Fic: Vacant Hotel Rooms (Multifandom)
I finished it! (It's so cracked out, kids. So, so cracked. So cracked I don't even think I'll x-post this hot litle mess.)
Vacant Hotel Rooms
five lovers Jordan McDeere never had
(or, men that make Danny Tripp appear a fraction of a man)
Fandom(s): Studio 60, The West Wing, Lost, Friends, Arrested Development, Law and Order: SVU
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine.
Pairing: Jordan McDeere/Josh Lyman, Jordan McDeere/Jack Shephard, Jordan McDeere/Chandler Bing, Jordan McDeere/Gob Bluth, Jordan McDeere/Elliot Stabler
Word Count: 4155
Rating: R
Summary: All these people drinking lover's spit.
Author's Note: I can't believe I wrote this. I blame
zauberer_sirinfor it all. And I dedicate this to her, as some kind of warped Christmas present, to celebrate all the mad love we have for one Jordan McDeere and the aimee!verse. Pretty much, this is bonkers AU with me fitting Jordan into five different shows at five different stages of her life. It's written as five vignettes, so there's no real cohesion there, and a general knowledge of each fandom is assumed. That said, do read, and hopefully enjoy. I'm totally nervous about this one.
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1.
she wants the young american scanning through the picture window
-
She visits Washington, DC in spring when everyone is talking about cherry blossoms and a senator’s love affair with his barely legal intern. The scenery’s nice, and it makes for good gossip, and a gun control bill is sitting on the table, and neither side likes it much (and who would have thought that both Democrats and Republicans could agree on something like guns?).
She takes the metro because it’s DC and she’d rather not drive (as though there’s a car here for her to call her own) and the morning smells like rain that won’t fall and her shoes are brand new and shiny.
This is Jordan. Age twenty-four, toiling her way up the corporate ladder at some two-bit entertainment network that will never be ABC or NBC or CBS or NBS or, hell, even FOX.
A FCC decision is handed down and it’s something about profanity or something else about nudity or too much sex, but never too much blood, and she really should have read over the notes scribbled down on the yellow legal pad tossed unceremoniously in her briefcase (new, brown, shiny). Words like ‘appeal’ and ‘verdict’ and ‘fined’ get tossed around a lot, and someone has to go, and someone needs to be the face of it; might as well be your pretty one, McDeere, and he had said her name the same as ‘kid,’ and she had smiled, graciously and false. The plane ride was bumpy and the peanuts were salty and her vodka tonic not strong enough.
This is Jordan, at age twenty-four, and how it just so happens that she meets Josh Lyman: he on his way to the hill, she, kind of lost and too proud to admit it.
She waits at the crosswalk, for the light to turn red, for the sign to say ‘walk,’ and a crowd of pedestrians grows around her. She spots him, and it’s not some earth-shattering moment; it’s just, he’s recognizable, and his hair’s a mess in a strangely attractive way and she probably watched him on her TV in her hotel room last night.
"You’re Josh Lyman," she says by way of greeting, and somewhere in the back of her mind she’s hoping she doesn’t sound like the teacher’s pet in the poli sci classroom who gets horny at the thought of politicians, Jimmy Carter and the Bill of Rights.
"Yeah," he says, drawing out the word in a funny kind of way, hand rubbing the corners of his mouth, Blues Brothers sunglasses sliding down his nose. "I guess today I am." He extends a hand for her to shake, with a quirked eyebrow that’s supposed to be a question and she offers her name with a strangely genuine smile and his hand is smooth yet warm and she prays hers aren’t clammy and damp.
His smile grows a little more, and dimples crease his cheeks and he’s cute, in that childish, fumbling kind of way, she thinks, and he asks her what brings her to DC.
"Oh, you know, business," she says, waving an arm around her in some kind of vague, all-encompassing gesture. She’s wearing nylons and a black skirt and a white pressed blouse that’s sticking to her spine in the unnatural late morning heat. There’s a blister on her heel and she should never have bought these shoes in the first place.
They cross the street in silence, accompanied by car horns and fast walkers who talk even faster into the cellphones attached to their ears, all loud ‘huh?’s and ‘yeah?’s and when they make it to the other side, she turns around, and he’s still there.
"Where’d you say you were staying?" he asks with a grin.
She tells him.
-
"I’m only here for four days," she says, slipping her underwear on underneath her skirt. She looks to him, silhouetted against the setting sun over DC filtering in through drawn shades, his fingers slipping buttons through their respective holes and looking down instead of up at her.
"Yeah," he says, not really a question when maybe it should have been, and her own blouse hanging open, half-buttoned, she pauses, and watches him.
-
The third day and she lies in bed as he showers, and she can hear the water running from here. His cell phone cuts into the noise and sounds shrill in the early morning of his apartment. She doesn’t answer it and it goes to voicemail.
She’s kind of imagining what this life could be like (here, with him) and it’s kind of a little embarrassing.
-
"I’m only here for four days," she says again, and this time she means that this is the fourth and time’s up, pal. You tell me what’s next.
His phone rings, and he holds up a hand in her direction. One second, he says without words. "Yeah, Donna?" he says out loud and she sighs, her hair falling in her face.
Who would have thought? she'd say. Politicians really are great liars.
-
(this is how it could have gone: She stays in DC because she loves the city and maybe she can come to love this man as well. She does, and it’s a mistake, because he’s already taken - by his work, and God forbid, maybe by another woman - and they say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Jordan leaves the entertainment business behind and dives headlong into politics, and Josh Lyman, if she doesn’t agree with your point there’s no way in hell your bill will ever become a law - what she means and what she’ll learn is that this boy will never become a man.)
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2.
saying time take us forward, relief from this longing, they can land that plane on my heart, i don’t care
-
LAX airport is a circle of hell all its own. The luggage on wheels never rolls the right way and someone always spills their coffee, forgets their passport, ends up waiting two hours for a flight they didn’t want to take in the first place.
It’s the LAX airport, and this is Jordan leaving for Taiwan or Hong Kong or some Asian city that’s supposed to bring the future to the States. Whatever, she says, internally, never aloud, and she orders booze at the bar and ignores the minute hand and the hour hand just above the bartender’s head - spelling out a time where gin and tonics are anything but suitable.
A man sits down next to her: this is how it goes.
He orders a beer and she always thought that if you were willing to drink this early that you went hardcore from the start, hard liquor diluted with ice or with tonic, but he orders a beer and she’s curious already.
This is Jordan, age twenty-six. Her first marriage already gone belly-up and she’s been without a wedding ring for over two months past. She bought a new place to live because there are such things as ghosts that cruelly masquerade as disappointments and still packed cardboard boxes litter the floor, the walls still bare and undecorated.
She smiles at him and he doesn’t really smile back. He just looks at her, near appraisingly, and she almost blushes when she says hi, my name’s Jordan.
She learns in five minutes that his name is Jack and that he’s a doctor and he’s flying out to Australia. She doesn’t ask why or where in Australia, because she decides, second gin and tonic in, that those aren’t the kind of questions one asks in an airport bar.
They don’t tell each other their last names.
He grabs a handful of peanuts, and sits there still, one between his fingers, the grainy salt sticking to the pads and the whorls of his fingertips visible, from her seat.
"My wife left me," he finally says, with resignation, as though this is nothing new and old damage he can't quite deal with, and she laughs in an all too inappropriate way, head thrown back, and the irony shows.
She remembers yelling and a glass thrown at a wall, followed by a collection of china his mother bought them as their wedding gift. She remembers yelling and another woman and the door slamming behind her as she walked away.
"And I left my husband." He smiles, and he’s a nice man, or so he seems, but she can’t think of any word other than ‘wolfish’ to describe the grin stretching across his face, the pointed chin, the sharp corners of the smile.
Five minutes or so will pass, and one or maybe the other will say -
"Let’s get out of here,"
and just like that, they fall into that old cliché.
-
They have sex in an adjacent hotel - a Marriott, if memory serves - anonymous sheets and anonymous bed, and he tells her that he’s a doctor, but that doesn’t explain the tattoos etched up and along his biceps, and she’s either too nervous or too selfish to ask and lets her fingers wander the designs as his own run around and across her hips.
She finds words spilling from her mouth of their own accord, and she’s half-sitting up against the headboard, fingernails scraping along his back, his shoulders, begging for him to fuck her, her legs closed in around him.
-
They part at the airport, the fork in the road (so Robert Frost, she thinks - clichés still holding fast), and he turns left and she turns right. Over her shoulder she calls.
"Have a safe flight."
-
(this is how it could have gone: They stay in the hotel and they talk of failure and broken hearts and they get it all out there, into the open, and he talks about Sarah and she talks about Ryan, he tells of his father and she of whatever disaster shadows her every movement. She still has to go to Asia and he still has to go to Australia, but they dally longer than they should - they miss their flights. Jack arrives in Australia with Jordan in his head, and when the desk clerk tells him Oceanic Flight 815 isn’t the one for him, he doesn’t fight it. He takes the next flight home and walks on tarmac and tile instead of sand and shore; he doesn’t call her. He doesn’t need to. She saved him once already.)
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3.
finds a convenient streetlight, steps out of the shade, says something like: you and me, babe, how about it?
-
Jordan visits New York because she has friends that she calls family who live there, who scoff at her for her LA existence and her tanned legs and she’ll laugh it off, because, really. It doesn’t mean a thing.
Her friend works for a company he never bothers to name, out of either forgetfulness or embarrassment or maybe just plain apathy, and now that she thinks about it, she never really did have any idea what it is he does for a living, but whatever it is, they’re having a Christmas party (even though it’s only the last week of November) and he needs a date, and she’s in the city - so, do you mind?
This is Jordan, age twenty-eight, content and aimless for the time being, save for the bulls-eye of a corner office and a secretary all her own.
She goes, and she regrets it after a sip of bad eggnog, the spotting of mistletoe above one of the doorframes and the opening strains of "Jingle Bell Rock" that filter above the mingling conversation.
-
She mingles by the buffet, and plate full of assorted cheeses and crackers and not a bit of that crab dip, she realizes that she has company.
"Chandler Bing," he says, and her eyebrows shoot up, and her answer is a "seriously?!" she really didn’t intend to say, and finally, with a slightly embarrassed blush, she adds, "I’m Jordan McDeere," on at the end.
He sticks his hands awkwardly in his pockets, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, unsure half-smile and that might be panic in his eyes and she takes another sip of the eggnog and it still tastes as bad as it did on that first sip - maybe even worse.
"You here alone?" she finally asks, and he pitches forward slightly, hands still in his pockets, elbows bowed at the side, and he laughs, or maybe chokes: it’s kind of hard to tell.
"Aren’t we all?" and he says it dry, self-deprecatingly, and it’s the farthest thing from Jack Nicholson imaginable and she smiles, because sometimes men like this actually do exist.
"Oh my God, Chandler. Who is this fine looking woman?" Nasal. The only word Jordan can think is ‘nasal.’
"Ah, yeah. Um. Right. Jordan. Jordan, this is…uhm -"
A hand extends itself, bright red nails more like talons than anything else. "Janice. His date."
-
Later, they make out in the corner, and it feels slightly sophomoric and kind of wrong, because now they’re playing some jazzy version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and this really isn’t music to grope to.
-
"I’d really, uh. I’d really like to, you know. Take you out sometime. And not, you know. Make out in dark corners while my date harasses my co-workers."
"That’d be nice," she says.
It never happens.
-
(this is how it could have gone: He does take her out sometime. And they do make out again. Only this time, it’s on his couch and not a dark corner and there aren’t any tinny Christmas carols playing and there is no scent of peppermint in the air. They make out on his couch and a duck quacks and spoils the moment, if only for a second, but then the moment is truly destroyed when one Joey Tribiani walks in through the door eating a meatball sub. It’s okay though. Because he takes her out again, and the cycle resumes itself, until, you know. Chandler finds a way to ruin it. And Jordan leaves him, with a cooling cup of coffee inside of Central Perk.)
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4.
i believe in miracles: where you from, you sexy thing?
-
"Oh my - fucking - God. So, like Courtney just totally fucked Bryan, or was it Byron?, no it was Bryan, in the men’s room. Like. Totally. For real."
Jordan’s not sure if she looks more shocked, stoned or bored by the news, and she takes a drag from a half-spent cigarette and hacks up a lung instead.
"And get this. Keanu Reeves is totally supposed to be here tonight. Like. Yeah. I know."
This is Jordan, age twenty, on a break from college, or maybe it’s still in session and this is just a weekend trip to LA and the less seedy, more popular clubs, but either way, this is Jordan, age twenty, old enough to con her way and sashay through places like the Viper Room, but still too young to know any better.
This is so 1993.
A Swedish pop band that’s not ABBA thumps out of speakers and Jordan dances in that way that’s more simulated sex than Astaire and Rogers. Hands grab her hips and she lets it happen, glitter on her neck and collarbone, midriff baring top riding up.
"Hey, baby," he says and there’s nothing sincere or kind in that grin, and it’s just sex or lust or something kind of chemical or dumb, and she’s obviously had too much to drink, because she’s kind of sort of interested.
"Hey yourself," she says, yells over the music, and this is the kind of bad dialogue they use in pornos, isn’t it?
They dance (read: thrust) more than they talk, and she knows who he is, and she’s something kind of anonymous, and when he yells - "the name is Gob…Gob Bluth" - into her ear she isn’t exactly surprised.
He asks her back to his place. Okay, he demanded that he escort her to his boudoir of bedeviling banging and he took her laughter as acceptance and she took her drunkenness as resignation.
She’s young and he’s rich and this is how really bad love stories start, right?
-
The next morning, and it’s not even morning, but instead mid-afternoon, and her mouth tastes like fermented cherries, cough syrupy, and dry.
He's already awake.
"Hey, baby. You wanna be in my act?"
She doesn’t know what he means and she closes her eyes and falls back on the rumpled sheets that strangely smell of sex and laundry and he keeps talking, something about a saw and a woman and halves and she keeps her eyes shut and wonders how the hell she’s going to make it back to campus.
"Baby?" he asks again, eyebrows waggling, and she always thought that was an expression and not really an action, "you wanna see what you, me and a box of fireworks can do?" and she throws her arm across her face, exhaling loudly and she feels the bed shift as he rises.
She keeps her eyes closed and there’s rummaging through a closet, something breaks, something else breaks too - she swears to God he’s humming "The Final Countdown" - and finally she hears a triumphant "a-ha!"
And then there’s an explosion of some kind.
"I think," he announces to maybe himself or her or just the empty room in general, "I’ve made a huge mistake."
It smells like smoke and she pulls on the miniskirt she wore last night, cursing under her breath, and she puts on the platform shoes and her purse is under the bed and he’s swearing and not really yelling and a poster of Houdini has caught fire along the edges and is slowly burning and curling its way up the wall - "I’m going to just, you know…let myself out."
"Yeah, yeah. You do that. You. Do that." Something else explodes and she opens the door.
A guy with glasses, more a boy than a man, is standing there, hands on his hips, and she arches an eyebrow as he pushes past her with a loud and dramatic ‘huff’ to stand in the doorway.
"Mother is not going to like this!"
Click of the tongue, and she walks outside, hand held up to shield the sun, and an ice cream truck drives by, tinkling music with a giant frozen banana on the roof.
-
(this is how it could have gone: She decides that money might just be able to buy happiness, and she drops out of college and becomes Mrs. Gob Bluth, much to the chagrin of friends and family alike. The wedding is, in a word, a debacle. And there might have been strippers present. And in Gob’s attempt to make the wedding cake disappear, he smashed it to pieces and the only photos in their wedding album are of Jordan in a confection coated wedding gown and Gob sprawled on the ground, mouth open in some kind of yell - "Come on!" - or contortion of pain. They stay married, despite the fact he fucks other women and she certainly fucks other men and they sleep in two separate twin beds in the same bedroom. It happens. In the end, she leaves Gob for Michael who really doesn’t want her to stick in the first place. But once a Bluth, always a Bluth. She starts drinking. Heavily.)
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5.
i've stopped my dreaming; i don’t do too much scheming these days
-
She listens to too much Janis Joplin like she might just be contemplating some kind of suicide all her own (she’s gonna use it till the days she dies).
This is Jordan, age thirty, back in New York for no clear-cut reason other than business she’d rather not attend to.
She goes back to New York like she doesn’t return home, the long plane ride and bad in-air movie, the flight to the city in lieu of the drive across the state of California to home among the blue and sun. But it’s calming and soothing and nostalgic in a way that her house never was, and surely, her mother must know this.
She finds herself downtown, in a goddamned police station, interrogation room and all.
Turns out the head of this particular affiliate is being fingered in some kind of office harassment, double homicide kind of thing, and I’m sorry, Ms. McDeere, but we’re going to have to take you in for questioning.
He had introduced himself as Detective Stabler, and he looks at her like he understands her, and that’s just silly, because they just met and no one’s that good at their job, better yet at reading people.
-
"Am I free to go?" she asks, coat in her arms, clutched to her chest, and no, she never fucked this man, and no, she doesn’t know any women he might have, and yes, she’s only in town for the weekend and she just met this creep the other day so she’s probably not the best person to consult as a character witness, okay?
"Uh, yeah. I guess you are," he says, and he’s good-looking for a cop. Not paunchy or stereotypically hilarious with a doughnut in hand and a mustache above his lip. Instead, he’s intense, and, well, hot, and she probably stares longer than she should because now he looks curious instead of dismissive, and she finds herself digging in her purse and handing him his business card.
"In case you have any more questions," she says, but it’s not what she means, and he seems to get this because now he doesn’t look just curious, he looks interested. It makes her stomach clench.
"Thanks for your time," and he sounds distant and insincere, his mind wandering, and she smiles because she really is that good.
-
"You like being a cop?" she asks after she invites him in and pours him a glass of bourbon or scotch or - this part really doesn’t matter. She only has the lamp on, the lamp sitting on the bedside table, and shadows that spell out ‘film noir’ and ‘inappropriate’ and ‘mistake’ are stretched out across the plain wallpaper.
"I like it enough," he answers, ambiguous and she doesn’t smile and neither does he. He doesn’t smile when he sets his glass down, only half of it gone, and she doesn’t smile when his hands close around her wrist and he pulls her against him.
She feels vaguely like a prostitute, she thinks, as his hand winds around her waist, the other twisting in her hair and pulling back and back and back; their mouths meet in some kind of macabre, tragic parody of a first kiss. Sirens wail outside and he stiffens but he doesn’t stop.
She wants to ask him where and when he got so lost. She thinks it would be a bonding of sorts and she’s hungry and tired and wants some human company, but it’s New York, and there’s ice but no snow and a cop spreads her legs and the comforter is scratchy against her back.
She feels lost and alone and just twelve years ago she thought the world might be hers and she might make it after all and there were records she always listened to and Lou Reed’s voice that wafted through her dorm room and there was the roommate that hated her because she smoked pot and red eyes, she’d be high, and because sometimes she slept until noon or hell, all day, and yeah, she only behaved like this for a semester and her grades suffered for it, but it was everything and it was real.
Twelve years is a long time, and time enough to slip away.
He fucks her and she tries to watch the skyscrapers reaching for the sky. It’s too dark. She can’t see a thing.
-
(this is how it could have gone: They try to make it work, in vain and in pain, but it’s fruitless because she reviews drafts for television sitcoms and cop shows while he arrests men that think eight-year old girls are the stuff of lurid fantasies. He’s dark and tired and frustrating and she’s too happy for him most of the time. He takes to yelling, "Jordan! You’re wearing me thin!" only not in the charming 50’s screwball comedy context. Eventually she gets just as dark and tired too and it’s just too much. He’s divorced again and, funny, so is she, and a double divorcee, she packs her belongings and heads back to LA, with more baggage than she left with.)
-
fin.