A Life Eternal - Veronica Mars
Title: A Life Eternal
Author: sadiekate
Fandom(s): Veronica Mars
Rating: R
Warnings: None, really.
Recipient: metaphor
Request: Duncan/Meg or just Meg.
Summary: This is what happens when people have too much money and too much of a taste for control. If you have enough power, you actually can bring someone back from the dead. Pre-apocalyptic.
Author’s Note: Thanks to trollprincess for reading this over and reassuring me it was good as soon as I finished it, because gasp! horror of horrors! Iced-Ti was off having a life and could not stroke my ego immediately. And thanks to __tiana__ for then abandoning said life and betaing it thoroughly, whilst spamming me with Rosenbaum photos. Now THAT’S multi-tasking.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3).
* * *
Meg is fairly certain that when her father quoted scriptures, this isn’t the kind of rebirth he had in mind.
* * *
Hollywood is fake, but everyone knows that. Horror films are one cliché after another, and the real walking dead look just like everyone else. Meg doesn’t have a craving for brains. She doesn’t even like red meat all that much. Her skin is unmarred, save for the scar across her stomach where they cut her baby out of her brain-dead, bled-out body. There is no trace of decay in her. Not on the surface.
She can’t say whether or not religion is as much of a hoax. If there is an afterlife, the memory is lost to her, like a dream you forget before you even wake.
This new life is a spiritual miracle sprung from a medical miracle, which are two entirely different things. She thinks. It’s still a lot to process.
“So,” she says flatly, after Duncan has laid it all out. “We’re zombies.”
“The preferred term is ‘reanimated’,” he says, and she wonders who he thinks he’s fooling. He means that it’s his preferred term, because he is the first of his kind.
Their kind.
* * *
Playing God, to Meg, seems to be crossing into the realm of thwarting God, and she is pretty sure God isn’t terribly into that sort of thing. She believes in the much friendlier New Testament God, who is fairly laid-back, all things considered. But he still has a Plan.
She wondered if He holds it against her now, her being this way. Even though she never asked for it.
* * *
This is what happens when people have too much money and too much of a taste for control. If you have enough power, you actually can bring someone back from the dead.
* * *
“Dad tried voodoo practitioners, all kinds of mysticism,” Duncan tells her vaguely, as he strokes her hand. “But they couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t.”
Meg thinks it’s probably the latter. Every religion, or spiritual sect, or whatever you want to call it, has this caveat in common; there are lines men aren’t meant to cross.
“He started using contacts he had made in the government to look into ways he might be able to bring Lilly back,” Duncan continues. “He figured, the military is always at the forefront in medical technology. But it was too late.”
Of course it had been. Lilly Kane would never be a suspended animation fairy-tale princess on pause. Even if she hadn’t been worm food, no way was she waiting around for the kiss of the ice-cold needle to awaken her. Meg hadn’t known her that well, but she knew that much.
“I fell off the bleachers last year,” Duncan says, not quite meeting her eyes.
Meg knows that means there’s more to the story, but she’s got enough on her mind that she’s not going to press the issue.
“I heard about that,” she says cautiously.
“What you didn’t hear,” he says. “Is that I died later that night. There was bleeding on my brain, and I died. But it wasn’t too late for me. My dad had them inject me with the experimental drugs, and I came back. They didn’t even realize it, at first. I was still in flatline, but I opened my eyes and started talking. I didn’t even remember much of anything at first. It was almost like being born.”
Meg doesn’t know why he’s trying to explain the feeling. She knows what it’s like. It happened to her.
“Why did you bring me back, too?” she asks, and he looks at her in wonderment.
“You’re the mother of my child, Meg,” he says gently. “She deserves to have us both around.”
She is unsurprised by the answer. It wouldn’t be anything as prosaic as love. She wonders if it’s a recent thing, his incapability with human emotion, or if he was like this the first time he was alive. She wouldn’t know. By the time she fell in love with him, he was already a dead man.
* * *
Meg knows suicide is a sin. It doesn’t stop her from trying, because it’s not like she’s actually alive.
She slits her own wrists before she realizes she has no pulse to beat the blood out of her veins.
She hangs herself, but since she doesn’t need to breathe, she just dangles uselessly.
The only thing inside her that works anymore is her brain. She’d put a bullet in her head, but Duncan’s careful not to keep guns around, and he hires a guard to make sure she doesn’t get one on her own.
Eventually she gives up, because she takes no comfort in desecrating her own corpse.
* * *
“Is she like us?” Meg asks one day, when she can finally bring herself to look at her own child.
She never says her daughter’s name, because it’s not fair that she is called after a dead girl who gets to stay dead.
“No,” Duncan says tenderly, watching the way his daughter’s tiny hand curls around his cold fingers. “She’s totally alive. When I came back, I didn’t think I’d be able to father a child. She’s a miracle, you know.”
Meg is starting to believe that miracles are not all they’re cracked up to be.
“Are there others like us?” she asks dully.
“A few,” Duncan tells her. “Soldiers killed in combat. They’ve been brought back better. They’re virtually indestructible.”
He says it like it’s a good thing. Like it’s okay that these people who gave their lives for their country have unwittingly committed their afterlives, too.
* * *
Meg hopes for the same things that most mothers do.
She hopes that her daughter will have a long and healthy life. She hopes her daughter remains unmarred by disease and injury. She hopes her daughter dies naturally of old age, with her grandchildren all around her.
She hopes that if her daughter gets to have that kind of life the first time around, the kind that she and Duncan never got to lead, Duncan won’t feel the need for their child to have a life eternal, too.
Meg can resign herself to waiting a hundred years for her daughter to die so that Duncan will let her go as well. But she can’t resign herself to waiting forever.
* * *
They have certain things in common.
Duncan wishes Veronica had been the mother of his child, his partner in this unlife. Meg wishes the same thing.
Because Veronica would see the danger in this cavalier prolonging of things that should be buried. She would escape, and she would find a way to stop this.
Meg sees the future of the world stretched out before her. She sees more and more people being reborn with a new invulnerability, some willing and some unwilling. She’s always believed that God has a plan, and that only bad things can come out of upsetting His precarious balance.
All Duncan sees is an infinite lifetime spent with a girl who is only second best.
* * *
Now Meg knows why Duncan was always so cool to the touch. Now she knows why she never heard his heartbeat when he cradled her to his chest after they made love.
When he holds her in their bed at night, it’s not as noticeable. Because now, she is just like him.
It’s still the only thing on her mind when she drifts into dreamless sleep.
* * *
Meg comes from a home of fire and brimstone. She learned about Judgment Day before she could walk or talk. It terrified her in her life before. She cowered from the sidewalk preachers who spoke of impending apocalypse.
The only thing she prays for now is the end of days.
It’s the only kind of faith she can muster anymore. It’s a cold kind of comfort.
Author: sadiekate
Fandom(s): Veronica Mars
Rating: R
Warnings: None, really.
Recipient: metaphor
Request: Duncan/Meg or just Meg.
Summary: This is what happens when people have too much money and too much of a taste for control. If you have enough power, you actually can bring someone back from the dead. Pre-apocalyptic.
Author’s Note: Thanks to trollprincess for reading this over and reassuring me it was good as soon as I finished it, because gasp! horror of horrors! Iced-Ti was off having a life and could not stroke my ego immediately. And thanks to __tiana__ for then abandoning said life and betaing it thoroughly, whilst spamming me with Rosenbaum photos. Now THAT’S multi-tasking.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God (John 3:3).
* * *
Meg is fairly certain that when her father quoted scriptures, this isn’t the kind of rebirth he had in mind.
* * *
Hollywood is fake, but everyone knows that. Horror films are one cliché after another, and the real walking dead look just like everyone else. Meg doesn’t have a craving for brains. She doesn’t even like red meat all that much. Her skin is unmarred, save for the scar across her stomach where they cut her baby out of her brain-dead, bled-out body. There is no trace of decay in her. Not on the surface.
She can’t say whether or not religion is as much of a hoax. If there is an afterlife, the memory is lost to her, like a dream you forget before you even wake.
This new life is a spiritual miracle sprung from a medical miracle, which are two entirely different things. She thinks. It’s still a lot to process.
“So,” she says flatly, after Duncan has laid it all out. “We’re zombies.”
“The preferred term is ‘reanimated’,” he says, and she wonders who he thinks he’s fooling. He means that it’s his preferred term, because he is the first of his kind.
Their kind.
* * *
Playing God, to Meg, seems to be crossing into the realm of thwarting God, and she is pretty sure God isn’t terribly into that sort of thing. She believes in the much friendlier New Testament God, who is fairly laid-back, all things considered. But he still has a Plan.
She wondered if He holds it against her now, her being this way. Even though she never asked for it.
* * *
This is what happens when people have too much money and too much of a taste for control. If you have enough power, you actually can bring someone back from the dead.
* * *
“Dad tried voodoo practitioners, all kinds of mysticism,” Duncan tells her vaguely, as he strokes her hand. “But they couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t.”
Meg thinks it’s probably the latter. Every religion, or spiritual sect, or whatever you want to call it, has this caveat in common; there are lines men aren’t meant to cross.
“He started using contacts he had made in the government to look into ways he might be able to bring Lilly back,” Duncan continues. “He figured, the military is always at the forefront in medical technology. But it was too late.”
Of course it had been. Lilly Kane would never be a suspended animation fairy-tale princess on pause. Even if she hadn’t been worm food, no way was she waiting around for the kiss of the ice-cold needle to awaken her. Meg hadn’t known her that well, but she knew that much.
“I fell off the bleachers last year,” Duncan says, not quite meeting her eyes.
Meg knows that means there’s more to the story, but she’s got enough on her mind that she’s not going to press the issue.
“I heard about that,” she says cautiously.
“What you didn’t hear,” he says. “Is that I died later that night. There was bleeding on my brain, and I died. But it wasn’t too late for me. My dad had them inject me with the experimental drugs, and I came back. They didn’t even realize it, at first. I was still in flatline, but I opened my eyes and started talking. I didn’t even remember much of anything at first. It was almost like being born.”
Meg doesn’t know why he’s trying to explain the feeling. She knows what it’s like. It happened to her.
“Why did you bring me back, too?” she asks, and he looks at her in wonderment.
“You’re the mother of my child, Meg,” he says gently. “She deserves to have us both around.”
She is unsurprised by the answer. It wouldn’t be anything as prosaic as love. She wonders if it’s a recent thing, his incapability with human emotion, or if he was like this the first time he was alive. She wouldn’t know. By the time she fell in love with him, he was already a dead man.
* * *
Meg knows suicide is a sin. It doesn’t stop her from trying, because it’s not like she’s actually alive.
She slits her own wrists before she realizes she has no pulse to beat the blood out of her veins.
She hangs herself, but since she doesn’t need to breathe, she just dangles uselessly.
The only thing inside her that works anymore is her brain. She’d put a bullet in her head, but Duncan’s careful not to keep guns around, and he hires a guard to make sure she doesn’t get one on her own.
Eventually she gives up, because she takes no comfort in desecrating her own corpse.
* * *
“Is she like us?” Meg asks one day, when she can finally bring herself to look at her own child.
She never says her daughter’s name, because it’s not fair that she is called after a dead girl who gets to stay dead.
“No,” Duncan says tenderly, watching the way his daughter’s tiny hand curls around his cold fingers. “She’s totally alive. When I came back, I didn’t think I’d be able to father a child. She’s a miracle, you know.”
Meg is starting to believe that miracles are not all they’re cracked up to be.
“Are there others like us?” she asks dully.
“A few,” Duncan tells her. “Soldiers killed in combat. They’ve been brought back better. They’re virtually indestructible.”
He says it like it’s a good thing. Like it’s okay that these people who gave their lives for their country have unwittingly committed their afterlives, too.
* * *
Meg hopes for the same things that most mothers do.
She hopes that her daughter will have a long and healthy life. She hopes her daughter remains unmarred by disease and injury. She hopes her daughter dies naturally of old age, with her grandchildren all around her.
She hopes that if her daughter gets to have that kind of life the first time around, the kind that she and Duncan never got to lead, Duncan won’t feel the need for their child to have a life eternal, too.
Meg can resign herself to waiting a hundred years for her daughter to die so that Duncan will let her go as well. But she can’t resign herself to waiting forever.
* * *
They have certain things in common.
Duncan wishes Veronica had been the mother of his child, his partner in this unlife. Meg wishes the same thing.
Because Veronica would see the danger in this cavalier prolonging of things that should be buried. She would escape, and she would find a way to stop this.
Meg sees the future of the world stretched out before her. She sees more and more people being reborn with a new invulnerability, some willing and some unwilling. She’s always believed that God has a plan, and that only bad things can come out of upsetting His precarious balance.
All Duncan sees is an infinite lifetime spent with a girl who is only second best.
* * *
Now Meg knows why Duncan was always so cool to the touch. Now she knows why she never heard his heartbeat when he cradled her to his chest after they made love.
When he holds her in their bed at night, it’s not as noticeable. Because now, she is just like him.
It’s still the only thing on her mind when she drifts into dreamless sleep.
* * *
Meg comes from a home of fire and brimstone. She learned about Judgment Day before she could walk or talk. It terrified her in her life before. She cowered from the sidewalk preachers who spoke of impending apocalypse.
The only thing she prays for now is the end of days.
It’s the only kind of faith she can muster anymore. It’s a cold kind of comfort.