by AliLamba // @alilamba
Veronica knows very well she is going to be late for this date.
She chews on her fingernail, ostensibly listening to the car radio, mostly just pretending she can’t see that it is exactly 7:15 pm. She’s been watching the numbers tick up.
7:15 pm is when the reservation is for.
The reservation for her date.
At this lux, fancy Thai place halfway across town.
She hates dates.
She hates first dates.
And most importantly, she hates blind first dates.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Words: 4025, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English
Series: Part 2 of For a Good Time, Call
Fandoms: Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Categories: F/M
Characters: Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls, Jackie Cook, Keith Mars, Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie (Veronica Mars)
Relationships: Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars
Additional Tags: Blind Date, First Dates, Slow Burn, Detectives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friendship, Help, Sex Work, Poker
Ugh, so, before this last week, I think I hadn't written anything in...three or four months. My state started opening up again, things were looking good, all I wanted was to be with my friends, outside with my kids, all day, every day, with all my free time. COVID numbers are on the rise nationally again though, so I find myself pulling back in, keeping my kids at home, and...back at my laptop, honestly.
It feels good to write again. Have a very rough first draft of something I've been working on for...years XD
“Are you sure you don’t want to see if I fit into your suitcase again?”
Veronica hates that she’s resorted to the most banal of bad jokes, but…this is apparently where they’re at. Taking a last minute stroll away from the hustle and bustly of the Kanes’ imminent migration from suburban villa to vacation villa, Duncan does the polite thing of not responding, his mouth tightening as he squeezes her clasped hand.
But she can’t seem to help herself.
“Duncan?” she adds.
He stops walking, which is something. Something more than he’s said for the last few hours, after they got up together, suffered through a cold, awkward breakfast while Duncan’s parents wandered in and out of their kitchen, seemingly always surprised to see Veronica still sitting at their kitchen counter nibbling toast with their son.
She and Duncan have known this day was coming for a while, okay? Veronica shouldn’t be feeling such a lump in her throat. She shouldn’t be working so hard to untangle a jumble of nerves sitting low in her gut.
It’s only six weeks. Maybe eight, if the weather is good and the Mannings can join them, but…
“Well?” she prompts, feeling truly pathetic.
Duncan turns to face her, takes her other hand in his own. Why doesn’t he look…okay, well, she doesn’t know how he looks. He looks as if there is something on his mind, like he’s working through a really difficult math problem, or something. But final exams were last week – he shouldn’t have – well – no – okay, Veronica is just trying so hard not to imagine the worst, she’s really grasping at whatever alternate reality is presenting itself. Maybe it really is math. Maybe he’s about to talk to her about math.
Veronica wets her lips. “Seriously, Duncan, I can get pretty sma—“
“I think we should break up.”
In retrospect (well, later in retrospect. Not now. Now she has no spect at all to retro) she will realize this is not at all a surprise. That a hundred clues presented themselves to her over the course of the last 48-odd hours, and that this is merely a culmination of all of those things.
Now, however, the ground does a really awful job of opening beneath her feet, and she gets the horrifying feeling of missing a stair.
“What?” she manages, and her voice is small and fragile.
Duncan is frowning, staring at something in the vicinity of her navel.
“I said, I think we should break up.”
It’s really no better to hear it a second time. She feels like she drops an extra six inches into the dirt.
“But – why?”
He squeezes her hands, and Veronica remembers to take a big, giant, shaky breath.
An awful, horrendous, horrifying thought occurs to her.
“Wait, is this about la—“
“It’s not about…” he cuts her off, and then glances at her quickly, “that.”
She exhales, feeling the belated sting of tears. Her skin is going hot and cold. Oh god. Oh god this is happening.
“Duncan I don’t understa—“
“It’s just,” he says, and he drops her hands to look away. “It’s just that I’m going to be gone all summer, Veronica, and, well, after that it’s senior year, and then college, and, well, honestly, I just think that it’s a lot to ask of us, okay? Just a lot to ask, when we’re about to go start our lives.”
“But, Duncan,” she hears herself say, and she already knows she will hate herself for this because it feels far too close to groveling, “Duncan, I can make the time, I can probably afford a fli—“
“Look, I’ve thought about it a lot,” he insists, turning back towards her. He’s a bit taller than her (fuck, everyone is), and he’s standing between her and the sun, and she has to squint to make out his features. “And – this is the right decision. I’m sure if you think about it, after I’m gone, you’ll realize the same.”
The burn of unshed tears is really pressing upon her now. Oh god – she’s pathetic, she thinks, except it’s with this panicky, oh my god, oh no, oh no, oh no mantra looping through her insides –
He takes her hands again, but Veronica barely feels his touch in her clammy hands, because she’s submitting all her energy to not losing it (don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry) in front of him.
“Seriously,” he says, and he leans forward, pressing cold, dry lips to her forehead. The tears she doesn’t want to cry spill over on one side, dripping down her cheek. “This is the right decision. Good bye, Veronica.”
Good bye, Veronica.
The reality of the moment comes crashing down, and Veronica’s hands drop to her sides like dead weights as Duncan steps away, steps around her, and begins his walk back to the house. Veronica can’t move. She can’t move, and she needs to, because her car is back at the Kanes’ house, and she needs to move it out of the way so that their cars can get out of their driveway and they can catch their private jet to Tampa. To Tampa, for crying out loud –
Veronica scrubs at her eyes, furiously willing the tears to stop. Her wet mouth drops open as she looks into the sky, hoping the sun will dry out her tear ducts. Not here, she begs herself. Not now.
Oh my god it’s really over.
She hugs herself in the sun, feeling suddenly cold. Clenching her jaw together, she inahles through her teeth, wincing as she listens for Duncan, turning halfway to ensure he’s gone. Her face crumples again as she follows his path back to her car. No, she reasons, desperately, foolishly, this can’t be it. This can’t really be it. Duncan will change his mind when he’s on the plane. He’s going to call her tonight, because this is just the separation anxiety talking. They’re Duncan and Veronica. They’ve been dating for most of the last year…more or less…well, sort of off and on, really, but definitely they were more on than off, and this was just going to be another one of those off periods, right? Right?
Veronica comes to a stop right outside the Kanes’ driveway gates. Oh god. Her keys. Her bag – they’re inside. Except…
This is surely a new low.
One of the Kanes’ housekeepers is making her way down the driveway, looking polite while she carries Veronica’s shoulder bag. Veronica can manage all of two steps to meet her.
“I’m so sorry,” the housekeeper whispers, offering a tight smile before hurrying back inside.
Veronica is going to cry again. Seriously, she can feel it, and it’s only with a surge of icy hot rage that she grasps her bag to her body and lurches for her piece of shit car.
It’s already unlocked because hello who would steal this car here, and she is sure she leaves a skid mark on the pavement she reverses so quickly.
Tears blur her vision before she’s down the massive hill his house is on.
She knows what this is about, actually.
Oh god. She’s known since she was sitting next to him eating toast, while he pushed scrambled eggs around with his fork.
It was her stupid idea.
Her stupid idea.
He hadn’t even wanted to – oh god he hadn’t even wanted to – memories are spilling through her mind, one after another, and she wants to scream.
Lighting a bunch of stupid candles in his room while he finished packing in his walk-in closet.
Draping herself over his duvet, rearranging her limbs, double checking her cleavage in the stupid bra she’d spent so much money on. It didn’t fit her well at all, but it was 50% off when she bought it, and, well, it was lingerie wasn’t it??
Seeing the look of shock on his face when he walked back into his room.
The awkward conversation that followed (are you sure? We don’t have to – no we really don’t have to) she’d had to convince him, and then it had been…it had been…
Veronica really had nothing to compare it to besides, well, movies and porn.
And she knew sex wasn’t supposed to have so much accidental hair pulling.
That things weren’t supposed to be so…dry.
And painful.
And…
Tears sweep over her face, fresh hot peals of it as she opens her mouth at a stoplight and sobs.
I wanted to finish this by the end of LoVecember yesterday and the stars just did not align. So this will be my submission this December 2022 XD
It is rated very T/M, and picks up where Tis the Season leaves off.
To Be Jolly
fandom: Veronica Mars
He’s kissing her. Under the mistletoe, like some freaking Hallmark movie he’s kissing her, and brightness fills him from his toes to his nose as she kisses him right back.
His arms snake around her back, pulling her closer, willing her not to pull away, begging her with his mouth not to stop.
She yanks back.
“What’s your favorite color,” she blurts, and the non sequitur might throw him except he’d tell her anything she asked of him right now.
“Green,” he pants, and dives back in, gripping his fingers in her shirt before he pulls back himself. “You?”
“Blue,” she answers, dragging him back, and her tongue touches his lips. Logan groans. She pries her lips away.
“Any brothers or sisters?”
Logan’s brain is not something he can control. “Sister,” he manages to grunt. “Re…rehab.” He threads his hands into Veronica’s hair, learning the shape of her skull, and he goes totally molten when she groans against his mouth. “You?” he’s not sure he says aloud.
“No,” she breathes, and then she pulls back. “Wait. Yes. Half…half…” she’s staring at his mouth, her own hanging open. “Half brother,” she says, and then she practically leaps on him, enough so that he instinctively picks her up, and she throws her legs around his waist and shit he’s going to lose it –
“Parents?” he asks, wincing a little, because it’s pretty inappropriate how much he wants to see her naked.
“Yeah,” she says, his lower lip between her teeth, and she’s hissing in this way that is destroying him. “Dad good, mom gone. Dad…” she kisses him more, kisses him thoroughly, and she’s pressing against him in every way that matters. “Dad was here tonight,” she finally whispers, and he finally lets her slide down him to the floor.
“You,” she asks, breathless, and he’s wondering if she’d prefer the couch or the carpet.
“Don’t go there,” he grins, mildly self-deprecating, and he can just see in her eyes that…she gets it. And fuck he’s so screwed.
She puts her hands on his chest, and pushes.
The force of the blow makes his feet stagger on instinct, but his legs hit the couch, and the awareness hits him right as his ass bounces on the couch cushions. He looks up at her with his mouth hanging wide open.
“What car do you drive,” she asks, looking at him in this way that he begs to God he’s not misinterpreting.
“I don’t even fucking know,” he answers, because his mind is a complete puddle, and Veronica grins like the sun.
I think it's going to be called The Star System? Maybe? I don't even know.
***
***
“Attention attention, there is a…physics emergency…in the uh…in the uh…” Veronica wasn’t sure how to finish it, and Logan was laughing as silently as he was able, so no help to her. “In the breaker bottle.”
“In the breaker bottle,” Logan repeated.
She knew her eyes were glowing as she smiled, “What’s it called?”
“The beaker,” he said, and he laughed again.
Veronica slammed the button. “The beaker, apparently. Physics emergency to the beaker. Just the one. Emergency that is. We have a lot of beakers. They’re cheap.”
Ugh this chapter, this fic that I didn’t need to start is werkin me.
It had been a long night.
The misty rain hadn’t helped, in the sense that it was hard to keep her footing on sleek roof tiles when they were wet. But it wasn’t her first time crawling and leaping from roof to roof, and she knew each one well. Well enough to keep an eye on her quarry, an eye on the neighboring rooftops, and an eye on where her feet should go.
She’d only given up when Felix had gone into Jackie’s brothel and not come out; he must’ve paid for the night. When the sky started to lighten (he had really paid for the night), she’d slunk back to her apartment, barely making time to towel off her hair, pull on warm socks and warmer nightclothes, and crawl between blissfully clean, soft sheets.
And she’d had the most pleasant half hour of sleep before someone had come knocking.
Knocking would have been preferred actually, except her father had unfortunately been in possession of a key. She’d woken at the first click in the lock, eyes snapping open even as sleep begged to drag her back under. Only his muffled voice had her groaning, picking up the spare pillow and shoving it over her head.
He sang a small child’s wake up song as he crept through the door of her bedroom, and she considered whether he would stop should he find a dagger thrown in the vicinity of his head. When he didn’t stop singing, his voice coming closer, she pulled the dagger from under her pillow and waved it in the air as warning.
“Good morning sunshine.”
Veronica dropped her hand, letting the dagger clatter to her nightstand. Her ears picked up the sounds of Deputy Sacks in the next room, which meant her dad had brought back up? Ugh. It was too early for this.
“Don’t we have a rule about early morning visits?” Veronica said, speaking through pillow.
“I’m sorry what?”
“I said,” she turned her head and spoke into the sandwich of air. “We have a rule against early morning visits.”
Her dad chuckled. “Ah. Right. I promise - this time it’s worth it.”
She pulled up the top pillow, squinting at him.
“You got me a unicorn?” she drawled, and her dad grinned, pulling up a seat.
