Veronica dies on Mac's thirty-eighth birthday. When she gets the call, the first thing Mac thinks is I guess Madison Sinclair's wish came true.
(That is how she always thinks of her in her head, first name and last, even though in a way no one will ever be closer to Mac than the girl who was almost her.)
She can still hear Keith breathing on the other end of the phone, but she has no idea what to say. She has never known someone who died. Madison Sinclair's father, her would have-could have father, had a heart attack four years ago even though he did half-marathons and Mac's dad still brought double cheeseburgers home every Friday night and exclaimed 'God's food!' as he came through the door. Mac had seen the funeral announcement but hadn't gone because she had chosen not to get to know him and it wasn't fair to pretend now.
She knew Veronica, but still fumbles for words. She almost goes with "I'm sorry," but those have all been used up. Finally Keith steps into the silence.
"It was fast," he says, ragged numbness in his tone, as if he could see grief skidding toward him and was just waiting for the impact.
No it wasn't, Mac thinks. We've been watching it happen for a year.
"I'm glad," Mac says, and that is the first lie.
Veronica had planned her own funeral. She had not had a will before it all started ("You would have just had to divide up my diamonds for yourselves," she had said wryly, when her father had expressed incredulity that in all her years of law school she had never gone through the process) but she had made clear her desires for what every movie funeral director would lugubriously call her "eternal rest."
"Make sure they stick to it," Veronica had ordered Mac. "They're a bunch of marshmallows. You're the only one I can trust not to melt."
"This will be a to-the-letter kind of deal," Mac assured her. "I'll keep them in line."
Maybe that had really been the first lie.
Logan ends up supervising everything. Mac goes with him because she feels that she is supposed to, because she feels it's the only thing she can do. Usually if Mac doesn't want to think about her feelings, it's easy. She gets to just be the techie, as involved or disparate as she wants to be. But there is nothing to hack here, no computer advice to give. The only way for her to play backup in this situation is to immerse herself just as fully as if she had been concertedly mourning.
There isn't much for her, though. She ends up just standing beside Logan as he confirms reservations and the cremation. She is next to him as they hand him Veronica's ring, as he turns it thoughtfully in his fingers, and finally slides it onto the chain that once held his dog tags.
She doesn't ask about that.
Veronica and Logan had gotten married after he returned from his second tour, this one almost a year long.
"I proposed to him," she had clarified firmly when they announced it to everyone.
"We don't actually call it a proposal when you look up from your fettuccini and say, 'Let's put a ring on that finger so I get on the priority mailing list," Mac heard Logan whisper loudly from over Veronica's shoulder, but he had his hands in his pockets in a grinning sort of slouch and no one had been fooled.
The wedding was small, Dick next to Logan, sober and scowling although Mac could not tell which came first, and Wallace beside Veronica, shooting 'remember what we talked about' dagger eyes at the groom even though the two of them now played basketball together whenever they had the chance. The justice of the peace thing was enough for Veronica, but afterward Logan had led them all to a restaurant big enough to hold his Navy buddies.
"I'll let him pretend this was a surprise," Veronica had told Mac, smiling fondly from their quiet corner toward her gesticulating now-husband.
"I think he'll figure it out. The chef was just telling him about the woman who called up and had him switch the stuffed mushroom caps hors d'oeuvres for beef skewers. Which, by the way, was very self-serving, and only the fact that it is your wedding and there are five other tofu and vegetable appetizers keeps our friendship alive." Mac reached and grabbed a couple of glasses of champagne off a passing tray, offering one to her best friend.
"I've already had too many. I think he's been trying to get me drunk." Veronica waved her off as Logan approached. "I have a headache now," she added laughingly. He had slid an arm around her waist, pretending to collapse against her dramatically.
"An hour into this thing and she's already using that excuse," he faux-moaned to Mac, his eyes barely leaving Veronica's face. "In a year she's going to have to fake her own death."
Mac wonders if he remembers that moment now. It is so clear in her own mind: the way Veronica had told him that she has him wrapped around her littlest finger and doesn't need to fake anything, the way he had said "You most definitely don't" with so much innuendo that Mac, even older and confident, had blushed and downed the second glass of champagne too, the way Veronica had elbowed him and reached to kiss him. Mac wonders if he remembers all that and wants to bite out his own tongue.
Veronica had not been devoted to the idea of a funeral service, but she had allowed one anyway. She had specified that it not be held in a church, so it is in a funeral parlor. They are tucked into the smallest room, not expecting many more people than those who came early to secure the space.
Veronica had also requested that it not be publicized anywhere, so Mac does not understand how people found out, but she turns around twenty minutes after her arrival and most of the chairs are full. Former clients sit in the same strip of seats as the uniformed men and women who had accepted Veronica as part of them, with Cliff, probably the source of the leak, uncomfortably playing buffer between them. She can even spot Piz pressed against the back wall.
Veronica had allowed one eulogy, suggesting a steel cage match to decide, but Logan volunteered and no one had the energy to argue.
Even as Logan approaches the podium, Keith is giving small dry coughs, stillborn sobs. His wife, Andrea, strokes a hand up and down his arm.
"I used to tell Veronica that our song was 'Love Me Tender,'" Logan starts. "And she would roll her eyes and remind me that it was a stupid concept, that we weren't in high school anymore. And then she would tell me that it was obviously 'Moon River.'"
They used to play footage of Logan's mother's funeral on the news, shots too clear to have been the illicit cell phone videography that had been claimed. Mac remembers feeling bad in a vague way even for Logan Echolls, with whom she had shared at least two classes every year since he had moved to Neptune but whose blank eyes skated over her face every September. Not even he deserved to have the hordes of sobbing mourners replayed on TV every few nights.
As Logan speaks now, Mac can't help but compare it to his father's eulogy, an overly-rehearsed piece probably written by someone else that he had tragically broken down in the middle of. Logan talks plainly of the Veronica they all remember, tough and determined and funny and terribly, wonderfully smart.
Mac had pitied Logan his father's dramatics. The lack of them she finds here makes her bite her lip against crying.
It was brain cancer. Of course it was. Because if it had been breast cancer Veronica would have shrugged and said, "I don't know why you want them, but your choice," and if it had been stomach cancer Veronica would have sighed and made a quip about eating like a teenager for too long anyway.
But her brain…her brain is Veronica, and there's no coming back from that.
People don't quite seem to know what to do afterward. There's no graveside ceremony for them to filter out to, no wake, so everyone stays and chats awkwardly. Logan is surrounded quickly, and even from this distance Mac can see that he is uneasy, the way she had been at the first family reunion after high school graduation, overwhelmed by so many people who loved her and had no idea how she felt. The discomfort looks odd on Logan, ill-fitting on the man who she knows as so confident. But she remembers him wearing the same look years ago when she was considering putting up for defense contracts some anti-hacking software she had written and had spent some time with him asking questions. Eventually he had become comfortable, but at the beginning he had never seemed settled, as if just by talking to each other they were breaking some sort of boundary between him and Veronica's friends.
She wades in and gestures over to the side room where Keith is breaking down despite Andrea's best efforts. Logan touches her shoulder for a moment, so thankful that Mac has to nod quickly and look away, and goes to crouch beside his father-in-law. Mac goes to speak with Piz, who still stands frozen against the wall. He hugs her as soon as he sees her.
"It was nice of you to fly in," she says, giving his back a few reflexive pats.
"Of course. I had to." In ten years, Mac had forgotten that there had been a time when Piz had thought that Veronica and everything that came with her would be the rest of his life. "Not much else would have brought me back but this." He sweeps a hand around the room. Mac spots a ring.
"You got married?" She and Wallace had been friendly with Piz after college because all he really needed to be happy was a Facebook message every now and then, and eventually because he was Veronica's boyfriend. But Veronica had gotten them in the breakup and so they lost touch.
Piz looks down at his ring. "Yeah. Her name is Dana. We met a couple of years after Veronica and I split up."
Mac can't help but notice that Piz does what they all do, landmarking his life around Veronica.
She wonders what they're going to do now, with only this last landmark to judge by.
A year after their wedding, Logan resigned his commission, although the reason they had gotten married in the first place was so Veronica would not get radio silence from the official channels when Logan was deployed. "It was good while it lasted," he had joked leaning against the porch railing beside Mac and handing her a beer. "I figure if she divorces me now, I'll at least get sympathy sex off the story."
"Don't you mean pity sex?"
"Easily confused cousins. You get pity sex when you tell the story of the heartless wife leaving her war hero husband. You get sympathy sex when they've been screwed over by fate too." He had taken a drink and looked through the window of the house he and Veronica had just bought in Neptune. Inside, a silent show was warmly lit and laughing: Veronica, and Wallace's wife, Gabrielle, six inches taller than her husband and able to look more imperious than anyone Mac had ever met, but who smiled more too.
Logan's tone had been casual. Mac remembers snorting, amused.
When she thinks of it now, she remembers the edges of his shoulders and the tension of his eyes. He had already known.
As people begin to leave, Mac invites Piz to come back with them to the house. "It would be great to have you with us." There is another lie.
"I have to fly back, actually." He gives an apologetic shrug. Mac hugs him again quickly and doesn't say anything about his rapid-fire cross-country trip.
He shuffles out and Mac is glad. They can barely take care of themselves. There isn't really room for another person.
Logan and Veronica's new house was a single story. It made it easier through the chemo and the radiation, easier for her to move around, easier for people to come visit. After a few months, they were all familiar with Logan and Veronica's bedroom. There had been this chair beside the bed. The first few times, Mac had commented that it was so comfortable that she wished she could own it. Eventually she would rather have sat on the floor.
She had been in the chair one afternoon as Veronica half dozed, waking every so often to boo at bad daytime television. They had started off the visit with details of some of the cases that Veronica was missing. Mac had even set aside a particularly juicy Loretta Cancun file, but Veronica didn't have much energy and they had just settled on the TV after a while.
Mac had been contemplating the use of Judge Judy as an instrument of torture when Keith's voice had slipped into the room with them.
"It's the only way! How can we do anything else?" he shouted.
Logan's voice followed, an aching hush. "She doesn't want it."
"They're talking about moving me into hospice," Veronica said. Mac glanced at her, startled. She had thought she was asleep. "About how much easier it would be to manage my pain and keep me comfortable." She snorted weakly. The pain was obvious to anyone looking, but it was the first time Veronica had admitted it to Mac. "They should just record their parts and put them on a loop while they play Go Fish."
"What are you going to do?" Mac asked, and the words came out in her shuffling high school cadence rather than the blunt, unfearful one she used now.
Veronica's cheeks were slightly feverish. She looked somehow more exhausted than Mac could remember, but stronger too. "This is one of those times where we're all right and none of us are and we just have to guess our way around."
Maybe if Veronica had not insulated most of them from seeing her at her worst the words would not have so alarmed Mac. But maybe it still would not have been alright, because the Veronica who would leave something to chance and guesswork was a stranger in a friend's body.
The funeral home director eventually glides into the room and asks them as tactfully as possible to clear out. Mac feels guilty for her relief.
There is an unspoken agreement among some of them- Keith and Andrea, Weevil and Jade, Wallace and Gabrielle- to meet back at Logan and Veronica's and start working their way through whatever sympathy food is there. Mac is halfway there before she realizes that Logan's car isn't in the group. She curses, feeling like a failure. There's no way Veronica would have driven a block without noticing that.
Then again, had Veronica been there she would probably have been with Logan. Now he is unpaired, able to lose himself if he wants to.
Here was how Mac knew Veronica was going to die: Wallace called her a few days before the end and talked about the great visit he had that afternoon, about how youthful Veronica had looked as she laughed, about how she had let no comment go without a snappy rejoinder.
The doctors were wrong, he was thinking. They don't know Veronica. They don't know how strong she is. They don't know that she can beat this. It was all over his voice.
Here was how Mac knew that Veronica was going to die: the world was not built for people like Wallace. The world was not built for miracles.
Mac doesn't know where Logan would have gone. She just drives around Neptune until she spots his car by Wilson Beach, a quiet strip of sand usually empty of swimmers and sunbathers because of its rocky shoreline.
Logan is sitting against one of the bigger stones. His shoes are discarded farther up the beach, the cuffs of his pants already looking heavy with water. Mac perches above him. There is a minute of quiet between them.
"Did you help her? At the end?" Mac doesn't mean to ask, but she still wants to know. Veronica had held on for a very long, excruciating time before one day she was just gone. "I know the pain got…bad."
Logan shakes his head. "I thought the worst part was when she didn't know what I was doing there or when she didn't know who I was. But it was when she didn't recognize Keith. And his face…" He seems to be synching his breath with the pattern of the waves. His voice nearly cracks anyway. "I would have, if she had asked. The morphine and the monitors were all there. It would have been easy. But she didn't want me to. And no matter how many times I would argue or debate, really everything was her choice."
"We wouldn't have blamed you," Mac tells him. She keeps her eyes on the skyline for a moment before sliding off the rock and holding out a hand. "Come on. It's time to go home."
"What do you mean?" Logan asks, and she truly cannot tell if he is being purposely obtuse. He is staring at her hand as if expecting her to have a nineties flashback moment, swiping it along her hair and hissing a gleeful "Psyche!" at him.
"Home, to the collection of misfits you've tied yourself to for life." She folds her fingers, beckoning him on, and thrusts her hand out further. She forces herself not to move, no matter how awkward it feels. "It's the only way any of us are going to get through it, Logan."
He looks up at her, squinting against the piercing light of the sun behind a haze. She knows that he is searching her face for a lie and that he will not find one.
"Let's go see the family," she says. "We're all waiting for you."
He takes her hand.
This is the truth.
This idea was at first just something I was playing around with, then it was developed to answer a prompt on the VM Fic Recs tumblr, then it was finished just for itself because it turned out that I read the prompt wrong. It was helped along by ghostcat3000, and delightfully betaed by cainc3 and g-swag-g, who so kindly answered my tumblr S.O.S. The title is inspired by two quotes: "We tell the truth. We do not flinch" (Temperance Brennan) and "When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching-they are your family" (Jim Butcher).
I'm deeply anxious about this fic- it's my first one from Mac's POV and my first one that is so purely angsty, so if you have anything positive to say, I'd love a review.