Chapter Text
It is one thing, Velma decides, to solve a mystery.
Solving a mystery is routine, formulaic. Solving a mystery is following the trail of clues to the inevitable bad guy in a mask and removing said mask only to discover that it’s just some rich guy trying to scare people away from his profits all along.
Of course, being Velma, she always knows who she will find beneath the mask before it comes time to remove it.
It does get old, after a while.
There is something to be said for ignorance there—once in a while, at least, Velma thinks it might be nice to be surprised.
Scared, of the monsters they went after.
But at the end of the day, they’re always just greedy old men in masks, and what’s to be afraid of there?
Anyway.
She’s getting off topic.
It’s one thing to solve a mystery. Run around, follow clues, set a trap, accidentally catch the bad guy when said trap inevitably fails (usually trapping Shaggy, or Scooby, or both, after which they will somehow drag the Monster of the Week into the mess), unmask some capitalist in a monster costume.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Velma is good at that. She’s good at solving puzzles, good at seeing to the man behind the mask. So good that she’d become thoroughly bored of it before graduating high school.
But, she stayed.
Stays.
As for why…
Well…that’s where Velma falters.
She supposes, as bored as she is with formulaic cases and aging white guys in masks, there is something to be said for boredom. At least when one is bored, one is safe from change.
When things change...for good or for bad...someone always has to hurt.
As for Velma...
She can't decide whether she'd rather the numbness or the pain. All she can do is remember how it came to this.
“Hey, Spec-face!”
Velma’s eyes fall to the ground reflexively, small hands tightening around the large binder she's holding, like a protective shield.
“Hey!” A hand grabs her roughly by the shoulder, yanking her back and spinning her around. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, nerdlinger!”
A high-pitched tittering reaches Velma’s ears, and she feels her cheeks flush to match her hair. Several girls, decked out in ruffles and ribbons, have accompanied the boy currently holding Velma hostage, and are watching from the sidelines, giggling like it’s some kind of hilarious game show.
Velma’s eyes darken. Showing off, that’s all it is. She’s being tormented because this boy wants to impress a few brainless girls. But then, she supposes it's not their brains he's interested in, anyway.
Her internal monologue is interrupted by her frayed, well-loved binder being ripped ruthlessly from her hands. Velma watches, eyes stinging, as the large boy throws it to the ground and stomps on it, leaving footprints all over the fabric. She opens her mouth—to cry, to scream, to beg him to stop—but her words are lost in her throat, and all that comes out is a strangled sort of squeak.
She watches in horror as he reaches down and starts to unzip the binder—images of broken pencils, of torn pages, her precious work, skating away in the breeze flashed through her mind—
“Hey!”
Velma’s eyes snap up, laser-focused on the owner of the new voice. Something in her heart sinks when she takes in the sight of the newcomer—a little girl, with pretty red curls and a purple dress.
She’s prettier than the other girls—something Velma isn’t the only one to realize, judging by the suddenly soured expressions on the other girls’ faces—and Velma is certain she’s here to join in on the fun.
But then, something happens. Something that shapes the direction Velma's entire life leading on from here will take. Something even Velma’s eyes, quick as they are when solving puzzles or complex math equations, couldn’t have seen coming.
The new girl puts her hands on her hips, vivid green eyes sharp with anger.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Her words are directed at the hulk of a boy still grasping Velma’s shoulder (though Velma doubts he’d comprehended a word she’d said, judging by the dazed, lovestruck look in his eye).
When her question goes unanswered, the new girl huffs and, bold as any of the boys, storms over to where they’re all gathered in a big dumb cluster, stupefied by her very existence. With a strength distinctly contradictory to her appearance, this pretty newcomer yanks Velma right out of his grip.
“Leave. Her. Alone,” she snaps, jabbing a slender finger tipped in glittery, purple polish to his chest with each syllable. Somehow, despite being at least a head shorter than the boy (still noticeably taller than Velma, of course), she manages to look down on him. “You’re pathetic, picking on a girl.”
With that, the red-headed girl strides over and retrieves Velma’s binder, chest puffed to look as big as her petite figure can manage. All the while, the boy just stares at her, mouth flapping like a fish out of water, while his posse of tittering girls glares from the background, too scared to step in.
With Velma’s binder in one hand, she grabs Velma’s hand in her other and pointedly marches the two of them away to another part of the playground.
She finally slows down past the main blacktop, and once they're safely beneath the shade of a large evergreen tree, her grip on Velma’s hand loosens.
Velma, socially awkward and a just little bit afraid of this new girl who’d just waltzed (or, rather, stormed) in and stunned her biggest bully into silence, can only stare at the back of her head.
She really does have pretty hair, Velma notes. Pretty everything, really. Velma wonders what it must be like, being pretty…
Then, as if suddenly remembering what happened, the girl whirls around, and Velma flinches on instinct. But the expression the girl wears now is almost unrecognizable. Her brows are furrowed in worry and her eyes are soft, caring—almost as if Velma is facing an entirely different person than the girl who’d been ready to spit fire just a few moments before.
“Are you okay?” this enigma of a girl asks, stepping into Velma’s personal space with absolutely no hesitation. She reaches for Velma’s hand and clasps it in both of her own, pressing against her chest. Velma marvels at the heat radiating from her. “Did he hurt you?”
Stunned, Velma can only shake her head. This doesn’t seem to bother the red-haired girl one bit, however, as, with Velma’s confirmation, she breaks into the most dazzling smile Velma has ever seen.
“I’m so glad,” she says, sounding like she means it from the bottom of her heart. She finally releases Velma’s hand, only so she can reach down and retrieve the binder she had set against the tree. She presents it to Velma like a trophy, chest puffed in pride, and Velma can’t help but giggle, which caused the girl’s smile to grow somehow even brighter.
Something blooms in Velma’s chest, hot and glowing and alive.
“Thank you,” she says, softly, finally managing to speak as she hugged the binder to her chest.
“Is that where you keep your writing?” the girl asks. Velma blinks, then flushes. Still, she nods, and the girl claps her hands together excitedly. “That’s really cool, I’ve seen you out here writing before! I wish I could write, but,” here she sighs (rather theatrically) and holds out her hands, shrugging, “I’m no good at stuff like that.”
Velma opens her mouth to say something—to say what, she isn’t sure, because she’s only just met this girl a few minutes ago and knows nothing about her aside from the fact that she is very pretty and can apparently shame a boy twice her size into silence with only a few well-chosen words—but before she can attempt, the girl is speaking again. It is a pattern that will become familiar and comfortable—one loud, bold, animated, the other reserved, quiet, listening with a fond smile.
“Oh, I’m Daphne, by the way!” the girl exclaims, seeming to realize that she had yet to introduce herself.
“Oh, uh…,” Velma stutters, once again caught off-guard by this new girl and her utterly effortless vibrance. “I’m, um…Velma,” she manages, though her words come out directed to the ground rather than the girl before her.
Nevertheless, the girl—Daphne—lights up again, and Velma decides then and there that she will do absolutely anything to keep that smile on her face.
Daphne is so cheerful, so brave, so everything that Velma is not. Velma doesn’t understand a thing about this girl, and for some reason, rather than frighten her, it makes her feel like she would follow Daphne to the ends of the earth if the latter only held out her hand and asked.
(It should have scared her, really, that sureness, but even a brilliant child like Velma is still a child, in the end. And children don’t really understand just yet that there are things worse than ghosts and monsters to be afraid of; that some things don’t have to have sharp teeth or bloody weapons to be feared. That some of the scariest things in this world present themselves with a warm, gentle touch and a smile that could shame the stars.
But that…that is for later. For now…
Daphne has something that Velma is missing—something that even the brilliant Velma is too young to name right now—and by her side, for once, Velma feels like the child she is.)
About a year later, they meet Shaggy.
Shaggy is…
Well, Shaggy is exactly ‘what it says on the tin’, so to speak. He’s goofy, bumbling, and awkward—qualities that make him quite hard to dislike. Velma doesn’t actually remember exactly how they met; it was like one day, it was just her and Daphne, and then the next, there's Shaggy, as if he’d been there all along.
(And of course, with Shaggy comes Scooby Doo.)
Shaggy adds something to the group that they didn’t have before, a kind of carefree energy and a sort of all-around lightheartedness to foil Velma’s logic and reason, and complement Daphne’s fiery energy and determination.
He’s not very smart—actually, Velma thinks it’s a wonder he hasn’t been held back at all, given all the angry red ink that always mars his report cards.
There is something there, however—in his eyes, in his silence—that sometimes makes Velma wonder if maybe he’s secretly smarter than them all, and has just realized that life is easier when you’re dumb.
Fred comes along in middle school—a tall, handsome boy who had moved to Coolsville over the summer.
Velma knows he is going to be a part of their mismatched group almost instantly—if not for the borderline weird way his eyes light up when someone mentions the word ‘trap’ (or, god forbid, 'mystery'), then for the way that Daphne looks at him.
It’s an odd, not entirely comfortable experience, watching someone you’ve always depended on—someone strong, brave, bold—look at someone else like they hung the stars. Velma contemplates this for quite a while after they met Fred. It is certainly odd, watching bold, outgoing Daphne turn into a demure schoolgirl whenever Fred turned his attention to her.
Daphne’s still Daphne, of course. Still fiery, still bold—still the bright spot in their little patchwork group. But there’s a new side of Daphne, one that Velma’s unfamiliar with, that comes out when Fred is around.
Velma isn’t sure when it started, or why, but a strange pressure, like a hard knot, has begun to form in her chest. It’s the oddest thing, but sometimes it feels like it tightens, or grows. She first notices this one day at the ice cream shop, sitting across from Shaggy who has been stealing bites of her own abandoned ice cream. Velma can feel Daphne’s body as a warm weight pressing casually against her thigh, as the latter giggles over something or other Fred has said. That’s when the knot swells out of nowhere, filling any extra room she had in her body.
She pushes the remainder of her ice cream to a delighted Shaggy and easily smiles off Daphne’s concern with a shake of her head. Daphne’s hand—gripping Velma’s thigh now out of her concern—seems to radiate some kind of hot electricity that runs up her leg and delivers a shock straight to her chest. Velma reflexively jerks away, briefly panicking, and makes a note to have it checked at the hospital where her mother works.
In her resulting panic, she misses both the brief, poorly masked look of hurt on Daphne’s face, as well as the fact that whatever had just hit her chest has already broken up the knot entirely. Dissolved it, like fire to a tangled web.
Something shifts.
It’s not just the official formation of Mystery Inc., a rag-tag team of amateur detectives and the bane of nefarious Corporate America, although that is certainly the most obvious change.
There’s something else, there, as well; something far more subtle, yet ultimately far more impactful for the group as a whole. It’s not something so simple as to be able to pinpoint exactly what it is that changes, and it doesn’t happen all at once—in fact, it happens so gradually that any one of them would be hard pressed to give an exact date. It’s more of a vignette than a single, groundbreaking scene.
But it is noticeable, and the signs, at least, are distinct.
It’s in the way Daphne shows another side of herself around Fred, giggly and girlish instead of fiery and determined.
It’s in the way Velma’s eyes flicker away, to the ground, when she sees Daphne make some obvious ploy for Fred’s attention only to get overlooked entirely for the sake of some gadget or trap.
It’s in the way Shaggy’s deceptively clever eyes see Velma almost physically shrink—and in the way those same eyes automatically shift to Daphne and Fred whenever this happens.
It’s in the way that Velma starts subconsciously distancing herself, both from the group and, though an outsider wouldn’t know it, from herself—in the way she starts jumping and twitching away whenever Daphne lays a gentle hand on her arm.
It’s in the way Velma is always too busy staring at the ground to see the confused, devastated expression this never fails to leave on Daphne’s face.
Fred doesn’t change, of course—he never knew them before, after all, and the worst part is that Velma can’t even bring herself to blame him, not really. It’s enough to make her wish for the first time in a very long time—since she met Daphne, actually; Daphne, who all but physically forced her to see the good in herself when all Velma could see was bottle cap glasses and a pudgy blob of flesh in the mirror—that she weren’t so unfailingly logical. That, for once, she could just be a normal girl and just blame someone else for no reason other than to have someone to blame.
As it is…she can’t even blame herself, not really. And more and more, she feels like she really, honestly would prefer it if she could.
(They never do find out what’s wrong with her chest, although her mother seems distinctly unconcerned with the prospect of terminal illness, despite the fact that it’s only grown. Rather, she does seem concerned, but not, it seems, for Velma’s physical health. She looks at her daughter with a worried sort of expression as Velma begins to retreat further into herself, but never says a word; or, knowing Velma’s family, can never find the words to say.)
Velma does, eventually, and at length, come to the realization that she is not, in fact, afflicted by some kind of new, hybrid, terminal illness that causes a mass of knotted tissue to build up in her chest until it literally crushes her lungs.
Velma is not certain whether the reality is preferable to this outcome. In hindsight, she was, frankly, embarrassed for not having realized what was actually going on before. In her defense, however, the prospect of love—and the idea that it could ever happen to her—was so far beyond her comprehension that it had simply never crossed even the very furthest reaches of her mind. For someone like Velma, who had so many thoughts running through her brain at all hours of the day (and night), all vying for the front spot and shouting over each other to be heard, perhaps it is forgivable that the obvious eluded her for so long.
She hopes so, anyway, because the reality is bad enough without the humiliation of having taken so long to recognize it.
The thing is, as ridiculous and unbelievable as it sounds, nobody ever warned Velma that falling in love wasn’t something you chose, like which outfit to wear, or deciding whether or not to be an organ donor on one’s drivers’ license. Velma had, up to this point, with a level of naivety achievable only by the very young or the very socially impaired, simply assumed that, as she had decided she wanted nothing to do with love, love would, similarly, have nothing to do with her.
It does occur to Velma after a time (of course it does, how could it not—because she’s logical, realistic, analytical-to-a-fault Velma), after she’s had some time to adjust, how well blue and purple go together. How good they look together—how effortlessly they complement each other. Neighbors on the color wheel, forever one beside the other. Never one too far from the other.
(On a somewhat unrelated note, purple and orange are almost directly opposite each other on that same color wheel.)
Velma will huff a close-lipped, self-deprecating laugh to herself, because of course. Even her beloved books and facts and logic agreed.
Purple and blue go together—aesthetically and artistically and logically. Hand in hand. Purple needs blue, after all, doesn't it.
(All orange is good for—the only business it has, she thinks, harshly—standing next to purple is a day-one lesson in Art 101 on how not to color.)
In retrospect, after some thought and grounding, she supposes it is actually quite remarkable in its own right that she was able to get so far in life stoutly believing that love worked like choosing an option in a questionnaire.
As it is, Velma is nineteen when she realizes that she is in love with Daphne—that she has been in love with Daphne since the day Daphne first smiled at her—and is pushing twenty-four, with Fraphne (Shaggy’s invention) having long since imploded in on itself (like Shaggy had predicted years ago), before she actually does anything about it.
And even then, it isn’t so much Velma actually doing anything about it as much as it is Daphne finally having enough of being pushed away and taking matters into her own hands.
(But it was always going to be like that in the end, wasn’t it?
That’s the way it’s always been—Daphne leading Velma gently but surely by the hand, Velma happily following after—and as much as absolutely everything has changed, there are still some rare few things in this world that will always stay the same.)
But.
That won’t happen just yet.
They (all of them—Velma, Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, even Scooby-Doo) have a ways to go—and a ways to grow—before they get there.
It’s an odd thing, but life has a way of jumping upon people all at once. Change more often happens overnight than over the course of long years.
That being said, this is exactly what is going to happen to Velma, between the day she turns twenty-three and the day she turns twenty-four.
(In fact, perhaps out of due respect for Velma’s own strict adherence to rules and order, it does start just exactly then—on her twenty-third birthday, at the modest party (‘modest’ only because Daphne had grudgingly agreed to keep it small out of respect to the birthday girl, and ‘party’ only because Velma has long-since stopped trying to fight the fact that she never can say no to Daphne) her friends had thrown for her.