Work Text:
It takes five minutes after they've arrived at the green room of the north--actually a shack barely big enough to have a toilet, a bed, and rudimentary kitchen--before Don is sick of having Bob staring at him and mimicking him. "You're not going to do the part in mime, are you?" he asks, and Bob breaks and starts laughing.
"That would be another departure from expectations, wouldn't it? Tonight, we present The Drowsy Chaperone, a period musical that never existed, with extensive commentary presented through the medium of interpretive dance."
"I don't think it'll play in Peoria."
"Probably not." Bob shakes his head, then shakes his arms out, working out the kinks of the long drive. They have a draft of a play to work over, and Bob has a character to develop. Peace, quiet, and being too far away from civilization to have a phone interrupt may help.
They have a cooler full of frozen pizzas. There's nowhere to order it, here, and he knows their writing binges of old. They'll get working, like they always do, and not notice until four in the morning that they haven't eaten since noon.
At noon they were still in shouting distance of something that could be called a city without eliciting belly laughs. But once they've started, bouncing the lines back and forth and rolling them between their minds like rocks in a tumbler until they are as perfect as they can be, they ease along until they've finished the entire first act.
The red readout on the digital clock in the microwave claims that it is 3:17 in the morning. Don is lying upside down on the tiny couch, his legs hooked over the back, and Bob is sitting on the floor by the wood stove. Feeding it should've marked the passage of time, but it became a part of their rhythm. The argument over the over-ingenuousness of the ingenue that drove them both out of the tiny cabin just long enough to bring in fuel, and fuel them to start arguing again, was perfectly normal.
"We can't stop there," Bob says, and the way he's gesturing with his hands isn't like him. It's Don's mannerism, like his phrasing: "I'm still working on my perceptions of the entr'acte speech, and the way it can tie together the inchoate first act with the intricacies of the second act's denouement, the crest and crash of tragedy."
"I do not sound like that," Don says, lying.
Bob grins. "I can record you again if you want."
"No." Don scowls at him, afraid it loses some of its power upside down. "I don't gesture like that, either."
"Sometimes you do."
Don rolls his eyes. "Not in years."
Bob purses his lips, the expression familiar from the inside, and kneels up enough to loom over Don. "Tell me if I got this part right," he says, and kisses him.
It's impossible to know whether this part of his impression is accurate, but he's surely studied it as carefully as the rest. "Maybe. Let me show you again."