A/N: This is the one I'm really unsure about but I took so long just working up the courage to actually post these that I thought it better to just do it and include them all. I really hope I haven't ruined the quotes for you. (Hmm I think my insecurities are showing, sorry 'bout that.)

Disclaimer: I do not own Veronica Mars or any related copyrighted material. That's Rob Thomas' baby.


Keep Looking Up

"Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent"

-T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The Camelot, neon fortress guarding the secrets of the love-lorn, lust-driven knights of Neptune.

Each closed door and drawn curtain a sordid secret banished to the realms of hourly rates and threadbare linen, clean if you're lucky.

Here upon the metal stair meets Guinevere and Lancelot while Arthur is busy playing golf or getting a Thai massage.

Here the ladies of the court congregate at the corner waiting for a suitor with a fat purse.

And across from the castle a lone crusader, an avenging angel sits collecting sins to paint a fresco of humanities weakness as borne out by history repeating itself.


Veronica adjusted the lens on her camera before focusing it on the third window to the right from the ice machine. The view was blocked by the off white blinds that had been dragged down across the pane of glass. Shadows still made it explicitly clear what extra curricular activities were occurring inside.

The silhouetted form of a women stood out starkly from behind the opaque screen, her arms raised to unhook a button at the back of her neck before the dress slide from her slender frame. A shadow box show with a decidedly more adult theme.

Sighing Veronica placed the camera on the seat beside her and picked up her textbook, this might take a while and she had mid-terms to study for. Ignoring the strange dichotomy of seedy motel and conscientious student she began to recite algebraic equations.

The hour crept by, the changing songs on the radio and the occasional tramp of feet up and down the stairs of the motel the only indication of the passing time. The click of a door had her reaching for her silent companion in the next seat. Raising the camera she watched as the door opened next to her target and a middle aged man made his way to an old ford before driving away. When the car had pulled out a small woman, dressed in a gold sequenced dress that hung from her shoulders and rode up her thigh, left the room. She was stuffing a couple of bills into her small gold purse.

Veronica watched as she clopped over to the vending machine in her plastic gold platforms whose sparkling straps snaked up her calf. After getting her drink the woman walked back across the black asphalt of the parking lot with more grace than should be allowed with those gaudy weights tied to her feet. She stopped when she reached the street corner where similarly dressed, or undressed depending on your definition, women stood waiting for a proposition.

Veronica let her eyes fall to her book to avoid watching the transactions of the corner flesh market, wishing the cheating couple would hurry up so she could just get her money-shot and go home.

Maybe take a shower.

It took a moment for the commotion behind her to catch her attention. The shrill shrieks and abrasive curses of the women drifted on the night breeze through the rolled down window of the LeBaron. She swivelled in her seat leaning out the window to see a man decked out in a velour tracksuit, hood pulled up over his head despite the heat. He ran, shining gold purse clutched in one scabbed hand, head turned back to shout an obscenity at his victim. Veronica saw the girl in the gold dress pulling the platforms from her feet while yelling.

Instinct kicked in and before she could question how good of an idea it was she had flung her car door open and out in front of the purse snatchers path. He turned his head just in time to see the obstacle but not quickly enough to dodge it. With a satisfying thump he flew into the metal barrier crumpling at the waist as he fell onto the street, wheezing and clutching his mid section.

Veronica swung her legs from the car and brought her taser up to his face, a wicked smile distorting her face. The small women, barefooted, made her way across, heels held in one hand. She snatched the purse from next to his head before carefully pulling on her heels, tying the straps and calmly bringing the platform down on the man's stomach with force, probably catching a finger or two where he was already holding it.

She raised her head smiling brightly at Veronica "Thank You, fierce girl" she said in stilted, heavily accented English.

"Just being a good citizen" she mock saluted, there was no point calling the sheriffs department, more than likely they'd arrest her and the lady of lose virtue and let the purse thief go.

The woman's corkscrew curls grazed the caramel tinted skin of her shoulders as she shook her head in confusion.

"Strange child" she muttered "always sitting in dark streets taking pictures of people".

"It's my job, I'm a P.I" she said defensively, put out by the fact she spent so much time around the Camelot that the 'locals' recognised her.

"P.I?" she pursed her metallic lips.

"Private investigator, like a detective but not with the police" she clarified, better not to be associated with the sheriffs department on these streets.

"Like Mr. Marlowe? Good, you seem nice girl, better not be police, makes you mean" she smiled.

Veronica nodded, she wasn't partial to the law round these parts herself and had to agree with her assessment.

"Well, you leave me out of photos, we will get along like burning houses, Missy Marlowe" with that she turned on her heel and clopped back to her corner.

Veronica unsure of what to make of her new 'friend' turned back to the prone man.

"I'd run, now, somewhere far away" she hissed letting the electricity arc over her taser, panicked and in pain the man scrambled to his feet before running away.

"And stop stealing purses, you punk!" she called after his retreating form.

It took another ten minutes but she got her money shot of the C.E.O kissing his assistant at the motel room door,before they drove away in separate cars.

Afterwards Veronica went home.


The girl with the gold platforms would wave at her whenever they happened to be working the same corner, sometimes she would even stop for a chat, giving away valuable pieces of information about the comings and goings of the motels patrons for a can of coke or a pack of cigarettes.

Once she even gave Veronica a can of some foul tasting energy drink when she had drifted off on a particularly long stake-out.

She never told Veronica her name and Veronica never asked, nor did she share much of her own personal details.

A month after the last time she had seen her, climbing into a well maintained Toyota, black miniskirt leaving little to the imagination and the same gold platforms wrapped around her small feet, she noticed her absence.

She asked one of the pretty boys dressed in denim cut-offs about her. She had seen them splitting a cigarette on more than one occasion. He just shrugged and said she was gone, probably found a better corner.

Veronica let it go, the faces where always changing on the badly lit corners of the side of town with less street lamps.

It wasn't till years later, when Veronica herself was a grown women, that she thought of the small woman and her gold platforms again. Chasing a bail jumper she had driven all the way to Sacramento, the night crawling over the city and her body demanding sleep she had pulled into a cheap motel by the highway.

She laid back on the sheets, nose filled with the overpowering scent of cheap detergent and the lingering smell of cigarette smoke and sweat. She let her head drop back onto the thin pillow and let her eyes drift to the ceiling.

"I don't know, one of the older girls said to keep eyes on ceiling, let the mind go, it's not so bad when you do that. I just keep looking up".


How many had stared at that ceiling as if it where the Sistine chapel?

Every crack counted and catalogued by wandering eyes.

Every stain transformed to the face of some patient saint imploring repentance or some wretched sinner beseeching forgiveness.

The entire history of man kind according to the 'Good Book' unfurled before the upturned eyes of men and women coming to know each other, biblically, before leaving as strangers.

How many more had strained against their neon cages, like statues half carved, trapped in marble desperate to escape but trapped, limbless, voiceless, potential unseen by every one but the sculptor. The sculptor who finds one crack or errant vein in the marble and abandons his works to their stone cells.

How many painted ladies and sculpted boys disappeared under layer after layer of grime, dirt and smoke, till darkened the stories they have to tell are forgotten? The bright colours and vibrant expressions lost.

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

-T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."


Postscript: Well, I hope you enjoyed my ramblings, stay tuned for more folks (maybe even within a reasonable time-frame... ha, yeah right.) Seriously though if you made it this far, thank you for indulging me.