Entry tags:

logan, mutinousmuse, pg-13, veronica

Fic: Staying Alive (PG-13) Logan, Veronica
Title: Staying Alive
Author: mutinousmuse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,403
Spoilers: General S1 and S2, but nothing specific
Characters: Logan, Veronica
Summary: Years after leaving Neptune and going their separate ways, Logan and Veronica meet under rather unusual circumstances.
Author’s Notes: Written for the lex_83’s Ask Questions Later challenge. X-posted at veronicamarsfic and veronicalogan. Much gratitude to queen_haq for the beta!
The Challenge: How to Dirty Dance

No one puts Baby in a corner.
- Johnny Castle, Dirty Dancing

It’s handy to know how to shake your action hero booty on the dance floor. A strong knowledge of dance moves – particularly the various forms of dirty dancing – is invaluable when it comes to seducing an enemy agent, blending in at a party, or saving the day at a summer resort. Dancing is a great way to blend in to the crowd, to strut your stuff, and of course – when done properly – to have the time of your life.

Staying Alive

He was on his way to find something very tall to leap off of when he passed the strip club.

Why the fuck not, he figured, and knocked over a Bike Lane sign as he zig zagged into the parking lot. After three years of barely having sex with his frigid, so-called wife, he figured he deserved one last fuck before he dashed his brains against a sidewalk somewhere. Frigid, of course, actually translated into too-busy-fucking-the-pool-boy, but no one had bothered to clue him into that fact. He figured Linda must have gotten tired of waiting for him to piece together the hints she’d been leaving strewn about the house for the past year, because when he’d come home tonight, she’d been spread-eagle right there on the kitchen table while Pedro or Paco or whoever the fuck he was drove into her like a jack hammer.

He’d stood there for a full two minutes before either of them had noticed he was there. When Linda’s eyes had fluttered open to meet his, she’d simply grabbed onto the Pablo’s hips and moaned.

“Honey, I’m home,” he’d cried, and then chucked a lamp across the room.

That had been two hours ago.

He tumbled out of his car and landed on the pavement, spilling whiskey all over himself in the process. Draining the last remnants of liquor from the bottle, he chucked it into the street and ambled towards the door of the strip joint. Three crisp hundred-dollar bills later, the bouncer looked away while a drunk and disheveled Logan strode past him and took a seat at a small table directly in front of the stage.

He snapped his fingers at the first girl who walked by and shoved a $20 into the waistband of her thong. With a passing glance at her face, he mumbled something about whiskey and waved her away. The girl on the stage looked like Linda, and Logan began to feel nauseous. When the stripper-cum-waitress returned, he shoved several more bills at her and told her he was feeling exceedingly thirsty this evening; she nodded and brought him two doubles.

Each dancer blended into the next, glitter and hair and high heels and glistening skin all gleaming and dull and gleaming again under the smoky lights. Shot glasses emptied themselves and were whisked away, and Logan decided that being dead could wait until tomorrow. Or at least, until after the club closed.

When the girl returned again, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into his lap.

“Linda,” he whispered, and she shrugged and ground herself down against him.

“Sure,” she said. “I can be Linda.” She snaked her arms around his neck and rocked her hips against him.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” he chanted softly as his body pressed up into hers rhythmically. He pulled the edge of her bra back to shove a $50 under it. She took in the denomination with a barely concealed grin.

His hands slid down her back and his lips moved over her ear. “What do you say we – ”

The rest of the sentence died in his throat as his eyes locked onto the stage with horror.

“Yeah baby?” the girl in his lap whispered.

“What do you say we get some more whiskey over her?” he finished, and gently removed her from his lap.

Any insult she may have been tempted to feign vanished as he waved some more money in her general direction.

Logan leaned forward, eyes fixed on the girl dancing before him.

“No.” His nausea returned, stomach roiling. “Oh fuck me no.”

The girl on the stage wrapped a leg around the silver pole several feet away from him and slid down it. Bending back, the tips of her blonde hair scraped the floor. Spreading her legs wide, she ground against the smooth metal, sliding downward until she was on her knees. She broke away from the poll and began to slither towards her rapt audience, her tiny, lithe body wriggling forward through a sea of bills raining down onto the stage’s surface. Raising herself upward and arching toward him, she tossed back her hair and her gaze locked with his.

Logan found himself staring directly into the eyes of Veronica Mars.

He could do nothing but gape as she held his eyes, hips moving obscenely with the beat of the music. Seven years ago he’d said his bitter goodbyes to Veronica, letting her become lost to him in a sea of green robes on the Neptune High football field. He’d left for Los Angeles the next day, and then San Francisco after that. He’d gone to college, gotten married, buried himself in the normalcy he thought he’d craved since childhood. When he thought of Veronica, it was to imagine her beautiful, successful, probably married to some lawyer or CEO somewhere, maybe even a lawyer or CEO herself. She was the fantasy in which he indulged himself on the increasingly frequent nights when Linda rolled away from him, but that’s all he’d ever wanted her to be – a fantasy. The one thing in his world that couldn’t be sullied by the growing knowledge that life was merely a series of bludgeonings on the way to the grave.

And yet here she was. His fantasy girl, it seemed, was every man’s fantasy girl, and the betrayal felt worse than his wife’s. He stood suddenly, chair crashing to the floor, desperate to finish what he’d started when he’d left the house several hours ago.

But then her legs wrapped around his waist, and her lips were brushing over his ear, and the catcalls of the other patrons drowned out her words to everyone but him:

“Logan, you need to get out of here now.”

“What?” The meaning of her words failed to penetrate the layer of whiskey lubricating his brain.

“There’s a staircase to my left,” she said, and then grabbed his chin and turned his head. “No, my left. Go up the stairs and go through the third door on the right. Don’t leave until I come for you. If you hear gunshots, get in the closet.”

“Veronica, what are you – ”

“If I’m not there within 15 minutes, don’t come out until morning. Then you need to get as far away from this place as you can and never come back.”

He stared at her numbly as she leaned back away from him, flashing a kittenish smile at the man sitting two tables away. Logan saw her wink at him, and he got up. She leaned forward again to whisper in his ear.

“You need to tip me,” she said. He pulled a $20 from his pocket and held it towards her uncertainly. “Christ, Logan, we don’t have much time.”

His hand moved as though through the molasses of dreams, and he noted with detachment the way her nipple hardened against his fingers as he tucked the bill into her bikini.

And then she was crawling away from him, mouthing ‘go’ as she retreated from the stage amidst whistles and applause. His feet carried him toward the staircase, head swimming. It wasn’t until he was on the second floor that he realized he had no clue what she’d said to do next.

He tentatively tried the doorknob of the first door on the right. It was locked, as was the door across the hall from it. The second door on the left opened into a supply closet much too full to fit a grown man inside of it. Drunk as he was, he was fairly certain most supply closets didn’t house whips and wigs, but he couldn’t quite manage to figure out why not. Images of Linda fucking Veronica on his kitchen table while men threw cash at them swam before his eyes, and he stumbled further down the hallway. The door on his left opened, and Logan froze in the threshold.

His stomach finally did what it had been wanting to do for an hour and emptied itself all over the floor. He heard two gunshots fired below him, and tried very hard to move. The body of a stripper lay on a bed in the middle of the room, hands and feet cuffed to the bedposts. Her throat was slit, and a stack of neatly folded $100 bills lay on her stomach.

Logan heard feet pounding up the staircase followed by more gunshots and spun around. Veronica’s words barraged him suddenly – third door on the right – and he ran. Staggering through the doorway, he found himself in another “bedroom” – this one mercifully empty – and he threw himself under the bed. Moments later, feet thundered past the doorway, and more gunshots ricocheted through the air.

He heard Veronica’s voice slicing above the chaos in the hallway, and fought the urge to run to her.

“Fuck!” she shouted. “Mikey, we’re too late.”

And then something in Logan’s head clicked. Veronica wasn’t a stripper. She was… a cop. Or something like a cop. Logan started laughing, a sick, barking sound, and then stopped himself just as quickly. He was fairly certain he was supposed to be quiet during all of this.

Minutes or hours or seconds later, a soft hand grabbed his wrist, and Veronica’s face appeared under the bed.

“Logan,” she said, and yanked gently. “Are you okay?”

He slithered out from under the bed, the effects of the whiskey still thrumming through him, and tried very hard to stand up gracefully. He settled for just plain standing up after three failed attempts, and realized his knees were shaking like leaves on a windy day.

“I think so,” he answered, swaying back and forth on slowly steadying legs. Her hand was still wrapped around his arm, and the warmth of her skin seared him through the thin cotton of his shirt. She was so fucking real that he wanted to cry, or laugh, or kiss her, or all of them at once. “Veronica, what the fuck are you doing here?”

Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and despite the fact that there was no way in hell she should have been able to hide a badge in the outfit she had on, she flashed one at him anyways. “F.B.I.,” she said. “We’ve been tracking a serial killer who’s been hitting up strip clubs all over town. And I was about to ask you the same thing.”

He realized, like a punch to the gut, that even all these years later, her first instinct was to assume that he was somehow guilty of some sort of wrongdoing. He yanked his arm from her grasp.

“I’ve never been here before in my life, officer.”

“Logan, I didn’t – ”

“Fuck off, Veronica.” He slammed his hand against the wall. It hurt; he did it again. He turned to face her, lips pulled back from his teeth, and for a split second, he wanted to hit her, hard, in the face. The urge passed, and he wanted to throw up again. “I came home tonight to find my wife fucking someone on my kitchen table,” he said, and then immediately wished he hadn’t when her face softened.

“Oh Logan,” she said, and her hand found his again. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t,” he said, voice ragged. “You would have loved it, Veronica. I smashed a lamp. It was just like old times.”

She winced for a moment, and he saw her remember. She didn’t pull away, though, and they stood staring at each other for a long moment before he finally stumbled back to sink down onto the edge of the bed.

“I went into the wrong room,” he said. She said nothing, but he felt her weight settle down onto the bed next to him.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Her hand came up to make small circles on his back. “You’ve had kind of a shitty day, then.”

“I see time hasn’t dulled your razor sharp wit,” he replied, but there was no bitterness in his voice.

She laughed a little, and continued to rub his back. “I suppose this is as inappropriate a time as any to tell you I’ve been meaning to look you up,” she said. “I heard you moved into town a year ago, and…”

She trailed off, and he looked up at her. “You’ve known I was here for a year?”

“I even went by your office once, but you weren’t in,” she said. “Your secretary said you were meeting your wife for lunch, and I figured you were, I don’t know, happy. With your life.”

“I thought I was,” he said, regretfully feeling the effects of the whiskey begin to ebb away. “How about you? Are you Veronica Smith or Jones or something else these days?”

She shook her head quickly. “Oh no. No, I’m more than happy to observe the wonders of so-called marital bliss from afar, thanks.” Logan tensed beneath her hands, and she froze. “Oh god, Logan, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “You’re right.” He lifted his eyes to hers, tracing the familiar lines of her face; the surreality of the situation overwhelmed him, and he found himself incapable of not telling the truth to her. Heedless of his insistence that it do no such thing, the sentence exploded out of him like dynamite.

“I was on my way to go kill myself when I came here,” he said, appalling both of them.

“Jesus Logan,” she gasped, and grabbed his wrist again.

“Don’t worry, the moment’s passed.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I should probably head home, actually. Bathe. Call my lawyer. You know, marital bliss stuff.”

She spoke tentatively. “I think I’m supposed to tell you that you shouldn’t be alone right now.”

Logan stared at her. “Veronica, I’ll be fine.”

“I have a spare room. And a dog. I don’t know what the dog has to do with anything.” She was babbling, and they both knew it.

“Well, it has been a while since we’ve bonded in the wake of a tragedy” he said, and let her pull him off of the bed and out of the room. “I suppose we’re overdue.”

He paused in the doorway, staring after Veronica’s barely clad ass as it sashayed down the hallway. Her head turned to him, and she raised an eyebrow. “Coming?”

Why the fuck not, he figured, and, eyes intentionally averted from the open doorway to his right, he slowly followed her down the hall.

~fin