Fic: Grayscale (R) Lamb
Title: Grayscale
Author: Marylane23
Pairing/Character: Lamb
Word Count: 2000-ish
Rating: R
Summary: Lamb and Morality. Also: Backstory, who knew?
Spoilers/Warnings: Through 2.01
Disclaimer: Veronica Mars et al belong to Rob Thomas, but they like it when I play with them.
Notes: Hey, thought I’d post this over here also. You know, now that I can. :)
Yay, first post to this community. Also posted at veronicamarsfic.
~~~
You may not believe it after talking to the likes of Veronica Mars, but Don Lamb is not the bad guy.
Pithy labels like that are for idiots and children. Nothing bugs him quite like being pigeonholed by those naïve enough to swear the world is straddling some discrete divide between black and white.
He refuses to be punished just because he’s adept at all things gray.
After all, it’s not like he killed Lilly Kane.
~~~
Neptune was his Neverland. Summers spent at his Aunt Lee’s in sunshine and sand.
When Lee dies and leaves him her house, it isn’t so much a debate about to whether to move as a challenge as to how fast he can pack his bags. One last semester at UCSD and he’s out the door on his way to the sweet life.
Except Lee’s pretty cottage is a worn out shell in a bad neighborhood. And if you don’t live in the hills you aren’t anybody. And psychology degrees get you jobs as a Maître d', if you’re lucky.
~~~
In one week his place gets burglarized and he loses his job for sleeping with a restaurant regular who turns out to be a very married Essie Pomroy. He ends up at the county courthouse to explain why the ambassador to Belgium gave him a black eye and to give a description of Aunt Lee’s missing heirloom jewelry on the same day.
He can’t figure out if Neptune changed or he just woke up, but he leans toward the latter.
Shades of gray seep into the periphery of his vision.
But then, endless hours of paperwork later, one of the deputies tells him they’re hiring. It’ll be scut work mostly, to start, says Deputy Mars, but it makes a good life. Helps people.
It feels like a beginning.
~~~
In Don’s second year in the department, Deputy Mars becomes Sheriff Mars, and it looks like the forces of good are finally gathering momentum.
Except he’s on regular patrols now, and his partner has this amazing knack for accepting folded bills in a handshake without the outside observer batting an eye, and he doesn’t want to be a rat.
Not when he’s still the new guy.
~~~
Keith Mars is more than his mentor, he’s his idol. Guy with no money, no blue blood, rubs elbows with the Neptune elite because they respect him. He’s pushed his way right through the loophole in this town’s class war, found the niche where good things come to good people because they deserve it.
He’s got the house. The wife. The cute-as-a-bug little girl.
But the deputies keep score of how many times Lianne has walked away from a DUI charge with promises that her husband will hear of how talented and dedicated she thinks Deputy Whoever is.
And even if he tries to ignore the whispers, a guy just can’t ignore how much little Veronica really does look like Jake Kane.
And as for Don, he’s gets pretty good at that “bills-in-a-handshake” trick himself.
~~~
Lianne falls of the wagon once again and Keith needs a week off to put her in another program upstate. So while Keith and the wife are “on a much-needed romantic getaway,” he is in charge of the station for the first time.
Don Lamb, authority figure. He certainly wouldn’t have called that.
And, of course, Lilly Kane, all of fifteen years old, gets busted for shoplifting. Richest kid in Neptune, and she sets off a department store alarm wearing a $400 pair of boots she could have paid for but apparently lacked the inclination.
As he’s finishing the paperwork, Veronica turns up sobbing and there’s nothing he can do to calm her down except give in and try to track down her dad.
Fifteen minutes of phone calls later he returns to find the office short one weeping 14-year-old and one surveillance tape that would have put an heir to the Kane fortune on community service detail for months.
He can’t exactly accuse Keith’s kid, and his week suspension isn’t made any more bearable by the fact that Veronica won’t look him in the eye.
~~~
Six months after Lilly’s miraculous escape he picks up Logan Echolls piss drunk by the side of the highway, mumbling about cigarettes, or maybe cigarette burns, he’s never quite sure.
While the kid’s sleeping it off in a cell, Aaron “Hair Trigger” Echolls, in the flesh, walks into the station. Don watches as his mentor shakes the man’s hand and they laugh like old friends about the trials of parenthood.
Charges never materialize. He wishes he was surprised.
~~~
Neptune’s had its share of murders, but Lilly Kane’s stunning exit from the world floors everyone.
But what really staggers him is just where the fuck Keith gets off tormenting Jake Kane. Rich people doing laundry and parents forgetting what was on TV while their daughter got brained with an ashtray across town isn’t precisely damning evidence.
Somehow he doesn’t think years of nailing the Sheriff’s wife automatically makes you a murderer, and objective isn’t the word he’d use for Keith’s line of questioning.
Before he knows it he’s on a first name basis with Jake Kane.
~~~
When the crime scene video gets leaked, he feels the scrutiny every time he walks through the station. He’s at the point where he just squares his shoulders and takes it.
He suspects Sacks, but let them think whatever they want. Even Keith.
Fuck if he cares.
That said, if he ever catches Sacks flaunting money a humble sheriff’s deputy shouldn’t have, money that wouldn’t be out of place for someone dabbling in the movie business, he’ll own him.
After all, by now he knows that he can own people.
~~~
He doesn’t set out to be sheriff. He isn’t senior in the department, he’s just smart enough not to burn bridges with a man like Jake Kane in a town like Neptune.
No, it’s a shock when the county supervisor fingers him for Sheriff after Keith implodes so spectacularly before the eyes of his community and colleagues.
Not that Don isn’t happy about the development. It isn’t every day that you’re handed your boss’ job without even having to run for it.
Besides, Keith screws himself out of his office. All Don has to do is move his stuff in.
~~~
Veronica Mars shows up at the office weeping for the second time and he’s not about to take it like a chump. Not now that it’s his office.
He’s a better player at this game these days.
Enough girls have been through this station that he can tell when they’re faking it to get an ex arrested or to put lost attention back on themselves. Happens more than people like to think.
Sweet little Veronica, pariah du jour, comes to him instead of her dad and wants him to root out the “rapist” among the richest boys in town. Probably’ll play this one like her old man and try to pin it on Duncan Kane. Anything to take down Neptune’s first family.
And yeah, he revels just a bit in calling her bluff.
~~~
She puts on quite the show, he’ll give her that. Then he sends her packing with something akin to bliss.
But out his window he can see her in the parking lot walking home, still weeping silently in her torn white dress, and it occurs to him that there isn’t much point to a show without an audience.
He’s sure the Pomroy brat still wonders why she never gets away with a party on his watch again.
~~~
He thinks maybe he hates her for being a victim that morning more than for any of the crap she’s pulled. For showing up like that just when his world was finally coming together.
She’s got leverage now. Inga saw her. Saw the Sheriff of Neptune send her away. And now that he thinks about it there might have blood on the dress.
She can take him down with one call to a news station, to the county supervisor, or, hell, even to her father.
But she doesn’t. And it gnaws at him. Is she just waiting for the right moment, or did he really somehow become the boogeyman?
For the first time in a long time, he worries he did something that was just... wrong.
Nothing gray about it.
~~~
When she pulls that stunt in the courthouse, makes him sit there like a complete dipshit as a tape of one of his deputies getting blown plays instead of the Sac N Pac robbery, he’s actually relieved. Maybe even proud.
Because this isn’t some scared little girl staring him down, no innocent. No one who sees things in black and white lets a couple of punks who robbed a convenience store off the hook just to fuck someone else over.
Or gets a fake driver’s license that says she’s her dead best friend. Or cons the newbie deputy into leaving the evidence locker unattended (not that he can prove it). Or turns in her own boyfriend.
So much for those nagging feelings of guilt.
~~~
The first call, from Duncan Kane of all people, comes in just as he’s headed out the door for a date. Something about tapes and Aaron Echolls and Veronica’s mother saying she never made it home and all this related in Inga’s accent would be hilarious if he didn’t feel like shitting himself.
He doesn’t even make it to the phone before there’s a second call on the line, and some delivery guy is saying he’s hit Aaron Echolls with his truck and some scorched blonde girl with a gun says he’s a murderer.
His date waits at the restaurant for two hours before breaking up with him via voicemail. He can’t really bring himself to be upset. Nights like this tend to give a guy perspective.
~~~
He’s first on the scene, a heartbeat ahead of the ambulance, a full 5 minutes before the fire department. This is his city now and he has to know before the masses: has to know how he can play this, and how in the hell he got so royally played this last year.
She’s just standing there, handgun pointed squarely at the guy whose hairdo he copied through the whole of Junior High. Neptune’s own little pint-sized righter of wrongs.
There’s no way she’ll waste this moment. He certainly wouldn’t. They don’t make “I told you so” speeches big enough for this.
But she doesn’t even look at him, doesn’t register who he is or that she hates him. Just mutters something about the truck driver checking on her dad. That he’s been burned.
And suddenly here he is in a world of black and white, light and dark. He doesn’t know what to do with that.
~~~
Because maybe Lilly and Veronica were just guilty of being teenagers.
And maybe Keith was just trying to cut a screwed up kid some slack and keep his permanent record clean.
And maybe, just maybe, Keith was better at the job and saw some crucial glimmer in Jake and Celeste Kane that the rest of them missed. Caught them in the lie.
And then there’s the Sheriff who steals kegs from spoiled rich kids and takes cash for favors.
He suddenly doesn’t like the contrast.
~~~
He’s still at the hospital discussing Aaron’s prognosis when the next call comes in. There’s a dead kid on the Coronado bridge. The car seen speeding away from the scene is registered to one Logan Thomas Echolls, and the driver matches the kid’s description.
And while he’s still gathering the troops to go after the second Echolls of the night and wondering how he pissed off God so badly that day to deserve all this, D’mato calls in that he’s picked up the Echolls kid at the Mars’ apartment, that the kid’s going to need a doctor.
He heads downstairs to the emergency room and there she is again, hand in hand with the boy as they wheel him in on a gurney looking every bit as massacred as his father.
~~~
He cuffs the kid to the bed as soon as the doctors have him settled, gives D’mato an earful about not doing it sooner, and turns to face Veronica.
And there’s that look again.
Damn if she isn’t looking at him like he’s the devil incarnate for chaining up her sweet little murderer of a boyfriend. It’s not as if he’s the sheriff or anything.
He smiles back at her, asks if she’d prefer it if the kid was cuffed to her. Make a date of it.
He’s just glad to have his world back.
~~~
It’s still a relief to stare into defiant eyes. Here he’d been half-thinking he was the villain of this story.
But he was right, there is no villain here. Not between the two of them.
Because she’s just as gray as he is.
Author: Marylane23
Pairing/Character: Lamb
Word Count: 2000-ish
Rating: R
Summary: Lamb and Morality. Also: Backstory, who knew?
Spoilers/Warnings: Through 2.01
Disclaimer: Veronica Mars et al belong to Rob Thomas, but they like it when I play with them.
Notes: Hey, thought I’d post this over here also. You know, now that I can. :)
Yay, first post to this community. Also posted at veronicamarsfic.
~~~
You may not believe it after talking to the likes of Veronica Mars, but Don Lamb is not the bad guy.
Pithy labels like that are for idiots and children. Nothing bugs him quite like being pigeonholed by those naïve enough to swear the world is straddling some discrete divide between black and white.
He refuses to be punished just because he’s adept at all things gray.
After all, it’s not like he killed Lilly Kane.
~~~
Neptune was his Neverland. Summers spent at his Aunt Lee’s in sunshine and sand.
When Lee dies and leaves him her house, it isn’t so much a debate about to whether to move as a challenge as to how fast he can pack his bags. One last semester at UCSD and he’s out the door on his way to the sweet life.
Except Lee’s pretty cottage is a worn out shell in a bad neighborhood. And if you don’t live in the hills you aren’t anybody. And psychology degrees get you jobs as a Maître d', if you’re lucky.
~~~
In one week his place gets burglarized and he loses his job for sleeping with a restaurant regular who turns out to be a very married Essie Pomroy. He ends up at the county courthouse to explain why the ambassador to Belgium gave him a black eye and to give a description of Aunt Lee’s missing heirloom jewelry on the same day.
He can’t figure out if Neptune changed or he just woke up, but he leans toward the latter.
Shades of gray seep into the periphery of his vision.
But then, endless hours of paperwork later, one of the deputies tells him they’re hiring. It’ll be scut work mostly, to start, says Deputy Mars, but it makes a good life. Helps people.
It feels like a beginning.
~~~
In Don’s second year in the department, Deputy Mars becomes Sheriff Mars, and it looks like the forces of good are finally gathering momentum.
Except he’s on regular patrols now, and his partner has this amazing knack for accepting folded bills in a handshake without the outside observer batting an eye, and he doesn’t want to be a rat.
Not when he’s still the new guy.
~~~
Keith Mars is more than his mentor, he’s his idol. Guy with no money, no blue blood, rubs elbows with the Neptune elite because they respect him. He’s pushed his way right through the loophole in this town’s class war, found the niche where good things come to good people because they deserve it.
He’s got the house. The wife. The cute-as-a-bug little girl.
But the deputies keep score of how many times Lianne has walked away from a DUI charge with promises that her husband will hear of how talented and dedicated she thinks Deputy Whoever is.
And even if he tries to ignore the whispers, a guy just can’t ignore how much little Veronica really does look like Jake Kane.
And as for Don, he’s gets pretty good at that “bills-in-a-handshake” trick himself.
~~~
Lianne falls of the wagon once again and Keith needs a week off to put her in another program upstate. So while Keith and the wife are “on a much-needed romantic getaway,” he is in charge of the station for the first time.
Don Lamb, authority figure. He certainly wouldn’t have called that.
And, of course, Lilly Kane, all of fifteen years old, gets busted for shoplifting. Richest kid in Neptune, and she sets off a department store alarm wearing a $400 pair of boots she could have paid for but apparently lacked the inclination.
As he’s finishing the paperwork, Veronica turns up sobbing and there’s nothing he can do to calm her down except give in and try to track down her dad.
Fifteen minutes of phone calls later he returns to find the office short one weeping 14-year-old and one surveillance tape that would have put an heir to the Kane fortune on community service detail for months.
He can’t exactly accuse Keith’s kid, and his week suspension isn’t made any more bearable by the fact that Veronica won’t look him in the eye.
~~~
Six months after Lilly’s miraculous escape he picks up Logan Echolls piss drunk by the side of the highway, mumbling about cigarettes, or maybe cigarette burns, he’s never quite sure.
While the kid’s sleeping it off in a cell, Aaron “Hair Trigger” Echolls, in the flesh, walks into the station. Don watches as his mentor shakes the man’s hand and they laugh like old friends about the trials of parenthood.
Charges never materialize. He wishes he was surprised.
~~~
Neptune’s had its share of murders, but Lilly Kane’s stunning exit from the world floors everyone.
But what really staggers him is just where the fuck Keith gets off tormenting Jake Kane. Rich people doing laundry and parents forgetting what was on TV while their daughter got brained with an ashtray across town isn’t precisely damning evidence.
Somehow he doesn’t think years of nailing the Sheriff’s wife automatically makes you a murderer, and objective isn’t the word he’d use for Keith’s line of questioning.
Before he knows it he’s on a first name basis with Jake Kane.
~~~
When the crime scene video gets leaked, he feels the scrutiny every time he walks through the station. He’s at the point where he just squares his shoulders and takes it.
He suspects Sacks, but let them think whatever they want. Even Keith.
Fuck if he cares.
That said, if he ever catches Sacks flaunting money a humble sheriff’s deputy shouldn’t have, money that wouldn’t be out of place for someone dabbling in the movie business, he’ll own him.
After all, by now he knows that he can own people.
~~~
He doesn’t set out to be sheriff. He isn’t senior in the department, he’s just smart enough not to burn bridges with a man like Jake Kane in a town like Neptune.
No, it’s a shock when the county supervisor fingers him for Sheriff after Keith implodes so spectacularly before the eyes of his community and colleagues.
Not that Don isn’t happy about the development. It isn’t every day that you’re handed your boss’ job without even having to run for it.
Besides, Keith screws himself out of his office. All Don has to do is move his stuff in.
~~~
Veronica Mars shows up at the office weeping for the second time and he’s not about to take it like a chump. Not now that it’s his office.
He’s a better player at this game these days.
Enough girls have been through this station that he can tell when they’re faking it to get an ex arrested or to put lost attention back on themselves. Happens more than people like to think.
Sweet little Veronica, pariah du jour, comes to him instead of her dad and wants him to root out the “rapist” among the richest boys in town. Probably’ll play this one like her old man and try to pin it on Duncan Kane. Anything to take down Neptune’s first family.
And yeah, he revels just a bit in calling her bluff.
~~~
She puts on quite the show, he’ll give her that. Then he sends her packing with something akin to bliss.
But out his window he can see her in the parking lot walking home, still weeping silently in her torn white dress, and it occurs to him that there isn’t much point to a show without an audience.
He’s sure the Pomroy brat still wonders why she never gets away with a party on his watch again.
~~~
He thinks maybe he hates her for being a victim that morning more than for any of the crap she’s pulled. For showing up like that just when his world was finally coming together.
She’s got leverage now. Inga saw her. Saw the Sheriff of Neptune send her away. And now that he thinks about it there might have blood on the dress.
She can take him down with one call to a news station, to the county supervisor, or, hell, even to her father.
But she doesn’t. And it gnaws at him. Is she just waiting for the right moment, or did he really somehow become the boogeyman?
For the first time in a long time, he worries he did something that was just... wrong.
Nothing gray about it.
~~~
When she pulls that stunt in the courthouse, makes him sit there like a complete dipshit as a tape of one of his deputies getting blown plays instead of the Sac N Pac robbery, he’s actually relieved. Maybe even proud.
Because this isn’t some scared little girl staring him down, no innocent. No one who sees things in black and white lets a couple of punks who robbed a convenience store off the hook just to fuck someone else over.
Or gets a fake driver’s license that says she’s her dead best friend. Or cons the newbie deputy into leaving the evidence locker unattended (not that he can prove it). Or turns in her own boyfriend.
So much for those nagging feelings of guilt.
~~~
The first call, from Duncan Kane of all people, comes in just as he’s headed out the door for a date. Something about tapes and Aaron Echolls and Veronica’s mother saying she never made it home and all this related in Inga’s accent would be hilarious if he didn’t feel like shitting himself.
He doesn’t even make it to the phone before there’s a second call on the line, and some delivery guy is saying he’s hit Aaron Echolls with his truck and some scorched blonde girl with a gun says he’s a murderer.
His date waits at the restaurant for two hours before breaking up with him via voicemail. He can’t really bring himself to be upset. Nights like this tend to give a guy perspective.
~~~
He’s first on the scene, a heartbeat ahead of the ambulance, a full 5 minutes before the fire department. This is his city now and he has to know before the masses: has to know how he can play this, and how in the hell he got so royally played this last year.
She’s just standing there, handgun pointed squarely at the guy whose hairdo he copied through the whole of Junior High. Neptune’s own little pint-sized righter of wrongs.
There’s no way she’ll waste this moment. He certainly wouldn’t. They don’t make “I told you so” speeches big enough for this.
But she doesn’t even look at him, doesn’t register who he is or that she hates him. Just mutters something about the truck driver checking on her dad. That he’s been burned.
And suddenly here he is in a world of black and white, light and dark. He doesn’t know what to do with that.
~~~
Because maybe Lilly and Veronica were just guilty of being teenagers.
And maybe Keith was just trying to cut a screwed up kid some slack and keep his permanent record clean.
And maybe, just maybe, Keith was better at the job and saw some crucial glimmer in Jake and Celeste Kane that the rest of them missed. Caught them in the lie.
And then there’s the Sheriff who steals kegs from spoiled rich kids and takes cash for favors.
He suddenly doesn’t like the contrast.
~~~
He’s still at the hospital discussing Aaron’s prognosis when the next call comes in. There’s a dead kid on the Coronado bridge. The car seen speeding away from the scene is registered to one Logan Thomas Echolls, and the driver matches the kid’s description.
And while he’s still gathering the troops to go after the second Echolls of the night and wondering how he pissed off God so badly that day to deserve all this, D’mato calls in that he’s picked up the Echolls kid at the Mars’ apartment, that the kid’s going to need a doctor.
He heads downstairs to the emergency room and there she is again, hand in hand with the boy as they wheel him in on a gurney looking every bit as massacred as his father.
~~~
He cuffs the kid to the bed as soon as the doctors have him settled, gives D’mato an earful about not doing it sooner, and turns to face Veronica.
And there’s that look again.
Damn if she isn’t looking at him like he’s the devil incarnate for chaining up her sweet little murderer of a boyfriend. It’s not as if he’s the sheriff or anything.
He smiles back at her, asks if she’d prefer it if the kid was cuffed to her. Make a date of it.
He’s just glad to have his world back.
~~~
It’s still a relief to stare into defiant eyes. Here he’d been half-thinking he was the villain of this story.
But he was right, there is no villain here. Not between the two of them.
Because she’s just as gray as he is.