a/n: Thanks to the lovely mimssio for doing cracker-jack job betaing even though she doesn't watch the show, and to Jaclyn who does and read for characterization and coherence.

timeline Note: Two reviewers have left me notes saying my timeline was off because Don only worked for Will for 13 weeks, and I haven't been able to respond directly, so in case there are others thrown by this, I'm doing it here. Don was Will's Executive Producer for 13 weeks. What he did before that is something of a black box, but there is at least canon evidence to support that he was around ACN for that time (He says he was dating Maggie off and on for four months, and thanks Will for promoting him up as fast as he did). So I've taken that notion and run with it, starting this story a little less than a year before Mac shows up, and setting Don up as the Senior Producer for NewsNight (Jim's current job) at the start of it. I have plans to address both Maggie and the how and why of Don getting promoted despite being younger and less experienced than the EP of a flagship show like NewsNight probably should be. I hope this answers the timeline concerns. And now onto the show.

#

vi.

The summer of 2009 passes in a blur for Sloan—a whirlwind of heat and humidity and bad blind dates courtesy of Carrie and her seemingly endless social circle.

And Don, of course.

Always Don.

Sloan's still trying to figure out how that part happened. They have nothing in common. She says the words 'market index,' and his eyes glaze over. He talks about personal brands, and she wants to throw herself off the balcony. If they were a stock, all the indicators, every predictive algorithm in her arsenal would have said 'fly-by-night,' said 'flash in the pan,' said by July they'd barely remember each others' names.

But summer's come and gone, and he's still emailing her feedback on Friday and she still has him near the top of her recent contacts and they still seem to keep finding each other in the break room in between meetings.

(It is very possible that part might be her doing)

Don't look at her like that. It's harmless. Just a harmless little crush on someone utterly inappropriate while she gets her feet back under her. After the last bad blind-date ended when she got up from the table intending to go to the bathroom and instead found herself outside hailing a cab, Sloan's been forced to admit she's probably not ready for even the possibility of the possibility of another relationship anytime in the near future.

So instead she has Don. Brash, ambitious, cocksure Don, who she treats like a prosthetic, a placeholder for a relationship she might one day have, but isn't quite ready for. Don who is her emotional opposite in every way. For whom sex can be as casual as a handshake and (as best she can tell) relationships consist of staying for breakfast. Don who leaves her at a bar for the redhead three tables over, but still picks up the phone at two a.m. when she comes home to a drunken voicemail from Jasper.

"Delete it."

"But I haven't finished-"

"Good." He cuts her off, voice raspy and weirdly quiet. "Don't. Don't finish it. Just delete it. Guys say a lot of crap we don't mean when we're drunk."

Sloan winces. Sometimes she wishes he wasn't so unflinchingly honest with her all the time. "Thanks," she mutters.

Don sighs, heavy and disgruntled, his always thin patience apparently worn threadbare by the interruption of his sleep-cycle. "Isn't this really a girl problem?"

That doesn't even merit a response. "Why are you whispering?"

Her question is met with a long, uncomfortable (and somehow incredibly sardonic) silence, and she's just about to repeat it, when it hits her. Sleep is not what she interrupted.

"Oh. Oh! Oh my god, you're not home are you?"

"There we go," he mutters.

"The redhead?"

"Yeah."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"That is just-" She doesn't actually have a word for what that is. "Why did you pick up?"

"I don't know."

But he sounds more bemused than upset and he makes no move to hang up. And the strange thing is, Sloan's realizing it honestly never occurred to her he wouldn't answer in the first place, but she puts that issue to the side in the face of more pressing matters.

"Should I offer to say hello?"

"Wha-? No. Why would you even-?"

"Well, I don't know the social etiquette for a situation like this! It's not like I talk to men with naked women beside them all the time." It's only after she's said it that she realizes, she might have. Maybe half her conversations with Jasper occurred under these exact circumstances. "Fuck."

"Hey."

"Fucking asshole!"

"Hey!"

"Not you. I mean maybe you from her perspective, but not-"

"Yeah, okay, let's just quit there, shall we? And also, I'm in the kitchen."

"Sorry?"

"Well, it seemed to be interfering with your ability to have this conversation, so I thought it might help if you knew I was in the kitchen." As if to prove this fact her satisfaction, she hears the sound of a tap being turned on and then off as Don presumably gets a drink of water.

"Oh." She doesn't say anything else, and he doesn't respond, and the silence unspools between them. It's not a natural silence. She doesn't think Don is built for natural silences, but the effort means something all the same. Somewhere out there in New York City, there's a guy standing in his boxers in another woman's kitchen actively listening to her not say anything. And somehow it makes everything just the tiniest bit easier.

Absently, she gets up from the couch and moves into her own kitchen, as if might somehow occupy the same space, as if it might make a difference. It doesn't. It's a stall and a start all in one, because this is the kind of conversation she doesn't want to have over the phone, except she doubts she'd ever wind up having it any other way. Pulling out a half empty bottle of pinot, she pours herself a glass and takes a sip in fortification. Then another. Finally says, "He cheated before, didn't he?"

It's not really a question. Carrie's been saying it for months, and Sloan's known it for longer, but Don's immediate, matter of fact, "Probably," still hurts.

And even though Sloan would usually say that the way Don speaks his mind in blunt, un-pulled punches that need no translation or social literacy is one of the things she likes most about him, right now, she kind of hates him for it.

"You sound like you speak from experience."

The words are caustic and bitter and incredibly unfair, and the moment she says them, she wishes she could take them back. But it's too late.

On the other end of the line Don's slack, studied silence goes taut and hard, becomes a biting, tight-wire garrote that makes it difficult to find her voice. In the background she can hear the muted clink of glass on granite. It sounds like a gunshot in comparison.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he mutters, voice incongruously flip and careless, and for the first time since she met him Don feels like a closed book. "You're right."

"Oh."

"Yeah. So trust me when I tell you, whatever he's got to say in that voicemail? It's not worth your time."

He hangs up before she can come up with a response to that.

#

vii

Later, after everything goes to shit, Don will look back on that conversation and wonder why he did that. Why he deliberately gave her the impression he was talking about himself rather than his father, equated his actions to those of her bastard fiancée and never bothered to correct it. Was he testing her? Warning her off? Managing expectations?

Not that it matters much. He knows what he is, who he is, and the differences between guys like him and guys like his dad and Jasper are ones of degree, not species.

Sloan might think he's a good guy, but then again, she's proven to be a crap judge of character.

#

Whatever his reasons for doing what he did, the gambit proves futile. Because Sloan doesn't take the hint. Doesn't cut him off or turn tail and run. Instead she shows up at his desk at ten the next morning to announce without fanfare or preamble: "I'm running on two hours sleep, and I have to be on in four. I need coffee."

Walks away before he has a chance to respond.

Okay. Obviously, they're getting coffee.

The ride down in the elevator is strange, mostly in that it's not that strange at all. They talk about what's popped up on the AP feed and whether he thinks the latest political gaffe is going to have legs, and he starts to wonder if they're coming to some tacit understanding to pretend last night didn't happen at all. Which is more than fine with him. It's not exactly a conversation he's looking forward to, and after twenty-nine years of practice, pretending something didn't happen is a skill well within his wheelhouse. Don leans back to watch the elevator tick down the last few floors. All they have to do is get to "L" and it never happened.

11 . . .

8 . . .

6 . . .

"Are we going to talk about last night?"

Shit, that was him. He glances over in time to see the line of Sloan's shoulders tense, but she doesn't take her eyes off the floor lights.

"No."

Okay, well, he offered right? This is really the part where he should leave things be.

"Don't you think we should?"

(Dear god, it's like he's caught her crazy)

"No."

The elevator doors slide open, and Sloan steps out before he can press the issue. He races to catch up. (Christ, she can move in those heels.)

"Okay here's a follow up. Why are we not talking about it?"

"Because I like you," she snaps, not slowing down a fraction and not sounding as though she actually likes him one bit. "I like you, and if we talk about it, if I think about it too much, then I'm going to like you a lot less. And I don't want that. So we're not going to talk about it. Ever. And I'm going to keep on liking you."

Then suddenly she pulls up short so abruptly he almost runs into her, spins on her heel to stare at him. "As a friend," she clarifies, "I like you as a friend, not like you, like you but like-"

There's every possibility this is going to devolve into an endless loop of 'likes' if he doesn't stop it. She's on in four hours, and he's waiting on a callback from a source, they don't have that kind of time. Don grabs her shoulders, stopping her mid-like. "I know what you meant, and I like you, too."

"You do?"

"Yes."

And he does. He has always liked her. From the moment she stood at his desk hand outstretched, raw and over-earnest and so incredibly Sloan it's almost painful to remember, he has liked her. Liked her for reasons he doesn't understand and can't explain, and honestly he finds the whole sensation more than a little annoying. But then that's Sloan for you. She makes him think of modern art and high-fashion-striking and challenging and not to everyone's taste—but when you like a piece, you like it and you don't even have to know why.

You just do.

Sloan smiles. Not one of the practiced on-camera smiles he's helped her perfect and she hands out to the world like party favors. But the other one, the genuine article, the one she keeps tucked away somewhere and doesn't consider company ready, a technicolor-bright keepsake of youth her fiancé broke and she's crazy-glued back together into something singular and stunning. And if he had it to do all over again, if he could pluck at the threads of his life and unravel his mistakes, he'd go back to that moment and have the good sense to fall in love with her then and there.

(Or at least have the good sense to recognize that a part of him probably did.)

Instead he smiles back, claps her once on the shoulders and steps away. "So what are we talking about?"

#

viii.

True to his word he never brings it up, and they never talk about it again. It sits between them though, a small seed that grows into hedgerow, a line of demarcation neither will cross. Because he knows her history and now she knows his. And it turns out he's exactly the kind of guy she thought he was.

The worst part is how anticlimactic it all feels, less a grand revelation and more an accepted truth. And Sloan realizes one night when she's had too many bourbons to keep her thoughts from going down this road, that it all changes surprisingly little for her, because maybe she didn't have this piece before, but she had the outline, could see the space where it went, and she still liked the picture. No reason for that to be altered with this one addition.

Except it should. She knows it should. And the fact that it doesn't seem to be, scares the shit out of her.

So she starts going back out on dates, and he keeps sleeping with women she doesn't bother to keep track of, but he still picks up when she calls at one a.m. and she still lets him hide out in her office when Will is on a particularly spectacular tirade.

And for a while that works for them. Works so well there's a part of her that actually starts to think maybe it will just work this way forever and maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

It doesn't of course. Nothing ever does. Needs change and markets shift and what thrived yesterday will be obsolete tomorrow.

Which is to say it works right up until Maggie.

Maggie changes everything.