SN ficlet: Harmless, Necessary
Title: Harmless, Necessary
Fandom: Sports Night
Characters: Dan Rydell, Casey McCall, a cat, supporting thinly-disguised fangirls
Rating: PG
Category: Fluff, slash implied, 2,390 words
Summary: Dan gets a cat; Casey (eventually) gets Dan.
Written: November 2006.
Note:This is for lordessrenegade, in her time of stress (and to apologise for being a grumpy old ratbag on a regular basis), and also a change of pace from all the woobieness thrown up by the last sn100 prompt. It's fluff - literally, actually - so don't expect too much. Thank you to catwalksalone for help and encouragement, even if I did completely ignore almost all her suggestions. This does, at least, mean that no-one can blame her if they hate it.
It began with the kitten.
Not that Casey realised it was a kitten right away. All he initially knew was that he knocked at Dan's apartment door, Danny opened it, and something shot up his pants leg and headed straight for his boxers.
He jumped, and said, "Fuck!" and went into the sort of half-dance, half-flail that any man might do in the circumstances. He might have said "Fuck!" a little bit more, too, and possibly also, "What the fuck?!"
Dan was no help at all.
"Don't frighten her!"
If anyone was frightened, Casey reasoned, it ought to be him. He was the one whose most sensitive parts were being accosted by what felt like a small felt bag of razor blades. But, hey: his balls had survived ten years of marriage. After Lisa, they could probably deal with anything. He made himself stand still, turned tactfully away, unfastened his belt, reached into his waistband and made cautious contact.
Something bit his finger. He said, "Fuck!" again. For a moment, he considered asking Dan for help, but … no, that'd be taking friendship too far. He tried again, and this time managed to grab what turned out to be, when he withdrew his hand, the scruff of a small, fluffy, tortoiseshell neck. The small, fluffy, tortoiseshell head swivelled; two baleful green eyes blazed up at him, and a tiny pink mouth opened startlingly wide (yup: teeth. Lots of 'em), and emitted a ferocious hiss.
"It's a kitten," he said intelligently. Dan laughed at him, reached out his hand, and took the little monster from him. To Casey's indignation, the green eyes immediately turned adoring; the kitten snuggled into the crook of Dan's arm and began to purr blissfully. Dan smiled fondly, and ran a free finger through its fur.
"I found her in the alley last night," Dan said, and his smile deepened. "Lost, and hungry, and scared - what was I gonna do?"
"Call a shelter?" Casey suggested, and Dan's head snapped up. He glowered at Casey with the sort of expression most people reserve for tax inspectors and the Angel of Death.
"A shelter?!" he said, appalled. "She needs a home!"
"You can't keep a cat here," Casey pointed out. "The lease - "
Dan waved him away. "There's no no-pet clause. I checked, and I faxed it over to Karen. She says the same thing."
"Karen's in California," Casey objected. Thank god, he didn't say; Dan's big sister unnerved him, with her cropped hair and her spiky fuck-me Lady Lawyer heels. "The property laws may be different there."
Dan shrugged and went back to stroking the kitten. "Nah. And if anyone kicks up a fuss, I'll move someplace else. Anyhow," he went on, and flashed Casey his cockiest grin, "the landlord loves me. I'm his direct line to the glamour and the glitter that is the world of professional sports. Aren't I?" he (apparently) asked the kitten. "Aren't I, huh?"
"It talks?" Casey asked, sarcastically.
"She understands," Dan said. "So, you be nice. No more talk of S-H-E - "
"You're sure it can't spell?"
Dan gave him a withering stare. "She's a kitten, Casey, don't be ridiculous!"
"Okay." Casey wasn't going to win this argument. He tried another tack. "But, talking of the glamour and the glitter that is the world of professional sports - do you really think this is a good home for it? I mean - it's a baby, it'll need feeding, and you're out all day …"
"I'm on it," Dan told him and, on cue, the doorbell rang. "That would be the Babysitters' Club."
In fact, it was the pretty young woman from the third floor - Casey had met her in the elevator several times - burdened down with schoolbooks and a sketch pad, and looking more than usually stressed. She smiled at Dan, scowled at Casey, took one look at the kitten, dropped everything on the floor, and let out a completely untranslatable noise which could only be phonetically rendered as "SQUEEEE!" Dan left her with a long list of instructions as to the kitten's intake ("Kitten food's on the shelf there - she likes the cans, don't give her the kibble, it makes her barf") and output ("I'll get her a dirtbox on the way home - meantime, there's a newspaper stash in the closet"), permission to "Eat anything you can find in the fridge, and order out if there's nothing there," and a final plea - "Oh, and if you download any porn, can you clean out your cookies this time?", all of which she appeared to listen to with half an ear whilst taking off her jacket with one hand, laying out her books with another and, somehow, not leaving off fussing the kitten for a moment.
"Porn?" Casey asked, as they rode down in the elevator together.
"Girlporn's scary," Dan said, and shuddered.
***
That was the beginning. From then on, Dan's apartment acquired a permanent floating population of what Casey mentally labelled Sad Old Cat Ladies - except that several of them were young, and some of them were hot, and at least half of them could have easily kicked his ass. He couldn't quite figure out where they all came from - a couple of them seemed to be British, and at least one was, he thought, Australian (he didn't dare check; the last time he'd asked that question, he'd ended up on the receiving end of a long and bitter lecture on the geography of the Antipodes) - or what was in it for them; Dan didn't seem to be sleeping with any of them, and the kitten wasn't that cute.
Another thing he couldn't work out was what he'd done to upset them. He'd thought at first it was his imagination, but no: they glared. All of them. He was sure of it. And when they thought he wasn't listening, he heard them talking about him. The word 'jackass' was cited a number of times.
On the upside, one of the older ones (there were several), who could easily have been Danny's mother, did always bring him cake. Oftentimes it was chocolate.
And the kitten settled comfortably in. It - she - grew; she became housetrained, saving her most obnoxious intestinal by-products for mealtimes and hungover mornings. She found her voice and learned to sing operatic arias. Sneaking out onto the balcony one day, she caught a pigeon twice her own size, and then clearly had no idea what to do with it (white-faced, Dan had the balcony screened, and paid off the super in game passes). Dan spent a fortune on catmint mice and bundles of feathers on strings, which the kitten duly ignored to his face and then fought to the death as soon as he was out of sight. She caught a cold and needed to be rushed to the vet, and Casey found himself unexpectedly co-hosting with Bobbi Bernstein because Danny was hyperventilating and couldn't focus for two seconds together. When her routine scheduled operation came along, Casey seriously considered suggesting that Dan be anaesthetised alongside her; it would have saved everybody a lot of grief. But everyone survived, her fur grew back and, just like that, she wasn't a kitten any more. She was a cat, poised and elegant and graceful (except at four in the morning, when the catmint menace threatened) and, Casey found to his surprise, she was a part of both their lives.
"Still," he said one night, when there was nothing on the TV but old, old movies and celebrity golf from Taiwan ("And not even celebrities you've ever heard of, Casey! I could be on that list! My mother could be on that list!!"), "I never really saw you as a cat person, Dan."
(They both ignored the obvious joke. It was beneath them. Besides, Elliott had made it every day for the past six months.)
"M'm?" Dan murmured. He appeared to be drifting off to sleep.
"Maybe a dog," Casey mused. "You could take it for walks. Take it to the park. Use it to pick up women. You know - it slips its leash, it jumps up at her, you run over and apologise, before you know it you're talking, next thing you know, you're in bed - "
Dan raised his head and blinked. "This is your experience of dog walking?"
"Well," Casey admitted, "… no. Not personally. It's … like a generic overview of dog walking."
"It's the warped fantasy of a man verging on middle-age and wondering whether he'll ever have sex again," Dan told him sternly; but he smiled, that faint, crooked smile that Casey knew meant any number of things, none of them that Danny was happy. "And anyway - " he said, and then something else, but he said it so quietly that Casey wasn't sure he'd heard him.
"Anyway?" he prompted. Dan shook his head, and got to his feet.
"You want a drink?"
Casey didn't, much. What he wanted was to think about what he'd thought he'd heard Danny say. So he said, "Sure," and watched as Dan walked out to the kitchen.
He'd thought that Dan had said, "I really don't want to meet women, Casey. Not any more". But, since Casey knew perfectly well that meeting (and sleeping with) new women all the time was #1 on Dan's 'Why It's Good To Be Famous' list, that didn't seem likely.
And even if he had heard correctly … it wasn't hugely probable that Dan's motivations were anything even vaguely approximating Casey's own.
Because Casey had become bored of meeting (and sleeping with) new women all the time quite some while ago. Somewhere around #17 on the Dating Plan of Infamy. Somewhere around the time of the Quo Vadimus buyout, when he'd thought about moving to California, or about not moving to California, and had realised that either way, if he did it alone he might as well rip the heart out of his body and be done with it.
So he stayed put. Wondering.
Across the room, in the comfortable armchair that had, by the simple force of sheer willpower, become her own, the cat opened one eye (still as green and as baleful as the day Casey had first met her), and looked at him. Contemptuously.
Coward, she seemed to be saying. And, what are you so afraid of, anyway?
Fucking things up, Casey told her. Losing everything. What would you do if you lost him?
She opened the other eye and stared straight at him, then got to her feet and slowly, meticulously, began to shred the upholstery.
That chair had been Danny's grandmother's, Casey knew. It was an antique. It had probably been worth a fortune.
But he'd let the cat destroy it. Because he loved her. Because he was Danny.
And because Danny's love was not a thing that, once given, was easily lost.
Which, really, left Casey with no excuse at all. Only words like jackass, and coward.
Was that how he wanted to be known for the rest of his life?
"It's really not," he said out loud, and, to the cat, "and what are you looking at, anyway?" So he pushed himself up, and he followed Danny out to the kitchen.
"Hey," Dan said over his shoulder. He straightened up from the refrigerator and handed Casey an open beer.
"Hey," Casey said, and he took it, leaned back against the sink. "I was wondering," he began, and then he ran out of words.
Dan tilted his head, watching him curiously. "What?" he asked, after a moment.
"Wondering …" Casey said. And then he said, "Why doesn't the cat have a name?"
Dan blinked. "What?"
"The cat," Casey said. "Cats have names. People name them. So why didn't you?" Then he said, "Danny?", because Dan's eyes had slid away from his; he was staring at a patch of floor in the corner of the room as though it were the doorway to the magical realm of Narnia. (Casey checked, from the corner of his eye. It wasn't.)
"She - " Dan said. And, "I - " He shook his head. "I don't know." He set his beer bottle down on the counter and started to walk back into the living room. Casey caught his arm as he went past.
"Danny?"
"Because!" Dan said. "Because, because." He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped defeatedly. "Because if I give her a name, then I admit that she's mine, and if I admit that she's mine, then it means that I can lose her. And I just can't do that any more. I went all-out to get Rebecca, and see how that worked out. I'm not chasing. I'm not pursuing. I'm not possessing. I'm just … just being. And she's just being, with me. At the moment, all she is is an idea of a cat. Once I give her a name, she's real."
"Huh," Casey said, slowly. He put his head back and looked Dan up and down. "You still seeing that shrink?"
"Abby?"
"Her, yeah."
"Yeah …?"
"You might think about asking for your money back." He watched as Dan, unwillingly, smiled, and he squeezed his elbow. "You? You're an idiot, you know that. I know, I know that makes two of us. I'm a jerk, and a jackass, and all those things your nutty women friends like to call me, but you? Danny, you know what you want, and you're too scared to ask for it?"
Dan's eyes were averted again, downcast, fixed on his shoes. Casey reached out with his free hand and tilted Dan's chin up. "Danny, what did you think I was going to say?"
Dan smiled slightly, reluctantly. "No?" he suggested. "Fuck off? Get out of my sight, don't ever come near me again?"
"Idiot," Casey said, softly; and he pulled Dan closer.
"The cat sleeps on the bed, you know," Dan murmured.
"Uh-huh," Casey said. "Then she'll just have to learn to share."
Later on that night, when the cat jumped on the bed, she was indignant to find her usual spot occupied. She considered the intruder for some time, then decided on the course of least resistance, snaked her way under the covers, and made herself comfortable in between the two men. H'm, she thought. Cosy. Why didn't they do this before?
Idiot humans, she thought, and went to sleep.
***
Fandom: Sports Night
Characters: Dan Rydell, Casey McCall, a cat, supporting thinly-disguised fangirls
Rating: PG
Category: Fluff, slash implied, 2,390 words
Summary: Dan gets a cat; Casey (eventually) gets Dan.
Written: November 2006.
Note:This is for lordessrenegade, in her time of stress (and to apologise for being a grumpy old ratbag on a regular basis), and also a change of pace from all the woobieness thrown up by the last sn100 prompt. It's fluff - literally, actually - so don't expect too much. Thank you to catwalksalone for help and encouragement, even if I did completely ignore almost all her suggestions. This does, at least, mean that no-one can blame her if they hate it.
It began with the kitten.
Not that Casey realised it was a kitten right away. All he initially knew was that he knocked at Dan's apartment door, Danny opened it, and something shot up his pants leg and headed straight for his boxers.
He jumped, and said, "Fuck!" and went into the sort of half-dance, half-flail that any man might do in the circumstances. He might have said "Fuck!" a little bit more, too, and possibly also, "What the fuck?!"
Dan was no help at all.
"Don't frighten her!"
If anyone was frightened, Casey reasoned, it ought to be him. He was the one whose most sensitive parts were being accosted by what felt like a small felt bag of razor blades. But, hey: his balls had survived ten years of marriage. After Lisa, they could probably deal with anything. He made himself stand still, turned tactfully away, unfastened his belt, reached into his waistband and made cautious contact.
Something bit his finger. He said, "Fuck!" again. For a moment, he considered asking Dan for help, but … no, that'd be taking friendship too far. He tried again, and this time managed to grab what turned out to be, when he withdrew his hand, the scruff of a small, fluffy, tortoiseshell neck. The small, fluffy, tortoiseshell head swivelled; two baleful green eyes blazed up at him, and a tiny pink mouth opened startlingly wide (yup: teeth. Lots of 'em), and emitted a ferocious hiss.
"It's a kitten," he said intelligently. Dan laughed at him, reached out his hand, and took the little monster from him. To Casey's indignation, the green eyes immediately turned adoring; the kitten snuggled into the crook of Dan's arm and began to purr blissfully. Dan smiled fondly, and ran a free finger through its fur.
"I found her in the alley last night," Dan said, and his smile deepened. "Lost, and hungry, and scared - what was I gonna do?"
"Call a shelter?" Casey suggested, and Dan's head snapped up. He glowered at Casey with the sort of expression most people reserve for tax inspectors and the Angel of Death.
"A shelter?!" he said, appalled. "She needs a home!"
"You can't keep a cat here," Casey pointed out. "The lease - "
Dan waved him away. "There's no no-pet clause. I checked, and I faxed it over to Karen. She says the same thing."
"Karen's in California," Casey objected. Thank god, he didn't say; Dan's big sister unnerved him, with her cropped hair and her spiky fuck-me Lady Lawyer heels. "The property laws may be different there."
Dan shrugged and went back to stroking the kitten. "Nah. And if anyone kicks up a fuss, I'll move someplace else. Anyhow," he went on, and flashed Casey his cockiest grin, "the landlord loves me. I'm his direct line to the glamour and the glitter that is the world of professional sports. Aren't I?" he (apparently) asked the kitten. "Aren't I, huh?"
"It talks?" Casey asked, sarcastically.
"She understands," Dan said. "So, you be nice. No more talk of S-H-E - "
"You're sure it can't spell?"
Dan gave him a withering stare. "She's a kitten, Casey, don't be ridiculous!"
"Okay." Casey wasn't going to win this argument. He tried another tack. "But, talking of the glamour and the glitter that is the world of professional sports - do you really think this is a good home for it? I mean - it's a baby, it'll need feeding, and you're out all day …"
"I'm on it," Dan told him and, on cue, the doorbell rang. "That would be the Babysitters' Club."
In fact, it was the pretty young woman from the third floor - Casey had met her in the elevator several times - burdened down with schoolbooks and a sketch pad, and looking more than usually stressed. She smiled at Dan, scowled at Casey, took one look at the kitten, dropped everything on the floor, and let out a completely untranslatable noise which could only be phonetically rendered as "SQUEEEE!" Dan left her with a long list of instructions as to the kitten's intake ("Kitten food's on the shelf there - she likes the cans, don't give her the kibble, it makes her barf") and output ("I'll get her a dirtbox on the way home - meantime, there's a newspaper stash in the closet"), permission to "Eat anything you can find in the fridge, and order out if there's nothing there," and a final plea - "Oh, and if you download any porn, can you clean out your cookies this time?", all of which she appeared to listen to with half an ear whilst taking off her jacket with one hand, laying out her books with another and, somehow, not leaving off fussing the kitten for a moment.
"Porn?" Casey asked, as they rode down in the elevator together.
"Girlporn's scary," Dan said, and shuddered.
***
That was the beginning. From then on, Dan's apartment acquired a permanent floating population of what Casey mentally labelled Sad Old Cat Ladies - except that several of them were young, and some of them were hot, and at least half of them could have easily kicked his ass. He couldn't quite figure out where they all came from - a couple of them seemed to be British, and at least one was, he thought, Australian (he didn't dare check; the last time he'd asked that question, he'd ended up on the receiving end of a long and bitter lecture on the geography of the Antipodes) - or what was in it for them; Dan didn't seem to be sleeping with any of them, and the kitten wasn't that cute.
Another thing he couldn't work out was what he'd done to upset them. He'd thought at first it was his imagination, but no: they glared. All of them. He was sure of it. And when they thought he wasn't listening, he heard them talking about him. The word 'jackass' was cited a number of times.
On the upside, one of the older ones (there were several), who could easily have been Danny's mother, did always bring him cake. Oftentimes it was chocolate.
And the kitten settled comfortably in. It - she - grew; she became housetrained, saving her most obnoxious intestinal by-products for mealtimes and hungover mornings. She found her voice and learned to sing operatic arias. Sneaking out onto the balcony one day, she caught a pigeon twice her own size, and then clearly had no idea what to do with it (white-faced, Dan had the balcony screened, and paid off the super in game passes). Dan spent a fortune on catmint mice and bundles of feathers on strings, which the kitten duly ignored to his face and then fought to the death as soon as he was out of sight. She caught a cold and needed to be rushed to the vet, and Casey found himself unexpectedly co-hosting with Bobbi Bernstein because Danny was hyperventilating and couldn't focus for two seconds together. When her routine scheduled operation came along, Casey seriously considered suggesting that Dan be anaesthetised alongside her; it would have saved everybody a lot of grief. But everyone survived, her fur grew back and, just like that, she wasn't a kitten any more. She was a cat, poised and elegant and graceful (except at four in the morning, when the catmint menace threatened) and, Casey found to his surprise, she was a part of both their lives.
"Still," he said one night, when there was nothing on the TV but old, old movies and celebrity golf from Taiwan ("And not even celebrities you've ever heard of, Casey! I could be on that list! My mother could be on that list!!"), "I never really saw you as a cat person, Dan."
(They both ignored the obvious joke. It was beneath them. Besides, Elliott had made it every day for the past six months.)
"M'm?" Dan murmured. He appeared to be drifting off to sleep.
"Maybe a dog," Casey mused. "You could take it for walks. Take it to the park. Use it to pick up women. You know - it slips its leash, it jumps up at her, you run over and apologise, before you know it you're talking, next thing you know, you're in bed - "
Dan raised his head and blinked. "This is your experience of dog walking?"
"Well," Casey admitted, "… no. Not personally. It's … like a generic overview of dog walking."
"It's the warped fantasy of a man verging on middle-age and wondering whether he'll ever have sex again," Dan told him sternly; but he smiled, that faint, crooked smile that Casey knew meant any number of things, none of them that Danny was happy. "And anyway - " he said, and then something else, but he said it so quietly that Casey wasn't sure he'd heard him.
"Anyway?" he prompted. Dan shook his head, and got to his feet.
"You want a drink?"
Casey didn't, much. What he wanted was to think about what he'd thought he'd heard Danny say. So he said, "Sure," and watched as Dan walked out to the kitchen.
He'd thought that Dan had said, "I really don't want to meet women, Casey. Not any more". But, since Casey knew perfectly well that meeting (and sleeping with) new women all the time was #1 on Dan's 'Why It's Good To Be Famous' list, that didn't seem likely.
And even if he had heard correctly … it wasn't hugely probable that Dan's motivations were anything even vaguely approximating Casey's own.
Because Casey had become bored of meeting (and sleeping with) new women all the time quite some while ago. Somewhere around #17 on the Dating Plan of Infamy. Somewhere around the time of the Quo Vadimus buyout, when he'd thought about moving to California, or about not moving to California, and had realised that either way, if he did it alone he might as well rip the heart out of his body and be done with it.
So he stayed put. Wondering.
Across the room, in the comfortable armchair that had, by the simple force of sheer willpower, become her own, the cat opened one eye (still as green and as baleful as the day Casey had first met her), and looked at him. Contemptuously.
Coward, she seemed to be saying. And, what are you so afraid of, anyway?
Fucking things up, Casey told her. Losing everything. What would you do if you lost him?
She opened the other eye and stared straight at him, then got to her feet and slowly, meticulously, began to shred the upholstery.
That chair had been Danny's grandmother's, Casey knew. It was an antique. It had probably been worth a fortune.
But he'd let the cat destroy it. Because he loved her. Because he was Danny.
And because Danny's love was not a thing that, once given, was easily lost.
Which, really, left Casey with no excuse at all. Only words like jackass, and coward.
Was that how he wanted to be known for the rest of his life?
"It's really not," he said out loud, and, to the cat, "and what are you looking at, anyway?" So he pushed himself up, and he followed Danny out to the kitchen.
"Hey," Dan said over his shoulder. He straightened up from the refrigerator and handed Casey an open beer.
"Hey," Casey said, and he took it, leaned back against the sink. "I was wondering," he began, and then he ran out of words.
Dan tilted his head, watching him curiously. "What?" he asked, after a moment.
"Wondering …" Casey said. And then he said, "Why doesn't the cat have a name?"
Dan blinked. "What?"
"The cat," Casey said. "Cats have names. People name them. So why didn't you?" Then he said, "Danny?", because Dan's eyes had slid away from his; he was staring at a patch of floor in the corner of the room as though it were the doorway to the magical realm of Narnia. (Casey checked, from the corner of his eye. It wasn't.)
"She - " Dan said. And, "I - " He shook his head. "I don't know." He set his beer bottle down on the counter and started to walk back into the living room. Casey caught his arm as he went past.
"Danny?"
"Because!" Dan said. "Because, because." He shook his head, and his shoulders slumped defeatedly. "Because if I give her a name, then I admit that she's mine, and if I admit that she's mine, then it means that I can lose her. And I just can't do that any more. I went all-out to get Rebecca, and see how that worked out. I'm not chasing. I'm not pursuing. I'm not possessing. I'm just … just being. And she's just being, with me. At the moment, all she is is an idea of a cat. Once I give her a name, she's real."
"Huh," Casey said, slowly. He put his head back and looked Dan up and down. "You still seeing that shrink?"
"Abby?"
"Her, yeah."
"Yeah …?"
"You might think about asking for your money back." He watched as Dan, unwillingly, smiled, and he squeezed his elbow. "You? You're an idiot, you know that. I know, I know that makes two of us. I'm a jerk, and a jackass, and all those things your nutty women friends like to call me, but you? Danny, you know what you want, and you're too scared to ask for it?"
Dan's eyes were averted again, downcast, fixed on his shoes. Casey reached out with his free hand and tilted Dan's chin up. "Danny, what did you think I was going to say?"
Dan smiled slightly, reluctantly. "No?" he suggested. "Fuck off? Get out of my sight, don't ever come near me again?"
"Idiot," Casey said, softly; and he pulled Dan closer.
"The cat sleeps on the bed, you know," Dan murmured.
"Uh-huh," Casey said. "Then she'll just have to learn to share."
Later on that night, when the cat jumped on the bed, she was indignant to find her usual spot occupied. She considered the intruder for some time, then decided on the course of least resistance, snaked her way under the covers, and made herself comfortable in between the two men. H'm, she thought. Cosy. Why didn't they do this before?
Idiot humans, she thought, and went to sleep.
***