Title: "Twenty-Two Civil Seconds"
Author: monimala
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Rating/Classification: SAC, Veronica, Lamb, episode filler
Disclaimer: Not my characters.
Summary: Despite my full intention to write unabashed desk porn, I ended up with this simple, non-'shippy 450 word filler scene for 3.6, "Hi, Infidelity," instead.
"Hey, would someone let me know when some girl is in my office?"
-Lamb, 3.6, "Hi, Infidelity."
Bile rose in her throat and she had to clench her jaw and curl her fists against the arms of the chair just so Lamb wouldn't see her cringe. GHB. In Mercer's cash box. Oh, God. '"Is it enough for a warrant?" she asked, still choking on acid…and the fact that twenty-two civil seconds had actually gone by between her and the closest thing she had to an arch-nemesis.
"It is now," he murmured, his own jaw more than clenched. He moved some papers around on his desk, glancing down at them, looking efficient and official and actually on the verge of *doing* something.
Veronica suddenly hated him with every fiber of her being.
No, it wasn't sudden. It was omnipresent contempt. It had always been there. Like the three freckles on the inside of her right elbow and the ugly trophies perched in prominent places all over this office.
She hated his never dirtied hands shuffling those papers…punching numbers on the phone as he got the assistant district attorney on the line. She hated his voice, so smug and smooth as he said things like, "I've come across some new evidence," and "I think it would be prudent." I. I. I. And she hated how he hung up and looked at her with nothing but the same exact, totally familiar, omnipresent contempt.
Looking at Lamb was like looking in a mirror. A taller, generally dickheaded, male mirror.
"Are we done?" he asked, pasting on a perfunctory campaign smile she recognized all too well.
She snorted, pushing out of the chair. "Are we ever?"
"No, I don't suppose we are, Veronica." He rose, too, probably out of some antiquated Texan chivalry bred into his bones. Not something conscious. She couldn't imagine this man ever doing something *consciously* courtly. "Don't worry about Hayes. I'm sure you'll see the arrest on the six o'clock news."
She stopped midway to the door, glanced back at him. There was a sauce stain on one of his sleeves. Probably horseradish. If she remembered it right, he liked to put it on the pastrami sandwiches the boys always ordered in bulk from Julio's New York Deli. "Make sure you change your shirt first," she said, before realizing that it would serve him right to look like even more of a pompous moron on TV.
He looked just as surprised by the advice as she was. Enough to ask, "Why are you helping me? Why did you come here today?" in a tone that was almost human.
So she gave him a reply that was almost human, too.
"Because being 'some girl' in your office is a fate none of the girls at Hearst deserve."
--end--
November 8, 2006.