Special Hell, ticket for one

[rivkat]

Veronica Mars, for waverly (who perhaps should have been more specific):

She never thought she’d end up here, with him. But Veronica Mars had to admit that what she thought would happen in her own life and what actually did happen rarely coincided. It was funny, really, since she was so good at reading other people, playing them if necessary, predicting their reactions to stimuli as if they were just billiard balls reacting to a kiss of English. When she got on the table herself, though, it was always a little different.

Maybe the pool table metaphor was a bad idea, she thought as she pulled her sweater on as quickly as possible. As if maybe if she covered up her naked skin it would mean that she hadn’t done what she had definitely just done.

There had been drug dealers, exposed on a routine adultery job; there had been a car chase and then a car crash, both involving the soon-to-be-ex-Sheriff; there had been an abandoned warehouse and a Three Stooges-worthy struggle, ending in an escape by the bad guys that would have been ignominious if it hadn’t also meant that she had not been shot. When the gun had gone off, so close that she still couldn’t hear out of her left ear, she had confronted her own mortality with a directness that even being locked in a downed refrigerator hadn’t produced. He had the same reaction, she could tell – most police went their entire careers without being shot at, and he was a more coddled type of cop than most. The adrenalin had left her so shaky that when he took her arm, she actually leaned into it, and then she turned and there he was, only inches away, and then –

Memory mercifully faded out at that point.

“I thought you went for the bad boys,” the Sheriff said, backing away from her (far, far too late), his hands automatically straightening his shirt, tucking it back into his uniform pants.

Veronica smiled, the one that looked like she was mocking him, even if she really meant it for herself. “Deputy, don’t you know? You are one.”