Chapter 41: Ronan Who?

The days went quickly after that, and then it was Sunday, April 13, 2014, and «Castaway in Time» was going out that night.

The week in between belonged to the internet. On Jane Kingsley’s word alone, a good part of the country had decided it hated Ronan without having seen one frame of his face, and the trouble was that her word was all anybody had of him.

There was no photograph. There was no listing.

He had a first name and nothing attached to it, and by the second day the internet had made a joke out of exactly that and started calling him Ronan Who. It trended twice with the hashtag on it.

NBS ran promos against all of it, hard, all week. Every cut of the spot so far had been Jane and only Jane, thirty seconds of her and the title at the end.

Then the word went round that the new one had him in it, and that Sunday’s audience would be getting a look at the man before the show ever started.

Over at Circle Agency, Robert Wright had the television on in his office and had left it on all afternoon.

He’d had the name since Mark Kelly’s call and it hadn’t left him alone since. Ronan. He’d talked himself out of it that day and gone on talking himself out of it every week after, and it had never once taken.

"Just show me his face." He was at his desk with his eyes on the screen. "That’s all I’m asking for. Whoever this Ronan is, the son of a bitch who walked in and took the role off my actor, I want to see what he looks like."

He shifted in the chair.

"And Jane Kingsley sitting there telling the whole country she enjoyed it with him. Lucky bastard doesn’t cover it."

He waited out the rest of the break, and then the thirty seconds for «Castaway» came up and he sat forward.

Jane first, the way it always was. Period dress, every light in the room working for her, and for a second Robert forgot what he was angry about.

"Whoever this Ronan is," he said, "I envy him. I do."

It didn’t take much longer than that.

The narration came in over her. "A lady in distress. Far from any help her own century can give her. Will a man from another one come for her?"

The shot cut to a pair of boots on steel decking, and the camera stayed low and moved with them down the passageway of a modern warship. It was in the walk. Anybody could see it. Nobody moves like that who hasn’t been taught to.

The camera came up his body and found the face.

He was young. Better-looking than he had any business being, and none of that was what held the shot, because the face was serious the whole way through. The eyes were a deep blue and there was nothing soft anywhere in them, only the flat, worn-down look of a man who had been somewhere and brought it home with him. The brows sat low and ready. Dark hair, cut short and squared off the way the service cuts it.

Robert didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He was looking at a soldier.

Then it broke over him and he came up out of the chair.

"N-no way." His hand shook when he pointed at the screen. "No. This is a dream. Why is he in there? This isn’t possible—"

He was already across the office and standing in front of the set.

Ronan came to attention and saluted, and the spot cut him to a room on his own with the door shut, and everything the man had been holding up came apart in his face.

"A soldier carrying more than any man should. Is there anyone left who can save him?"

Then the water. The storm taking him over the side, the black of it, and hands hauling him up the hull of a ship that had no business being there at all, and Jane above him with the lantern.

"Two people from two centuries. One meeting that will remake them both."

The card came up at the end of it.

Jane Kingsley as Rose De Vere.

Ronan Mercer as Elijah Shaw.

Seeing the name written out was what finished it.

"Just how the fuck is the insignificant little nobody we dumped out on the street the male lead of this show? Him?" His voice cracked on it. "He’s the one who took the role off Johnny Miller?"

None of it fit together anymore. Every piece he’d been holding for months came apart in his hands at once.

It had the shape of a dream. It had the shape of a nightmare he couldn’t get himself out of.

His head swam and he made it back to the chair and sat down in it, and worked his fingers into his forehead.

Then he laughed at the ceiling.

"I can’t believe this bullshit. Kelly took Johnny Miller off the lead and put Ronan Mercer in it? Does the man have any idea how flat that kid is? Five years. Five years I had him in this building."

Five years of giving the kid chances, and in all five of them Robert had never once seen anything in him worth the paperwork.

"Terrible decision. A genuinely terrible decision." He said it to the empty office. "I give that show four episodes. Five, if they’re lucky. And then NBS is going to want a long conversation with Mark Kelly about how it happened." That got a chuckle out of him.

He’d been all over the place for the first few minutes of it. By the time he’d stopped, what was left underneath was simpler than anger, and he could look straight at it: he wanted Kelly to watch this thing fail. He wanted to be somewhere he could see the man’s face when it did.

"Go on then, Kelly. I hope I’m in the room when it comes apart on you."

And that was what made it worth watching. NBS had spent the whole year trying to build a scripted block on Sunday nights, and CNS and ABS had taken those hours off them week after week with originals of their own. «Castaway» was what the network had hung the entire night on. Whatever they had left was sitting inside that hour.

He got his feet up on the desk and settled in to watch it go wrong for them.

* * *

Across town, Johnny Miller hadn’t been out of his apartment in days except when work made him.

Getting pulled off the lead had been bad. Getting pulled off it at the last minute, after he’d told every person he knew he’d be working with Jane Kingsley, was the part he couldn’t walk around in public with. So he stopped going out.

He was sitting in the dark of his own front room with a week’s worth of beard on him and the table in front of him crowded with empties, and he cracked another one open.

The television was face down on the floor where it had gone, the screen shattered out of it.

He drank. "Oh, Jane fucking Kingsley." The words came out soft around the edges. "Look at what you did to me. Look at it. I put my own television on the floor because you sat on national TV and told everybody the guy who took my job is good at kissing. Good at the sex scenes." He tipped the bottle at the wreck of it. "You’re a horrible woman. You know that?"

He got the phone up and spent a while on it, working through the dummy account, putting things about Jane and about Ronan Who wherever there was somewhere to put them.

Then he threw it down on the table and let it lie.

It started buzzing almost at once.

"Who the hell calls at this hour?" He looked at it without reaching. "What, you got a joke you’ve been saving up?"

It was Erik. He picked it up.

"What. You calling to laugh at me again? Because you had your fun in that bar. All of you did, glasses up, big speech, the works. And look how that turned out."

"Easy, man." Erik didn’t rise to it. "I’m not calling to make fun of you. That’s not what this is."

"Then what is it, you piece of shit?" It came up out of him all at once. "What do you want off me? You calling to promise me a role too? Is that it? You gonna line one up and then take it back off me a week before, because that’s the going rate on a promise these days—"

"Johnny. Man." Erik sounded worn out with it. "That’s not what I called about. We found out who he is. The actor who took your role. We got a name."

Something went through the drink and cleared a path in it.

"Oh?" He sat up off the cushions. "Then tell me. Tell me all about it, Erik."

Erik took a second before he said it.

"You’re not going to believe this. It’s the Forever Extra. It’s Ronan Mercer."

"R-Ronan Mercer?" His eyes came all the way open. "You’re pulling my leg. Tell me you’re pulling my leg."

"It’s true, man. It’s everywhere. Go and look for yourself."

Johnny hung up on him and looked.

It didn’t take any looking at all. The pictures were already coming up faster than he could scroll them, that same face out of the promo everybody had spent the day pulling apart, Jane Kingsley’s co-star.

His hand closed hard around the phone.

"So it’s you. Of course it’s you."

He sat with it a while, and then he went into his contacts and found a number he hadn’t used in a long time and dialed it.

"Hey. That crew of yours around this week? I’ve got something for you." He was steady now, steadier than he’d been all night. "There’s a bastard I want taught a lesson."

The voice on the other end was flat and unbothered. "Money first. Then it’s done."

Johnny grinned into the dark.

***

Read advanced Chapters in my website: NewComer714(dot)com.