Fanfic: Where's Waldo?
Title: Where’s Waldo?
Rating: R, for language and sexual references.
Fandom: Veronica Mars.
Synopsis: Written for buffyx's Veronica Mars Unconventional Pairings Ficathon, for hobviously, who wanted tentative friendship, humour, and making fun of Veronica. Set after the end of season two, this has, by its very nature, a hell of a lot of spoilers.
***
Mac’s locked in her bedroom -- has been locked in her bedroom for three days now, all trauma and tears and consumption of the West Coast supply of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream -- and Veronica, of course, is locked in there with her, giving in to the seemingly incurable female need to comfort the wounded. Well, unless they did the wounding. That, Logan seems to remember, usually leads to gloating, not comfort.
Or maybe that was just a Lilly thing.
Lilly had been the very prettiest of pretty poison apples, like the sort of thing your parents check your trick-or-treat bag for on Halloween -- the sort of thing they’re supposed to take away from you if they find it. And sure enough, Aaron Echolls wanted the ‘parent of the year’ award, because when he realized just how poisonous that apple was, he’d taken it away. Thanks, Dad.
Somehow, thinking ill of the dead doesn’t seem like a crime where Aaron Echolls is concerned. If anything, it seems entirely appropriate, because Aaron stood up in front of God and the world and everybody, and made a liar out of Lilly when she was already gone and buried, all her poison leeched away, all her prettiness nothing more than fodder for the worms.
Hannah had been just as pretty, but without a single drop of poison; biting into her was just eating an apple, and they’d called it ‘the forbidden fruit’ for a reason, because Hannah was forbidden, and damn, but she was sweet. Too sweet, if he was being totally honest with himself (and there was no reason not to be honest with himself, because dude, it wasn’t like anyone was listening). He’d cared about her, could even have fallen for her, because she was harmless, and because she was forbidden, but once that aura of untouchablity faded, he’d have lost interest, he’d have drifted away, unable to keep caring just because she looked a little bit like Veronica and kissed a little bit like something he couldn’t have. Losing her was for the best, even if he couldn’t really see that at the time.
Veronica, on the other hand...if Lilly was a poisoned apple, and Hannah was the forbidden one, Veronica’s a caramel apple from a traveling carnival, sweet and sharp and sour and sticky, and bad for your teeth and addictive as hell, so that you wind up going back for more, even after you’ve been on the Tilt-A-Whirl six times and your stomach is still technically there, looping around and around, forever. Veronica was the guilty pleasure you couldn’t give up, with a center that was somehow technically good for you.
He’s fairly certain Lilly would approve.
He’s fairly certain that he finally doesn’t care.
But Veronica is still locked in Mac’s room, doing whatever it is that girls do when they’re trying to talk each other through stupid traumas (and that’s where his mind helpfully supplies an image of the two of them dumping all that ice cream into a wading pool and dairy-based-mud wrestling as a therapeutic exercise to ease Mac’s pain, and he normally doesn’t find her all that attractive, but he heard once that everything is better with chocolate, and he’s willing to believe it), and he’s bored shitless, and however good or bad or fucking unbelievable this last year may have been, it’s left him with a definite dearth of people he can use to amuse himself. Hannah? Gone. Dick? Partying like his greatest goal in life is to die like a bad seventies rock star. Duncan? The phrase ‘who the fuck knows’ springs readily to mind. Cassidy? A mass murderer, and also, sort of down with a bad case of being dead.
Logan Echolls is young, rich, totally free of parental responsibility, finally dating the hottest, craziest girl he knows when neither one of them is under suspicion for murder, and bored out of his goddamn mind.
This sucks.
This sucks like a sorority girl in Tijuana, and it’s the reason he’s been reduced to driving up and down Neptune’s main drag, trying to look like he’s being cool, he’s been carefree, he’s being anything but what he is, which is ready to start throwing eggs at random passersby, just to see something happen. Has Neptune always been this dead, or have the last three years, with their steady string of deaths and deceits and femme fatales with their legs that go all the way up to thank you Jesus, totally fucked up his idea of ‘normal’?
He’s dating Veronica Mars, the girl whose idea of a hot night out frequently involves a box of donuts, a parked car, and a high-end digital camera, aimed at the door of a motel room where somebody that isn’t him is getting what’s probably going to turn out to be the most expensive blowjob of his life.
Yeah, his idea of normal is pretty much fucked.
That -- and the boredom, can’t forget the boredom -- is probably why, when he sees Wallace Fennel walking down the sidewalk, basketball tucked under his arm, clearly car-free and just as clearly planning to walk all the way home, he pulls up alongside the trudging basketball player, cranks down the window, says, “Get in.”
Wallace eyes him like he’s something that might have escaped from the local zoo. Attractive from a distance, you’d pay money to see it, but there’s a good chance that it might take your arm off if you get too close. “Is this a kidnapping? Because -- just a pointer here -- usually, those work better when they don’t start on a major thoroughfare, in broad daylight, in a really, really yellow car.”
“No, jackass, it’s a ride,” Logan says. “Behold, the wonders of the air conditioned vehicle.”
Now Wallace is eyeing him like he’s lost his mind. “You want to give me a ride?” Logan nods. “Did I miss something? Did I slip into a parallel dimension somehow? Because I am not down with growing a goatee and serving the forces of evil.”
“So you don’t want a ride.”
“I didn’t say that.” Wallace opens the door and climbs into the passenger seat, dropping his basketball into the foot well, where it bounces, twice, but somehow avoids rebounding into Logan’s side of the car, where it might interfere with the driving. Logan rolls the windows back up with the push of a button, and pulls away from the curb.
They drive for a while in silence. Logan isn’t bored anymore, which is, sadly, an improvement; sure, he’s uncomfortable and trapped in a car with someone he barely knows, but who matters enough to Veronica that he can’t just say ‘sorry, changed my mind, get out’ and dump the guy, but he isn’t bored, and right now, that’s what matters.
It’s Wallace who breaks the silence first, Wallace who, perhaps, doesn’t have quite the depth of ‘anything but boring’ that Logan has managed to acquire. “This is a surprise.”
“Mm?”
“You, giving me a ride. It’s not a bad surprise. But it’s a surprise. Sort of like asking for a bike for Christmas and getting a pony instead.”
Logan glances away from the road, eyebrows raised in a gesture that Wallace, after watching him with Veronica more times than he really wants to count, knows signals his amusement. “I’m your Christmas pony?”
“I think I’ll call you ‘Flicka’.”
Logan snorts. “Just don’t get any funny ideas about horseyback rides over there, partner.”
Wallace grins. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.” Pausing, he asks, “What’re you doing out here? It’s a beautiful day. I’d figure you and our Miss Mars would be out somewhere, getting your summertime groove on.”
“Mac had another ‘setback’ in the night, according to her mother,” says Logan, framing the word ‘setback’ with air-quotes. “Veronica bought out the 7-11’s supply of ice cream and had me drop her off about two hours ago. We’re supposed to go out for dinner, but the Magic Eight-Ball of the summer so far says that the outlook is not good.”
“Mac’s been having a hard time of it. And she hasn’t got that many friends.”
Logan, who has found himself in the odd position of ‘almost as socially outcast as the computer nerd, thanks to a dead girlfriend and a runaway best friend and a murdering father and, oh, yeah, a murder trial of his very own’, doesn’t say anything.
“I’m glad she’s got Veronica. Even if it’s made her harder to find than Waldo.”
“Back in eighth grade, Lilly got so sick of those stupid books -- Duncan had the complete set, Waldo getting lost in great works of art, and different countries, and time, all that fun shit -- that she took a pair of scissors, cut out all the damn Waldos, and really hid them.” Logan grins a little, shaking his head. “I found a Waldo in my sock drawer just last year. He was way in the back, stuck in the corner.”
“Man, I bet that drove Veronica crazy,” Wallace says, and chuckles.
“She found every Waldo that was actually in the Kane house in like, three days, and taped them all back into the book. But it was never the same for Duncan after that. The tape pretty much told you where the Waldos were.”
“Sometimes our girl can be just a liiiiittle OCD.”
“And sometimes, the ocean can be just a little wet and salty.”
Wallace snorts. Logan does the same, and then they’re laughing, both of them laughing like fiends as they drive down the street towards Wallace’s house, and it’s nothing like having Duncan back, but Logan doesn’t give a damn, because it’s still a shared moment, a shared joke, a little piece of summer that feels halfway normal, and that? That feels damn good.
When the laughter dies, Logan glances to Wallace, and says, almost casually, “I’m starving.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“I’m thinking burgers, fries, and milkshakes containing more dairy fat than the state of Wisconsin.”
Wallace glances towards him, surprised, before nodding, slowly. “That sounds good,” he says. “We could do that.” Then he grins. “Giddyup.”
Laughing again, Logan turns the car around.
Rating: R, for language and sexual references.
Fandom: Veronica Mars.
Synopsis: Written for buffyx's Veronica Mars Unconventional Pairings Ficathon, for hobviously, who wanted tentative friendship, humour, and making fun of Veronica. Set after the end of season two, this has, by its very nature, a hell of a lot of spoilers.
***
Mac’s locked in her bedroom -- has been locked in her bedroom for three days now, all trauma and tears and consumption of the West Coast supply of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream -- and Veronica, of course, is locked in there with her, giving in to the seemingly incurable female need to comfort the wounded. Well, unless they did the wounding. That, Logan seems to remember, usually leads to gloating, not comfort.
Or maybe that was just a Lilly thing.
Lilly had been the very prettiest of pretty poison apples, like the sort of thing your parents check your trick-or-treat bag for on Halloween -- the sort of thing they’re supposed to take away from you if they find it. And sure enough, Aaron Echolls wanted the ‘parent of the year’ award, because when he realized just how poisonous that apple was, he’d taken it away. Thanks, Dad.
Somehow, thinking ill of the dead doesn’t seem like a crime where Aaron Echolls is concerned. If anything, it seems entirely appropriate, because Aaron stood up in front of God and the world and everybody, and made a liar out of Lilly when she was already gone and buried, all her poison leeched away, all her prettiness nothing more than fodder for the worms.
Hannah had been just as pretty, but without a single drop of poison; biting into her was just eating an apple, and they’d called it ‘the forbidden fruit’ for a reason, because Hannah was forbidden, and damn, but she was sweet. Too sweet, if he was being totally honest with himself (and there was no reason not to be honest with himself, because dude, it wasn’t like anyone was listening). He’d cared about her, could even have fallen for her, because she was harmless, and because she was forbidden, but once that aura of untouchablity faded, he’d have lost interest, he’d have drifted away, unable to keep caring just because she looked a little bit like Veronica and kissed a little bit like something he couldn’t have. Losing her was for the best, even if he couldn’t really see that at the time.
Veronica, on the other hand...if Lilly was a poisoned apple, and Hannah was the forbidden one, Veronica’s a caramel apple from a traveling carnival, sweet and sharp and sour and sticky, and bad for your teeth and addictive as hell, so that you wind up going back for more, even after you’ve been on the Tilt-A-Whirl six times and your stomach is still technically there, looping around and around, forever. Veronica was the guilty pleasure you couldn’t give up, with a center that was somehow technically good for you.
He’s fairly certain Lilly would approve.
He’s fairly certain that he finally doesn’t care.
But Veronica is still locked in Mac’s room, doing whatever it is that girls do when they’re trying to talk each other through stupid traumas (and that’s where his mind helpfully supplies an image of the two of them dumping all that ice cream into a wading pool and dairy-based-mud wrestling as a therapeutic exercise to ease Mac’s pain, and he normally doesn’t find her all that attractive, but he heard once that everything is better with chocolate, and he’s willing to believe it), and he’s bored shitless, and however good or bad or fucking unbelievable this last year may have been, it’s left him with a definite dearth of people he can use to amuse himself. Hannah? Gone. Dick? Partying like his greatest goal in life is to die like a bad seventies rock star. Duncan? The phrase ‘who the fuck knows’ springs readily to mind. Cassidy? A mass murderer, and also, sort of down with a bad case of being dead.
Logan Echolls is young, rich, totally free of parental responsibility, finally dating the hottest, craziest girl he knows when neither one of them is under suspicion for murder, and bored out of his goddamn mind.
This sucks.
This sucks like a sorority girl in Tijuana, and it’s the reason he’s been reduced to driving up and down Neptune’s main drag, trying to look like he’s being cool, he’s been carefree, he’s being anything but what he is, which is ready to start throwing eggs at random passersby, just to see something happen. Has Neptune always been this dead, or have the last three years, with their steady string of deaths and deceits and femme fatales with their legs that go all the way up to thank you Jesus, totally fucked up his idea of ‘normal’?
He’s dating Veronica Mars, the girl whose idea of a hot night out frequently involves a box of donuts, a parked car, and a high-end digital camera, aimed at the door of a motel room where somebody that isn’t him is getting what’s probably going to turn out to be the most expensive blowjob of his life.
Yeah, his idea of normal is pretty much fucked.
That -- and the boredom, can’t forget the boredom -- is probably why, when he sees Wallace Fennel walking down the sidewalk, basketball tucked under his arm, clearly car-free and just as clearly planning to walk all the way home, he pulls up alongside the trudging basketball player, cranks down the window, says, “Get in.”
Wallace eyes him like he’s something that might have escaped from the local zoo. Attractive from a distance, you’d pay money to see it, but there’s a good chance that it might take your arm off if you get too close. “Is this a kidnapping? Because -- just a pointer here -- usually, those work better when they don’t start on a major thoroughfare, in broad daylight, in a really, really yellow car.”
“No, jackass, it’s a ride,” Logan says. “Behold, the wonders of the air conditioned vehicle.”
Now Wallace is eyeing him like he’s lost his mind. “You want to give me a ride?” Logan nods. “Did I miss something? Did I slip into a parallel dimension somehow? Because I am not down with growing a goatee and serving the forces of evil.”
“So you don’t want a ride.”
“I didn’t say that.” Wallace opens the door and climbs into the passenger seat, dropping his basketball into the foot well, where it bounces, twice, but somehow avoids rebounding into Logan’s side of the car, where it might interfere with the driving. Logan rolls the windows back up with the push of a button, and pulls away from the curb.
They drive for a while in silence. Logan isn’t bored anymore, which is, sadly, an improvement; sure, he’s uncomfortable and trapped in a car with someone he barely knows, but who matters enough to Veronica that he can’t just say ‘sorry, changed my mind, get out’ and dump the guy, but he isn’t bored, and right now, that’s what matters.
It’s Wallace who breaks the silence first, Wallace who, perhaps, doesn’t have quite the depth of ‘anything but boring’ that Logan has managed to acquire. “This is a surprise.”
“Mm?”
“You, giving me a ride. It’s not a bad surprise. But it’s a surprise. Sort of like asking for a bike for Christmas and getting a pony instead.”
Logan glances away from the road, eyebrows raised in a gesture that Wallace, after watching him with Veronica more times than he really wants to count, knows signals his amusement. “I’m your Christmas pony?”
“I think I’ll call you ‘Flicka’.”
Logan snorts. “Just don’t get any funny ideas about horseyback rides over there, partner.”
Wallace grins. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.” Pausing, he asks, “What’re you doing out here? It’s a beautiful day. I’d figure you and our Miss Mars would be out somewhere, getting your summertime groove on.”
“Mac had another ‘setback’ in the night, according to her mother,” says Logan, framing the word ‘setback’ with air-quotes. “Veronica bought out the 7-11’s supply of ice cream and had me drop her off about two hours ago. We’re supposed to go out for dinner, but the Magic Eight-Ball of the summer so far says that the outlook is not good.”
“Mac’s been having a hard time of it. And she hasn’t got that many friends.”
Logan, who has found himself in the odd position of ‘almost as socially outcast as the computer nerd, thanks to a dead girlfriend and a runaway best friend and a murdering father and, oh, yeah, a murder trial of his very own’, doesn’t say anything.
“I’m glad she’s got Veronica. Even if it’s made her harder to find than Waldo.”
“Back in eighth grade, Lilly got so sick of those stupid books -- Duncan had the complete set, Waldo getting lost in great works of art, and different countries, and time, all that fun shit -- that she took a pair of scissors, cut out all the damn Waldos, and really hid them.” Logan grins a little, shaking his head. “I found a Waldo in my sock drawer just last year. He was way in the back, stuck in the corner.”
“Man, I bet that drove Veronica crazy,” Wallace says, and chuckles.
“She found every Waldo that was actually in the Kane house in like, three days, and taped them all back into the book. But it was never the same for Duncan after that. The tape pretty much told you where the Waldos were.”
“Sometimes our girl can be just a liiiiittle OCD.”
“And sometimes, the ocean can be just a little wet and salty.”
Wallace snorts. Logan does the same, and then they’re laughing, both of them laughing like fiends as they drive down the street towards Wallace’s house, and it’s nothing like having Duncan back, but Logan doesn’t give a damn, because it’s still a shared moment, a shared joke, a little piece of summer that feels halfway normal, and that? That feels damn good.
When the laughter dies, Logan glances to Wallace, and says, almost casually, “I’m starving.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“I’m thinking burgers, fries, and milkshakes containing more dairy fat than the state of Wisconsin.”
Wallace glances towards him, surprised, before nodding, slowly. “That sounds good,” he says. “We could do that.” Then he grins. “Giddyup.”
Laughing again, Logan turns the car around.