When she'd left Neptune, Veronica had meant to leave it all behind her. But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and a person's nature? Well, that isn't so easy to leave behind.

A/N: I have too many ongoing stories as it is, but I couldn't help but post this. I liked movie and the books, but the lawyer storyline just sort of rang false to me. Not that she couldn't or wouldn't decide to take that path - I think she would have made a fine lawyer - but the way those nine years just sort of become invalidated as soon as she steps foot in Neptune. No friends made at Stanford, no networking at Columbia? Not a moment when all that hardwon legal knowledge comes in handy? So, here it is, my take on a likely path done in the grand tradition of the Veronica voice-over. If I have time and energy, this will continue.

-Prologue-

Somehow, I thought that leaving Neptune would change things. Change me.

After all, it was Neptune that had made me the way I was, what with its money-makes-right attitude, its pervasive corruption, its sleazy underbelly. All of which I had observed and captured in true-to-life RAW files, just in case I ever found myself beginning to feel like misanthropy wasn't a valid worldview.

I thought that if I put down that camera, put that town in my rearview mirror, and put myself in a place far, far away, I could become someone else. Someone who didn't hurt the people she loved. Someone who didn't get the people she loved hurt, which was the direction my life was going after that first disastrous year at Hearst.

Turns out it's not that easy.

It took longer than it should have for me to understand that, but at the time I was desperate to believe it. Even if my father's pedestal was a little cracked and weathered, what with some questionable decisions made in his personal life, he still meant the world to me. His disappointment was therefore a correspondingly heavy weight pressing down on my shoulders, even if a part of me was certain that would all change if I dared explain the circumstances that had led me to Jake Kane's doorstep one last time. But that was something I couldn't do, because that door led to men even more dangerous than the billionaire who held Clarence Weidman's leash.

And, well, what daughter wants to admit to her father she's got a sex tape making the rounds of her campus? The sense of violation was already bad enough without bringing him into it.

And then there was Logan.

My transfer paperwork was already in the mail before I caught my flight to Virginia.

I did my time in the FBI Honors Internship Program, with ten weeks at the FBI Academy at Quantico, which turned into a sixteen hours a month continuing internship at the FBI San Francisco field office. It was a little over an hour drive in perfect traffic conditions (and while our weather may be great, anyone who tells you SoCal has great traffic is lying), but I kept at it for two years. Notice the tone? "Did my time", "kept at it"?

It's hard to give up a dream you've had since childhool, but after two years I had a pretty good idea it wasn't them, it was me. The FBI is all about rules and procedure and oversight. And for someone like me who'd been bending rules, circumventing procedure, and avoiding oversight since I was seventeen, it wasn't a good fit. In the movies it's the rogue agent who saves the day and gets the girl, but in reality, after all the explosions are finished, the rogue agent is sitting in his or her supervisor's office, being suspended without pay while an investigation is launched into their handling of the case.

They say that it's better to try and fail than to never try at all, but I've learned to quit when you see the writing on the wall. Sometimes it's better to save everyone a lot of frustration and tears than trying to fit that square peg into the round hole.

I declared for Psychology at Stanford, graduating near the top of my class with both my BA and Interdisciplinary Honors in International Security Studies from the CISAC. Without all those late nights at the Camelot, I figured I'd have a lot of time on my hands and a girl's gotta keep busy if she wants to stifle the temptation to stick her nose in where it isn't wanted. I even spent a summer studying abroad-scholarship, not a sudden influx of wealth. After graduation, my skills with a camera found an outlet that wasn't recording all those N-17 scenes and while it didn't pay six figures and come with a company-provided retreat, it paid the rent and sent me around the world.

When you say it like that, it sounds neat, tidy, bloodless. Maybe not the law degree my dad had suggested back when he'd decided he'd like me safely behind a desk and safely in an upper middle-class tax bracket, but not exactly joining a cult or taking up a lucrative career taking my clothes off.

I'm sure he would have been less pleased to know that I'd lasted all of two months at Stanford before my shiny, self-righteous intent to be no more curious than the average college coed had collapsed under the weight of my own nature. In my defense, it wasn't just innate nosiness-I was a girl with expenses, an ability to calculate just how much I was going to pay in interest if my loans heaped up, and a legitimate PI license. Infidelity paid better than the tips down at the local diner.

Dad might have gotten over that part eventually, provided I didn't give him too many details-I'd learned my lesson about discretion and circumspection in college. Other people, preferably with badges, sidearms, and well-trained backup got to do the big reveal when it involved the criminal element.

He'd approved when I'd told him I'd enrolled myself in self-defense classes. I didn't tell him when I traded in my trusty stun gun for a Taser X26P, when a StrikeLight joined the list of essential items nesting in my purse, or make him aware that I'd gotten myself a concealed carry permit and very occasionally made use of it. Although, in defense of that last one, the FBI takes the marksmanship of its field agents seriously, which means that if one of those agents options to take you down to the range, it is meant to be a bonding moment

Some of those things were just common sense changes, inspired by being pinned to pool tables by men who didn't like people asking questions. Others were suggested none too gently by friends, who rather than telling me to just get out of the PI business made it their business to make sure I survived the experience.

Except for the year when it was basically social suicide to be seen with me in public, I've always made friends easily, even if I seem to have trouble keeping them. My Wallace at Stanford? A Marine still serving out his time in the reserves while working on his engineering degree whom I'd met, strangely enough, in a class we were taking to meet the fine arts requirement. Or at least I was. He actually seemed pretty into it. I soon knew more about my pistol than I knew about my car, which considering my high school experience was saying something. T.J. wasn't much impressed with the defense course either and redirected me to "supplemental" lessons.

Almost before I knew what had happened - and T.J. was like that, a fixer, someone who came and saw and took action - I was being dumped out of bed for what he insisted was the gentler, kinder version of PT. With God as my witness, I never want to see what real PT is like. Good thing, too. I hear they make female Marines in the middle of swamp in the Carolinas.

Any nostalgia I might have been carrying around for those days when I played soccer rather than taking the easy PE credit in pep squad? Yeah, that vanished, but there comes a moment when you're grateful that you can outrun the philandering soon to be ex-husband who has ten inches and a hundred and twenty pounds on you.

It didn't stop at the running. It was all about mentality, about preparation, and about finding me a martial art discipline that was heavy on leverage and violence and light on brute force. Don't get me wrong, the go-to plan was always to run or to reach for a weapon to even the odds between me and everyone else who isn't a 5' 1" female, but some of the most frightening moments in my life had come happened when my stun gun was out of reach. "It's fine to do dangerous things," I was told, "you're only stupid if you don't prepare for them."

And there is this thing, which you don't think about when you become friends with someone who is or has ever been in any branch of the armed forces. There are more of them and if you agree to become roommates with one of them, expect to find people you don't know crashing on your couch. Usually this was limited to people in the same branch, but T.J. and his high school friends had apparently made their friendly rivalry a thing - from the Coast Guard to Air Force, they had someone in each branch of the uniformed services. I'm pretty certain that I managed to meet them all bleary-eyed, in my pajamas, with my hair doing that ugly kind of bedhead that comes from actually being in bed.

I want to point out that this move-in with T.J. was strictly platonic - it had the advantage of making a real kitchen available, rent manageable, and any house with a guy in it is statistically less likely to be the scene of a crime than that of a woman living alone.

It was on our thrift store couch that I met Caz. Full name: Cassidy Butcher, occupation: Navy SEAL. Someone way back in his military career was a Wild West enthusiast - I was actually introduced to him as Sundance. He came into my life in the middle of a case done as a favor for a friend, which meant that he wasn't operating under illusions about just how brusque or manipulative I was capable of being when a case began to turn personal. We'd known each other fo r less than a week when he said to me, "I get it. V is for Vendetta."

So sometimes I was V, sometimes I was Mars, sometimes I was Vendetta, and they couldn't seem to help the occasional quip about a VSB (Vengeance Seeking Bitch) locking onto a target, but he never called me Veronica again.

Somehow, in the course of the two years that T.J. and I split the rent, it became an understood thing that if Caz was in the country and on leave, he'd be at the apartment. We even got rid of the couch and bought a futon, because Caz was over six foot tall and our little couch couldn't comfortably accommodate that.

Then graduation came. T.J. went back overseas, this time to use his engineering degree in third-world countries, helping them to develop their infrastructure. My own career choice was slightly less altruistic. It came with good pay, miserable hours, and a chance to use all those honed investigative skills without the rigid rules of the FBI. I told my father and everyone who asked that I was a photographer, which was technically true, and let on that I made less than I actually did.

For five years I belonged to the CIA.

And that's all I'll say about that, because everything else is classified.

I would have stayed in the game until there was nothing left, because it asked me to be me, to lie, to prod, to be just that little bit more clever than anyone else, but things changed. A helicopter fell out of the sky in a rain of fire and shrapnel and bodies and I - I survived. The scarring was distinctive and required careful wardrobe management to hide, which was more than an inconvenience. It was dangerous and because I was never meant to do nothing more than sit behind a desk, I found myself in the PI business again.

Not alone this time - Caz had been honorably discharged in time to coax me through physical therapy and patiently wait out the biting rants that mandatory counseling inspired. He just seemed to assume that the PI venture would be a partnership and because he proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he was there to stay - ten years and ten thousand miles hadn't done anything to change that part of me - the eastern branch of Mars Investigations was born. I'd been commuting to D.C. for the last five years when I wasn't on foreign assignment, but while there might be plenty of corruption in the capital, I didn't have the resources to play that game anymore. So we moved ourselves to the city that never sleeps. Sometimes very literally.

Without the prejudices of a town set against us and a population many, many times greater than Neptune, it was easy enough to stay in the black. Easy enough that we found ourselves a receptionist, picked up a couple of computer security specialists, and added another investigator to the roster before I got the call that shook the foundations of my life just as I was beginning to feel really comfortable in it again. Tolerable apartment shared with Caz, good friends both at work and outside it, and a working knowledge of the best delivery places in my little section of the city.

After nine years, his information shouldn't have even been in my contact list. That's what well-adjusted adults do, right? They accept that things finish, put them aside, and move on.

I suppose that means that I'm not that well-adjusted after all. I guess what they say is true. You travel far enough and you end up right back where you started.