Notes: For 15minuteficlet's Legacy challenge.
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There were shadows of him in all corners.
He remained present in the small things in their lives, like the way that Natalie would pause before calling out to Casey and Peter, as if there was another name she had to force herself not to say. Or the way secret smiles would be shared when someone had a birthday and they would all gather around to sing. Sometimes, Casey turned to Peter in the middle of a segment and momentarily lost his train of thought, lost what he was saying, because the wrong man sat beside him.
And it was all his fault.
�Too many giant blue margaritas,� Dana had said wisely when he finally broke down and told her what had happened, and he supposed it was as good an explanation as any.
Now he went home to his house every night and he sat on the couch alone, his mind inevitably drifting to the sight of Danny�s eyes, widening just the slightest bit as he leaned in, his mouth, soft and sweet and still tasting like the lingering hint of something blue.
There had been effort involved in Dan�s pulling away, Casey could see it in his eyes, could feel it in the slight trembling of his fingers as he touched Casey�s cheek, pushing him back. �You don�t want to do this,� he had said in a breathless voice, and Casey had wanted to get mad, wanted to tell him that he had no idea what he wanted, but his lips were still tingling from the touch of Dan�s skin, and his mind was a haze of half-remembered seconds that had ended too soon, and the words didn�t come.
He should have known when Dan fled the room that some deep rift had opened between them that couldn�t be closed again, but he was sure that he would go into the office in the morning and find Dan pretending that nothing had happened, that everything was fine.
Instead he found packed boxes and a letter of resignation.
LA was supposed to be nice this time of year, Casey heard, and he wondered occasionally if Dan had met any Laker girls after all, but he always stopped himself from wondering too much, because there were some hurts that went too deep and hadn�t healed enough yet.
But Dan was inescapable, it seemed. The studio was filled with his presence, his legacy, and occasionally the fleeting thought would cross Casey�s mind that California was only a plane ride away, that maybe he would find something out there he had been missing for far too long, maybe for his whole life.
But in the end a legacy, even a painful one, was preferable to the risk, to the inevitable rejection, so he sat alone in his apartment at night and he watched his hands move of their own volition as they tore an unused plane ticket to shreds.