Rodney Goodman is nineteen, but looks younger. His suit is too large on him, and no one has tamed his hair so it pokes up in swooping cowlicks.
Veronica came to Gia's gravestone unveiling hoping to see his mother. The first property Grant Winters bought was back in 2006 right after his graduation (from Heart, coincidentally. He had apparently transferred after their encounter) while Woody was still mayor. There was nothing unusual in the official paperwork, and the area was still vacant. It was a long shot, but Veronica had hoped to see if any of Woody's notes had been kept by his family, if he had ever mentioned a twenty-year-old kid buying one of the county's old buildings, abandoned for newer facilities. But the cold-eyed woman who Veronica had seen only a few times had not put on an appearance for this.
She isn't the only one. Gia Goodman had overcome the stigma of being the daughter of a pedophile, only for her involvement in two deaths to be discovered. Her funeral had been private, family and friends only, but from what Veronica had heard, the number of friends in attendance had been small. The number that showed up to the cemetery today is even smaller. It is mostly less influential 09ers, the hangers-on, wanting to be seen, to gape at the spectacle, and to gather any gossip that might be floating around. They talk amongst themselves, standing away from the grave and leaving even as the ceremony ends. Rodney stands at the graveside, looking deflated. Veronica glances toward her (Logan's) car. She should really be back in the office. She walks over to Rodney, who is shaking hands with the rabbi, a portly, middle-aged man who looks as if he wants to leave too.
"I have some…good memories of your sister. She could be a lot of fun," she offers, standing slightly behind him.
He nods a little, and swipes a hand by his nose. It makes him look even younger. Veronica starts to step away.
"You were with my sister when she died, weren't you?" Rodney's voice is deep and wavering. Veronica blinks sharply. It reminds her of Logan after Lilly's funeral. "Did she…I know this sounds stupid, because she was shot and everything, but do you think she was happy until then?"
The truth is that Gia Goodman had been scared and manipulated and trapped and pretending, that her last moments were not peaceful, that Veronica had never heard Gia speak about her brother with any particular fondness. "I think that there were good things in your sister's life. I think you were one of them," she says, and she walks quickly back to her car.
Her father's 11 AM is just leaving as she strides into Mars Investigations.
"I'll call you before next week, Mrs. Cobb," Keith says, ushering the woman out the door. Once she's through, he turns to his daughter and raises an eyebrow.
"Hey." She raises her hands and moves around him to the inner office. "Part of me becoming a partner was getting to be my own boss. The sweet smell of freedom, Daddy-o. There's nothing like it."
He leans against the doorway, still examining her. "Part of you being a junior partner was showing me that you could make it in the big leagues. And right now I'm more inclined to hand Mac the keys to the kingdom." He and Veronica glance out toward the main space where the latest employee of Mars Investigation sits. Mac recently decided to give up on Kane Software and give in to Veronica's hints that she should just come to work for them. ("Your stuff is so much more interesting that anything they're doing, and it usually doesn't make me feel sleazy. Plus I'm working on an app that should be taking care of my dubious future grandchildren, so I have no excuse for money over integrity.")
Mac looks up from her computer, her brain taking a second to catch up and focus on them. "Oh, no. Keep your keys. I'm happy to be the sidekick."
"Good. You just crack wise and look pretty," Veronica says, adding roughness to her voice.
Keith looks at his daughter, cocking his head in pity. "But then what will you do?"
"Hey! I bet Mac's De Niro impression's got nothing on mine."
Keith walks over to his desk. His step looked just slightly heavy today, Veronica thinks, relieved. She moves to go sit at her own desk, now tucked slightly awkwardly against the wall. "Yes, I've heard that's how you make it in the biz. I use mine at least twice a week," he says.
"Gonna need it for our latest client?"
"Someone broke into her home two weeks ago, and she thinks the sheriff gave up before he started. First step will be to request the official report from the sheriff's department."
"I'll do it."
Her voice is measured, casual and unhurried, a vague, distracted offer as she looks over something on her computer. Keith looks suspicious anyway. "Alright. But remember that there are still deputies who saw you dressed as a bunny for Halloween when you were six. Hard to intimidate them into getting whatever information you're looking for after that."
Veronica grabs her bag and holds her hand out for the Cobb file. "You've never seen my De Niro."
She fills out the request for the burglary report, unsurprised when she writes in an address in the 02 zip code. She hadn't thought it was possible for the sheriff's department to be more unwelcoming but without even Sacks to look dry and consistent, there it is. The Lamb dynasty might have ended, but Duffy, the elected replacement, is not much better. He has been with the department twenty years- Veronica recalls him as a slightly bumbling shadow in her childhood- and he makes up for the former sheriff's malignance with apathy. Veronica also can't help but notice that a shiny new Lexus sits in his parking space.
She sides the form across the desk. "Here you go, Deputy…" He's new, young and a little too muscular. She checks his name tag. "Crowder. Haven't seen you around here before. Where'd you come from?" The new station has a high desk; it's harder to lean against flirtatiously because mostly she seems like a child on tiptoe.
Apparently it doesn't matter. Not looking up, the officer grabs her form. "I know who you are." He clicks something on the computer. From his dragging, Veronica suspects he's playing solitaire. "Veronica Mars."
She raises an eyebrow. "I guess my reputation precedes me." It really was only a matter of time before they started posting her picture around with the caption Don't talk to this girl. She relaxes away from the desk. "And I suppose this means that you're not interested in talking to me about the twenty-six percent crime increase in certain districts?" She digs in her pocket, holds up a coin pinched between her fingers. "There's a shiny quarter in it for you."
Veronica is used to being laughed at. This, however, is not the kind of nasty laughter she knows. Deputy Crowder laughs genuinely, as if he is truly amused by a joke she did not even realize she was telling.
"Oh, sweetheart," he says, still smiling widely. "You've got to know that a quarter isn't going to cut it. Not with the big boys who are so publically-minded with their checkbooks."
Veronica's Taser has regained its place in her bag, but despite the "sweetheart," despite the arrogant near-admission of bribery, she holds back. There's a reason Logan can count on one hand the times he's won against her at poker. Veronica is a strategist. Neptune knows her; they must realize that she is investigating but she doesn't want to show her hand. "I was just a concerned citizen. You know how property values fall when people get up to no good," she says, and taps a finger against the desk. "Put me down as publically-minded too." She heads toward the door.
"Five to seven business days for your report," Deputy Crowder says, his voice bored and rote. He has returned to his solitaire game.
Being a junior partner is officially supposed to mean a lot of paperwork, but her dad is still stiff, still healing, so Veronica spends the rest of the day out of the office, just her and car, coffee and camera.
Toward evening, she goes and looks at an apartment. It might not be money-conscious, but it's something she's thinking about. She doesn't worry about her dad being alone anymore, and she doesn't want to be thirty and living at home.
The real estate agent she has been talking to is a tired, dusty, cheerful woman named Diana. "There are plenty of available residences right now," she says, her husky voice making even the slow emptying of Neptune seem attractive. "But we have many wealthier buyers who are purchasing old lots and building new homes. Still, I think we can find something for you." But the place they check out is a large, empty loft that reminds her of Gia's place enough to give her a tingle along her spine, so she doesn't consider it any further.
"We'll keep looking," Diana says. "It's a buyer's market in Neptune right now."
Her dad is in the kitchen when she gets home. He is singing a little, badly.
"Ratatouille and couscous, to give you a little taste of the international, baby." He has that wide grin of his on his face as he does Austin Powers, also badly. It pulls a laugh out of her and she goes to the cabinet for plates.
Her dad mentions watching a movie after dinner, but she asks for an hour first. She has gotten into the habit of writing to Logan by now, just about her day, about observations and cases and the new place that she found with the great muffins.
Lemon-poppy today, she starts, Which you would think would be weird, but I was convinced to try and I'm leaving you for a sixty-year-old baker named Martha, so take from that what you will.
It was a good day, fairly routine, so she doesn't even consider censoring her account until the end. She hasn't mentioned going to the cemetery yet.
Went to Gia's unveiling today. Not the social event of the season. In related news, I think they've decided that the motto for the 09er zip is "Cold as ice." Not that the two of us were sleepover buddies or anything (narrowly avoided, actually) but I feel bad for her. They didn't do the right thing with Susan, but no one deserves to be Cobb's special blackmail friend.
Hard to feel upset about the stories I've heard about how he's doing in County. My dad would hide his face in shame if I connect the dots about how that came to be, but I will say that it's nice to have an in with some of Neptune's less law-abiding citizens.
Don't tell, or they won't let me write to you anymore. I know you Navy boys are supposed to keep your associations as clean as those spanking white uniforms of yours.
V
She and her dad argue over what to watch, finally compromising with some comedy chosen at random. She thinks that she has seen it before until she realizes that it's just reusing jokes from actually funny movies. They both fall asleep in the middle, waking groggily for the last fifteen minutes.
"I have an excuse," Keith says drowsily as they turn off TV and lights, shutting down the house for the night. "You're just getting old before your time."
"Nah, I just know what I like to do with my time. My clubbing days are over."
"You had clubbing days? I must have been napping for that hour of your life." His voice is wry. He still isn't entirely comfortable with the idea that her grand return to Neptune isn't just a temporary thing, still makes offhand comments about New York, but it makes her relax a little more each time he jokes about the idea that she's never going to be normal, never really going to be easy going Veronica Mars.
There's nothing from Logan before she goes to bed, but he's replied by the time she checks her email between throwing on clothes and biting into toast. Most of it is pretty standard, a recap of his day stepping around the information that he isn't allowed to tell her. He might be the one flying fighter jets and traveling to distant locations, but his days are repetitive, fairly strictly scheduled. He fills in the mundane with color, with descriptions of his trainees, his friends, the lack of well-conceived lemon-poppy muffins. She laughs, a couple of crumbs escaping as she gets ready to leave. She stops laughing, though, when she gets to the end.
Gia and I only had sleepovers by accident (she ended up passed out at Carrie's a few times) which meant that I missed out on all the chatty bonding development of our relationship. But she could make Carrie laugh like nobody else and I know what it feels like to be trapped, so I guess you can put my motto down as "Room temperature."
Not for Cobb, though. We have more of a "hope you like hellfire" relationship, so your continuing involvement with Neptune's criminal element will go uncontested by military censors.
Pretty sure they already know that I'm not spotless, though. There's probably a bet by this point about who's reforming who.
L
There's plenty to respond to, but Veronica has a question that she hasn't asked through almost six months of casual, fond mentions of Carrie. She holds the last bite of toast in her mouth and swipes out a one sentence reply.
How did you get together with Carrie anyway?
She doesn't feel bad about the length or the abruptness until she is sitting in the car following through on a fraud case, and her phone buzzes with an email. She finds that she is a little anxious to open it, anxious that he will be offended or still so pained over her death that he can't talk about it.
Neptune must be offering some intense distractions if you could hold yourself back from asking about this for six months.
Carrie went on tour after her second album came out. It had a lot more experimental stuff, and she started doing shows in these little venues. She was doing a late one this one night, so she went to grab dinner first. I had just been transferred to Lemoore that week. I didn't have groceries yet so I'd been eating out a lot.
I don't think I would have recognized her (I don't think we were ever in the same room in high school, and she had changed so much anyway) but she recognized me and she came over to say hi. I gave her my number at the end, just because it seemed like the thing to do when you ran into someone from high school, but I guess she saw that being the new guy on the block was hard because she started texting me. And when she was heading back home after the tour, she came for a couple of days and it just…happened.
But I'm glad that it did. Carrie was loyal- I watched one of her bodyguards, this guy who she didn't fire after he let Ruby get by him at a concert once, cry because she was cremated so he couldn't be a pallbearer- and she was funny and we both knew what it meant to want to be someone different than you were in high school.
I'm glad that we had that great year because the next one was…let's start with "catastrophe" and get out the thesaurus to fill in the rest. I wasn't there the whole time, but she slipped so far so fast that I didn't even notice it until she was on the cover of every tabloid there was.
Ships have a zero tolerance policy and they already knew that I had a history when they asked me to enlist, so I had to do alcohol intervention courses for a while. That helped when I was trying to figure out what to do. But I also knew how it felt to have something in your life that make you want to drown everything out, to make these choices that just ended up making everything worse, to make a life that you didn't like but didn't know how to leave. So helping Carrie…it was like helping myself.
I don't know if she would have stayed sober that last time, but I hate that I'll never get to know.
Anyway, that's the flashback into the Logan/Carrie saga. I still can't believe you waited this long for it.
I started trying out this new place. Not sure if you've heard of it. The high road?
That's right near the land of being a better person, right?
Yeah, I don't spend time there. Which leads me to my next question: how did Piznarski Part 2: The Pizening, happen?
One day you'll join me up here. The air…so clear. The intentions…so good.
Piz and I were a coincidence. I was working HR for a newspaper that he freelanced for so we'd see each other if he had meetings. We had a couple of mutual friends. We'd run into each other at Starbucks. So after a few years of awkward side hugs and detouring right around the details when we had to explain how we knew each other, I just asked him if he wanted to actually run into each other on purpose.
Piz was always a really easy guy to go out with, and I guess when I stopped being Veronica Mars: intrepid girl detective and started being Veronica Mars: law student, where the hardest part of dating me was that I was studying all the time, I was a pretty easy girl to go out with.
And plus side of that dating move: I started listening to a lot of NPR, so now I'm an excellent addition to any cocktail party.
You sure you're on the high road, and not the one to hell?
I know it's been a while, but I suspect that you're still more cases than cocktail parties these days. How is that going?
I happened to be in the sheriff's department yesterday and I heard some very unsavory mentions of bribery. And I was sure that our fine officers of the law would never engage in something like that, so I had Mac do a quick check into the sheriff's department financials, and you'll never believe it, but it looks like a foundation called Fortress has been giving a little something whenever it can to a fund for "department morale and comfort."
I'm not sure how much time you've spent in their waiting room lately, but it doesn't seem to have gotten any more comfortable.
Well, I for one maintain hope that we will one day have an interrogation room with cushioned seats. Maybe an espresso machine.
Have you thought more about getting a gun?
Veronica is picking up pizza for herself and her dad and Wallace when she gets that one. She feels her lips purse, her breath going even to try to calm her annoyance.
She still remembers the menace of the gun in Logan's hand as he pointed it as Liam Fitzpatrick, still recalls the feel of Cassidy Casablancas's in her hands, the smooth, sleazy weight of it. Guns are intimidating and unpredictable. She never wants to hold one again.
I'm going to stick to use my weaponized little mind. Nothing's happening anyway.
But it's going to happen eventually, and when you don't know what your mind is going to be up against, a little cold steel is good backup.
Here's the thing: she's mad at him, but it's hard to fight over email, hard to write the words and look at them, to pause and allow her fury to send them anyway. She's gotten angry with him over the past few months, but she usually ends up waiting a minute, erasing her words and rephrasing.
Is this a protective instinct thing now that you aren't here to be my backup? Because you know that my perfume is called "Strong Independent Woman."
You changed your perfume? We really don't communicate anymore. Now I'll have to change all of my special imaginings.
You're the best PI I know (don't tell the second best PI I know; I really do enjoy this new development where I can look your dad in the eye) but this whole situation has flashing danger lights. I just think it's important to remember that even your mind doesn't come with its own bulletproof vest.
Never ever tell me what "special imaginings" is code for.
I'll think about it, but don't expect me to be Veronica Get Your Gun. I've been menacing enough so far with a Taser and a winning smile.
There's barely even enough time for the message to send before she types out another.
To solve that bet from earlier: I don't think either of us is reforming anyone. I think we're just finally figuring out how to put the puzzle together.
She wakes in the middle of the night, throat rough. As she gets back into bed, she checks her phone, just in case.
Well, he's written. You always were good at puzzles.
It would do terrible, wonderful things to his ego if she told him she went to sleep smiling just from that.
Sorry for the delay, guys, especially after you've been so so fabulous with your feedback. The past couple of weeks have kind of smacked me in the face, but I stayed up far past my bedtime to get this to you. (For anyone who's reading my story The Ninety-Nine Percent, I apologize. That's going to have to wait until I'm done dealing with Moby-Dickhead.)
A couple of notes: since the last chapter was posted, the first Veronica Mars book has been released. From what I've heard, it's excellent! I have not read it, however, and am doing my best not to let discussion from that affect this story. This fic will continue to follow movie canon only.
I have also become aware of some small inaccuracies regarding military life (although some of those are actually inaccuracies from the movie, but whatever) so I'm just going to give a disclaimer for the fic: I've been doing some research and have had great help from some sources with personal experience, particularly dansunedisco on tumblr. However, there are mistakes in here that I have chosen not to correct, and I apologize for those. The errors are mine, and I hope you can enjoy anyway.
Also, I'd just like it to be noted that because you asked so nicely for more chapters, I have obliged. However, there's going to be a little more darkness added in. I can only keep up the fluff for so long!