On normal days Don gets home later than Sloan, and when he works late he gets home much later than she does. By the time he'd gotten in tonight she'd been fast asleep already, and he's so tired he basically passes out before he has a chance to change.
So the first time he really sees her that day is when she wordlessly shakes him awake at five AM.
"Why," he groans, covering his eyes with his arm.
"Earthquake in San Francisco," she says, and he peers out from under his arm at her. She's rolled over onto her side, bunching the blankets up under her arms as she scrolls through whatever she's reading on her phone. Her face is illuminated softly in blue light, just bright enough that he can see her eyebrows knit together.
"How big?" he asks. She pauses a moment, waiting for something to come through.
"Seven point one." She's already kicking her legs over the side of the bed as she says it.
"Shit." He'd been half-hoping he might be able to go back to sleep. No dice on that. He pulls himself out of the bed. All he has to do is put his shoes on, but Sloan's ready to go a full three minutes before he is. She's practically bouncing on the balls of her feet, like she's eager to face the mayhem and destruction they'll be spending the day exposed to. Her expression of consternation belies that image, though.
They usually go to work at different times in different cars, because for once in his life Don's trying not to air his affairs publically in the workplace, but it's also not exactly a secret, there's no real time or call for those precautions at five in the morning during a crisis.
Sloan's so single-mindedly focused on getting to the ACN building that she barely says two words to him on the way over except for when she's reading things off her phone. As she's getting out of the car, she pauses in the parking lot, tearing her eyes away from the phone momentarily.
"You good?" she asks, looking like she's only right this second becoming fully aware of his presence.
"Me? Yeah," he says as they start towards the lobby. "I've covered bigger earthquakes on less sleep." She nods sharply, stopping just short of the doors. "You?" he asks.
"I'm grand," Sloan says.
"Hey," he says, bumping shoulders with her. "If it makes you feel better, this is almost certainly not going to be your worst day in the newsroom."
"It does make me feel better, actually," she says. She rolls her eyes while she says it but she also smiles, so he counts it as a win. Since they're still standing shoulder-to-shoulder he winds his fingers through hers, and they walk into the building and up to their offices that way.
Thankfully, the only person who sees them come in together is Mac, who is one of four people Sloan told immediately.
"Hey Kenzie," Sloan says, and they hug, because even though Sloan is a little skittish when it comes physical contact, Mac is a hugger, and their friendship is weird and sympatico enough to dictate hugs even though it sprung up overnight out of nowhere. "Where's Will?"
"Already on the air," Mac says.
"I'm going to go check on him," Sloan offers as she's already walking away.
After she's gone, Don takes a moment to evaluate Mac, who is looking a little more frazzled and less put together than she normally does. She must catch his critical look, because she tosses her hands up in self-defense preemptively.
"I've had a very strange night," she confesses. Don raises his eyebrows, but she offers no further elaboration on this topic. "Come on," she says, pulling him along. "Let's make ourselves useful."
They're the last two into the board room, and when they enter everyone looks up at them, eyes heavy-lidded and weary. The whiteboard has been wiped clean and reads only 7.1 in Gary's neat handwriting along the top.
"Neal wants to pitch Godzilla," Maggie says. Her tone is drained of any levity and nobody even has the wherewithal to groan.
"Not tonight," Mac says, waving him off.
"Just… give me six seconds," Neal says, fidgeting with his phone. He's the only person who hasn't taken his seat yet, fluttering nervously by the door as Mac drops her pile of file folders on the boardroom table.
"Six seconds?" Mac asks.
"Yeah."
She looks down at her watch and is almost halfway through tapping her foot a single time before Neal has the video on his phone queued and playing for her.
To Mac's credit, she watches the video pretty attentively for much longer than six seconds and when she's done she hands it off to Tess, who has apparently seen it already, because she passes it on immediately. It comes around to Don pretty quickly, and he resists the urge to apologize to everyone for keeping them waiting while they had to listen to the Godzilla spiel ad nauseam.
Then he watches the video.
It's literally just six seconds of fragmented footage, on repeat, of something moving out in the ocean. The foreground looks like a small tourist's sailboat, and offers no real perspective on the scale of whatever's thrashing around under the grayblue ocean of noise and pixels.
"Is there audio?" Mac asks as Don watches it a third time, squinting and pulling the screen closer to his face. The footage is so low-quality, though, that it's impossible to discern anything from it.
"There is," Neal says. "I turned it off because it's just a lot of profanity, and with the looping..."
"So what are we looking at?" Don asks.
"Well, that's the weird part," Neal says, taking his phone back from Don and prodding it intently a few times. "Nobody really knows."
"Dude, it's the thing from Cloverfield," Martin insists. "The film. You know, the fictional film." Despite how tense and tired everyone is, a low snicker goes around the table.
"It's not," Neal says. "It's also not a whale, or a squid, or any kind of carcass matter. Whatever it is, it's about five kilometers off the Golden Gate, and it got there right around the time of the first foreshock."
"According to?" Mac prompts.
"Twitter users. And…"
"The footage is clearly manipulated somehow," she interrupts.
"It's not, though," Neal insisted. "It was posted to twitter through Vine – Vine is an app for microvlogging that…"
"Neal." Mac sighs through her nose as she speaks. "If it were any other day, it would be an amusing curiosity," she says, pressing a hand to her forehead. "But right now, there are people– hundreds of people– in San Francisco missing presumed dead, and it is just not the moment. We've wasted enough time here already. Moving on."
And when Mac tells people to move on, ninety eight percent of the time they move on immediately, so Neal's latest outside-the-box pitch gets left by the wayside in favor of search-and-rescue coverage.
The next time Don sees Sloan is a few hours later when he seeks her out to bring her coffee. She's holed up in her office, on the phone, speaking Japanese. She holds up a hand when she sees him standing in the doorway and then ushers him in and finishes up her conversation.
"Who was that?" he asks.
"My aunt," she says, taking the coffee from him. He leans against her desk. "She couldn't get in touch with my mother and was worried it had something to do with the earthquake."
"Doesn't your mother live in Santa Monica?"
"Where it is currently five in the morning? You bet," Sloan says, running a hand through her hair. "But it's all California to her." She sighs, leans back in her chair, glances out the window. "What'd I miss?"
"Another aftershock. Six point eight."
Sloan glances back towards him.
"And," he continues. "Mac and Charlie have been holed up in her office for…" He checks his watch. "Forty minutes."
"That can't be good," she says.
He shrugs, as nonchalant as he can manage. "If it were really not good," he reasons. "We'd have heard about it by now."
Mac doesn't emerge from her conference with Charlie until nearly nine in the morning, and when she does it's only to pull Will into the room for further (and speedier) discussion. Don keeps an eye on them through the glass walls of Mac's office, but their faces are impossible to read. Another twenty minutes pass, Will goes back to the anchor desk, and Mac comes out of her office again.
This time she just walks over to Neal's desk, hugs him for about thirty seconds, and walks away again.
Don chalks it up to stress.
Twenty minutes later she calls him into her office.
That's when things start to get really strange.
[DIVIDER]
Half an hour and a lot of surprising, frankly unbelievable information later, Mac tells him to go get Sloan. He doesn't have a problem with this besides the fact that he feels kind of like he's outside of his own body.
She's hovering in the newsroom, idly watching Will on a television. She follows him back to Mac's office without questioning his clearly shellshocked state. Once they're back in Mac's office he settles down in a chair, covers his mouth with his hand, and watches Charlie hand her a report. It's in Japanese and he asks if she can translate it. Because she's a good sport, she makes no comment on the supposed state of her fluency in Japanese.
She skims the report four or five times before she begins. By the second read-through, her nose is crinkled delicately. By the last time, her brow is furrowed in confusion and concern.
Still, she begins. "On August 10, 2013, following a geothermic anomaly at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, an unidentified creature–"
"Kaiju," Charlie corrects in his broad American accent.
"Well, yeah, that's the Japanese word," Sloan says, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I guess if you were going to be really literal, it means monster, with a connotation of like the feature film kind of— it's clearly a figurative use of the word, if it's..."
"Say kaiju while you're reading it."
"Fine. A… kaiju was detected in the vicinity of… why am I reading this?" Sloan asks, her shoulders slumping as her voice breaks. "You're making fun of me, right?"
She looks to Charlie, who just shakes his head. Unconvinced, she turns to Mac.
"It's a real report," Mac says, sounding more resigned than Don's ever heard her sound before.
Sloan turns to him last, her eyes narrowed dangerously, desperately. Like she would totally believe that the entire thing is just a stupid joke Charlie's making at her expense, and she could maybe buy that Mac would join in for whatever reason, but there's no possible way he'd participate in that so as soon as he says it's real then and only then is it real.
He doesn't want that kind of responsibility. He just shrugs.
"I know what they told me," he gestures between Charlie and Mac.
"We heard it from the White House," Mac says after a long moment.
"Fuck," Sloan splutters. "Are you—seriously?"
"Believe me," Charlie says. "I know how it sounds."
"Everything we've heard in the last few hours suggests that this report," Mac picks up a file folder as she gesticulates, "And every other source we have on the subject are entirely true."
"So run it," Don says.
"If we run it and it's not true, we'll not only look like massive idiots, we'll also be causing widespread terror over a—"
"So don't run it," Don says.
"If it is true and we don't run it, people might who might've been able to evacuate safely might not get the warning they need—"
"Fuck," Sloan says.
They sit in silence for a very long moment and Don belatedly realizes why Charlie and Mac have been in here for so long.
They make the broadcast less than an hour before Trespasser takes out the Golden Gate Bridge.
Nobody gets any sleep that night.