30 Rock: A Good Thing Going (Jack/Liz)
Title: A Good Thing Going
Author: frey_at_last
Pairing: Jack/Liz (and I break up Liz/Criss; you were warned)
Spoilers: basically the last season
Rating: PG-13?
Summary: Five years later, a (not so) surprising development
A/N: I WROTE FIC AGAIN OMG. I'm not sure if the timeline/tense sequencing here is completely confusing or not, perhaps because I was tipsy when I wrote most of it. SO THERE
After twelve years of knowing a guy, after a guy goes from a corporate nightmare to your weird boss to your friend and then your closest friend and the only family you absolutely need to invite to your wedding and finally to the guy whose calls you let go to voicemail because you don't remember the password to block him -- certainly after being told in several memorable variations that he sees you as some kind of zipped-up sister-schoolteacher-figure way off his radar -- you really don't expect this guy to act all sexy in your hallway and push you backwards onto your bed and say stuff (say STUFF) and actually tear your clothing in his haste to get it off you. But it turns out that when you get Jack in a bedroom in the dark that all these things actually happen.
Okay. Maybe when you say that out loud it is not as surprising a thing as it is in the moment. If she had ever, ever thought about him as a type of sex-doer (where her two categories are "this takes concentration" and "I can also read my Kindle") -- and she's not saying that she ever did think about him as that, because obviously, she never, ever did -- she probably would have pegged him as the concentration type. Okay, she can admit it.
But honestly, most of the concentrating she'd had to do in the past was on the level of "don't forget the prop meeting in twenty minutes" and "unclench your shoulders," but this -- this is concentration like "what's the German word for 'again,' again?"
Noch mal. It only comes to her after she is flat on her back, and she thinks she might be actually wheezing.
"Noch mal?" Jack says into her shoulder.
Liz takes a few more seconds just to breathe. Then to concentrate again. "Wie sagt man?" she mutters. How do you say it? "Ich kann nicht."
She isn't looking, but she can feel his face moving against her skin as he smirks... and that is surprising, too.
This is all probably mostly surprising given that Liz has shared a bed with him before and that time they did the opposite of this -- but after all, they never quite got the lights off that night, and she was newly married --
(that was four years before Criss read Into the Wild and announced that he was going to become a "broken-down-schoolbus monk" in Brooklyn -- "it's not a 'nascent movement,' that book is twenty years old!" she'd insisted, but to no avail -- and it was surprising how little it disrupted the rest of her life to have her husband become a permanent Occupy Wall Street type who only visited to take the kids on Wild Thornberrys-style field trips and to sign the papers she served him)
-- and they'd been trying to sleep in his dead mother's bed. Whereas this time, they are post-coital in Liz's. Which probably explains the smirking.
Still.
It is weird. Because right now he -- Jack -- is lying on his side with his head sort of nestled on her breastbone and she doesn't know which is weirder: that this guy is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation (not G.E. and not Kabletown -- a third, completely different multi-billion dollar corporation that rhymes with BepsiCo) and her former boss, or that this guy was her best friend until they stopped talking eighteen months ago--
(the best friend she'd ever had, until he declared his love for her over a phone call while they were both still married, he for the third time, apparently thinking that "every other woman I've loved over the past ten years was just a futile attempt to stop loving you" was something to say to a woman standing in her kitchen making her husband a grilled cheese sandwich at 11 at night with her two kids sleeping down the hall)
--and the only guy she'd regretted losing more than Floyd.
It was uncomfortable to realize that she was more broken up over cutting Jack off than she was over being left by the husband she'd let talk her into marrying him, but even more uncomfortable was the shitty feeling itself of being broken up over losing him.
Liz didn't see how it could make any sense that she would miss him like this. He had tried to break up her marriage, her only successful relationship. He had ended his own a week later. He had called her every day for a month even though she never answered. After the two month mark he hadn't called any more at all.
She'd called her mom to talk about the twins starting middle school, and spent forty-five minutes in a spitting rant about how much she hated him.
"Why get so upset about a fellow that thinks you're the one for him and is willing to say so?" chirped her mother, right before Liz ended the conversation.
"Because I'm not the one for him, and he's not the one for me. That was never on the table," she said.
(And then, almost an afterthought: "And I'm married.")
But it was true. He was always too rich to make her feel normal and too powerful to make her feel comfortable, too self-assured to give her space to consider him, too insecure to be generous, too quick to defend himself. He was too much of a lady-killer, too hung up on his mother, too flaky to be a good father, too damn irritating to even let her feel wistful about their broken down friendship.
Most of what she did in the months after she stopped talking to him was go on working at her new show, watch her husband make her kids' lunches every day before school, and eventually realize that this husband didn't really want this life with sandwiches as much as he'd told her he did. And after Criss left, she sold her apartment, moved into a new one, and stayed up alone at night after the kids were asleep. She had a routine: unpack one box, make two lunches.
And one night in the summer, with Terry and Janet gone at camp, for the first time in over a year she picked up the phone and called Jack.
It began as an excruciatingly stilted exchange about his work and her writing.
He didn't mention the new line of cake-batter flavored Doritos he'd launched six months earlier; she'd seen them at the grocery store and monologued for ten minutes to a terrified cashier about her principles, namely, not accepting apologies in the form of million-dollar-grossing snack food innovations, however genius.
She didn't mention she'd started another Dealbreakers book with advice that was all so specific, her editor actually asked if she was dating George Soros.
He didn't mention his daughter, and she didn't mention her twins. Neither of them mentioned Criss.
Eventually he stopped, trailing off a rambling anecdote about his new kind of carbonation technology (bubbles that go down instead of up, which seemed mostly like a set-up to get her to scold him for blatantly ripping off The BFG, but Liz didn't give him the satisfaction) and exhaled forcibly.
"I'm sorry, I must be boring you," he said. "I'm just very surprised that you called me."
"Well, I would think that you would be surprised. You, you know, eighteen months ago you call me out of the blue in the middle of my life in the middle of my marriage and you screw everything up."
She said the last part so mildly, so kind of ironically sarcastic that it made her angry with herself. For once in her life, she could try taking herself seriously. On the other end she heard him inhale, gearing up for some smug little retort, and when she interrupted him she was suddenly hot, and suddenly crying.
"You fucked up my whole life," she said, and she knew she had to finish before he could say a single word, or maybe before she lost the ability to speak. "I had a whole life that you came and you fucked up because you said crap to me that I want to forget but I can't, I can't, because it makes me crazy. And we can never be normal now. You fucked us up, and you are not the right guy. You were always the wrong guy." She had to take a breath, which meant he had time to talk, but all he said was her name over and over. "And Jack," she started again, "I've missed you more than I've ever missed anyone in my life."
"Lemon, Lemon," he'd said. "I need to see you, I need to come over. May I come over?"
So he'd come over, and here he is. His head on her chest and one arm underneath her neck, the other propped lazily against the inside of her knee.
He is smirking, but when she cranes her neck to see his expression, it changes into something much different. Maybe, seeing that look in his eyes, she can understand how none of this is really surprising at all, in spite of their years of lousy timing and his inconvenient grand gestures.
He'd thrown himself at her feet when she had other stuff to think about, the serious and real stuff she'd been trying to achieve for the whole time she'd known him, and it was like he didn't even care. It was like when she ended up with a life and he ended up with nothing, he expected her to drop everything to make him happy. That was something she couldn't even do ten years ago for Floyd, and they hadn't even been married to other people, and they hadn't even had kids.
But what the hell. Since Criss left, she hasn't thought about Floyd once (other than to neurotically compare her levels of regret), but she's thought about Jack every single day. For all the guys she's watched walk out of her life, this is the one guy she cannot let go of. If it weren't for her kids, she would've gotten on that boat with him if he'd asked. She probably would have followed him to Cleveland.
(She couldn't even follow Criss to Brooklyn.)
Right now the mind-boggling thing is that everything is upside down: he's not asking her to follow him anywhere.
"I want you in my life, and to make that happen I'm willing to compromise in whatever way you see fit," is actually how he put it, right after he came in the door. The way he said it, with his eyes all wide as he was reaching for her hands, it wasn't arrogant the way she'd seen him be when he went after a lady (like he already knew how she would react and thought he deserved it). The way he said it was like he wanted to woo her.
It was a revelation that made her lock him in the bathroom for twenty minutes, and he hadn't even tried to knock down the door, just talked to her through the doorjamb until she confessed that she'd broken the handle in her panic to sequester him inside. Then he knocked the door down.
But even that he did a little bit more gently than he could have, she judged.
And once he was out, he'd kissed her against the wall in her hallway, his hands cupping her face when she'd expected them to go up her skirt or grip her wrists. When the doorbell rang, she forgot for a minute that her kids were at camp, and she pushed his face away with a panicked gasp -- "the twins!" -- but actually it was just a guy delivering flowers. Flowers from Jack.
(What, does he have some kind of an instant flower service? He ordered her flowers on his way over here to declare his love? There is no way she should want this guy.)
He went to the door to accept them (in his untucked dress shirt, with his hair standing up where she'd had her fingers in it) and she swore she saw the flower guy roll his eyes.
Ironic.
So here they were.
"Bist du noch böse auf mich, schätzchen?" Jack is drawling, his fingers making patterns on her thigh that are hard to ignore, and Liz revels in an absurd rush of relief that he hasn't switched over to English. Maybe someday they will get to English. One day at a time. For now, in bed, the noble language of the Kaiser.
(And maybe everything else will move at just the speed she needs, and maybe he can wait for her after all. Maybe she is just the kind of person who needs twelve years to fall in love with a man. If she is in love.)
Much later, she comes back from the kitchen and pauses, leaning one knee against the mattress. He's sprawled open across her bed. Asleep, his posture takes on the unselfconscious ease and confidence that he affects almost seamlessly when he's awake.
It's oddly touching.
Though he is someone who is used to being seen by so many different people, she feels shy about seeing him like this. He seems almost too unguarded, and, having known him so long, she knows better than anyone else what he has to hide. It feels unfair to watch him for too long when he can't look back. Someone should probably cover him up, hold his body close and hide his face.
But she's the only one here.
"Ah," she says aloud. For a second she thinks about waking him up, because she's never had a life-changing realization before without needing to tell him all about it, and this is one he's got to hear.
But. It's late. And really, of all the realizations she's had over the past decade -- over most of her life, maybe -- this one feels like it can keep. This one feels like it will be there in the morning when he wakes up, and like she'll have all the time in the world to tell him.
The floor is cold and Liz wants to get back in bed with him. So she does.
* * *
Author: frey_at_last
Pairing: Jack/Liz (and I break up Liz/Criss; you were warned)
Spoilers: basically the last season
Rating: PG-13?
Summary: Five years later, a (not so) surprising development
A/N: I WROTE FIC AGAIN OMG. I'm not sure if the timeline/tense sequencing here is completely confusing or not, perhaps because I was tipsy when I wrote most of it. SO THERE
After twelve years of knowing a guy, after a guy goes from a corporate nightmare to your weird boss to your friend and then your closest friend and the only family you absolutely need to invite to your wedding and finally to the guy whose calls you let go to voicemail because you don't remember the password to block him -- certainly after being told in several memorable variations that he sees you as some kind of zipped-up sister-schoolteacher-figure way off his radar -- you really don't expect this guy to act all sexy in your hallway and push you backwards onto your bed and say stuff (say STUFF) and actually tear your clothing in his haste to get it off you. But it turns out that when you get Jack in a bedroom in the dark that all these things actually happen.
Okay. Maybe when you say that out loud it is not as surprising a thing as it is in the moment. If she had ever, ever thought about him as a type of sex-doer (where her two categories are "this takes concentration" and "I can also read my Kindle") -- and she's not saying that she ever did think about him as that, because obviously, she never, ever did -- she probably would have pegged him as the concentration type. Okay, she can admit it.
But honestly, most of the concentrating she'd had to do in the past was on the level of "don't forget the prop meeting in twenty minutes" and "unclench your shoulders," but this -- this is concentration like "what's the German word for 'again,' again?"
Noch mal. It only comes to her after she is flat on her back, and she thinks she might be actually wheezing.
"Noch mal?" Jack says into her shoulder.
Liz takes a few more seconds just to breathe. Then to concentrate again. "Wie sagt man?" she mutters. How do you say it? "Ich kann nicht."
She isn't looking, but she can feel his face moving against her skin as he smirks... and that is surprising, too.
This is all probably mostly surprising given that Liz has shared a bed with him before and that time they did the opposite of this -- but after all, they never quite got the lights off that night, and she was newly married --
(that was four years before Criss read Into the Wild and announced that he was going to become a "broken-down-schoolbus monk" in Brooklyn -- "it's not a 'nascent movement,' that book is twenty years old!" she'd insisted, but to no avail -- and it was surprising how little it disrupted the rest of her life to have her husband become a permanent Occupy Wall Street type who only visited to take the kids on Wild Thornberrys-style field trips and to sign the papers she served him)
-- and they'd been trying to sleep in his dead mother's bed. Whereas this time, they are post-coital in Liz's. Which probably explains the smirking.
Still.
It is weird. Because right now he -- Jack -- is lying on his side with his head sort of nestled on her breastbone and she doesn't know which is weirder: that this guy is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation (not G.E. and not Kabletown -- a third, completely different multi-billion dollar corporation that rhymes with BepsiCo) and her former boss, or that this guy was her best friend until they stopped talking eighteen months ago--
(the best friend she'd ever had, until he declared his love for her over a phone call while they were both still married, he for the third time, apparently thinking that "every other woman I've loved over the past ten years was just a futile attempt to stop loving you" was something to say to a woman standing in her kitchen making her husband a grilled cheese sandwich at 11 at night with her two kids sleeping down the hall)
--and the only guy she'd regretted losing more than Floyd.
It was uncomfortable to realize that she was more broken up over cutting Jack off than she was over being left by the husband she'd let talk her into marrying him, but even more uncomfortable was the shitty feeling itself of being broken up over losing him.
Liz didn't see how it could make any sense that she would miss him like this. He had tried to break up her marriage, her only successful relationship. He had ended his own a week later. He had called her every day for a month even though she never answered. After the two month mark he hadn't called any more at all.
She'd called her mom to talk about the twins starting middle school, and spent forty-five minutes in a spitting rant about how much she hated him.
"Why get so upset about a fellow that thinks you're the one for him and is willing to say so?" chirped her mother, right before Liz ended the conversation.
"Because I'm not the one for him, and he's not the one for me. That was never on the table," she said.
(And then, almost an afterthought: "And I'm married.")
But it was true. He was always too rich to make her feel normal and too powerful to make her feel comfortable, too self-assured to give her space to consider him, too insecure to be generous, too quick to defend himself. He was too much of a lady-killer, too hung up on his mother, too flaky to be a good father, too damn irritating to even let her feel wistful about their broken down friendship.
Most of what she did in the months after she stopped talking to him was go on working at her new show, watch her husband make her kids' lunches every day before school, and eventually realize that this husband didn't really want this life with sandwiches as much as he'd told her he did. And after Criss left, she sold her apartment, moved into a new one, and stayed up alone at night after the kids were asleep. She had a routine: unpack one box, make two lunches.
And one night in the summer, with Terry and Janet gone at camp, for the first time in over a year she picked up the phone and called Jack.
It began as an excruciatingly stilted exchange about his work and her writing.
He didn't mention the new line of cake-batter flavored Doritos he'd launched six months earlier; she'd seen them at the grocery store and monologued for ten minutes to a terrified cashier about her principles, namely, not accepting apologies in the form of million-dollar-grossing snack food innovations, however genius.
She didn't mention she'd started another Dealbreakers book with advice that was all so specific, her editor actually asked if she was dating George Soros.
He didn't mention his daughter, and she didn't mention her twins. Neither of them mentioned Criss.
Eventually he stopped, trailing off a rambling anecdote about his new kind of carbonation technology (bubbles that go down instead of up, which seemed mostly like a set-up to get her to scold him for blatantly ripping off The BFG, but Liz didn't give him the satisfaction) and exhaled forcibly.
"I'm sorry, I must be boring you," he said. "I'm just very surprised that you called me."
"Well, I would think that you would be surprised. You, you know, eighteen months ago you call me out of the blue in the middle of my life in the middle of my marriage and you screw everything up."
She said the last part so mildly, so kind of ironically sarcastic that it made her angry with herself. For once in her life, she could try taking herself seriously. On the other end she heard him inhale, gearing up for some smug little retort, and when she interrupted him she was suddenly hot, and suddenly crying.
"You fucked up my whole life," she said, and she knew she had to finish before he could say a single word, or maybe before she lost the ability to speak. "I had a whole life that you came and you fucked up because you said crap to me that I want to forget but I can't, I can't, because it makes me crazy. And we can never be normal now. You fucked us up, and you are not the right guy. You were always the wrong guy." She had to take a breath, which meant he had time to talk, but all he said was her name over and over. "And Jack," she started again, "I've missed you more than I've ever missed anyone in my life."
"Lemon, Lemon," he'd said. "I need to see you, I need to come over. May I come over?"
So he'd come over, and here he is. His head on her chest and one arm underneath her neck, the other propped lazily against the inside of her knee.
He is smirking, but when she cranes her neck to see his expression, it changes into something much different. Maybe, seeing that look in his eyes, she can understand how none of this is really surprising at all, in spite of their years of lousy timing and his inconvenient grand gestures.
He'd thrown himself at her feet when she had other stuff to think about, the serious and real stuff she'd been trying to achieve for the whole time she'd known him, and it was like he didn't even care. It was like when she ended up with a life and he ended up with nothing, he expected her to drop everything to make him happy. That was something she couldn't even do ten years ago for Floyd, and they hadn't even been married to other people, and they hadn't even had kids.
But what the hell. Since Criss left, she hasn't thought about Floyd once (other than to neurotically compare her levels of regret), but she's thought about Jack every single day. For all the guys she's watched walk out of her life, this is the one guy she cannot let go of. If it weren't for her kids, she would've gotten on that boat with him if he'd asked. She probably would have followed him to Cleveland.
(She couldn't even follow Criss to Brooklyn.)
Right now the mind-boggling thing is that everything is upside down: he's not asking her to follow him anywhere.
"I want you in my life, and to make that happen I'm willing to compromise in whatever way you see fit," is actually how he put it, right after he came in the door. The way he said it, with his eyes all wide as he was reaching for her hands, it wasn't arrogant the way she'd seen him be when he went after a lady (like he already knew how she would react and thought he deserved it). The way he said it was like he wanted to woo her.
It was a revelation that made her lock him in the bathroom for twenty minutes, and he hadn't even tried to knock down the door, just talked to her through the doorjamb until she confessed that she'd broken the handle in her panic to sequester him inside. Then he knocked the door down.
But even that he did a little bit more gently than he could have, she judged.
And once he was out, he'd kissed her against the wall in her hallway, his hands cupping her face when she'd expected them to go up her skirt or grip her wrists. When the doorbell rang, she forgot for a minute that her kids were at camp, and she pushed his face away with a panicked gasp -- "the twins!" -- but actually it was just a guy delivering flowers. Flowers from Jack.
(What, does he have some kind of an instant flower service? He ordered her flowers on his way over here to declare his love? There is no way she should want this guy.)
He went to the door to accept them (in his untucked dress shirt, with his hair standing up where she'd had her fingers in it) and she swore she saw the flower guy roll his eyes.
Ironic.
So here they were.
"Bist du noch böse auf mich, schätzchen?" Jack is drawling, his fingers making patterns on her thigh that are hard to ignore, and Liz revels in an absurd rush of relief that he hasn't switched over to English. Maybe someday they will get to English. One day at a time. For now, in bed, the noble language of the Kaiser.
(And maybe everything else will move at just the speed she needs, and maybe he can wait for her after all. Maybe she is just the kind of person who needs twelve years to fall in love with a man. If she is in love.)
Much later, she comes back from the kitchen and pauses, leaning one knee against the mattress. He's sprawled open across her bed. Asleep, his posture takes on the unselfconscious ease and confidence that he affects almost seamlessly when he's awake.
It's oddly touching.
Though he is someone who is used to being seen by so many different people, she feels shy about seeing him like this. He seems almost too unguarded, and, having known him so long, she knows better than anyone else what he has to hide. It feels unfair to watch him for too long when he can't look back. Someone should probably cover him up, hold his body close and hide his face.
But she's the only one here.
"Ah," she says aloud. For a second she thinks about waking him up, because she's never had a life-changing realization before without needing to tell him all about it, and this is one he's got to hear.
But. It's late. And really, of all the realizations she's had over the past decade -- over most of her life, maybe -- this one feels like it can keep. This one feels like it will be there in the morning when he wakes up, and like she'll have all the time in the world to tell him.
The floor is cold and Liz wants to get back in bed with him. So she does.
* * *