Backwater Parts 1 & 2
Title: Backwater .1.
Characters: Danny Concannon, CJ Cregg
Rating: Harmless
Notes: Pre-Series. A revelation tracked across the campaign trail.
Disclaimer: All credit goes to Sorkin, Wells, & NBC/Warner Bros.
He thinks she’s pretty. Not that he would admit it to anyone. It’d cost him -he wasn’t all that sure what it would cost him. A press pass? His job? By default, no press pass meant no job, so maybe it was a bit silly to separate the two. His dignity would definitely be a casualty. There wasn’t too terribly much of it to begin with, of that he was aware -he’d been told too many times not to be, after all -but here, at hour zero, he could feel what was left starting to drain out the bottom of his feet.
Feet. He should move. Had anybody else moved? No. Okay. Wait, he was sitting down? Even better.
They were at a meet and greet photo op -the press, him, Governor Bartlett, and her. If he stepped up and was honest, he’d admit that he didn’t have much of an idea of what was going on, aside from the fact that they were in a backwater diner in a backwater town somewhere in Nebraska eating (backwater) pancakes. Nobody had even so much as seen a pancake thus far, though, so the last bit was probably a lie.
Boy, he really couldn’t think with her standing there and looking, well. Pretty.
He’d been following the Bartlett campaign for a long time now. Long enough where, theoretically, he shouldn’t have been shaken by the presence of one of the candidate’s senior advisors. But. CJ Cregg, who he’d worked with closely (but not closely enough -oh, jeez did that not bode well for him) in the past weeks, was laughing.
She was laughing, and wearing a worn-out blue flannel shirt over a pair of crumpled jeans, and it was the first time he’d seen her with her hair pulled back and-
There were a million more ‘ands’, all of which added up to the aforementioned him-finding-her-pretty thing. All of which, it would seem, pointed towards the untimely demise of his career.
Across the diner, CJ lets out another raucous laugh at something one of the elderly waitresses said to a blushing-over Sam Seaborn. Danny feels the breath wheeze out of him and squeezes his notebook until paper cuts break out along his palm.
He was wrong, earlier. The laughing wasn’t one of the ‘ands’ that lead to her being pretty. It was one of the ones that made her amazing and so very, very far out of his league.
Title: Backwater .2.
Characters: Danny Concannon, CJ Cregg
Rating: Harmless
Notes: Pre-Series. A revelation tracked across the campaign trail.
Disclaimer: All credit goes to Sorkin, Wells, & NBC/Warner Bros.
She was still pretty in South Dakota. He didn’t know how she’d done it, how anyone could look anything other than woebegone and bedraggled in a state that had more cows than people and not enough hot water for a shower exceeding the thirty second mark. But she was pretty, and he was still employed. Both miracles, really, when you stopped to think.
Not that he had the kind of time to think. Not with Governor Bartlett recounting everything that’d ever been said or thought about Mount Rushmore and grain-based agriculture. Danny wasn’t sure what made him think those two topics meshed into a single cohesive conversation, and, frankly, he didn’t want to know for fear that he’d either be subjected to another hour-long lecture or, worse, that he’d actually be able to understand what was going on in the other man’s head.
That might be able to make an interesting sidebar. If, you know, he ever did a sidebar one of these days. The note got scribbled down anyway. He’d taken to writing down more and more since Nebraska cause it had a way of keeping his head in the game. By that he meant, of course, that it had a way of keeping him from staring at CJ.
The morning in the diner was the first of what he’d taken to calling his ‘rough’ days. Rough days & easy days. It was cliché and terrible, but he did that on purpose, because that’s usually how he felt on the worst of days, when he wasted hours at photo ops or on the press bus, just sitting -or standing -and staring. That was how he felt at those times -cliché and terrible. So the names stayed, and were used often.
Today, for example, was a rough day. Her hair was up again -he was starting to check for that as an indicator of how his day would be; hair up or down, presence or absence of glasses, and skirt-or-pants -and she’d thrown on this terrible, oversized calamity of white wool that, he hated to admit, he was actually starting to like.
CJ caught his eye from across the field, so Danny made a show of ducking his head and scribbling away in his notebook. Bartlett was on about grain exports, or cows exporting grain, or Teddy Roosevelt -he didn’t really know, but wrote it down anyway. After a minute, he risked a look up again. This time, it was CJ who was staring at him. She shot him a curious look, then, oh-so-subtly, pointed at the Governor, as if to ask ‘Are you seriously writing this down?”
Danny blushed, pulling himself together just long enough to nod and mouth ‘Sidebar’ back in her direction. She’d laughed then. Silently, to herself, and not at all like she had back in the diner. Still, that was all Danny heard, the out-of-control laugh, and the thrumming joy of it all was enough to make him forget why he was standing in a field full of cow pies with a chewed-up pencil and a dinky notebook.
South Dakota, he decided, just might be his favorite state.
Both of these pieces are part of my ficing_insane challenge: 72 hours to write 50 CJ/Danny-centric fanfics. Day one just wrapped today with a grand total of 16, so if you like what you see here, there's plenty more to be found over @ my journal. Drop in & submit a prompt!
Characters: Danny Concannon, CJ Cregg
Rating: Harmless
Notes: Pre-Series. A revelation tracked across the campaign trail.
Disclaimer: All credit goes to Sorkin, Wells, & NBC/Warner Bros.
He thinks she’s pretty. Not that he would admit it to anyone. It’d cost him -he wasn’t all that sure what it would cost him. A press pass? His job? By default, no press pass meant no job, so maybe it was a bit silly to separate the two. His dignity would definitely be a casualty. There wasn’t too terribly much of it to begin with, of that he was aware -he’d been told too many times not to be, after all -but here, at hour zero, he could feel what was left starting to drain out the bottom of his feet.
Feet. He should move. Had anybody else moved? No. Okay. Wait, he was sitting down? Even better.
They were at a meet and greet photo op -the press, him, Governor Bartlett, and her. If he stepped up and was honest, he’d admit that he didn’t have much of an idea of what was going on, aside from the fact that they were in a backwater diner in a backwater town somewhere in Nebraska eating (backwater) pancakes. Nobody had even so much as seen a pancake thus far, though, so the last bit was probably a lie.
Boy, he really couldn’t think with her standing there and looking, well. Pretty.
He’d been following the Bartlett campaign for a long time now. Long enough where, theoretically, he shouldn’t have been shaken by the presence of one of the candidate’s senior advisors. But. CJ Cregg, who he’d worked with closely (but not closely enough -oh, jeez did that not bode well for him) in the past weeks, was laughing.
She was laughing, and wearing a worn-out blue flannel shirt over a pair of crumpled jeans, and it was the first time he’d seen her with her hair pulled back and-
There were a million more ‘ands’, all of which added up to the aforementioned him-finding-her-pretty thing. All of which, it would seem, pointed towards the untimely demise of his career.
Across the diner, CJ lets out another raucous laugh at something one of the elderly waitresses said to a blushing-over Sam Seaborn. Danny feels the breath wheeze out of him and squeezes his notebook until paper cuts break out along his palm.
He was wrong, earlier. The laughing wasn’t one of the ‘ands’ that lead to her being pretty. It was one of the ones that made her amazing and so very, very far out of his league.
Title: Backwater .2.
Characters: Danny Concannon, CJ Cregg
Rating: Harmless
Notes: Pre-Series. A revelation tracked across the campaign trail.
Disclaimer: All credit goes to Sorkin, Wells, & NBC/Warner Bros.
She was still pretty in South Dakota. He didn’t know how she’d done it, how anyone could look anything other than woebegone and bedraggled in a state that had more cows than people and not enough hot water for a shower exceeding the thirty second mark. But she was pretty, and he was still employed. Both miracles, really, when you stopped to think.
Not that he had the kind of time to think. Not with Governor Bartlett recounting everything that’d ever been said or thought about Mount Rushmore and grain-based agriculture. Danny wasn’t sure what made him think those two topics meshed into a single cohesive conversation, and, frankly, he didn’t want to know for fear that he’d either be subjected to another hour-long lecture or, worse, that he’d actually be able to understand what was going on in the other man’s head.
That might be able to make an interesting sidebar. If, you know, he ever did a sidebar one of these days. The note got scribbled down anyway. He’d taken to writing down more and more since Nebraska cause it had a way of keeping his head in the game. By that he meant, of course, that it had a way of keeping him from staring at CJ.
The morning in the diner was the first of what he’d taken to calling his ‘rough’ days. Rough days & easy days. It was cliché and terrible, but he did that on purpose, because that’s usually how he felt on the worst of days, when he wasted hours at photo ops or on the press bus, just sitting -or standing -and staring. That was how he felt at those times -cliché and terrible. So the names stayed, and were used often.
Today, for example, was a rough day. Her hair was up again -he was starting to check for that as an indicator of how his day would be; hair up or down, presence or absence of glasses, and skirt-or-pants -and she’d thrown on this terrible, oversized calamity of white wool that, he hated to admit, he was actually starting to like.
CJ caught his eye from across the field, so Danny made a show of ducking his head and scribbling away in his notebook. Bartlett was on about grain exports, or cows exporting grain, or Teddy Roosevelt -he didn’t really know, but wrote it down anyway. After a minute, he risked a look up again. This time, it was CJ who was staring at him. She shot him a curious look, then, oh-so-subtly, pointed at the Governor, as if to ask ‘Are you seriously writing this down?”
Danny blushed, pulling himself together just long enough to nod and mouth ‘Sidebar’ back in her direction. She’d laughed then. Silently, to herself, and not at all like she had back in the diner. Still, that was all Danny heard, the out-of-control laugh, and the thrumming joy of it all was enough to make him forget why he was standing in a field full of cow pies with a chewed-up pencil and a dinky notebook.
South Dakota, he decided, just might be his favorite state.
Both of these pieces are part of my ficing_insane challenge: 72 hours to write 50 CJ/Danny-centric fanfics. Day one just wrapped today with a grand total of 16, so if you like what you see here, there's plenty more to be found over @ my journal. Drop in & submit a prompt!