Veronica Mars has a secret.
It's one that no one knows about. Not Wallace with his newly reinstated BFF status, not her dad who has really great investigative skills, but never seems to have a clue when it comes to her, and not even Mac, who is the closest Veronica has to a girl best friend since Lilly's death.
Sometimes it's not so much as a secret really, but rather an obsession. The word secret brings images of a car wash, of soap duds and of Lilly, still very much alive and breathing. Veronica hates the phrase, 'I have a secret.' She hates it with a passion, loathes it with every part of her being, and maybe that's why she refuses to call her 'thing' a secret.
Secrets are never good.
Usually they're followed with some disturbing revelation of the person that she could have happily continued on existing never knowing. More often than not, that secret will lead to someone getting hurt, a broken heart and a scarred memory. Veronica has kept and revealed too many secrets that the mere mention of one fills her with dread.
So, it's pretty understandable why she prefers the term 'obsession', though not in a stalker-ish, newspaper clippings on a notice board kind of way. Everybody has an obsession, she figures. A little quirk in their character, something that may or may not represent who they are. Something that can either offer a little insight into someone's personality, or just contradict everything else about them.
She knows of Logan's fascination with literary tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear; of Mac's rather odd wish that she could be a hobbit, of Weevil never having missed a single episode of Pinky and the Brain, something that he had only began to watch because of Ophelia. The first had made her sad as she mourned for her friend, permanently scarred by his father while the second had made her laugh, not because it was weird or funny, but because it was just so Mac. But it was the third that had, oddly enough, made her feel a growing amount of affection for the ex-PCH leader.
Affectionate enough, apparently, that she is now standing outside his door having a conversation with herself.
Veronica's getting her secrets and her obsessions mixed up, and maybe it's time to start from the beginning?
Back when Buffy first aired, Veronica Mars was a whole different person. She still had her mom, her hair was longer and a lighter shade of blonde, not yet having the dark streaks or shorter bob that she would sport years later. Lilly was still alive, and though Veronica and Duncan were not yet a couple, they were reaching it, with much poking and prodding by said girl. The fab four, were still very much a quartet and fabulous, none of the scandals having yet rocked Neptune. And like Sunnydale, Neptune looked like a nice little Californian town, albeit with much richer residents and a bike club instead of the undead to disturb the good people.
Her dad hadn't allowed her to stay up to watch the show, and so she taped them every week, till by the time she reached high school, she had a whole collection of Buffy tapes, each meticulously labeled and filed. She'd watched every episode twice, and the good ones more times than she cared to count. She could practically recite all the lines from 'Fool for love' and she still cried every time she watched 'Innocence'.
Lilly used to tease her about it all the time, and had tried to wean Veronica off it before they entered high school and someone found out about her obsession. Needless to say, she gave up eventually. When it came to her favourite tv show, the old Veronica was very much alike to her present counterpart in stubbornness.
Over time, Buffy became her safety blanket in a world that was just too crazy sometimes for her to handle on her own. When things went a little insane, she world curl up in bed with ice-cream and a tape, letting the Scooby Gang cheer her up before going back to real-life with new perspectives in hand. That summer when Lilly died, and her mom left and her dad lost his job, they became her best friends, her only friends at that time.
In her weakest moments, when she's huddled in the girl's toilet crying silent tears, Veronica would wish that she had someone like Buffy Summers with her, to be her friend, her confidante, and maybe, her hero. Lilly had been that for her at one time, had shown her a world that she hadn't known existed, and when she had died, the door to that world was slammed shut. Sometimes Veronica felt like she was frantically scratching at that door trying to pry it open, needing to be in that world again, needing comfort and affection. Those were times when she forgot that to the real world, she was Veronica Mars, and Veronica Mars was as tough as tough came.
Except, she wasn't always tough.
When she watched Buffy, all she was, was herself. No tough façade, no witty comeback, no confident strut. She was simply Veronica, a girl who felt lost without her best friend, a girl who was frightened of having to go through her teenage years without her mom, and a girl who just missed her boyfriend. The show was sacred to her, and she guarded it fiercely, not letting anyone besides her father and Lilly into that secret world. She had never mentioned it to Wallace before, and hadn't even considered letting Mac in.
So it surprised her when one day, she had just picked up the very first episode of the series, gotten into her car and driven over to Weevil's.
Over the years, Veronica had developed a crush on almost all the male characters on the show. She had notebooks upon notebooks filled with scribblings declaring her love for Angel, Oz and Spike respectively depending on the age when said scribblings were written. At first it was Angel, all tall dark and handsome, charming his way into both hers and Buffy's hearts. She'd cried when he was killed in Season Two, something that she still felt too embarrassed to even admit to herself. Then, it was Oz, and amongst the three guys, it was he who she truly fell for. To this day, she still hated the name Veruca with a passion. And lastly, there was Spike. It was hard not to like him, and truth be told, Veronica preferred him evil and sexy than nice and gooey.
She wondered sometimes if it was normal for a girl to be so infatuated with non-existent characters when she had a real-life boyfriend causing real-life dramas in her life. She also wondered if it was normal for the girl to be comparing said boyfriend with these characters. Duncan was like Angel, all passion and true, puppy love that ran deep. But the monotony got old and boring after a while. Leo was her Oz; nice and sweet and sincere in everyway. If only she had been a different girl, if only they had met a different time in her life, then it could have worked. He was really the guy that got away. Which left Logan to fill out Spike's place, and he certainly did not disappoint; the bad boy that she just couldn't get enough of at that time. He was poison and he was going to hurt her someday, she knew that, but that was the appeal of bad-boys, wasn't it?
Her late night musings often took her to places she didn't really want to go. And they always left her with the one truth: that the real deal, the real guy would be a mixture of all three; passion, sincerity and the ultimate bad-boy appeal. She would always try to envision him, wonder what he looked like, how he would make her feel. All she'd gotten so far were flashes of vanilla and cocoa, something that often left her waking up craving for ice-cream.
Yes, late at night, Veronica Mars had a deeply romantic soul. And a rather imaginative mind.
But back to her boys.
When she needed cheering up, it was Oz who visited her dreams, making her laugh with his quirky remarks. On the bad nights that usually followed a tough day, Angel would be there, waiting to comfort her and make her forget everything else but him. But it was the nights after Spike had visited her in dreamland that she would wake up sweaty and more than a little horny.
Somewhere along the way, so gradually that she hadn't even realized it, Oz's warm green eyes had been replaced with an even warmer pair of chocolate brown eyes that always seemed to be able to tell what was on her mind. Angel's long black duster became a much shorter black jacket and it was no longer an English-accented voice that turned her on, but rather a lower tone baritone that always seemed to carry a sexual innuendo behind it even when the actual words were innocent.
One day, she had just woken up, sweat covered body broken out in goose-bumps as she finally put a name and a face to the person who had been haunting her dreams lately and turning her on even more that she would have liked to admit. She had whispered his name in dark, secretly relishing the way it rolled off her tongue so naturally, yet terrified deep down about what this mean for their relationship.
"Eli."
That done, she had gone back to sleep, a small smile on her face.
So maybe, that had explained how she'd gone from an obsession to a secret, or from a secret to an obsession, for Eli had certainly become her obsession now. She hadn't been able to get him out of her head, and he was there constantly, demanding her attention even when the real him was standing right in front of her. It drove her mad. Two Weevils, both asking for favours, one of the more I-need-your-help-to-make-sure-I-don't-end-up-in-prison type whereas the other was of a decidedly naughty and raunchy fashion.
She didn't know what exactly had finally driven her off the edge, whether it was her growing affection for him, her long-time obsession with Buffy, or his current permanent status as the main resident in her dreams. It could be any one of them, or it could have been all.
But here she was, full of nervous energy, needing to do something about all the pent up emotions. His neighbours probably thought that she was a mad woman, pacing up and down outside the Navarro residence for the past half-hour. Her legs were starting to hurt, but she just couldn't stop. It was either continue pacing or knock on the door. And she didn't think she was ready to take that step yet.
His grandmother wasn't home, he'd told her that yesterday at school, something to do with a cousin having broken her arm and needing help. She hadn't really cared about the reason, having been more interested in the fact that the house would be empty. It certainly was convenient for her, should she decide to either jump his bones the moment her opened the door, or get rejected and laughed at when she told him the truth.
At least this way, her reputation with the rest of the Navarros would not be ruined.
Finally gathering courage that she didn't know she still had, she walked up those few steps and knocked. Her grip on the tape was so tight that her fingers were turning blue from the lack of blood circulation. She could hear movement inside, could hear him cursing as he tripped over something, and then the footsteps became louder as he approached the door.
He opened it, a smile on his face, though she could tell that he was surprise that she was there. 'Hey.'
Veronica smiled back tightly. 'Hey.'