WHO: Cullen Rutherford and Veronica Mars WHEN: Monday evening, January 31 WHERE: the Mount Weather library WHAT: A couple days after having a random evening of hanging out in the tavern/making out in Veronica’s room, they meet again. WARNINGS: References to violence, rampant heterosexuality.
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Over the years, Veronica Mars had convinced herself she wasn’t a people-person. It wasn’t entirely true - before life had decided to suck she had been one of the popular kids in school, surrounded by friends both true and two-faced (and some, as it turned out, could be both at once). Now that she had settled into her best version of being cantankerous and jaded, it was simply easier to tell herself that being lonely was preferable to being betrayed. And so when she went to the tavern, she chose a small table and stared right ahead, daring anyone to come sit by her. When she ate in the Mess Hall, she usually gathered her food and ate on the fly, not wanting to go through the “can I sit here” awkwardness.
And when at the library, she stacked books around herself as if forming a series of turrets, her pen making scratches at a rapid pace against the paper. It was a project she had begun ages ago when she had first arrived: get familiar with everyone’s source material. It wasn’t a project she advertised, knowing how people reacted to having their secrets on the outside, but Veronica didn’t give a shit. If there was someone dangerous here, she wanted to be armed with knowledge. On today’s agenda: the Harry Potter series. She’d read up through the sixth book but hadn’t had time for the seventh. Unfortunately, approaching the subject matter in this way wasn’t nearly as fun as staying up all night with a pot of coffee and reading the book as soon as it was released at midnight.
Cullen had taken the opposite approach to “source material,” considering other people’s secrets none of his business. He already had more people than he would like knowing the ins and outs of his business; it seemed only courteous not to do the same to others. There were people higher up the chain of command who knew who was who, and with Asala as one of the people in charge, he was all right with that.
His approach to social interaction, however, was a lot like Veronica’s. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people. He didn’t like stupid people, of which there were unfortunately many, and he didn’t like going in pursuit of fun when there was still a mountain of work to be done, but he actually did enjoy a night in the tavern with his friends. It was just that so often the people who had been his friends either ended up dead or going mad and trying to burn the world down rather than admit defeat. The people he’d become friends with in the Inquisition were the first friends he’d had that actually survived the big battle and didn’t turn out to be villains in the end. As such, he was slow to open up to people. He tended to be a bit awkward, as well - too straightforward and blunt, or too talkative about a topic of interest, or stumbling over his words when someone flirted with him. The Templars were excellent at teaching sword, shield, and self-discipline, but less excellent at teaching social graces.
So when Cullen came through the library to look for new reading material and spotted Veronica, he had absolutely no idea what to do.
Clearly he couldn’t ignore her - not that he wanted to ignore her. He liked Veronica, they’d had fun on Friday night, and he very much wanted to talk to her again. What if she didn’t want that, though? Then he’d just be making things awkward if he went over to talk to her. And she looked very busy at the moment. She had all those books, and she was not set up like someone who wanted to speak to other people. It couldn’t hurt to say hello, though, right? It wasn’t as if he were utterly hopeless at reading people. He could say hello, and judge from there if she wanted to talk to him or if she’d rather he fall through a mysterious trap door and vanish.
Right. Hello it would be, then. He could do this, and he would not muck it up.
Cullen approached from the side, to make sure she’d see him and he wouldn’t mistakenly startle her. Not that she seemed the sort to startle easily; it was just polite. “Good evening,” he said, and smiled slightly. “I don’t mean to interrupt - I just saw you and thought I would say hello.”
At the first sign of movement out of the corner of her eye, Veronica raised her head from her papers, chin set, eyes narrowed, ready to be inhospitable if necessary - but no, it was Cullen Rutherford. He was altogether undeserving of any degree of ire, so she softened her Active Bitchface into something a little less hostile, even if some surprise nonetheless showed through her eyes. It wasn’t that she hadn’t figured she’d run into Cullen again - it was a small, contained population, after all - but the fact that he’d approached her was… unusual. And not, she decided after gauging her feelings about the interruption, unwelcome. What had last Friday been about anyway? She’d invited him up after they’d met at the tavern, there’d been some kissing, but worse, there’d been some cuddling. They’d been mutually lonely, mutually silly. And now Veronica felt embarrassed, as if she’d put on a play and been something she was usually not. Never mind that she’d enjoyed herself. Never mind that she’d been charmed when he hadn’t wanted to rush into sex. Never mind that he was a good bit older and more dragon-slaying than she’d ever be.
“I’m at the end of a chapter,” she assured him, shutting Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. “No big.”
If Cullen was bad at social interaction, well, Veronica was nearly so. She gazed at him expectantly with the air of someone used to quid pro quo. People wanted her to do things for them. Find their dog. Figure out who their husband was cheating on them with. Stalk the gardener. But small talk? Nah, people didn’t usually approach her for that. She was too abrasive, defensive, and well… purposeful.
Understanding belatedly that this was a social call, she cleared her throat and gestured to the chair across from her. “All yours, buddy.”
And realizing yet again that she was doing it - that thing where her snark pushed people away rather than endeared her to them - she parted the tower of books in two and peeped out at him. “They wouldn’t let me build a pillow fort, so this? Next best thing.”
The comment made Cullen laugh - a quiet chuckle, really, out of respect for the subdued nature of the environment - and he took the offered chair. He liked Veronica’s jokes - the half or so of them that he understood, anyway. A lot of them were predicated on knowledge of her world, but those ended up being entertaining, too. Friday night’s “what’s a cheerleader” had led to “explain football” and “wait, everyone in your world goes to school?”, and it was all interesting. She had promised to add to his ever-growing Mount Weather Lexicon that evening, and she had delivered.
He hadn’t expected when he met her at the tavern that he would end the evening lying around in her bed, wrapped up together and alternating between kissing and telling stories about dogs. It had been good - he hadn’t been that close with anyone since his Trouble had put Betsy in Medical, and he’d missed it more than he realized. He was a little concerned by how much younger she was, but it wasn’t as if she weren’t a real adult, and she had been the one to initiate, and he got the impression from her reaction to his pulling back on the reins that she had as much or more (probably more) experience with romantic entanglements than he did. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it did. It didn’t worry Cullen enough to make him not want to get to know her better, though, and so he looked her stack of books over as he sat.
“It’s a very fine book fort,” he said, eying it like the walls of a proper fortress. “I find myself tempted to build a few very small trebuchets to attempt to take it down. Perhaps also a tiny battering ram.”
She snorted, charmed despite herself. Veronica was unused to conversation with a guy who knew ‘trebuchet’ as something other than the name of a font. “What about a flying buttress?” she posited, and then in a lower tone belonging to a twelve year old: “Buttress.”
“You know,” she said after a moment, “I don’t even know what a flying buttress is. I’ve just heard it bandied about in discussions of castles and moats and fortresses in our history classes. Did you ever live in a castle? Or is that something strictly for the higher classes?”
It seemed a neutral enough topic to alight on. Conversations around here were a little like walking over a minefield - you didn’t want to accidentally start up on someone’s inevitably tragic past. And what little she knew about Cullen indicated that he weighed his words carefully. That personality quirk usually went hand in hand with being private, and Veronica didn’t want to piss him off by virtue of being her usual nosy self.
Cullen had a lot he kept to himself. He didn’t lie about his past, but there was a good deal of it that he didn’t care to discuss, at least not in a light social setting. Architecture and class structures were easy enough, though; Veronica had called that one correctly. He actually rather liked architecture, though much of his study of it had been for the purpose of figuring out how to effectively destroy it.
“The Inquisition was housed in a castle called Skyhold, actually,” he answered. “I had my office and quarters in a tower there with a roof that was about a third caved in - it was an old castle, abandoned for Maker only knows how long, which also means no flying buttresses. They’re supports for walls with the middle cut away. You see them in old elven and modern Orlesian buildings a lot. Er...Orlais being the country next to the one I’m from. People from there are Orlesian. Remus says it sounds like France.”
“You’ve lived in a freakin’ castle,” she muttered to herself, “of course you have.” She was impressed, even if he wasn’t. A drafty, caved in castle was still a castle. “Which country that’s isn’t not-France are you from? And what’s it like?”
It wasn’t an interview, not really, even if she was full of questions. It was more fun to talk to people than to study their canon, after all. And it was absolutely more socially acceptable.
Cullen didn’t mind satisfying her curiosity. It was a pleasant enough topic of conversation, and a good excuse to talk to Veronica. Already he felt significantly less self-conscious than he had when he’d first approached.
“I only lived in a castle the once,” he reminded her, because he didn’t want it to sound more impressive than it actually was. “Before that, I lived in the Templar barracks in Kirkwall, which were in a former slave prison. I’m from Ferelden, though, and grew up in a grass roof house on a dairy farm in the Frostback Mountains, near the village of Honnleath. It’s not unlike here, in terms of cold and snow, but the mountains are much higher and rockier.”
“Sounds like Colorado,” she offered, and then explained: “Grasslands with cattle. Big, rocky mountains with snow on top. Lot of people who hate to be told what to do. That kind of thing.”
It bothered her to think that his home world had had slaves. He’d said it so casually. Veronica had never labored under the idea that fantasy worlds would be perfect - if they were perfect, why were all of Cullen’s friends so consistently armed - but still. Hearing the offhand way that he discussed the barracks made his world feel less fantasy-fluffy-make-believe, and more of a place of toil, joy, strife… the usual bullshit that made up an existence.
“I told you about Neptune, California,” she said, glancing at the stack of books for no reason other than it was easier to talk about herself if she wasn’t looking at him head-on. “It’s a wealthy burg. Nearly everyone who lives there has parents who got rich quick turing a tech boom. Nearly everyone.” A tight, self-deprecating smile. “Dad and I get by fine, but I work at the detective agency to help us. The work, it comes and it goes.”
“You hit the nail on the head with your description of Colorado - it’s a very good match for southern Ferelden,” Cullen replied. “It’s not wealthy country in the least. Nearly everyone farms, and fortunes are dictated by the seasons even in times of peace.”
Not that there had been a lot in the way of peace over the past several years, but that was all on the list of things he’d rather not get into.
“It’s given me virtually no patience with the lords and ladies of the nobility, which annoys the Inquisition’s ambassador and spymaster both to no end. They snipe and gossip and wear silk while the people who work their lands and keep them in jeweled slippers pray to Andraste that the weather holds and they don’t starve…” He paused with a wry smile. “And I’ll stop there before it turns into either a rant or a lecture. This is why my standing orders when I’m forced to deal with nobles are ‘hush and look pretty.’”
“A cunning defensive strategy.” Veronica rolled her eyes, a smirk on her lips. “I guess you have to behave yourself in the Inquisition, right? No backtalking the royalty. We have royalty too in Neptune - the 09ers, so named after the last two digits of the zip code in which they live. They’re sons of tech industry know-it-alls. Daughters of actresses. Politicians. They run it all. Get away with murder, if they want.”
Her voice was light, but her expression was suddenly not. She smiled then, without humor, and leaned back in her seat as if getting comfortable. “Any of your bad guys make it here? What’s the going plan if they do?”
Perhaps it was the violent nature of the world Cullen came from, but he assumed she meant ‘get away with murder’ literally. It was certainly literal in Thedas. He’d seen it over and over in Kirkwall, and it was worse in Orlais. Enough money and power could get a person out of nearly any charge, and it was infuriating. Cullen might not appreciate Sera drawing butts on his reports at Skyhold, but he did appreciate her taking nobles down a peg or two.
“We had a demon here shortly after I arrived, and we killed it,” he said, thinking back over the possible villains that could come from his world to this one. “There was the dragon, which wasn’t technically from our world but close enough, and we killed that as well. So...kill it? That’s our usual response to ‘bad guys,’ as you put it. This concept of ‘wait, let’s see if maybe this time it doesn’t want to kill us’ with creatures who show over and over that they definitely want to kill us is more than a little foreign to me.”
Her shoulders relaxed a hair, her smile growing less fixed. Kill bad guys? Veronica could work with that. “Hey, I’m all about non-violence and rehabilitation in a world where we can actually provide those things,” she said, shrugging airily with a ‘what can I do’ carelessness, “but while we’re trying not to starve to death and barely staying peaceful with the natives? Nah. I have myself a short but heartfelt little list of folk that if they show here, in a pod, I’m going to be nice. I’m going to be patient. I’m going to be conflicted, of course, but I’m going to be obedient when they get assigned a room and fed and given a job and treated like worthy people.”
Her fluffy little demeanor abruptly melted like cotton candy thrown into a swamp. “And then I’m going to people like Iron Bull, like you, and I’m going to tell them what they did, and let them take care of it.”
It wouldn’t be how Dad would have wanted it. But Dad wasn’t here, and if the Pod Gods were dumb enough to bring Aaron Echolls or Beaver Casablancas to her instead of him, well, the Pod Gods were going to reap the consequences.
“I’ve got to say,” she said after a moment, hiking up an eyebrow as she looked him over, “you got some serious brownie points on the common sense portion of today’s getting-to-know-you.”
Cullen didn’t even blink at the idea of killing someone who needed killing. People like him and the Iron Bull and the others from Thedas, as Veronica had noted, were well used to the notion. There were good people who made mistakes in the world, but some people gave up their right to being treated like human beings, and they got their heads taken off. They got their heads taken off if they were lucky - if they weren’t, they took a sword to the gut in battle and took a lot longer to die, or they were useful enough to the Inquisition that they were kept imprisoned long enough for the red lyrium to kill them instead. Cullen had heard enough of the villains who came from the other worlds represented at Mount Weather to know that there was genuine evil all over. If some of it came through from Veronica’s world, that was the sort of thing that neither he nor Bull nor any of the others were likely to have any problem dispatching straight to the Void.
“I’m equally glad to see that you’re also on the side of Evil Needs to Be Destroyed,” Cullen replied, giving her a tilted smile in return. “Which does indeed seem like common sense, but if it is, common sense is decidedly lacking around here.”
“This place reeks of finding hope in the darkest place. Inspires many an optimist,” Veronica answered, rolling her eyes. “I mean, humanity screwed up badly enough to literally blow the planet up. People come here, they want to prove they’re better than that.”
She very sincerely doubted humanity could transcend its worst impulses. Particularly in these bare-bones conditions. Veronica wasn’t opposed to trying one’s best but at the same time in her experience people were just people with all the usual temptations and deadly sins. No matter what freaky-deaky world they were from. Perking up, she let a smile loose Cullen’s way. “Hey, look at that. You suck at lightweight small talk nearly as much as I do. That almost deserves a ribbon.”
That got another quiet laugh out of Cullen, who looked a bit sheepish at being called out. “At least I’m not alone in it this time,” he said in an attempt at looking on the bright side. “Really, I think I am an optimist. If I weren’t, I’d have thrown myself off a cliff by now. Instead, I help throw demons, corrupted knights, and megalomaniacal darkspawn off of cliffs.”
Cullen would have agreed that humanity as a whole wasn’t going to get its act together here. He did believe that individual humans could, though, and that was close enough to being an optimist for him. He had looked despair in the eyes and walked away from it, which meant that despite the too-serious expression Varric accused his face of, Cullen was choosing to be hopeful.
“Sounds just like California,” Veronica quipped, even if she was fairly certain Cullen might take her seriously. They might not have demons, knights or darkspawn - whatever that was - but they did have gang members, rich kid jackasses, and entitled B-list celebrities. Surely there were parallels.
“How long have you been here, anyway?” she asked, tracing a place on the desk that had been chipped by something. Who knew what. Another kid pressing on the paper too hard with their pen, or one of the genocidal fights that had taken place here. Either/or.
“It’s been…” Cullen paused, making a quick count of the time. “Almost nine months now.”
He seemed a little surprised by the answer. He’d been here a long time, he knew that, but nine months? That was the better part of a year. Part of spring, then summer and autumn both come and gone, and here they were in the midst of winter, and all that time he’d been in a world completely alien to his own. He’d made sergeant in a world not his own, for Maker’s sake. It sounded like madness, spoken out loud.
Cullen snorted a short laugh. “I can’t decide if that seems like forever or if it’s passed in an instant. What of you?”
“Since November. Early November.” Less than three months, really - only one-third of the time Cullen had been here. Like Cullen, Veronica wasn’t sure if time had flown or dragged. Either way it was definitely skewed in an apocalypse. “People seem to come and go pretty frequently around here. Weird how some seem to stick. You must have been around for what… near the beginning?”
Well, beginning probably wasn’t the right word. Beginning of the end, as the Smashing Pumpkins were fond of screeching.
Cullen nodded. “Not long after, at least. Sera, Asala, Hawke, and Fenris were here a bit before I was--they’re others from my homeland,” he added for clarification. Everybody knew Asala, but the others were less visible. Then again, no one was quite so visible as the Inquisitor, no matter what the universe. “I came a month or so after the earliest arrivals. Short of the mysterious disappearances, I think most of us who’ve been here that long have given up on any notion of returning home. I can’t say what makes us sticky...but here we are.”
“Sticky. That’s a good word for it. ‘Chosen’ sounded so pretentious.” Veronica wasn’t sure how she felt about another six months. Granted, she’d heard things were easier in the summer when food was more plentiful and tempers were more generous, but as much as there were people she was glad to be away from… the thought of going another six months without seeing her father hurt like a persistent toothache.
She smiled then, hurriedly before she could really feel it. “Here’s to another six months of random dragons, tragic backstories, and awkward alliances. Pretend I’m holding a drink for that.”
Cullen chuckled and raised an imaginary mug of ale. “And Maker save us from ever being Chosen,” he added. “I’ve met some Chosen Ones in my time, and all three of them seem like their lives are working out much better here, a good ways away from being Chosen.”
Things didn’t end well for heroes, Varric always said. Here, for all its flaws as a place, things seemed to work out better for the heroes. There were random dragons and tragic backstories, but no one was trapped in the Fade, or on an endless quest, or fighting to keep the world from being unmade. It could be worse.
“Who knew it’d take an apocalypse for some people to find something that resembles a happy ending?” Not that Veronica really believed in those. She believed in respites, sure, moments when life went to go bat someone else’s happiness to death before returning to her door. But endings? Nah.
Still, one took what one could.
She stood then, that slapdash smile still on her face. “I’m going to grab dinner. And then read something creepy and claustrophobic, fitting the February chill and mountain barracks atmosphere.” A pause, her gaze moving directly on him, over him, as she tried to decide what to do. “You’re welcome to knock on my door, later, if you want. If you don’t want, or want to raincheck, that’s fine too.”
Right now, she wanted to think about what he’d said. Nine months. Could she be happy here? Happy enough? One thing was for sure - she didn’t want to go to sleep with that strange hollow feeling left in her heart.
“I’ll see you later tonight, then,” Cullen said, and smiled in that slightly crooked way that the scar on his mouth insisted on. He hadn’t expected the invitation, but it was welcome. He had friends here, but he was lonely much of the time, too. It was a hazard of being a person who kept so much of himself to himself. He’d like spending another night with Veronica--and maybe some more nights after this one. Even just lying in her bed reading with her next to him would be a nice change from the usual staying up too late in hopes that he’d sleep through the nightmares.
“Cool. I’ll get something Lovecraftian going. I hope you like tentacles.” Gathering her belongings, and deciding it’d be more fun to let him wonder what the hell a Lovecraft was and what tentacles had to do with a rousing night in, she shot him once last sideways smile of her own and headed toward the Mess Hall.