Fic: Under Control (Wallace, Veronica) PG-13
Title: Under Control
Characters: Wallace, Veronica, Keith, Logan, Piz
Word Count: 2,126
Rating: PG-13 for a couple of minor curses
Summary: Veronica thinks she's got everything under control. Wallace doesn't agree. Spoilers up to 3.08 "Lord of the Pis."
Disclaimer: Veronica Mars belongs to Rob Thomas.
Author's Notes: This is my vm_santa gift for sugarpromises, who wanted a Veronica/Wallace BFF fic dealing with the events that happened at the end of "Of Vice and Men."
“Hey, you’ve reached Veronica. Leave a message after the beep.”
Wallace shook his head as he heard the beep and then hung up the phone. He’d already left her a message and she hadn’t called back yet. He tossed his cell phone back onto his bed and went back to his engineering book. After a couple of minutes, he slammed the book shut. All the numbers and equations were starting to swim together in his head. After spending the past couple of days cramming all of it in for his final, he was so tired of mechanical engineering. He really wanted to just grab some pizza with his friends. But for once, Piz was nowhere to be found, and Veronica wasn’t answering her phone.
He hadn’t seen her since before he’d left for his cramming session at the motel, when she’d asked to crash in his room while he was gone. He figured she’d probably hightailed it out of there as soon as Piz came back.
He decided to go to the Mars apartment and see what she might be up to. He knew she’d probably yell at him for not warning her that Piz was coming back, or she’d want to drone on and on about her father and Logan and all the girly-girl drama she had going on with them. He wouldn’t mind hearing it, though. He’d been so caught up in mechanical engineering the past few weeks he hadn’t had a lot of time to spend with his best friend.
“Hey, Mr. Mars,” he said when Veronica’s father answered the door. “Veronica here?”
“Hey, Wallace,” Keith replied, smiling at him. “She’s in the back, resting. I just finally got Logan to leave, but you can go on back. I know she’ll want to see you.”
Wallace frowned as he stepped inside. Veronica, resting? During the day?
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked wondering what she could have gotten herself into in just these past few days.
Keith glanced back toward Veronica’s room, then lowered his voice. “Someone drugged her drink yesterday in the cafeteria and tried to attack her in the parking garage. If Logan hadn’t gotten to her in time…” His voice trailed off.
Wallace shook his head as he headed back to Veronica’s room. He didn’t know why he was surprised. He should be used to things like this happening to her by now. But no, he could never get used to the idea that his best friend was always getting herself in dangerous situations.
She was lying on her bed with her eyes closed when he entered. Music drifted out from her CD player. “Hey,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Hey,” he replied sitting on her bed. “What happened to you?”
“It’s no big deal,” she said, sitting up.
Wallace nodded, even though he knew it was definitely a big deal. He also knew the last thing she would want was him fussing over her and making it into an even bigger deal, so he decided he’d just let it go. He knew she would tell him when she got ready.
“What is this you’re listening to?” he asked, going to her CD player. “It sounds like something you’d hear at a funeral. You need to be listening to one of the CDs I gave you.”
“Oh, yes, because songs like ‘Back that Ass Up’ and ‘Blingin’ for Life’ are so what I need to hear right now.”
He grinned at her as he slipped in a Nelly CD, one of the few rappers she tolerated. They didn’t say anything for awhile as he sat at her desk and started playing a computer game on her laptop.
“It’s really not that big a deal,” she said finally.
“Of course not,” he replied, not looking up from the computer screen. “You getting drugged and attacked in a parking lot isn’t a big deal at all. I’m sure it happens all the time.”
“It was my own fault,” she said in a joking tone. “You’d think by now I would know not to leave my drink unattended.”
“And you think that’s funny?” he asked starting to get annoyed at her nonchalant routine. “Why would someone just decide to drug you? Have you called the police?”
She shot him a look and he remembered that the police meant Lamb, which meant she was better off not calling them.
“Seriously, Veronica, what happened?”
She told him about how one moment she’d been eating her dinner and then the next thing she remembered was walking to her car.
“I can’t believe you’re not more worried about this,” he said.
“I don’t believe in sitting around worrying,” she told him. “I believe in going out and finding who did this to me and those other girls and making them pay.”
“What other girls?” Suddenly he realized what she was talking about. “You think the campus rapist did this? Because of the drugging?”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Veronica…”
“Okay, okay.” She got up and closed the door a bit, and lowered her voice. “You have to promise not to tell my dad.” She lifted up her hair and then turned around. His stomach dropped when he saw the bald patch at the back where it looked as though her hair had been ripped right out.
“I can’t believe you’re saying this is no big deal! It looks like he ripped your hair out!”
She shrugged again as she got back into the bed. “Like I said, I’ll find out who did this.”
“But aren’t you scared? I mean, this person obviously knows who you are. Don’t you think you should at least tell your father?”
“No! I don’t want him finding out about this because he’ll just worry. And I don’t need him or anyone else worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”
He stared at her. “I think you’re just doped up on medicine right now. That’s the only way to explain your craziness.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, smiling at him. “I’ve got everything under control.”
* * * *
Over the next few days, Wallace tried to spend as much time with Veronica as he could. She might have thought she had everything under control, but he didn’t believe so. He couldn’t believe that she was acting so nonchalantly about almost being shaved bald and raped.
So he made sure to eat with her in the food court, study with her while she was working her shift in the library, and meet her after class so he could walk her to her car. She was too preoccupied with writing a paper for her criminology class and working on her latest case, something involving an egg and Chip Diller’s ass, to notice her now-hovering BFF.
Wallace was surprised when Logan approached him at the end of their sociology class. “Have you seen Veronica today?” he asked earnestly. “I’ve been calling her, but she hasn’t called me back yet.”
“Yeah, I saw her earlier at lunch,” Wallace replied. “She’s got a lot going on right now.”
“Yeah, I bet. It only takes a second to return a call.”
Wallace didn’t say anything, determined not to get into the middle of their ongoing relationship drama.
“I’m just worried about her, you know?” Logan went on.
Wallace chuckled, shaking his head. “Tell me about it,” he said. “That girl needs a 24 hour bodyguard.”
“That’s not such a bad idea.”
“Yeah, right. Good luck getting her to agree to that.”
* * * *
As the guy’s fist connected with his face and he went down, Wallace wondered again why his first instinct when it came to pretty girls was to try to be a hero and protect them. Last time he’d done this, he’d gotten a gun pulled on him by that crazy ass janitor back at Neptune. Now he was lying in a mess of hamburgers and French fries in the food court.
He stood up shakily as some security guards came forward to take away the guys who had started the fight. One of the cafeteria workers came up to him and told him he should go to the infirmary.
“Nah, I’m alright,” he replied, looking around. Veronica, whom he had just been sitting with a few moments before, was nowhere to be seen, although her bag still lay on the ground. He bent down to pick it up, wondering what had happened to her.
“I can’t believe this!” he heard her say. He looked up and saw her coming toward him, anger radiating off her. She started rambling on about Logan hiring bodyguards and how he had no right, and that’s when Wallace put two and two together. He’d only been joking but Logan had taken him seriously.
“He had no right,” she repeated, calming down a bit. He could tell she was still pissed as she took some ice out of her cup, wrapped it in a napkin, then handed it to him.
“Maybe he did,” he replied quietly, putting the ice over his eye.
“What?” She looked at him, eyes flashing.
“Maybe he did. You’re the one walking around here like you weren’t almost raped a week ago. You don’t even care that you’ve got people who are worried about you.”
“I don’t need anyone to worry about me,” she replied. “I can take care of myself, you know. I’ve…”
“Got everything under control,” he finished. “But sometimes, you don’t Veronica. You do need people to help you sometimes. Maybe one day you’ll learn that before all the people who do care about you aren’t there anymore.”
He walked away, leaving Veronica staring incredulously at his back.
* * * *
He didn’t see or hear from her again until late the next day. She stopped by his dorm room just as Piz was leaving for his radio show.
“Hey, Veronica,” Piz said as he opened the door. “Did you hear my radio show yesterday about the …”
“Sorry, I missed it,” she replied, cutting him off.
Piz babbled on about it for a bit until he noticed that she wasn’t listening and that Wallace hadn’t bothered to greet his friend yet, or even look up from his studying.
“Is it just me or did the temperature just drop to like, ten degrees?” he said jokingly, trying to lighten the mood.
“Well, I guess I’ll talk to you later,” he added after Veronica shot him a look that could cut through the ice in the room. “You should try to catch the show tonight, I’ll be talking ab…”
“Yeah, thanks, Piz!” Veronica cut him off again, a sunny smile on her face. It disappeared as Piz left and she went and sat on Wallace’s bed.
They didn’t say anything for a moment, as he concentrated on his book.
“Okay, maybe you’re right,” she said finally.
“And?”
“And I was wrong.”
Wallace tossed down his pencil. “Wait, what was that? Veronica Mars, admitting she was wrong? I must be hearing things.”
Veronica smiled slightly, relieved that he didn’t seem to be too angry with her. “I’d give you my ‘I need to work on trusting people better’ speech, but I know you’ve already heard it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But maybe you need to hear it again. So you can actually start working on it.”
“I trust you. I just don’t want you to worry about me.”
“With all the things that happen to you, how could I not? And you know, you don’t have to do everything all by yourself. You don’t have to pretend like everything is fine and that you’ve got everything under control.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get that. I’m still trying to work on that, too.”
“Well, I’ll be here to make sure you do. Bad shit always seems to happen to you whenever I’m not around.”
“Hmm, you’re right. I guess that means I have you to blame for everything.” He grinned as she picked up a pillow from his bed and hit him with it.
“But seriously, though,” he said, clearing his throat a bit. He hated when he had to get all sappy. “You know I’ll always be here for you and that I’m always going to worry about you. In case you didn’t know, you’re never allowed to die, either.”
As she continued to smile at him, he could see tears start to swim in her eyes, and he knew it was time to end this before it became anymore girly-girl than it already was. “Okay, and that ends the sappy portion of our program.”
“Nope,” she replied. “We have to hug it out. Have you learned nothing from those Full House reruns?”
And before he could protest, she pulled him in for a long hug.
Characters: Wallace, Veronica, Keith, Logan, Piz
Word Count: 2,126
Rating: PG-13 for a couple of minor curses
Summary: Veronica thinks she's got everything under control. Wallace doesn't agree. Spoilers up to 3.08 "Lord of the Pis."
Disclaimer: Veronica Mars belongs to Rob Thomas.
Author's Notes: This is my vm_santa gift for sugarpromises, who wanted a Veronica/Wallace BFF fic dealing with the events that happened at the end of "Of Vice and Men."
“Hey, you’ve reached Veronica. Leave a message after the beep.”
Wallace shook his head as he heard the beep and then hung up the phone. He’d already left her a message and she hadn’t called back yet. He tossed his cell phone back onto his bed and went back to his engineering book. After a couple of minutes, he slammed the book shut. All the numbers and equations were starting to swim together in his head. After spending the past couple of days cramming all of it in for his final, he was so tired of mechanical engineering. He really wanted to just grab some pizza with his friends. But for once, Piz was nowhere to be found, and Veronica wasn’t answering her phone.
He hadn’t seen her since before he’d left for his cramming session at the motel, when she’d asked to crash in his room while he was gone. He figured she’d probably hightailed it out of there as soon as Piz came back.
He decided to go to the Mars apartment and see what she might be up to. He knew she’d probably yell at him for not warning her that Piz was coming back, or she’d want to drone on and on about her father and Logan and all the girly-girl drama she had going on with them. He wouldn’t mind hearing it, though. He’d been so caught up in mechanical engineering the past few weeks he hadn’t had a lot of time to spend with his best friend.
“Hey, Mr. Mars,” he said when Veronica’s father answered the door. “Veronica here?”
“Hey, Wallace,” Keith replied, smiling at him. “She’s in the back, resting. I just finally got Logan to leave, but you can go on back. I know she’ll want to see you.”
Wallace frowned as he stepped inside. Veronica, resting? During the day?
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked wondering what she could have gotten herself into in just these past few days.
Keith glanced back toward Veronica’s room, then lowered his voice. “Someone drugged her drink yesterday in the cafeteria and tried to attack her in the parking garage. If Logan hadn’t gotten to her in time…” His voice trailed off.
Wallace shook his head as he headed back to Veronica’s room. He didn’t know why he was surprised. He should be used to things like this happening to her by now. But no, he could never get used to the idea that his best friend was always getting herself in dangerous situations.
She was lying on her bed with her eyes closed when he entered. Music drifted out from her CD player. “Hey,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Hey,” he replied sitting on her bed. “What happened to you?”
“It’s no big deal,” she said, sitting up.
Wallace nodded, even though he knew it was definitely a big deal. He also knew the last thing she would want was him fussing over her and making it into an even bigger deal, so he decided he’d just let it go. He knew she would tell him when she got ready.
“What is this you’re listening to?” he asked, going to her CD player. “It sounds like something you’d hear at a funeral. You need to be listening to one of the CDs I gave you.”
“Oh, yes, because songs like ‘Back that Ass Up’ and ‘Blingin’ for Life’ are so what I need to hear right now.”
He grinned at her as he slipped in a Nelly CD, one of the few rappers she tolerated. They didn’t say anything for awhile as he sat at her desk and started playing a computer game on her laptop.
“It’s really not that big a deal,” she said finally.
“Of course not,” he replied, not looking up from the computer screen. “You getting drugged and attacked in a parking lot isn’t a big deal at all. I’m sure it happens all the time.”
“It was my own fault,” she said in a joking tone. “You’d think by now I would know not to leave my drink unattended.”
“And you think that’s funny?” he asked starting to get annoyed at her nonchalant routine. “Why would someone just decide to drug you? Have you called the police?”
She shot him a look and he remembered that the police meant Lamb, which meant she was better off not calling them.
“Seriously, Veronica, what happened?”
She told him about how one moment she’d been eating her dinner and then the next thing she remembered was walking to her car.
“I can’t believe you’re not more worried about this,” he said.
“I don’t believe in sitting around worrying,” she told him. “I believe in going out and finding who did this to me and those other girls and making them pay.”
“What other girls?” Suddenly he realized what she was talking about. “You think the campus rapist did this? Because of the drugging?”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Veronica…”
“Okay, okay.” She got up and closed the door a bit, and lowered her voice. “You have to promise not to tell my dad.” She lifted up her hair and then turned around. His stomach dropped when he saw the bald patch at the back where it looked as though her hair had been ripped right out.
“I can’t believe you’re saying this is no big deal! It looks like he ripped your hair out!”
She shrugged again as she got back into the bed. “Like I said, I’ll find out who did this.”
“But aren’t you scared? I mean, this person obviously knows who you are. Don’t you think you should at least tell your father?”
“No! I don’t want him finding out about this because he’ll just worry. And I don’t need him or anyone else worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”
He stared at her. “I think you’re just doped up on medicine right now. That’s the only way to explain your craziness.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, smiling at him. “I’ve got everything under control.”
* * * *
Over the next few days, Wallace tried to spend as much time with Veronica as he could. She might have thought she had everything under control, but he didn’t believe so. He couldn’t believe that she was acting so nonchalantly about almost being shaved bald and raped.
So he made sure to eat with her in the food court, study with her while she was working her shift in the library, and meet her after class so he could walk her to her car. She was too preoccupied with writing a paper for her criminology class and working on her latest case, something involving an egg and Chip Diller’s ass, to notice her now-hovering BFF.
Wallace was surprised when Logan approached him at the end of their sociology class. “Have you seen Veronica today?” he asked earnestly. “I’ve been calling her, but she hasn’t called me back yet.”
“Yeah, I saw her earlier at lunch,” Wallace replied. “She’s got a lot going on right now.”
“Yeah, I bet. It only takes a second to return a call.”
Wallace didn’t say anything, determined not to get into the middle of their ongoing relationship drama.
“I’m just worried about her, you know?” Logan went on.
Wallace chuckled, shaking his head. “Tell me about it,” he said. “That girl needs a 24 hour bodyguard.”
“That’s not such a bad idea.”
“Yeah, right. Good luck getting her to agree to that.”
* * * *
As the guy’s fist connected with his face and he went down, Wallace wondered again why his first instinct when it came to pretty girls was to try to be a hero and protect them. Last time he’d done this, he’d gotten a gun pulled on him by that crazy ass janitor back at Neptune. Now he was lying in a mess of hamburgers and French fries in the food court.
He stood up shakily as some security guards came forward to take away the guys who had started the fight. One of the cafeteria workers came up to him and told him he should go to the infirmary.
“Nah, I’m alright,” he replied, looking around. Veronica, whom he had just been sitting with a few moments before, was nowhere to be seen, although her bag still lay on the ground. He bent down to pick it up, wondering what had happened to her.
“I can’t believe this!” he heard her say. He looked up and saw her coming toward him, anger radiating off her. She started rambling on about Logan hiring bodyguards and how he had no right, and that’s when Wallace put two and two together. He’d only been joking but Logan had taken him seriously.
“He had no right,” she repeated, calming down a bit. He could tell she was still pissed as she took some ice out of her cup, wrapped it in a napkin, then handed it to him.
“Maybe he did,” he replied quietly, putting the ice over his eye.
“What?” She looked at him, eyes flashing.
“Maybe he did. You’re the one walking around here like you weren’t almost raped a week ago. You don’t even care that you’ve got people who are worried about you.”
“I don’t need anyone to worry about me,” she replied. “I can take care of myself, you know. I’ve…”
“Got everything under control,” he finished. “But sometimes, you don’t Veronica. You do need people to help you sometimes. Maybe one day you’ll learn that before all the people who do care about you aren’t there anymore.”
He walked away, leaving Veronica staring incredulously at his back.
* * * *
He didn’t see or hear from her again until late the next day. She stopped by his dorm room just as Piz was leaving for his radio show.
“Hey, Veronica,” Piz said as he opened the door. “Did you hear my radio show yesterday about the …”
“Sorry, I missed it,” she replied, cutting him off.
Piz babbled on about it for a bit until he noticed that she wasn’t listening and that Wallace hadn’t bothered to greet his friend yet, or even look up from his studying.
“Is it just me or did the temperature just drop to like, ten degrees?” he said jokingly, trying to lighten the mood.
“Well, I guess I’ll talk to you later,” he added after Veronica shot him a look that could cut through the ice in the room. “You should try to catch the show tonight, I’ll be talking ab…”
“Yeah, thanks, Piz!” Veronica cut him off again, a sunny smile on her face. It disappeared as Piz left and she went and sat on Wallace’s bed.
They didn’t say anything for a moment, as he concentrated on his book.
“Okay, maybe you’re right,” she said finally.
“And?”
“And I was wrong.”
Wallace tossed down his pencil. “Wait, what was that? Veronica Mars, admitting she was wrong? I must be hearing things.”
Veronica smiled slightly, relieved that he didn’t seem to be too angry with her. “I’d give you my ‘I need to work on trusting people better’ speech, but I know you’ve already heard it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But maybe you need to hear it again. So you can actually start working on it.”
“I trust you. I just don’t want you to worry about me.”
“With all the things that happen to you, how could I not? And you know, you don’t have to do everything all by yourself. You don’t have to pretend like everything is fine and that you’ve got everything under control.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get that. I’m still trying to work on that, too.”
“Well, I’ll be here to make sure you do. Bad shit always seems to happen to you whenever I’m not around.”
“Hmm, you’re right. I guess that means I have you to blame for everything.” He grinned as she picked up a pillow from his bed and hit him with it.
“But seriously, though,” he said, clearing his throat a bit. He hated when he had to get all sappy. “You know I’ll always be here for you and that I’m always going to worry about you. In case you didn’t know, you’re never allowed to die, either.”
As she continued to smile at him, he could see tears start to swim in her eyes, and he knew it was time to end this before it became anymore girly-girl than it already was. “Okay, and that ends the sappy portion of our program.”
“Nope,” she replied. “We have to hug it out. Have you learned nothing from those Full House reruns?”
And before he could protest, she pulled him in for a long hug.