Title: "The Passenger"
Author: monimala
Character/Pairing: LoVe, V/Lamb
Rating: AC
Word Count: 700
Disclaimer: I still don't own the characters. Please don't sue my soon-to-be-broke ass.
Summary: Veronica is happy for five minutes.
Spoilers/Warnings: Generic season three spoilers through 3.11, dark themes, language.
Notes: I haven't the foggiest idea what's going on in this fic. I admit it.
Veronica is happy for five minutes, five whole minutes, before it all goes to shit. No questions, no secrets, no lies. Logan says "I love you," and "will you marry me?" and she is still crying like a teenager at a 'N Sync concert and snotting out the "yes," when he twists the wheel and meets the Mercedes that has just drifted in front of them from the opposite lane.
He doesn't die instantly.
That's what they say in all the news reports, right? "The driver, Logan Echolls, was killed instantly. The passenger, Veronica Mars, suffered only minimal cuts and abrasions from flying glass." Only he suffers. For what feels like hours on end. Until the sirens come. And there is nothing minimal about her cuts.
She watches the blood bubble up from his mouth, where minutes before there had been words. There had been a future. A few happy years and 2.5 kids before the inevitable Hollywood divorce and the getting-together-to-fuck-on-alternate-Sundays. She watches his eyes get sadder and sadder and realizes that she's been watching him die for years and not even known it. He just needed some drunk bimbo in a sports car to finish the job.
The seatbelt cuts into her chest when she reaches over and shakes him. She shoves at the airbags, cursing them and cursing him and saying, "Damn you, you're supposed to wake up now."
By then it's minute 7 and it is already too late.
**
Everyone expects her to mourn. To shut down and go zombie. And the fraction of the "everyone" that doesn't (Madison, Dick, Chip Diller) assumes she'll be out slutting it up and drinking and proving just what a heartless bitch she's really been all these years.
They're the ones who would be right.
Okay, Logan was the like-ohmygod-awesome one. Not her.
Fine, Logan deserved better than her. Too bad he never wanted it.
Yes, Logan would have attended her funeral and stayed at her grave for a week. But she couldn't even make herself get out of bed that day, much less sit in the dirt.
And yes, vodka tastes like nothing but what you put in it. Like Kahlua and spit and memory.
But she doesn't get behind the wheel.
She doesn't steal a future from anybody else.
She just says, "I'll have another," and smiles at the first guy to walk in the door.
**
After about three months, her dad tosses her in rehab. He says the magic words, "you're turning into your mother," and she looks up at him with dead, glassy eyes and says that won't happen until she's robbed him blind.
He kisses the top of her head and tells her, "Veronica, that's already happened. I got nothing without you."
It's the first time she cries since Logan proposed.
She hopes it will be the last.
**
She's ninety days sober and 180 days not-quite-widowed when she finally has sex with someone who matters.
The surprising part is that this someone turns out to be Don Lamb.
He comes over to the apartment to drop off a file or pick up a file or insert-your-contrived-excuse-here and before the "How's the 13th step?" is even out of his mouth, she crawls inside him and scalds herself on his half-baked concern.
Clothes come off quicker than she thought possible. As he's shoving his tongue down her throat and his hands are skating over her skin with something like tenderness, she realizes he's probably wanted this for years.
But all she wants is now.
And he gives it to her against the wall.
Better than she's ever had it. Yes, better than Logan and she knows that should make her feel guilty but she's too busy feeling good for the first time since she got in a car and thought her future lay on the long stretch of road ahead.
"He never deserved you," Lamb whispers, raggedly, against her throat.
She rakes her nails down a back that has a wealth of faded scars from all the women who've cried out his name before her. She takes five minutes, five whole minutes, for herself. And she sighs, "I know," before she twists the wheel.
--end--
January 31, 2007.