Fic: The Pros and (More) Cons of Being Epic
Title: The Pros and (More) Cons of Being Epic
Author: wonderbreadland
Pairing/Character: Veronica, Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 1255
Rating: G
Summary: It's his fault. He wanted them to be epic.
Spoilers: No solid ones, just very vague references.
Warnings: None. It's pretty angsty, actually, until the end. I got into a rather pleasantly melancholy mood. It happens.
Author's Note: I uh. Hi. This is my first Veronica Mars fic, but I'm rather pleased with it on the whole. I'm posting it in my icon journal for lack of a better place. I suppose I can use this thing for both projects.
Originally posted at wonderbreadland.
It’s his fault. He wanted them to be epic. Who knew it would turn out to be such a curse? Though really, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Who wants to be cursed to be in love forever? To want each other forever, to be forever breaking up and getting back together and getting your heart broken over and over and over again. There’s only so much a being can take, but if your love is epic then your heart has to be too.
It’s been a few years since the last time they ran into each other (Chicago, two years ago), and the last time it had been a few years since the time before that (London, senior year of college). It’s been an endless succession of meetings, but Veronica hasn’t spoken more than ten words to Logan since Neptune, not even on the phone. She still sees him everywhere. She’s moved so far away, swinging like a pendulum from east to west, from west to east to Washington, DC, where the buildings are white and the people don’t look you in the eye. All the better to hide, in a smile amongst the shining limos and flashing bulbs of cameras. Logan taught her that.
Veronica likes her new city. Has there ever been a better place for a mystery solver? There is intrigue in the faces of statues, flinty cynicism growing in the grass of the Mall. She deals in false compliments, festering secrets and taking the complacent rich kids down. They’re not kids anymore. That’s what she keeps forgetting.
She’s still small and blonde and young-looking, so amidst the restaurants of the suburban town Bethesda the rent-a-cops accuse her of skipping class. Sometimes she agrees and lets them escort her to the schools, red-bricked and white-pillared, moneyed and affluent. She adopts the jaunty stride she once used to deflect the angry eyes of her classmates. Her eyes scan the crowd of chatting adolescents, her ear struggles to locate one particular sarcastic, mean, tender voice. The cop’s voice transforms into a principle’s, a teacher’s. Veronica Mars, it says, why does trouble follow you around?
It doesn’t, she almost answers. It doesn’t anymore. She doesn’t know where it is-where he is, hadn’t realized that she never learned how to find him since he had always been there. When he wasn’t, she was at a loss and started looking in all the wrong places. In Washington. In high schools.
It’s his fault. He had said they were epic.
She had become so used to seeing him that she almost didn’t notice when he turned up. It was August, hot and muggy and deserted, the time of year when the city seems determined to remind you that it was built on a swamp.
She’s watching the red hand of the do-not-walk sign flash and it’s about two in the afternoon. Idly she glances at the mirror-people across 16th street as they wait to walk. Veronica is not surprised to see Logan’s face among them, but she doesn’t let her eyes linger, knowing that if they do the illusion will fade. The red hand becomes a white man. She thinks idly of some snarky comment relating the color of the figure to the predominant race of the city, but has no one to tell. The city is beeping and the people are walking and everyone walks fast because it’s August, and there are no tourists to mess up the pace.
Halfway across the road she stops abruptly and looks into the face she’s seen every day since the last time she left. She knows this is not her mind by the way he’s looking at her, with his soul is pooling in his eyes, spilling out into the crevices of the crows feet that stem from his lashes. The Logan Veronica sees is always smirking. This one looks like he might cry. They are epic, and this is the part where they are reunited. Where they have changed.
He’s wearing a suit.
“Hey,” manages Veronica, squeezing the word out of her throat with a pop and a squeak.
“Hey,” says Logan, who still hasn’t blinked or moved.
Car-horns sound, but no one curses at them because this is DC, and honking brings bad PR and it’s campaign season because when isn’t it campaign season? Logan and Veronica walk. They walk like they are normal, like this is not the fifth-sixth?- reuniting heralded by poets and songwriters and a thousand feature films and hundreds of novels. They walk like they are not epic, because they do not have the luxury of slow motion or camera effects. They have to get out of the street or they’ll be run over.
They both have meetings, they think, but stop at Starbucks anyway. With shaking hands Veronica sits down and makes small talk, trying to ignore how important this moment is and what is different about this time: they are talking. She learns that he is now into politics, not the front-runner but behind the scenes, a speechwriter. She teases him about his award-winning essay all those years ago. He admits that the same bullshit works in more than one arena.
The political aide thing works for him, Veronica tells him later when they’re busy getting drunk in a bar in Georgetown where everyone’s as young as they can’t forget they were. Sleepless nights and rumpled suits he wore yesterday, he wears the skin of a world-weary ex-idealist like he was born to it and everyone’s just as tortured as the next guy. She tells him how all the guys she’s dated are either orphans or wish they were. She’s more than a little drunk.
He asks her why she always left the mornings after their six (seven?) sporadic meetings and she doesn’t have an answer. She looks down at her drink and all that it reminds her of (oblivion, rooftops, parties and confessions).
"Because," she says, settling for something half true, "it wouldn’t have been much of a story if I had."
He invites her back to his hotel room. Actually, he doesn’t invite her so much as he says, let’s get a cab, and she knows what that means. They are epic, and she always goes back with him. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t want to be epic anymore. She’s sick of the torture that makes good art. She’s not an artist. She just wants to get along. She doesn’t say a word. He’s still fucked up and she still understands that kind of darkness so they go home together to die a little.
In the morning Veronica gets up to leave. She’s gathering articles of clothing and pieces of her heart when she realizes that Logan is sitting up, watching her go.
"Veronica," he says in a voice she hasn’t heard since she was eighteen, "why don’t you stay?"
She laughs a little and wipes away the few tears that spill out and dons a bitter little smile that Logan can’t help but recognize from the mirror. "Because," she tells him, "because we’re epic."
"Couldn’t we be epic together?" He is serious and intent and grown-up and Veronica doesn’t forget they aren’t kids anymore, even if he had always been this wise.
She chokes on a sob. "They don’t write epics about couples who are together like that," she says.
Logan shrugs. "Maybe," he suggests, "they can stop writing about us."
She leaves, but she takes Logan with her.
Author: wonderbreadland
Pairing/Character: Veronica, Logan/Veronica
Word Count: 1255
Rating: G
Summary: It's his fault. He wanted them to be epic.
Spoilers: No solid ones, just very vague references.
Warnings: None. It's pretty angsty, actually, until the end. I got into a rather pleasantly melancholy mood. It happens.
Author's Note: I uh. Hi. This is my first Veronica Mars fic, but I'm rather pleased with it on the whole. I'm posting it in my icon journal for lack of a better place. I suppose I can use this thing for both projects.
Originally posted at wonderbreadland.
It’s his fault. He wanted them to be epic. Who knew it would turn out to be such a curse? Though really, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Who wants to be cursed to be in love forever? To want each other forever, to be forever breaking up and getting back together and getting your heart broken over and over and over again. There’s only so much a being can take, but if your love is epic then your heart has to be too.
It’s been a few years since the last time they ran into each other (Chicago, two years ago), and the last time it had been a few years since the time before that (London, senior year of college). It’s been an endless succession of meetings, but Veronica hasn’t spoken more than ten words to Logan since Neptune, not even on the phone. She still sees him everywhere. She’s moved so far away, swinging like a pendulum from east to west, from west to east to Washington, DC, where the buildings are white and the people don’t look you in the eye. All the better to hide, in a smile amongst the shining limos and flashing bulbs of cameras. Logan taught her that.
Veronica likes her new city. Has there ever been a better place for a mystery solver? There is intrigue in the faces of statues, flinty cynicism growing in the grass of the Mall. She deals in false compliments, festering secrets and taking the complacent rich kids down. They’re not kids anymore. That’s what she keeps forgetting.
She’s still small and blonde and young-looking, so amidst the restaurants of the suburban town Bethesda the rent-a-cops accuse her of skipping class. Sometimes she agrees and lets them escort her to the schools, red-bricked and white-pillared, moneyed and affluent. She adopts the jaunty stride she once used to deflect the angry eyes of her classmates. Her eyes scan the crowd of chatting adolescents, her ear struggles to locate one particular sarcastic, mean, tender voice. The cop’s voice transforms into a principle’s, a teacher’s. Veronica Mars, it says, why does trouble follow you around?
It doesn’t, she almost answers. It doesn’t anymore. She doesn’t know where it is-where he is, hadn’t realized that she never learned how to find him since he had always been there. When he wasn’t, she was at a loss and started looking in all the wrong places. In Washington. In high schools.
It’s his fault. He had said they were epic.
She had become so used to seeing him that she almost didn’t notice when he turned up. It was August, hot and muggy and deserted, the time of year when the city seems determined to remind you that it was built on a swamp.
She’s watching the red hand of the do-not-walk sign flash and it’s about two in the afternoon. Idly she glances at the mirror-people across 16th street as they wait to walk. Veronica is not surprised to see Logan’s face among them, but she doesn’t let her eyes linger, knowing that if they do the illusion will fade. The red hand becomes a white man. She thinks idly of some snarky comment relating the color of the figure to the predominant race of the city, but has no one to tell. The city is beeping and the people are walking and everyone walks fast because it’s August, and there are no tourists to mess up the pace.
Halfway across the road she stops abruptly and looks into the face she’s seen every day since the last time she left. She knows this is not her mind by the way he’s looking at her, with his soul is pooling in his eyes, spilling out into the crevices of the crows feet that stem from his lashes. The Logan Veronica sees is always smirking. This one looks like he might cry. They are epic, and this is the part where they are reunited. Where they have changed.
He’s wearing a suit.
“Hey,” manages Veronica, squeezing the word out of her throat with a pop and a squeak.
“Hey,” says Logan, who still hasn’t blinked or moved.
Car-horns sound, but no one curses at them because this is DC, and honking brings bad PR and it’s campaign season because when isn’t it campaign season? Logan and Veronica walk. They walk like they are normal, like this is not the fifth-sixth?- reuniting heralded by poets and songwriters and a thousand feature films and hundreds of novels. They walk like they are not epic, because they do not have the luxury of slow motion or camera effects. They have to get out of the street or they’ll be run over.
They both have meetings, they think, but stop at Starbucks anyway. With shaking hands Veronica sits down and makes small talk, trying to ignore how important this moment is and what is different about this time: they are talking. She learns that he is now into politics, not the front-runner but behind the scenes, a speechwriter. She teases him about his award-winning essay all those years ago. He admits that the same bullshit works in more than one arena.
The political aide thing works for him, Veronica tells him later when they’re busy getting drunk in a bar in Georgetown where everyone’s as young as they can’t forget they were. Sleepless nights and rumpled suits he wore yesterday, he wears the skin of a world-weary ex-idealist like he was born to it and everyone’s just as tortured as the next guy. She tells him how all the guys she’s dated are either orphans or wish they were. She’s more than a little drunk.
He asks her why she always left the mornings after their six (seven?) sporadic meetings and she doesn’t have an answer. She looks down at her drink and all that it reminds her of (oblivion, rooftops, parties and confessions).
"Because," she says, settling for something half true, "it wouldn’t have been much of a story if I had."
He invites her back to his hotel room. Actually, he doesn’t invite her so much as he says, let’s get a cab, and she knows what that means. They are epic, and she always goes back with him. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t want to be epic anymore. She’s sick of the torture that makes good art. She’s not an artist. She just wants to get along. She doesn’t say a word. He’s still fucked up and she still understands that kind of darkness so they go home together to die a little.
In the morning Veronica gets up to leave. She’s gathering articles of clothing and pieces of her heart when she realizes that Logan is sitting up, watching her go.
"Veronica," he says in a voice she hasn’t heard since she was eighteen, "why don’t you stay?"
She laughs a little and wipes away the few tears that spill out and dons a bitter little smile that Logan can’t help but recognize from the mirror. "Because," she tells him, "because we’re epic."
"Couldn’t we be epic together?" He is serious and intent and grown-up and Veronica doesn’t forget they aren’t kids anymore, even if he had always been this wise.
She chokes on a sob. "They don’t write epics about couples who are together like that," she says.
Logan shrugs. "Maybe," he suggests, "they can stop writing about us."
She leaves, but she takes Logan with her.