#also he gets in a lot of sticky situations & also lays out humiliating plots for the other (upper class) cast

[miocortieni-blog]

feliciano spent at least 30 years with a commedia dell'arte group touring europe in the 16th century, holding the female romantic lead, isabella, for most of it until he was allowed to play zanni/harlequin and the male romantic lead, flavio, towards the end !

[sesamestreep]

Not sure if you're still doing the 3 sentence word fic prompt but if you are: Sloan and Don "never"

well, this took on a life of its own, and it’s basically a full fic. set immediately after episode 2x05, so fair warning for Sloan’s plot line in that episode. it’s not discussed in great detail here, so I didn’t tag much of anything about it, but I’m happy to add more if people think it’s necessary. slightly nsfw content, I guess, but not in an exciting way ;)

“Wait, never?”

“Never.”

“Like, never never?”

“How many PhDs do you have again?” Don asks, amused. “And you need me to explain what the word ‘never’ means?”

Sloan tips forward in her seat—too fast, she realizes, as she lands way closer to the bar than she meant to. She lays her palms flat against the sticky varnished surface, as she tries to gather her thoughts and feelings into something coherent. “I’m sorry, that’s just not possible,” she says, finally. She might be a little drunk, given how long that simple phrase took for her to formulate.

Don laughs into his glass. “I think I would know.”

“Yeah, but…really? Never?”

“We did this already.”

“I thought dudes, like, needed them,” Sloan says, gesturing aggressively with the hand that isn’t curled around her drink. “Like, to survive.”

That just makes Don scoff at her, though. “Come on.”

“I’m serious! I thought nude photos were basically the cornerstone of modern dating.”

He shakes his head, as if he can’t quite believe her. It occurs to her a second later that it might have been an excuse to avoid meeting her eye. “At the risk of sounding like a complete geezer,” he says, sounding hesitant, “I have this thing called an imagination.”

Sloan snorts, more loudly than she meant to. “You do sound like a complete geezer. If you start talking about how you used to have to walk fifteen miles to school each day, and fifteen miles back, in the snow, I’m just going to leave you here.”

“I know I was the one who said you needed to make it to the rage phase, but I didn’t mean with me specifically.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” she says, putting her glass down on the bar guiltily. “I get snotty when I’m drunk.”

Don waves off the apology immediately. “I was kidding. I meant—never mind. You can be as snotty to me as you want. If it helps.”

“I don’t know.”

“If I were in your situation, I’d be a lot drunker. And much snottier.”

“Well,” Sloan says, spreading her hands out wide to indicate…something, “as we’ve established, you couldn’t be in my situation. Because you’ve never…”

“Okay, what I actually said was that I’ve never asked for them. You’re extrapolating quite a lot from that one statement.”

It takes a superhuman amount of effort for Sloan to actually swallow the gin in her mouth at that moment, because all her jaw wants to do is drop to the floor. Luckily, she manages it, because the alternative would be a whole mess. She briefly loses her train of thought when she considers how many worse things have been spilled on this bar’s floor, given its general level of divey-ness. It’s not their usual spot—she’d insisted she wasn’t up for Hang Chew’s and dealing with the awkwardness of facing everyone else from ACN when NewsNight wraps and the bar fills up with staff, but she’d also been absolutely certain that she needed to get shitfaced basically immediately after the Incident at AIG, so now she and Don are in some hole-in-the-wall near enough to the Financial District that she can make that happen but not close enough that they’ll be surrounded by finance bros. The wisdom of getting this drunk in public less than 24 hours after the greatest humiliation of her adult life and the most profound violation she’s ever experienced is, perhaps, debatable, but, while she can count the number of people she actually, truly trusts at this moment on one hand, she also knows somewhere deeper than logic that Don will do right by her, that if anyone tries to ruin today for her anymore than it’s already been ruined, he will stop it or he’ll catch an assault charge trying. She knows this to be true. So, in relative terms, she’s not doing anything that risky. But that’s not what they were talking about, was it? Oh, right.

“Donald Ulysses Keefer,” she says, slowly, “are you saying that someone has naked photos of you just lying around somewhere?”

“First of all, very proud of you for getting my last name right, at the very least—”

“Wait, are you saying your name isn’t Don?”

“It is Don. It’s not Donald.”

“It’s just Don?” She asks, brow furrowing in consternation. “Like, Don Corleone?”

“Well, that’s not exactly—it’s not important.”

Sloan squints at him. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Great question,” he replies, drily. “But I must say, I’m more confused and intrigued by your other question.”

“Which one?”

“You asked if someone out there has naked photos of me just lying around.”

“Oh, yes. That question. What about it?”

Don steeples his fingers underneath his chin, affecting a serious air. “Is your question, are there nude photos of me in the world and those photos are just lying around, waiting to be discovered? Or are you asking if there are, out there in the world, nude photos of me, in which I am not only nude but also just lying around?”

Sloan pauses, trying to formulate a response. “My question is—what I meant was—go fuck yourself, Don.”

“I was trying to be funny.”

“I know you were,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you succeeded.”

He frowns. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want you to be sorry. I want him to be sorry,” she all but shouts, her thoughts coming through crystal clear and actually translating into words for the first time all night. “And not just because I punched him in the face!”

Don watches her carefully for a long time, waiting for her breathing to even out after her outburst, for her fingers to loosen their grip on the edge of the bar. Sloan hadn’t realized any of that was happening until she realized he was waiting for it to stop. She, on the other hand, is waiting for him to get impatient, to rush her into being okay somehow, and to finally fuck this up so she can be really, truly mad at him, rather than at his entire gender as a concept.

He doesn’t, though. He just keeps surprising her. She always forgets how patient he can be when he needs to, which is easy to miss under his quick temper. They’re not two qualities that should coincide in a person but Don’s ineffable like that.

“You’re ineffable,” she says, out loud, for some reason. The alcohol seems a likely culprit.

“You’re telling me,” he quips. “Maybe that’s why nobody wants nude pictures of me.”

“That’s not what ineffable means. It’s like—”

“I know what it means, Sloan. I was an English major, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “I’m in the wrong generation for all this shit.”

She rolls her eyes. “Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people who wishes they were born in a different era because they want to die of polio or whatever.”

“No, professor. I was talking about the nude photos thing. That is, if you’re still curious.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“I’m saying I came of age in the wrong era for that. My go-to move for hitting on girls when I was in college was to ask for their email address. Like I was going to send them a newsletter, or something.”

“And nobody in your 19th century women writers seminar was offering you a dirty Polaroid to look at when you got back to your dorm after playing hacky sack on the quad?”

Don gives her a look, then, of such transparent delight that it almost knocks her over. “God, Sloan, it’s like you were there,” he says, amused.

She shrugs, trying to pretend like she isn’t still a little off-balance. “I wish I had been. I’m sure you had some egregious facial hair that I could be blackmailing you about now.”

He laughs at that. “No comment. But, to your earlier question, no. No one was offering and it never would have even occurred to me to ask.”

He trails off, then—lost in thought or maybe just distracted by the TVs in the bar playing March Madness. This is the moment that, if Sloan was sober, she’d pump the brakes on this conversation. It was a bad idea to even start them on this subject at all, but they’re getting dangerously close to discussing specifics about Don’s dating life, which is not something she needs specifics on. She spends too much time thinking about him in a potentially romantic context as it is; the last thing she needs is for those fantasies to be more realistic.

But Sloan isn’t sober, so she asks, “And now…?”

“And now,” he says, choosing his words carefully as he shifts his attention back to her, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s not like I’m doing much dating now anyway.”

She ignores the warning bells telling her to turn back. “No?”

“No,” Don repeats, looking down at his drink where it sits on the bar. “I’m…focusing on myself, I guess.”

“In my experience, men do that even when they’re in relationships.”

“Ouch. Okay.”

Sloan winces. “Sorry, it was an easy joke.”

“No, no, that was—it was a fair hit. I’m sure Maggie could tell you—”

“Maggie hasn’t told me anything,” she says, starting to reach for his arm before she thinks better of it. “Really, Don, I was just trying to be funny.”

“Still, I imagine she could tell you some horror stories about me.”

As if she’d ask. As if anything Maggie could say would truly warn her off now. She doesn’t say that, though.

“For fuck’s sake,” she shouts, instead, because anger is definitely easier, “are you ever going to stop raking yourself over the coals for whatever the hell happened with Maggie? She screwed that shit up too, you know, and she’s said as much to you and to everyone else who will listen. Why do you insist on taking all of the credit for that relationship blowing up?”

Gone is the amused affection that was in his eyes earlier, she thinks, as he turns to her with a look of pure frustration. “Because I was wrong first,” he says, sharply. “And most often. And I should have known better. I should have been the adult in that relationship.”

“Well, it’s troubling that you seem to think a healthy relationship requires only one adult, but besides that—”

Don puts up a hand to stop her in her tracks. “I believe you now, you know. You’re very mean when you’re drunk.”

“I said snotty.”

“And?”

Sloan huffs in annoyance. “Snotty and mean are different things!”

“I’d say they’re not but I really don’t want to fight about it, so fine. You’re very snotty.”

“Thank you. And you’re full of shit.”

“I know that,” he says, hotly. A second later, though, he seems to run out of steam. He drags his hands down his face miserably. “Believe me, I know.”

Some of the fight goes out of her too, seeing him so dejected. “One mistake doesn’t mean you deserve to be unhappy forever,” she says, trying to sound gentle.

“I could say the same thing to you,” he replies. “Would it make a difference?”

“Coming from you? It might.”

He considers her for a long moment before he moves to cover her hand gently with his own. He does it slowly, leaving her plenty of time to pull back or avoid the contact somehow, but she stays where she is. It’s really the lightest touch imaginable, like he’s just trying to be sure he has her attention and not like he’s actually trying to hold her hand, but she can feel her heartbeat in her throat nonetheless.

“Sloan Ulysses Sabbith,” Don says, earnestly and deliberately, meeting her gaze steadily, “you don’t deserve to be this unhappy forever. And what’s more, you won’t be. I promise you that.”

She clears her throat, which is suddenly very dry. “Oh, really?”

“Really,” he says, giving her hand a pat before he withdraws his own.

She does not allow herself to feel disappointed by this. There are more important matters to deal with, anyway. “How could you possibly promise such a thing?”

“Because I can see the future.”

“And the real answer?”

“That is the real answer,” he says, standing up and fishing his wallet out of the pocket of his jeans.

“Don,” she says, exasperated.

He leans into her space a little, as he tries to copy her tone. “Sloan.”

“How could you possibly know that I’ll be happy?” She asks, hating how sincere and vulnerable she sounds. He’s not even being serious right now, but she still needs to know why he said it. Even if it’s all just a joke, she has to know.

Don seems to hear the urgency in her question because he puts his hands on her shoulders to steady himself as he looks her in the eye. “Because you, Sloan, are not the sort of woman who settles for less,” he says, firmly. “You do not give up. You do not blink first. You are the sort of woman who, when faced with injustice, punches it in the goddamn face. If it comes down to a fight between you and Fate, over whether you’re destined to be happy or not, my money is on you. It’s always on you.”

She doesn’t know what to say in response to that. The moment stretches between them as she tries to come up with anything at all. Nothing feels right. If the situation were different—if this wasn’t the worst day of her life, and if Don was still sitting down, she’d probably just climb into his lap right here and now, witnesses be damned. But that wouldn’t be appropriate. If this is ever going to happen—if they’re ever going to happen—she doesn’t want it to be tainted by everything else that’s happened today. This is a moment for them, but it’s not their moment. Not yet.

“My middle name is not Ulysses,” she says, faintly. It’s the best she can do, under the circumstances. “You know that, right?”

“I know,” he says, with a small smile. “It’s Imogene.”

“How did you—?”

“I pay attention, Sloan,” he says. “I’m going to go pay the tab, okay?”

He pats her on the shoulder as he goes by, a quick good game gesture that probably means nothing, but she still feels her pulse flutter at the contact. She watches him move through the crush of people at the bar and lets herself imagine this night as something simpler, like it was actually just the two of them on a regular date and once he’s done paying, he’ll make sure she gets home alright—not because she’s had a rough day but because he wants an excuse to spend fifteen more minutes with her and because she might invite him up to her place if he kisses her goodnight in front of her building. It would be lovely, she thinks, as she looks at him across the room now. He must feel her eyes on him then, because he turns and gives her a quick smile before returning his attention to the bartender. Not yet, she thinks. But soon.