[fic] round-up
I got sucked into this ficathon and wrote all the things and have to stop for the night, but here's what happened so far. Sorry for the spam!
roswell | maria/michael(/liz) | 500 words | for tenshinrtaiga
like a mirror painted black
She can see the way she thinks about him; it doesn't look the way it's supposed to. Stars or something that rings like bullshit and smells like home. It's not a light that suddenly brightens behind her pupils, making that dark warm chocolate something living when there's nothing left worth living for. It's not a smile at the corner of her lips that pull because something hard has been there and now they bend in a different way than before.
It isn't hope.
Hope is for dreamers, not for lovers.
(Oh you thought they were the same?
Wrong fucking fairy tale.)
She's seen all those things on her face before.
She's been looking at that face as long as she's known her own. It is dark where she is fair, it is soft where she is hard, it is science where she is poetry.
(Or some bullshit like that.)
She's been in love before and she's seen that look before.
She can see the way she thinks about him; it doesn't look the way it's supposed to. It isn't a surprise lurking around the corner that maybe delights and maybe annoys. It isn't an embarrassment, it never makes her blush with shame. It never hides, it never lurks in the corner like a secret.
It should.
She thinks about him and it doesn't look the way it's supposed to.
It looks like grim determination.
Like a soldier getting ready for war.
Like a knight about to face a dragon.
Like a pirate facing down a goddamn armada.
It looks like a fight she's determined to survive.
She starts to examine her own face in the mirror. The soft, pouting lips and silky eyelashes that somehow make up a person with expressions and loves lost. She thinks about him and she watches her face in the mirror, trying to see what they see, when they look at her - the poet falling upon the sword of love they've already dug out of her broken body and armed themselves with to destroy something else. She watches her eyes and tries to find the thing that gives her away.
She thinks of her thinking of him.
And there's a dragon lurking behind her baby blues.
She leaves a note behind that they never find and it says, It is hard to be in love with someone who is in love with someone else.
And what she meant was, She likes it when you nibble just behind her earlobe.
But don't bite too hard.
Izzie finds her in a smoky bar crooning something dark and Alanis-esque that will never be a radio hit. They take shots of cheap whiskey and don't talk about their lives or the people they've loved or the lives they didn't live because of a fucking planet worlds away.
And they never, ever talk about why she left.
(She figures it doesn't matter why she left anyway. Call it a career. Call it falling out of love if that helps you.
Never call it longing because she'll just laugh at you and fill up your glass on the house.)
vampire diaries | caroline/enzo | 500 words | for lynzie914
sorry not sorry
I'm sorry in advance.
She says with a smile and he knows that she's ninety percent bravado and ten percent lipgloss but he lets her kiss him because she wants him to and he knows she wants him to and that's enough.
I won't apologize.
She says and her shoes are in her hand standing in the doorway of his tiny apartment and her eyeliner is already smudged under her eyes which means he can't bring her to tears begging with his tongue because she's already there for the wrong reasons and it won't mean the same thing but he opens the door wider and doesn't stop her from walking in.
I shouldn't.
She says and she's playing more drunk than she is and it gives them both the cover she needs to linger into his outstretched arms when she pretends to stumble and he grabs her elbow because he wants to be that guy that takes her home and drapes the sheet over her and watches her sleep and makes omelettes in the morning but he's the guy that's going to kiss her when he shouldn't and that's what she wants so he does and she sighs shouldn't into his mouth but they both hear yes.
This means nothing.
She says with one eyebrow raised and her hand on her hip and he smiles with his lips like that's exactly what he wanted to and he doesn't take her hand and he doesn't shake beneath her fingers and he doesn't lean back his head and close his eyes while she rides him because that would be giving this moment away so instead she pretends not to notice that he watches her with wide open eyes the whole time and holds out his arms, waiting for her to fall.
Please.
She says and it's true and he takes it because she wants to be the one who gets up in the morning and leaves before the sunrise without leaving a piece of her heart on the bed behind her, so he plays rough with his own heart and likes to think that makes him a hero like in the poems.
But she's just a girl who is ninety percent bravado and ten percent lipgloss who never learned to fight dirty or guard her heart.
He doesn't see the broken pieces of her heart strewn about his sheets in the morning because he is too blinded by his own.
Just like a man.
To think they are the ones who know pain best.
But she's just a girl who never learns.
She doesn't notice the pieces of her heart strewn about his sheets in the morning.
She's too distracted by the echoes of his heart pretending to be wounds, laying like offerings around her body, pulling her in with their expectations and needs.
How just like a girl.
To not see her own pain for the bitter show of heartache a man will press upon her wounds and make them sting.
How like a girl to rise up from the ashes of her own heart and turn to protect another.
How like a man to think his heart is worth more than hers.
arrow | thea | 650 words | for lynzie914
i know you are but what am i?
Oliver, she finds, can be very clinical.
She is disturbed that she isn't at all disturbed by this.
The first time they fight - brother and sister - and she knows that it is him behind the mask, she laughs at him. She chides him and pokes at wounds she knows they share and it doesn't hurt her a bit. Afterwards, she drives him to his 'cave' and waves to Felicity before kicking her car into a gear she shouldn't use on a domestic street and visits a mall.
She spends too much money and really loves her new heels. She wears them to the club that night and dances and dances, stomping her feet into the ceiling of the space that her brother calls a sanctuary and kisses a stranger for the hell of it.
Thea Queen who isn't a Queen really but damned if she isn't a fucking queen knows that she probably should be the good guy. Fight the good fight. Should set aside quality time in her schedule to brood while looking down off of a rooftop while a voice-over plays havoc in her mind about how morally dubious her morally upright vendetta really is.
But she doesn't.
He manipulated you.
But somehow she feels like she's supposed to apologize. Be horrified. Seek retribution.
Seek redemption.
Somehow being told that she really didn't do a thing that she really did do sounds a lot more like: Atone.
And that ain't gonna fucking fly.
This isn't you.
He says.
On a rooftop.
Wearing a hood and carrying a bow and arrow.
And she'd laugh if it wasn't so fucking sad.
So what am I? she challenges before stepping out into thin air and plummeting (for just a moment) towards oblivion.
(The answer is: what I want you to be.
She just doesn't give him time to say it.)
She's at morning training with daddy dearest who is maybe a supervillain and maybe made her kill someone she truly, deeply loved, and maybe she should confront him or something but instead she focuses on her breathing, on the way her feet feel on the cold floor, on the breeze coming through the door down the hall, on the way that bruise Oliver left on her hip bone aches pleasantly when she leans in just the right way, because her body is knowable and hers when it is hers and maybe it isn't hers all the time, but it is right now and that's enough for today.
When has anything ever been really hers?
Her name - not her name.
Her father - not her father.
Her brother - not her brother.
Her life - not her life.
What is a body at the end of the day?
Am I really supposed to apologize for something my body did when nothing of mine has ever been mine?
That's what she should say.
Instead she says something that will hurt him more and hurt her less.
(Does she have any expose skin left to cut?
Is there anything of hers left to harm?)
Maybe I'm not the person you want me to be. It's not like you were ever the person that I needed you to be. She says on a rooftop at night right before she does the wrong thing she shouldn't do.
She watches his heart break a little and smiles.
Maybe she is the villain.
Isn't that how half-sisters trained by the enemy usually turn out?
Will he kill her, she wonders.
Was she the villain all along, she never says aloud.
(Does any of it any matter with him standing there so sure and so steadfast and still with his own name to match to his own body in a life that is his? Does any of it matter?)
Okay, so she chooses to play the bad guy.
Did she ever have any other choice?
Did she ever have any choice?
(Does it matter?)
lost girl | dyson/kenzi | 500 words | for thisisagift
just wait a little while longer
It stops being boring after a while, Valhalla. Lots of mead, so she really can't complain, lots of lots of guys that are mostly giants and think she is an epic joke for most of what she thinks is a year but could be just an hour.
Like it matters.
Vikings are fucking huge and she's just a little Russian girl with a chip on her shoulder and a heart large enough to take down hell. Which either makes her impressive or stupid or really fucking dangerous.
The good thing, she says to a thick beard with arms and legs, is that all the people I love are warriors. So they'll be here eventually. I just gotta wait.
Underneath that beard might be a man-shaped something who maybe looks down at her pityingly but she can't fucking see that high up so it doesn't end up mattering all that much.
There's a certain clarity to death. It comes right before boredom and right after disbelief. You can't have any without the other. (She meets some that think they are still alive. The mock battles are real and they die over and over and over again. She holds their hands on their cots in the dirty tents and promises things she can't give and it almost makes her feel better. And in the morning they get up and try again. She can't tell anymore who has it worse and who has it better. She kisses some, steals their dying breath from their lips and cries for them. Boys dead and forever dying, never alive and never living.) In clarity, she finds herself feeling peaceful. It lasts about ten seconds and then she picks a fight with one of the shield maidens and they have a good laugh about it later over a pint or five.
She's sure she could look down and check on everyone, but she doesn't because she isn't sure what she's looking for.
Anyway, if they did she'd tell them they were being creepy and to fuck off so for once she takes her own advice.
He reads all the lore.
He knows exactly what to do.
It takes longer than he'd like.
He has to throw some things away.
When he sits down in the stool next to her she cries for the first time since she died and it shocks her more than it shocks him. That's how she knows that it took him a lot longer to catch up than she's willing to know.
She doesn't say, It took you long enough.
She doesn't say, I missed you.
She never says, I waited.
He takes her hand in his and kisses her palm like the old fashioned geezer that he is and she says, The mead here is fantastic.
And he doesn't say, I'm sorry.
And he doesn't say, I searched.
And he doesn't say, I love you.
She pours him a drink and drapes her legs across his lap and he lifts his tankard and says, Cheers.
pretty little liars | spencer/mona | 300 words | for lynzie914
the scarecrow asked for a brain and so he got a broken heart
Spencer used to feel really sorry for the scarecrow - all he got was some useless brains and he didn't need them in the first place, he was always the smartest of the bunch.
She got used to asking for the same thing after a while. She understood it in the end, you ask for the thing you are good at.
Because something new just might break you.
(She never says, If Mona were here. Because that's Hanna's heartbreak and there's only one at a time around here.
They all have things they own.
They stake claim on them one by one.
Like how they all missed Ali, but it didn't matter because Emily's heart missed Ali.
So yeah... Hanna's heart misses Mona.
Which means Spencer's brain can't miss a fucking thing.
So she doesn't say, If Mona were here.
But her heart beats it in her chest just the same.)
Don't be greedy, Spencer, she tells herself as she dresses herself in black and looks at herself in the mirror and braces herself for Hanna's beautiful tears.
(The only one who has tears more beautiful than Hanna is Arya.
And only because they come tearing out of her like wreckage.)
Only when they were passing out gifts, she chose brain. Emily got courage and Hanna got heart and Arya got home and Spencer got brain.
Which means she's not really good at anything except that and it isn't her fault she's greedy.
When their phones chime and it's time to take their places, Emily's face says fight and Hanna's tears well behind her eyes and Ayra grabs their hands and Spencer...
(Spencer's heart beats out If Mona were here...)
Spencer clears her throat and says, We got this.
Courage.
Heart.
Home.
Brain.
She's got this. She's the brain.
(That's all they need, right?)
veronica mars | veronica(/logan/weevil/lilly) | 900 words for clockwork_hart1
waiting for a climax
She threw everything out that she couldn’t carry when she left town.
Turns out a heart can carry quite a bit more than you’d think.
The first boy she dates in her new town is a scholarship kid with an earring in one ear and a motorcycle and a younger brother who dotes on him. She rides with her thighs clenching his thighs through town, the wind in her hair isn’t nearly salty enough but her tears try to keep up with her expectations, and he breaks things off with her because he says because she isn’t serious enough (but she knows she was playing too dirty with his heart and she respects that he knows himself enough to make her go).
The second boy she dates in her new town has a flashy car and a too-bright smile and too much money to burn and no family to speak of. She kisses him softly through a haze of whiskey, which isn’t the right brand and it burns her throat in places she’d rather weren’t exposed, and he breaks thing off with her because he says she’s too serious (but she knows he was playing too dirty with her heart and she respects that he knows himself enough to make himself leave).
The third boy isn’t too hard or too soft and his soft edges don’t hide knives and his sharp edges don’t hide wounds and she tells him to leave too early to make it count because he’s not enough.
The fourth boy is her TA and they fuck in a closet between classes and she never calls him again and she gets an ‘A’ on a paper that she thinks probably deserved a ‘B’ but they don’t smile or anything and she feels like an adult.
The fifth boy is a man with a grown up name and white teeth and a tie and when he leaves her broken down sobbing at the door of her apartment leaning into a wall because she broke a heel the words grow up come floating back to her before he disappears into martinis and trophy wives and year end stock reports.
They were all boring because when she looked into their eyes she wasn’t looking in the mirror.
What’s the use in giving yourself to someone who only sees the parts of you that you want them to see? The good parts, the clean parts, the cool girl parts, the parts that are not really you at all and just the mask you put on in order to make the world smile at you when you’re pouting in the liquor aisle of the twenty-four hour drugstore because your heel is broken and your mascara is smudged and you aren’t a fucking grown up but you could legally buy that bottle of single malt scotch if only someone would open the fucking case for you. And the kid at the cashier smiles and calls you a cab because even like that, your mask is still securely fastened to your skin.
She thinks about going home but takes a semester abroad program in Wales instead. She loves the cold and discovers a new obsession with coffee that is quite different in the cold than it is in the heat. She doesn’t try to explain that to herself, just wraps her chapped fingers around her mug and takes too many classes and doesn’t look twice at any boys.
There’s a legend that says the gods were jealous of our mortality and split our souls in two so that we might wander forever lost without our other half.
Veronica Mars looks in the mirror and sees a shell.
Two halves of her walk free, love loosely, flirt with death while she runs and hides.
Maybe in her case, in her desperately ridiculous case, Lilly was the body and she was the shadow and they were two halves of a soul that will fill up two girls.
Between the four of us we might have been one full person.
That’s a horrid way to end a story.
Who said that’s the end?
Go home, Veronica Mars. Pick a new major.
So maybe she’s not cut out for journalism.
Wales wasn’t all that exciting anyway.
(She doesn’t go home yet, convinces herself to be something she’s not.
Keeps wandering around and makes do with a boy with the ghost of a crooked smile hanging a noose around her neck.)
She found a comic book in his possession once (does it matter which one) and she laughed over the bright splashing pages and the simple conclusion at the end. She makes a joke about it to him later (maybe one or the other) (their faces blur in her mind and sometimes when she’s really drunk they really are one person) and he smiles at her softly.
You didn’t read the end.
Sure. Pow! Crash! Bad guy defeated.
You didn’t read the beginning.
She flaps her hand in their face, The middle is always the best part.
The middle is the high, where the past is buried and the future is on the horizon. You missed the low.
Superheroes don’t have lows.
Why else would they be heroes?
She really hopes this isn’t her high - her middle - stuck on her own, a shadow with a dead shell and two halves of a soul watching her from her eyes but nowhere in sight.
Ugh what are my emotions today?
roswell | maria/michael(/liz) | 500 words | for tenshinrtaiga
like a mirror painted black
She can see the way she thinks about him; it doesn't look the way it's supposed to. Stars or something that rings like bullshit and smells like home. It's not a light that suddenly brightens behind her pupils, making that dark warm chocolate something living when there's nothing left worth living for. It's not a smile at the corner of her lips that pull because something hard has been there and now they bend in a different way than before.
It isn't hope.
Hope is for dreamers, not for lovers.
(Oh you thought they were the same?
Wrong fucking fairy tale.)
She's seen all those things on her face before.
She's been looking at that face as long as she's known her own. It is dark where she is fair, it is soft where she is hard, it is science where she is poetry.
(Or some bullshit like that.)
She's been in love before and she's seen that look before.
She can see the way she thinks about him; it doesn't look the way it's supposed to. It isn't a surprise lurking around the corner that maybe delights and maybe annoys. It isn't an embarrassment, it never makes her blush with shame. It never hides, it never lurks in the corner like a secret.
It should.
She thinks about him and it doesn't look the way it's supposed to.
It looks like grim determination.
Like a soldier getting ready for war.
Like a knight about to face a dragon.
Like a pirate facing down a goddamn armada.
It looks like a fight she's determined to survive.
She starts to examine her own face in the mirror. The soft, pouting lips and silky eyelashes that somehow make up a person with expressions and loves lost. She thinks about him and she watches her face in the mirror, trying to see what they see, when they look at her - the poet falling upon the sword of love they've already dug out of her broken body and armed themselves with to destroy something else. She watches her eyes and tries to find the thing that gives her away.
She thinks of her thinking of him.
And there's a dragon lurking behind her baby blues.
She leaves a note behind that they never find and it says, It is hard to be in love with someone who is in love with someone else.
And what she meant was, She likes it when you nibble just behind her earlobe.
But don't bite too hard.
Izzie finds her in a smoky bar crooning something dark and Alanis-esque that will never be a radio hit. They take shots of cheap whiskey and don't talk about their lives or the people they've loved or the lives they didn't live because of a fucking planet worlds away.
And they never, ever talk about why she left.
(She figures it doesn't matter why she left anyway. Call it a career. Call it falling out of love if that helps you.
Never call it longing because she'll just laugh at you and fill up your glass on the house.)
vampire diaries | caroline/enzo | 500 words | for lynzie914
sorry not sorry
I'm sorry in advance.
She says with a smile and he knows that she's ninety percent bravado and ten percent lipgloss but he lets her kiss him because she wants him to and he knows she wants him to and that's enough.
I won't apologize.
She says and her shoes are in her hand standing in the doorway of his tiny apartment and her eyeliner is already smudged under her eyes which means he can't bring her to tears begging with his tongue because she's already there for the wrong reasons and it won't mean the same thing but he opens the door wider and doesn't stop her from walking in.
I shouldn't.
She says and she's playing more drunk than she is and it gives them both the cover she needs to linger into his outstretched arms when she pretends to stumble and he grabs her elbow because he wants to be that guy that takes her home and drapes the sheet over her and watches her sleep and makes omelettes in the morning but he's the guy that's going to kiss her when he shouldn't and that's what she wants so he does and she sighs shouldn't into his mouth but they both hear yes.
This means nothing.
She says with one eyebrow raised and her hand on her hip and he smiles with his lips like that's exactly what he wanted to and he doesn't take her hand and he doesn't shake beneath her fingers and he doesn't lean back his head and close his eyes while she rides him because that would be giving this moment away so instead she pretends not to notice that he watches her with wide open eyes the whole time and holds out his arms, waiting for her to fall.
Please.
She says and it's true and he takes it because she wants to be the one who gets up in the morning and leaves before the sunrise without leaving a piece of her heart on the bed behind her, so he plays rough with his own heart and likes to think that makes him a hero like in the poems.
But she's just a girl who is ninety percent bravado and ten percent lipgloss who never learned to fight dirty or guard her heart.
He doesn't see the broken pieces of her heart strewn about his sheets in the morning because he is too blinded by his own.
Just like a man.
To think they are the ones who know pain best.
But she's just a girl who never learns.
She doesn't notice the pieces of her heart strewn about his sheets in the morning.
She's too distracted by the echoes of his heart pretending to be wounds, laying like offerings around her body, pulling her in with their expectations and needs.
How just like a girl.
To not see her own pain for the bitter show of heartache a man will press upon her wounds and make them sting.
How like a girl to rise up from the ashes of her own heart and turn to protect another.
How like a man to think his heart is worth more than hers.
arrow | thea | 650 words | for lynzie914
i know you are but what am i?
Oliver, she finds, can be very clinical.
She is disturbed that she isn't at all disturbed by this.
The first time they fight - brother and sister - and she knows that it is him behind the mask, she laughs at him. She chides him and pokes at wounds she knows they share and it doesn't hurt her a bit. Afterwards, she drives him to his 'cave' and waves to Felicity before kicking her car into a gear she shouldn't use on a domestic street and visits a mall.
She spends too much money and really loves her new heels. She wears them to the club that night and dances and dances, stomping her feet into the ceiling of the space that her brother calls a sanctuary and kisses a stranger for the hell of it.
Thea Queen who isn't a Queen really but damned if she isn't a fucking queen knows that she probably should be the good guy. Fight the good fight. Should set aside quality time in her schedule to brood while looking down off of a rooftop while a voice-over plays havoc in her mind about how morally dubious her morally upright vendetta really is.
But she doesn't.
He manipulated you.
But somehow she feels like she's supposed to apologize. Be horrified. Seek retribution.
Seek redemption.
Somehow being told that she really didn't do a thing that she really did do sounds a lot more like: Atone.
And that ain't gonna fucking fly.
This isn't you.
He says.
On a rooftop.
Wearing a hood and carrying a bow and arrow.
And she'd laugh if it wasn't so fucking sad.
So what am I? she challenges before stepping out into thin air and plummeting (for just a moment) towards oblivion.
(The answer is: what I want you to be.
She just doesn't give him time to say it.)
She's at morning training with daddy dearest who is maybe a supervillain and maybe made her kill someone she truly, deeply loved, and maybe she should confront him or something but instead she focuses on her breathing, on the way her feet feel on the cold floor, on the breeze coming through the door down the hall, on the way that bruise Oliver left on her hip bone aches pleasantly when she leans in just the right way, because her body is knowable and hers when it is hers and maybe it isn't hers all the time, but it is right now and that's enough for today.
When has anything ever been really hers?
Her name - not her name.
Her father - not her father.
Her brother - not her brother.
Her life - not her life.
What is a body at the end of the day?
Am I really supposed to apologize for something my body did when nothing of mine has ever been mine?
That's what she should say.
Instead she says something that will hurt him more and hurt her less.
(Does she have any expose skin left to cut?
Is there anything of hers left to harm?)
Maybe I'm not the person you want me to be. It's not like you were ever the person that I needed you to be. She says on a rooftop at night right before she does the wrong thing she shouldn't do.
She watches his heart break a little and smiles.
Maybe she is the villain.
Isn't that how half-sisters trained by the enemy usually turn out?
Will he kill her, she wonders.
Was she the villain all along, she never says aloud.
(Does any of it any matter with him standing there so sure and so steadfast and still with his own name to match to his own body in a life that is his? Does any of it matter?)
Okay, so she chooses to play the bad guy.
Did she ever have any other choice?
Did she ever have any choice?
(Does it matter?)
lost girl | dyson/kenzi | 500 words | for thisisagift
just wait a little while longer
It stops being boring after a while, Valhalla. Lots of mead, so she really can't complain, lots of lots of guys that are mostly giants and think she is an epic joke for most of what she thinks is a year but could be just an hour.
Like it matters.
Vikings are fucking huge and she's just a little Russian girl with a chip on her shoulder and a heart large enough to take down hell. Which either makes her impressive or stupid or really fucking dangerous.
The good thing, she says to a thick beard with arms and legs, is that all the people I love are warriors. So they'll be here eventually. I just gotta wait.
Underneath that beard might be a man-shaped something who maybe looks down at her pityingly but she can't fucking see that high up so it doesn't end up mattering all that much.
There's a certain clarity to death. It comes right before boredom and right after disbelief. You can't have any without the other. (She meets some that think they are still alive. The mock battles are real and they die over and over and over again. She holds their hands on their cots in the dirty tents and promises things she can't give and it almost makes her feel better. And in the morning they get up and try again. She can't tell anymore who has it worse and who has it better. She kisses some, steals their dying breath from their lips and cries for them. Boys dead and forever dying, never alive and never living.) In clarity, she finds herself feeling peaceful. It lasts about ten seconds and then she picks a fight with one of the shield maidens and they have a good laugh about it later over a pint or five.
She's sure she could look down and check on everyone, but she doesn't because she isn't sure what she's looking for.
Anyway, if they did she'd tell them they were being creepy and to fuck off so for once she takes her own advice.
He reads all the lore.
He knows exactly what to do.
It takes longer than he'd like.
He has to throw some things away.
When he sits down in the stool next to her she cries for the first time since she died and it shocks her more than it shocks him. That's how she knows that it took him a lot longer to catch up than she's willing to know.
She doesn't say, It took you long enough.
She doesn't say, I missed you.
She never says, I waited.
He takes her hand in his and kisses her palm like the old fashioned geezer that he is and she says, The mead here is fantastic.
And he doesn't say, I'm sorry.
And he doesn't say, I searched.
And he doesn't say, I love you.
She pours him a drink and drapes her legs across his lap and he lifts his tankard and says, Cheers.
pretty little liars | spencer/mona | 300 words | for lynzie914
the scarecrow asked for a brain and so he got a broken heart
Spencer used to feel really sorry for the scarecrow - all he got was some useless brains and he didn't need them in the first place, he was always the smartest of the bunch.
She got used to asking for the same thing after a while. She understood it in the end, you ask for the thing you are good at.
Because something new just might break you.
(She never says, If Mona were here. Because that's Hanna's heartbreak and there's only one at a time around here.
They all have things they own.
They stake claim on them one by one.
Like how they all missed Ali, but it didn't matter because Emily's heart missed Ali.
So yeah... Hanna's heart misses Mona.
Which means Spencer's brain can't miss a fucking thing.
So she doesn't say, If Mona were here.
But her heart beats it in her chest just the same.)
Don't be greedy, Spencer, she tells herself as she dresses herself in black and looks at herself in the mirror and braces herself for Hanna's beautiful tears.
(The only one who has tears more beautiful than Hanna is Arya.
And only because they come tearing out of her like wreckage.)
Only when they were passing out gifts, she chose brain. Emily got courage and Hanna got heart and Arya got home and Spencer got brain.
Which means she's not really good at anything except that and it isn't her fault she's greedy.
When their phones chime and it's time to take their places, Emily's face says fight and Hanna's tears well behind her eyes and Ayra grabs their hands and Spencer...
(Spencer's heart beats out If Mona were here...)
Spencer clears her throat and says, We got this.
Courage.
Heart.
Home.
Brain.
She's got this. She's the brain.
(That's all they need, right?)
veronica mars | veronica(/logan/weevil/lilly) | 900 words for clockwork_hart1
waiting for a climax
She threw everything out that she couldn’t carry when she left town.
Turns out a heart can carry quite a bit more than you’d think.
The first boy she dates in her new town is a scholarship kid with an earring in one ear and a motorcycle and a younger brother who dotes on him. She rides with her thighs clenching his thighs through town, the wind in her hair isn’t nearly salty enough but her tears try to keep up with her expectations, and he breaks things off with her because he says because she isn’t serious enough (but she knows she was playing too dirty with his heart and she respects that he knows himself enough to make her go).
The second boy she dates in her new town has a flashy car and a too-bright smile and too much money to burn and no family to speak of. She kisses him softly through a haze of whiskey, which isn’t the right brand and it burns her throat in places she’d rather weren’t exposed, and he breaks thing off with her because he says she’s too serious (but she knows he was playing too dirty with her heart and she respects that he knows himself enough to make himself leave).
The third boy isn’t too hard or too soft and his soft edges don’t hide knives and his sharp edges don’t hide wounds and she tells him to leave too early to make it count because he’s not enough.
The fourth boy is her TA and they fuck in a closet between classes and she never calls him again and she gets an ‘A’ on a paper that she thinks probably deserved a ‘B’ but they don’t smile or anything and she feels like an adult.
The fifth boy is a man with a grown up name and white teeth and a tie and when he leaves her broken down sobbing at the door of her apartment leaning into a wall because she broke a heel the words grow up come floating back to her before he disappears into martinis and trophy wives and year end stock reports.
They were all boring because when she looked into their eyes she wasn’t looking in the mirror.
What’s the use in giving yourself to someone who only sees the parts of you that you want them to see? The good parts, the clean parts, the cool girl parts, the parts that are not really you at all and just the mask you put on in order to make the world smile at you when you’re pouting in the liquor aisle of the twenty-four hour drugstore because your heel is broken and your mascara is smudged and you aren’t a fucking grown up but you could legally buy that bottle of single malt scotch if only someone would open the fucking case for you. And the kid at the cashier smiles and calls you a cab because even like that, your mask is still securely fastened to your skin.
She thinks about going home but takes a semester abroad program in Wales instead. She loves the cold and discovers a new obsession with coffee that is quite different in the cold than it is in the heat. She doesn’t try to explain that to herself, just wraps her chapped fingers around her mug and takes too many classes and doesn’t look twice at any boys.
There’s a legend that says the gods were jealous of our mortality and split our souls in two so that we might wander forever lost without our other half.
Veronica Mars looks in the mirror and sees a shell.
Two halves of her walk free, love loosely, flirt with death while she runs and hides.
Maybe in her case, in her desperately ridiculous case, Lilly was the body and she was the shadow and they were two halves of a soul that will fill up two girls.
Between the four of us we might have been one full person.
That’s a horrid way to end a story.
Who said that’s the end?
Go home, Veronica Mars. Pick a new major.
So maybe she’s not cut out for journalism.
Wales wasn’t all that exciting anyway.
(She doesn’t go home yet, convinces herself to be something she’s not.
Keeps wandering around and makes do with a boy with the ghost of a crooked smile hanging a noose around her neck.)
She found a comic book in his possession once (does it matter which one) and she laughed over the bright splashing pages and the simple conclusion at the end. She makes a joke about it to him later (maybe one or the other) (their faces blur in her mind and sometimes when she’s really drunk they really are one person) and he smiles at her softly.
You didn’t read the end.
Sure. Pow! Crash! Bad guy defeated.
You didn’t read the beginning.
She flaps her hand in their face, The middle is always the best part.
The middle is the high, where the past is buried and the future is on the horizon. You missed the low.
Superheroes don’t have lows.
Why else would they be heroes?
She really hopes this isn’t her high - her middle - stuck on her own, a shadow with a dead shell and two halves of a soul watching her from her eyes but nowhere in sight.
Ugh what are my emotions today?