Fic: Dark Places Where Monsters Dwell
Dec. 30th, 2005 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosI now bring you 6,500 words that prove there is something seriously fucking wrong with me.
Title: Dark Places Where Monsters Dwell
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Mac and Dick (no, don't worry -- not like that ... kinda), Veronica and Madison
Warnings: Character death. Lots and lots and LOTS of character death.
Spoilers: Up to "Ahoy Mateys", although the events of the following two episodes come into play here, too. I just haven't seen them yet, is all, so better safe than sorry.
Summary: For lack of other options, Mac and Dick try to survive together in a post-apocalyptic world.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, whee!
Author's note: I blame![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
apocalyptothon and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sadiekate and xphoenixrising. Because really, I couldn't be expected to wait for post-apocalyptic VM fic.
*****
Dark Places Where Monsters Dwell
*****
The day the four of them try to break into the hospital, Dick's finished off enough of a bottle of Jagermeister to be pretty much useless. Not that he's not useless the rest of the time -- he might not be the smartest person on the planet, but at least he's fucking self-aware enough for that -- but he can barely stand up straight and all he's doing is pissing off Veronica, at this point.
That's why he's the one stupid enough to say, "Fuck it," get into the driver's seat of the Xterra, and drive right through the goddamn front of the hospital.
It isn't a pretty entrance. But the lobby of the hospital is littered with bodies and reeks of decay, and it wasn't going to be a pretty entrance any way you looked at it.
Veronica keeps giving him looks like she wants to strangle him, and Mac has this pleading look in her eyes like she's begging him not to start a fucking fight, and Madison's about this close to bursting into sobs again. And while there might be a small part of Dick that wouldn't mind playing the big heroic, leader-type guy for them (a very small part, but there nonetheless), he's seen enough action movies to know the drill. There is someone who gives orders, someone who keeps the peace, someone who cries all the time and someone who's a drunken asshole.
He thinks, What would Logan do if he were here?, then gets out of the Xterra in the middle of the lobby and bows deeply, extending his arm towards the interior of the hospital. "Ladies," he says, trying not to ruin the effect by gagging on the taste of rotting flesh that settles in the back of his throat. "Your castle awaits."
Veronica's lips twist a little before settling into a sarcastic smile, and he gets the impression she wants to yell at him for his stupidity but can't because he got past the hospital's barricades. She gives the Xterra the same sarcastic look, as if he and the damn car got together and planned this from the start, as if it's taken the place of Logan as Dick's loyal partner-in-crime.
Logan died eight days ago, and they buried him on the beach with his surfboard as a tombstone.
Dick opens his mouth to say something -- what, he doesn't know, but probably something fucking inappropriate -- then pukes all over the side of the Xterra.
*****
Burying Lucy is a stupid promise, and Dick tells Veronica that the moment she says they're all going to go down to the hospital to get her out of the intensive care unit. He doesn't give a shit if Veronica promised Duncan on his deathbed that she'd rescue his kid, that she told Meg's sister she'd do it right before Lizzie disappeared ... hell, he doesn't even give a damn that it's probably the right thing to do.
They were the only healthy people in Neptune who hadn't locked themselves in the hospital -- another thing that Veronica had decided without their input -- and trying to get her out of there wasn't worth the risk.
In between crying jags, the bitch in Madison reared its ugly head and snapped, "The hospital's full of drugs, Dick. There's got to be something in there for you to overdose on."
Dick changed his mind about breaking into the hospital after that. But, you know, not because of the drugs.
Lucy died days earlier, somehow surviving her first few weeks only to stop breathing in her seventh month of life. When they make it through the debris of Neptune's dead and get to the intensive care unit, they find her sprawled out in a bed with needles still jammed into her skin and only figure out she's been dead for five days because that's when the entries on her chart stop. It's easier to think that than ponder the alternative, that her doctors and nurses died first and she lie there withering away with no one to take care of her.
Dick takes one look at her prone body and takes whatever pills are in his hand, praying for a fatal dose.
*****
Two days later, they're sitting around the bonfire on the beach because everywhere else in Neptune is ten feet away from a dead body. At least you can roll the ones on the beach into the ocean, and if you head back to the fire quickly enough and sit down facing away from the water, you won't even notice if they wash back up on shore again.
"When did you first notice?"
All three of them start at Madison's voice, because now she's the one that's wasted, the empty vodka bottle twirling in the sand beneath her fingertips. She stares blankly into the fire, watching it dance and barely moving along with the rhythm in her head. Dick thinks she might be going fucking crazy, and then he thinks she isn't and then he thinks she's already far gone and then he wishes she'd just go the hell away. Not just off the beach, but into another dimension or off to another planet or even into the cornfield like in that stupid Twilight Zone episode Beaver made him watch once.
She turns her tired eyes on the rest of them with the bottle still spinning, spinning, spinning under her fingertips. The skin around her eyes is dark with shadows. Dick's pretty sure that's the biggest sign of the apocalypse he's seen yet, for fuck's sake -- Madison without her makeup. "My little sister," she says slowly, "wouldn't stop coughing."
She chokes on her words, and then understanding dawns on Veronica's face. Mac goes this sickly shade of pale and swallows hard.
Dick's positive he's supposed to go all serious and shit just like the rest of them. Mostly, he tries to look concerned and wonders if he feels up to walking all the way up to the nearest apartment complex just to break a window and steal a fucking six-pack.
Madison goes back to staring at the fire. Spinning, spinning, spinning, and Dick gets dizzy just watching her fingertips in motion. "It was this weird rattle in the back of her throat, you know? That gross sound you make when you've got a really bad chest cold and you're all full of phlegm? Like that."
She's not even looking at Veronica, which is why Dick is the only one who sees her gaze dart anxiously over to Mac. Mac looks like she's about to hyperventilate, and Veronica opens her mouth to speak.
Dick doesn't want to hear it, because it'll be some bullshit complaint about her dad or that black kid she was always hanging out with or fucking Duncan, and before she can say anything, he blurts out, "Beaver passed out and fell in Kendall's lap."
The others stare at him as if he's grown a third arm straight out of his forehead. And he doesn't know if it's because he's still a little bit drunk from Lucy's funeral or if he's just caught up in the moment, but he laughs a little and adds, "Wish I'd thought of it first."
Mac makes a weird throttled sound in the back of her throat and stumbles to her feet, running away past the lump of sand over the baby's grave.
Her eyebrows drawing together as she scowls as him, Veronica plasters on a smile and says, "Gee, you're such a sterling conversationalist, Dick," then kicks over the bottle sitting next to Dick on the sand as she chases after Mac.
Beaver died seventeen days ago, one of the first in Neptune to go, and Dick's been drunk or getting there ever since.
*****
There were about five minutes there in the beginning, before everything really went to hell, where Kendall actually acted like a mother. No, really. Dick walked into the living room and found her spooning chicken broth into Beaver's mouth, his little brother curled up and trembling under a flannel blanket. Granted, Kendall was doing it impeccably dressed and manicured while watching Access Hollywood, but it still counted, especially for someone whose only known qualification for being a mother was possessing the equipment to become one.
Which she wasn't using for that, but since the northernmost qualifications were so nice to leer at across the dinner table, Dick wasn't complaining.
Dick vaguely remembers making a crack about Beaver getting a beautiful woman to do whatever he wanted and Kendall rolling her eyes in response, but for some stupid reason, he mostly remembers what Billy Bush was saying. (Billy Bush probably doesn't even remember what he was saying, Dick sometimes thinks, but then again, Billy Bush was an annoying asshole and it's safe to guess that he's dead now anyway. When he thinks about it, he hopes Billy Bush choked on his own fucking bile like Beaver did in the end.)
According to Billy Bush, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were both in the hospital, although their publicists had no comment. Tom Cruise had hired nurses to come to his house. Madonna and her kids were missing.
The night after they bury Duncan's daughter on the beach not far from where they buried Logan, when the girls have finally gone to sleep, Dick starts counting them off on his fingers.
Brad and Angelina, dead and dead. Tom and Katie, dead and dead. Madonna and her stupid little kids, dead and dead and dead.
Dick Casablancas, alive.
It sucks, but hey, it works for him.
The next morning, Madison's clothes lie scattered across the sand, her small footprints in the sand leading towards the water. Madison dies sometime after Dick goes to sleep at two in the morning, and the only feeling Dick can muster up is relief he won't have to dig another fucking hole in the sand.
*****
They just called it "this new flu" for a while, and then somewhere along the line some bookworm who'd read The Stand one too many times started calling it Captain Trips and it just sort of stuck. They even interviewed Stephen King on "Good Morning, America" or one of those other stupid morning shows, Dick remembers, and all that really sticks in his mind is that the big dork just looked embarrassed to be there -- because it was TV or because it was a dumb reason to get interviewed, Dick didn't know.
Kendall had read it, though, which had shocked the hell out of Dick and Beaver when she'd blurted it out during the interview. She'd just cocked an perfectly sculpted eyebrow and said, "What? I read it on a dare once in high school. I can read, you know."
"You mean, something other than Cosmo?" Beaver muttered.
"Hey, at least that'll keep me alive," she said in that familiar bitchy way of hers. Dick almost misses it.
Every once in a while, he thinks of that as the last real family moment he had before everything went to hell. Usually, he wakes up ten hours after that with a massive hangover and Veronica irritated with him again.
Kendall died fourteen days ago at home, and the one thing Dick doesn't think he'll ever admit to anyone is that he sat next to her bed holding her hand until she went.
*****
Even before Madison wanders into the sea, Veronica only talks when she has to for days on end, which should have been the first sign. She's eerily quiet the rest of the time, Mac hovering around her like a worried grandmother.
Dick spends a lot of time watching Mac and wondering what Beaver saw in her. She looks a little like a chipmunk in an oddly cute way, but she's sweet enough to cause a sugar rush just from standing next to her and every time Dick sobers up long enough, he catches her looking at him like he's a half-drowned puppy she's got to save.
One day, Mac offers her a hot dog from the ones they've roasted over the bonfire, and Veronica says a quiet thanks before ragged coughs tear from her throat.
Mac and Dick share a look, and it strikes Dick that it's the first time in days that Mac's looked at him with pity that's not meant for him.
Veronica dies two days later on the beach, and Dick and Mac brave the growing stench coming from her apartment complex to take her back home and tuck her into her own bed.
Both of them avoid looking at the lump on the couch hidden by a nice blanket and cover their mouths as they rush through the living room.
*****
Before Beaver keeled over while reading on the couch and landed face-first into the lap of Kendall's expensive miniskirt, he'd rented a copy of The Stand because he wanted Dick to know exactly what the hell he was going to go through later on.
At the time, Dick had just spent a lot of time making cracks about how Molly Ringwald had been hotter in The Breakfast Club. But now Dick likes thinking about it like that, even though Beaver was the pissant little brother and Dick had spent the majority of his life practicing his bullying techniques on the kid. He likes thinking that Beaver did it to prepare him for what it would be like, the plague and the aftereffects and being so goddamn alone, because it makes a sick sort of sense.
It gives Dick a starting point, for one thing. It's like an X on the map he can point to later on. X marks the spot where Beaver knew he was going to die. X marks the spot where Beaver knew Dick was never going to get sick. X marks the spot where Beaver knew Dick was probably going to be the one left behind to take care of his fucking girlfriend.
Jesus, Dick couldn't even take care of a goddamn goldfish. He'd had one once a couple of years ago and Logan had bet him a hundred bucks to swallow it whole and alive. Hell, he would have done it for free, considering how wasted he'd been.
Wait ... had he done it for free?
Oh, yeah. Still drunk.
For days, he and Mac hang out on the beach, eating what they can scavenge from stores and trying not to sit downwind of any place that would have been too crowded. Dick used to think he could spend the rest of his life on the beach, just as long as he had a bottomless keg, the delivery number for Pizza Hut, and Lindsay Lohan to keep him company. Now he's not so sure he can pull it off, because Mac isn't Lindsay Lohan and even if she were, he doubts Lindsay Lohan would be wearing that many layers. Or be scowling at him like that.
"We can't stay here forever," she says, rubbing at her upper arms. Dick nearly passes her one of the blankets before he realizes that she's not doing it from the cold. She glances around at what's left of Neptune, the eerie silence broken only by the occasional barking of dogs and the gentle roar of the ocean waves that's even managing to piss him off.
"Sure we can," he says, flashing her a cheerful smile he knows she hates. "The food's all ours, we've got enough beer to last us for years, and I'm pretty sure we can learn to put up with each --"
"I think I'm pregnant," she blurts out.
Beaver died something like three weeks ago, but if he were still here, Dick would kill him.
*****
When Meg Manning died in the hospital and left behind that tiny little baby girl, Dick remembers that his main contribution was to go up to Duncan when he spotted him arguing with Veronica on the street, revel in the sudden uncomfortable silence as he clapped Duncan on the back, and flash the guy a wide smile as he said, "Sucks to be you, doesn't it?"
It wasn't that Dick didn't like babies, or even that he didn't like that baby. Nobody trusted him to change her or feed her or even be alone in the same room with her, which was actually kind of a bonus. Lucy turned out to be a pretty agreeable kid in the end who thought he was just about the funniest thing on the planet, although when you shove breadsticks up your nose and make walrus noises at a baby, they have to love you.
Plus, hot chicks loved a guy with a baby, and he thought working up to Duncan letting him take the kid on walks along the beach with a stroller was a definite investment in his sex life.
There was a short list of people Duncan did trust with Lucy -- when you're in the middle of a nasty custody battle with your kid's abusive grandparents, even Dick knew better -- but Beaver and his geeky girlfriend somehow made the list. One day, Dick came home from hanging out with Logan to find Beav and Mac alternating between cooing over the kid in her car seat and flashing these great big fuck-me eyes at one another.
Dick rolled his eyes and went upstairs to play Grand Theft Auto and contemplated calling Madison for about ten minutes before the phone rang, which meant he got the bad news before everybody else did.
Dick Casablancas, Sr. died in Mexico a month and a half ago -- not from the flu, but in a fucking boating accident -- and in retrospect, Dick is pretty sure that's when his little brother knocked up the computer geek.
*****
Dick has to be the responsible one.
Thinking it makes Dick want to laugh out loud, so he avoids saying it out loud because he's positive it'll drive him fucking batshit. After Mac makes her grand nervous announcement on the beach, Dick makes sure to drink everything in sight and pass out dangerouly close to the water's edge. If they'd had any weed or pills handy, he'd probably have taken those, too. Kill all of my irresponsibility off in one go, he thinks bitterly when he wakes up, the worst hangover of his life clouding his head in pain.
He has a brief dazed moment where he's grateful his liver can't beat the shit out of him, and dies laughing to Mac's bewildered annoyance.
Dick isn't entirely sure what the hell they're doing the next few days, although he knows he fills the Xterra up with gas he siphons from some other broken-down car and stands there for ten minutes clenching his fists as he stares blindly at that fucking bright yellow paint job. When things had gone to shit, some PCH dickhead had gone around town setting 09er cars on fire, and the Casablancas cars had made the top of the list. Somehow, Logan had managed to keep his car intact, which had mostly resulted in Dick cracking jokes for the next week and a half about Logan giving Weevil blow jobs just to keep his precious Xterra in one piece.
He'd even managed to get one in on Logan's deathbed, which had pissed Veronica off to no end but made Logan smile a little. The shit you can only say to your best friends, you know?
He spends those few days having these moments of brief maturity followed by long moments of complete stupidity. He spends an entire afternoon packing the Xterra so that they can go find someone else out there in the world, then takes the pregnancy test Mac hands him and drops it before he can even look at the positive result because ... well, hell, she pissed on it, for crying out loud.
Veronica's been dead for days, but if she were here, Dick's pretty sure she would have smacked him upside the head for that one.
****
Dick's turned it into a guessing game in his head, something to kill the silent time in the car as he drives. When Mac's not sleeping, she's trying not to let him see her cry or talk to him, both of which he gets. If she bursts into tears, she's that weeping pregnant chick he's got to drag along with him. If she talks to him, they'll just get reminded the only thing they have in common is their ability to stand upright (and Dick's ability to stand upright is debatable), and then he'll say something that pisses her off and they'll spend the rest of the day (if not the week) not talking to one another.
So he sits in the driver's seat and tries to figure out what anybody else he used to know would have done in his situation.
I am all alone with a pregnant girl who hates me, there's a loaded handgun in the glove compartment, and we are the only two people who made it out of Neptune alive. What do I do?
It's like a math problem. Except, you know, without math.
The Beaver in his head is too busy comforting Mac and assuring her it's all right to see some asshole with a deadly leer and his gaze fixed on her back sneaking up behind them with a knife.
The Duncan in his head spends most of his time dazed and boring, making Mac think everything's all right and she's got a keeper before he goes fucking apeshit one day and dumps her on the side of the road before driving off to Mexico.
The Logan in his head fights with her during the day and fucks her at night. Sure, she's not his type, and he's not her type, either. When the hell did that ever stop Logan?
The Veronica in his head is responsible, clever, strong, and resourceful and still gets the two of them killed or raped anyway.
Dick wonders if there's a list somewhere, of guys from Neptune you'd least like to get stuck with in an end-of-the-world scenario. He's pretty sure he's on the top of the list and feels like shit for a full twenty minutes before he realizes Aaron Echolls would definitely be worse to be around. Dick Casablancas might be notorious for being a selfish jerk, but at least he's not going to peg you over the head with an ashtray.
Aaron Echolls has been dead for almost two months now, which is probably a good thing. At least he can't argue that he never had to spike a girl's beer to have sex with her, Dick thinks, and for once the reminder of that night makes him queasy.
*****
Outside of Reno, they stop to get food from a deserted mini-mart and some asshole with a deadly leer and his gaze fixed on Mac's back sneaks up behind them with a knife.
Dick doesn't think -- not a surprise -- and shoots him right between the eyes with the handgun Mac had had to remind him to carry into the mini-mart. Now, that's a surprise.
The wannabe rapist dies within minutes, bleeding out all over the linoleum floor. It's the first time Dick's ever hit a real target, and he slumps against the front counter and down to the floor staring at the gun in shock.
Mac crouches beside him, concern in her eyes. She won't take her eyes off him because doing so will make her look at the dead body on the floor. "Are you going to be okay?" she finally says after a long quiet moment.
"Yeah." No, I'm not. Jesus, I just killed someone. That really sucked. Let's never do that again. "Yeah, I can do that again."
Dick doesn't hear or know what he's saying, and he thinks that he could be okay if they just sat there for another hour letting him think, "Oh, shit," over and over again while letting the weight of the gun get more familiar in his hand. He has a brief moment of clarity -- Mac needs a gun, we need more weapons, I need to practice my aim -- right before he puts the gun down and starts to shake.
Mac smiles at him, pained but grateful, the worried smile of a realist, and she wraps her arms around his shoulders.
Beaver died weeks ago now, but Dick's got to give him props for picking a girl who'll hug you after you kill a guy and not say anything when you cry on her shoulder.
*****
"You know, half of my sock drawer was filled with condoms."
Mac stares at him in confusion as she looks up from the fried chicken they're eating. Vegetarianism died as a concept sometime between the rest of civilization dropping dead and the loss of the electricity, and Dick had been so desperate for real meat he'd spent the entire morning since they'd crossed the border into Nebraska chasing a chicken around the front yard of someone's farm. Hey, it was either that or killing a cow, and yeah, they were bigger targets and moved slower, but he'd had a hard enough time convincing Mac to let him kill the chicken. "Congratulations," she says, dragging it out so that it sounds more like a question than a statement.
"It's just, you know, after Meg, I thought we were all supposed to learn our lesson or something." Dick leans forward across the picnic table, flashes Mac his least smarmy smile, and says, "Don't tell me I was the only one paying attention during sex ed."
Mac makes a face and takes a sip of the soda Dick cooled in the nearby river. "That's just because you were hoping they'd give us all kinds of dirty pointers."
"Hey, I still say a little lesbian porn is educational."
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and for a second Dick just smiles and eats his chicken and feels a little more at ease than he has in weeks. There weren't any bodies on the farm, and they hadn't seen anyone alive in a week and a half, and that last guy had made a run for it as soon as he'd seen the hunting rifle Dick had taken to carrying around. Summer's fading into fall and the stark streak of common sense that tells him they really have to find someplace to stay before winter comes is momentarily buried under the childish glee that autumn looming on the horizon doesn't mean another trip back to Neptune High.
"I just --"
Mac's voice jolts Dick out of his thoughts, and he looks over at her in all seriousness as she blushes and pokes at her food. "We just ... with your dad, and the flu was coming, and ... we were going to do it any--" She lifts her head suddenly and stares at him, as if she were talking to herself or into a cell phone and he'd just been some dickhead she hadn't even known was watching her. "I don't even know why I'm bothering to tell you all this."
He shrugs it off and thinks that if he were in her shoes, he would have come out without all of the stuttering and said he'd nailed her all over the goddamn house just for the hell of it and could produce photographic evidence for anyone who wanted it.
She stops eating for a minute and smiles, and it's almost wicked the way she says, "I should probably tell you about me and Madison."
The dirty part of his brain immediately wonders (and kinda hopes) she's about to tell him Beaver had a three-way with her and Madison, but then she starts in on this story about Veronica Mars (well, of course it would be Veronica, and there's another wave of disappointment that the phrase "four-way orgy" doesn't follow) digging into her past and her and Madison being switched at birth like out of some lame Lifetime movie.
Madison Sinclair is dead, but somewhere out there she's getting the shock of her afterlife and Dick almost wishes he could watch the fit that's sure to follow.
*****
They pick out the cabin because it's in the middle of nowhere and it's on a hill, which makes about as much sense to the both of them as if they'd picked a house in the valley near the river that's surrounded by trees. There's good enough arguments for both -- they can see anybody coming from miles away on the hill, but being in the valley means being closer to freshwater -- and either way, Mac can argue better than he can every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Dick mostly wonders if he can talk Mac into one night a week of complete immaturity. Not like he expects her to go out to a bar, drink everything in sight, and dance on the tabletop for an audience of corpses, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't pay to see it, either. You know, without the dead people.
Beaver's been dead for months now, it suddenly occurs to Dick, and he can't help to think that Beaver would probably have a fit that his older brother's thinking of his girlfriend like that.
*****
They settle into this weird routine, where they make sure they're fed and watered and warm and then suddenly winter comes and they're trapped inside where they have to ... you know, talk. They usually only last ten minutes or so before Mac starts in on something that bores the hell out of Dick or Dick says something that makes Mac want to throw something at his head. After that, they drift off to their respective corners like boxers, either one of them waiting for their next opening.
It's the closest thing to home Dick's had since the flu. Every once in a while, Mac gives him these looks that make him wonder if she's thinking the same thing, if uncomfortable conversations followed by long bouts of trying to avoid everybody else feel just as familiar to her as they do to him.
Kendall and Beaver are dead, but wherever they are, they must be getting a real fucking kick out of this.
*****
He kisses Mac because ... well, hell, he doesn't know why the hell he kisses her. He doesn't even like her, for Christ's sake. She makes this face when she has to eat meat that makes him want to start an argument and lugged her laptop halfway across the country like a teddy bear. She's all cute and bouncy when she's happy and dazed and mopey when she's not. She thinks he's an idiot and he thinks she's pretty high and mighty for someone from the wrong zip code.
But then again, it's not like they've got any other fucking options, right?
And it sounds just as bad in his head as he knows it will sound when she asks him why he stopped clearing the dinner table to do this and he uses that as his excuse. "Well, who the hell else am I supposed to make out with?" is what he'll end up saying, right before she smacks him or stomps on his foot or something.
Until then, the kissing's not so bad.
I'm still kissing Madison Sinclair, he thinks suddenly, and he has to keep kissing her or burst out laughing.
Mac pushes him away, though, gentle but insistent, and he almost thanks her. Her eyes narrow with suspicion for a moment, one hand unconsciously resting on her rounded waist, and she says, "That was ..."
Her voice trails off like she's trying to find something polite to says, and he practically sighs before saying, "It sucked."
Her cute little nose scrunches up. "Yeah. Sorry."
Dick shrugs and glances towards the sink. "I can do the dishes."
"I'd appreciate it," she says, right before she pads in her stockinged feet into the living room.
Madison and Beaver are both long dead, but Dick is positive that wherever they are, they're laughing their fucking asses off.
*****
Dick wants to grow a beard.
It's the stupidest thing, really, but he keeps lobbying for it with Mac. If he's going to run around the woods with a hunting rifle and shoot shit for them to eat all goddamn winter long, he figures he definitely needs a beard. And a tame wolf to be his trusted companion, and maybe a wise Indian friend who can hook him up with some peyote or something.
Mac puts up with his admittedly dumb arguments, most of which she claims he either got from Dances With Wolves when she's feeling generous or Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns when she wants to needle him. Dick doesn't even know why she gets a say since it's not like she's making out with him or anything, but he finds himself checking with her anyway, because ... hell, maybe he hopes she will make out with him again.
Maybe he really is that horny, all hard up for the weird geeky chick who's pregnant with his little brother's kid.
The house is warm, and he doesn't know how she does it. He comes back to the house every night and it's like she wiggled her fingers and made the air warm. There's no heater and no electricity, but there's a fireplace and a wood stove, and winter vacations in Aspen don't count when the fireplace is on a remote. Mac mutters something about a family camping trip and gets this sad look on her face when she brings it up, and Dick's usual reaction is to blurt out something bound to piss her off. Witty he isn't, but annoyance as a distraction he can pull off just fine.
They sleep in the same bed to make it even warmer, since the house gets really cold at night, and he doesn't even know how she puts up with him. He sprawls all over and is pretty sure the dreams he's having at night about Playboy centerfolds are getting a little vocal, and every morning he wakes up and finds she hasn't smothered him with her pillow out of disgust counts as a good day.
Some days he wakes up on his side with his arms and legs on Mac's side of the bed and Mac listening to bad emo music in the kitchen, and he wonders if she woke up with his arm wrapped around her or his leg drapped over hers. Hell, if he were her, that'd sure as hell throw him when he woke up, too.
Even that's better than the days he wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, Mac sleeping still and perfect beside him as the phantom weight of a dead newborn burns his palms.
The nightmares of what'll happen when Mac gives birth have him walking through the living room staring at the empty liquor cabinet with the same restrained longing that makes Mac wander through the living room occasionally and drift her fingertips over the cold plastic cover of the computer sitting on the desk there. Dick wishes it were that easy, that he could just get fucking wasted and be a stupid irresponsible teenager again. He'd trade back whatever immunity he has to that goddamn flu if he could just go back to worrying about not getting caught with weed or passing English lit.
One of these days Mac is going to go into labor, and if Dick works hard enough at it in the coming weeks, he might be able to improve his contribution from a bad Alien joke to one that might actually be a little funny.
It's not the worst thing in the world, though, because he can just see it now, Mac ordering him around and telling him what she needs, then probably following up the birth by hooking the electricity back up again and restarting the Internet all by her lonesome. Maybe he'll even get lucky and she'll download some porn for him. She types faster than he does, anyway.
No, that's not the worst, he thinks, because Hell is other people and Hell is all around us.
Okay, so he's never been the most profound guy in the world. And he thinks that if he told that "Hell is other people" bit to Mac, she'd tell him some famous philosopher said it first even though he got it from a Dynamite Boy song. But he can't help remembering the way people watched them from the shadows as they drove cross-country, staring and hiding and waiting for them to go the hell away like they'd learned to avoid strangers from the last assholes to pass through.
Which makes him wonder sometimes, where the last assholes to pass through went to, which is part of the reason he spends just as much time protecting the house as he does making sure they're both fed and stocked up on firewood.
Not everyone out there is dead, and that's what worries Dick more than anything else these days.
Title: Dark Places Where Monsters Dwell
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Mac and Dick (no, don't worry -- not like that ... kinda), Veronica and Madison
Warnings: Character death. Lots and lots and LOTS of character death.
Spoilers: Up to "Ahoy Mateys", although the events of the following two episodes come into play here, too. I just haven't seen them yet, is all, so better safe than sorry.
Summary: For lack of other options, Mac and Dick try to survive together in a post-apocalyptic world.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, whee!
Author's note: I blame
apocalyptothon and sadiekate and xphoenixrising. Because really, I couldn't be expected to wait for post-apocalyptic VM fic. Dark Places Where Monsters Dwell
*****
The day the four of them try to break into the hospital, Dick's finished off enough of a bottle of Jagermeister to be pretty much useless. Not that he's not useless the rest of the time -- he might not be the smartest person on the planet, but at least he's fucking self-aware enough for that -- but he can barely stand up straight and all he's doing is pissing off Veronica, at this point.
That's why he's the one stupid enough to say, "Fuck it," get into the driver's seat of the Xterra, and drive right through the goddamn front of the hospital.
It isn't a pretty entrance. But the lobby of the hospital is littered with bodies and reeks of decay, and it wasn't going to be a pretty entrance any way you looked at it.
Veronica keeps giving him looks like she wants to strangle him, and Mac has this pleading look in her eyes like she's begging him not to start a fucking fight, and Madison's about this close to bursting into sobs again. And while there might be a small part of Dick that wouldn't mind playing the big heroic, leader-type guy for them (a very small part, but there nonetheless), he's seen enough action movies to know the drill. There is someone who gives orders, someone who keeps the peace, someone who cries all the time and someone who's a drunken asshole.
He thinks, What would Logan do if he were here?, then gets out of the Xterra in the middle of the lobby and bows deeply, extending his arm towards the interior of the hospital. "Ladies," he says, trying not to ruin the effect by gagging on the taste of rotting flesh that settles in the back of his throat. "Your castle awaits."
Veronica's lips twist a little before settling into a sarcastic smile, and he gets the impression she wants to yell at him for his stupidity but can't because he got past the hospital's barricades. She gives the Xterra the same sarcastic look, as if he and the damn car got together and planned this from the start, as if it's taken the place of Logan as Dick's loyal partner-in-crime.
Logan died eight days ago, and they buried him on the beach with his surfboard as a tombstone.
Dick opens his mouth to say something -- what, he doesn't know, but probably something fucking inappropriate -- then pukes all over the side of the Xterra.
*****
Burying Lucy is a stupid promise, and Dick tells Veronica that the moment she says they're all going to go down to the hospital to get her out of the intensive care unit. He doesn't give a shit if Veronica promised Duncan on his deathbed that she'd rescue his kid, that she told Meg's sister she'd do it right before Lizzie disappeared ... hell, he doesn't even give a damn that it's probably the right thing to do.
They were the only healthy people in Neptune who hadn't locked themselves in the hospital -- another thing that Veronica had decided without their input -- and trying to get her out of there wasn't worth the risk.
In between crying jags, the bitch in Madison reared its ugly head and snapped, "The hospital's full of drugs, Dick. There's got to be something in there for you to overdose on."
Dick changed his mind about breaking into the hospital after that. But, you know, not because of the drugs.
Lucy died days earlier, somehow surviving her first few weeks only to stop breathing in her seventh month of life. When they make it through the debris of Neptune's dead and get to the intensive care unit, they find her sprawled out in a bed with needles still jammed into her skin and only figure out she's been dead for five days because that's when the entries on her chart stop. It's easier to think that than ponder the alternative, that her doctors and nurses died first and she lie there withering away with no one to take care of her.
Dick takes one look at her prone body and takes whatever pills are in his hand, praying for a fatal dose.
*****
Two days later, they're sitting around the bonfire on the beach because everywhere else in Neptune is ten feet away from a dead body. At least you can roll the ones on the beach into the ocean, and if you head back to the fire quickly enough and sit down facing away from the water, you won't even notice if they wash back up on shore again.
"When did you first notice?"
All three of them start at Madison's voice, because now she's the one that's wasted, the empty vodka bottle twirling in the sand beneath her fingertips. She stares blankly into the fire, watching it dance and barely moving along with the rhythm in her head. Dick thinks she might be going fucking crazy, and then he thinks she isn't and then he thinks she's already far gone and then he wishes she'd just go the hell away. Not just off the beach, but into another dimension or off to another planet or even into the cornfield like in that stupid Twilight Zone episode Beaver made him watch once.
She turns her tired eyes on the rest of them with the bottle still spinning, spinning, spinning under her fingertips. The skin around her eyes is dark with shadows. Dick's pretty sure that's the biggest sign of the apocalypse he's seen yet, for fuck's sake -- Madison without her makeup. "My little sister," she says slowly, "wouldn't stop coughing."
She chokes on her words, and then understanding dawns on Veronica's face. Mac goes this sickly shade of pale and swallows hard.
Dick's positive he's supposed to go all serious and shit just like the rest of them. Mostly, he tries to look concerned and wonders if he feels up to walking all the way up to the nearest apartment complex just to break a window and steal a fucking six-pack.
Madison goes back to staring at the fire. Spinning, spinning, spinning, and Dick gets dizzy just watching her fingertips in motion. "It was this weird rattle in the back of her throat, you know? That gross sound you make when you've got a really bad chest cold and you're all full of phlegm? Like that."
She's not even looking at Veronica, which is why Dick is the only one who sees her gaze dart anxiously over to Mac. Mac looks like she's about to hyperventilate, and Veronica opens her mouth to speak.
Dick doesn't want to hear it, because it'll be some bullshit complaint about her dad or that black kid she was always hanging out with or fucking Duncan, and before she can say anything, he blurts out, "Beaver passed out and fell in Kendall's lap."
The others stare at him as if he's grown a third arm straight out of his forehead. And he doesn't know if it's because he's still a little bit drunk from Lucy's funeral or if he's just caught up in the moment, but he laughs a little and adds, "Wish I'd thought of it first."
Mac makes a weird throttled sound in the back of her throat and stumbles to her feet, running away past the lump of sand over the baby's grave.
Her eyebrows drawing together as she scowls as him, Veronica plasters on a smile and says, "Gee, you're such a sterling conversationalist, Dick," then kicks over the bottle sitting next to Dick on the sand as she chases after Mac.
Beaver died seventeen days ago, one of the first in Neptune to go, and Dick's been drunk or getting there ever since.
*****
There were about five minutes there in the beginning, before everything really went to hell, where Kendall actually acted like a mother. No, really. Dick walked into the living room and found her spooning chicken broth into Beaver's mouth, his little brother curled up and trembling under a flannel blanket. Granted, Kendall was doing it impeccably dressed and manicured while watching Access Hollywood, but it still counted, especially for someone whose only known qualification for being a mother was possessing the equipment to become one.
Which she wasn't using for that, but since the northernmost qualifications were so nice to leer at across the dinner table, Dick wasn't complaining.
Dick vaguely remembers making a crack about Beaver getting a beautiful woman to do whatever he wanted and Kendall rolling her eyes in response, but for some stupid reason, he mostly remembers what Billy Bush was saying. (Billy Bush probably doesn't even remember what he was saying, Dick sometimes thinks, but then again, Billy Bush was an annoying asshole and it's safe to guess that he's dead now anyway. When he thinks about it, he hopes Billy Bush choked on his own fucking bile like Beaver did in the end.)
According to Billy Bush, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were both in the hospital, although their publicists had no comment. Tom Cruise had hired nurses to come to his house. Madonna and her kids were missing.
The night after they bury Duncan's daughter on the beach not far from where they buried Logan, when the girls have finally gone to sleep, Dick starts counting them off on his fingers.
Brad and Angelina, dead and dead. Tom and Katie, dead and dead. Madonna and her stupid little kids, dead and dead and dead.
Dick Casablancas, alive.
It sucks, but hey, it works for him.
The next morning, Madison's clothes lie scattered across the sand, her small footprints in the sand leading towards the water. Madison dies sometime after Dick goes to sleep at two in the morning, and the only feeling Dick can muster up is relief he won't have to dig another fucking hole in the sand.
*****
They just called it "this new flu" for a while, and then somewhere along the line some bookworm who'd read The Stand one too many times started calling it Captain Trips and it just sort of stuck. They even interviewed Stephen King on "Good Morning, America" or one of those other stupid morning shows, Dick remembers, and all that really sticks in his mind is that the big dork just looked embarrassed to be there -- because it was TV or because it was a dumb reason to get interviewed, Dick didn't know.
Kendall had read it, though, which had shocked the hell out of Dick and Beaver when she'd blurted it out during the interview. She'd just cocked an perfectly sculpted eyebrow and said, "What? I read it on a dare once in high school. I can read, you know."
"You mean, something other than Cosmo?" Beaver muttered.
"Hey, at least that'll keep me alive," she said in that familiar bitchy way of hers. Dick almost misses it.
Every once in a while, he thinks of that as the last real family moment he had before everything went to hell. Usually, he wakes up ten hours after that with a massive hangover and Veronica irritated with him again.
Kendall died fourteen days ago at home, and the one thing Dick doesn't think he'll ever admit to anyone is that he sat next to her bed holding her hand until she went.
*****
Even before Madison wanders into the sea, Veronica only talks when she has to for days on end, which should have been the first sign. She's eerily quiet the rest of the time, Mac hovering around her like a worried grandmother.
Dick spends a lot of time watching Mac and wondering what Beaver saw in her. She looks a little like a chipmunk in an oddly cute way, but she's sweet enough to cause a sugar rush just from standing next to her and every time Dick sobers up long enough, he catches her looking at him like he's a half-drowned puppy she's got to save.
One day, Mac offers her a hot dog from the ones they've roasted over the bonfire, and Veronica says a quiet thanks before ragged coughs tear from her throat.
Mac and Dick share a look, and it strikes Dick that it's the first time in days that Mac's looked at him with pity that's not meant for him.
Veronica dies two days later on the beach, and Dick and Mac brave the growing stench coming from her apartment complex to take her back home and tuck her into her own bed.
Both of them avoid looking at the lump on the couch hidden by a nice blanket and cover their mouths as they rush through the living room.
*****
Before Beaver keeled over while reading on the couch and landed face-first into the lap of Kendall's expensive miniskirt, he'd rented a copy of The Stand because he wanted Dick to know exactly what the hell he was going to go through later on.
At the time, Dick had just spent a lot of time making cracks about how Molly Ringwald had been hotter in The Breakfast Club. But now Dick likes thinking about it like that, even though Beaver was the pissant little brother and Dick had spent the majority of his life practicing his bullying techniques on the kid. He likes thinking that Beaver did it to prepare him for what it would be like, the plague and the aftereffects and being so goddamn alone, because it makes a sick sort of sense.
It gives Dick a starting point, for one thing. It's like an X on the map he can point to later on. X marks the spot where Beaver knew he was going to die. X marks the spot where Beaver knew Dick was never going to get sick. X marks the spot where Beaver knew Dick was probably going to be the one left behind to take care of his fucking girlfriend.
Jesus, Dick couldn't even take care of a goddamn goldfish. He'd had one once a couple of years ago and Logan had bet him a hundred bucks to swallow it whole and alive. Hell, he would have done it for free, considering how wasted he'd been.
Wait ... had he done it for free?
Oh, yeah. Still drunk.
For days, he and Mac hang out on the beach, eating what they can scavenge from stores and trying not to sit downwind of any place that would have been too crowded. Dick used to think he could spend the rest of his life on the beach, just as long as he had a bottomless keg, the delivery number for Pizza Hut, and Lindsay Lohan to keep him company. Now he's not so sure he can pull it off, because Mac isn't Lindsay Lohan and even if she were, he doubts Lindsay Lohan would be wearing that many layers. Or be scowling at him like that.
"We can't stay here forever," she says, rubbing at her upper arms. Dick nearly passes her one of the blankets before he realizes that she's not doing it from the cold. She glances around at what's left of Neptune, the eerie silence broken only by the occasional barking of dogs and the gentle roar of the ocean waves that's even managing to piss him off.
"Sure we can," he says, flashing her a cheerful smile he knows she hates. "The food's all ours, we've got enough beer to last us for years, and I'm pretty sure we can learn to put up with each --"
"I think I'm pregnant," she blurts out.
Beaver died something like three weeks ago, but if he were still here, Dick would kill him.
*****
When Meg Manning died in the hospital and left behind that tiny little baby girl, Dick remembers that his main contribution was to go up to Duncan when he spotted him arguing with Veronica on the street, revel in the sudden uncomfortable silence as he clapped Duncan on the back, and flash the guy a wide smile as he said, "Sucks to be you, doesn't it?"
It wasn't that Dick didn't like babies, or even that he didn't like that baby. Nobody trusted him to change her or feed her or even be alone in the same room with her, which was actually kind of a bonus. Lucy turned out to be a pretty agreeable kid in the end who thought he was just about the funniest thing on the planet, although when you shove breadsticks up your nose and make walrus noises at a baby, they have to love you.
Plus, hot chicks loved a guy with a baby, and he thought working up to Duncan letting him take the kid on walks along the beach with a stroller was a definite investment in his sex life.
There was a short list of people Duncan did trust with Lucy -- when you're in the middle of a nasty custody battle with your kid's abusive grandparents, even Dick knew better -- but Beaver and his geeky girlfriend somehow made the list. One day, Dick came home from hanging out with Logan to find Beav and Mac alternating between cooing over the kid in her car seat and flashing these great big fuck-me eyes at one another.
Dick rolled his eyes and went upstairs to play Grand Theft Auto and contemplated calling Madison for about ten minutes before the phone rang, which meant he got the bad news before everybody else did.
Dick Casablancas, Sr. died in Mexico a month and a half ago -- not from the flu, but in a fucking boating accident -- and in retrospect, Dick is pretty sure that's when his little brother knocked up the computer geek.
*****
Dick has to be the responsible one.
Thinking it makes Dick want to laugh out loud, so he avoids saying it out loud because he's positive it'll drive him fucking batshit. After Mac makes her grand nervous announcement on the beach, Dick makes sure to drink everything in sight and pass out dangerouly close to the water's edge. If they'd had any weed or pills handy, he'd probably have taken those, too. Kill all of my irresponsibility off in one go, he thinks bitterly when he wakes up, the worst hangover of his life clouding his head in pain.
He has a brief dazed moment where he's grateful his liver can't beat the shit out of him, and dies laughing to Mac's bewildered annoyance.
Dick isn't entirely sure what the hell they're doing the next few days, although he knows he fills the Xterra up with gas he siphons from some other broken-down car and stands there for ten minutes clenching his fists as he stares blindly at that fucking bright yellow paint job. When things had gone to shit, some PCH dickhead had gone around town setting 09er cars on fire, and the Casablancas cars had made the top of the list. Somehow, Logan had managed to keep his car intact, which had mostly resulted in Dick cracking jokes for the next week and a half about Logan giving Weevil blow jobs just to keep his precious Xterra in one piece.
He'd even managed to get one in on Logan's deathbed, which had pissed Veronica off to no end but made Logan smile a little. The shit you can only say to your best friends, you know?
He spends those few days having these moments of brief maturity followed by long moments of complete stupidity. He spends an entire afternoon packing the Xterra so that they can go find someone else out there in the world, then takes the pregnancy test Mac hands him and drops it before he can even look at the positive result because ... well, hell, she pissed on it, for crying out loud.
Veronica's been dead for days, but if she were here, Dick's pretty sure she would have smacked him upside the head for that one.
****
Dick's turned it into a guessing game in his head, something to kill the silent time in the car as he drives. When Mac's not sleeping, she's trying not to let him see her cry or talk to him, both of which he gets. If she bursts into tears, she's that weeping pregnant chick he's got to drag along with him. If she talks to him, they'll just get reminded the only thing they have in common is their ability to stand upright (and Dick's ability to stand upright is debatable), and then he'll say something that pisses her off and they'll spend the rest of the day (if not the week) not talking to one another.
So he sits in the driver's seat and tries to figure out what anybody else he used to know would have done in his situation.
I am all alone with a pregnant girl who hates me, there's a loaded handgun in the glove compartment, and we are the only two people who made it out of Neptune alive. What do I do?
It's like a math problem. Except, you know, without math.
The Beaver in his head is too busy comforting Mac and assuring her it's all right to see some asshole with a deadly leer and his gaze fixed on her back sneaking up behind them with a knife.
The Duncan in his head spends most of his time dazed and boring, making Mac think everything's all right and she's got a keeper before he goes fucking apeshit one day and dumps her on the side of the road before driving off to Mexico.
The Logan in his head fights with her during the day and fucks her at night. Sure, she's not his type, and he's not her type, either. When the hell did that ever stop Logan?
The Veronica in his head is responsible, clever, strong, and resourceful and still gets the two of them killed or raped anyway.
Dick wonders if there's a list somewhere, of guys from Neptune you'd least like to get stuck with in an end-of-the-world scenario. He's pretty sure he's on the top of the list and feels like shit for a full twenty minutes before he realizes Aaron Echolls would definitely be worse to be around. Dick Casablancas might be notorious for being a selfish jerk, but at least he's not going to peg you over the head with an ashtray.
Aaron Echolls has been dead for almost two months now, which is probably a good thing. At least he can't argue that he never had to spike a girl's beer to have sex with her, Dick thinks, and for once the reminder of that night makes him queasy.
*****
Outside of Reno, they stop to get food from a deserted mini-mart and some asshole with a deadly leer and his gaze fixed on Mac's back sneaks up behind them with a knife.
Dick doesn't think -- not a surprise -- and shoots him right between the eyes with the handgun Mac had had to remind him to carry into the mini-mart. Now, that's a surprise.
The wannabe rapist dies within minutes, bleeding out all over the linoleum floor. It's the first time Dick's ever hit a real target, and he slumps against the front counter and down to the floor staring at the gun in shock.
Mac crouches beside him, concern in her eyes. She won't take her eyes off him because doing so will make her look at the dead body on the floor. "Are you going to be okay?" she finally says after a long quiet moment.
"Yeah." No, I'm not. Jesus, I just killed someone. That really sucked. Let's never do that again. "Yeah, I can do that again."
Dick doesn't hear or know what he's saying, and he thinks that he could be okay if they just sat there for another hour letting him think, "Oh, shit," over and over again while letting the weight of the gun get more familiar in his hand. He has a brief moment of clarity -- Mac needs a gun, we need more weapons, I need to practice my aim -- right before he puts the gun down and starts to shake.
Mac smiles at him, pained but grateful, the worried smile of a realist, and she wraps her arms around his shoulders.
Beaver died weeks ago now, but Dick's got to give him props for picking a girl who'll hug you after you kill a guy and not say anything when you cry on her shoulder.
*****
"You know, half of my sock drawer was filled with condoms."
Mac stares at him in confusion as she looks up from the fried chicken they're eating. Vegetarianism died as a concept sometime between the rest of civilization dropping dead and the loss of the electricity, and Dick had been so desperate for real meat he'd spent the entire morning since they'd crossed the border into Nebraska chasing a chicken around the front yard of someone's farm. Hey, it was either that or killing a cow, and yeah, they were bigger targets and moved slower, but he'd had a hard enough time convincing Mac to let him kill the chicken. "Congratulations," she says, dragging it out so that it sounds more like a question than a statement.
"It's just, you know, after Meg, I thought we were all supposed to learn our lesson or something." Dick leans forward across the picnic table, flashes Mac his least smarmy smile, and says, "Don't tell me I was the only one paying attention during sex ed."
Mac makes a face and takes a sip of the soda Dick cooled in the nearby river. "That's just because you were hoping they'd give us all kinds of dirty pointers."
"Hey, I still say a little lesbian porn is educational."
She rolls her eyes and shakes her head, and for a second Dick just smiles and eats his chicken and feels a little more at ease than he has in weeks. There weren't any bodies on the farm, and they hadn't seen anyone alive in a week and a half, and that last guy had made a run for it as soon as he'd seen the hunting rifle Dick had taken to carrying around. Summer's fading into fall and the stark streak of common sense that tells him they really have to find someplace to stay before winter comes is momentarily buried under the childish glee that autumn looming on the horizon doesn't mean another trip back to Neptune High.
"I just --"
Mac's voice jolts Dick out of his thoughts, and he looks over at her in all seriousness as she blushes and pokes at her food. "We just ... with your dad, and the flu was coming, and ... we were going to do it any--" She lifts her head suddenly and stares at him, as if she were talking to herself or into a cell phone and he'd just been some dickhead she hadn't even known was watching her. "I don't even know why I'm bothering to tell you all this."
He shrugs it off and thinks that if he were in her shoes, he would have come out without all of the stuttering and said he'd nailed her all over the goddamn house just for the hell of it and could produce photographic evidence for anyone who wanted it.
She stops eating for a minute and smiles, and it's almost wicked the way she says, "I should probably tell you about me and Madison."
The dirty part of his brain immediately wonders (and kinda hopes) she's about to tell him Beaver had a three-way with her and Madison, but then she starts in on this story about Veronica Mars (well, of course it would be Veronica, and there's another wave of disappointment that the phrase "four-way orgy" doesn't follow) digging into her past and her and Madison being switched at birth like out of some lame Lifetime movie.
Madison Sinclair is dead, but somewhere out there she's getting the shock of her afterlife and Dick almost wishes he could watch the fit that's sure to follow.
*****
They pick out the cabin because it's in the middle of nowhere and it's on a hill, which makes about as much sense to the both of them as if they'd picked a house in the valley near the river that's surrounded by trees. There's good enough arguments for both -- they can see anybody coming from miles away on the hill, but being in the valley means being closer to freshwater -- and either way, Mac can argue better than he can every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Dick mostly wonders if he can talk Mac into one night a week of complete immaturity. Not like he expects her to go out to a bar, drink everything in sight, and dance on the tabletop for an audience of corpses, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't pay to see it, either. You know, without the dead people.
Beaver's been dead for months now, it suddenly occurs to Dick, and he can't help to think that Beaver would probably have a fit that his older brother's thinking of his girlfriend like that.
*****
They settle into this weird routine, where they make sure they're fed and watered and warm and then suddenly winter comes and they're trapped inside where they have to ... you know, talk. They usually only last ten minutes or so before Mac starts in on something that bores the hell out of Dick or Dick says something that makes Mac want to throw something at his head. After that, they drift off to their respective corners like boxers, either one of them waiting for their next opening.
It's the closest thing to home Dick's had since the flu. Every once in a while, Mac gives him these looks that make him wonder if she's thinking the same thing, if uncomfortable conversations followed by long bouts of trying to avoid everybody else feel just as familiar to her as they do to him.
Kendall and Beaver are dead, but wherever they are, they must be getting a real fucking kick out of this.
*****
He kisses Mac because ... well, hell, he doesn't know why the hell he kisses her. He doesn't even like her, for Christ's sake. She makes this face when she has to eat meat that makes him want to start an argument and lugged her laptop halfway across the country like a teddy bear. She's all cute and bouncy when she's happy and dazed and mopey when she's not. She thinks he's an idiot and he thinks she's pretty high and mighty for someone from the wrong zip code.
But then again, it's not like they've got any other fucking options, right?
And it sounds just as bad in his head as he knows it will sound when she asks him why he stopped clearing the dinner table to do this and he uses that as his excuse. "Well, who the hell else am I supposed to make out with?" is what he'll end up saying, right before she smacks him or stomps on his foot or something.
Until then, the kissing's not so bad.
I'm still kissing Madison Sinclair, he thinks suddenly, and he has to keep kissing her or burst out laughing.
Mac pushes him away, though, gentle but insistent, and he almost thanks her. Her eyes narrow with suspicion for a moment, one hand unconsciously resting on her rounded waist, and she says, "That was ..."
Her voice trails off like she's trying to find something polite to says, and he practically sighs before saying, "It sucked."
Her cute little nose scrunches up. "Yeah. Sorry."
Dick shrugs and glances towards the sink. "I can do the dishes."
"I'd appreciate it," she says, right before she pads in her stockinged feet into the living room.
Madison and Beaver are both long dead, but Dick is positive that wherever they are, they're laughing their fucking asses off.
*****
Dick wants to grow a beard.
It's the stupidest thing, really, but he keeps lobbying for it with Mac. If he's going to run around the woods with a hunting rifle and shoot shit for them to eat all goddamn winter long, he figures he definitely needs a beard. And a tame wolf to be his trusted companion, and maybe a wise Indian friend who can hook him up with some peyote or something.
Mac puts up with his admittedly dumb arguments, most of which she claims he either got from Dances With Wolves when she's feeling generous or Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns when she wants to needle him. Dick doesn't even know why she gets a say since it's not like she's making out with him or anything, but he finds himself checking with her anyway, because ... hell, maybe he hopes she will make out with him again.
Maybe he really is that horny, all hard up for the weird geeky chick who's pregnant with his little brother's kid.
The house is warm, and he doesn't know how she does it. He comes back to the house every night and it's like she wiggled her fingers and made the air warm. There's no heater and no electricity, but there's a fireplace and a wood stove, and winter vacations in Aspen don't count when the fireplace is on a remote. Mac mutters something about a family camping trip and gets this sad look on her face when she brings it up, and Dick's usual reaction is to blurt out something bound to piss her off. Witty he isn't, but annoyance as a distraction he can pull off just fine.
They sleep in the same bed to make it even warmer, since the house gets really cold at night, and he doesn't even know how she puts up with him. He sprawls all over and is pretty sure the dreams he's having at night about Playboy centerfolds are getting a little vocal, and every morning he wakes up and finds she hasn't smothered him with her pillow out of disgust counts as a good day.
Some days he wakes up on his side with his arms and legs on Mac's side of the bed and Mac listening to bad emo music in the kitchen, and he wonders if she woke up with his arm wrapped around her or his leg drapped over hers. Hell, if he were her, that'd sure as hell throw him when he woke up, too.
Even that's better than the days he wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, Mac sleeping still and perfect beside him as the phantom weight of a dead newborn burns his palms.
The nightmares of what'll happen when Mac gives birth have him walking through the living room staring at the empty liquor cabinet with the same restrained longing that makes Mac wander through the living room occasionally and drift her fingertips over the cold plastic cover of the computer sitting on the desk there. Dick wishes it were that easy, that he could just get fucking wasted and be a stupid irresponsible teenager again. He'd trade back whatever immunity he has to that goddamn flu if he could just go back to worrying about not getting caught with weed or passing English lit.
One of these days Mac is going to go into labor, and if Dick works hard enough at it in the coming weeks, he might be able to improve his contribution from a bad Alien joke to one that might actually be a little funny.
It's not the worst thing in the world, though, because he can just see it now, Mac ordering him around and telling him what she needs, then probably following up the birth by hooking the electricity back up again and restarting the Internet all by her lonesome. Maybe he'll even get lucky and she'll download some porn for him. She types faster than he does, anyway.
No, that's not the worst, he thinks, because Hell is other people and Hell is all around us.
Okay, so he's never been the most profound guy in the world. And he thinks that if he told that "Hell is other people" bit to Mac, she'd tell him some famous philosopher said it first even though he got it from a Dynamite Boy song. But he can't help remembering the way people watched them from the shadows as they drove cross-country, staring and hiding and waiting for them to go the hell away like they'd learned to avoid strangers from the last assholes to pass through.
Which makes him wonder sometimes, where the last assholes to pass through went to, which is part of the reason he spends just as much time protecting the house as he does making sure they're both fed and stocked up on firewood.
Not everyone out there is dead, and that's what worries Dick more than anything else these days.
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Date: 2005-12-30 08:45 am (UTC)But oh wow. That was so amazing. So bleak and dark - in a completely good way.
Did you know you are wholy responsible for me enjoying the post-apocolyptic genre? Or even liking it at all? It's all your fault. ;-)
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Date: 2005-12-30 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 09:02 am (UTC)I love that you referenced The Stand, and that it was Dick and Mac who survived, and Mac being pregnant, and... Well, I love everything about the story. :)
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Date: 2005-12-30 11:52 am (UTC)Not even having seen more than half an episode, I could still get a very good grasp of each character's personality and the way their personal dynamics filled the story.
The non-linear story really suited it and the so-and-so died certain days ago was enough to create a sense of how they had come to the place of just sitting on the beach waiting to die.
Loved the The Stand references, the author embarrassed to be the expert on apocyliptic times!
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Date: 2005-12-30 03:16 pm (UTC)This was.... heavy. In a good way. Dick and Mac. All alone. And Dick is going to have to deliver the baby and he has to protect them and all that. And it's awesome.
Not everyone out there is dead, and that's what worries Dick more than anything else these days.
The X-Men are alive, right? Heh. Ohhh *hugs Dick and Mac*
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Date: 2005-12-30 03:43 pm (UTC)Okay, so he's never been the most profound guy in the world. And he thinks that if he told that "Hell is other people" bit to Mac, she'd tell him some famous philosopher said it first even though he got it from a Dynamite Boy song.
Hee! And I was about to get all proud of him for a deep thought, too.
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Date: 2005-12-30 05:04 pm (UTC)The night after they bury Duncan's daughter on the beach not far from where they buried Logan, when the girls have finally gone to sleep, Dick starts counting them off on his fingers.
Brad and Angelina, dead and dead. Tom and Katie, dead and dead. Madonna and her stupid little kids, dead and dead and dead.
Dick Casablancas, alive.
It sucks, but hey, it works for him.
It worked for me too, like whoa. =) This was amazing, thank you so much for posting it.
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Date: 2005-12-30 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 07:05 pm (UTC)You have a tiny typo here:
Some days he wakes up on hs side
But otherwise, there's not much to complain about. I love that the Xterra's somehow managed to survive a major housefire as well as the apocalapse.
I'm still kissing Madison Sinclair, he thinks suddenly, and he has to keep kissing her or burst out laughing.
That totally made me burst out laughing.
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Date: 2005-12-30 08:31 pm (UTC)You're so fucking talented, I don't know what to do with you. That was just terrifyingly bleak and awesome and fucked-up. I love the unlikely Dick and Mac combo - you made them make so much sense. I was on the verge of tears through the whole damn thing. You killed Veronica! And Logan! And Beaver! And Keith! And Wallace! And everybody! Holy shit!
You own the world.
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Date: 2005-12-30 08:53 pm (UTC)Beaver died weeks ago now, but Dick's got to give him props for picking a girl who'll hug you after you kill a guy and not say anything when you cry on her shoulder.
Seriously, what was that? Did you just make me feel sorry for Dick Casablancas? How is that even possible?
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Date: 2005-12-30 09:06 pm (UTC)Wow... I'm so speechless that I'll just go and pimp this fic on my lj. That's all I can do. Gawd.
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Date: 2005-12-30 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-30 10:29 pm (UTC)Not fair! You made me like Dick!
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Date: 2005-12-30 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 12:47 am (UTC)Wow!
Date: 2005-12-31 01:00 am (UTC)I'm a sucker for Apocalypse fic...definitely due to my readings and re-readings of The Stand...and this was a gorgeous, aching, homage to both that and On the Beach that stayed so very true to Dick...who is, of course, an unlikeable fuck-up...even at the end of the world...but one who still needs a freakin' hug!
Bravo!
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Date: 2005-12-31 02:37 am (UTC)I noticed a few possible mistakes, though:
"Dick Casablancas might be notorious for being a selfish jerk, but at least h-e's not going to peg you over the head with an ashtray."
"The Beaver in his head is too busy comforting Mac and assuring her it's all right to see some asshole with a deadly leer and his gaze fixed on her back sneaking up behind them with a knife."
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Date: 2005-12-31 03:57 am (UTC)Thanks so much for writing and posting this.
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Date: 2005-12-31 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-31 03:58 pm (UTC)And I'm glad I did, because that was really good. Really liked the style. Maybe a bit overdone in parts, but good. One thing that jumped out was the almost gratuitous cursing, but unless I'm mistaken, Dick's excessive profanity seemed to mostly fade away after he was left with Mac, which was a nice touch.
Nice Stand references. Interesting to see Dick's POV. I liked the way he really did think of other people and who he was in relation to them.
Well done.