30 Rock: Try a Little Tenderness (Jack/Liz)
Title: Try a Little Tenderness
Author: frey_at_last
Pairing: Jack/Liz (faint background Jack/Avery)
Spoilers: S4 and the synopsis of a S5 episode
Rating: PG
Written for the Doomed Ships comment ficathon, with michellek's prompt: Jack/Liz, why am I holding my breath? ( link)
Liz always had a sneaking suspicion she was the star of some forgotten John Hughes movie, one that didn't get picked up by the studio maybe because it was set twenty-five years later and Molly Ringwald was too good for the sequel and wouldn't sign, and they had to cast some other aging, awkward lady who had less star appeal and much lower standards. But Liz never saw any cake, never got her underwear stolen, never played the drums or had a guy paint a portrait of her and display it in the museum for their first date. (Really, John?)
She never even had a Duckie, unless you count Wesley. (And she doesn't.) Who would wait around in new wave record stores for her while she flirted with dudes with feathered hair? She doesn't necessarily want that - what adult person pines for some adoring sidekick? Liz is an adult person - but, yeah. Somehow when there's no camera crew and no love ballads with synthesizer and saxophone, this whole deal is just pathetic. She knows it's pathetic. She's glad it's not preserved in any studio warehouse for some executive to sell into reruns on TBS. There are enough witnesses already, right. And she's fine. Her life should not be a drama interpreted by the Brat Pack.
So yeah, her birthday goes by and she's the only one that remembers. Really, she should count it as an improvement. At least this year, she remembered. Hooray, self! On the other hand, she remembered last year, too, and the year before, so it's not a new accomplishment. And she remembered those times for a reason, because of stuff. Like, stuff arriving on her desk in the morning. Specific stuff, birthday-themed, like last year, a contract for her talk show with a ribbon taped on it, or the year before, a five hundred dollar gift certificate to Quiznos and a list of adoption agencies that were supposedly sympathetic to single women. And he included cards.
(She still has one: there are rainbow colored cake slices on the front and the inside reads "Happy Birthday To Our Treasured Employee, From Everyone At NBC," but but at the bottom he signed it and wrote: Lemon - You impress. Jack. It was amusingly monosyllabic and she considered asking Toofer if it was really a sentence, or a line from a badly subtitled Tarzan movie. But she didn't ask Toofer. She laid the card carefully in a drawer.)
Okay, maybe those things were less birthday-themed than they were Jack-themed. But the point is she remembered because Jack remembered. And that's kind of where the Sixteen Candles thing comes in. Because now she remembers and Jack forgets.
* * *
"I didn't even know they sold five hundred dollar gift certificates to fast food restaurants," she'd said that afternoon, in Jack's office.
He'd raised his eyebrows at her. "They don't."
"Ah, so you worked your mystical rich dude rites and convinced the manager. Or this is fake."
"You're very amusing. And no, I convinced Rich Schaden. He was amenable after I won a few bets at last month's Powerful Men in Sales tournament."
"You're saying you fought in a tournament for me. Should I lend you my handkerchief?"
"Don't be ridiculous. The PMS tournament is a nation-wide battleground where only the most valiant contenders endure a heated three-to-four day period of unpredictable emotional stresses and the dread of approaching physical torture in order to prove their manhood. I won for the sake of my dignity, and then I got the certificate for you."
"You don't listen to yourself, do you." She'd been grinning at him, and when he'd looked up from his desk, he'd smiled too. They paused.
"You haven't thanked me yet, Lemon." He should have looked smug, but he didn't. For some reason all she could think was, he planned this a month ago. And his real present, the adoption list, was still downstairs on her desk, and how long ago had he started doing that? He'd only been back in New York since September.
Liz had drawn a fingertip over the surface of his desk, letting the moment settle long enough that they weren't joking anymore.
"Thank you, Jack."
* * *
Liz stays at work after her staff leaves, even though it's one of those once-a-year weeks where her writers are on top of it and she's not still hand holding at seven PM. (Maybe that can be her present - a subtle, unspoken message from Frank or Sue or Toofer saying, Happy Birthday! We appreciate you. We are glad you're here, although you're forty. She's given her life to this job, so it is some nice karma, right? To get a night off, as a special memorial. Which is the kind of funeral that celebrates.)
She shouldn't be staying late, but she is. This is for numerous reasons. She could explain them to anybody. But she doesn't get any challengers, and the only person around is Subas, who gives her a nod when he comes in with the vacuum cleaner, as if it's no surprise at all to him that she's still here.
She goes home. As she flips through her DVR listings, she makes sure her phone is on medium volume, with the battery charging. This is so that when she gets a call, at about 10:30, she hears it over the episode of Glee (seriously, what is with her and high school dramedies?) and answers it after the first ring.
It's her mother.
* * *
By the next day, Liz knows what seems so wrong to her, so unfair, and it's that she's going backward. Granted, her age is going forward, but her successes, her relationships, are going backward. Taking stock of her life over the past ten years, she thinks she might have been happiest six years ago (when she and Pete and Jenna got TGS, and it was so awesome to go to work every day with her best friends) or two or three years ago... when Jack was her best friend.
Was? She's not ready to think about this in the past tense. It doesn't fit yet.
It feels like it might fit soon.
It's a full three days later when Jack is in the writer's room, talking to Pete about Lamaze classes (this alone is enough to make her nauseous), and he's scribbling something on his iPad when he says, "What's the date today? The fifteenth? No - the fifteenth?" and, although he hasn't really addressed her since he came in the room, he seems to know right where Liz is, and he looks up and their eyes lock.
"Yep, November fifteenth," says Pete.
It's written all over his face, like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar - like she's caught him collecting another cookie jar. Or like she's caught him in another affair.
Jack keeps his grip on his iPad, oddly frozen, with a table and six writers between them, and for once Liz is grateful for the barrier, since it means he can't speak the apology in his eyes. She looks down and shrugs, and maybe her expression is too close to her badger face, but it's meant to say, hey, it's no big deal.
"Dude, no fuckin way, that means I owe rent by tonight," says Frank. He stands up and blocks Jack from her view.
"Liz," comes Jack's voice, and she can tell from his tone (she pretty much knows all the ways he says things, at least the kinds of things he says to her) that he's going to say it out loud, in front of everybody. Like, 'I'm sorry I forgot your fortieth birthday,' and then everybody's gonna be reminded not only that she's forty, but that not one of them remembered it. And ugh, this ridiculous awkward climax, this cathartic third act that is supposed to make the dweeby girl feel better about her second level billing in her straight to DVD movie - it would make it even worse. She cuts Jack off before he can start, retreating to her own office.
"Seriously," she says, and it probably seems like a weird one-sided conversation out of nowhere, but that's what she wants. "No worries. I wasn't holding my breath."
*
Author: frey_at_last
Pairing: Jack/Liz (faint background Jack/Avery)
Spoilers: S4 and the synopsis of a S5 episode
Rating: PG
Written for the Doomed Ships comment ficathon, with michellek's prompt: Jack/Liz, why am I holding my breath? ( link)
Liz always had a sneaking suspicion she was the star of some forgotten John Hughes movie, one that didn't get picked up by the studio maybe because it was set twenty-five years later and Molly Ringwald was too good for the sequel and wouldn't sign, and they had to cast some other aging, awkward lady who had less star appeal and much lower standards. But Liz never saw any cake, never got her underwear stolen, never played the drums or had a guy paint a portrait of her and display it in the museum for their first date. (Really, John?)
She never even had a Duckie, unless you count Wesley. (And she doesn't.) Who would wait around in new wave record stores for her while she flirted with dudes with feathered hair? She doesn't necessarily want that - what adult person pines for some adoring sidekick? Liz is an adult person - but, yeah. Somehow when there's no camera crew and no love ballads with synthesizer and saxophone, this whole deal is just pathetic. She knows it's pathetic. She's glad it's not preserved in any studio warehouse for some executive to sell into reruns on TBS. There are enough witnesses already, right. And she's fine. Her life should not be a drama interpreted by the Brat Pack.
So yeah, her birthday goes by and she's the only one that remembers. Really, she should count it as an improvement. At least this year, she remembered. Hooray, self! On the other hand, she remembered last year, too, and the year before, so it's not a new accomplishment. And she remembered those times for a reason, because of stuff. Like, stuff arriving on her desk in the morning. Specific stuff, birthday-themed, like last year, a contract for her talk show with a ribbon taped on it, or the year before, a five hundred dollar gift certificate to Quiznos and a list of adoption agencies that were supposedly sympathetic to single women. And he included cards.
(She still has one: there are rainbow colored cake slices on the front and the inside reads "Happy Birthday To Our Treasured Employee, From Everyone At NBC," but but at the bottom he signed it and wrote: Lemon - You impress. Jack. It was amusingly monosyllabic and she considered asking Toofer if it was really a sentence, or a line from a badly subtitled Tarzan movie. But she didn't ask Toofer. She laid the card carefully in a drawer.)
Okay, maybe those things were less birthday-themed than they were Jack-themed. But the point is she remembered because Jack remembered. And that's kind of where the Sixteen Candles thing comes in. Because now she remembers and Jack forgets.
* * *
"I didn't even know they sold five hundred dollar gift certificates to fast food restaurants," she'd said that afternoon, in Jack's office.
He'd raised his eyebrows at her. "They don't."
"Ah, so you worked your mystical rich dude rites and convinced the manager. Or this is fake."
"You're very amusing. And no, I convinced Rich Schaden. He was amenable after I won a few bets at last month's Powerful Men in Sales tournament."
"You're saying you fought in a tournament for me. Should I lend you my handkerchief?"
"Don't be ridiculous. The PMS tournament is a nation-wide battleground where only the most valiant contenders endure a heated three-to-four day period of unpredictable emotional stresses and the dread of approaching physical torture in order to prove their manhood. I won for the sake of my dignity, and then I got the certificate for you."
"You don't listen to yourself, do you." She'd been grinning at him, and when he'd looked up from his desk, he'd smiled too. They paused.
"You haven't thanked me yet, Lemon." He should have looked smug, but he didn't. For some reason all she could think was, he planned this a month ago. And his real present, the adoption list, was still downstairs on her desk, and how long ago had he started doing that? He'd only been back in New York since September.
Liz had drawn a fingertip over the surface of his desk, letting the moment settle long enough that they weren't joking anymore.
"Thank you, Jack."
* * *
Liz stays at work after her staff leaves, even though it's one of those once-a-year weeks where her writers are on top of it and she's not still hand holding at seven PM. (Maybe that can be her present - a subtle, unspoken message from Frank or Sue or Toofer saying, Happy Birthday! We appreciate you. We are glad you're here, although you're forty. She's given her life to this job, so it is some nice karma, right? To get a night off, as a special memorial. Which is the kind of funeral that celebrates.)
She shouldn't be staying late, but she is. This is for numerous reasons. She could explain them to anybody. But she doesn't get any challengers, and the only person around is Subas, who gives her a nod when he comes in with the vacuum cleaner, as if it's no surprise at all to him that she's still here.
She goes home. As she flips through her DVR listings, she makes sure her phone is on medium volume, with the battery charging. This is so that when she gets a call, at about 10:30, she hears it over the episode of Glee (seriously, what is with her and high school dramedies?) and answers it after the first ring.
It's her mother.
* * *
By the next day, Liz knows what seems so wrong to her, so unfair, and it's that she's going backward. Granted, her age is going forward, but her successes, her relationships, are going backward. Taking stock of her life over the past ten years, she thinks she might have been happiest six years ago (when she and Pete and Jenna got TGS, and it was so awesome to go to work every day with her best friends) or two or three years ago... when Jack was her best friend.
Was? She's not ready to think about this in the past tense. It doesn't fit yet.
It feels like it might fit soon.
It's a full three days later when Jack is in the writer's room, talking to Pete about Lamaze classes (this alone is enough to make her nauseous), and he's scribbling something on his iPad when he says, "What's the date today? The fifteenth? No - the fifteenth?" and, although he hasn't really addressed her since he came in the room, he seems to know right where Liz is, and he looks up and their eyes lock.
"Yep, November fifteenth," says Pete.
It's written all over his face, like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar - like she's caught him collecting another cookie jar. Or like she's caught him in another affair.
Jack keeps his grip on his iPad, oddly frozen, with a table and six writers between them, and for once Liz is grateful for the barrier, since it means he can't speak the apology in his eyes. She looks down and shrugs, and maybe her expression is too close to her badger face, but it's meant to say, hey, it's no big deal.
"Dude, no fuckin way, that means I owe rent by tonight," says Frank. He stands up and blocks Jack from her view.
"Liz," comes Jack's voice, and she can tell from his tone (she pretty much knows all the ways he says things, at least the kinds of things he says to her) that he's going to say it out loud, in front of everybody. Like, 'I'm sorry I forgot your fortieth birthday,' and then everybody's gonna be reminded not only that she's forty, but that not one of them remembered it. And ugh, this ridiculous awkward climax, this cathartic third act that is supposed to make the dweeby girl feel better about her second level billing in her straight to DVD movie - it would make it even worse. She cuts Jack off before he can start, retreating to her own office.
"Seriously," she says, and it probably seems like a weird one-sided conversation out of nowhere, but that's what she wants. "No worries. I wasn't holding my breath."
*