Written for the Multifandom Women Comment Ficathon on LJ, for plural_entity. The prompt was this: "Don't try to rub my shoulders / and don't try to hold my hand. / Don't try to give me a fucking hug. / Who said you could touch me anyway?"
Don't Try to Hold My Hand
By icecreamlova
- : -
Lunch. Soft clouds. Sky a surreal blue. Blinding sunlight bouncing off white-washed walls, making everything seem as flat and harsh as an overexposed photo. Tabletops shining like crimson mirrors.
Veronica stared down at the table. In the corner of her eye, she could see Logan gazing upwards into nothing.
They didn't try to look at each other, because what was the point?
The silence was deafening.
"I think Dad has a suspect," Veronica mumbled, for want of anything better to fill it with.
"About time she got justice."
Lilly, Veronica wanted to start. She couldn't quite say the words, and even when she tried again, her voice was soft. "She would be glad." It was all she could force out. Not, Lilly would say, 'Who could possibly want to kill me?', which she knew was what the real Lilly would have wanted to.
She could feel Logan's eyes on her, then.
"Yeah." His voice was curiously flat.
They sat side by side.
She still felt alone.
- : -
They had started sitting together.
It made sense to everyone except them. Or maybe just her.
They had been Lilly's best friend and boyfriend, and Duncan hadn't been back to school since (she left him rocking back and forth at the scene of his sister's death) that night. The four were inseparable before (the person they loved best in the whole world was gone) that awful tragedy, poor girl.
Of course Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls would sit together at lunch, closer to each other than whoever crowds around them - even if physically, they were far apart.
Comfort in the familiar.
It made sense, except there was no comfort.
(She had tried only once. Tears had run down his face, but he'd flinched away when she tried to touch his shoulder, and that had been enough, too, for her to know his wasn't a shoulder she could cry on.
Don't, one of them had said. Or possibly both.)
Logan had crossed his hands behind his head and leaned back, busy in his mockery of boneless relaxation. He looked like he wanted to curl in on himself and shrink to nothing - or maybe that was just her, projecting - and so tried to take up more space than usual, instead.
Veronica wasn't sure what was larger: the negative space where Lilly had once held court, or the punch to the gut whenever she noticed the emptiness beside her, inside her, anew. Logan only melted into that.
Grief didn't fill it.
- : -
"That's my girlfriend. Your best friend, Duncan's sister. What is wrong with you people?"
- : -
Five months later, they had stopped sitting together.
It made sense.
Lilly was (only alive in her head) gone. Duncan was out of her reach. The people they'd once called friends had abandoned her - and she'd seen enough she was almost glad of it. "Mars" didn't mean anything around here any longer, except hints of disdain, how could we have voted him Sheriff, going after poor Mr. Kane like an animal, the sneer tugging one corner of an otherwise perfect five-thousand-dollar smile.
(And Logan, well. Better to avoid nostalgia, because then she couldn't think, I'm going to get you back for [insert travesty here] even if it means I need to [insert revenge here], and he made it easy to forget her memories of laughing together.)
- : -
Except sometimes Logan sought her out, waited at the table she'd claimed as her own, whenever he thought he might catch her by surprise - or whenever, Veronica suspected, he had a square inch of exposed heart Lilly hadn't burnt, and needed her to finish the job. He would lean against the table's edge until it had to press uncomfortably into the curve of his back, cross his hands behind his head, and:
"Ronnie." It was a drawl, making his mouth curve in what could have passed for a smile. He always looked like he was on the verge or either smiling or crying nowadays.
Veronica stepped forward until she blocked his sunlight, stared down at him coolly, deliberately. "As much as being given a pet name touches the hard, dead depths of my heart" - the corner of his mouth lifted further - "my lunch is getting cold. Move."
"But it's so comfortable here. Tell you what," said Logan, his voice brighter than the sun and about as convincing as a fluorescent light bulb trying to pass for it, "we should share."
"Sorry, Logan. I'm not as generous as you are." Veronica jerked her head in a deliberate "scram" gesture.
She was entirely too tired to deal with this today. From the way he'd sulked through the corridors like a miniature storm cloud that morning, Veronica had thought he would be too.
The smell of pizza wafted from his table of origin, the land of the rich and entitled (and people she didn't want to think about).
"Go," said Veronica, "follow your nose, go home to your alien kind."
He squinted against the sunlight, as though her shadow weren't still covering his face. But his eyes were surprisingly lucid. "They were your kind too, you know."
Half-unwillingly, Veronica glanced at the seat she had occupied when she was still part of a foursome: the teenagers lounging across one another's laps, the glints of gold jewellery flashing in sunlight, two girls sitting side by side, heads together and so animated and alive as they spoke about useless things, Daddy bought me this bracelet last weekend, zero points for taste but ten for brand, perhaps-
-they squeezed together and arranged themselves so that undesirables would never find a place at the table, but Veronica couldn't keep from tracing the outline with her eyes, even as Lilly's chimed: What, I'm just negative space now?, which was just wrong, wrong, wrong-
"We were associates, unfortunately for me," said Logan, blissfully unaware of her turmoil. "Whenever I think about it too often, I feel the need to scrub all over."
Reality came crashing down around her again. She seized his words like they were barbed lifelines - any sentence could become a grievous insult if she tried hard enough.
Veronica took a seat beside him. "Which makes it really pathetic that you're trying to renew it." She propped her chin on her hands, smiling sweetly, clinging to the animosity fizzing through her veins. Just that sentence wasn't enough; she needed something deeper.
Perhaps this:
"What is it?" Her best, most sincere, concerned voice - one she found too easy to pull out, on the rare occasions when she let herself imagine what splashed the purple and black patterns across the skin just north of his collar, to wonder when precisely he had bloodied his knuckles again. "Logan, why're you sitting here? What's wrong?"
His eyes snapped open, and he stared at her. Veronica didn't twitch, keeping her face soft and worried and, tell me, I'm your friend, her eyes said.
"Very funny," he said. Tried to flick out casually: five points for effort; none for execution.
"You know you can tell me," said Veronica, softly.
Logan slid off the table, swivelled around to watch her like two simple sentences could unnerve him beyond measure. For once, he had no answer.
Then Veronica's lips twitched: she could not hold it back any longer.
The emotions flickering across his face would have been too complicated to read, if she hadn't felt them herself: shock. Relief. The familiar, necessary anger.
"My confidante," said Logan mockingly. "I'll make sure to take you up on that." He turned to walk to his table, his land of alien kind, and Veronica thought, you can have him back, I did not need that today, except she wasn't as tempted as she had been to watch that table and risk being pulled into could-have-beens.
She ate her lunch, staring up at the sky.
- : -
That he seemed more animated that afternoon was something Veronica didn't think about.
- : -
But then:
Night-time. Safe indoors. Shadows in every corner. The electric lighting spreading across hotel's expensive wallpaper, and across furniture so opulent it was like walking onto a 1920s film set, until every outline looked soft and undefined.
Trina Echolls walked away from the shattered pieces of Logan's last hopes, leaving Veronica behind to let Logan weep against her shoulder.
He had never looked as small as he did in that moment, his head was level with hers, and Veronica wasn't a tall person. He had curled up on himself, as if to hide, too late, those exposed, vulnerable bits he had relied on her to prod. There was no defiance left in him. Just his tears, wet against the skin of her neck.
For a moment, Veronica wondered helplessly why she was the one left to do this. She wasn't any better at comforting someone, especially Logan, than he was at comforting her.
Had it been the night he knocked on her door, I want you to find my mother, hitting her on that one vulnerable spot like Logan always could? Perhaps it had been earlier than that. Their first truce, maybe, after she'd brought him video proof of Lilly's imperfections, Lilly's fabulous personality, and thrown off a sin she hadn't realised she'd committed, in his eyes, until after she'd started filing off Lilly's rough edges.
Or maybe it had been earlier still. The first time she made him angry enough, he made her angry enough, it was shelter from the pain of everyone else moving on.
Comfort.
Of a sort.
She sighed, and raised a hand to rub soothing circles on his back.
The task comforting other people ought to be left to those who actually knew how to do it.
But there was only her.
- : -
Well?