A/N: Y'all were surprised by the revelation of Darryl Marone, huh? Glad you like the twist. This chapter is a whole lot of Mac and Dick, which I'm assuming no-one will complain about ;)

(For disclaimer, etc. - see chapter 1)

Chapter 18

It took a while for Mac to pull herself together after the blow out with Dick. Between his overly honest yelling and her already vicious hangover, a shower and breakfast were not going to be a cure all. Thinking over what had happened didn't help any. Mac could sift through the facts all she wanted, whether they were about last night's drunken kiss or the fact Dick might be a father, and it didn't make any of it any easier to unscramble or make her peace with. None of it settled her stomach, that was for sure.

A second round of aspirin after about a gallon of water and some food eventually had Mac feeling like a member of the human race. It also alerted her to the fact that Dick would probably be hungry and needing another dose of meds right about now. No matter what happened with the two of them, she had a job to do here. She was Dick's primary carer, his only friend for as long as Logan was away. His health came first and everything else had to take a back seat whether Mac wanted to face it or not.

Dick's words were echoing in her head for the hundredth time as Mac threw together a sandwich and raided the cupboards for something to go with it. She tried her best to get Dick to eat something marginally healthy at least once a day, before they reverted to pizzas and various other take out in the evenings as they kicked each other's butt at video games or whatever. Pain medication wasn't the only way to heal a body, not that Dick seemed to care much about veggies or an over-abundance or sugar in his diet.

"You think I don't care? You think it doesn't even bother me that I might have a kid out there? Well, it does, Mac. It bothers me a lot!"

She heard the words as clearly now as when he yelled them into her face. Mac hated how right he was, how much she had judged him and so easily. Before it was okay. She could make excuses for treating him badly because that was how he had treated others, herself included. Mac justified her actions and words based on his own and that was fine. Since moving in together, no matter what the reason, Mac and Dick had gotten closer. They had become a kind of friends, though Mac refused to put too much thought into a more precise descriptor up to now. To just assume Dick was an ass, after all the time they had spent together, all she had come to know about him, it was not Mac's proudest moment and she planned to tell him so.

"When I drink and women are all over me, it... it's not just about feeling like I'm worth something, it blanks out everything else too. All the stuff it hurts too much to think about."

That comment had hit Mac like a bullet to the brain. She knew what he meant, she knew exactly. At the moment he spoke those words she should have admitted that Dick might have been speaking for her. Not the drinking and women part of it, but the need to block everything out, to forget. She handled things better these days, after so many years, you had to learn to let go, but she knew what it was to suffer. She understood thinking too much, blaming yourself, rightly or wrongly, wondering too much. The need to get away from that could get pretty severe, especially when there was no-one to turn to, no-one to talk things through with and off-load. Mac had friends and family, but neither her situation with Madison or worse the one with Cassidy were things she could just bring up with anyone and everyone. She had to assume that aside from Logan, Dick felt very alone and isolated, no place to turn to when he was hurting, when he just needed someone to listen and tell him it was okay.

"No matter what you think about me, I don't lie to women. They sleep with me, they know that's all it is. Lucy knew it, same as all the rest. I don't know if I knocked her up, but it is not all my fault if I did."

Mac stopped at the bottom of the stairs with a tray on her arm as those words ran through her head. Dick had a point. It definitely took two to make a baby, and if this Lucy person had decided to sleep with Dick, presumably without protection, she had to know what she was risking. That didn't make Mac feel any better about the prospect of Dick being a father. It shouldn't bother her. It didn't make sense unless her feelings ran way deeper than friendship. Mac shook her head and forced herself to keep on walking. Now was not a good time for this particular thought process. Everything else was on hold, until she made her apology.

Mac found Dick's door half way open and the man himself lying on the bed with his head turned away. Whether he was napping or had just heard her coming and didn't want to see her, Mac couldn't be sure. With her free hand, she knocked on the open door just to be certain he knew she was there and then came into the bedroom with her tray. She put the food down on the other side of the bed and then got the correct pills from the bottles in the nightstand. If Dick looked at her at all, Mac didn't know about it, and she tried not to think about it either.

"Here," she said at last, more because she had to rather than anything else.

She put the pills into Dick's hand, waited for him to throw them in his mouth and then handed over a bottle of water with the lid already removed. Mac dared to glance at his face as he swallowed down the medicine, taking the bottle away when he pushed it her way. Apparently he wasn't talking to her, but that was okay. Mac needed her time to speak anyway.

"I had nightmares for months after Cassidy died."

Dick's eyes shot up to meet hers the moment she said it and Mac wasn't surprised. She also wasn't done yet.

"To start with, I hardly slept at all, and then when I did, nightmares, all of the time. What happened, what might've happened... It's not something I exactly want to recall in vivid detail, but it was bad. So yeah, I understand exactly what you mean about blocking out bad memories and not wanting to deal. I'm the one person on the planet that probably gets it in a way nobody else ever could, because I know what it is to love and to hate the same person at the same time, and not have a damn clue how to ever deal with that."

Dick wasn't sure if all the air had gone out of just his body or if in fact the room was devoid of oxygen altogether. Certainly he had no clue how to take a breath right now, never mind form a sentence. He always knew that out of everybody in the world, Mac was the one who ought to understand him best and yet disliked him most. Well, not the most, because Ronnie always had that title, but Mac had to have come a close second for a while there. He gave her some real reasons to hate him, sometimes on purpose because he almost thought it was for the best. Now they were some kind of friends and still he had not expected her to walk in here and make this kind of confession.

"I'm sorry I yelled before," he admitted at last, the only thing that seemed right to say in such a moment.

The blank mask of something akin to pain and anger combined melted slowly off Mac's face. A hint of a smile came through and Dick was more than a little relieved to see it.

"I'm sorry too," she assured him. "I had no right accusing you and getting mad. That was stupid."

"It's cool." Dick nodded, returning the half smile she had found for him.

The air came back into the room and passed through them both in a joint sigh of relief. Things were not solved here, not anywhere close to perfect. Dick might still be a father. Mac might still be feeling a little more for the guy than she was okay with. The point was, they were back to being friends and the world was spinning in the right direction on its axis. Call it a win for now.

"Um, you need anything else?" asked Mac, hands in her back pockets as she floundered some for normal conversation. "Help to the bathroom or whatever?"

"Yeah, probably a good idea," said Dick, shifting off the bed.

Mac moved on automatic to help him, putting everything else out of her head as she concentrated on the task at hand. She got Dick to the bathroom and then came back to the bed, straightening the comforter and tidying the video game boxes by the TV just for something else to do. A few minutes later, she got Dick back to his bed and was about to leave him to his lunch when he spoke again.

"At least you treated him right."

Mac didn't have to ask who he was talking about or what he meant. This was a continuation of what they had been talking about ten minutes before, as if no time had passed at all. It wasn't a conversation she wanted to have in a lot of ways, and yet in others, she couldn't wait. It might just be cathartic.

"Not always," she said, turning back to look at Dick picking at his sandwich. "And, y'know, what happened... None of it was our fault."

"Doesn't make me feel any better. If I was a better brother..." his voice trailed away and he shook his head.

"If I was a better girlfriend, if your mom and dad had been better parents, if Woody Goodman hadn't been a pervert," Mac reeled off as she came to perch on the other side of the bed. "There are a hundred factors, Dick. You know there always is with stuff like that."

"I know," he agreed. "I knew before the therapist told me, before Logan said it," he said, rubbing his forehead as if it ached. "Knowing stuff and accepting it are two different things though, right?"

"Oh yeah," Mac agreed, pulling her legs up onto the bed and making herself more comfortable. "After what happened, I was kind of a mess. I couldn't look at guys in the same way. I felt like they were all looking at me, that they... they had plans for me. It was irrational, a part of me knew that, but it freaked me out for a long time."

"You think you're over it now?" asked Dick, looking genuinely curious.

Mac shrugged. "As much as I can be. Cassidy was a part of my life and I can't change that. I can't change that I loved him or that I hated him. I can't go back and make it different, but I don't have to let it ruin the rest of my life. Comes a point you have to draw a line and say, that's it. I'm not running my life around this crap anymore. You have to learn to live again."

Dick nodded, either in agreement or understanding, maybe a little of both. Since he didn't say a word, Mac couldn't really be sure.

"Honestly? I started with the whole acting out and chasing chicks thing because... because it was a way to get attention," he admitted eventually. "Beav was the smart one, I had to be the funny one, the sexy one," he said with a smirk he couldn't help. "Anything so that somebody noticed."

"You were pretty hard to ignore in high school," Mac agreed, nodding her head. "Did it really help? Being adored by the 09ers and all?"

Dick shrugged. "Didn't hurt. Still, wasn't exactly what I wanted. Wasn't the same as having somebody who really gave a crap. Y'know I only ragged on you and Beav so hard because... I don't know, because I wanted what you guys had, in this weird twisted way. You always looked so freakin' happy."

"Well, we were, I guess," said Mac, awkwardly looking away. "Now the happy memories are all twisted up with the bad ones."

"I get that." Dick nodded. "I get nightmares too, but then you know that," he recalled.

"Yeah," Mac admitted.

It was good to say it all out loud and have somebody understand, but before too long they were both done with a topic that was still very awkward, too much to keep on dragging up unecessarily. Mac was right about needing to draw a line and move on. Dick felt a little bit like a weight was coming off his shoulders as he spoke to her about all of this. She was the first person he felt truly understood where he was coming from, and that was amazing. He was startled when she suddenly got up and went for the door.

"Mac...?" he called after her.

She was smiling when she turned around.

"Relax, dude, I'm just going to grab my lunch," she told him. "I'll be right back."

"Cool," he told her, smiling just the same.

There was no logical connection. Veronica had spent hours on internet searches and background checks only to come up with a big fat zero. She was absolutely certain that Darryl Marone was the most likely candidate for Dick's attack. He had plenty of motives and from the pictures Veronica had dug up, he sure had the size and stature to make a mess of a semi-drunk Dick. The problem was, Veronica was almost certain that Missy Stone and her room-mate, Adam Durant, were the culprits when it came to the knock out juice involved in the crime. The big problem now was tying all the leads together, and that Veronica was failing to do.

Darryl, much like his younger sister, Betina, had attended Neptune High, but Missy Stone was never a student there, having attended Pan instead. Adam seemed to be a newer addition to Neptune altogether, having graduated from a school two counties over before enrolling at Hearst a couple of years back.

Family ties was the next check, but Veronica was coming up empty there too. Even mutual friends seemed to be a bust. There was a chance that Darryl, and potentially Lucy, liked to party at the 09er where Missy worked, but that didn't exactly make them buddies or likely to want to commit a crime together. Certainly, Veronica didn't have any motive on Missy or Adam's side either.

Her hand went to her head that ached considerably. The one thing Veronica Mars hated most about the crime solving basis was when the crimes just refused to be solved no matter what! Dick Casablancas' attack was such a case and what made it worse was that she was spending all this time on it for no pay at all. Veronica knew damn well that was heartless, but it was also true. She couldn't afford to spend too much time on this when she had paying clients to attend to, and yet she felt compelled to do it. For Mac and for Logan. For Dick too, actually.

Veronica yawned and sat up straight in her chair again. One more revision of the facts before she called it a night. She doubted it'd do any good, but she had to try.

To Be Continued...