Work Text:
Roman has been stuck in LA for over a year, doing a made-up job at the studio as Frank's little butt boy, when a phone call summons him back to New York. The call comes directly from his dad, at an absolute ungodly fucking hour in the morning, because Logan Roy doesn't give a shit about other people's time zones. Roman's day goes downhill from there, reaching a nadir when he gets out to Van Nuys.
"Did you just fucking say White Plains?"
He's standing on the tarmac with a half-empty duffle bag sitting at his feet. Unsure how long this little dancing monkey performance is going to last, he hasn't bothered to pack much more than some underwear, his hair stuff and a pill bottle with a faded illegible label, containing what he thinks is a mix of Adderall and Xanax tablets.
"I'm sorry, sir," the pilot says. He's holding up his hands in a surrender pose, like he thinks Roman is someone who can be placated. "The flight crew should have already spoken about this with the travel office. On such short notice, we weren't able to get a runway slot at Teterboro."
The guy just stands there for a second with his mouth hanging open, like he's expecting Roman to respond. He looks like some old bag's Shar Pei waiting for a treat. "Some people don't realize, the difference in total travel time is really quite negligible," he adds, like somehow the fucking ETA is the relevant issue here. "And, we should be able to make up some time in the air, though, if we hit a favorable jetstream and whatnot."
Not that he pays attention to people who are essentially glorified cab drivers, but Roman is pretty sure that this guy is new, or at least he's not the usual guy who operates the corporate PJ. That guy looks like how a pilot is supposed to look, blue steel and a brush cut, all Top Gun and shit. This guy looks like he should be turning in a faked expense report for a trip to Des Moines.
Roman shoots him a death glare that's wasted behind sunglasses. Fucking White Plains, like he's some kind of first ex-wife coasting on a shitty pre-nup, or somebody who thinks it's a splurge to take a charter to the Vineyard. "Did anyone explain to you," he asks Captain Dumbfuck, "that White Plains is the airport for fucking wine moms who live in Connecticut?"
"I, uh--" The pilot stammers and trails off. Roman pulls out his phone and half-turns away, in case he hasn't made it clear that he's done with this fucking conversation.
Roman's EA makes a couple calls that wave the family name around like an anthrax envelope. She manages to get everything straightened out, but Roman already has a pounding headache and it's only the start of the cross-country flight. Somewhere above the flyover states, he tries to jerk off in the bathroom to improve his mood. But sometimes his dick only gets hard when he's actively trying to make himself feel worse, so that's a total bust, too.
There's a car waiting for him when the plane lands at Teterboro. Sitting in the car is one person Roman hasn't thought about since before he got banished to go get diddled by Frank in the west coast kiddie pool. Gerri Kellman looks up from her phone, squinting at the blast of sunlight that's shining in through the open car door. "Hello, Roman," she says. "Logan really appreciates you making the trip on such short notice. He thought you might want to see a friendly face when you landed."
Roman snorts to show how absolutely fucking doubtful he thinks that is, and not to mention--
"So he sent his fucking lawyer?"
Gerri makes a neutral "hmm" sound and then waves her hand between Roman and the empty seat next to her, seeming to invite him to get in the fucking car already. She doesn't actually say that, because none of his dad's executive meat puppets would ever have the balls to tell him that he's wasting their fucking time.
Roman rolls his eyes, climbing up into the car to sit down across from Gerri. She leans forward to confirm their destination with the driver and surprises him a little bit by giving the address of his apartment in the city. She sits back in her seat and nods in Roman's direction, saying, "I assume you'd like to freshen up a bit?"
Roman shrugs. "Yeah, sure. Why not. Been a while since I stopped by." Putting on a show of giddy sarcasm, he claps his hands together and adds, "Maybe I have mail!"
A while back, there was a whole thing with the ATN website rebrand and a consultant who had to be paid off so he'd stop pretending that he'd never seen a dick pic before. Which is still such bullshit, because Roman clearly hadn't meant it in a "you're so hot, I just can't stop myself from committing sexual harrassment, here's a picture of my dick" kind of way. He'd said right there in the email: If you think my ideas are a disappointment, wait until you see my dick.
Anyway, he was a naughty boy, and instead of getting sent to his room, he got sent to production studio purgatory. But it was supposed to be temporary, so he kept up his place in the city and stayed at one of the corporate apartments in Malibu. Somehow, temporary has turned into an entire fucking year and some change, but he's never gotten around to telling his building to cancel the housekeeping service while he's gone, so there should be clean towels and shit.
When they've left the tarmac and joined the parade of identical black SUVs exiting the airport, he pulls out his phone and fires off a series of texts to Shiv:
Dad made me come all the way back here in the middle of pilot season to clean up Kendall's mess
U so busy eating twat in the village you can't keep Kendall from going all Lohan WTF??
U gonna go see him?
He does know that Shiv's not currently eating twat in Greenwich Village, because her performative Sapphic shack-up lasted for about five totally predictable seconds, but he's going to keep bringing it up until it stops being funny, which he assumes will happen on the 27th of fucking never.
He pockets his phone and looks over at Gerri. He's not sure he would call her a friendly face, per se, but she's definitely a familiar one. She's worked at Waystar basically as long as he's been alive. When he was a kid, after his parents dug in on opposite sides of a demilitarized zone the size of the Atlantic Ocean, there were long stretches of time when he saw Gerri more often than he saw his own mother. He shakes his head to himself, impressed with how quickly that comparison crawled out of his Freud fuckfest of an imagination.
He stares out the window for a little bit and tries to remember any useful blackmail, perverted sexcapades or spectacular fuck-ups that have Gerri's name attached. Nothing is really coming to mind. She's good. Smart. Probably only managed to stick around for as long as she has by being pathologically uninterested in fucking his dad. Roman shifts in his seat, crossing his legs and folding his hands across one of his kneecaps. "So," he says, "how's, uh … everything?"
She sets her phone down on her lap and blinks at him a couple times before answering. "Oh, fine, you know. My daughters are having a little bit of a tough time, first Christmas without their dad and all."
He hems over this for a moment, because he fucking obviously meant how's everything with the company, not how is everything with whatever basic cable family drama she's got going on at home. On the other hand, talking about work is fucking boring, so--
"Why didn't you just tell the little rugrats that divorce means double the Christmas presents?" he asks. "Like, two Barbie dreamhouses for the price of one." He realizes that this is inane and not how pricing models work, but he lets the words keep dribbling out of his mouth anyway.
Gerri gives him a weird look. "My daughters are in college."
"Right. That's … good?" He's not sure how he's supposed to know how old Gerri's kids are. Although he does have a vague memory of Shiv flipping her shit when she broke up with some guy, bitching about how she didn't want to end up like Gerri and get stuck popping out last-chance IVF twins when she was 43. Grasping for a subject change, he says, "So, when'd you ditch the old man?"
"I didn't get divorced, Roman, my husband died."
"Oh. Uh … sorry?" The whole exchange is deeply fucking awkward, and it makes his skin flush hot like he just got caught jerking it in a sauna or something. A person who was not psychosexually maladjusted would probably label this feeling as "embarrassment," but to Roman it's as relaxing as popping a couple of those Xanax he's got in his duffle bag. He twists in his seat to lean one elbow against the car window. "Anyway," he says, letting the word drag out into a lazy drawl, "what the fuck is up? Must be a pretty big deal to drag me back here in the middle of pilot season."
Gerri frowns. "Oh, I didn't realize you were involved day-to-day with the production company."
"I mean, I'm not, but … what the fuck, you know?" Roman follows up this statement with a wave of the hand, in case Gerri didn't get the message that what he just said should be self-explanatory.
And, whatever, not that he's going to admit this to Gerri, but he's a little unclear on the actual function and purpose of pilot season. It's mostly come up when his EA is making excuses about why it's more difficult than usual to get a last-minute appointment at the dermatologist or a suite at Chateau Marmont. His plan has been to cite pilot season as a useful shorthand for communicating that he is an extremely busy studio executive who had to be begged to come back to New York to get them out of this particular shitstorm, but he may need to workshop that one a little bit.
But, back to the issue at hand. "C'mon," he says, "let's stop pussying around. Tell me about how Kendall shit the bed. Are there pictures? Video? Can we get someone to put together a slide deck?"
"Well," Gerri starts to say. She has her hair all pinned up as part of that corporate vagina dentata image she's got going on, but a piece of it has escaped the nest and she has to tuck it behind her ear. "I'm not sure where to begin. I know that you spoke with your father, but he may not have gotten into all the details."
Roman snorts. "Yeah, you could say that." His dad said, Romulus, listen, Kendall's not well. I need you to come back here for a bit. Roman mumbled some kind of reply because it was ass o'clock in the morning. Logan said, Right. The plane's already at Van Nuys, so don't fuck around, and then he hung up.
Because gossip hits the blogs the same on both coasts, Roman knows that Kendall's not well is code for Kendall spiraling out and getting his ass dumped in rehab. He figures that Kendall's bitch wife must have dragged him there by his balls before Logan was able to put a stop to all that.
One Easter when they were kids, some Roy cousin invited herself to dinner to try to get a handout and show off her weird huge baby. She got totally plastered, in a non-entertaining, puke-all-over-the-bathroom kind of way. After the giant baby got handed off to Shiv's nanny and somebody called the on-call concierge doctor, his dad told everyone to sit the fuck down for dinner already and that alcoholism was an excuse invented by sissies and sluts who didn't have any impulse control.
Afterward, the adults stood around sipping Macallan while Shiv hunted for eggs in the garden and Kendall and Roman took turns swigging from the half-empty bottle of Domaine Leroy that had been left out on the dining room table. Roman makes a mental note to remind Kendall of this story once they let him out of the overpriced drunk tank and returns from his trip down memory lane to discover that Gerri is still talking.
"As you know," she says, "despite our best efforts, Kendall's recent difficulties have attracted some publicity."
"I mean, he OD'd in the bathroom at Soho House. Not even Karolina could suck enough dicks to keep that quiet."
"Right. So--"
Roman is still stuck on this point, though. "Like, seriously," he says, "The bathroom at fucking Soho House? Has anyone else pointed out what a massive fucking cliché that is?"
"I don't think--"
"Next you're gonna tell me he was doing a bump off his new business card." Roman makes a show of shaking his head and letting out a deep sigh. "I guess we're lucky that drugs just make Kendall more of a cry baby bitch," he says, "or we'd have a real Patrick Bateman situation on our hands. I'm just saying, it's a caricature. Overdosing in the bathroom at Soho House is, like, the full fucking SNL skit, don't you think?"
"To be honest, I think that your brother had a major untreated substance abuse issue and was not overly concerned with whether he was playing into any particular stereotypes."
Gerri somehow manages to say this in a tone that's so mild, it takes a second for Roman to process and react. He lets out an abrupt snort. "Good one," he tells her. "Tou-fucking-ché or whatever." After a beat, he adds, "Why not bring in Shiv, though? She's finally done with all that school shit, isn't it time for dear old Dad to start trapping her in his web?"
Gerri shakes her head. "No, I think her program at the Kennedy School runs through the end of the year, actually."
After Shiv got bored with pretending that she liked to munch box, she fucked off to some executive leadership program at Harvard, which to Roman seems like more of the same thing that she was trying to avoid in the first place. But then again, what the fuck does he know; he has a strict policy against sticking his nose in either textbooks or vaginas.
"So, quick recap," Roman says. "Kendall's in the loony bin, Shiv's at libtard finishing school, Connor is still ... Connor. And now, I'm the only show pony left in the stable. Wow, you guys must be fucked."
He chuckles then, trying to keep things light. It's not like he's all that eager to be getting dragged back here. He's made it clear to anyone who will listen that LA is a golden pussy fountain and all he does these days is shit out big massive tent poles for summer blockbuster season.
Gerri's smile is as tight as a virgin asshole. "The most pressing issue is that Kendall was supposed to take the lead presenting on the new strategic plan objectives and KPIs at the shareholder executive committee meeting next week. Everything has already been finalized, it's just a--"
"Yeah, yeah, it's the usual fiscal year-end shareholder rub and tug. I got it."
"Essentially, yes."
"So, you put me up there and we all jerk ourselves through a quick slide deck. I'm not my brother the Times Square coke whore, but I'm also not my dad, so everyone knows that shit's under control and they're gonna keep getting that good hard dynastic dick down, Happy fucking New Year. Does that cover it?"
She stares at him for a moment, then says, "You know, all things considered, that was a relatively erudite summary."
Roman scoffs. "C'mon Gerri, you have to stop showering me with compliments like this, people will talk."
Gerri seems to think that this means the conversation is over and goes back to looking at her phone. Since he doesn't want to sit there looking like a dumb baby, Roman unlocks his phone and sees that he has a series of reply texts from Shiv:
I can't get back there until next weekend
Tell me how Ken is doing
At least I can look at a twat without crying
She follows up with a winking emoji because Shiv is just the absolute fucking worst. Roman shoves his phone back in his pocket.
Now he's bored, and his headache is starting to come back. As the car enters the Lincoln Tunnel, he slumps down further in his seat. He looks over at Gerri, watching how the tunnel lights flicker across her face. "I was probably gonna have to come back soon anyway," he says. "It's really not safe to have me around all those aspiring actresses. Last thing we need is for someone in this family to get fucking Weinstein'd." He leers at her. "You know what I mean?"
Gerri raises an eyebrow. "I want you to consider the fact that I have signed off on every single non-disclosure agreement that has ever been executed on your behalf. There is absolutely nothing about your extracurricular activities that is a mystery to me."
Something about the way she says it makes Roman's ears flush and his dick twitch. He'd stop to wonder what the fuck that's about, but he prefers to keep a Chinese wall between himself and the part of his brain that decides what makes him happy in his pants.
Traffic in Midtown is as fucked as ever, but eventually the car pulls up in front of Roman's building. Gerri looks up from what she's doing to give him a once-over and he can tell from the way she purses her lips that he's a disappointment. "Please don't forget to shave," she says. "We're going straight to the office from here and you look like a hobo."
"Get the fuck out of here." He rubs his palm against the stubble on the side of his chin. "You know what passes for business attire in LA? Not showing up to the office in fucking flip flops."
"Well, Toto, I don't think we're in Los Angeles anymore."
Roman makes a disgusted sound, because it's an embarrassment that he even caught that fucking reference. It makes him look like either a fudge-packer or a baby boomer and he's not sure which one is worse. "Fuck off," he says. "What, you think I'm your little dog now?"
Gerri has already returned her attention to her phone, but her gaze flicks up at him for just a second. "Yes, Roman," she says placidly. "I think you're my little dog."
Her words are completely deadpan, but there's a glint in her eye that has Roman mentally skipping ahead to how he's gonna jack off in the shower ten minutes from now.
She shakes her head, like she can tell exactly what he's thinking and she's not impressed. He's halfway out of the car before he remembers that there was one more thing he wanted to ask. "Is Kendall, like, okay and shit?"
"I mean, it's hard to say, but my understanding is that he's in one of the top programs."
"Well, yeah, I'd fucking hope so."
"I can have someone send you the information if you'd like to go see him." She still hasn't looked up from her phone, but her tone softens just a little bit. It makes Roman feel small and weak and he has zero plans to acknowledge that he likes it.
"Yeah. Sure." He steps all the way out of the car. "Uh, thanks, or whatever."
"Back down here in twenty minutes," she says. "Don't waste my time."
***
Over the next few weeks, he spends more time at the office than he does at his now-foreign apartment. He shows up to the shareholder executive committee meeting and makes a joke about how he's prepared to go Game of Thrones on Shiv to keep the bloodline going. But it totally fucking lands in the room, so as far as he's concerned, everything turned out fine.
He sees Kendall twice: the first time he looks like dogshit and the second time he looks even worse but says he feels better, so who knows what the fuck that means. He avoids a bunch of people who heard that he's back in the city and want to meet up and get drinks or have a circle jerk or whatever. At the beginning of the third week, he has an idea while he's taking a piss about leveraging user-generated content on the ATN socials. He strolls into his dad's office and finds out he's being sent back to LA.
He feigns nonchalance; offers to stick around and help out with the Q1 business development shit that Kendall was supposed to handle. The rumor is that Kendall is going to get his own taste of banishment once he gets out of rehabistan. He'll be stuck in Shanghai handling the telecom clusterfuck there.
But Logan says, "No, no, son, I don't want to keep you. Sally Ann is going to handle all of that," because his dad can't just sport fuck brainless bimbos like a normal septuagenarian, his side pieces have career ambitions. And then that's it, he's dismissed.
He decides he might as well leave straight from the office, unable to remember whether he gives a shit about anything he left at the apartment. He's been working in Frank's empty office out of spite, and he's thinking about whether he wants to jack off on Frank's keyboard before he leaves when Gerri finds him.
"I hear that you're heading back." She's standing in the doorway with her arms crossed.
"Looks like it."
She nods. "Well, have a safe trip," she says. "Give Frank my regards."
At this point Roman just wants to get the fuck out of here. He doesn't even feel like asking her if she wants to stick around and watch him jizz all over Frank's desk. "Sure," he says, "I'll do that. I'll mention it the next time I have to bend over and give him my butthole."
Gerri's response is an expression he's started to recognize over the last few weeks, one that he can only describe as "calculatedly milquetoast." Then she says, "You'll be back."
"What, for my dad's funeral? Yeah. Probably. I guess."
"No, before then. You did a good job here."
The thing is that Roman likes being seen by other people as an idiot and he maybe even likes being made to feel like an idiot. But, Roman is not actually a complete idiot. He knows, for example, that Frank got sent to LA because he was a threat to Sally Ann, and he won't be coming back as long as she sticks around. Roman knows that the actual reason he himself got subsequently sent to LA is that he tanked the ATN website rebrand by getting fixated on adding a bunch of verticals, despite overwhelming evidence that the average ATN viewer doesn't have the IQ points necessary to click through to the end of a listicle.
He's not a complete idiot, but he's also not a fucking mind-reader. So he knows that doing a good job while he was here was never going to stop his dad from sending him back to LA again, but he doesn't have a fucking clue what he should be doing instead.
He rolls his eyes and puts his hands on the desk to lever himself up out of Frank's big cushy orthopedic old man chair. "Right," he says. "Good job by me. Guess that's why I'm getting sent back to the avocado gulag."
She tilts her head and studies him for a moment. "Logan has a low tolerance for the ephemeral," she says. "You're trying to get his attention with bigger and bigger ideas, but what will keep his attention is picking one of those ideas and seeing it all the way through to completion."
It has the shape and sting of good advice. Maybe Roman would listen if he cared about any of this shit, but caring about things is stupid. "C'mon, Gerri," he says. "You know that HR told me that I have to stop talking about my problems with reaching completion."
He circles around her to exit Frank's office, waving back over his shoulder as he walks in the direction of the private elevator. He leaves the building, gets into the car that's waiting for him out front and tells the driver to take him back to Teterboro.