin will come, and in a way that he doesn’t like thinking about, he’s been waiting for Martin for three years now.
* * *
Seeing Danny on the other side of his door doesn’t surprise him. Looking back on it, Martin will think that he’d somehow known all along it would be Danny doing this - because, God knows, Danny’s watched his back a few times and saved his life once. Martin’s pretty sure Danny’s tired of it, but he doesn’t like thinking about that.
But Danny’s here, now, and that counts for something.
He’ll ask Sam about it eventually, why she’d talked to him, because Danny had been so angry that night after the Ethan Heller case. She’ll say yes, she did, and admit that the only way she could be there for him was not to be there, if that made any sense.
“It does,” he’ll say, and she’ll smile and laugh with relief, the shy, girlish laugh that makes him forget she’s almost as cynical as he is.
That’s in the future, though; Danny’s here, now.
“Hey, Martin.” Tie loose and jacket over one arm, fresh - or not fresh, Martin amends, taking in the shadowed eyes and wrinkled shirt - from work.
“Hey,” he says, lost for anything more profound. He knows what this is about, searches for anger and defensiveness because he doesn’t need Sam’s help and he sure as hell doesn’t need Danny Taylor’s, but all he finds is exhaustion.
“Can I come in?” Danny emphasizes the question with a nod in the direction of Martin’s apartment.
“Uh, sure.” He’d cleaned up a bit after Sam left, but his apartment still looks like... like some upscale version of a crack house, he supposes. At least the dishes are in the kitchen and all his stuff is piled in a few heaps instead of distributed throughout his living room. He watches Danny move past him, carefully not looking at the disaster area that is Martin’s apartment as he pushes a fleece blanket aside to sit down on the couch.
They look at each other for a moment.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” Martin asks.
“No, thanks.” Danny’s gaze is dark and resolute. “We need to talk, Martin.”
* * *
There’d been this bar he’d gone to a lot, the Reading Room. Not much studying had gone on there, obviously, and besides, ‘Reading Room’ wasn’t even its real name, only a nickname that the graduate students had given it. Danny had gone there regularly since starting at Columbia and every night he’d met friends there, knew the bartender and all the servers, had been Danny Taylor, bright, sarcastic, too popular for his own good, the center of attention.
The first time he’d ever been center of attention and hated it was when he’d stood up at his first AA meeting. He’d sat in the back, purposely invisible, for weeks before working up the courage to even say his name, much less that he was an alcoholic and he’d had everything going for him and then fucked it up.
But he had, eventually. Laura’d been there that day.
And that had been the beginning. Or the end; Danny really isn’t sure. Maybe it had been neither of those things, only one more step on the path from there to here. No clear lines, he thinks, between any two points in his life.
A new member starts talking now, voice rusty and hesitant, a story like any one of the thousands Danny’s heard before. It could be his own story, really, repeated endlessly throughout his nine years of meetings. He doesn’t mind, instead finds the stories comforting in a way, something new in each of them.
Tonight he can’t concentrate, though, the man’s voice - David, his name is, Danny thinks - weaving in and out of Danny’s distraction. It’s quarter after seven and Martin’s still not here. Danny swallows down his irritation, reminds himself that he’d needed four tries to get out of his apartment, another two to get through the doors of the community center, three more to walk into the room. It’s not fair to expect Martin to be here first time out of the gate.
Still, he can’t cut the thread of fear and anger that twists through him at Martin’s lateness, and he wonders why it is he needs Martin to be strong.
* * *
They’ve been in Martin’s living room for a half hour. Martin knows this because he’s glanced at the clock every thirty seconds. Danny’s sitting forward on the couch, elbows resting on his knees, listening to Martin try to explain himself, and Martin thinks with some despair he's making no sense at all.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Martin says, though he knows it’s really no mystery. Pain and too much stress, refusing to tell anyone, his own personality working against him. In a way, though, he really doesn’t know how he’d ended up this way; it’s as inexplicable as going to sleep and waking up in someone else’s bed. Bewildering, not quite waking up from nightmare. He’s still in it, he knows, but can’t make himself wake up.
He tries to explain this, fearing he’s making no sense whatsoever, but Danny nods anyway.
Martin can feel his hands wanting to shake and makes himself keep them still. He can’t keep back the tremors, though, and he knows Danny’s noticed them. In a way, that’s worse than Danny watching him lose his cool and almost get himself and Ethan Heller shot, because he can blame that on a fit of bad judgment. Nothing can explain away his hands, the trickle of sweat at the back of his neck.
“I can’t help you, you know,” Danny tells Martin when he’s done, tone flat, gentle but absolutely unyielding. “I can’t, unless you ask.”
“I don’t need anyone’s help.” Like he told Sam earlier, but there’s no force in the words anymore.
“Okay,” Danny says. Stands and collects his coat, draping it over one arm. “I’ll see you later, then.”
He brushes past Martin, soft rustle of clothing, faded hint of cologne when Martin breathes in sharply.
Distantly, Martin hears the door open, Danny’s footsteps muted, whine of the hinges covered by his voice, desperate suddenly.
“Danny, wait.”
* * *
David’s stepped down and another man, Roger, has just introduced himself. A coke addict for years, he explains, and he’d gotten hooked on it during his first two years at a brokerage firm on Wall Street - pressure of eighty-hour weeks and all his colleagues did it to keep themselves sharp, and Danny knows how that is.
Roger’s story wanders through the familiar cycles of denial, trying to quit, failing, losing everything, realization, failure again. Danny’s told Martin that this is what it’s going to be like, but telling is one thing and living’s another.
Like he told himself years ago that he could deal with wanting Martin and not having him. That worked out really well. Better in theory than in practice, as they say.
Though now he supposes that any hope, however vague, of having Martin is now off the table. He doesn’t know if it’s because Martin’s like him now, flawed, broken, never quite fixed, or if it’s because he’s already anticipating Martin hating him for what Martin’s going to go through in the next few months.
Danny tells himself he can deal with Martin hating him, but he can’t deal with Martin dead or Martin broken beyond any hope of being fixed again.
Not really wanting to, he looks at his watch.
After seven-thirty now, and he involuntarily looks over his shoulder at the door.
Across the row, Laura catches him in the act and offers him a slight smile. Sympathetic; they’ve both done this before, have dealt with success and failure - more the second than the first. He tries to smile back, but the smile doesn’t quite make it, and he makes himself look back at Roger.
* * *
I can’t do this by myself... I need... God, Danny.
He can hear Danny pause behind him, feel expectation drawing out, a tense thread, between the two of them.
Help. I need help, Danny.
“Okay,” Danny says.
The door closes.
* * *
The night he’d gone to see Martin, Danny had told him everything.
Martin had known he was an alcoholic, but he didn’t know why, didn’t know what had happened to make him quit. Danny told him about his parents, his brother, law school, the accident, the lawyer who’d plea-bargained him out of jail and into detox and the rest of his life.
Martin had listened intently, absorbing details like this was a case - and he wasn’t a goddamn case, Danny had thought resentfully - and when he’d finished, Martin hadn’t said anything, or done anything, just sat in silence for a minute.
“D’you...” Martin tapped an impatient finger on the coffee table. Behind him an old baseball game on ESPN Classic played soundlessly. “You probably think I’m... God, like, a pansy or something.”
“No, Martin, I don’t.” Because addiction can happen to anybody, and all the trite, unfortunately true advice they give at clinics and rehab groups. “I - we should have been there for you.”
“I didn’t want you there,” Martin had said quietly, painful awareness in his voice now, and that had hurt, Martin’s pain. “Or,” Martin had amended, “I’d thought I didn’t.”
“What about now?”
“I do,” Martin had said.
Now, days later sitting alone with a paper next to him and listening to Roger talk about his life, Danny hopes this is still true.
* * *
He’s been standing outside for a half hour now, staring at the bright lights of the community center from a safe, shadowed place across the street. People have been going in and out, some alone and some in groups, a few laughing, others silent. There’s a knot of people smoking under the bus shelter, and Martin remembers what Danny had told him about twelve-steppers.
Realizes he’s one step away from being one of them.
Fifty steps, his brain uselessly supplies. You’re not inside yet.
He’d actually seen Danny walking in, newspaper folded under his arm, and his heart had skipped weirdly at that - surprise that Danny was here, that he was doing what he’d promised.
I’ll meet you there, okay? Tuesday night, seven.
Seven-thirty now - past, Martin realizes, and he wonders suddenly why he’s surprised that Danny’s kept his promise when it's Martin who so clearly hasn’t kept his own.
He has a thousand reasons, he thinks, adjusting the hood of his sweatshirt. He’s tired these days, worn out by the simple effort of living, he hates meeting new people, if he goes in this will all be real, this thing he keeps telling himself is a bad dream he’ll wake from soon, if he tries hard enough to deny that it’s really his life.
And none of those reasons seem good enough anymore, empty next to the fact that Danny’s here, like he’d said he’d be.
Before he can think anymore about it, Martin jogs across the street and up the steps, trying to push past people and be polite about it, almost asks a woman for directions to the NA meeting room before he sees the signs posted on the wall and follows them to a plain grey-painted door with no window in it, no way to see what’s waiting for him on the other side.
* * *
Danny doesn’t look again, though he wants to; the meeting’s more than half over, and he’s pretty sure Martin would have come by now.
He makes himself listen to Roger, doesn’t think about what he’s going to tell Sam, what he’s going to do after tonight, because what he’ll do is exactly what he’s done in the past: nothing.
* * *
The first thing Martin does when he walks in is look for Danny, stutter of panic when he can’t find him right away.
But no, he’s there, back to the door, and Martin thinks absurdly that he’d recognize that spiky dark head anywhere. It takes Danny a second to look around, but he does, offers Martin a slight smile and a nod before turning around again.
Picks up the newspaper sitting on the chair next to him, casual like he wants to read it, and folds it in one hand, careless of the ink smudges he’ll get, and it’s clear what he’s offering.
Martin’s measured out the past couple of days, trying to take things one day at a time, like they say, only days are impossible units, so he breaks them up. He's spent today doing what he needs to do to get here.
Call Dr. Carlyle
Eat
Finish cleaning
Shower
Get dressed
Take subway to community center
Stand outside finding courage enough to cross the street
Walk in
Find the room
Stand outside the door
Stand outside finding courage enough to open it and go inside
Walk in
Stand here, stare at Danny’s back for a second, think that Danny either doesn’t care because he’s annoyed that Martin’s late, or that Danny trusts him enough to take the last few steps himself.
Martin hopes it’s the second as he gathers himself and takes those steps.
Slides in next to Danny, catches a woman in a green sweater looking at him from across the aisle. She nods politely, thin flicker of smile.
He glances over at Danny, not sure what he’s looking for. Approval? Acknowledgment? Help? He doesn’t know, only knows he has to look at Danny, see him, see maybe what Danny had offered him by coming here, by offering his help when Martin had asked.
More than help, Martin thinks, when Danny nods to him, an unobtrusive gesture before he looks forward again, and Martin looks up to listen to the man talking.
-end-
Post-fic notes: The woman wearing the light green sweater who's in the background when Martin comes in... she sort of glances over at him after he sits down. That's Laura. (Obviously I completely made up a name and history for her. Indulge me.)
Oh, and at the very very end, when Martin sits down next to Danny and looks at him, Danny gives him this sort of micro-wave with his index finger. It's such a tiny gesture, but I absolutely loved it.