Chapter Text
Amy doesn’t answer her phone.
He’s stuck in a crappy Omaha hotel bar with Leon and Kent and Ben, and Amy refuses to answer his calls.
He doesn’t know her room number, and he’s not quite willing to harass Gary until he gets it, so he contents himself with blasting up her phone.
Sooner or later she’s going to crack, he’s sure of it.
He’s still sure of it when it’s gone midnight and he has to go to bed - she’s probably just asleep, probably needs more sleep now that she’s… that she’s pregnant.
He can’t even picture it, Amy all round and motherly, it seems like something out of science fiction. But the kid… the kid he can see - a little boy with Amy’s stormy temper and wide eyes, or a girl with her big ears and his freckles - he can already picture one or both of them on a campaign leaflet.
He finally accepts that she’s not going to answer her phone around one a.m. and tries to sleep himself.
It doesn’t really work.
His mind is racing, idea tumbling over idea in a rush he can barely keep up with. It makes sense, suddenly, why Amy had seemed to drop off the face of the earth not too long after she’d come to DC for her interview, why she’d started taking days to reply to messages. It makes sense, the way she’s been oddly standoffish ever since BKD took on Selina’s campaign - looking at him all the time like she wanted to come closer but couldn’t. Why that tension in her, the tension that he’d thought was gone, maybe forever, when he’d seen her smile that day in DC, had crept back in, inch by irritating inch.
He doesn’t get much sleep.
He does raid the mini-bar and drink three of the less mediocre mini-bottles of Scotch, but it doesn’t help much.
The next morning, they have a breakfast meeting with Selina - Kent’s taking them through his proposals for demographic targeting in Iowa, and Amy’s filling Selina in on her plans for the new campaign office - so he gets up early and grabs a seat, figuring he can catch her before the others arrive.
It’s a good idea, in theory - and Amy shows up exactly as he expects… but that’s the limits of his success.
She smiles at the waitress, orders pancakes with blueberries and pannacotta and something called a watermelon cooler. The moment they’re alone, he says, “Amy, what the -”
“I can’t talk right now.”
“You can’t - well you’re gonna.”
“No, Dan,” she says, sounding irritatingly serene. “I’m not.”
“So what, you’re just going to sit there and eat sugar and read your phone?”
“When you put it like that,” she says, “It sounds like a really good plan.”
“Amy for -”
They’re interrupted by Gary, who has come down to place Selina’s order and have a mild panic attack, it’s not clear in which order. He’s het up about something to do with the leviathan, some kind of herbal remedy Selina used up the night before, and which he’s afraid he can’t replace in flyover country.
He’s so wound up, he doesn’t seem to find it in the least bit suspicious when Amy…expresses interest, asks questions even, pretends to give a single solitary fuck about the whole thing.
Finally, tiring of the pretence - and given an excuse by the hustle and bustle of Selina and Ben’s arrivals, Dan gets up and takes the seat beside Amy. She gives a deep sigh, and shifts so she’s facing away from him.
But he’s not in the mood to indulge her, and so he takes her elbow in one hand, none-to-gently urging her to turn and face him. If anything, she looks bored.
“I’m really not in the mood,” she says, her voice low (because she doesn’t want anyone else to hear).
“Did you not see how many times I called you?”
“Oh,” she says, not looking him in the eye. “I saw.”
“Well then why -”
“I was ignoring you.”
“You were - Amy, we have to talk.”
“No,” she says, with a transparently false expression of surprise on her face. “We don’t. I can’t imagine what you even think we need to talk about.”
“You’re acting like a fucking child, you know that?”
She shrugs, and reaches over to steal some of Gary’s maple syrup. “So?”
“You can’t just -”
“Let’s get this straight,” she says, “I can do whatever I want, and you don’t get a say in the matter. I can run off to… to -”
“Nevada?”
“I was going to say Namibia,” she says, looking ruffled for the first time in the conversation. “Like Angelina Jolie or whoever -”
“If you’re modelling yourself on Angelina Jolie then you’ve got a lot to -”
“Is this the part where you tell me how terminally unsexy and boring I am?” She cocks an eyebrow at him, and he feels wrong-footed, because…well, okay, yes, he had been planning to say something to that effect - as a joke - but… “Not interested, Dan. And we have a meeting.”
And that seems to be it.
It’s not that he can’t get her alone, because he does manage it once or twice over the course of the day, it’s that Amy refuses to give him anything, won’t be drawn into any discussion or rise to his bait, no matter how hard he tries.
It lasts for about a week.
They’re in the Des Moines office, catching up on the day’s news, when it happens. CBS This Morning is playing on one of the big screens, though none of them are watching it, scanning twitter and their email alerts instead, discussing whether there’s anything to be gained by issuing a statement on Montez’s latest mistake. Until…
“No!” Amy sounds furious, and it takes him a moment to realise why. Buddy Calhoun is being interviewed by Jane McCabe, which, it’s not like Dan can’t appreciate the irony…
But Amy apparently can’t, because as she increases the volume on the interview, she keeps talking.
"No, no, no! He does not get to - he doesn’t get to…he is not the -”
Buddy’s talking about relaunching his political career, how he’s learned from the humiliation of his gubernatorial campaign, how he thinks he can be a useful voice for change, for helping men to understand just what they want out of relationships, how they should never commit to someone who doesn’t respect them and their desires and their needs and their wants…
On and on and on it goes, and Dan’s not sure who’s more relieved, him or Amy, when Jane finally brings the interview to a close (it must be a slow news day, otherwise they’d never let him talk for so long). Amy all but throws the remote at the tv, and turns away from them, hugging herself.
“Well,” Selina says, “That should fuck things up nicely for the next few days.”
“I’m sorry ma’am,” Amy says, “I didn’t think he would -”
“Drag your name through the mud so he’d get a chance to go on tv? Why ever not?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “I thought he was really finished with all of - it’s not fair.”
“Jesus fuck,” Selina says, staring at Amy. “Are you crying?”
A profound and awkward silence falls, no one in the room quite knowing where to look, as Amy turns to face them. “I’m sorry,” she says, “It’s just… I can’t - I can’t stop. It’s not enough that he made me look like a…once, he has to come back and ruin everything all over again and -”
Selina can’t quite hide her expression of distaste, but she gestures at Gary to get Amy a tissue or something. “You didn’t even cry when we lost the primaries the first time, Ame, what are you, pregnant or something?”
She asked the question expecting to be contradicted, Dan can tell, expecting Amy to laugh and deny that such a thing was even possible.
But when Amy meets her eyes, looking impossibly nervous, Selina realises the truth, and her tone turns…almost sincere. “Amy,” she says, “Seriously? Right before we go into a campaign?”
“It wasn’t exactly…something I planned.”
“Well who’s the… tell me you are dragging someone else into this hell with you, because believe me girlie, you do not want to do this by yourself?”
“He’s not in…” Amy swallows, hard, and squares her shoulders. “The father’s not in the picture.”
“Is it that stale lump of cottage cheese? Is that why you’re so upset? Because, Ame, if you let him touch you, after what he did to you, then… I’m not sure I trust you to -”
“It’s not him.”
“Well thank fuck for that!” Selina sounds genuinely pleased. “Sure, you’re pregnant at a terrible time, and you probably feel like an immense hormone bomb, but you didn’t let your shithead ex knock you up. Remember when I got pregnant? You think I wasn’t doing the dance of joy that it wasn’t Andrew’s? It’s something to celebrate!”
“Yes ma’am, it is.”
Amy must take too long to respond, or maybe her face gives her away, because Selina looks between her and Dan, an unexpectedly shrewd look in her eyes.
He can actually see Amy tensing up as Selina figures it out, and because he’s looking at Amy, he’s not prepared when Selina rounds on him. “Dan, you did this?”
More than anything it’s Amy’s agonised expression that makes the decision for him - he’s not going to flop around like some dying fish, as though he’s uncomfortable or embarrassed at what’s happened.
“Ma’am,” he says, “I wasn't expecting that I’d need to discuss it with you this soon, but yes. And while we still have a lot to work out, I’m…looking forward to it.”
Okay, no, he isn’t, not in the slightest, shitty diapers and late night crying don’t sound the least bit appealing, but… he has to say something.
“You’re looking forward to it, despite the fact that you’re ‘not in the picture’?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Amy says, “He’s just waiting for -”
“For what?” Dan says, cocking his head to look at her. (He’s genuinely curious what she thinks he’s going to do).
“There’s no reason anyone needs to know who the sperm donor is.”
“Yeah, I have questions about that,” Selina says, “You were supposed to be Catherine’s donor back in the day and then it turned out your boys didn’t swim, I remember her warbling about it at some point, so how did this even happen?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Amy says, (and the pissed-off tone in her voice is pretty enlightening, because okay, he gets it, she thinks he lied to her).
“I guess we have a medical miracle on our hands.”
“Miracle?” Selina has a dangerous tone in her voice. “Fucked up a perfectly good campaign manager is what you did. Look at her, she’s got incontinence of the eyes. You broke her, right when I need her to be vaguely functional.”
“Ma’am, it’s fine, I’ll be fine -”
“Except when your millipede ex-fiance is on tv, at which point you become a weeping mess. At least your cervix is competent, unlike Catherine's.”
“I promise this will not affect you, or the campaign, I swear to -”
“Fucking relax, Ame. I’m not going to fire you, we’ll sort it out.” The way Amy’s body sags with relief, he can tell she was genuinely worried, which… he could have told her she was safe, if she’d only talked to him. “Though if Dan’s the daddy, no wonder you look like you want to drink a bottle of draino. Jesus, I thought literally the last thing you ever wanted was to end up like your fucking sister.”
“I’m not gonna - that’s not going to happen.”
There are angry tears in Amy’s eyes, but Selina doesn’t seem to notice them. “Well, you got knocked up by a better class of deadbeat, I’ll say that for you. What was it, a delivery guy, and someone so incompetent they discharged him from the army?”
“He was her college boyfriend,” Amy says, looking irritated. “Anyway, it’s not the same, I’m not going to -”
“And I’m not a fucking deadbeat!”
“Sure Dan,” Selina says, “Now can we sit down and get to work?”
And for the rest of the day, Amy refuses to so much as glance in his general direction.