Title: Backwater

Characters: Danny Concannon, CJ Cregg

Rating: Harmless

Notes: Pre-Series.

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.