Title: "by any other name"
Author: monimala/Mala
Fandom: "Veronica Mars"
Rating/Classification: some adult content, mention of non-con, ficlet.
Disclaimer: Rob Thomas is my tiki god.
Summary: First attempt at VM fan fiction. "she thinks of hands and texture and sour beer breath."
She cuts and pastes their faces, one over the other, some nights when she can't sleep. It's one of those things she thinks about in the middle of the night when the shadows get too long around her bed and she starts expecting Freddy Kreuger to crabwalk across her ceiling. Her own personal nightmare. The one she can't remember. The one that Dad can't vanish with jokes he memorized off Laffy Taffy wrappers and a glass of warm milk. So, she does what she does for any other case: she makes a mental list of suspects.
Every boy at Neptune. Copy. Paste. Crop. She shuffles through them, stomach lurching as she thinks of hands and texture and sour beer breath and who...who sees her every day at school, looks her in the eye, and Knows.
Logan. Logan spends more time high than he does sober. He could've been coked up and itching for action and not even remember it. Or...or...worse...he remembers and that's why he kissed her and it tasted so unbelievably familiar. God, no. Logan is an asshole...but he loved his mother and Lilly and she can't...she won't...accept that he ripped off her underwear and--
Duncan. Duncan has black-outs. Fugue states. He could've killed Lilly in one of them...so couldn't he have...? She usually rolls over at that point, stuffing her head under her pillow like a good little ostrich. No. Nu-uh. No way.
Thank goodness she knows Wallace is in the clear. He's too earnest. He may be a professional file-stealer thanks to her unseemly influence...but the young man is trustworthy and he hadn't yet joined the 09-er elite, much less the general Neptune hoi-polloi. He's good people. Maybe the best people.
There's so few of them.
Some nights, when she's feeling especially down on men and The Man, she wonders if Sheriff Lamb hits the teen scene because she wouldn't put it past him. Whenever he looks at her, she feels naked. She feels raped. Raped. All over again. The "R" word. Most of the time, in the daylight, she doesn't think about it. She's got too many other things to think about. Or she softens it with the word "date." Like someone took her out for dinner and a movie first or bought her a wrist corsage. But she's no dummy and a rape by any other name is still a rape.
She goes through the jocks. The stoners. The people with enough connections or enough cash to spring for roofies for That Very Special Girl.
Her body remembers but her mind doesn't and never the twain shall meet.
Trick photography. Shading. Airbrushing. Were his arms tanned? Freckled? Did he pin her down?
She's a cliche. A Lifetime "Moment of Truth" movie cliche where a bleached blond Candace Cameron and her noble police deputy boyfriend--some bland, forgettable hunk--crusade against date rapists everywhere. Not that Leo is a bland, forgettable, hunk.
He's...sweet.
Which might be worse.
Right around 4 a.m., she usually gets to the last suspect. She tells herself it's because she goes alphabetically but that's not the least bit true. "Navarro" is in the middle of the alphabet. "Eli" is toward the beginning. And "Weevil"...is almost at the end. Almost. But not quite. Her capacity for denial is epic.
Weevil baffles her. Mystery wrapped in enigma, wrapped in conundrum. He's a wildcard. He boosts cars and moonlights as a bookie and looks at her, sometimes, like he'll cash in on all the favors she owes him.
No. Like he all ready has.
But he doesn't seem like the stale Natural Light type. Or the kind of guy who'd sneak into an 09-er bash just to score with a girl while she's passed out. No, Weevil Navarro is tart tequila and lime and a six pack of Dos Equis. He's a bike ride around a hairpin curve with a girl's arms wrapped tight around his waist. A girl who'd give it up willingly the first time he called her "querida" without his buddies around. Lucky girl.
She makes herself that girl at 4:15...and then her eyes get to shut.
She gets to sleep.
And have her own personal dream.
The one she can't forget.
--end--
April 15, 2005.