Work Text:
It starts with the high school reunion reminder. She’s already destroyed the invitation that showed up weeks ago. She’d let her guard down, thinking it was the end of it. But Daniel is the one who picks up the mail, so Veronica doesn’t even have a chance to circumvent the conversation. She resents it, a little. He wants to go. He went to his, he says, and it was a, quote, she thinks, as she contemplates rolling her eyes, blast, unquote. After they go for a few rounds, him talking about the joys of seeing old bullies and friends and letting go of long ago hurts, her telling him that she has absolutely no interest in that kind of self-therapy, she snaps.
“There is no way in hell I am stepping foot in that town when all those people are there, too,” she tells him sharply. “There is nothing you or Mac or Wallace or God himself can say that would make me change my mind.”
He stares at her, a little wounded, and Veronica pauses for a second to wonder how she ever got together with a guy who can’t handle the mildest of barbs. Her minds skirts by the guys she wants to compare him to, because she doesn’t want to think about the guys she wants to compare him to.
The tiff doesn’t end. But they agree to go to the grocery store because there’s nothing in the apartment fit for human consumption and he doesn’t have the fondness for processed cheese she does so the emergency mac and cheese isn’t even an option.
She should have known that was a mistake.
Daniel is quiet as they go through the store, and she makes it her quest to not care. To not care she hurt him, to not care he got hurt, to not care that he won’t let this reunion thing go. To not care he doesn’t know her well enough to know why she wouldn’t want to go; and to not care that even if she laid out every step of that decision, he still would rail against it.
They decide on chicken caesar salad, because Daniel says they need to eat better when he means she needs to eat better. She lets this happen, because she’s 28 years old and that’s too old to be pouting about greens when she needs to be pouting about high school.
The line for check out is incredibly long for a Wednesday night, and she lets herself sigh. The line is even less fun because she and Daniel aren’t looking at each other, are barely talking. She mocks a few tabloids, more to herself than to him, and he decides to add in one of his own. The one he picks has Conner Larkin and Logan Echolls on the cover, then and now. Daniel falters half way through when it becomes clear to him what had always been clear to her: it’s about Aaron Echolls’ suspicious ‘suicide’, ten years on. Turns out, it wasn’t a suicide, if this tabloid has any answer. The theory it proposes about sex club hijinks is so far from the truth it’s laughable. If it were anyone else’s life, she would have had at it, too. But it’s hers, and it still stings. He glances at her, and she turns her head away, feeling the pulsing along her jawline that tells her she’s grinding too tightly.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel says quietly. “I forgot for a second you two were friends.”
“It was a long time ago,” she tells him. “It’s not a big deal.”
She thinks she hears him, and hates herself for it. A half a second later, she realizes that she does hear him. Because, she gripes to herself, we live in a society where there can’t not be a television screen available. And in a society where that television screen can’t not be tuned to the latest in celebrity news and gossip. She can’t help but stare at it. She knows it is a Bad Idea, but she lets herself indulge anyway.
He has his arm draped around a girl’s - woman’s - waist, and it turns out this is a premiere party for her latest record. Veronica is never as happy as she is now that she refuses to get cable and doesn’t listen to FM radio. She likes the little bubble of a world she’s created to insulate herself from the world she came from before, and she doesn’t need reminders of Logan Echolls popping up more often than they already do.
He looks good. Older, a little more worn, but good. She hates that she’s glaring at the screen because of that.
And because life likes to keep throwing punches even though she’s already down, the woman on screen asks about Aaron Echolls and Lilly Kane.
“I thought he killed her then,” Logan tells the woman, the camera, the shopping audience at large. “And every year, I become more convinced I’m right.”
Veronica feels herself glow a little bit. Every year, he becomes more convinced she was right. It is a balm on an old wound from the time he didn’t believe her at all. Didn’t believe in her at all. When he didn’t believe she loved Lilly at all. The screen moves to other news. Rob Lowe, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen Twins. People she can block out as easily as Logan Echolls finds it to slip on through. Daniel nudges her. “How are you doing?”
She leans into him. “Fine.”
She gets to hear the Logan bit three more times before they leave the store. She was right. He knows it. He still knows it.
She makes the salad. He grills the chicken. They work in tandem, but silently. He’s still wounded that she doesn’t want to share her high school experience with him. She’s wounded that he would even think that was an option. She’s told him about punctured tires, about purity scores, but he doesn’t know how it hurt, or who did the hurting. She can’t find the words to tell him how much it hurt. How much she still resents that it hurt.
The ice breaks a bit as they eat dinner. He tells her about walking by the dog park. She returns that she’s thinking about maybe getting a dog, herself. She’s not sure she’s done mourning Backup, but she misses the companionship a dog offers.
She thinks Backup would understand perfectly why she had a real aversion to her high school reunion. She thinks even if he didn’t, he would understand her enough to let it go.
They talk dog breeds for a bit, and she expounds on her fondness for pit bulls.
“Don’t you want to get something else?” Daniel asks. “If Backup is the pinnacle, don’t you want to try a different dog?”
She mushes a chickpea he insisted be added. “All dogs are different.”
“I know that,” he sighs.
She peels apart some chicken. “How was work?”
“A grind. I could really use a break.”
She doesn’t bite. Just smiles at him and stuffs her mouth full of spinach greens, romaine lettuce, and chicken.
After, when she’s wiping down the counters and putting the dishes in the dishwasher away so she can fill it up with the new dirty dishes, Daniel wanders into the kitchen holding a picture of Lilly. She is filled with the sudden and inexplicable desire to rip it from his hands, to hide Lilly from his sight.
“You can talk to me about it,” he tells her, gently. And she hates him in that moment more intensely and completely than she has hated anyone or anything before in her life. She hates him, because he doesn’t want to know about Lilly, who she was and how she was. He wants the Story of Lilly, the Story of Lilly’s Murder, and the aftermath. He’s no better about it than the people of People Magazine, of Entertainment Tonight. The people who flooded her town and harassed her father and Logan and Duncan and herself, who shoved microphones into everyone’s faces and got a distorted view of Lilly, and of Neptune, because they didn’t care enough to know who actually knew.
“I know,” she croaks out. “But I don’t want to.”
She doesn’t want to, because telling the Story of Lilly ignores Lilly almost completely. It means traipsing into the Story of Logan, which doesn’t ignore Logan at all but has more than enough bits that aren’t for anyone’s consumption. It’s about what he was and what he did, rather than who he was and who he is.
Telling the Story of Lilly means potentially talking about the Story of Weevil; and even more than Logan’s, it doesn’t allow for who Weevil was. And she doesn’t want Daniel anywhere near Weevil, memories of him or otherwise. She doesn’t want to know what her straightlaced and buttoned up boyfriend would make of the gang member she befriended and needed and counted on, both during her investigation into Lilly’s murder and beyond. She doesn’t want to see his face when they get to those pictures.
It’s the reason the photos she took of Weevil gradually slipped out of the frames and into the photo albums. The crowd she ran with now would ask all the wrong questions, and she wouldn’t give them any of the right answers.
It means focusing on the people she’s done a good job of not obsessing over in these last nine years. It means feeling the loss of their continued absence. It means missing them. It means worrying over and about them.
There’s a reason she doesn’t ask about Weevil. There’s a reason she tries to ignore all mentions of Logan. She can’t know about their lives. It hurts too much to even wonder.
Daniel looks pained. “Can you try anyway?”
She blames Wallace for this, she does. Mac avoids all mention of Lilly, of Life before Lilly. Wallace thinks it explains her. He tells people who ask about the Best Friend Murdered, the Ostracism, the Life After.
Wallace only knows the Story of Lilly, too. But Wallace never really asked to hear it.
She hates to think it, but she loves him more for not. No one else who isn’t of Neptune ever didn’t ask, once they knew it existed. Everyone always assumes it’s something she would actually want to talk about. It’s one of the times she misses her home town, because no one who is Neptune born and raised thinks that. No one in Neptune really talks about it. Especially not the people who she knew.
She misses the ease of history she and Logan, and she and Weevil, had. Even she and Duncan. Not having to outline the tawdry details of her life was a level of comfort she didn’t know existed until she got out into the Real World.
She realizes she’s still staring at him when he asks, “Please?”
“Yeah,” she answers. “I can try.”
She does try. She has the old folders on a hard drive and backed up to the cloud, under a handle she hardly ever has reason to use. She doesn’t know why she can’t just delete them, but there you go. He reads the notes, the suspects. He still doesn’t get to know about Weevil, because she never had a file open on Weevil. She never had one, because she never suspected him, not even at the end. There isn’t a file on Logan. She never had one, because she didn’t suspect him, until the end. She tells him about Logan. About early drives back from Tijuana and shot glasses and letters. About secret hiding places rich kids use to keep their parents from knowing their secrets, and secret sex tapes dirty old philanderers make of those rich kids. About wanting to trust this one guy, and desperately hoping he wasn’t lying to her.
She still doesn’t tell him about Weevil.
She doesn’t tell him about why she knew it was Aaron once she saw the tapes. She doesn’t tell him about Trina’s boyfriend, about Logan’s nonchalant reaction to his father’s violence. She doesn’t tell him about Trina and Lynn and hotel lobbies. She doesn’t let slip the secrets Logan and she shared at night.
Veronica takes hold of Lilly’s picture. She tells Daniel about her. She shares Lilly’s secrets because she can’t share Logan’s, because she doesn’t want to spill her own. She tells him how Lilly was loved, but felt second best. How she and Duncan were closer than siblings, and how he would try to shield her from Celeste’s disapproval and disappointment the best he could. She tries to figure out how to describe Lilly properly, outwardly loving but distant father, cold and angry and exacting mother.
“You ever see Gilmore Girls?”
Daniel looks stunned by the sudden turn in conversation. “Yeah?”
“You know Lorelai Gilmore?”
He grins. “My high school girlfriend loved her. Yeah.”
Veronica gently touches her finger to Lilly’s cheek. “The Kane house was basically Emily and Richard’s, and Lilly was kind of like a Lorelai. Except her brother got unconditional love and attention from both their parents, and he gave that to her, so it was both better and worse for Lilly.” She looks up at him again. “And, you know, Lilly was even wilder. She didn’t know how to let people know she was hurting. She didn’t know how to - how to be anything other than outrageous. Fabulous. It was hard, for her, to not be the brightest star in the room.”
It was hard for her, because she was too worried about fading away. Veronica knows that now in a way she didn’t then, couldn’t then, when Lilly was a thing beyond the ordinary. When Lilly was her idol, her heroine, her golden and shining best friend who took her hand and never cared that little Veronica Mars was a little timid, a little skittish, and a lot not rich.
Veronica remembers the times she wasn’t worried about it, when Lilly didn’t feel like she had to perform. When she could just be Lilly. It happened around her when they were alone, not always but often; best friend privilege. It happened around Logan, too; but then she would manufacture a break up. Lilly didn’t know how to belong someone. She doesn’t tell Daniel that either.
“So, she slept around.” Daniel looks like he knows what kind of person - what kind of girl - Lilly was. He doesn’t. No one does, because if there’s one thing Veronica’s learned, it’s that there isn’t A Type of Girl Who Does Those Things.
She lets it go. “Yeah, she did.”
She puts the picture down and walks into the living room. She doesn’t talk to Daniel about Lilly After Death, how she would still see her around. How she and Lilly still had conversations. How she’s pretty sure Lilly saved her life once, by bringing her to Weevil and away from a doomed bus.
She doesn’t say how she doesn’t see Lilly anymore, but she swears she can still feel her sometimes. A brush that tells her where not to go. A tingle that tells her to walk forward. A whisper she can’t hear telling her how fabulous it is that she’s finally, finally, finally red satin. How sometimes, she thinks the news she gets of Logan is Lilly’s doing. Because Lilly hated an unstirred pot more than anything else.
She doesn’t tell him that the love has never faded, but the awe has. She doesn’t tell him that she wishes she could go back and talk to the teenaged Lilly, that she wants more than anything to be able to help that girl with all her baggage and bravado. How she still wonders who Lilly would have been, if Lilly had lived. If she still would love her with such fierce devotion like she does now; or if she would hate her; or if, like her brother, Lilly would just be someone she used to love. She aches at the loss of never knowing.
Daniel nods sympathetically. “So, that’s why no reunion, huh? Bad memories of a girl who can’t be there?”
“No. I don’t want to go to that stupid reunion because of all the crap that happened after.” She will not be pulled into the Story of Veronica. She won’t let herself get turned into just the whats and dids and done tos. She won’t let herself fade into a character in a macabre tale of death and betrayal and redemption. Sixteen year old Veronica, seventeen year old Veronica, eighteen year old Veronica, they were vibrant and contradictory, and they deserve better than that. And, she reflects, so do those Logans. Because it is impossible to tell the Story of Veronica without talking about Logan’s part. And it is impossible to talk about Logan’s part without explaining what was happening behind those scenes too.
She pauses. Lets herself calm down. “I hate that town, and I hate those people, and I am not going back. End of story.”
It’s not. Because she hates that town and those people, and she is never going back. But she loves that town and she loves those people, because she and it and they have a history they don’t have to shorthand. There is no pussyfooting around it. There is no whitewashing for the uninformed and never initiated.
He groans. “Fine, we can pretend you don’t come from anywhere we can go back to.”
“That’s right,” she agrees. “I was found in a cornfield and you can call me Kal-El.”
He huffs, but like she’s amused him, and she feels equilibrium start to return. She presses a kiss to his mouth, and he walks her backward to the couch. She nestles down, and is ready to have this be done. To have this sickening twist down memory lane to be over with, something she doesn’t have to encounter again.
She’s going to have to make it work with Daniel, she concludes, because she doesn’t want to have to explain Neptune and Lilly and everything else to someone new.
Daniel’s back to joking about bad commercials and stopping at atrocious shows, and Veronica heaves out a sigh. This is normalcy, and she likes it just fine. No need for the excitement and heartbreaking trauma of Neptune.
Her cell phone rings during a particularly off beat commercial involving puppets, and she answers it without looking down. “Hello?”
“Veronica?” the voice on the other end crackles. She stills. “Veronica, you there?”
“Logan?” She winces at the way she says his name, the way she still says his name. Daniel’s head snaps around. See, she thinks, this is why you shouldn’t talk about Neptune. It just comes back around to bite you in the ass.
“Yeah.” She can practically hear the shuffle step she just knows he’s doing. Or maybe hopes.
“I saw you on the tv machine at the grocery store,” she says, after grappling for something to say. “You’re looking good.”
“Thanks,” he tells her. “Um, the reason I’m calling is - did you happen to hear any news from six on today?”
She shakes her head at the phone, and then realizes that is an inefficient way to communicate through it. “No. Why?”
“My girlfriend, she...” For a second, she’s afraid they got disconnected. For a second, she’s worried about what the end of that sentence could possibly be. Is pregnant. Is my fiancé. Is my wife, after a Vegas wedding. She doesn’t want to hear any of it. “Was murdered.”
“Oh,” she manages to get out. It’s so far from her imaginings she struggles to keep in the ‘Thank God’ that wants to follow. Because she doesn’t; because she would never be happy for someone other than Aaron Echolls getting murdered. “I’m so sorry.” That second part she adds in because she is, but also because she has nothing else she can say. ‘Two murdered girlfriends, huh? Bummer’ just seems highly inappropriate, even though it dances across her frontal lobe.
“Thanks,” he tells her distractedly, and she starts to worry. “Actually, the reason I’m calling is, I -”
He stops. She feels the headache building behind her eye. “You’re their main suspect.”
“Yeah.” He stops again. “Listen, I know this is stupid, but I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Where are you?” She dreads the answer. She doesn’t look at Daniel. She doesn’t want to see what his face is doing right now, now that one of the characters in her story is calling her up on the phone.
“Neptune.” He sounds sheepish. “Lock up.”
“Neptune?” She’s going to kill him. She knows what he wants, and she’s going to kill him. She knows what she’s going to do, and she’s going to kill him.
“Yeah. We were visiting - anyway. This isn’t exactly how I planned on talking to you after nine years of your complete radio silence, but I need you. I need your help.”
“I don’t do that anymore,” she tells him, gripping the phone. She hears what she can only imagine is a choked back sob.
“I know,” he says desperately. “I know you don’t, and I don’t know why you would, but Ronnie, I don’t have anyone else and -”
She cuts him off. “Logan, I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t. I’m saying I don’t know how useful I’ll be. I’m - I’m rusty.” It hurts to admit that, that she may not be what he needs.
“I trust you,” he tells her. “I’ll buy you the ticket, anything. Just, please come here and do what you do, and get me out.”
She bites her lip, knows what she’s going to say. “I’ll be there by morning.”
“Thanks,” he tells her again. “Call Weevil. He’ll pick you up.”
“Weevil?” She knows her voice goes an octave or two outside her normal range. She feels the cold and shivery shocks flooding through her to her fingertips.
“Yeah,” Logan says sharply. “We’ll play catch up when you get here, but he works for me. He and I kind of bonded over not hearing shit from you.”
“Oh.”
“You disappear for about a decade, you’re going to miss a few things,” he shoots at her. “Listen, I gotta go. I’ll see you when I see you.”
She doesn’t look at Daniel now, for a completely different reason. She doesn’t want to acknowledge what’s just happened. She doesn’t want to acknowledge that after weeks of fielding text messages and e-mails from Mac and calls from Wallace, after an entire evening of her boyfriend, it’s a phone call from the Sheriff’s department cell block that pulls her back to Neptune.
Because Mac, Wallace, Daniel and God have nothing to say that can get Veronica to go home. But Logan Echolls is a completely different story.