3pipeproblem | (no subject)

YOU TRAITOR!!!!! J/K. I like him too. :)

*raises hand* Excuse me.

WHAT?

It's a miracle! Write fic about it! And tell me what happened!

In other news, I hate Channel 7. I don't know where Boston Legal has gone over here.

One-thousand, six-hundred-and-thirty. The first thousand is the suit itself; three-hundred-twenty for that shirt with the single-stitch tailoring. Shoes, belt, tie to make up the remainder. Smecker leans back in his chair, mentally adjusting his estimate a few dollars when he notes how well the suit moves with Shore's shoulders.

It's rare he has a day off from the Bureau. Hours snatched at a time, and yes to a degree he has autonomy of schedule, but the cost of the life is the knowledge that at any minute the phone may ring with the call and the indisputable summons to the latest abattoir. At least in the Judeo-Christian mythology, the demon goes from hell to earth, not the other way around.

Still, days off do occur. Before, he would have done music, the Boston Philharmonic or an opera. Or driven along the coast until the city was behind him and the only lines the organic chemistry of dune grass, surf, sea, sky.

Before what is of course the question begged. Before what? Descended angels of the Lord's own vengeance? (He's decided Alan Shore had a point; they may do God's work but They Are Not Saints. Angels then.) Before; before he met them. This is the way the world is delineated now; there is before them and there is after them.

There is also before Alan, and there is now. Before Alan Shore, he would not spend a day off in sliding unobtrusively into the last row of seats in a courtroom and watching the lawyer do what he does so very well. Spin a golden vista of words and rhetoric from the base straw of a less-than-golden case; string out a damn impressive line of coke for the jury to inhale. It is not unakin to watching a magician with the cups and balls, and Paul's sharp enough, has always been sharp enough, to know how the trick is done, but where that would normally ruin the fun, now he leans back and watches Alan Shore methodically and brilliantly change every one of the twelve minds that matter.

He's also sharp enough to see that Shore had to fight his own conscience down for every word that comes out in defense of the large chemical corporation. On the FBI agent's face with its sharp-slashed cheekbones and mouth, a brief crocodile grin manifests; it might conceivably be in pity.

Alan's wearing seventy-five more dollars than he himself is, he concludes, while propping his foot against the top back of the chair before him (for no other purpose than to evoke the irritated, disapproving glares of those around him). Seventy-five more dollars, an impassioned expression as he argues and argues well, and smoothly buried, oh so smoothly buried-- if Paul Smecker did not now know what Alan Shore looks like with that one-thousand dollar armor off him, without anything at all in fact, he thinks he might have missed it too-- so very smoothly buried beneath all that, Alan wears a considerable weight of self-loathing and desperation. Nobody wants to be done with the case and out of this courtroom more than Alan does at the moment, even in this moment where he is skilfully playing at the very top of his game with his closing arguments.

He wonders if Alan intends to get drunk after this. It seems very likely. Paul Smecker's eyes slide shut, lazily, as if he's dozing in the afternoon sunlight that streams in the courtroom windows, and he muses on how long it will take before they, Alan's firm, Alan's whole six-figure leather-seat world, ask him to bend that fraction too far. The Amazing Rubber Man.

But His Ken-doll hair is still perfect.

Oh my God.

I like Malcom Holmes.

I feel bad for going OMG!squee when Tara was all, "I'm not going anywhere with you." And he was like, "Then why are we holding hands?" And she's all cute, school-girl type blush. "Fine. Dinner. But that's IT."

OMG. I feel so bad. But... ahhhhhhhh....

In other news, OMG Denny/Alan love. Gah. "Do we look good?" "We look great." *stops traffic* EEEE. Must. Adopt. Denny.