TITLE: His Friend Too
AUTHOR: arbailey
WORD COUNT: 2,678
RATING: PG-13 for language
SUMMARY: When Veronica catches her best friend and an aging action hero together, everything falls apart.
SPOILERS: Pre-series that quickly goes AU but does spoil the 1st season Lilly/Aaron storyline
DISCLAIMER: I don't own any rights to Veronica Mars, and this story is written as a tribute only.
A/N 1: Very late and a bit shorter, but a new chapter all the same. Winding down now. It looks like two more chapters, unless they get away from me again- which is a real possibility, unfortunately.
A/N 2: Apologies for the buggy 1st upload... Lost some bits in there, but this should be correct and complete :)
Chapter 10: Photographs and Memories
Veronica has never gotten blackout drunk. She's never lost time- hours or even days- represented as completely blank spaces in her memory. She's never woken up somewhere strange with no memory of how she got there. Logan has sheepishly described it to her, and she is fairly certain she has seen the same sort of embarrassed, bleary look in her mother's eyes, but she has no direct reference for what it feels like to awake from an alcohol induced dark-night-of-the-soul. But it probably feels a lot like this. Boneless. Brainless. Broken.
Like a blackout drunk, she has no memory of how she got back from the beach into the dusty confines of the attic. She can hear Logan saying things, things which couldn't be true, and she runs. But then she remembers that look in his eyes and remembers that Lilly lies to her, all the time. Duncan must have lied to her, or she could never have been blindsided by his sudden absence the way she was. Her parents lie to her in all the small, white ways that parents do. But Logan never has. He's held things back that maybe he shouldn't have, and he's told her things she had no business knowing, but he's never lied to her face.
And Veronica is not the kind of girls who just lets a niggle go. She couldn't even if she wanted to, desperately. And so the idea worms its way into her brain and blooms dramatically, pushing a hot, tear-sticky cloud into every corner of her mind. Her awareness of the passage of time has become fluid, the trip home passing by invisibly, instantaneously. However, she feels certain she has been staring at the double page spread for Neptune High Prom 1980 for hours, possibly days.
Her mother looks blissfully happy in the photo. Her dress is gorgeous, her blonde hair is feathered, and her boyfriend, the future billionaire, is adorably attentive as a random member of the planning committee carefully places the silver plastic crowns on their heads. It's all very sweet, really. Veronica had never imagined that such a cheerful photo could leave her with so much rage...
Which isn't fair on her part, and she knows it. Of course, her mother is entitled to a life before Veronica, however little she can imagine it. She's even allowed a life before Keith, a whole slew of old boyfriends and missed romantic connections. But what she's not allowed is this secret life, the pathetic affair that plays out in Jake's letters...
They fan out around her in a half circle, dog-eared and soft from years of repeated readings and re-foldings. She's read them all, stacked them in neat little piles, and laid them out in a rough chronology, as if this act of organization can somehow hold back the tide of chaos that is ripping through Veronica's formerly simple life. She is furiously angry on her father's behalf, and she has a pervasive feeling of nausea sitting just at the back of her throat.
There's a photo album full of California teens bleached blonde in the sun, wearing ridiculous clothes and ridiculous expressions of happiness and contentment. There are newspaper clippings too, for all of the early milestones of Jake's meteoric rise, for his wedding, for the birth of his children. Lilly is just over twelve months older than Duncan, and Duncan's only a month and a half older than Veronica. Celeste has never been the maternal type. What had driven her to another pregnancy so soon after Lilly? Maybe an errant husband stepping out with his high school sweetheart... Maybe Lilly and Duncan were a sort of investment, pawns in their mother's game to hold onto Jake. Maybe Veronica was her own mother's attempt at leveling the playing field. It's all so sordid and tawdry. It feels like a tragic romance novel, like it couldn't be real. But it is apparently her life, her parents. Her siblings.
Being with Duncan had never felt wrong or dirty. It had been nice, uncomplicated and innocent. She hadn't burned for him, wanted him the way Lilly talked about wanting her many men, but she had felt comfortable and secure in his arms and his kisses. Wasn't nature supposed to kick in, to give her the subconscious heebie-jeebies if she unwittingly ended up dating her brother! Truthfully, mothers were not coming out so well in this story, neither Lianne nor Mother Nature. Lianne had been friendly to Duncan, and supportive to Veronica though she always stressed the fragile and sometimes fleeting nature of first love. And while Veronica can now see the times when Lianne might have been gently urging her away from Duncan, it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough.
Furious, she slaps her hand through the neat piles of documents detailing her mother's careful and pervasive betrayal and sends them spinning into the musty air of the attic. It's all just paper. The yearbook. The letters. The newspaper clippings, the birth announcements, the photographs. Paper. How can these little scraps of paper unbalance everything she has ever understood about her family and her life! Spitefully, she gathers everything into a pile in her arms, carefully guarded letters crumpling with her rough treatment. She takes several unsteady steps down the rickety attic ladder and then stomps towards the kitchen table and a confrontation with her mother.
Mom isn't home yet, an entirely common occurrence, but now Veronica is second guessing everything. She dumps her pile unceremoniously onto the table and a manila envelope, not as dusty as the rest, lands on top. She hadn't seen this in the attic, but the postmark is recent, only three weeks earlier, and her stomach jumps into her throat as she slumps into a kitchen chair.
Reaching into the envelope, she feels them before she sees them: photographs. A hundred painful possibilities flash through her mind before she pulls them out, but none of her imaginings prepared her for this. Pictures of herself, caught in the cross-hairs of a gun.
And the strangled, painful noise behind her tells her that mother has finally returned home.
Lianne knows she's not a good person. Keith and Veronica might not know the full scope of her wrongdoing, but they know enough to be disappointed in her. So she drinks to cope with her own hurt feelings, and that only makes them more disappointed. And since she already knows what a bad person she is, there isn't much reason to stop. Might as well go all out. So yes, she knows she's a bad person. But seeing her years of lies spread out on the table, well, it just makes the enormous scope of her betrayal so painfully obvious.
And now her little girl is looking at the new photos, the newest disloyalty, the moment Lianne knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could never, never fix the mess she had created. Veronica is staring unseeingly at the photos, clearly upset, but unable to parse out the true threat. Why was she being held at gunpoint? Who had she hurt? What had she done? Lianne can't explain it to her even now, surrounded by the evidence of her affair and the certain knowledge that Veronica has seen all her secrets. Her heart is in her throat as it was when she first received the photos. It's not the fear that clutched her the first time she saw them, but the shame that she has drawn her innocent daughter into Celeste's power games. Although, in truth, Veronica has always been one of the central causes of Celeste's anger, even if she was blissfully unaware of the cause of her boyfriend's mother's irrational disdain.
There aren't enough apologies in the world to offer her daughter, and the words stick in her throat as she tries to begin. She hears the door behind her open, and she lets out a hysterical little chuckle. With all these perfectly timed entrances, it's like a scene from a movie: the saddest screwball comedy ever committed to celluloid. She stalks to a cupboard, pulls out her secret stash and makes her usual. Four fingers of vodka and two ice cubes splash together unsteadily in her hand.
A good lawman can read a room within seconds of entering. Who skimmed the money and which enforcer is seeing it gets returned. Who hit who first, which woman they're fighting over, and how far the feud goes back. Who has the gun and whether he or she is prepared to use it. Keith Mars has casually walked into hundred of rooms like this, dripping in tension and unspoken rage. In his own home, it's terrifying.
His wife is crying. His daughter is - pointedly - NOT crying, her cheeks red and shiny with the strain of holding back tears. The kitchen table and the floor around is strewn with letters and papers. Yearbooks and photo albums are haphazardly lying face down on the floor with broken spines. And in the very center of the table on the top of the pile is a set of photos where his pretty little girl peers out from behind the reticule of a sniper's rifle, blissfully unaware that her picture is being taken and a threat is being made.
Lianne see him spot the photos, and her face blanches. She steps quickly to intercept him. His blood boils all over again as Lianne slaps her palm down over the photos, trying to obscure his view. He subconsciously fiddles with the handle of his briefcase and growls quietly, "Don't bother, Lianne. I've seen them."
Her eyes pop open, and it would be comic in any situation where his daughters life hadn't been threatened. Lianne gapes idiotically, "What do you... How dare you Keith! You had no right to go through my things!"
"I'm sorry, are you actually arguing about respecting boundaries?" Keith chuffs out, amused despite himself.
Lianne swallows audibly and opens her mouth to protest, but Keith cuts her off, his voice brutally clipped, "I hate to disappoint you, but I actually found them in your hand while you were passed out on the couch. And you're delusional if you think I could ignore a threat to Veronica. Imagine my OVERWHELMING surprise when I traced those photos back to the Kanes."
One of the photos shows Veronica walking out of the dentist's office, right across from a popular outdoor cafe. He lied to the cafe owner and claimed to be investigating a mugging to get his hands on the security footage. Spotting Weidman and his camera on the grainy black-and-white tape hadn't exactly shocked Keith. The photos had stunk of the dramatic flourishes favored by Celeste. Keith knew he could be reprimanded, even recalled, if anyone found out. What he did was completely unethical. He knows he abused his position as sheriff. He just doesn't care.
Lianne collapses into the chair across from her daughter, and Veronica stares determinedly at the photos, ignoring everything and everyone else in the room. "You had no right," Lianne hisses out quietly through clenched teeth.
Keith's tone is just a shade too sharp as he replies, "Maybe not. Anyway, a lot of what happened wasn't right. But she's my daughter, and mail fraud is the least of what I'd do to protect her." If they only knew...
Lianne balks, "She's not y..." and she swallows her words compulsively. She pauses to collect herself, "She's not in any danger. This is just Celeste playing mind games, just like she's been doing for the last twenty-three years."
Keith looks skeptical, "You sure about that? It's Jake's head of security who took these lovely snaps of our daughter, framed in a gun sight. And forgive me if I don't have absolute faith in your judgment when it comes to him... I know you're still seeing him, even now."
Lianne is taken aback, "Jake would never... He loves her! He would protect her! And I was confronting him about the photos, telling him to get Celeste to back off, that's it!"
"I'm supposed to believe that you were having a strictly platonic conversation about Veronica's well-being at the goddamn Camelot!" Keith bites out, the volume of his voice progressively rising.
"Have you been following me? For Christ's sake... It's none of your business, Keith!" Lianne shrieks out, gesturing wildly at him with her drink.
"None of my business?" he roars out, his jaw tight and his eyes blazing.
"Just stop!" Veronica screams. "Is it my business? I want to know who my father is!" Veronica rasps out in a harsh whisper. The expression on her face suggests she has startled even herself. For one long tense moment, everything is still. Then Lianne leans her head into her hand, bracing her elbows against the table.
Keith coughs uncomfortably and pauses for a minute as he puts his briefcase on the table, clicking it open. "Well you're not the only one, honey. I called in a favor from a friend at the state lab," he says as he tosses a non-descript manila envelope on the table. It looks alarmingly like the envelope holding the photos that started this whole furor. "Haven't had the courage to open it though. I've been carrying it around for a week..."
"Well I don't want to know!" Lianne blurts out, holding her cold, sweating drink against her temple as the ice clinks together musically in the mostly empty glass. She pauses for one long moment, and she can feel their hurt stares boring into her. "It doesn't even matter. It's over either way. No matter what that letter says, I lose all three of you." Her shoulder slump, and she seems to fold in on herself. "I think I'm going to go stay with a friend for awhile. Get my head straight." She drops the glass onto the table, nearly splashing vodka on to the envelope holding the results of the DNA test before Veronica speedily pulls it out of harm's way. The sound is far, far too loud. Everyone cringes.
She sits quietly in the moment after her pronouncement. She might be waiting for them to try to talk her out of it, but she'll be waiting a long time. This is what she had been fearing for Veronica's entire life. The moment they found out. The moment they stopped loving her. And she knows she deserves it, this exile. Greedily, she tried to hold onto everyone she loved, and it cost her everything.
"Don't be like me, baby, whatever you do," she whispers out, staring blankly into the middle distance. "If you love someone, hold on until you can't. And when it's over, when you can't hold on any more, let it go. There is nothing for you in the middle. It's a no man's land of broken hearts."
Without another word, she stands up and stalks off towards their bedroom. They can hear her rummaging through drawers and the loud squeak of hangers scraping against the bar. Veronica and Keith sit quietly, staring at the large manila envelope sitting on the kitchen table until they hear Lianne's car start. Neither moves until the sounds of her engine disappear in the distance.
Veronica scoots forward in her seat and lays her finger tips gingerly against the envelope. "You know this doesn't change anything. Whatever the tests say, I know who my daddy is."
Keith smooths her blonde hair, her mother's hair, out of her eyes. With a small and slightly pained smile, he says, "I think you're stealing my line, kid."
Veronica shakes her head, her eyes pooling but her voice firm, "It doesn't matter who says it, as long as we can both agree it's true."
Keith nods assuredly and scoffs, carefully evincing a counterfeit confidence more solid than his true feelings, "Never a doubt in my mind."
"Okay," says Veronica, exhaling mightily as she pulls the envelope to herself and slides a finger beneath the flap, tearing the seal open. "Then let's do this."
A/N 3: So Lianne left. I dunno how I feel about that, but I'm not sure they can stay together as one family unit after everything that happened. I think they need a cool-off at the very least. How do you guys see Lianne? Also, currently deciding how to deal with Duncan. Thoughts? Full disclosure: Sorry DuVe shippers (there must be a few, it has an acronym) this one isn't for you.
A/N 4: All reviews and con-crit are super appreciated!