I can’t hear Gravity by Sara Bareilles without immediately saying “FUCK YOU, SARA BAREILLES!” -- it is a quote from @mysilverylining‘s brilliant Logan x Veronica fic Neptune and one of the first times I remember laughing out loud while reading a fic.
Our local carnival is this weekend. The Olde Canal Days Festival. I tried deep fried Oreos last night, and again tonight. All I could think of was Neptune's Mayor Echolls feeding them to Veronica with her eyes covered. <shiver> It's quite possible I blushed while eating them. Neptune by @mysilverylining
@mysilverylining Dude I hear ya. You & I are the George R. R. Martin's of fanfic ;) BUT:
Do you write a little bit all of the time or in waves? I'll go months without even looking at it and then write 20 pages in a weekend. Good luck and can't wait to read you!
Okay, so @mysilverylining gave me the option of three bits of prompt dialogue:
3. “I don’t want your pity, I want your absence.”
34. “It’s not like I missed you or anything.”
41. “What are you doing in my house?”
I used them all, just because.
This takes place in The Pliant Web AU universe (aka post-WWII Tripoli spies/detective intrigues aka the story I will never stop researching). Read this very short story for some context, then think ten or so chapters ahead. I never promised you a rose garden.
Thank you, M. Hope you like it.
Extra special thank you to @cheshirecatstrut for making sure the grammar wasn’t completely appalling.
from this prompt meme. I have one more in the queue.
*
After the sandstorm, he walks down via Leopardi, noting the stark difference. The lack of birdsong, or children, playing with hoops and sticks. The green trim of shuttered windows, now lined with fine stripes of sand. His gums gone dry like sickness, teeth biting down into the hard crunch of those grains. The wind blows soft and warm with the stuff still, getting into his eyeballs and his ears and the crease of his cane-gripping knuckles.
There’s a little-known aftereffect to a sandstorm; heads become hives. It’s the noise. The swarming buzz of it doesn’t go away. One walks in it, withstands, until, days later, it finally fades to quiet.
The cane gets flung to the floor as soon as he’s in the house. It echoes when it lands and for a long, slow moment he just looks at it. His cover, his trap.
Dimly, he hears footsteps on the second floor—light and sure.
“Jacqueline?” There is no response.
(continued after the cut)
Logan runs upstairs, taking them two at a time and slides down the tiled hallway to his suite of rooms. The door is open; his bedroom, ransacked; drawers open and clothes strewn about. He eyes the room slowly, picking up a knocked-over hookah, a set of player cards, some neckties, listening, before opening the door to his corner wardrobe with a flick of his fingers, pushing back his suits with a clatter of hangers and exposing skinny legs in cuffed tweed, ankles, a pair of wingtips. Size 35, if he’s a day. The thief looks up, fake mustache askew, blonde hair peeking out from a homburg, and he sighs.
“What are you doing in my house?”
He doesn’t help her out, he moves away and waits. While Logan wants to shame her, somehow he knows that she won’t be shamed, so he turns his back, continues picking up his things. As he cleans, he realizes that there’s an order to the disorder, it’s messy in a just-so way. Someone picked up his desk drawer, emptied it, but didn’t bother sifting through. It’s all for show. Logan laughs and dares to look back, catching her biting her lip and inhaling sharply, seemingly uncertain for once.
“This isn’t your house, it’s Dickie’s.” She says the name as if it isn’t a name at all but an insect she’d step on if she could.
The wardrobe creaks and Veronica crosses in front of him to the window. She picks up a picture frame.
“And it’s not a house at all, it’s a former-school-passing-itself-off-as-a-house, so-”
Logan bangs a water glass on the table, not hard enough to break, but hard enough to punctuate—bring a stop to her sentence. A full stop. He’s got so much sand in his hair, all he wants to do is sit in some water. The sea would do. If he didn’t have this part to play, he’d be there right now; bobbing up and down in the waves. Sandier than before, of course. But the lie would be meaningful. It would have beauty.
“Look, I don’t care. You don’t have to finish putting anything back. Just go out the same way you came. The sands are done with us, you’ll be fine.”
“I know I’ll be fine. It’s you who doesn’t seem fine.”
He heads down to the kitchen, away from her curious brand of sympathy meets folded-arms smugness, and turns on Dickie’s wireless. Artie Shaw is in the middle of a song he can’t remember the name to but knows from before the war. He’d danced to it once at some party in London, with a sweet nurse named Parker who’d probably made some man a lovely wife.
The kitchen remains clean and undisturbed. He opens the cooling cabinet and inside, there’s a gaily painted bowl that doesn’t belong to them covered by a cloth. He lifts it, a domed-shaped bread surrounded by tomato puree with potatoes. Bazin. It will do. He sets down a dinner plate, utensils, and a water glass, fills it slowly with red wine.
“I’m sorry about Richard’s brother.”
She’s removed her little mustache. The area above her lip is slightly irritated from the whatever it was that she’d used to attach it there. Veronica clutches the hat to her chest, almost apologetically; small in her men’s striped shirt and vest, a large watch with a tan leather wristband swallowing up her wrist. He has never seen her this soft. She blinks those blonde lashes and presses her lips together.
“I heard from Miss MacKenzie. Sounds… ghastly.” Veronica approaches the table, stopping across from him. “No. That’s…that’s not the right word. Too civilized. Which is not what that was. Horrible… somehow doesn’t seem like enough.”
Logan stands and gets the bottle of wine from the counter. He pours another glass and gives it to her.
“You must be-”
The chair scrapes against the slate floor as she moves it to sit, hanging her hat on the back corner of the chair. Suddenly not hungry, Logan pushes the empty plate and fork towards her, followed by the Bazin. The wine, he holds on to. It keeps his mouth occupied while she talks and talks about the dirty business of Cassidy’s death. News travels quickly around here.
“I met him once. At a party when we first arrived. I was looking for a powder room but… it wasn’t one. It was a bedroom, he was sitting there looking at the wall.”
Logan coughs and sips more of the wine. It’s sour, gone off. “That sounds like Cush.”
“Cush?” She raises an eyebrow.
His answer is a shrug. She doesn’t need to know.
Veronica watches him, her stare is too bold, and he’s got no room in him for games or ripostes. There’s nothing inside. He could say something about her little get-up, note that he hasn’t seen her in weeks, point out that her clothes have no sand in them at all. She looks as clean and sand-free as the morning, which means she has been there for hours. Waiting for him probably.
She shifts, crosses her arms, and he unfolds in response. Tries to be bare, let her read him as easily as he can read her right now. Impatient but worried and loving him somehow. So much that she allowed herself be caught. Her gaze goes from sharp to unfocused and her jaw drops slightly. She loves him. He thinks she does, although she’s never said it. Perhaps, like him, she only thinks it and saying it out loud would make it less true.
Logan taps the side of the plate and the contemplation stops entirely. The power of the dinner bell. She digs into the Bazin, stuffing her mouth and chewing ferociously and efficiently. It reminds him of a prairie dog and it’s strangely soothing. Clarinet, red wine and the sight of her. He could fall asleep watching it. She wipes what’s left of her plate with her index and middle fingers and has the decency to look sheepish when their eyes meet.
“Do you want to talk, about what happened?” she says, wiping sauce off her face with a palm. “You can and you should, no one should have to watch their friend di—”
“Veronica. I don’t want your pity, I want your absence.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He kicks back his chair and stands, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the tails out of the waistband.
“Logan, wait—”
His belt slides out of his pant’s loops and he curls it around his right hand. Her eyelashes flutter rapidly for a moment. It reminds him of a rolodex; that’s probably how she thinks—fast flipping notecards full of information, ready to accessed at any given time. Right now, she’s taking him in, figuring out his mental state. As the observer, she’s always got the upper hand, the distance. Bullshit. He wasn’t going to allow it.
Logan forces himself to smile, easy and wide. “I get the costume. You wanted to be inconspicuous, pay a visit without the scandal.”
“Give the boy a medal.”
Heh.
The glint of a necklace on her chest catches his eye. He reaches for chain and, in rubbing the delicate filigree between his fingers, pulls her closer. “But what I don’t understand is… why did you keep it on, Miss Mars? Why not take it all off, get in my bed and wait for me that way? Isn’t that what you really want?”
Her eyes harden but she can’t quite meet his gaze. She looks at his mouth. He makes sure to enunciate.
“Remove the jacket, the shirt, the vest, the socks, the shoes. Whatever frilly underthings you have on. Don’t take off the necklace, though. I think I’d like to see it dangling over my face.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
It’s not insulting, her remark. It’s not about him at all. He drops her necklace, steps back, rubs his forehead, “It isn’t. It doesn’t have to be. I would never…”
Wrong tactic. The goal is not to encourage, after all. He points to the door.
“Nevermind. Scamper off into the night, will ya? Run off to your little band of helpers.”
“I’m not leaving.” Veronica crosses her arms.
Logan opens his mouth in a weary o, faux-aghast. “Oh, right. You can’t go until you get what you came for. So what did you come for? What’s up in my bedchamber that’s so important? What is it,” he says, his voice rising in pitch. “if not an excuse? Be honest with me. Just. Once.”
Veronica blinks, once, twice, three times.
“That’s what I thought.”
The belt falls to the floor, and childishly, he kicks it to the side. The shirt comes off too.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go run a bath. Eat whatever’s left, be my guest, but then leave please. Don’t ask me to tell you what it’s like to watch someone you’ve known for half your life get hanged for being a traitor. How fast it is. There and gone. All that sand filling up the sky, erasing everything.”
Of course he realizes, big, dumb idiot that he is, talking about it is what’s happening. That is her gift. Veronica Mars closes her cases—by getting people to talk. Logan has no such gift, his talents are buried. He holds out his hands, thinking please, please understand. His hands tremble and it is terrible, horrible, horrid, ghastly; all the words she said or tried to. Veronica takes his hands and pulls him to her. He resists halfheartedly and can’t bring himself to settle.
She’s easy enough to get around. All he has to do is lean down enough to feel her hesitation, then move her gently by the shoulders. Veronica gives and he gets past. The air feels cooler as soon as there’s some space between them.
*
A bathtub is a luxury around these parts and he’d never given this one much thought or use. The water is hot and the steam rises up into waves. He wiggles his fingers through it as if he’s waving. He’s much, much drunker than he thought. And judging by the tremor in his hands, much more of a mess. He might fall asleep and drown. Would that be such a terrible thing?
Veronica enters the bath, her hair still pinned up but now dressed in one of Jacqueline’s work shifts.
“I didn’t know we hired new help.”
“I told you I was staying,” she says and he doesn’t know what’s more touching, the defiant tilt of her chin or her studied look of indifference at his nakedness.
Logan can’t ever guess how she’ll react to anything. It’s that element of the unexpected that tethers him to her. He has to know what she’ll do next, how she’ll choose, where she’ll go. Even if he’s not an active player in her story, he has to know.
“It’s not like I missed you or anything.”
She says it like a punchline, but soft. A murmur. It’s his turn to be unsettled. He can’t hear the sand anymore, just the music from downstairs and the scrape of her fingernails on his scalp.
“What were you looking for, Veronica?”
Scratch, scratch.
“You.”
“Why?”
“I need you to fly me to Leptis Magna.”
Logan giggles, half-giddy, half-exhausted. “Are we talking dreams or reality here, sugarplum? How the hell are we going to get there?”
“I got you a plane.”
He dunks himself under and opens his eyes below the water. She floats above him, upside down, a mermaid in reverse. Breaking through the surface, he rises straight to a full stand, rubbing his hand on his head, brushing the water off. Veronica doesn’t blush, she smiles.
“What do you say, big boy?”
The question should have been different. Where are we going? Or, what are we doing there? Whose plane is it? How on earth did you get a plane, Veronica Mars? Instead he only asks one thing.
It’s been 18 hours and still, I don’t even know what to do/say/think. I have nothing. I’ve felt so empty since yesterday like removed from reality. Seeing your usernames/icons showing me your support, made me feel something at last. I finally cried, no even because of the show but because of you. I cannot express how much love I feel towards all of you right now, towards this fandom that deserved so much more, so much better. You all are incredibly dear to me, you have no idea. The reassurance of you all is the real gift from this show.
@theawkwardterrier @starlightafterastorm @whatwillthegirlbecome @scandalpantsstuff @fatherjerusalem @ghostcat3000 @absolutelyiris @lilamadison11 @gretchcutlers @emilykinncy @mysilverylining @heavenli24 @nevertothethird @susanmichelin and to everyone else that has been a part of my VM fandom life for the last 6 years. At the end of the day, you’re what really matters to me and the reason I keep coming back to this site. Thank you so much my loves.
