TITLE: Two Guys and a Couch
E-MAIL: eli @ popullus.net
RATING: PG-13
POSTED: Jan. 10, 2004
SUMMARY: Drunken silliness; snark ensues.
NOTES: For shrift on her 25th, my first Sports Night. With a little help from Apathy to make sure it wasn't only funny in my own head.
DISCLAIMER: Quite frankly, I'm not sure who these guys belong to any more. I do know that it sure as hell ain't me. Read.




It was awfully quiet. It was too quiet. The door was closed, the lights were off, and it was so quiet that they had either killed each other or--

Dana couldn't think of any other reason for the silence. There was absolutely no reason for noise to not be coming from the guys' office, but there wasn't any. None. That wasn't right. Maybe the Apocalypse was at hand.

"You think Dan finally stuffed Casey under the couch?"

"I think it's more likely Casey figured out how to get the window open, and now he's huddled in there concocting a plausible reason why Dan would choose to jump out on his own."

Dana spun to face Natalie and Jeremy, and -- latching onto the wonderful solidity of Jeremy's desk -- resolved to not do that again any time soon. Once the room stopped whirling, she frowned. "Shut it, Jeremy. Casey would never, ever do that."

"Nope. Not Casey," Natalie nodded. "Besides, those windows don't open. We're forty-nine floors up -- that's almost 600 feet from the ground, as you should know, Mr. Factoid -- and at that height it could cause serious damage to the New York tourist industry if someone went splat on the sidewalk." She slapped the desk in demonstration and Dana giggled.

"But Dan would stuff Casey under the couch?"

"Yes," Dana and Natalie said together.

Dana smirked. Maybe Casey and Dan had decided to leave Anthony's without checking in with her, and the Kim had come back to the bar with an outlandish story of secrets and lies and how the world might be about to end, but at least some things were still going right.

Jeremy sucked in a deep breath and Dana rolled her eyes. Great, he was going to argue.

"You know," he said, condescending, as only he could be, "you could turn on the lights out here and they would probably, just maybe, be bright enough to shed some illumination on the office in question. Which has walls made out of glass."

Natalie nudged him in the side with her elbow. "Yeah, we could do that. And we could, since it's not one-way glass, let them know we're out here, Einstein."

Jeremy pushed off from Natalie with an insulted look. After an unsteady moment he ended up, head down, with his arm back around her shoulders. "You're probably right," he sighed.

Dana's eyes widened and Natalie's head whipped around. "Probably?" Natalie poked him in the shoulder. Jeremy wobbled again, but pouted instead of apologizing. Dana managed to muffle her snort of laughter when Natalie poked him again.

"Hey," Jeremy protested, batting at her hand.

"Say it again, and this time, take out the 'probably,'" Natalie ordered.

Jeremy whined, "Why?" and Dana decided it was time to take a chance and peer through those little frosty squares, see if she could see anything in the guys' office. Jeremy was drunk enough that this could take a while. Unless Natalie let him drop to his ass on the floor, which might not be too long from now considering the idiocy Dana could still hear coming out of his mouth as she navigated her way across the room.

When the trash can got in her way despite a last-minute swerve, Dana allowed that she might be a bit impaired herself. Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she kicked the metal bin and threw her hands in the air with a triumphant "Score!" as it thudded onto Kim's chair and didn't topple off again. She kept going. Nope, doing fine.

"Nice shot, Dana!" Natalie called out behind her.

"Thank you!" Two more steps... "Now hush," she commanded. Instant silence. Suspicious, she turned to see Natalie doing a bang up job of making sure Jeremy stopped talking. Dana tilted her head. Jeremy was going to need to breathe, eventually. His hands slid up to cup Natalie's face and the two of them flowed even closer together. Okay, maybe not.

Shaking her head, Dana tiptoed the final foot to the door. She still couldn't really see anything in there, but now that she was this close, she could hear sounds -- not voices, exactly. Her nose bumped against the glass and she jerked back at a *thump* from inside the office, followed by a muffled snicker that could only have come from Dan.

What in hell?

"Dana?"

She scowled at the door. They were in there. Not that she'd doubted Kim's report of being kicked out so she wouldn't interfere with "man-talk of Apocalypse-level importance," but--

"Hey. Dana."

Looking over her shoulder, she saw Natalie tugging Jeremy toward the elevator. "Hey."

"We're going home, Dana. The boys will come out when they want to and we can think of at least five--"

"Six!"

"Okay," Natalie grinned up at Jeremy without missing a step, "six better things to do in the meantime. But they need to be done not here. Understand?"

"Okay!" Dana chirped. She started to turn back to the door. Paused. "Only six?" she called out as they disappeared around the corner.

Jeremy leaned back into sight. "We're pacing ourselves," he declared with a solemn head-bob.

"Ah, always a good idea. See you at the noon rundown?"

Natalie peered around the corner and gave her a look. Why was she getting a look? Dana went over in her head what she'd just said and decided to give Natalie a look. Natalie nodded. "Yep. Sure. 'Night, Dana."

Jeremy opened his mouth. Natalie clapped a hand over it and disappeared around the corner, dragging him behind her.

"G'night! Don't let the bedbugs bite!" Dana sang, then giggled at Jeremy's, "Natalie!"

"Just when you think he has some hope," she muttered to herself as the office went silent once more.

Completely silent. Damn, they'd made too much noise. They'd been found out. Maybe if she didn't make any more noise, Dan and Casey would figure she'd given up and left, too. They'd be wrong. She never gave up. But it would be just like them to think that she'd give up. They always thought that she would, if they just--

"Go away, Dana," Casey called from beyond the door, and she yelped.

"Yeah, Dana, find a cab and go home."

Dan was laughing at her now, she could hear it. She pulled the door handle and growled when it didn't move. They'd locked it? She started pounding on the glass.

"Not until I know whether either of you is trapped under a cushion or halfway out a window. 'Cause if you are, I need to call Bobbi to fill in and Isaac to cancel a paycheck." She paused in her pounding for a moment before picking up again. "I can hear you muttering! Open the door!"

Her fist hit square in the middle of Casey's chest when the door swung open between one blow and the next.

"Ow."

"Don't you 'ow' me," Dana snapped. He just grinned and braced his hand on the doorframe. "I wasn't hitting the door any where near hard enough to cause actual pain, but if you two don't fess up, I'll--"

"We're fine, Dana," Dan assured her from the couch.

In the dim light from the skyscrapers beyond the window, she could see him lounging there with his arms stretched out and his right ankle comfortably perched on his left knee, presenting a rumpled but perfectly Dan-like picture. On the couch. Which Casey was most definitely not under.

Dana slipped under Casey's arm and rushed over to push at the windows. They didn't budge. Ha. Natalie was right.

"What in the world are you doing?"

She spun, rather proud when the room didn't spin with her and she came to a stop at precisely the right spot to peer up at Casey's bemused smile. "Just testing a theory."

Dan snorted. "What? That you're unhinged?"

"Danny," Casey sighed, clamping his hand on her elbow before she could turn to attack.

"Shutting up."

Dana pulled her arm away. There was something up and she, as the one in charge, needed to know everything. Right? Right. "Tell me what was going on here."

"Well, you see--"

"Dan."

"Yeah. Okay. Shutting again."

Casey brought his eyes back to her as she opened her mouth to say something scathing -- it would come to her any second now -- and shook his head. "No, Dana. Go home. Go to sleep. Come back tomorrow."

She narrowed her eyes threateningly. He narrowed his back. Damn. Casey's stubborn was almost as good as her stubborn. And it was almost 3 a.m. She pulled out an appropriately benign smile.

"All right, you boys can have your secret. This once. Just, if one of you isn't going to be breathing well enough tomorrow to do the show, make sure to give me or Natalie a heads up before noon, okay?"

"Don't worry, we will," Casey assured her, pulling her around to face the door.

"Yep, especially since tomorrow's Saturday, and Saturdays are--"

"Daniel!"

Dana stared at Casey. It wasn't often that he pulled out the "father" voice, but it seemed to have done the job; Dan was silent. Then she noticed that Casey's eyes were laughing. Turning back, Dana just managed to catch Dan pulling his tongue back into his mouth before Casey unceremoniously shoved her at the door.

After another frown for the pushiness, Dana let herself be herded out. She could tackle them later, when they thought she'd forgotten. That would be easier. Sneakier.

Casey let go of her arm. "Good night, Dana."

"Good--"

The door snicked shut.

"Well," she huffed.

**

"So when do you think our intoxicated leader will figure out that tomorrow--" Dan looked at his watch, "--today is Saturday? And that, being Saturday, we have a noon show?"

"With any luck, before noon," Casey sighed as he dropped to the couch. Who knew it would be so difficult to try to sleep in your own office for a quick turnaround show? "You shouldn't have poked at her like that. You know how belligerent she is when she's drunk and I'm still too drunk to deal with that."

"I was taunting because I'm drunk, thank you very much," Dan informed him. "And you're the one that really gave her a poke. Why'd you stop me from reminding her?"

Casey rolled his head to the right to look at his partner. "Want me to calculate the odds for you that she'd choose to sleep in her office, which would end up being sleeping in our office?"

Dan winced. "Yeah, good call, Case." He reached out and tugged, and Casey obligingly slid down until his head rested on Dan's chest. He could hear Dan's heart beating. Thud-thump. Thud-thump.

"Why do you think they came up here?"

"I dunno." Fingers slid into his hair to massage his skull, almost in rhythm with the heartbeat, and Casey hummed his approval. How'd Dan do that? "They might have run into Kim. You didn't really please her with that shoving-her-into-the-elevator move."

"Yeah, but it was fun," Dan sighed. "Seeing as how I'm usually the one being shoved, and their shoving often turns into bruising, turning the tables put a certain...zing in the night."

Casey chuckled, remembering the amazement on Kim's face as the elevator doors slid shut.

"So exactly how many beers did you buy her?"

"Kim?"

"No, not Kim." Dan pulled once on Casey's hair. "Dana."

Casey raised his head for a moment. He couldn't think with the thumping. The answer came to him, and he dropped back. "None."

Dan snorted. "No, really. How many?"

"Zero. Zip. Zilch. Zzzz...I've run out of z-words. I should be able to come up with more than that," Casey complained. "I'm a writer, for goodness sake."

"For what?" Dan's fingers clenched hard this time and Casey yelped as his head was yanked from its resting place. "You, Mr. McCall, did not just say that. Because if you did -- forgetting all that we've gone over on the subject of coolness -- I would get a freebie."

"A freebie?"

"A free shot. A free pass to mock you, on air, with any phrase on the list," Dan smirked. Casey almost smiled back before he remembered what was on the list. Shit.

"And what, dare I ask, would I need to do in order to get you to pass on this freebie?" Casey tried dropping his voice and giving Dan the "I'll fuck you senseless" eyes he'd been practicing. Dan only raised his eyebrows, which made Casey think more practice was in order.

"You could start with the answer to my question, since the odds that she was drunk enough to not remember this little encounter tomorrow are fairly low and I'd like to know what magnitude of hangover I'm going to be facing."

Casey shrugged. "None. Really. It was all tequila." Dan's mouth fell open. "It was supposed to get her good and sloshed so that we could slip back up here without her noticing. She's built up a tolerance for beer," Casey mused.

Dan started sputtering. "You...Dana...tequila...wha--"

Casey's mouth closed over Dan's, stopping the flood. After a minute, he pulled back, a bit breathless. "You want to keep up the complaining, or you want to get back to where we were before The Great Interruption?" he challenged.

"I'm done with the complaining."

##

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