It hurt more than she would ever admit. The world had dealt her a crappy hand, there was no way to sugar coat it; best friend murdered, dumped by boyfriend, cruelly mocked and ridiculed by those that she use to call friends, abandoned by her mother, and to put a cherry on top of it all raped at a party with no recollection. Yes, the last six months had not been kind to her. The world had been cruel to her so she did the only thing she could do…she got tough. And it helped. Cutting her hair, changing her clothes, and adopting a take no shit from anyone policy, made it all bearable. She closed herself off to the world because she couldn't take anymore. She built a wall around herself so high that no one could possible truly hurt her, or a least she thought.

Somehow that smug-all-knowing ass had managed to slowly break down her defenses. Why did he have to start caring again? It was so much easier when he was calling her names and vandalizing her car. Psychotic-jackass Logan Echolls she could deal with, knight in shinning armor Logan Echolls was uncharted territory. He was making her care and if she had learned anything in her short 16 years of life, she knew that caring for someone only allowed them the opportunity to hurt her in the future.

What most people at school didn't know was that she was friends with Logan long before he was friends with either of the Kane kids. She was the person that had introduced Logan to her best friend Lily Kane and Lily's brother Duncan. She had met Logan for the first time in the hospital, shortly after her eighth birthday. His family had just moved into town and somehow in the process of moving the stuff into the new house Logan had taken a fall down the stairs and managed to break his arm and bruise himself up pretty badly. She summarily had taken a fall, off her new pink bike that she had gotten for her birthday a few weeks earlier, and managed to have broken her arm also. They had shared the beds next to each other in the emergency room. Logan was the first person to sign her bright pink cast and she was the first to sign his blue one. Shortly after leaving the hospital her mom had arranged a play date for the two of them. One play date quickly turned into two then three and the rest was history. She introduced him to Lily and Duncan and the four of them quickly became friends. There friendship grew as the four of them got older and when they hit their teen years Logan started dating Lilly while Duncan and her created a relationship. Together the four of them became the popular kids in high school surrounded by other friends, but at the core it was the four of them. The four of them had been friends for so long that to this day it was a pretty unknown fact that she, Veronica Mars, was Logan Echolls first friend in Neptune.

She stared across the school courtyard to at him, sitting at his table surrounded by the people that he called his friends, Dick, Luke, Cassidy, Madison, Shelley, and a slew of other popular kids that she had also once called her friends. He laughed and joked around, seemingly without a care in the world, but she knew him better than that, she knew he was hurting just as much as she was. With Lily murdered and Duncan having fled the country, she was the only one left that could understand the hurt that he was feeling, maybe that is how it all started, maybe hiding their pain through throwing insults at one another just wasn't working any more, truthfully she didn't know. All she knew was that ever since he showed up a month ago at the Camelot hotel and punched the undercover FBI agent in the face neither of them has been able to stay away from one another. Of course at school they had kept up appearances, neither wanting to change the perceived status quo, but in dark corners and in the safety of his pool house or her apartment, they had been stealing kisses and becoming friends again. Sharing in the pain that only the other could understand.

They were different in so many ways, but what people didn't realize was that at each of their cores the two the core they were the same two people who were dealt a shitty hand in life. Who had lost those that they loved and been betrayed by those that should have loved them.