New AU Veronica Mars Fanfic.
slight 2.20 spoilers but mostly set in the future.
It is 11:32 p.m. and the house plunges into darkness as she blows out the single candle on her coffee table. She nods her head in satisfaction, approving her own instinct for ambiance, shades of grey are by far the best pallet for self-reflection Her eyes focus unerringly on the accumulating shadows, trying to make out the indistinct edges of the memories staring back at her with bright feral eyes and fangs glinting in wait. She thinks this time she’ll be better prepared when they strike. Wistful once upon a time music plays, it seems fitting harmony for the swish of wine swirling against glass as it tilts towards her mouth, and the liquid pools and slides silky and tart across her tongue. She breathes deep and watches with impartial eyes as the dull red number glowing on the clock-face across the room shivers almost imperceptibly into the next digit. It is 11:33 pm. In 26 minutes she will be thirty years old.
Thirty. The number should be important, a new beginning, the tarnish of her teens and the tainted traces of her twenties absolved in baptism into a new decade. It is another milestone reached, another day ticked off on the timetable of the inevitable. It is another of those occasions that everyone else counts and she can’t remember if she ever cared about. Another of those landmarks that ceased to matter when everything she once knew as normal crashed and burned in the glorious bonfire of other people’s vanities.
Thirty. The number isn’t important but the idea of it saddens her. The same way looking at old pictures of herself in junior high saddens her, like another minute is gone that she can never reclaim, never redo and already, only seconds after it has slipped past, she can’t quite remember what made it special or worth remembering or any different than all the other minutes that came before it in a finite parade that seems endless in retrospect.
She rises, restless and alone as she crosses her living room to stare at the blurry distillation of Seattle’s cityscape reflecting on Elliott Bay. She finds it a soothing vision through the rain-streaked pane; the abstract flow of color and light and movement reflected on errant swells like so many stars dancing in the midnight dark. This is the reason that she moved here. This is the reason that she can never live far from water. The distorted mirror of life is hypnotic, sad, lonely, beautiful, another of life’s enigmas that is meant to be admired but never understood. Like Lilly, like Logan, like love.
She sinks down on the floor, her back against the side arm of her couch and watches the reflections of light dance the ballet across lightly swelling waves before her. She takes another sip of the ruby red wine in her half filled glass, letting the plumy warmth slide around her mouth as she thinks about the people she doesn’t have. The people she lost, the pieces of herself that she has never quite gained back.
She thinks that if her mother hadn’t chosen oblivion over her own daughter she would have thrown her a surprise party, Italian food and bottles of wine, fat flickering candles dripping wax onto white linen, Pavarotti on the stereo and tiramisu for dessert.
She thinks that if Lilly hadn’t fallen silent on blood stained concrete her birthday surprise would have somehow involved gambling and Elvis impersonators and hot male strippers, because Lilly always said a party wasn’t a party until someone got naked.
She thinks that if Logan hadn’t gone to Rome and never come back he might have flown her to Carmel just so they could walk on the beach after dinner with their feet digging wet impressions into the edge of the surf and their shoes discarded at the edge of the sand like they intended to walk out into the ocean and never come back.
She doesn’t know how many of those elusive minutes tick by as she watches the water washing the shore clean and lets her mind wander. One arm is banded tight around her ribcage and the other gently cradles the crystal stem of her wine glass, it is thin and delicate and fragile against her skin, because now she can afford elegance on her own and its a way to tell the world that she isn’t poor or scrappy anymore.
She has made herself known, left her smudged mark on culture, cashed in on her talent and climbed her first rungs of that ladder to the top. Thirty years old and her name has traveled the world on other people’s tongues being dropped and discovered and lauded in places that her body has not yet been. She’s a star on the rise.
She should feel like she’s on top of the world. On the good days the pay off is big enough to make her almost forget what it cost her. On the good days she rationalizes that she has not been untrue to herself. After all, she is what she has always been, an observer of human nature, and a cataloger of human sin. Now she just has a bigger canvas. And no one can blame her for the fact that the pictures she captures through the impersonal lens of a camera are the kinds of things that no one wants to see, things that no one wants to admit exist, things that capture your eyes and your heart and your mind and won’t let you look away. Life in it’s rawest form has been her specialty since age sixteen when her life was stripped to its skeleton and all that she had once thought beautiful was nothing but spilling blood and shattered bone and fate with a sickle in hand awaiting his next victim.
She argues with herself about whether it is a little bit wrong to show the world a peek of what lives behind other people’s smiles, what lurks in other people’s skins. She knows the answer even as she poses the question in her head. The images that she etches onto film are a broken kind of beauty and what she does is stunning and haunting and vital, but at its root it is heartless. It is nothing about an all abiding love or passionate heart and everything about despair and loss yearning to sublimate. On the bad days she knows that on top of the world is only one of the emotions that she should feel that she doesn’t.
They call her brilliant and she flushes in the face of their effusive praise. They read it as humility and she is glad that the only other person who understands that she took the easy way out is too long gone to ever see the stain of shame on her cheeks. She is the only one left who knows that once upon a time she chose the hard way. Natural talent or not, being behind the camera would always be an evasion for her, it would always be easier, one degree of separation from the pain, a numbing salve cheap because it was bought at someone else’s expense. One less bruise she had to see bloom purple beneath her own skin.
She had fought the inevitability of it for a while. She had tried for normal, pre-law. photography just an elective to dabble in, summa cum laude, law school applicant, 174 on her LSATs, a shoe in, a natural.... an interloper, because on the inside she had never really believed in justice after Lilly and Aaron and Logan and Mac and Cassidy and herself. She’d had enough of the personal side of travesty to last a lifetime and it was an empty pursuit to chase something that you had stopped holding dear a long time ago.
In the end she came back to what she knew, what she’d always known was her double-edged sword to bear. Human nature as a still life, beauty and evil and sadness and perfection recorded with the same unbiased lens. And she was good, but only soullessness made her great, her success a direct result of her greatest failure. Her debut was flawless. A picture too wrenching and exquisite for words, a boy with a grudge, broken heart on his sleeve, weeping over his dead murderous father's grave, tragedy in black and white, so real that it wrung you out just to look at it.
She’d never meant to take the picture but she was too comfortable looking at the world through a layer of glass to stop herself. She’d moved her fingers without thought, she’d thrown her heart out of the picture and seen it for it was; stark contrast, real life agony overlaid on a parody of perfection, A photographer’s dream shot. Her photography professor had called it stunning. It had been too late by the time she realized it was in the folder with her final project. Too late by the time she saw it on display, a five-foot tall trophy to her careless betrayal.
She’d never forgiven herself for letting her fingers fall heavy on the trigger. She’d never forgotten the look on his face when he saw it life-size on a wall, pain in two dimensions because three was too much to bear. Her absolution and his destruction, because the world wasn’t right enough for them to both to be simultaneously whole.
Irrefutable, unalterable decisions were made with their eyes before their mouths ever uttered the syllables and she thinks to this day that utter heartbreak is a much more devastating weapon than anything made of steel or gunpowder. She has always known she was wrong but it never mattered less. Words were etched in blood, scarring hearts, closing minds and there was no use thinking about what could have been because it wasn’t and she had always been a pragmatist and nothing had changed really, she was who she was and he was who he was and the we they had once formed had never been built to last.
She shakes herself a little to dislodge the melancholy. Who needs love with the world at her feet, the horizon within grasping distance? She isn’t lost or alone and she tries to tell herself that this is where she wants to be. That it was years ago, too many layers of memory gauzing over the details to try to re-write the postmortem. She convinces herself that she is only thinking about this because it is almost her birthday and nostalgia goes well with chocolate icing and too much red wine. She tells herself that life isn’t so bad with a steady paycheck and a steady group of friends and a steady sense of who you were through their eyes. A hero, a patriot, a fighter, a winner, no one ever need say a loner.
She reminds herself that now she has people. Friends, colleagues, acquaintances, people who know her, people who love her. Tomorrow she’ll celebrate with them.
Her dad will call at 12:01 am with his usual off key rendition of Happy Birthday Baby that is equal measures endearing and disturbing and she’ll feel a warm fuzzy glow in her stomach as she laughs because he is the only one who has ever loved her indiscriminately, wholeheartedly and she never forgets how lucky she is in that.
Wallace will call from his honeymoon in Hawaii, sounding drunk and happy at two in the afternoon. She’ll figure he probably hasn’t had a drop to drink and its just the love talking.... he’s been like that for a year and a half, ever since he met Kelly, and it shows no signs of dissipating. She never thinks to envy him. People like Wallace are made for happily ever after. It’s not his fault that she isn’t.
Mac will send her a funny e-card with some sort of silly animal singing happy birthday in an goofy contralto and the message will say ‘wish I were there’. Nothing but a wish since she is currently in Hong Kong setting up a technical center for Microsoft but it is the thought that counts and Mac knows the value of a sentiment half sarcasm and half sweetness and all about never forgetting the people who catch you when no one else is there to break your fall. She and Mac understand each other but Mac will always be the nicer one, Cindy can be devious but she just isn’t capable of cold-blooded.
She’ll probably get a card in the mail from Duncan, right on time but without a return address, as always, it’ll have a new picture of his Lilly posing awkwardly on some distant beach, blonde and tanned and all gangly twelve year old limbs. She’ll put it on her bulletin board and relegate last year’s picture to the bottom drawer and she won’t try to trace the postmark because she’s come to peace with that particular bittersweet chapter and she’s glad for the young girl’s crooked naive smile even though she’ll never really know her.
Rebecca and Stan from the newspaper office will drop by and cajole her to join the gang for drinks at the pub after work and she probably will, wiling the night away in a welcoming raucousness of a local bar while her friends tell war stories about the last harrowing rush to deadline.
She has people to keep her company. Tonight she has chosen to be alone. Sometimes she prefers alone.
She takes another sip of her wine to wash the taste of memories out of her mouth and glances at the clock again. Four minutes to go. Four minutes until she can hear her father’s crazy lovable voice telling her that all he wants is to see her happy and she can tell him that she is and think that its only a halfway kind of lie because happy is all relative anyway. Four minutes before she can fall into bed and bury the ghosts for another year.
Thirty years, a half, a third, a fourth of her life, who knew really? If those thirty years had taught her anything it was that it didn’t matter if you were rich, or famous or smart or happy, in the end no one ever knew when it would all be gone. She’d seen it happen too many times to doubt that. So she’ll go on living, tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that until all her tomorrows run out. She will dream and she will strive because cynicism might change your view of the world but it doesn’t make you less human. She has dreams, some realized and some lost, just like the people cast in them. Tomorrow, next year, there will be new dreams forged, new dreams broken and she will still be the girl she has always been. Thirty years old but still Veronica Mars, intrepid girl PI, world-renowned photographer, marshmallow with a wrought iron shell. Midnight will come and go and nothing will change just because she’s reached a multiple of ten. She raises her glass to that and finishes it in a long swallow.
A ringing tone startles her from her daze and has her rising to her feet; She has her phone in her hand before she realizes it is the doorbell instead. She frowns a little as she glances at the clock. 12:00 on the dot, if it’s from her father he’s early, and he’s never early and he’s never at the door, not since college. She crosses the room in her stocking feet, perplexed. She swings the door open a few inches, the chain still in place because thirty or not it never hurts to be careful as a girl living alone.
The sight that meets her eyes is one that was never even on her quickly made list of possible midnight guests. The face is that of a stranger, a pony tailed delivery boy fresh out of his teens and she wonders if he has just rolled from his bed or if he hasn’t yet slept, the hubris of youth still burning bright. She wonders because these questions are rhetorical and meaningless unlike the familiar thing in his hands that she is trying desperately not to question. It is a single exquisitely deep purple iris with a gold ribbon wrapped stem. It is her favorite flower, and it is never in bloom on her birthday. It is a calling card that she does not want.
She contemplates closing the door and forgetting the unkempt boy and his perfect flower ever graced her doorstep but her hand is sliding the chain back before her brain catches up and the door is swinging open and he’s thrusting a clipboard at her and handing her a small gold embossed card and she is left holding the flower and staring at her empty front steps.
She thinks about dropping the card and the flower right where she stands, closing the door and letting the paperboy or the mailman kick them out of the way into a corner where they will wilt and decay and go back to not existing in her life. Her curiosity gets the better of her; it’s her blessing and her curse, right now decidedly leaning towards the later.
She flips the card in her hand before she can wrestle her conscious mind into recognition that sometimes ignorance IS bliss. Too late her mind screams even as her eyes fall to the single slanted line of familiar script.
Some things gold are meant to stay.
Her fingers tighten on the small card crinkling it into her palm even as the phone rings from her kitchen table.
She sets the flower down gently and stares at it even as her hand picks up the phone and flips it open to hear her father’s off key singing voice. She smiles but her heart isn’t in it. She laughs but she knows he can tell she’s faking.
“Happy birthday honey.”
She forces her voice to cheery. “Thanks dad.”
“Is everything okay Veronica?” his voice holds fatherly concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine, great...happy.” the pause is almost undetectable but her father isn’t a great PI for nothing so she hurries on before he can latch on to the millisecond of hesitation. “Really dad, I’m fantastic, I’m just tired, and it’s been a long week.” It truth she didn’t feel the least bit tired as her system flooded with the kind of adrenaline you only feel on the brink of battle.
“Well, get some sleep. I love you kid.”
She quirks her voice to match her left eyebrow “You know I think the statute of limitations on the term kid runs out a 30.”
Her father’s voice is cheerfully irreverent “Nope sorry, it all has to do with the ratio as long as you’re thirty years younger than I am you still rank as a kid.”
She laughs softly “Goodnight dad. I love you.”
“Good morning birthday girl, sweet dreams.”
The phone goes dead in her hand and she’s left with nothing to focus on but that note and that flower and the boy from the past who had sent them to her because there could only be one person with the audacity to write that line, to send that token, to taunt her with what could have been and this is no flower, its a god damn gauntlet.
Her jaw tightens and suddenly the ghosts and the dreams and wistful thoughts are gone and she is back to being Veronica Mars, woman with a purpose.
Today she will start on the new mystery. She would begin by finding out all the places that irises bloomed in August.
It is 11:32 p.m. and the house plunges into darkness as she blows out the single candle on her coffee table. She nods her head in satisfaction, approving her own instinct for ambiance, shades of grey are by far the best pallet for self-reflection Her eyes focus unerringly on the accumulating shadows, trying to make out the indistinct edges of the memories staring back at her with bright feral eyes and fangs glinting in wait. She thinks this time she’ll be better prepared when they strike. Wistful once upon a time music plays, it seems fitting harmony for the swish of wine swirling against glass as it tilts towards her mouth, and the liquid pools and slides silky and tart across her tongue. She breathes deep and watches with impartial eyes as the dull red number glowing on the clock-face across the room shivers almost imperceptibly into the next digit. It is 11:33 pm. In 26 minutes she will be thirty years old.
Thirty. The number should be important, a new beginning, the tarnish of her teens and the tainted traces of her twenties absolved in baptism into a new decade. It is another milestone reached, another day ticked off on the timetable of the inevitable. It is another of those occasions that everyone else counts and she can’t remember if she ever cared about. Another of those landmarks that ceased to matter when everything she once knew as normal crashed and burned in the glorious bonfire of other people’s vanities.
Thirty. The number isn’t important but the idea of it saddens her. The same way looking at old pictures of herself in junior high saddens her, like another minute is gone that she can never reclaim, never redo and already, only seconds after it has slipped past, she can’t quite remember what made it special or worth remembering or any different than all the other minutes that came before it in a finite parade that seems endless in retrospect.
She rises, restless and alone as she crosses her living room to stare at the blurry distillation of Seattle’s cityscape reflecting on Elliott Bay. She finds it a soothing vision through the rain-streaked pane; the abstract flow of color and light and movement reflected on errant swells like so many stars dancing in the midnight dark. This is the reason that she moved here. This is the reason that she can never live far from water. The distorted mirror of life is hypnotic, sad, lonely, beautiful, another of life’s enigmas that is meant to be admired but never understood. Like Lilly, like Logan, like love.
She sinks down on the floor, her back against the side arm of her couch and watches the reflections of light dance the ballet across lightly swelling waves before her. She takes another sip of the ruby red wine in her half filled glass, letting the plumy warmth slide around her mouth as she thinks about the people she doesn’t have. The people she lost, the pieces of herself that she has never quite gained back.
She thinks that if her mother hadn’t chosen oblivion over her own daughter she would have thrown her a surprise party, Italian food and bottles of wine, fat flickering candles dripping wax onto white linen, Pavarotti on the stereo and tiramisu for dessert.
She thinks that if Lilly hadn’t fallen silent on blood stained concrete her birthday surprise would have somehow involved gambling and Elvis impersonators and hot male strippers, because Lilly always said a party wasn’t a party until someone got naked.
She thinks that if Logan hadn’t gone to Rome and never come back he might have flown her to Carmel just so they could walk on the beach after dinner with their feet digging wet impressions into the edge of the surf and their shoes discarded at the edge of the sand like they intended to walk out into the ocean and never come back.
She doesn’t know how many of those elusive minutes tick by as she watches the water washing the shore clean and lets her mind wander. One arm is banded tight around her ribcage and the other gently cradles the crystal stem of her wine glass, it is thin and delicate and fragile against her skin, because now she can afford elegance on her own and its a way to tell the world that she isn’t poor or scrappy anymore.
She has made herself known, left her smudged mark on culture, cashed in on her talent and climbed her first rungs of that ladder to the top. Thirty years old and her name has traveled the world on other people’s tongues being dropped and discovered and lauded in places that her body has not yet been. She’s a star on the rise.
She should feel like she’s on top of the world. On the good days the pay off is big enough to make her almost forget what it cost her. On the good days she rationalizes that she has not been untrue to herself. After all, she is what she has always been, an observer of human nature, and a cataloger of human sin. Now she just has a bigger canvas. And no one can blame her for the fact that the pictures she captures through the impersonal lens of a camera are the kinds of things that no one wants to see, things that no one wants to admit exist, things that capture your eyes and your heart and your mind and won’t let you look away. Life in it’s rawest form has been her specialty since age sixteen when her life was stripped to its skeleton and all that she had once thought beautiful was nothing but spilling blood and shattered bone and fate with a sickle in hand awaiting his next victim.
She argues with herself about whether it is a little bit wrong to show the world a peek of what lives behind other people’s smiles, what lurks in other people’s skins. She knows the answer even as she poses the question in her head. The images that she etches onto film are a broken kind of beauty and what she does is stunning and haunting and vital, but at its root it is heartless. It is nothing about an all abiding love or passionate heart and everything about despair and loss yearning to sublimate. On the bad days she knows that on top of the world is only one of the emotions that she should feel that she doesn’t.
They call her brilliant and she flushes in the face of their effusive praise. They read it as humility and she is glad that the only other person who understands that she took the easy way out is too long gone to ever see the stain of shame on her cheeks. She is the only one left who knows that once upon a time she chose the hard way. Natural talent or not, being behind the camera would always be an evasion for her, it would always be easier, one degree of separation from the pain, a numbing salve cheap because it was bought at someone else’s expense. One less bruise she had to see bloom purple beneath her own skin.
She had fought the inevitability of it for a while. She had tried for normal, pre-law. photography just an elective to dabble in, summa cum laude, law school applicant, 174 on her LSATs, a shoe in, a natural.... an interloper, because on the inside she had never really believed in justice after Lilly and Aaron and Logan and Mac and Cassidy and herself. She’d had enough of the personal side of travesty to last a lifetime and it was an empty pursuit to chase something that you had stopped holding dear a long time ago.
In the end she came back to what she knew, what she’d always known was her double-edged sword to bear. Human nature as a still life, beauty and evil and sadness and perfection recorded with the same unbiased lens. And she was good, but only soullessness made her great, her success a direct result of her greatest failure. Her debut was flawless. A picture too wrenching and exquisite for words, a boy with a grudge, broken heart on his sleeve, weeping over his dead murderous father's grave, tragedy in black and white, so real that it wrung you out just to look at it.
She’d never meant to take the picture but she was too comfortable looking at the world through a layer of glass to stop herself. She’d moved her fingers without thought, she’d thrown her heart out of the picture and seen it for it was; stark contrast, real life agony overlaid on a parody of perfection, A photographer’s dream shot. Her photography professor had called it stunning. It had been too late by the time she realized it was in the folder with her final project. Too late by the time she saw it on display, a five-foot tall trophy to her careless betrayal.
She’d never forgiven herself for letting her fingers fall heavy on the trigger. She’d never forgotten the look on his face when he saw it life-size on a wall, pain in two dimensions because three was too much to bear. Her absolution and his destruction, because the world wasn’t right enough for them to both to be simultaneously whole.
Irrefutable, unalterable decisions were made with their eyes before their mouths ever uttered the syllables and she thinks to this day that utter heartbreak is a much more devastating weapon than anything made of steel or gunpowder. She has always known she was wrong but it never mattered less. Words were etched in blood, scarring hearts, closing minds and there was no use thinking about what could have been because it wasn’t and she had always been a pragmatist and nothing had changed really, she was who she was and he was who he was and the we they had once formed had never been built to last.
She shakes herself a little to dislodge the melancholy. Who needs love with the world at her feet, the horizon within grasping distance? She isn’t lost or alone and she tries to tell herself that this is where she wants to be. That it was years ago, too many layers of memory gauzing over the details to try to re-write the postmortem. She convinces herself that she is only thinking about this because it is almost her birthday and nostalgia goes well with chocolate icing and too much red wine. She tells herself that life isn’t so bad with a steady paycheck and a steady group of friends and a steady sense of who you were through their eyes. A hero, a patriot, a fighter, a winner, no one ever need say a loner.
She reminds herself that now she has people. Friends, colleagues, acquaintances, people who know her, people who love her. Tomorrow she’ll celebrate with them.
Her dad will call at 12:01 am with his usual off key rendition of Happy Birthday Baby that is equal measures endearing and disturbing and she’ll feel a warm fuzzy glow in her stomach as she laughs because he is the only one who has ever loved her indiscriminately, wholeheartedly and she never forgets how lucky she is in that.
Wallace will call from his honeymoon in Hawaii, sounding drunk and happy at two in the afternoon. She’ll figure he probably hasn’t had a drop to drink and its just the love talking.... he’s been like that for a year and a half, ever since he met Kelly, and it shows no signs of dissipating. She never thinks to envy him. People like Wallace are made for happily ever after. It’s not his fault that she isn’t.
Mac will send her a funny e-card with some sort of silly animal singing happy birthday in an goofy contralto and the message will say ‘wish I were there’. Nothing but a wish since she is currently in Hong Kong setting up a technical center for Microsoft but it is the thought that counts and Mac knows the value of a sentiment half sarcasm and half sweetness and all about never forgetting the people who catch you when no one else is there to break your fall. She and Mac understand each other but Mac will always be the nicer one, Cindy can be devious but she just isn’t capable of cold-blooded.
She’ll probably get a card in the mail from Duncan, right on time but without a return address, as always, it’ll have a new picture of his Lilly posing awkwardly on some distant beach, blonde and tanned and all gangly twelve year old limbs. She’ll put it on her bulletin board and relegate last year’s picture to the bottom drawer and she won’t try to trace the postmark because she’s come to peace with that particular bittersweet chapter and she’s glad for the young girl’s crooked naive smile even though she’ll never really know her.
Rebecca and Stan from the newspaper office will drop by and cajole her to join the gang for drinks at the pub after work and she probably will, wiling the night away in a welcoming raucousness of a local bar while her friends tell war stories about the last harrowing rush to deadline.
She has people to keep her company. Tonight she has chosen to be alone. Sometimes she prefers alone.
She takes another sip of her wine to wash the taste of memories out of her mouth and glances at the clock again. Four minutes to go. Four minutes until she can hear her father’s crazy lovable voice telling her that all he wants is to see her happy and she can tell him that she is and think that its only a halfway kind of lie because happy is all relative anyway. Four minutes before she can fall into bed and bury the ghosts for another year.
Thirty years, a half, a third, a fourth of her life, who knew really? If those thirty years had taught her anything it was that it didn’t matter if you were rich, or famous or smart or happy, in the end no one ever knew when it would all be gone. She’d seen it happen too many times to doubt that. So she’ll go on living, tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that until all her tomorrows run out. She will dream and she will strive because cynicism might change your view of the world but it doesn’t make you less human. She has dreams, some realized and some lost, just like the people cast in them. Tomorrow, next year, there will be new dreams forged, new dreams broken and she will still be the girl she has always been. Thirty years old but still Veronica Mars, intrepid girl PI, world-renowned photographer, marshmallow with a wrought iron shell. Midnight will come and go and nothing will change just because she’s reached a multiple of ten. She raises her glass to that and finishes it in a long swallow.
A ringing tone startles her from her daze and has her rising to her feet; She has her phone in her hand before she realizes it is the doorbell instead. She frowns a little as she glances at the clock. 12:00 on the dot, if it’s from her father he’s early, and he’s never early and he’s never at the door, not since college. She crosses the room in her stocking feet, perplexed. She swings the door open a few inches, the chain still in place because thirty or not it never hurts to be careful as a girl living alone.
The sight that meets her eyes is one that was never even on her quickly made list of possible midnight guests. The face is that of a stranger, a pony tailed delivery boy fresh out of his teens and she wonders if he has just rolled from his bed or if he hasn’t yet slept, the hubris of youth still burning bright. She wonders because these questions are rhetorical and meaningless unlike the familiar thing in his hands that she is trying desperately not to question. It is a single exquisitely deep purple iris with a gold ribbon wrapped stem. It is her favorite flower, and it is never in bloom on her birthday. It is a calling card that she does not want.
She contemplates closing the door and forgetting the unkempt boy and his perfect flower ever graced her doorstep but her hand is sliding the chain back before her brain catches up and the door is swinging open and he’s thrusting a clipboard at her and handing her a small gold embossed card and she is left holding the flower and staring at her empty front steps.
She thinks about dropping the card and the flower right where she stands, closing the door and letting the paperboy or the mailman kick them out of the way into a corner where they will wilt and decay and go back to not existing in her life. Her curiosity gets the better of her; it’s her blessing and her curse, right now decidedly leaning towards the later.
She flips the card in her hand before she can wrestle her conscious mind into recognition that sometimes ignorance IS bliss. Too late her mind screams even as her eyes fall to the single slanted line of familiar script.
Some things gold are meant to stay.
Her fingers tighten on the small card crinkling it into her palm even as the phone rings from her kitchen table.
She sets the flower down gently and stares at it even as her hand picks up the phone and flips it open to hear her father’s off key singing voice. She smiles but her heart isn’t in it. She laughs but she knows he can tell she’s faking.
“Happy birthday honey.”
She forces her voice to cheery. “Thanks dad.”
“Is everything okay Veronica?” his voice holds fatherly concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine, great...happy.” the pause is almost undetectable but her father isn’t a great PI for nothing so she hurries on before he can latch on to the millisecond of hesitation. “Really dad, I’m fantastic, I’m just tired, and it’s been a long week.” It truth she didn’t feel the least bit tired as her system flooded with the kind of adrenaline you only feel on the brink of battle.
“Well, get some sleep. I love you kid.”
She quirks her voice to match her left eyebrow “You know I think the statute of limitations on the term kid runs out a 30.”
Her father’s voice is cheerfully irreverent “Nope sorry, it all has to do with the ratio as long as you’re thirty years younger than I am you still rank as a kid.”
She laughs softly “Goodnight dad. I love you.”
“Good morning birthday girl, sweet dreams.”
The phone goes dead in her hand and she’s left with nothing to focus on but that note and that flower and the boy from the past who had sent them to her because there could only be one person with the audacity to write that line, to send that token, to taunt her with what could have been and this is no flower, its a god damn gauntlet.
Her jaw tightens and suddenly the ghosts and the dreams and wistful thoughts are gone and she is back to being Veronica Mars, woman with a purpose.
Today she will start on the new mystery. She would begin by finding out all the places that irises bloomed in August.