Nobody has to stay - but we wish they would anyway.
So there's the rub. Some people don't even mean to let you down. They just do.
Veronica Mars wasn't a patient girl, but she had waited. She had looked and she had waited, and she had hoped - very quietly - that for once she was wrong. The certainty of Lilly's absence had, in some way, been comfortable - a sharp twist of pain, but a familiar one. There was nothing comfortable or familiar or good about this, about now.
Wallace was gone. Mac was gone. She had looked, and she had waited for them to show up again, to be somehow joking, but days had passed and neither was coming back. This? This wasn't funny. She had spent a few days acting like nothing was wrong, but now there was no more pretending.
It was the basketball that was the last straw. She had almost hurled it at the wall when she had come across it in Wallace's room, the only one of his possessions still there. Instead she had taken it back to her own room, slipped it under the bed and left. This was different. This was Mac, who had provided the best in awkward, unpracticed girl talk, and Wallace who - Wallace. It was Wallace, who was never supposed to leave her, who already had once back at home, but he had come back. She couldn't think he would again this time.
So she ran. It wasn't the same thing as before - no excursion to the far side of the island, no trek as far from home as possible. It was just running, as hard and as fast as she could, pounding through the jungle to push away as much emotion as she could, racing until she couldn't feel or think. When she stopped at last, sinking to her knees to her catch her breathe, she wasn't even sure where she was. All she knew for certain was that it didn't really matter where she was. They were all disappearing one by one, and they would do that no matter where she found herself now.
[Closed now. I'll be back to return tags in an hour. <3]