it's: Our lives will not flash before our eyes. Our lives will not flash before our eyes.
by: bj
in sum: Lilly loved slasher movies.
label: veronica. canon ships, omg.
i say: title and summary from "relativity" by jane hillberry. first veronica mars fic. originally written for the hetficathon. so late it's almost on time again.
you say: feedback appreciated more than i can say.
This is Veronica's life--unpredictable, edge-filled, strangely resolute. Secure.
She used to go to slasher movies, used to sneak in with help from Logan's name, used to thrill at her own terror when blood splashed across the screen. Clutched Lilly's hand and Duncan's arm and laughed with relief as palpable as horror when the heroine survived. Duncan didn't ever like those movies. They only went because Lilly thought they were hilarious and Logan called Duncan a pussy for really being scared.
Veronica sleeps fitfully now, covered entirely by a paisley comforter, clutching a pillow to herself as if it represents something sorely lacking in her life.
When she dreams, when she remembers her dreams, she remembers seeing smoke and smelling the cologne she gave Duncan for their one Christmas. Sometimes she smells Lilly's perfume, her father's aftershave, burning pumpkin.
For hours at a time, she sits beside Lilly's fountain, working on cases and logic puzzles. Once, she opened her history textbook, and a random spray of water splattered the flyleaf.
"Gotcha," she said, and closed the book.
Lilly loved slasher movies.
Veronica never knew terror, real and bitter in the back of her throat, until she smelled the smoke outside the old freezer. Her heart pounding like a migraine in her chest, her own voice shrill in her ears, not even really understanding what he was yelling outside, knowing--knowing--she was going to die.
And of course her dad saved her, of course he did, and that made him her dad more than anything else--but. Still. She was going to die.
Later, after, after everything, for the first time, she envies Lilly her death. At least she didn't know it was coming.
So he says, anyway.
"She--she walked away from he," he sobbed on the stand, watching the jury from the corner of his eye. "I l-loved her, how could she--?"
The first week of school, Veronica tried to take meetings in the girls' room, but the windowlessness of it, the dim lighting, the mirror reflecting her screams--the perfume smell--were not conducive to business. She appropriated a secluded table beyond the flagpole instead.
"This isn't nearly as subversive as your old office," Logan said, blocking the sunlight.
Veronica looked at his shadow on her lab notes for a moment. She also had to move offices because--in the mirror, him running his hands over her face, fingers in her mouth, ducking under her shirt, into her cords, mouth biting at her shoulder.
At the arraignment, he had sat behind his father, beside Trina. Veronica was across the room, behind the Kanes. Abruptly, he had stood in the middle of the aisle, staring at the Kanes. For a second, at Veronica. Trina had tugged his sleeve and whispered something fiercely. He had jerked from her grasp and walked away, out of the courtroom entirely.
Veronica hadn't seen him since. She didn't really see him standing beside her table, blocking her light.
"I got tired of scaring the freshmen away," she said flatly.
Could not look up at him. Could not. Had to. Her fingers curled into her palm on her neatly marked graph of Ohm's Law observations. She took a breath and looked.
The set, shape, game of his mouth reminded her, will always remind her. He looked terrible--unbruised, but undefiant and pale and alone and she remembered what that felt like but--. In a way, it was worse than when she thought he was the murderer. Now, that suspicion, and the guilt of it, will always come first in her thoughts, in her estimation of him. She was paranoid enough to believe the same must be true for him.
She looked back down.
"Going soft on me, Mars?" he asked, and her Egg McMuffin breakfast came up to the back of her throat. She stared at her homework and Janine Larson's cheating boyfriend until Logan said, very quietly, "Fuck you too," and walked away.
The kids with third-period lunch crowded out into the courtyard and back into the school. Slowly, the sun moved across her shoulders until Logan would not have cast any shadow at all.
Her dad and Mrs. Fennel didn't get back together, but they have lunch or dinner sometimes. Sometimes she and Wallace will both come over for dinner and Veronica has a small taste of what it might have been like if she had not hoped and acted on that hope.
She doesn't think about her mother or the money she took.
She doesn't think about her mother standing at the front door and lying, hugging her and crying with her and then leaving again and. Never. Coming back.
Her chest feels about three inches deep and she thinks she will never breathe easy again.
Duncan is holding hands with Meg. Everywhere. Every couple in every hall is Meg and Duncan holding hands, solid and predictable and exactly what Neptune needs.
In the journalism lab, it is Duncan holding hands with Meg, but for a moment, right when she came in, right before she went out again, looking at them from behind, their shoulders and heads together--their hands linked between their hips in the dim room--she almost thought it was herself and Duncan. Two years ago; two years ago.
She remembers the satisfaction of all her pretty sunshine hair on the floor, hacked off. At the time she had remembered Duncan winding his hands into it, hair twisted around his wrists like handcuffs, and Lilly telling her how mod she would look with a shorter cut.
Veronica wonders why she decided to grow it back out.
When she tells him her dad is out of town chasing, ha ha, a bail bondsman who skipped bail for credit card fraud, Wallace suggests a fright fest for the night before the trial ends. Feeling guilty for her bad friendship this year, she puts Chuckie, Bride of Chuckie, and Seed of Chuckie in her Netflix queue. They watch and laugh and throw popcorn at the screen, and Veronica thinks of sneaking into Freddy vs. Jason with Lilly and Duncan. Logan was having a fight with his dad that night and couldn't go. She thinks of the coming verdict and all the closure it's not going to bring.
After Wallace goes home with her eternal thanks for sticking around when she's such a mopey Molly, she goes straight to bed. She dreams that she is burned alive wearing a white dress, buried in the arid ground, forever thirsty. She wakes with a gasp and a sob, as if surfacing from a deep ocean dive.
She is very careful not to be late for closing arguments at nine. She shuffles into the courtroom with the crowd, clutching her purse as if she's in Times Square, and manages to sit only a few rows from the Kanes. She is kind of jealous of the ringside seat they've got, probably close enough to see the DA's notes on his desk, and then she realizes she just thought of this trial and its predicating crime as a circus.
Lilly liked the circus too. Anything bright, anything riotous. Anything alive.
Duncan has a deeply secret fear of clowns.
She does not, does not, does not look at him, flanked by his dearly-bought trio of lawyers. She does not remember him giving her a ride home, her heart full of hope, she does not remember how concerned he was for Logan or how inept and sweetly bumbling he seemed.
She sneaks a look across the aisle and Logan isn't there. Trina's mascara is artfully smeared. She looks more like a strung-out junkie than the desperate daughter of an innocent man.
The jury comes into the suddenly quiet room like a herd of elephants. Veronica stares at the back of Duncan's head, thinking about how, not so long ago, she had been content to spend the rest of her life in just this position.
They rise for the judge, Veronica is still clutching her purse, and they sit again. She wonders where Meg is this morning.
Celeste Kane leans her head on her husband's shoulder when the DA starts flipping crime scene photos at the jury, talking and talking all the while.
All that blood, leaked across the concrete, sprayed over the water feature.
Her own blood seizing in her body, her heart startled on a squeeze, fisted in her chest, weighing a hundred pounds.
Then, between the bloody over-exposed images from the Kanes' backyard, there is one, two, three stills from the cameras in his poolhouse, then more, then nothing but.
Grainy and washed-out, almost monochrome, and Lilly seemed more alive in the pictures where she was dead.
Duncan bows his head.
His eyes are probably closed, hands probably fisted on his thighs. He is probably afraid. Veronica remembers putting her arms around him and putting her head on his neck at the movie theatre.
"It's not real," she had whispered.
He had laughed into his chest and in the backseat of her dad's car on the way home he'd said, "It could be real, Veronica. Easy."
She remembers seeing in him all the deep and scared things he wasn't allowed to show anyone else--wasn't even supposed to show her, hadn't tried to, really. Keeping them close to her, filling up her heart, even now. Even when they helped her think he might have killed Lilly.
The DA stops talking and puts the big stack of big photos on his desk.
Veronica takes her iPod earphones out her purse and puts them on when his lawyer gets up to lie.
Veronica eats a tuna sandwich for lunch, mechanically, and decides not to go to school that afternoon.
She lays down on the couch and closes her eyes.
When she wakes up, the living room and kitchen are filled with the murky underwater light of early evening. She can't remember what she dreamed, if she dreamed. Her father is dozing in the armchair, his jacket half-off, his suitcase fallen over beside the coffee table, Backup at his feet like the faithful hound he is.
She closes her eyes again and she dreams of running down a narrow hallway, running as if she's fallen into her already-running body. The hallway is getting narrower. Blood is wet, warm, sticky and real on her hands even though she has never touched enough blood to know what it feels like to have her hands covered in it. Her whole body is covered in it.
She stumbles over a body in green and light green and she can't look at Lilly bleeding again so she keeps running.
The blood starts to chill and she feels her skin puckering like it did after the carwash, soaked through her pep squad uniform, the constant ocean breeze cool and brisk.
She stumbles over a coiled spring of a body, blank white skin punctuated with red belt marks and she stops. Logan stays in front of her, too strong to run past, the one who didn't want saving even if she could have--
Her head starts pounding and she touches her forehead, expecting to feel broken skin and bone, expecting the blood to be running everywhere, but there is nothing. Not even terror. There are no hundred locked doors, there is no light ahead of her. Everything goes on so far that she can't even see a vanishing point, just Logan's body in front of her and Lilly's body behind her and Duncan's misery in her head.
Blood on her hands.
Her dream is lucid, though she won't remember it when she wakes at eleven-thirty to her father trying to watch the late news quietly. She wonders, in her dream, if she is the survivor, or just the breathlessly drawn-out last kill.
End.