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He can't bear to watch any more, but he can't tear his eyes away. His phone rings insistently in his pocket but he already knows what Kent is going to say, and he doesn’t need to hear it. Dan Egan isn't new to this rodeo.
Vermont businessman. Popular, well known, employs--directly or indirectly--one in six citizens of this frozen over New England hellscape. It should have been a cakewalk, a stepping stone to bigger campaigns, better candidates. A Senate race, potentially. Dan has it all planned out. And then congressional candidate Phil Mayford tries to take a selfie with the crowd at a rally, falls off the front of the stage and breaks his leg. In front of two hundred walking fucking cell phones and the local press. Ten days before election day.
It's over. They may as well pack up and go home now. Mayford’s toothy smile and fucking Dumbo ears taunt him from the posters plastered on every flat surface of the campaign headquarters, a harbinger of doom sent to personally pave his way to career purgatory.
His other phone rings, the personal one. The caller ID says Amy, but it's probably Ben, or Kent or god fucking damn it maybe even Selina herself, because this travesty of an administration is barely managing as it is and they've just lost another seat in the house, and … well, he's fired. Fired and blacklisted from D.C. for the rest of his life.
Or maybe just left to decompose in a skip in a Whole Foods parking lot, if POTUS gets her way.
“It's difficult to say what effect this might have on Mr Mayford’s congressional chances—”
His hand finds the remote and he turns the excitable political commentary off, the anchors milking every moment of drama in an otherwise tedious race, but the fateful words MAYFORD BREAKS LEG TAKING SELFIE are burned into his retinas forever. Second chances are one thing, third chances are pushing it. Even Dan is self aware enough to know that eventually you run out of chances, and his day has come.
“FUCK!” He screams, knocking the contents of his tiny, 1980s classroom fucking desk on to the floor. A picture frame flies across the room and smashes into the opposite wall, a trajectory made less impressive by the fact that his office in Illinois is smaller than a shrew’s testicles, and he can practically touch both walls with his arms outstretched. The frame shatters, spilling shards of glass to join the dust and dirt trodden into the foul carpet.
“All the way from New Hampshire, the J-Star is all up in this V!”
God no. No no no no no no—
“Dan fucking Egan.” Jonah Ryan is at his door, stooped slightly to get his inflated head under the frame, smug mutant face grinning like every birthday has come at once. “Daaaaanny Egan. Started packing already, I see.”
“Get the fuck out of my office.” He snarls.
“That's no way to speak to a Congressman.”
“God,
so
sorry. I meant, get the fuck out of my office,
Congressman
.”
Jonah comes in anyway and kicks the door closed behind him, leaving Dan in perfect throttling distance with nowhere much else for Jonah to go. “You know how much you mean to me, Egan—oh wait. Not at fucking all. ” The lanky streak of human garbage grins wider. “Which is why I thought I’d stop by and tell you in person that there’s no way in hell I’m endorsing that trainwreck you’ve hitched your wagon to.”
On a different kind of day, Dan might have snapped back that an endorsement from Jonah Ryan would only damage their ratings, or to remind the congressman that it was
his team
who came crawling to the Mayford campaign, begging to put his gangly fucking noodle limbs behind a candidate who might actually win for once. But as it stands, he hardly hears what the dipshit is saying, because the words are drowned out by blood pounding in his ears as the office (cage? his coffin?) starts to sway and spin out of control.
Not now. Not now. “Get. Out.” He forces the words out through uncooperative lips and prays to anyone who might be listening that Jonad might just take the hint for once.
“I just want to make sure it’s clear, dick-breath. Jonah Ryan doesn’t associate himself with this kind of mediocre-ness. Medio...sity?
Mediocrity
. We were the ones doing
you
a… a… Egan?”
Dan’s legs give out beneath him and he hits the floor before he can catch himself. His knees take the brunt of the fall as he thuds hard on to the thin carpet, the sharp jolt of pain from landing on a broken shard of glass barely registering. His vision is clouded and blurry, only able to make out vague shapes and lights; it takes him a few seconds to realise its because he’s looking through tears, starting to drip down his face.
“Egan, what the fuck—”
The blurry lights change again, a giant fucking dark blob in front of him blocking out the sunlight from the one small window, but breathing is hard enough right now, each gasp only half filling his lungs, and it’s all he can do to keep sucking in enough oxygen as his chest attempts to tear itself apart. “Dan? Jesus, are you okay? Do you want me to get someone? Amy? Or I could call…”
He shakes his head, whole body desperate for some kind of stability, something to ground him, but Dan is still fighting for breath and his brain won’t shut up and listen to
reason
and there’s snot dripping from his nose and tears soaking into his shirt collar and
Jonah
, Jonah fucking Ryan’s fucking giant baseball glove hand gripping his forearm tightly, tightly enough to pull Dan’s attention away from forcing down desperate gulps of oxygen and focus it instead on the physical contact, and somehow as soon as he stops counting each rattling breath they come easier. “...to me, you’re okay. Everything is going to be okay, Dan, just breathe deep and slow. I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. Deep breaths, that’s it.”
He’s still snotting and crying and shaking, but the panic attack loosens its crushing fist from around every fucking organ in his body, and as the seconds tick by, basic functions start, one by one, to return. Jonah is still talking and the words start to actually click in his brain, his garbled run-on sentence actually sounding like English now, and Jesus if it’s isn’t the sappiest bullshit he’s ever heard come out of Jonah Ryan’s mouth. His immediate thought is that he wishes it’s being recorded, because Jonad promising he
wasn’t going anywhere
is the kind of gold dust leverage he could only dream of.
On the other hand, his body is just about functioning again and he’s not in hospital this time, so he kind of
owes
Jonah. Which isn’t a position he really relishes being in. He jerks his arm out of Jonah’s vice-like grip, and digs in a pocket for a tissue, keeping his eyes down. Where’s Gary and his big bag of bollocks when you need him? The search is fruitless, but when he looks up, Jonah’s holding out a hankerchief. A monogrammed fucking hankerchief. Because Jonah is a more of a walking talking rich person cliché than he is an actual human being.
He wipes his eyes, blows his nose, and kind of wishes he could keep his face hidden forever, because of all the people that could see him like this, he really wouldn’t choose it to be the Leaning Tower of fucking Pisa. “Get the fuck away from me.” Dan says flatly, and Jonah scrambles back so quickly he nearly falls on his ass. He backs off as far as he can--which, granted, isn’t far— and stands against the door.
Dan has nothing more to say, but Jonah doesn’t leave. He came to gloat over the Hindenburg style campaign burn-out, and he’s done his schtick. There’s no reason for him to still be here, other than an attempt to annoy the fuck out of him so much it actually drives him to murder.
On the bright side, no more D.C. means no more Jonah. Every cloud has its silver lining.
“Do you need anything else, shit-brain?” Dan snaps.
Jonah smiles. “Go fuck yourself, Egan.” He shoots back. “You know what they say. Practise makes perfect. You’ll get a candidate elected one day.” No pity. No false platitudes. For once in his life, Dan is grateful that Jonah Ryan is such an insufferable asshole.
“Got you elected.”
“Uncle Jeff got me elected. I could have hired a monkey as campaign manager and I still would have won.”
“You’re insulting yourself more than you’re insulting me, you realise that, right?”
Jonah finally reaches for the handle, but stops before he turns it. It’s unfair of him to tease his impending departure like this— Dan wants him gone. Immediately. Forever. And he never wants to speak of this again. “It was a good campaign.” Jonah admits reluctantly, like the very words cause him excruciating physical fucking pain.
“He fell off the stage.”
“That wasn’t your fault, though. Your campaign, it was… Look, objectively, it was a well-run campaign.” He speaks quickly, like he can taste dog shit on the words as they glide over his tongue. “This isn’t like the giant jizz stain you left on the Meyer campaign, okay? The candidate fucked this one up. Not you. A couple of months of licking Cafferty’s ballsack in Washington and you’ll be back on the campaign trail in time for the mid-terms. Don’t beat yourself up about it.” His hand reaches the door this time and yanks it open, thin plywood rattling on its hinges as Jonah treats the place like he’s barreling through corridors in the West Wing.
“Jonah.” Dan says as he steps over the threshold. He looks over his shoulder, and yeah no okay Dan has too much pride to
thank Jonah Ryan
for anything, so they just kind of awkwardly make eye contact for a second longer than is really comfortable before Jonah slams the door closed behind him. Dan hears him loudly introduce himself as Congressman Ryan of New Hampshire to a couple of the PoliSci interns (Dan can guess which ones, too) and finally,
finally,
he’s gone.
***
He gets a text that evening, a phone number. Dan shoots back a single question mark, but Jonah replies immediately.
discrete popular on the hill can recommend 10/10
It’s a therapist.
Dan shakes his head, but he saves the number in his contacts anyway.